She reaches up to touch her hair, and I can’t really tell where her fingers end and the curly locks begin. Still, it’s fetching as all get-out. “I can’t do a thing with it,” she says.
I nod. I know my part so well that I don’t really have to think it through. I’m like a stage actor or maybe the bass in a barbershop quartet, just delivering lines the way I ought. “You look just fine,” I say, though the motion makes me lick my lips. Damned dry lips, what they wouldn’t give for a touch of barrel-mash whiskey.
“They’ll be coming soon,” she says.
“They always do.”
You’d think after all these years I’d know how to dress for the occasion. I never had a worry over it before she came along. I’d just hoof it around in my old, wool pants and cotton shirt. The holes in my clothes never troubled me none because there wasn’t much difference between the hole and what it was supposed to be covering up. But I wouldn’t know where to find clothes even if I wanted them.
There in the early days, before I settled down to this notion of just what “forever” means, I’d go off half-cocked. More rightly, I’d either be floating around three feet off the ground, trailing some see-through innards where my belly got sawed in half by a set of steel wheels, or else my legs would be walking around with nothing to guide them. Not that they got much guidance even back when my brains was attached, considering I spent most of my breathing life balanced in the cab, shoveling like I was feeding the devil.
“What do you suppose it’s like out there?” she asks.
She’s looking out the mouth of the tunnel, down to the north fork of the Hughes River. A soft fog rises from the water, seeping into the gold and red forest. Beyond the trees, a collection of lights are winking on, one after another, like dead fireflies pinned against the horizon. Over time, the number of lights has doubled and tripled, and I reckon that’s as good a way to mark the years as any because the stars have pretty much stayed the same. Back in my day, Cairo was the glass marble capital of the world, and sometimes I think those marbles are not toys but eyes, looking back from the forgotten past like a mirror.
“Same as always,” I say, as if I possess the wisdom granted by age. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, but try not to dwell on, it’s that foolishness never dies. Otherwise, I’d be in one piece and rotting away quiet in a pine box somewhere.
“Do you think they’ll like me?” She touches her hair again.
You can see how this dance has played out over the years. She’s lost her confidence, and that’s an awful thing in a woman. Sure, I’m a little beyond gentlemanly judgment, and my coarser nature somehow uncoupled when the boxcars between my skull and my private parts jumped the tracks, but Christ damn it, a man’s still a man. “You’ll be the belle of the ball,” I say.
I reach for my pocket watch. The chain got crushed in the accident, and the watch is stuck on seven minutes before twelve, and I can never figure if that’s noon or midnight. Either way, I reckon I’ll never reach it, so it don’t matter which.
“Almost time?” she asks. She asks a lot of questions. That’s women for you. You can lop off their heads and still they keep yakking.
“Pretty soon now,” I say, which is as safe a bet as any.
And it probably will be soon. The sun still rises and falls regular, just like it did when I was in one piece, and right now it’s settling against the rounded hills, throwing a punkin-colored light across the trees. The horseshoe curve of the tunnel opening, at least on the sundown side, is outlined with light, and out beyond is all the promise of laughter, love, and life. That’s probably the worst trick of this condition, knowing there’s another way. Maybe there are folks like us out yonder, cavorting and cutting up around graveyards and such, just drifting to hell and gone, whichever direction the wind blows. But me and her, all we got is Silver Run and time.
The people usually come from the east end, where it’s darkest, but of course a tunnel runs both ways. I used to think life was just one long rail, running on and on, and all I had to worry about was raking chunks of coal from the tender, pushing the boiler gauge to the red, blinking cinders from my eyes. You don’t think much about the end of the line, and when you do, you usually picture it as a nice, easy rolling stop, engine chuffing and wheels creaking as you come up on a comfortable station with lots of friends on the platform to welcome you home. You don’t expect to trip over your big toe at full throttle and go ass-over-teakettle between the cars.
But a fellow gets used to the notion, by and by. Leastways, I have. Or so I tell myself. What choice do I got?
“Maybe I should change clothes,” she says, fretting her head for no reason.
“If you was any prettier, you’d run them off faster than a pack of coyotes in a blood fever,” I say. Truth is, she got no other clothes, and if she did change, well, I don’t even like to think what might happen if I saw her in her undergarments. Hell, I might even blush, and I don’t know what color my cheeks would be. Maybe perdition red or mortuary blue.
“I’ll miss you,” she says, just like always.
“Comes a time for parting,” I say, though it stings a little all the same. Funny how you can just babble out any old words when you’re trying to hide what you really feel.
“You’ve meant a lot to me. We’ve been through so much together.”
Well, that ain’t rightly true. We’ve pretty much been through the same thing once, over and over and over again. But try talking sense to a woman and see where it gets you.
“I never expected somebody like you to come along,” I say, which is about as close as I ever brush up against honesty in my current condition.
“Well, you were here first,” she says.
And now we come to it. The only real sore point between us. Now, I pretty much nipped any notion of romance in the bud, me being at least a century older than her, but maybe even us dead folk get a little territorial. I don’t know how it is with others since I only got this one example, but I figure if I’m going to be stuck in one place until the end of time, it ought to at least belong to me. But there I go again, acting like I’d expect any different from the female gender.
The ones that come here, they call me “The Engineer,” though I was always a fireman and never once laid a hand on the throttle. I figure they forgot the way of the steam locomotive same as they forgot every other way except their own, and so it has been since back to the beginning of time. Plus I kind of like the sound, “The Engineer.” Got more of a ring to it than “fireman” does, like a slow steam whistle on a dewy summer morn.
Trouble is, they don’t call me much of anything anymore. They got this new one they come looking for. Fresh kill. “The Jilted Lady,” they call her, and damned if that don’t got a ring to it, too. I find myself saying it a lot, trying it out on these numb lips. Not that I ever say it aloud, especially to her.
“I have to admit, I had some adjusting to do,” I say. “I never expected somebody like you to come into my life.”
She doesn’t laugh. She’s a little humorless, but I chalk it off to the way she got here. Seems I’m always apologizing for the way she is.
“Maybe things could have been different if we’d met at a different time,” she says.
Sure as shootin’. I been around long enough to know that it don’t matter the reason why it don’t work, just that it don’t. “You never asked to be here,” I say.
Indeed she didn’t. She didn’t ask nothing, and she couldn’t even if she had wanted. That guy wrapped a rag around her mouth tight as a banjo string, and she tried and tried to scream, but nary a peep came out. O’ course, considering what the guy did to her, I reckon there’s a blessing in that, and proof that maybe God is a merciful creature after all.
She wipes at her eyes. Maybe she’s crying, or maybe she’s fussing with makeup. Looks the same either way. “We were going to be married,” she says.
That’s plenty enough cause for waterworks, I reckon, and maybe a swift death saved her f
rom a slower, more tortured demise. Then again, her death wasn’t all that swift. The fellow who stole her heart took just a mite too much joy in her pain, and wasn’t in no hurry to end the honeymoon.
Damndest of all was having to witness it and not being able to do a thing about it. You think it’s bad enough when your pecker’s gone south for the winter, try failing somebody when they need you most. Try helping when you’re helpless yourself. Even dead, even ground to government pork beneath the freight cars of B&O’s Silver Runner Engine #52, it stings a little.
Ah, hell, at least self-pity is a feeling. At least I got that.
“Don’t fret over it,” I say. “What’s done is done.”
“I think he’ll take me with him tonight,” she says, and outside the punkin sky has gone all bruised and purple, rags of clouds sopping up the last daylight.
I check my watch again, wondering for the hundredth time or so why we take our watches and clothes and wounds with us when we cross over. But maybe all we are is scars, the rip we cut in the fabric of the world, and we’re lucky to even do that when you consider how big the universe must be. Like a bucket that spills over from being too full. Maybe me and her is some of the slop.
I want to tell her not to get her hopes up again, but see no reason to be mean. I’ve had my chances at that, but it ain’t my way. She does a good enough job beating herself up the way it is. Instead, I say, “The Good Book says there’s a time for every purpose under heaven.”
She nods, and her head shifts just a little, and her throat gapes, then a line blacker than shadow creases her neck. Her head falls plumb off, just like it did when her gentleman caller confessed his undying love. It’s laying there in the rock bed, jutting between two mossy crossties. She rolls her eyes up at me and smiles the way you do when you’re making the best of a bad situation.
“Things happen for a reason,” I say. “And things don’t happen for the same reason. Or maybe a different reason.”
I have no idea what that means. It just sounds like something a wise, old coot will say when he’s trying to comfort the afflicted.
She stoops down, picks up her head gentle as a kitten, fixes it back in place, then goes through the shenanigans of checking her curls. “I can’t do a thing with it,” she says.
I gave up praying long ago, figuring providence is best kept to them that have hope, but I’m tempted to offer up a whopper right about now. I figure maybe she’s due to move on, maybe she’ll catch a caboose one night and just roll on down the line. That ain’t the way the legend ought to go, though, because I’m the train fellow. I’m the one they talk about when they walk through here and whisper like they’re in church or something.
At least, I used to be. Until The Jilted Lady came along.
“I hear them,” she says, giving her hair one more little touch with those slender, pale fingers.
Beyond the tunnel come footsteps, bunches of them, shoe-leather kicking up gravel and dead leaves. They usually come in groups, especially at night. More fun that way, I figure. Most times they’re giggling, the boys putting on a brave face, the girls acting like they want to be held close and protected. From cradle to grave, and even beyond, females are smart enough to act weak and dumb and vulnerable.
I can’t do much about it since, for some reason, I’m bound to this little stretch of abandoned rail bed while The Jilted Lady gets to rove the tunnel from end to end. Best I can do is bite my tongue, hold in my guts, and wait. I’m a right fair hand at waiting.
“Hey,” she yells, trying to get their attention.
Lights sweep the tunnel, cast out by what they call “flashlights,” a kind of lantern that burns without fire. Their voices are loud enough to shake the masonry with echoes, but I can’t understand a word they say. I like to think they’ve come looking for The Engineer, but my day is past. Time slides on down the track, spewing sparks from its smoke stack like the vomiting mouth of hell, rolling and rolling on until the conductor’s lantern is little more than a wink of starlight against the deep, endless night, and then even that is gone, the rumble fading, the dust settling, and the last whisper of its passing lost in the wind.
“I love you,” she says to one of them, and it could be any of them. These days, she’s none too choosy. And when you get down to it, I reckon one man’s as good as another for a woman’s purposes. Don’t matter what you’re like, as long as you’re willing to be owned. Hop whatever boxcar you can when the weather’s bad, that’s what I always say. Worry about the destination later.
But whichever man she’s talking to doesn’t hear, or walks faster, or pulls one of the young ladies closer. Their breaths plume from their mouths like the ghosts of locomotive smoke, and none of them mention The Engineer. They hurry on, and by the time they’re all the way through the tunnel, it’s full dark. Both inside and out.
“He’ll be back,” she says.
“He’d be crazy not to,” I say, adjusting my entrails so I don’t look so shabby. “Any man would be lucky to earn your charms.”
Sooner or later the eastern mouth of the tunnel is filled with the light of a rising sun and the glory of birdsong.
“Almost time?” she asks.
“Pretty soon now.” I check my watch and try not to grin. Things happen for a reason, and they don’t happen for the same reason. Or maybe a different one.
She fusses with her hair. The Jilted Lady. I like the way that sounds. I’m only half a man, depending on which end we’re speaking of, but I still got my pride. All a woman’s got is vanity. There ain’t no shame in letting a lady have her way. Not a lot worth fighting over, the way I see it.
Me and her, all we got is Silver Run and time.
And each other, I reckon.
The End
Missing Pieces Table of Contents
Master Table of Contents
###
AS I DIE LYING
By Scott Nicholson
CHAPTER ONE
Begin at the beginning.
In an autobiography, that means you have to relive your life. And that’s the last thing I want to do. Once was more than enough. And five times was far too many.
Unless it’s six, in which case all that follows was written by that other guy, the one trying to hitchhike my story and make me sound worse than I really am. If he wasn’t such a lousy writer, this would have been published long ago, and we wouldn’t have gotten to the end. Some of us might have lived happily ever after.
Rest assured, anytime I look cruel, inept, or sociopathic in this story, it’s because he’s changed things around. He wants a fall guy so he can get away with murder. My murder. Maybe your murder, too.
So I look for evidence. Everything else is just metaphysical tourism.
Photographs and locks of hair, pressed flowers and postcards, teddy bears and blue ribbons. Memories, souvenirs, keepsakes, and your girlfriend’s big toe. Old love letters and other horrors, agonies, scars. Why do we hoard such things?
I’ve come to believe it’s because we need proof.
History, even revisionist history, is written by the winners. So if you want to tell the whole story, the true story, get it out there yourself and make everyone believe. With luck and a shrewd marketing push, it’s a bestseller. If you’re pathetic, you’re filed in Self-Help. If this book is published under the last name “Zwiecker” and ends up on the bottom shelf in the fantasy section, then you’ll know he’s won.
“Publish or perish,” they say. We plan to do both, though we’re not sure in which order.
So when I begin at the beginning, I’ll skip the part where Mother bled between her legs while Daddy was sitting on the couch with a bottle of Jack as I squirted into Ottaqua, Iowa, like a bloody watermelon seed.
Ray Bradbury claims to remember being born. He’s a great writer, but that’s total bullshit. Nobody remembers, but people treat it like it’s a big deal. You carry your birth date around all your life, and it nails you to Social Security cards, party invitations, and all tho
se forms you fill out in school. Then, on your tombstone, where you only get a little bit of space to sum up your life, some wax-faced creep chisels in a set of meaningless numbers instead of poetry, or a secret love, or the name of your favorite candy.
In the end, all you get is a few words.
This is all the proof I can offer:
I was on my hands and knees when memory cursed me, awareness laughed in my face, and ego slipped into my head like an ice cream ghost. Light streamed through the window, golden and warm. Light was good. Light was safe, even though it tasted like dust.
The brown thing was in the shadows. It was soft and smelled like Mother, all cigarettes and Ivory soap and things beyond my vocabulary like “senescence.” My arms and legs wriggled toward the brown thing, my belly skinning across the floor. I reached the shadow. My fingers closed on the fur, and I was pulling it closer when the boot came down on my hand.
My hand was on fire, and my eyes were sparks, and my chest was a Play-Doh volcano. The boot stretched out and up into the dark, taller than a tree. It was a man, built of midnight and stitches and thunder. He bent down and picked up the brown thing. His boots shook the floor as he stomped into the light, but all I could see was the scuffed leather, worn laces, and cracked tongue of the boot near my face.
Then the boots danced. They licked me and painted me with bright strips of color. The thunder waltzed me away from my room to a land that light never reached.
But I wasn’t alone.
“Hello,” the boy said. Like the Midnight Man, the boy clung to the shadows. He might have been there the whole time and I hadn’t seen him.
“Who are you?”
“A friend.”
Mad Stacks: Story Collection Box Set Page 30