by Richard Ford
“Neither one sounds all that great,” Sims said. The train flashed through a small Montana town without stopping—two crossing gates with bells and red lanterns, a row of darkened stores, an empty rodeo corral with two cows standing alone under a bright floodlight. A single car was waiting to cross, its parking lights shining. It all disappeared. Sims could hear a train whisde far off.
“Here’s the last one,” Marge said. She took another sip and cleared her throat as if she was taking this seriously. “The rest are … I don’t know what. Weird. But just answer this one. Do you feel protective often, or do you often feel in need of protection?”
At the front of the car the Army people all roared with laughter at something one of them had said in a loud whisper. A couple more beer cans popped and somebody shuffled cards, cracking them together hard. “Put your money where your mouth is, sucker. Not where mine is,” one of the women said, and everybody roared again. Marge smiled at one of the Army men who turned to see who else was enjoying all the fun they were having. He winked at Marge and made circles around his ear with his finger. He was a big sergeant with an enormous head. He had his tie loosened. “Answer,” Marge said to Sims.
“Both,” Sims said.
“Both” Marge said and shook her head. “Boy, you’ve got this test figured out. That’s an extra five points. Neither would’ve taken points off, incidentally. Ten for me. Fifteen for you.” She entered the numbers. “If there weren’t twenty taken off yours right from the start, you’d live longer by a long shot.” She folded the book and stuck it down between the seat cushions, and squeezed Sims’s arm to her. “Unfortunately, I still live five years longer. Sorry.”
“That’s all right with me,” Sims said and sniffed.
One of the Army women got up and walked back down the aisle. She was a sergeant, too. They were all sergeants. She was wearing a green shirt and a regulation skirt and a little black tie. She was a big, shapely woman in her thirties, an ash blond with reddish cheeks and dark eyes that sparkled. She was not wearing a wedding ring, Sims also noticed. When she passed their seat she gave Marge a nice smile and gave Sims a smaller one. Sims wondered if she was the jokester. BENTON was the name on her brass name tag. SGT. BENTON. Her epaulettes had little black-and-white sergeant’s stripes snapped on them. The woman went back and entered the rest room.
“I wonder if they’re on duty,” Marge said.
“I can’t even remember the Army, now,” Sims said. “Isn’t that funny? I can’t remember anybody I was even in it with.” The toilet door clicked locked.
“You weren’t overseas. You’d remember things, then,” Marge said. “Carl had a horror movie in his head. I’ll never forget it.” Carl, Marge’s first husband, lived in Florida. Sims had met him, and they’d been friendly. Carl was a stumpy, hairy man with a huge chest, whereas Sims was taller. “Carl was in the Navy,” Marge said.
“That’s right,” Sims said. Sims himself had been stationed in Oklahoma, a hot, snaky, hellish place in the middle of a bigger hellish place he’d been glad to stay in instead of shipping out to where everybody else was going. How long ago was that, Sims thought? 1969. Long before he’d met Marge. A different life altogether.
“I’m taking a snooze pill now,” Marge said. “I worked today, unlike some people. I need a snooze.” She began fishing around inside her purse for some pills. Marge waitressed in a bar out by the airport, from nine in the morning until five. Airline people and manufacturers’ reps were her customers, and she liked that crowd. When Sims had worked, they had had the same hours, and Sims had sometimes come in the bar for lunch. But he had quit his job selling insurance, and hadn’t thought about working since then. Sims thought he’d work again, but he wasn’t a glutton for it.
“I’ll come join you in a little while,” Sims said. “I’m not sleepy yet. I’ll have another one of these, though.” He drank the last of his gin from his plastic cup and jiggled the ice cubes.
“Who’s counting?” Marge smiled. She had a pill in her hand, but she took a leather-bound glass flask out of her purse and poured Sims some gin while he jiggled the ice.
“Perfect. It’ll make me sleepy,” Sims said.
Marge put her pill in her mouth. “Snoozeroosky,” she said, and washed it down with the rest of her drink. “Don’t be Mr. Night Owl.” She reached and kissed Sims on the cheek. “There’s a pretty girl in the sleeping car who loves you. She’s waiting for you.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Sims said and smiled. He reached across and kissed Marge and patted her shoulder.
“Tomorrow’ll be fine. Don’t brood,” Marge said.
“I wasn’t even thinking about it.”
“Nothing’s normal, right? That’s just a concept.”
“Nothing I’ve seen yet,” Sims said.
“Just a figure of the mind, right?” Marge smiled, then went off down the aisle toward the sleeper.
The Army people at the front of the car all laughed again, this time not so loud, and two of them—there were eight or so—turned and watched Marge go back down the aisle toward the sleeping car. One of these two was the big guy. The big guy looked at Marge, then at Sims, then turned back around. Sims thought they were talking about the woman in the rest room, telling something on her she wouldn’t like to hear. “Oh, you guys. Jesus,” the remaining woman said. “You guys are just awful. I mean, really. You’re awful.”
All the worry was about Marge’s sister, Pauline, who was currendy in a mental health unit somewhere in Minot—probably, Sims thought, in a straitjacket, tied to a wall, tranquilized out of her brain. Pauline was younger than Marge, two years younger, and she was a hippie. Once, years ago, she had taught school in Seattle. That had been three husbands back. Now she lived with a Sioux Indian who made metal sculptures from car parts on a reservation outside of Minot. Dan was his name. Pauline had changed her own name to an Indian word that sounded like Monica. Pauline was also a Scientologist and talked all the time about “getting clear.” She talked all the time, anyway.
At four o’clock yesterday morning Pauline had called up in a wild state of mind. They had both been asleep. The police had come and gotten Dan, she said, and arrested him for embezzling money using stolen cars. The F.B.I., too, she said. Dan was in jail down in Bismarck now. She said she knew nothing about any of it. She was there in the house with Dan’s dog, Eduardo, and the doors broken in from when the F.B.I, had showed up with axes.
“Do you want this dog, Victor?” Pauline had said to Sims on the phone.
“No. Not now,” Sims had said from his bed. “Try to calm down, Pauline.”
“Will you want it later, then?” Pauline said. He could tell she was spinning.
“I don’t think so. I doubt it.”
“It’ll sit with its paw up. Dan taught it that. Otherwise it’s useless. It has nightmares.”
“Are you all right, honey?” Marge said from the kitchen phone.
“Sure, I’m fine. Yeah.” Sims could hear an ice cube tinkle. A breath of cigarette smoke blown into the receiver. “I’ll miss him, but he’s a loser. A self-made man. I’m just sorry I gave up my teaching job. I’m going back to Seattle in two hours.”
“What’s there,” Marge asked.
“Plenty,” Pauline said. “I’m dropping Eduardo off at the pound first, though, if you don’t want him.”
“No thanks,” Sims said. Pauline had not taught school in ten years.
“He’s sitting here with his idiot paw raised. I won’t miss that part.”
“Maybe now’s not the best time to leave Dan,” Sims said. “He’s had some bad luck.” Sims had had his eyes closed. He opened them. The clock said 4:12 A.M. He could see the yellow light down the hall in the kitchen.
“He broke my dreams,” Pauline said. “The Indian chief.”
“Don’t be a martyr, hon,” Marge said. “Tell her that, Vic.”
“You’re not going to make it, acting this way,” Sims said. He wished he could go back to sleep.
“I remember you,” Pauline said.
“It’s Victor,” Marge said.
“I know who it is,” Pauline said. “I want out of this. I’m getting the fuck out of this. Do you know how it feels to have F.B.I, agents wearing fucking flak jackets, chopping in your bedroom with fire axes?”
“How?” Sims said.
“Weird, that’s how. Lights. Machine guns. Loudspeakers. It was like a movie set. I’m just sorry” Pauline dropped the receiver and picked it up again. “Oh shit,” Sims heard her say. “There it goes.” She was starting to cry. Pauline gave out a long, wailing moan that sounded like a dog howling.
“Monica?” Marge said. Marge was calling Pauline by her Indian name now. “Get hold of yourself, sweetheart. Talk to her again, Vic.”
“There’s no reason to think Dan’s a criminal,” Sims said. “No reason at all. The government harasses Indians all the time.” Pauline was wailing.
“I’m going to kill myself,” Pauline said. “Right now, too.”
“Talk to her, Victor,” Marge said from the kitchen, “I’m calling 911.”
“Try to calm down, Monica,” Sims had said from his bed. He heard Marge running out the back door, headed for the Krukows next door. Death was not an idle notion to Pauline, he knew that. Pauline had taken an overdose once, back in the old wild days, just to make good on a threat. “Monica,” Sims had said. “This’ll be all right. Pet the dog. Try to calm down.” Pauline was still wailing. Then suddenly the connection was broken, and Sims was left alone in bed with the phone on his chest, staring down the empty hall where the light was on but no one was there.
When the police got to Pauline and Dan’s house it was an hour later. Pauline was sitting by the phone. She had cut her wrists with a knife and bled all over the dog. The policeman who called said she had not hit a vein and couldn’t have bled to death in a week. But she needed to calm down. Pauline was under arrest, he said, but she’d be turned loose in two days. He suggested Marge come out and visit her.
Sims had always been attracted to Pauline. She and Marge had been wild girls together. Drugs. Overland drives at all hours. New men. They had had imagination for wildness. They were both divorced; both small, delicate women with dark, quick eyes. They were not twins, but they looked alike, though Marge was prettier.
The first time he had seen Pauline was at a party in Spokane. Everyone was drunk or drugged. He was sitting on a couch talking to some people. Through a door to the kitchen he could see a man pressed against a woman, feeling her breast. The man pulled down the front of the woman’s sundress, exposed both breasts and kissed them; the woman was holding on to the man’s crotch and massaging it. Sims understood they thought no one could see them. But when the woman suddenly opened her eyes, she looked straight at Sims and smiled. She was still holding the man’s dick. Sims thought it was the most inflamed look he had ever seen. His heart had raced, and a feeling had come over him like being in a car going down a hill out of control in the dark. It was Pauline.
Later that winter he walked into a bedroom at another party to get his coat, and found Pauline naked on a bed fucking a man who was naked himself. It had not been the same man he’d seen the first time. Later still, at another party, he had asked Pauline to go out to dinner with him. They had gone, first, out on a twilight rowboat ride on a lake in town, but Pauline had gotten cold and refused to talk to him anymore, and he had taken her home early. When he met Marge, sometime later, he had at first thought Marge was Pauline. And when Marge later introduced Pauline to Sims, Pauline didn’t seem to remember him at all, something he was relieved about.
Sims heard the rest-room door click behind him, and suddenly he smelled marijuana. The Army crew was still yakking up front, but somebody not far away was smoking reefer. It was a smell he didn’t smell often, and hadn’t for a long time. A hot, sweet, thick smell. Who was having a joint right on the train? Train travel had changed since the last time he’d done it, he guessed. He turned around to see if he could find the doper, and saw the woman sergeant coming back up the aisle. She was straightening her blouse as if she’d taken it off in the rest room, and was brushing down the front of her skirt.
The woman looked at Sims looking at her and smiled a big smile. She was the one smoking dope, Sims thought. She’d slipped off from her friends and gotten loaded. He had smoked plenty of it in the Army. In Oklahoma. Everybody had stayed loaded all the time then. It was no different now, and no reason it should be.
“Where’s your pretty wife?” the sergeant said casually when she got to Sims. She arched her brows and put her knee up on the armrest of Marge’s seat. She was loaded, Sims thought. Her smile spoke volumes. She didn’t know Sims from Adam.
“She’s gone off to bed.”
“Why aren’t you with her,” the woman asked, still smiling down over him.
“I’m not sleepy. She wanted to go to sleep,” Sims said. The woman smelled like marijuana. It was a smell he liked, but it made him nervous. He wondered what the Army people would think. Being in the Army was a business now. Businessmen didn’t smoke dope.
“You two have kids?”
“No,” Sims said. “I don’t like kids.” She looked down at her friends who were playing cards in two groups. “Do you?” Sims said.
“None that I know about,” the woman said. She wasn’t looking at him.
“Are you a farmer?”
“No,” Sims said. “Why?”
“What else is there to do out here?” The woman’s look unexpectedly turned sour. “Do you say nice things to your wife?”
“Every day,” Sims said.
“You must really be in love,” she said. “That’s the coward’s way out.” The woman quickly smiled. “Just kidding.” She ran her fingers back through her hair and gave her head a shake as if she was clearing her thoughts. She looked down the aisle again and seemed, Sims thought, not to want to go back down there. He looked at the name BENTON on her brass tag. It also had tiny sergeant’s stripes stamped on it. Sims looked at the woman’s breast underneath the tag. It was in a big brassiere and couldn’t be defined well. Sims thought about his own age. Forty-two.
“Your friends are having a good time, it sounds like.”
“They’re not my friends,” she said.
This time the other Army woman in the group got up and looked back where Sergeant Benton was standing beside Sims’s seat. She put her hands on her hips and shook her head in a mock disapproving way, then waved an arm in a wide wagon-train wave at Sergeant Benton. “Get back down here, Benton,” the woman shouted. “There’s money to be made off these drunks.”
The other sergeants said, “Whoa!” then laughed. Another beer can popped. Cards were shuffled. The other woman was fat and short with black hair.
“They think they’re your friends,” Sims said.
“Let ’em think it. I just met them tonight,” the woman said. “It’s the easygoing camaraderie of the armed forces. They’re all nice people, I guess. Who knows? Where’re you going if you’re not a farmer?”
“Minot,” Sims said.
“Which rhymes with why-not. I remember that from school. Pierre rhymes with queer.” She shook her head again and touched her palm to her forehead. She had big hands, red and tough looking. Hands that had worked. Bigger than his own hands, Sims suspected. “I feel a little light-headed,” the woman said.
“Must be the dope you smoked,” Sims said.
She grinned at Sims. “Well, do tell.” She look scandalized but wasn’t scandalized at all. “You’re just full of ideas, aren’t you?”
“I’m a veteran myself,” Sims said.
“What of? Modern life?”
“I was in Vietnam,” Sims said. The words just popped out of his mouth. They shocked him. He didn’t want them back, but they shocked him. How many people had been there, after all? He tried to guess how old Sergeant Benton was, if she might’ve been there herself. Thirty. Thirty-five. It was a long time ago.
“W
hen was that?” the woman said.
“When was what?” Sims said.
“Vietnam? Was that a war or what?” She looked disgustedly at Sims. “I don’t believe you were in Vietnam. Do you know how many of you guys I’ve met?”
“How many?”
“Two million,” the woman said, “possibly three.”
“I was in the Navy,” Sims said.
“And you were probably on a boat that patrolled the rivers shooting blindly in the jungle day and night, and you don’t want to discuss it now because of your nightmares, right?”
“I worked on an air base,” Sims said. This seemed safe to say.
“That’s a new one,” Sergeant Benton said. “The nonviolent tactic.”
“What’s your job in the Army?” Sims felt a big smile involuntarily crossing his face. He wished he’d never mentioned Vietnam. He wished he had that part of his life story to tell over again. He was relieved Marge wasn’t here.
“I’m in intelligence,” Sergeant Benton said brazenly. “Don’t I look smart?”
The fat woman stood up and faced Sergeant Benton again. “Stop harassing the civilians, Benton,” she shouted. A laugh went up.
“You look plenty smart,” Sims said. “You look great, if you ask me.” Sims realized he was still grinning and wished he weren’t. He wished he’d told her to go to hell in a rickshaw.
“Well, aren’t you nice?” the woman said in a voice Sims thought was vulgar. The sergeant kissed her fingertips and blew him a kiss. “Sweet dreams,” she said and walked off down the aisle to where the other soldiers were laughing and drinking.
Sims took a walk back to the sleeping car to check on Marge. Two of the sergeants turned and watched him leave. He heard someone chuckle and somebody say, “Gimme a break.”
When he stepped out onto the vestibule he noticed it was colder, a lot colder than Spokane. It was September the eighteenth. It could freeze tonight, he thought. Canada wasn’t far north of where they were. That was not an appealing world, Sims thought. Cold and boring.
The train was coming into a station when he looked in on Marge. There was one main street that came straight up to the main tracks. The sky was cloudy in front of a big harvest moon. Down the street were red bar signs and Christmas lights strung across one intersection. Here was a place, Sims thought, you’d want to stay drunk in if you could.
