“Hell, that’s all right, old boy,” Anderson said heartily. “It happens to all of us. I’m only sorry I can’t help you out.”
Mary left the Tessingers, who were on the point of going to bed, and joined me in the aisle. Most of the berths were made up now, and the car had shrunk to a high narrow tunnel between green curtains. Some of the unreality of the world outside had seeped into the train. For a moment I had a sense of terror, as if the dim aisle were an ancient path in an unknown jungle where dangerous creatures waited in ambush.
“We’re coming into Topeka,” Mary said. “Let’s go out on the platform and have a look.”
We made our way to the platform at the rear of the car. Topeka was a scattering of lights, a series of warehouse walls broken by glimpses of almost deserted streets stretching drearily into darkness, then a quickly extinguished vista of neon lights grinning in many colors on the unheeding heads of after-movie crowds, finally the long irregularly lit platform of the station. One of a hundred such cities that one saw for the first time with remembering boredom, and left immediately with relief. My jag was running down like an unfuelled engine, and I felt very sorry for all Topekans, whose city was a poor gathering of feeble lights in the immense darkness of the hemisphere.
Mary slipped her warm hand between my arm and my side. “When I was a little kid I was very poor,” she said dreamily. “I used to watch the passenger trains come into the station. It was the bottom of the depression, but there were still plenty of rich people to ride them. I had never been on a train, and it seemed to me that the men and women behind the lighted windows were like kings and queens on thrones.”
I was touched by what she said, but distrusted the sentimentality. “Every kid feels that way about riding on trains,” I said. “But once you’ve taken a few trips the illusion collapses. The parts of cities you see from trains always seem to be on the wrong side of the tracks.”
“I’ve still got my illusion. I feel more alive when I’m on a train. It gives me a feeling of power to ride across the country and leave the rest of the world sitting.”
“I guess you’ve never grown up. Maybe you’re lucky.”
“Maybe I am, but it’s sort of painful. Now I’m the lady in the lighted window, but I still see myself the way I did when I was a kid. I’m on the inside looking out, but I’m on the outside looking in, too.”
“You’re schizophrenic,” I said, and kissed her.
The baggage and mail had been loaded, the travellers taken aboard and the doors closed behind them. The brakemen swung their lanterns and the train began to move, laboring toward the staccato frenzy of speed.
Her mood changed suddenly, and she said:
“I shouldn’t have spent so much time with the Tessingers, but I couldn’t resist the situation. Mrs. Tessinger must know as well as I do that Teddy isn’t interested in her, but she’s a woman, and she just can’t help being grateful for his flattery. He’s been saying the most outrageous things, and she eats them up.”
“Such as?”
“Oh, everything. Her beauty, her youthful spirit, her energy, her clothes. Tomorrow, I expect, he’ll go into all the anatomical details.”
“What’s Rita’s reaction?”
“Admiration, so far as I can see. She knows what he’s doing, and she seems to be all for it. She’s spent the last few years in a very conservative girls’ school.”
I took hold of Mary and kissed her again, hard.
“You are a little drunk, aren’t you?” she said.
“Do you mind?”
“No, I’m very tolerant.” She put her hand on the back of my neck, drew my head down, and kissed me. “Let’s go in now, shall we? I’m cold.”
We turned toward the door but before my hand found the knob, the door opened and Hatcher’s long lean face appeared in the opening:
“Say, mate, I was looking for you. I been all the way up to the club car looking for you. How’s about another drink?”
“Go ahead if you like it,” Mary said. “I’m going to bed.”
She kissed me lightly on the cheek and disappeared down the passageway.
“She’s a sweet number,” Hatcher said. “How did you happen to get in so close with such a sweet number?”
“I met her in Honolulu at a party. Then I met her again in Detroit.”
“Some guys are born lucky. She looks like warm stuff to me.
“Even if I am not entirely a gentleman,” I said with a certain pomposity, “Miss Thompson is a lady.”
“Don’t let her kid you. They all have the same instincts. The same beautiful instincts.”
“Shut up, God damn it! I’m thinking of marrying this girl.”
“Sorry. Sorry. You got your angle and I got mine. Play it the way you like it. How about that drink?”
“Anderson didn’t have any. We’ll have to drink yours.”
“O.K., I was weaned on moonshine. Come on, I left the bottle in the smoking-room. Hope it’s still there.”
It was under the seat where he had left it. He fished it out and took a long pull from the mouth. I poured a little in a paper cup and drank it, but the interruption had spoilt my taste for drinking. Besides, the stuff was even more nauseous than I remembered. My stomach flopped over like a dying fish.
“Jesus,” I said, “this stuff is terrible. Worse than any jungle juice I ever had.”
“Oh, it’s not so bad.” In a spirit of bravado, Hatcher tipped up the bottle and took another long gulp. In the next few minutes he swallowed his adam’s apple more frequently than was normal, but he managed to control any other symptoms of queasiness.
He sat back and lit a cigarette and told me some of the things he had seen as a merchant seaman. The sailor in Canton who had his belly slashed by a razor and came running down the street with his bowels exposed. “Yeah, I heard they sewed him up and he got over it.” Once on a little tramp steamer on which he shipped out of Australia he had a mad captain who slept every night with a lifesize rubber woman. Her painted rubber face, the captain’s steward said, gradually grew paler from his kisses.
As he told that story, Hatcher’s own face gradually grew paler. His bright blue eyes became glaucous and rolled slowly in their sockets. His speech became blurred as if someone had swaddled his tongue in cotton batting. “’Scuse me,” he said finally. “Don’t feel s’good.”
With his jaw hanging beneath pale parted lips he got up with an effort and lumbered through the door to the men’s toilet. For a few minutes I could faintly hear the sounds of retching, like heavy paper tearing.
I didn’t feel so good myself. The smoking room rocked cumbrously like the cabin of a ship riding a long deep swell. The lights in the ceiling divided like amoebas and danced like elves. I raised my right hand to my face in order to cover one eye and stop their insane reproductive dancing, but my fingers struck me across the bridge of the nose. I discovered that my hands were exceedingly remote objects, only partially animate and only nominally under my control. My whole body was growing numb, as if my nervous system were a live wire gradually going dead as the battery ran down.
It seemed to me that the train was slowing but perhaps, I thought, it was only my metabolism. Suddenly the train stopped with a jerk, lights outside the window became as fixed as my eyes could hold them, and my stomach flopped over again like a dead fish turning in its grave.
Hatcher was still in the men’s room, so there was only one thing for it: I had to get outside. On legs which were as hard to handle as rubber stilts I got out into the passageway. The walls seemed to expand and contract on either side as I edged my way between them across the buckling floor to the door.
I stumbled out onto the open platform into cool night air under a high clear sky. The stars descended upon me like an elevator in a shaft.
8
AS THE falling stars entered the narrow field of my consciousness they patterned themselves in circular groups which began to turn. Rotating towards each other the wheels of stars clustered
like grapes into a turning silver fist, a rolling white eyeball, a seed of light which eloigned itself in darkness until it was a remote chink in a bellowing heavy curtain and finally swallowed up. Then the low sallow sky of unconsciousness, starless as the skies of hell and roiled and weaving at the desolate horizon with dusky orange smoke, blossomed suddenly in an intricate array of turning wheels. In time with a low humming which rose and fell like the sourceless ululation of cicadas, the wheels spun monstrously in geometric patterns.
My surviving speck of consciousness was as helpless and hurried among them as a grain of sand caught up in the churning of a millwheel. Yet the innumerable millwheels churned an element as intimate as my blood.
Come as close to death as you may, there is no complete cessation of consciousness. The mind’s torment clings to the flesh till the heart has stopped and the brain dies. While I lay straddled by nightmare my mind, lost in the horrible interior of my body’s engines, prodded them into continued effort. My diaphragm wrestled with paralysis and won. I went on breathing.
The dark wheels lost their motion and their shape, extending, like a spattered gout of blood, blood-red fingers which groped among the unknown terrors of my situation. I lay in a jungle of dark weaving tendrils and limp leaves which swayed and bowed like sinuous feathers in a desultory wind. When I opened my eyes this soft inconstant world was resolved into the real world of solid dimensions. But a trace of the movement persisted in a teetering of the whole universe above me. The fulcrum of this motion was the small of my back, which seemed ready to break under the strain.
I was conscious of a dark rectilinear shape, as fearfully palpable as the lid of a tomb, which loomed between me and the night sky. Reflected dimly by this huge and shadowy object, I saw faint lights, some fixed as stars, one or two moving like comets in remote orbits. Like a voice calling across stellar space, I heard a faint “All aboard!” A light moved in an arc near me. I became conscious, in a blinding flash of terror and recognition, that the painful fulcrum on which my back rested was a rail. I was under the train and it was about to move across my body.
Simultaneously I let out a yell which was drowned in the snort of rushing steam, and flung myself forward. I struck my head on a brake rod. Grovelling and scuttling like a lamed crab I dragged myself out from under the wheels and flung myself on the platform beside the rails.
“What the hell!” somebody said.
I turned on my back and sat up, and a brakeman came towards me swinging a lantern.
“Hold the train,” I said in a hoarse voice hard to recognize as my own. “I’m supposed to be on it.”
He moved his lantern in a signal and I lost my feeling that the train was pawing the ground with its steel hooves. “Look here,” he said. “What were you doing under the train?”
Self-pity and the hammering and droning in my head made me bark irritably, “Lying there. For fun.”
He took hold of my arm and dragged me up: “You get up on your feet and give me a straight answer. This train can’t wait all night.”
My legs were still only partly under my control, but I balanced myself on them.
“What’s the matter, you sick?” the brakeman said. “Say, you’re drunk.” He shook me by the shoulder. I struck his hand away.
The conductor came up, biting impatiently at his heavy grey moustache. “What’s the holdup here?”
“I was unconscious,” I said, unnerved into childishness because I had never been unconscious before. “Somebody put me under the train.”
“He’s drunk,” the brakeman said. “You can smell his breath. He says he’s on the train.”
“Well, get the hell back on or I’ll call the Shore Patrol. Wait a minute, let me see your ticket.”
“It’s in my berth. Don’t you know me?”
The brakeman raised his electric lantern to the level of my face and the conductor gave me a narrow-eyed look. “Yeah, I know you. Climb back on and get in your berth. You’re lookin’ bad, boy. And if you make any more trouble this trip, any trouble at all, the S.P. will put you off the train.”
There was no use in arguing and I was uncertain of my grounds anyway. I transported my roaring head and raw throat down the platform to the end of the car, up the iron steps, in the door, down the passageway toward the men’s smoking-room. Before I got there the train had begun to move. Remembering my flashing terror of the wheels, I had a swelling sense of relief, like a man walking on a grave in which his own empty coffin has been buried.
My relief gave way to blank wonder and then to another terror when I saw that the men’s smoking-room was empty, and found by experiment that the door of the men’s room was locked. I knocked on the door. There was no answer. I knocked more loudly, until the sound of my knocking echoed in my tender skull like the blows of a metalsmith’s hammer. There was still no answer.
I tried the knob again and rattled the door in its frame. Then it occurred to me with a pang of shame that I was acting like a child. Hatcher, of course, was in some other part of the train, probably in bed by this time.
But the door was locked, and it locked only on the inside. If there was anyone in that little room capable of speech, he would have answered. “Hatcher!” I called through the wooden panels. “Hatcher!”
“What’s the trouble?” someone said behind me. “Gotta go bad?” I turned and saw Teddy Trask wearing a purple silk bathrobe over candy-striped pajamas, and carrying a shaving kit.
“I think there’s a sick man in there. The soldier that got on at Kansas City.”
“My God, you don’t look so good yourself. Where’d you get the dirt all over your uniform? Let me see this door.”
He tried the knob and examined the narrow space between the door and its frame. “We’ll soon find out.” From his shaving kit he took a new safety razor blade, unwrapped it deftly, and applied it to the crack of the door.
When he had been hunched over his work for perhaps a minute I heard him say “There!” and the bolt snapped back in its socket. He turned the knob and opened the door, but it wouldn’t open far.
He forced it a few inches more till the space was wide enough for his head, and looked around the edge of the door.
“My God!” he said. “What’s the name of that Army doctor down the line?”
“Major Wright.”
“I’ll go and get him.”
He hustled away, his slippers lapping the floor in quick syncopated rhythm. I took my look into the little room.
Hatcher was kneeling on the floor in a posture similar to the Moslem attitude of prayer. Most of the weight of his body was supported by his legs, which were bent under him. His head, turned sideways, rested on the edge of the toilet bowl. The wall light two feet above his face allowed me to see that his one visible eye was staring blankly at the blank wall. There was about him a souring sweet smell of sickness and drugs.
I tried to get in to him, pressing my shoulder against the door, and he moved suddenly. He fell sideways into immediate stillness like a loosely filled sack. I felt such pity for his helplessness and indignity, which I myself had so nearly matched a few minutes before, that I cried out.
“Here, here,” Major Wright said behind me, taking hold of my shoulder with one hand. “Let me see what I can do for him.”
While I stood back on unsteady legs and watched, Teddy Trask, who was smaller than I, stepped around the door. He maneuvered Hatcher into a more nearly upright position, embraced his chest from behind, and brought him out into the smoking-room where he gently laid him out on the floor. Hatcher’s face grinned bleakly at the ceiling.
The doctor made a quick examination, attempting to take his pulse, inspecting his chest and mouth for signs of breathing. When he touched a staring eyeball with his finger I winced and turned away, but not before I had noticed the absence of any reflex. Private Hatcher’s eyeballs were as insensate as glass.
“I’m afraid he’s dead,” Major Wright said, squinting at me over his shoulder through rimless spectacle
s. “What made him sick?” There were marks of Hatcher’s sickness on his rumpled uniform.
“We were drinking some pretty terrible liquor,” I said with shame. “I passed out, too.”
“It would take a good deal of liquor to kill a man like that. How much did he have?”
“I don’t know. Maybe a pint in the last couple of hours.”
“Is there any of it left? I want a look at the stuff.”
The bottle of Bonded Bourbon was in plain sight on the floor near Hatcher’s limply spread field boots. At the sight of it my nerves crawled. I picked it up with aversion and handed it to him. He uncorked the bottle and took one sniff. His squinting little eyes narrowed to two steel edges.
“This man’s been drinking ether,” he said. “No wonder he’s dead.”
He recorked the bottle quickly and replaced it on the floor.
“Those poor bloody dog-faces never learn,” Teddy Trask said. “Two of my buddies in France drank poison liquor. One of them died, and the other’s blind.”
Major Wright looked at him sharply at the word ‘dog-faces.’ He said to me: “How much of this stuff did you drink, Mr. Drake?”
“A couple of short ones. But that was enough to put me out. How long did we stop at that last place?”
“Emporia? About five minutes. Why?”
I told him why.
“Do you suggest that someone deliberately dragged you under the wheels of the train?”
“I don’t suggest it. I state it. I know I didn’t do an Anna Karenina under my own power. I passed out on the rear platform, and if I’d fallen from there I’d have fallen either behind the train or to one side. I couldn’t have fallen under the wheels.”
“You can’t tell what you did when you were unconscious. Ether makes people do some awfully funny things.”
“Such as die,” I said.
“That’s true too. All the ether addicts eventually die if they keep it up. Where did this bottle come from?”
“He bought it somewhere in Kansas City. I think someone poisoned it.”
Trouble Follows Me Page 10
