Whitechurch (12 page)

He, of course, is beaming with pride. Chalk up another one.

“Where are the drinks?” he says.

I stare at him. That’s all I feel like doing. Not true. I am wishing I were a magnifying glass, and the sun was searing behind me, pinpointing Paul through my eyes.

“To hell with the drinks,” Mary Martha says. “I got smoke. Why don’t we just smoke instead?”

I never smoke. I do not like the way it makes me feel. The lightness without the well-being. The scary feeling of no control, even worse than the everyday feeling of no control.

“Sure,” I say.

This throws Pauly nicely. He takes a good sharp look into me. The three of us are out the back now, on the small platform where the car we were riding would be attached to the car that was following, if there were more than ten or twelve people ever desiring to travel to or from Whitechurch by train. Pauly is staring at me, tilted, the way a dog does when you make an unfamiliar sound. The wind feels wild and screamy, the way it seems to rush from all sides, swarming us and whipping our hair onto our faces as we face out the back toward where we were. Somehow Mary Martha manages to light up, and she is pulling hard on the smoke.

“Mary Martha here says Lilly didn’t get on the train because of me,” Pauly says as if he’s talking about the banner headline on the morning’s
Whitechurch Spire
. He takes the joint and sucks on it, then continues talking. “Says Lilly already made up her mind about school anyway. She’s gone, Oak. What do you think about that?”

He passes me the joint as if he’s passing me the info. I take it, I stare at it. The flower girl is perhaps now in the dining car gifting somebody else with her smile. I take a minor hit of the joint.

“So what, Pauly?” I say. “We knew this, I think. We knew Lilly was going. She wants a life, and she doesn’t need your permission. It would probably be a good time to stop playing stupid about it.” Normally this moment would be
handle with care
. Trouble is, at this moment, I don’t. Care.

I stare at him, provoking. I hope he screams at me.

“My favorite color is VCR blue,” Paul says evenly.

Mary Martha snorts a laugh, grabs a smoke. “Recite another Mary Martha poem,” she says.

“The color of the screen when the tape is finished but you leave the TV on. I watch that for hours sometimes.”

I take the joint from Mary Martha before she offers it. I take another hit. What a chump I was not to go to her. I should go back to the bar and invite her back here, is what I should do.

I’m thinking, I did it again.

I’m thinking, He wasn’t even there, for Chrissake.

I’m thinking, I can’t remember when it wasn’t like this.

I’m thinking, Thinking is a start anyway.

I’m thinking, I may well do it. I’m thinking hard on it when Pauly snatches the smoke from the pinch of my fingers, and Mary Martha works at sparking up a second one.

“Mary Martha keeps making me offers I shouldn’t be able to refuse,” Pauly says, nervous-grinning. “And listen to this, she says that Lilly says it’s fine with her if I go for it.”

Weird, I am glad to hear that Lilly said that. Go, Lilly.

Run, Lilly.

“Why did you change your name, Mary Martha?” I ask.

“Why would Lilly say that?” Pauly asks. Suddenly adrift.

Mary Martha looks at me. “How come you don’t have a girlfriend, Oakley? Good-looking guy like you, and nice, too, not like this psychopath Pauly.”

“That’s not my name anymore,” Pauly says. “I want to be called Penelope.”

“Shut up, Pauly,” she says, and hits him very sharply, very affectionately, on the shoulder. I feel bad for Mary Martha.

“Okay, you can still call me Pauly, but it’s the other one, the one spelled P-o-l-l-y.”

“How come, Oakley?” she persists.

How come
. How come? Why does that phrase mean “why”? Like, how did it come to this? Is that it? How, fucking, come?

“Because he’s got
me
,” Pauly says.

“Didn’t Mary Martha ask you for a poem a while back? Ya fake,” I say.

I figure to catch him off guard, make him slip. As so many times before, I figure him wrong. He leans with his back against the rail, facing me head-on.

Mary Martha
— Epilogue

Dear Miss Penelope

This is all hell for me

The color

is VCR

It’s not a bad haircut

It’s a scar

Now the death flower’s

fading

Love does not fucking last

But say now

This train’s trucking

awfully fast

Mary Martha is game, but also inexperienced and stoned. She does her best.

“Was I in there someplace?” she asks, then chuckles.

All I know at the moment is that I am not, in there. I don’t care what is, either. Pauly is right about me. If something requires an act of will, I won’t.

That has to stop.

I will ask the flower girl to join us.

The conductor’s face appears in the window, and suddenly I am in a full panic. We will be arrested now. I know we will be, and I hate that feeling so much. We were arrested before, me and Pauly. I used my phone call to bring my dad down, and luckily he was home to do it and to not give a particular shit about it either which is not too bad a quality in a father I think. Pauly used his one call to call, as he said, the only person he had.

He called me. Right there at the police station while I sat in the cage. He lifted the number when they were interviewing him at the desk.

The cops didn’t think it was all that funny once they worked it out. I thought it was pretty all right once I did.

I point at the face, and Mary Martha turns to check. She pounds the glass and he goes away.

“Don’t mind these people here. I’m an employee, remember. And if you had any idea what these boys put inside themselves … you’d
walk
to Boston.”

“I don’t want to go to Boston,” Pauly says.

I know in an instant he is cemetery serious.

“Are the drivers really screwed up all the time? Do you think we really might crash?” Pauly has swung around to the side of the train, looking forward into the mad wind. He is leaning way far out, the way they told you not to as a kid or a pole would tear your head off. I’m suddenly aware of the
sound
of the train as I watch Pauly. Like the noise is the soundtrack to his actions, and that noise is like the assault of drummers on the street, a hundred drummers on the street, banging and banging away on big metal cans, going faster, then faster, then harder, until they’ve gotten inside you, beating from inside you.

Mary Martha still thinks this is a conversation. “Nah, I was just—”

“I don’t sleep with anybody but Lilly,” Pauly says, and he is saying it to me. Then to Mary Martha. Actually, he’s screaming it, fighting the wind. “I want to see Lilly. I don’t want to see Boston. I don’t sleep with anybody besides Lilly.”

He doesn’t. Doesn’t sleep with anybody besides Lilly. Nor with Lilly herself.

Now it sounds like helicopters. Like beating blades of helicopters are coming up from beneath our feet. I look down. Then up at Pauly. Then down again, like I cannot tell which of these things is really happening.

“Don’t hang so far over there, Pauly,” I say.

“Pole’ll take your head off,” Mary Martha says.

His only acknowledgment is to bare his teeth. His mouth blows wide open and distorted and he hyperventilates, hissing in and out between his teeth.

We come tearing through an old mail depot, and the poles now do come whipping past, one-two-three-four, swings of giant bats just missing Pauly’s head. I recoil with every one. Mary Martha gasps. Pauly fails to notice us. He’s treating the poles the way a bullfighter treats bulls, leaning into them, daring them, yapping at them.

Until I yank him back in.

“Cut the shit,” I say.

For all the world, he appears to be answering a statement I didn’t make. “You think so? Oakley, you don’t really believe that, that she’s gone.”

Fortunately he’s not looking for a response from me, because I am empty. He turns toward the back railing. The smoke is all gone, which is probably good. The wind and mainly fresh air are still with us, which is good. Poles don’t tear heads off from the back of the train.

“Relax, Pauly,” I say. “Boston’s not that far away from Whitechurch.”

“But it
is
,” he snaps. “It’s
all
the way away. Do you understand me? It is all the way away, and if I go, then I don’t get back. You understand?”

I don’t. But I haven’t given it a great effort either. He will uncoil on his own. “No, Paul,” I say. “I don’t understand.”

Mary Martha doesn’t either. “You aren’t half the fun you’d figure to be, Pauly.”

He is hanging over the back rail, and I fear he is going to get sick. I step right up next to him, same hunched posture, shoulder tight up against his. The tracks are flying past beneath us. And the river is flying past beneath that. Our un-beautiful river is not quite brown. Tawny, you’d call it, tawny and flat as it flies by below us as if it actually had a life of its own, rather than just the illusion of motion created by the train’s real motion. Me and Pauly are both looking at it the same long way.

“Ever see
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
?” he says, looking up and crookedly smiling at me. The words are not the problem. The crooked smile and the nearly imperceptible bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet is not the problem. It’s the sudden hungry thrill in the squint of his eyes. That’s the problem.

“No, Paul.”

“It’s about these two buddies in the old—”

“No. I mean, no, we are not jumping.”

“Ah, hello?” Mary Martha says. “Is this a private party?”

Pauly looks over his shoulder at her. He speaks in a loud confessional whisper. “Are you a virgin, Mary Martha? Was Penelope a virgin? Or like, with a new name did you get to start over again?”

“Right. I’m getting in out of the rain,” Mary Martha says. It is not raining. She goes inside and shuts the sliding door.

“Maybe we should rob trains and stuff. Better than staying behind in Whitechurch, huh?”

He is hanging far over now, staring down at the railroad ties slamming by beneath our feet. The sound of the drummers backed by highspeed highway traffic, and crashing surf. Pauly’s feet are barely touching the platform.

Through all the din, I can still hear myself breathing. Through my nose. Hard, clipped, small explosions of air. I sound more like a train than the train does.

“Why all the
we
, Paul?” I say, finally say. “We should jump off,
we
should rob trains. I don’t want any of that, okay? You wanna rob a train,
you
rob a fuckin’ train.”

Now the rain does come. And it comes in torrents.

“And if
I
want to jump?” he asks, and he looks so so pleased with this bend in the conversation, it’s as if I have made all the bad things go away.

I’m out over the edge myself now. The rain is coming so heavy it is shoving us downward. The chunky brown railroad ties are rising to meet our faces halfway. I feel the blood coming to my head, pooling behind my eyes, and the sound is now a cattle stampede across a steel surface.

“Go on,” Pauly says. His own eyes look swollen, as if the same blood dam is about to burst in him. “Go on and tell me. I’ll get you started even. ‘Pauly, if you want to jump …’”

I turn to him, and our faces are so close the rain is running off the tip of my nose onto his cheek.

“Can’t even make this fuckin’ decision without me, can ya, Paul?”

He looks like a corpse. The blood has run out, gone somewhere inside. Cold and fishy in the eye, whiter than bone.

I straighten up. He continues to hang there like a gaffed tuna.

“Where are you going?” he croaks.

“Goin’ to get a life, Paul.”

I have my hand on the steel handle to the door to the train.

“I love you,” he says before I open the door.

“Cocksucker,” he says after I open it.

I stand there looking at Mary Martha and the conductor, sitting in the rear seats playing cards. They stare up at me.

“Ah, that didn’t mean either of the things you probably think it would.”

She shakes her head at me. “People are one-hundred-percent right about you two.”

I nod. “Regardless. Will you do me a favor and pull him out of the rain in about five minutes? I have an appointment.”

“Okay,” she says, and returns to her game. The conductor sneers at me.

I have my hand now on that heavy sliding silver door, looking through that small window right into the sweet open real-life face of that girl, and she is happy to see me too, waving me in and in I am coming, look out now, because I am going to finally step through, join up….

I never open that door.

The engine bucks, like something has bounced off us, then decelerates.

I run hard all the way to the rear of the train once more.

Mary Martha is sitting there, edged up a little closer to the conductor, still playing cards.

“See you back in ’Church, cocksucker,” Mary Martha says as I shoot through the rear exit.

The train has jerked to a stop in this the first station on the Boston trip.

I hop down off the back of it and follow after him.

I
SIT AT THE WINDOW
watching the wind blow.

Rather, watching the evidence

of the wind blowing at forty miles per hour.

The mushroom cap of an exhaust unit

on the roof of the bakery

across the street,

spinning like a whirligig,

the trees that grow in a line behind

the main shops of the town,

dipping down below the roof lines, springing back up,

ducking again,

fighting for position

against the wicked wind we get around here.

Watching from my room, facing the street, set on the second floor

over the empty shop where up until one month

ago

they sold fifty different blends of coffee

but now they’re gone

because Whitechurch