He looked down at her. She looked like a child, her hair over her eyes, her little orange sweatshirt glowing in the fading firelight. She’d taken off her sneakers, but had her jeans on, and her socks had little kittens on them, he’d noticed earlier. He felt an astonishing surge of affection, and kissed her forehead. She smiled and nuzzled his shoulder.
Silently, the four of them sat thinking about their pasts and their futures, as they awaited their destiny.
~ ~ ~
“Gotta go, babe,” Travis said. “C’mon.”
“No,” she whined. “More.”
“Later, you insatiable wench. C’mon. Get up.”
Reluctantly, Eileen reached for her drink on the deputy’s nightstand, plumped up a pillow, and sat up to drink and watch him dress. She liked seeing him in uniform, but she liked seeing him in those tight, faded jeans even more. It was hot, and he wore a cotton plaid shirt that had the sleeves ripped out of it, a few ropes of tangled threads hanging down the back of his bicep. He tucked the shirt in and hooked a wide belt with a big buckle. “C’mon, Eileen. Get dressed.”
She knew she better hustle, or he’d turn on the light, and she wasn’t certain how old she’d look in this light, but didn’t want to chance it. Deputy Travis was a good fifteen years her junior, and she knew he was a little lusty for her daughter. Clover need never know Eileen was having a fling with him. It was nothing serious, of course, it was just one of those things that made her feel like a woman every now and then. Travis had been kind of a steady lover, if infrequent, and if Eileen thought about it, she could get mad at the idea that he was using her for sex when he couldn’t find somebody else. So she didn’t think about that. She chose to consider their relationship in other terms. She chose to believe he liked her company. She certainly liked his. He needed someone young, like Clover, and she needed someone more mature. But for now—well, for now, he always seemed to carry her brand of vodka in his cabinet, and he usually had some type of flavored drink or fruit juice that hadn’t gone sour, and he had a cock that would not quit. She liked all of those things.
“You talked to Clover, right?” he asked from the bathroom as he inspected himself in the mirror.
“Yeah,” Eileen said as she hoisted her breasts into a bra. “How come you’re not wearing a uniform?”
“This ain’t official. This is unofficial. A favor to the mayor and my friends at the railroad.” He turned out the bathroom light and came out to fit his off-duty .38 in the back of his jeans, then threw on a light jacket to cover.
She didn’t want him to watch her dress, but she had dawdled too long, and now she had no choice. She stepped into panties quickly, to cover her sagging stomach, and as she did, she saw his eyes travel the length of her in the dusky light. Then he turned away, and with a woman’s intuition, she knew that he hadn’t liked what he saw.
Maybe she’d join a gym.
Anyway, while he was looking the other way, she stepped into her pants, and pulled her cotton sweater on over her head. Then she made a couple of quick steps to the bathroom.
While sitting on the toilet, she saw that there wasn’t any toilet paper. A roll of paper towels stood on the floor beside the filthy tub. She ripped off a sheet, moistened a corner of it in her mouth and rubbed at the skin under her eyes to remove mascara smudges. Then she poked at her hair with her fingers, finished on the toilet and that was about all the time Travis was going to give her. He was understandably edgy; he had a mission tonight, and he wasn’t sure how it was going to go. She admired the fact that he was brave enough to venture into territory like that.
“Don’t forget,” she said as she exited the bathroom. “Clover dates that guy.”
“I would never forget that,” Travis said. “C’mon, let’s go.”
He preceded her out the front door of his house, then looked both ways, up and down the street, to make sure nobody was going to see them.
“See ya,” he said, and skipped down the stairs, leaving her there, no good-bye kiss, no idea of when they’d talk or see each other again. It was a small point to her, as she knew he’d be at the donut shop in the morning, puffy-eyed and ready for caffeine, but it would have been a nice gesture to give her a kiss or at least the promise of a date in two or three days. Or something.
But that wasn’t the shape of their relationship, and Eileen had to staunch that little drop of blood that leaked out of her heart as he dismissed her so readily. She was just a convenient lay for him, and she knew it, and to think anything else was to set herself up for certain disappointment.
Still, a girl could dream, couldn’t she?
“Bye,” she said, and resisted the impulse to touch him. They got into their respective cars and drove off, she to her cold, lonely, stinking trailer, and Travis to his side job for the mayor.
Eileen wondered if she should stop and check on Clover, to make sure she was home safe.
Nah, she thought. Clover’s probably in bed, tired after doing all that laundry. And Eileen needed a shower and an early night to bed, too. The bakery never slowed down, and her three a.m. shift seemed to come earlier and earlier. Before shower, before bed, she also needed a good, stiff drink, made with something other than grape Kool-Aid, which was all she could find at Travis’s place. She needed to get right with herself about the way that Travis treated her. Either that, or dump him. Maybe it was time to give that some serious thought.
Who else would she get to bed her, if not Travis?
Somebody, certainly. If she joined a gym.
She started the car, trying not to attach significance to the fact that Travis never touched her in public, ignored her at the donut shop, sped off into the night before she got her rattletrap car started, and didn’t stick around to make sure that it did start, never mind seeing her to her door, and . . . and . . . and he always went first out the door, and if someone was on the sidewalk, he pushed her back in and closed the door until the coast was clear.
She knew. She was no dummy. But all those fantasies she entertained about the two of them making a future together were just that. Fantasies. No basis for reality, no possibility of coming true. They gripped her the strongest after they’d made love, when she was awake as he slept next to her. She’d resist the temptation to touch his face, to smooth his hair, to stroke the muscles in his back or on his arm. She’d want to kiss him with affection, but he hated that, and he’d brush her off. So she learned not to do that, but to just look at him with affection and heartfelt desire and wish things were otherwise. She wished she didn’t drink as much or smoke, so he could respect her a little more, she wished she were a widow or something honorable, rather than having never been married, yet owning up to an adult daughter.
A daughter that was only a couple of years younger than her lover. And someone her lover had his eyes on, too.
No, Eileen and Travis were not to be for long, but for now it was okay. It was good, sometimes, even, when they’d had decent sex and sometimes Travis forgot himself and wanted to cuddle her afterwards. That’s when she felt like a woman, small, soft, and feminine.
Those times were worth all the rest. She ignored all the bad stuff—Travis was a jerk, after all, and everybody knew it.
Life included lots of tradeoffs. He was one of them.
Her trailer was dark, but when Eileen turned on the living-room light, she noticed that Clover had cleaned the place up. And hung fresh uniforms in her closet.
That Clover. Wasn’t she something?
Eileen had done something right in raising Clover, although she had no idea what it was.
She poured herself a glass of vodka, splashed in a little bit of orange juice and gulped down half of it. “I’ll shower in the morning,” she said to nobody, took off her clothes, put on the T-shirt she’d stolen from Travis a few months ago, and slipped into her bed. She picked up a paperback that was on her nightstand, opened it to the mark, but she couldn’t remember the characters or what they were up to. She’d have to start reading it all over ag
ain, and she had no patience for that.
So she put the mark back in the book and the book back on the nightstand, turned out the light and sipped her drink.
She thought about calling Clover and thanking her, but decided instead to thank her in the morning.
If morning came.
She drained the glass and set it on top of the book.
Morning would come. Life was too cruel to cancel morning and let her off the hook.
~ ~ ~
Just about the time Travis met Sonny Topolo, the Samoan heavy he planned to take with him down to the hobo camp as extra insurance, York was thinking about the man who had died not twenty yards from where he lay, Denny was thinking about the fact that he had introduced Clover as his girlfriend, and what exactly that meant to her and more importantly, to him, Sly was beginning to panic and think about sailing, and Clover was busy picking names for their third child, the first son being Denny Junior, the second one being York, and the third, sure to be a girl, would have a name a little less strange than Clover, but something equally as old-fashioned. She enjoyed being a Clover. Maybe her daughter would be Violet. Or Lily. These were thoughts she’d keep to herself, though, because they were certain to scare Denny away. There were some thoughts that she had to keep to herself: Thoughts about children, of commitment and marriage, and the thoughts that came right along with them about Denny sleeping indoors in a bed with her, and especially the biggie: the job Denny was going to have to get to support her and the three little ones she wanted to lavish love upon. Nope, there would be time for all of that, because they were young yet, and as things they wanted became as apparent to him as they were to her, he would move in those directions. She just had to be patient.
Introducing her as his girlfriend to another woman was a big leap. Things were progressing.
She sighed the contentment of a woman with an unencumbered mind.
Denny heard her sigh and wondered if what he was doing was fair to her. It wasn’t, he knew it wasn’t. She ought to be finding herself a man she could settle down with, a man who could give her the kids she wanted, someone stable, with a job and a house and all the rest. Denny was probably going to be a roamer, footloose, for the rest of his days. The fact that he hadn’t moved from this one spot in the last two or three years didn’t mean anything to him. He still felt like a transient, and lived a transient’s life, with no roots, no belongings, and no ties. Sometimes he caught himself in a daydream, where he and Clover had a bunch of rug rats running around the yard, playing on the swing set, and he read bedtime stories to them, and she had her own donut shop and he spent time . . . doing what? Nothing legal, for certain; he could never toe the line for some boss. He knew what the right thing to do would be, and that was to stop building up Clover’s hopes. He wasn’t good for her.
But every time he thought about her coming down that path, smelling so nice and giggling like a girl, and bringing donuts and seeing to York the way she did, and he thought about not touching her, or worse yet, having to know that somebody else was touching her on a regular basis—Deputy Asshole, for example—it made him a little bit crazy, and he knew that he’d never be strong enough to break it off with her.
Nope, she’d have to be the one to end it, and he hoped she’d do it soon before he had to feel guilty about sucking away her best years.
He felt her little head on his chest, and listened to her girlish little breaths as she floated on the edge of dreamland next to him, and his mood turned surly. Being responsible is the shits, he thought.
~ ~ ~
Before the clouds came to cover them, the stars appeared, and Sly looked at them and thought they looked mighty tropical. There wasn’t any jungle vegetation around him, but in the warm dark he could easily imagine himself in Vietnam. His nerve endings told him he was preparing for a raid and a firefight, and he was wound tighter than he had been in thirty years. He kept reaching for his M16, always within reach, but it wasn’t there, of course it wasn’t there, they weren’t in Vietnam, they were in California, for Christ’s sake, Sylvester, get a grip on yourself.
But he was no child, and he knew that life had its ups and downs, and that it had been too much of a cruise for him lately. For the last ten or twenty years, in fact, and it was time for some shit to hit the fan. There was nothing too fun about life; it was serious business. Even living like they did was serious business. Most people had no idea. Life was just the same, whether you were on the corporate fast track or living in a hollowed-out dump by the train tracks. You still had to find food to eat, and maintain a latrine, and deal with the weather and all kinds of people in the process. All the time dealing with people. Must be a part of the divine plan, because it was fucking inescapable.
Well, if everything he heard was accurate, they’d be dealing with some people this evening, and it would be no joke.
Stand firm, he told himself, and be there for your buddies. This was not a time that Sly could go sailing and either live or die by the hand of God and the Viet Cong. This was not a time where his foxhole mates could cover for him or take a bullet for him or continue the firefight whether he had been hurt or put out of commission in some way or just flat-out went sailing and left them all to their own devices. No, these buddies were damned near helpless. This was York, an old blind man who might as well be Moses or Buddha, as far as Sly cared. He loved York as much as he loved any other human being. York would give no resistance, York would not defend himself. And Denny was still young: the little rat had his whole life ahead of him. Nope, this was Sly’s job. He was the one who had been combat trained, had at one time been a fine-tuned fighting machine, though his mind went to the brisk and balmy Caribbean breezes every time the fight came his way. Still, he knew how to do all those things, and this, the fatalist in him reasoned, had been the reason all along for that wretched experience. He needed to defend York and their perimeter. Well, he could do it. He would do it, and he would do a good job of it. It might redeem his soul for the cowardice he had displayed in real combat. Nobody knew about any of that but him and his God, because the rest of the platoon sure as shit never talked. He was the only one who’d survived.
He reached his hand down for the M16.
It wasn’t there, of course.
~ ~ ~
Travis and Topolo drove to the railroad yard, which seemed eerie and uncharacteristically abandoned in the night. The two railroad guys waited there, smoking and shuffling their feet. Travis parked in the dark lot, and wordless except for a quick greeting, the four of them got into a green van owned by the railroad. In the backseat were two baseball bats. Travis tried not to balk when he saw them, their polished wood illuminated in the harsh interior lights. He and Sonny climbed in the backseats, and the railroad guys climbed in the front for the four blocks or so to the place where they had vermin to eliminate, exterminate, or otherwise induce or persuade to thrive elsewhere.
This was not Travis’s favorite job, and he hoped to almighty God that the bums would go quickly, quietly, and without a problem. He knew he could trust himself, but he didn’t know about these railroad goons. He resisted the temptation to look more closely at those two baseball bats, to see if they had blood on them or anything.
Maybe one of their kids was on a Little League team.
Maybe not.
~ ~ ~
York was worried over the dead guy. He knew that the mayor and the railroad wanted him off their land, but that was nothing. There was something else afoot. Someone had been murdered, and that was a far more threatening thing to have been brought into their world than a little dispute over squatters’ rights. There was a murderer at large.
He felt an unfamiliar agitation over the approaching evening. He wasn’t worried about Sly; Sly was a lot of talk and no action. York had been hearing about Sly going to the coast for ten years, and nothing like that had ever really approached happening. York had no doubt that Sly had been in the military, because occasionally he traded on his veteran status, and always to
good advantage. But all that talk about defending the perimeter was a lot of hokey. York was glad that he didn’t need to depend on Sly for much of survival value. He came through at the right times with the right stuff, though, like medication when York needed it, and the occasional paycheck when there was too much month left at the end of the money. But battle? Never. Not Sly.
Denny. Denny was the impetuous hothead that had York worried. Denny and that slingshot. Those ball bearings could probably kill a man if powered out right and hit in a crucial spot.
But even Denny’s arrogance and disrespect for the law and those men who were coming to evict them tonight weren’t the real thing that worried York. It was whoever killed the guy and pushed him off the train. That guy wasn’t going to be finished with his business until he knew for certain that nobody could finger him.
York hoped that Sheriff Goddard was keeping Deputy Travis busy with that part of the investigation, and leaving to the railroad the whole question of whether York could stay put. Those guys had other, more important things on their minds than a couple of old guys living harmlessly in their weeds. But that Deputy Travis. He was another hothead who acted before he thought.
Travis and Denny going toe-to-toe would be something to see. They were both too ornery to let their fight flash to an instant conclusion. More likely, it would be like a giant anaconda fighting a gator, a slow-motion grind to the death of them both.
Denny and Sly both knew how York felt about violence and disturbing the peace of their little village. If they wanted to beef, they needed to take it somewhere else. York was in charge here, as far as that went, and he, in accordance with his heartfelt beliefs, would do what the powers asked of him, rather than initiate any nastiness.
If they wanted York to move, he would. He just hoped to hell they moved him to a nice place, with good-smelling women and not where he’d have to worry about getting his throat slit in the night by an icy-eyed killer on the train.
Sly had the watch, whatever that meant to Sly. To York it meant that Sly had something to keep his mind occupied, and York could relax. Sly had a tendency to go off the deep end when it came to military stuff sometimes, and his actions and reactions worried York a little bit. But Sly wasn’t a young man any longer, and those fighting hormones tended to diminish over time.
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