by Richard Ford
Between self-pity and aggrandisement, there is little room to maneuver. His stomach churned; his shirt felt rank. The train was old. Mark wandered to the forward car; the conductor waved him in. The gray seats were unoccupied, the windows dark. He sat sprawling in the windowseat while the train filled up.
A woman with two shopping bags settled beside him. She wore a pink knit suit and had a purple handbag and white hair. He made space. She produced The Saturday Review. The train lurched and rumbled forward, and he told himself his father made this trip five hundred times a year. They stopped at 125th Street, and then they gathered speed.
He needed water. He wanted to sleep. His neighbor read the magazine with absorbed attention and came, on page 23, to his photograph. He was sitting on a rock in front of Long Island Sound. His tie had blown over his shoulder, his hair was engagingly tousled by the propitious breeze. He wanted to tell her, “That’s me.” He wanted her to know that she was sitting next to Mark Fusco, novelist, whose first book earned such praise. He imagined her shocked disbelief, then recognition. She would tell her husband, when she got off the train at Pelham or Greenwich or wherever she was getting off, “Guess who I sat next to, guess who I met on the train?”
Mark was on the verge of telling her, clearing his throat to begin, when the train braked. Momentum threw him forward; he jerked back. They had no scheduled stop. His neighbor had her handbag open, and its contents spilled. “What was that?” she asked. The whistle shrieked. He bent to help her gather pens, a tube of lipstick, Kleenex, keys. “What was that?” she asked again, as if he might have known.
They remained there without explanation. The train lights flickered, dimmed. He tried to open his window, but it had been sealed shut. Brown grime adhered to his hands. His head hurt. He excused himself to drink from the water dispenser, but there were no paper cups. He pressed the lever nonetheless, and water trickled out. In the space between the cars conductors huddled, conferring. They looked at their logbooks, their watches. The next stop was Larchmont, he knew. He tried to see the Larchmont station down along the track; he saw the New England Thruway and apartment buildings and gas stations and what looked like a supermarket and a lumberyard. The train had been stopped in its tracks. He understood, of a sudden, the force of that expression; he returned to his seat and repeated it. “The train has been stopped in its tracks.”
Then there were rumors. The train had hit a dog. It had hit a car. It had narrowly avoided a collision with a freight; the switching devices failed. The President was on his way to New Rochelle, and traffic had therefore been halted. There was trouble ahead with the switches, and they would wait it out here. There were work slowdowns, strikes. The woman to his right protested the delay. Her husband would be worried silly; he was a worrier. He liked to feed the cat and canary just so, in sequence, and if there was some change in the schedule, some reason to feed the canary first, he worried for the cat.
Her husband would be waiting at Mamaroneck. He would keep the motor running and fret about the wasted gas and fret about the timer oven since this was the maid’s Tuesday off; since her husband had retired, she called him worrywart. She went to New York once a week. It wasn’t for the shopping, really, it was to escape—a freedom spree, she called it, not a shopping spree.
Mark drifted, nodding, sweating. They would know him at Lutèce. He would buy a pipe and captain’s hat and lounge along the dock.
The grandmother from Agrigento buried donkey bones. She told her children there was treasure at the temple site, and they ought to dig. They were greedy; they vied for attention. She lay dying by the seawall, seeing her progeny fight, watching them swing shovels and threaten each other with picks.
Her favorite nephew watched too. He had flown to Sicily on a visit from the north; he was torn between two women—a big city sophisticate and the girl next door. The grandmother stretched out a finger like a claw. He mopped her brow with flannel soaked in lemon water; he ground rosemary and garlic and fed her moistened mouthfuls of bread and olive oil. Her house was bright with broken glass embedded in cement. Barbed wire clung to the doorframe like a climbing rose.
“Giovanni?” she said.
“Grandmother?”
Her voice was as the sea on gravel. “When there’s treasure, stupido, you look for it here.” She scratched at her ribcage, then nodded. “You understand, caro, the heart?”
He understood, he said. Dolphins played in the white surf. This teetered on the verge of sentiment, said Winterton, but it might be profound.
Then the conductor appeared. His hair was brown, and he wore a handlebar moustache. He stood at the front of the car, expectant, gathering an audience. They quieted. “We’re sorry to inform you”—he cleared his throat, repeated it—“I’m sorry to inform you of the cause of our delay. There has been an accident. A person or persons unknown has been discovered on the track. That’s all I can reliably report.” His voice was high. He relished the attention, clearly, and refused to answer questions. “That’s the statement, folks.”
Police appeared beneath the window, with leashed dogs. There were stretcher-bearers and photographers; it was beginning to rain. He said to the woman beside him, “I need air.” Then he followed the conductor to the space between the cars. “Can I get out and walk?” he asked. “I’m late. I know the way.” They would not let him leave. “I might be sick,” he said. They pointed to the bathroom door, unlocked.
The bathroom reeked of urine; the toilet would not flush. He held his nose and gagged. He braced himself upon the sink and stared at his reflection—hawking, blear-eyed, pinched. “‘The apple tree . . .’” he mouthed. What was out there on the track found him irrelevant; it proceeded at its chosen pace, and Mark was not a witness they would call.
In the next two hours, waiting, he learned what he could of the story. He heard it in bits and fragments, the narrative disjunct. A body was found on the tracks. It had been covered with branches and pine boughs and leaves. It had been a suicide, perhaps, or murder. It was female and, judging by hair color, young. The engineer had noticed the leaf pile ahead and slowed but failed to stop. By the time he identified clothing underneath the branches, and what looked like a reaching hand, he could not halt the train. No blame attached to his action. The body had been crushed. There were few identifying marks. Bone and flesh and clothing shreds were scattered on the engine, spattered on the crossties and beneath the first two cars. If the act were suicide imagine the anticipation, the self-control awaiting death; if murder, the disposal of the corpse. Forensic experts had arrived to gather evidence. Police were searching the approach roads to the overpass, and all nearby foliage. Traffic was delayed in both directions, therefore, while they combed the tracks.
“I’m leaving tomorrow,” he said to his parents that night.
“For the Cape?” his father asked.
“So soon?” his mother asked.
“I need to get to work again.”
“We wouldn’t bother you,” she said. “We’d leave a tray at the door.”
“We’d screen your calls,” his father said. “We’d say, ‘No interviews.’”
“I didn’t mean it that way. I left my work in Wellfleet.”
“Coffee?”
“Please.”
They settled in the living room. He tried to tell them, and could not, what had happened on the train—how his blithe assumption of the primacy of art was made to seem ridiculous by fact. It was flesh and not Karenina that spread across the track. It was rumor, not a cry for help, he heard. What impressed itself upon him was his picture in a magazine, and Betty’s lush compliance in, enactment of his fantasy, was how much money they might spend for lunch. Mrs. Newcombe’s ancestor spat in the coal grate. Bonnie will not take him back, will work in the Town Library; she runs off with the drummer from Spokane.
He would write it down, of course. Mark made notes. It would become his subject; he would squeeze and absorb and digest it—as might have, once, the Barone P. P. He would th
row his voice. It would take him time, of course, but if it took him twenty years he’d balance the account. He would feed the canary, then cat.
Junot Díaz
EDISON, NEW JERSEY
The first time we try to deliver the Gold Crown the lights are on in the house but no one lets us in. I bang on the front door and Wayne hits the back and I can hear our double drum shaking the windows. Right then I have this feeling that someone is inside, laughing at us.
This guy better have a good excuse, Wayne says, lumbering around the newly planted rosebushes. This is bullshit.
You’re telling me, I say but Wayne’s the one who takes this job too seriously. He pounds some more on the door, his face jiggling. A couple of times he raps on the windows, tries squinting through the curtains. I take a more philosophical approach; I walk over to the ditch that has been cut next to the road, a drainage pipe half filled with water, and sit down. I smoke and watch a mama duck and her three ducklings scavenge the grassy bank and then float downstream like they’re on the same string. Beautiful, I say but Wayne doesn’t hear. He’s banging on the door with the staple gun.
At nine Wayne picks me up at the showroom and by then I have our route planned out. The order forms tell me everything I need to know about the customers we’ll be dealing with that day. If someone is just getting a fifty-two-inch card table delivered then you know they aren’t going to give you too much of a hassle but they also aren’t going to tip. Those are your Spotswood, Sayreville and Perth Amboy deliveries. The pool tables go north to the rich suburbs—Livingston, Ridgewood, Bedminster.
You should see our customers. Doctors, diplomats, surgeons, presidents of universities, ladies in slacks and silk tops who sport thin watches you could trade in for a car, who wear comfortable leather shoes. Most of them prepare for us by laying down a path of yesterday’s Washington Post from the front door to the game room. I make them pick it all up. I say: Carajo, what if we slip? Do you know what two hundred pounds of slate could do to a floor? The threat of property damage puts the chop-chop in their step. The best customers leave us alone until the bill has to be signed. Every now and then we’ll be given water in paper cups. Few have offered us more, though a dentist from Ghana once gave us a six-pack of Heineken while we worked.
Sometimes the customer has to jet to the store for cat food or a newspaper while we’re in the middle of a job. I’m sure you’ll be all right, they say. They never sound too sure. Of course, I say. Just show us where the silver’s at. The customers ha-ha and we ha-ha and then they agonize over leaving, linger by the front door, trying to memorize everything they own, as if they don’t know where to find us, who we work for.
Once they’re gone, I don’t have to worry about anyone bothering me. I put down the ratchet, crack my knuckles and explore, usually while Wayne is smoothing out the felt and doesn’t need help. I take cookies from the kitchen, razors from the bathroom cabinets. Some of these houses have twenty, thirty rooms. On the ride back I figure out how much loot it would take to fill up all that space. I’ve been caught roaming around plenty of times but you’d be surprised how quickly someone believes you’re looking for the bathroom if you don’t jump when you’re discovered, if you just say, Hi.
After the paperwork’s been signed, I have a decision to make. If the customer has been good and tipped well, we call it even and leave. If the customer has been an ass—maybe they yelled, maybe they let their kids throw golf balls at us—I ask for the bathroom. Wayne will pretend that he hasn’t seen this before; he’ll count the drill bits while the customer (or their maid) guides the vacuum over the floor. Excuse me, I say. I let them show me the way to the bathroom (usually I already know) and once the door is shut I cram bubble bath drops into my pockets and throw fist-sized wads of toilet paper into the toilet. I take a dump if I can and leave that for them.
Most of the time Wayne and I work well together. He’s the driver and the money man and I do the lifting and handle the assholes. Tonight we’re on our way to Lawrenceville and he wants to talk to me about Charlene, one of the showroom girls, the one with the blow-job lips. I haven’t wanted to talk about women in months, not since the girlfriend.
I really want to pile her, he tells me. Maybe on one of the Madisons.
Man, I say, cutting my eyes towards him. Don’t you have a wife or something?
He gets quiet. I’d still like to pile her, he says defensively.
And what will that do?
Why does it have to do anything?
Twice this year Wayne’s cheated on his wife and I’ve heard it all, the before and the after. The last time his wife nearly tossed his ass out to the dogs. Neither of the women seemed worth it to me. One of them was even younger than Charlene. Wayne can be a moody guy and this is one of those nights; he slouches in the driver’s seat and swerves through traffic, riding other people’s bumpers like I’ve told him not to do. I don’t need a collision or a four-hour silent treatment so I try to forget that I think his wife is good people and ask him if Charlene’s given him any signals.
He slows the truck down. Signals like you wouldn’t believe, he says.
On the days we have no deliveries the boss has us working at the showroom, selling cards and poker chips and mankala boards. Wayne spends his time skeezing the salesgirls and dusting shelves. He’s a big goofy guy—I don’t understand why the girls dig his shit. One of those mysteries of the universe. The boss keeps me in the front of the store, away from the pool tables. He knows I’ll talk to the customers, tell them not to buy the cheap models. I’ll say shit like, Stay away from those Bristols. Wait until you can get something real. Only when he needs my Spanish will he let me help on a sale. Since I’m no good at cleaning or selling slot machines I slouch behind the front register and steal. I don’t ring anything up, and pocket what comes in. I don’t tell Wayne. He’s too busy running his fingers through his beard, keeping the waves on his nappy head in order. A hundred-buck haul’s not unusual for me and back in the day, when the girlfriend used to pick me up, I’d buy her anything she wanted, dresses, silver rings, lingerie. Sometimes I blew it all on her. She didn’t like the stealing but hell, we weren’t made out of loot and I liked going into a place and saying, Jeva, pick out anything, it’s yours. This is the closest I’ve come to feeling rich.
Nowadays I take the bus home and the cash stays with me. I sit next to this three-hundred-pound rock-and-roll chick who washes dishes at the Friendly’s. She tells me about the roaches she kills with her water nozzle. Boils the wings right off them. On Thursday I buy myself lottery tickets—ten Quick Picks and a couple of Pick 4s. I don’t bother with the little stuff.
The second time we bring the Gold Crown the heavy curtain next to the door swings up like a Spanish fan. A woman stares at me and Wayne’s too busy knocking to see. Muñeca, I say. She’s black and unsmiling and then the curtain drops between us, a whisper on the glass. She had on a t-shirt that said No Problem and didn’t look like she owned the place. She looked more like the help and couldn’t have been older than twenty and from the thinness of her face I pictured the rest of her skinny. We stared at each other for a second at the most, not enough for me to notice the shape of her ears or if her lips were chapped. I’ve fallen in love on less.
Later in the truck, on the way back to the showroom Wayne mutters, This guy is dead. I mean it.
The girlfriend calls sometimes but not often. She has found herself a new boyfriend, some zángano who works at a record store. Dan is his name and the way she says it, so painfully gringo, makes the corners of my eyes narrow. The clothes I’m sure this guy tears from her when they both get home from work—the chokers, the rayon skirts from the Warehouse, the lingerie—I bought with stolen money and I’m glad that none of it was earned straining my back against hundreds of pounds of raw rock. I’m glad for that.
The last time I saw her in person was in Hoboken. She was with Dan and hadn’t yet told me about him and hurried across the street in her high clogs to avoid me and m
y boys, who even then could sense me turning, turning into the motherfucker who’ll put a fist through anything. She flung one hand in the air but didn’t stop. A month before the zángano, I went to her house, a friend visiting a friend, and her parents asked me how business was, as if I balanced the books or something. Business is outstanding, I said.
That’s really wonderful to hear, the father said.
You betcha.
He asked me to help him mow his lawn and while we were dribbling gas into the tank he offered me a job. A real one that you can build on. Utilities, he said, is nothing to be ashamed of.
Later the parents went into the den to watch the Giants lose and she took me into her bathroom. She put on her makeup because we were going to a movie. If I had your eyelashes, I’d be famous, she told me. The Giants started losing real bad. I still love you, she said and I was embarrassed for the two of us, the way I’m embarrassed at those afternoon talk shows where broken couples and unhappy families let their hearts hang out.
We’re friends, I said and Yes, she said, yes we are.
There wasn’t much space so I had to put my heels on the edge of the bathtub. The cross I’d given her dangled down on its silver chain so I put it in my mouth to keep it from poking me in the eye. By the time we finished my legs were bloodless, broomsticks inside my rolled-down baggies and as her breathing got smaller and smaller against my neck, she said, I do, I still do.
Each payday I take out the old calculator and figure how long it’d take me to buy a pool table honestly. A top-of-the-line, three-piece slate affair doesn’t come cheap. You have to buy sticks and balls and chalk and a score keeper and triangles and French tips if you’re a fancy shooter. Two and a half years if I give up buying underwear and eat only pasta but even this figure’s bogus. Money’s never stuck to me, ever.
