Railroad

by Graham Masterton

  He paused for a moment. The passageway smelled of cologne and urine. He listened to hear if anyone was awake, and then he tiptoed along to the third door, and knocked.

  There was no answer. He knocked again, harder this time, holding his breath. He heard a rustling of sheets, and then a whispered voice say, ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Hannah? It’s me, Collis.’

  ‘Collis? What do you want? What time is it?’

  ‘I don’t know, maybe two or three o’clock. I’m not wearing my watch.’

  ‘What’s the matter? Can’t you sleep?’

  ‘I was thinking of you, Hannah.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  He paused. He wanted to be sure that he phrased this in just the right way. He said, ‘I need to talk to you. It’s important. I feel that something important is slipping away from us.’

  ‘Collis, whatever it is, we could just as easily discuss it in the morning. You shouldn’t be here. These are the ladies’ quarters.’

  ‘Hannah, if you would open the door for a moment, I could explain myself much more easily.’

  ‘Open the door? Collis, it’s out of the question. I’m in my night attire.’

  ‘So am I,’ he whispered back. ‘So, well, that makes us equal.’

  He heard her let out a short, testy sigh. ‘Collis, I’m a married woman. It’s bad enough that I should be talking to you at this hour, let alone contemplating opening the door for you.’

  ‘Then you are contemplating it?’

  ‘You have obliged me to contemplate it, by asking me.’

  He paused again, and when he whispered again, there was a smile in his voice. ‘And what is the outcome of your contemplations?’ he asked her.

  ‘I’m a married woman, Collis. It’s out of the question. I may have mixed feelings about Walter, but it seems I shall just have to put a brave face on it, and make the best of what the Lord has seen fit to give me.’

  ‘Hannah,’ said Collis, ‘you must understand that I have the strongest and strangest feelings for you.’

  ‘Well, you must resist them. Any liaison between us would be a sin. I cannot think of it.’

  ‘I’m not necessarily thinking of adultery,’ said Collis. ‘It’s something else altogether. Something more. I feel I want to know you as a very close friend, as if I want to take responsibility for you. I want to know you so well that intimate relations between us could take place, but not as a first priority.’

  ‘You don’t know me. How can you say such a thing?’

  ‘Of course I know you. We’ve been walking and talking on this damned boat for a week. There are dozens of people who are betrothed and married after only half the time that we’ve spent together.’

  ‘But, Collis, I am married to someone else. I am not available for such a relationship. And however sad that may be, and whatever a waste of human lives you may think it is, it is the will of the Lord, and woe betide us if we ignore it.’

  From one of the other cabins, a harsh woman’s voice called out, ‘Let him in, my dear, in the name of pity, and then we can all get some sleep!’

  Collis giggled, but Hannah drew in her breath in embarrassment. ‘Collis,’ she whispered, ‘you must go!’

  ‘I’m not asking for anything improper, Hannah. I just want to talk about this feeling I have for you.’

  ‘No, it’s impossible. You’ll have to go.’

  ‘Hannah, please. I’m imploring you. I can’t sleep for thinking about you.’

  ‘And neither can anyone else!’ the harsh voice put in.

  ‘Please, Collis, you’re humiliating me.’

  Collis leaned his head against the door. ‘Very well, if you want me to go, I’ll go. But if you change your mind, well, you know that you only have to say the word.’

  ‘All right,’ said Hannah quickly. ‘Now, please leave before one of the officers comes down and catches you here.’

  ‘Good night, Hannah. Sweet dreams.’

  ‘Good night, Collis.’

  ‘I love you, Hannah.’

  ‘Please, Collis, don’t start again. You cannot love me, because I am not free to be loved.’

  Collis pulled a face to himself in the darkness of the corridor. ‘Who ever is?’ he asked her. ‘Freedom is only what you seize for yourself, after all. And look at us now. We’re right in the middle of the Caribbean, in the middle of the night, with nobody to suspect or even care that we’re together. What could be freer than that?’

  ‘Collis, God knows that we’re together.’

  At that moment, a door further along the corridor cannoned open, and in the gloom Collis could make out a short barrel of a woman in a nightgown like a pink marquee, and a bristling forest of curl papers.

  ‘God knows,’ she barked, ‘and everybody else in these cabins knows! And if you don’t move your lecherous hide out of here this instant, I’ll make sure the captain knows, too, and has you locked up in irons!’

  ‘Madam,’ said Collis hastily, ‘I was on the verge of leaving.’

  ‘Well, then, move!’ demanded the woman. ‘And make sure I don’t catch you down here again, or I’ll sit on your head, for impertinence!’

  Collis called, ‘Good night, Hannah!’ and then quickly opened the door to the promenade deck and stepped back out into the breezy night. Scratching his head, he walked forward to the rail again and stood for a while by the flag. To starboard, along the dusky horizon, he could see the marking lamps of a night fishing fleet, and to port, the first barely distinguishable lightening of the sky before dawn. He wished he hadn’t left his cigars in his cabin; he could have done with a smoke right now.

  He looked behind him for a while, at the curtained portholes of the women’s cabins. Hannah’s must be the third one along. He debated with himself for a moment whether he ought to go tap at it, and ask her again to let him in, but he decided that enough was probably enough. It was going to be sufficiently difficult facing her on the promenade deck in the morning as it was.

  He was still leaning against the rail in his nightshirt, thinking about this, when he felt a tug at his sleeve. He turned to see the half-breed girl standing there, a cheroot sloping out of the side of her mouth, her long black hair tangled and blown by the wind. Around her shoulders she wore a heavy red-and-blue Pueblo blanket, but beneath the blanket her blouse was so low over her heavy pendant breasts that Collis could make out the duskier, stippled skin of her areolas. She wore a wide, dark-blue skirt, but her feet were bare, and she had silver rings on every finger, including her thumbs, and on her toes. In the wind, Collis could smell an oily, exotic perfume, mingled with sweat.

  ‘You want to smoke, señor?’ the girl asked him.

  He looked at her. She had the dark colouring and the accent of a Mexican, but there was something distinctly European about her face and her figure. She could have had French or German blood in her, or maybe even Slavic, because her eyes were deep-set and her cheekbones were angular and high. There was only a slight smile on her lips, and that was noticeably mocking.

  ‘You’re most kind,’ Collis told her, with exaggerated courtesy. He watched her closely as she reached into the waistband of her skirt and produced a small wooden box with a decorated label. She opened it up and offered it to him: three dark hand-rolled cheroots of Cuban Tobaccos. He took one and put it between his lips, and she leaned forward so that he could touch the tip of it to the lighted cheroot she held in her own mouth and suck it into life. While he sucked, she stared at him, very close, with her deep, moist eyes.

  ‘Are you going far?’ he asked her, when his cheroot was properly alight.

  ‘To San Francisco,’ she told him.

  ‘Do you know anyone there?’

  She shrugged.

  ‘So what are you going to do, if you don’t know anyone?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Work in a bar, maybe. Anywhere is better than Jacksonville.’

  ‘You didn’t like it there?’

  She ran her hand through her thick
, greasy hair. Washed and dressed properly, he reflected, she could have been almost beautiful.

  ‘It wasn’t the city,’ she said.

  ‘Was it your parents? A man?’

  ‘A man? More like a dog who eats his own sick.’

  Collis smiled wryly. ‘Well, I suppose we all have our troubles.’

  The girl blew smoke out of her nostrils, without taking the cheroot out of her mouth. ‘This man, he was more than trouble. He was crazy. You never met nobody so crazy.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear it. Could I borrow your cheroot again? Mine’s gone out.’

  While Collis fed once more off the red tip of her cheroot, she held his wrist to steady his hand, and looked at him fiercely. The fierceness was passionate, rather than aggressive, but all the same Collis found it more than a little disturbing, especially since he was dressed in nothing but his nightshirt. Once his cheroot was alight again, he stood well back from her and eyed her cautiously.

  There was a long silence between them, while they both stood and looked at each other. The sky was gradually fading from indigo to pale blue, and the lights that hung from the Virgina’s masts began to pale. The girl turned to the ship’s rail after a while and rested her elbows on it, smoking, her arms crossed under her breasts so that they were provocatively plumped up.

  ‘I suppose it wasn’t in my cards, that’s all,’ she said. ‘A slave woman in Bryceville told my fortune in the tarot cards, and she said I was going to travel, and be lonesome.’

  ‘You don’t have to be lonesome,’ said Collis, guardedly.

  ‘Who would want me? A girl like me? And even if anyone did want me, I’m not so sure that I would want him.’

  ‘What’s your name?’ Collis asked.

  The girl half turned towards him. She tugged up her blouse a little, but there was a hint of a smile on her face when she did it. Behind her, the sea was a dull turquoise colour, laden with mist, and the darkness was draining away as rapidly as it had come. It must have been four in the morning by now, and it wouldn’t be long before the crew and the earliest of the early-rising passengers would be up on deck.

  ‘My uncle and aunt always called me Maria,’ said the girl. ‘But I heard that my father, before he went away, used to say I was Mamuska, after his grandmother in Poland. A place named Lwow.’

  Collis held out his hand. ‘Well – how do you do. I’m Collis Edmonds, out of New York.’

  Maria-Mamuska declined to take his hand. ‘We don’t need to do that. You’re in your nightshirt. I feel that I know you already.’

  ‘You could get to know me better.’

  ‘It’s getting light,’ Maria-Mamuska said. ‘Maybe you ought to go dress. You don’t want your lady friend to get the wrong ideas about us.’

  Collis gave her a lopsided smile. ‘Lady friend? I’m not sure if she’s my lady friend at all. She’s a lady, certainly. But that’s half the trouble.’

  Maria-Mamuska reached out and held Collis’s hand. ‘She won’t let you play with her?’

  Collis gave a grunt of amusement. ‘If you want to put it like that, no.’

  ‘Maybe you don’t try hard enough.’

  ‘How hard is hard?’

  ‘Do you want to show me?’

  Collis picked a shred of tobacco off the tip of his tongue. ‘Is that a proposition?’ he said.

  Maria-Mamuska looked at him boldly. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Well …’ said Collis. ‘I think it’s dawn. And maybe dawn is too late for business that ought to be done at night-time.’

  ‘Who cares what time it is?’ said Maria-Mamuska.

  Collis felt tempted. It was a long time now, almost three weeks, since he had been with a woman, paid or unpaid, and his encounters with Delphine and Hannah had only served to inflame him, rather than satisfy him. It was only four o’clock, after all, and the Latvian slept so drunkenly that not even the second coming of St Hilda would ever wake him before seven.

  Maria-Mamuska stepped closer and held Collis’s arm. ‘You are a fine man,’ she said. ‘Good-looking, and rich. I never talked to a man like you before.’

  ‘Rich?’ said Collis. ‘I’m hardly rich. Why do you think I’m going to San Francisco?’

  ‘You tease me.’ Maria-Mamuska grinned. ‘Look at all the fine clothes you wear. Look at your fine hats.’

  ‘Those are all I have, I’m afraid,’ he told her. ‘I left New York because my father’s business went bankrupt, and because of gambling debts. If you want anything out of me, I’m afraid you’ll have to put up with my being nothing more than good-looking.’

  ‘You joke,’ she said crossly.

  ‘I wish I did. Unfortunately, it’s true.’

  She took away her hand. ‘You’re just trying to make a fool of me.’

  ‘Why should I want to do that?’

  ‘You’re just trying to make me look stupid, that’s all. You’re just like Lucas. You’re a crazy man!’

  ‘Maria, listen –’

  ‘No, I don’t listen,’ she said hotly. ‘You strut around in all your wonderful clothes, you talk like a rich man, and it’s all wind! All you want is to get into my bed! You’re a crazy trickster, you understand that?’

  ‘You don’t have a bed,’ he reminded her. ‘You were trying to get into mine.’

  ‘Same thing!’ she snapped, tossing her oily black hair. ‘And now who looks after my baby?’

  ‘Your baby? What baby?’

  ‘This one!’ she pouted, slapping her stomach.

  Collis couldn’t keep himself from grinning. The sheer nerve of this girl was unbelievable. His luck, this morning, was patently with him. If she had continued to believe him rich, and if his carnal urgings had been overwhelming enough, they would have gone for a tussle on the top berth of his cabin, and afterwards, being the sort she was, she would have plainly blamed him for making her pregnant. He stood there in his nightshirt on the dawn-lit deck, his cheroot stuck in his mouth, his hands on his hips, and watched her righteous fury with the detached amusement of a spectator at a solo theatrical performance.

  ‘You think you can use me!’ she spat. ‘You think I’m nothing but dirt! You think you can take my body and pay nothing for it! Well, mister, I was never a whore, not for money, and I won’t be your whore for free!’

  ‘I didn’t actually ask you to be,’ said Collis, puffing smoke.

  She snatched the cheroot right out of his mouth, crushed it up in her fist, and tossed it over the side.

  ‘That was regrettable,’ he said. ‘I was just beginning to enjoy the flavour.’

  ‘You’re mocking me,’ she breathed.

  ‘A little, yes. But you can’t expect me to take you seriously when you’re ranting and screaming so much. And you can’t expect me to feel guilty because I don’t want to look after some old fellow’s illegitimate baby.’

  Maria-Mamuska slapped her stomach again, so hard that Collis was sure her baby must have been wondering what it had done wrong, so early in its life, to come in for such a pasting. ‘You men are all monsters!’ she told him. ‘You all make me pregnant! You all make me your slave! Well, I’ll have revenge on you! You see!’

  ‘For heaven’s sake, calm down,’ Collis said. ‘You’re making a damned exhibition of yourself.’

  ‘Hexhibition!’ she screamed. ‘Hexhibition!’

  Collis, disconcerted, took a pace backwards, but Maria-Mamuska took another step nearer.

  ‘Who cares about hexhibition! You want a hexhibition? You want one? Well, here’s hexhibition!’

  With her face stiff with anger, and her cheroot stuck firmly between her walnut-coloured teeth, Maria-Mamuska planted herself directly in front of Collis, seized the top of her blouse with both hands, and tugged it right down, baring a stunning expanse of womanly anatomy. ‘Here!’ she said. ‘Is this what you mean? Is this what you mean when you say hexhibition?’

  ‘Oh, God,’ sighed Collis. He didn’t know what else to say. He was frustrated, certainly, but this kind of one-wo
man circus was the last thing he wanted. He raised his eyes tiredly away from Maria-Mamuska’s uninvited ‘hexhibition’ and, as he did so, found himself turning his head towards the cabins, as if something else were ineluctably drawing his attention. He heard bells jangle on the Virginia’s bridge, and he paused for a moment, but then his gaze travelled further, along the black-and-green-painted superstructure, further, past the bleached ropes and the lifeboats, along the rows of tarnished portholes, until it reached the third porthole of the women’s quarters. There, framed in a circle of studded brass, like a horrified portrait on a drawing-room wall, was Hannah West’s face, white, her eyes wide and her mouth so far open that she looked as if she had choked on a very dry piece of seedcake.

  Almost simultaneously, as if by a prearranged signal, Hannah’s drapes flew shut, and Collis clamped his hands over his eyes. He couldn’t believe it. Of all the damned stupid despicable luck. He might have been able to save the situation with Hannah if he had met her in a gentlemanly fashion at breakfast, and buttered her muffins for her, and warmed her frostiness with his usual flattery. He could have assured her that it was lonesomeness, not lust, that had led him to tap on her cabin door, seeking comfort. He could have begged her forgiveness for his foolish behaviour, and bought her perfume in Panama to make up for it. Instead, what had happened? She had spied on him, the silly woman, and caught him standing on the deck at dawn in nothing but his nightshirt, apparently enjoying a one-man display of the largest and least respectable bosom on the entire boat.

  ‘You may dress now,’ he said to Maria-Mamuska, in a small, restrained voice.

  He waited for what he considered to be a respectable time and then uncovered his eyes. She was still standing there bare-breasted, staring at him with that fierce look of hers, and the dawn breeze made her nipples as stiff as charcoals. It made her eyes water, too, although Collis wasn’t certain if she was crying or not.

  He took hold of her Pueblo blanket and gently covered her with it. She stood where she was, not moving, although she lowered her head slightly, and some of the tension and anger seemed to filter out of her.