Phantom Nights (3 page)

Sun burning red half the length of the horizon in a drought-shroud of atmospheric dust; in the bird-flecked waning light she parked just off the narrow gravel road a hundred yards south of the track. On the side of the road opposite the river loop were the remains of an old railroaders' hotel with breached walls and the roof fallen in, and a still-active Negro church that had a bell rusted soundless in its squat belfry. Behind the country church lay a cared-for burial ground where Mally's late husband, William, and a host of kinfolk on both sides were interred.

Hoping to catch a breeze, she left the car door open on the driver's side, cracked window glass aglow with the light of the vanishing day, and enjoyed a Chesterfield while she thought about her future. Now that she would no longer be caring for Priest Howard, Jesus cherish his lonely soul. Mally was a registered nurse, but there wasn't much call for her services locally. The physician running the county's clinic for indigent Negroes—which was pretty much of a redundancy in one of the poorest counties in the forty-eight states—could use her. But the pay was a pitiful fifteen hundred a year; aside from near-starvation wages, she considered the doctor in charge to be incompetent, and she wasn't in a crusading frame of mind. John Gaston Hospital in Memphis paid better, but it was either find a place to live in Memphis or drive a hundred miles round trip six days a week. Mally had her doubts that the old Dodge could survive many such trips. Balding tires, a front-end shimmy whenever she drove faster than thirty-two miles an hour. Repair bills would eat her alive.

The thought of teaching at Evening Shade Community High School depressed her. She could teach physics or math, but the school didn't offer either basic math or science courses. A total disgrace in Mally's opinion; not the least of the consequences to the school's graduates was that they could not meet admission requirements for Tennessee's state universities, even if they had the money for higher education. The school's roof leaked shamefully; there were rats; the library was one shelf in a dank room, the spines falling off old textbooks stored inside.

Hoot owls in the live oaks, radiator hiss as it cooled down. She sat sideways on the seat with her sandaled feet on the running board. Feeling used up, all in. And obscurely guilty, as if somehow she had failed Priest Howard. Then that ugliness with his son Leland in his last hour . . . Couldn't be have been spared the indignity of that visit? Although surely he'd seemed to want it, to insist on his estranged golden boy being at his side before he gave up the ghost. Simply to have the pleasure of calling Leland—what?
Thief
.

She had no notion of what might have been unsettled in their bellicose kinship to account for that. But whatever had weighed so heavy on the old man's mind, he hadn't confided it to Mally during his last lucid weeks.

Spite of what Mr. Leland might be thinking right about now, that look he'd given her.

High-power white man with a leching eye—they always spelled trouble. Gold toothpick and two-toned shoes, thought he had style. But Mally had some experience in telling the wrong ones, those men with a history of default in the romance game.

Mally tugged at a bra strap that was too tight under her dress. Finished her cigarette and dropped the butt in the gravel, squirmed uneasily. She looked at the sky, dusky blue now, the sun gone. The air seemed to be cooling but wasn't moving, still felt thick as wet paint on her maple-toned skin.

She calculated there was light enough left to walk across the road and around behind the church, pay a visit to William. Wrong of her to be almost there and not go to the graveyard. Because she was not a blaming person. Her anger long gone, sadness still around and always would be, but at a distance, no longer a torment. Still, a lot of sorrow to deal with in one day . . . She had to go.

Mally heard a dog howl not too far off as she stepped out of the car. The sound made her quiver. A fright from childhood, lore of the easily haunted. And then, a couple of years after The War—that business in Korea, couldn't think of it as a
war
after what they'd been through only six years ago—there had been an actual dog pack roaming Evening Shade and the next county over. At least thirty wild dogs. Killing livestock and unwary domestic animals. An elderly white woman had been dragged, her apron full of snapbeans, off a rickety screened porch and mauled in her dooryard, bitten through and through, the wild dogs lapping her gore from the hardpan ground. Sharpshooters from the sheriff's department had exterminated that pack, but talk was lately that a new pack of stray dogs had formed and been spotted near a horse farm off the Worthington Pike. A foal had been torn apart in the paddock.

Which was, Mally calculated as she walked around the unpainted frame church, some whitewash from a bygone year still clinging stubborn as lichen to the woodgrain, about three miles as crows flew on up the road from Cole's Crossing.

She heard a rattling and hard slither in the gravel of the road behind her and turned to catch a glimpse of a towhead boy crouched over the handlebars of his bicycle, pumping hard, unbuttoned shirt flapping palely as he swerved around the car door she hadn't closed. A wavering light on the fender of the bike. His sudden appearance gave Mally a moment's cold spell, hair frizzing on the back of her neck, but he didn't stop for a look around. Had somewhere to get to, in a hurry. She listened hard, thinking there might be others behind him. Wishing she had brought the flashlight from the glove compartment. Steel barrel, a weapon of sorts.

But so far just one white boy, on up the road toward the railroad tracks and out of her line of sight now, not several to be acting big for one another if they spotted her there all alone.

Smart for her to remember that even one teenage boy could be too many, depending on his size, in these circumstances.

Hurry on up then
, Mally told herself.
Make your visit, and go.

T
he Washington, D.C.-bound
Dixie Traveler
, out of the Memphis Union Station promptly at eight-thirty every night, was due at Cole's Crossing at four minutes past nine, give or take a few seconds. Mally had been parked there many a night collecting her wits after a trying day attending to Priest Howard when the streamliner whipped past the unguarded crossing at seventy-two miles an hour. Mally seeing flashes of faces in the diners and club cars, sometimes wistfully imagining herself aboard in one of the coloreds-only coaches, all settled down with a sandwich from the buffet car and magazines to read, a new life waiting at the other end of the line—but her imagination never made it that far. Stepping down in Washington or Philly or even New York, not knowing a living soul up there, fifty dollars in her purse. What next, Mally? She hated the blankness this question afforded, the fear in her bones. Why couldn't she find the gumption to leave this hard-luck and heartbreak place? The standard poesy, but of course hearts didn't "break": no, they withered to the roots from longing while blood turned pale as mercury, filling the chasms of memory and regret. Her eyes felt heavy with unshed tears.

As she kissed William's stone and rose from beside his grave, which could have done with some weeding, Mally heard the scream of the
Dixie Traveler
, that distant and important voice, knew that the
Traveler
was two miles down the line at Watkins' Junction. Later on, well past Evening Shade's modest depot, the Traveler would stop for a minute and a half in Corinth, not again until it reached Chattanooga. She walked quickly back to her car, glancing up the road where steel rails, if you put your ear to one of them, would be singing with the energy of the oncoming train.

The sky was slate now; big trees stood out in sharp silhouette against the three-quarter moon beginning to command the sky and a few stars. Not much light by which to make out the boy nearly a hundred yards from her, standing on a rise at the edge of the railroad right-of-way, his bike laid down next to the road behind him. His back was to Mally as she reached her car and slipped inside under the steering wheel. The boy didn't turn when the door
thunk
ed shut. He continued to stand close to the northbound tracks, hands at his sides. White shirt like a drooping flag on his slender body, its pallor tinged by the green highball light on the signal bridge in front of the trestle.

Now, why hadn't he gone on across?
Mally wondered. Or had he pedaled hard this far just to be there for the passage of the
Dixie Traveler
, an imaginative train-watcher like herself?

But to her mind he was dangerously close to the track, and in his stillness—she put on the car's headlights to see him a little more clearly in spite of the distance—in his stillness seeming ready to give himself up to something, to the enormous power of a diesel engine.

Mally didn't turn the key in the ignition. There was a disagreeable rumble in her stomach, reminding her that she hadn't eaten since early morning. And a small disturbance, a premonition in her heart as she studied the blond boy in his cut-off jeans. No sign from him, no uneasy movement to indicate he might be aware that he was being observed.

What was this?
Mally thought, a little annoyed with herself. Too soon released from the inevitable end of Priest Howard, death still on her mind and in her nostrils, gloomily trying to make something ominous of a farm boy just waiting for a train to go by, nothing more . . .

Mally started the engine, which coughed itself to life and gave her a shaking in the process. But her attention was still on the boy on the railroad grade. He had turned his head west and was looking down the line as the
Dixie Traveler
rounded the long bend at Half Mile, its powerful cyclops headlamp ghosting the telegraph wires alongside the tracks, giving shine to a water tank and a no-longer-used coal tipple leaning on rusted legs. The boy's face also lighting up. Too far for Mally to accurately judge what he looked like, but guessing at his age she thought maybe fourteen, and close to six feet tall with that gangly, just-growed look about him.

She put in the clutch and let off the handbrake, shifted into reverse to back up and turn around. The boy had to know she was there, but paid no attention. He was entirely focused on the onrushing streamliner, as—

—he stepped up on the end of a railroad tie, then stepped across the outside rail and laid himself face down in the
Dixie Traveler
's path with arms outstretched suppliantly, as if to a raging deity.

Mally ground the gears getting out of reverse and into low, the old Dodge spinning
 
its all-but-shot tires in gravel and clay ruts then lurching forward as she stood on the accelerator. A hundred yards to cover, and she could see the green-and-white diesel engine of the varnish, as old-time railroaders called the deluxe passenger trains, out of the corner of her eye, moving, oh Lord, too fast to stop in time even if the engineer or the fireman in the high cab saw the boy lying there.

She pounded on the horn, which was feeble, and screamed, which no one could hear, as she raced the
Dixie Traveler
for the crossing and the prone boy about to give up his life. Memory of her Uncle Cletus, who had worked on the L&N and been mangled after a fall from a crummy one icy night, memory of him being fed his meals all stumped up on pillows at the table during family get-togethers and oh Christ Savior, who was this young boy craving to be mangled or die in such a terrible way, what had life done to him already that he hated it so bad?

Mally hit the brakes at the crossing and piled out of the sedan with the howling of an air horn and the four-thousand-horsepower thunder of doom in her ears, partly blinded by the looming light. And knew she could not hope to reach in time the motionless boy lying fifty feet from her on his face, top of his head barely visible, laid down tight enough between the rails to be eating ballast.

She turned away from the furious blast of wind in her face and pounded a fist against the long hood of her car, then buried sobs in her cupped palms as she hunched over the fender, grit exploding against her bare arms, dust everywhere. . . .

The train passed, and she slowly raised her eyes to it, to the dwindle of red lights atop the rounded end of the club car as a lumbery clatter from the weight of the
Traveler
on the long trestle carried back to her.

She couldn't look down at the roadbed, bring herself to cast about for scattered remains near where the boy had laid himself down, presumably to be destroyed.

Tears to wash some of the grit from her reddened eyes. A draining force, exhaustion so compelling she could have slumped down beside her car and fallen asleep there in an instant.

Instead Mally wiped her eyes and took a breath, holding it grimly as she walked around the front of her Dodge to make certain. She had stopped the car askew in the road, and in the sullen yellow of headlights, insects whizzing through the beams, she saw the boy rise up on one knee from the track.

Mally's heart kicked up in her throat, as if a dreadful night had suddenly acquired lightning.