Stories (2011) (29 page)

I'm going to take Bobby down to the lake again tomorrow. If
you tie him to a blowed-up inner tube he floats. It's not a bad way to cool off
from a hot day, and it also drowns the ants and maggots and such.

I know it does. We kept my little brother in pretty good
shape for six months that way. It wasn't until we started nailing him to the
shed out back that he got to looking ragged. It wasn't the ants crawling up
there and getting him, it was the damn nails. We ran out of good places to
drive them after his ears came off, and we had to use longer and longer nails
to put through his head and neck and the like. Pulling the nails out everyday
with the hammer claw didn't do him any good either.

My Old Man said that if he had it do over, he wouldn't have
hit my brother so hard with that chair. But he said that about my little sister
too when he kicked her head in. She didn't keep long, by the way. We didn't
know as many tricks then as we do now.

Well, I hope I can get Bobby back in this sack. He's
starting to swell and come apart on me. I'm sort of ready to get him packed
away so I can get home and see Mom. I always look at her for a few minutes
before I put Bobby in the freezer with her.

Dappled sunlight danced on the eastern side of the train.
The boughs of the great cherry trees reached out along the tracks and almost
touched the cars, but not quite; they had purposely been trimmed to fall short
of that.

James Butler Hickok wondered how far the rows of cherry
trees went. He leaned against the window of the Pullman car and tried to look
down the track. The speed of the train, the shadows of the trees and the
illness of his eyesight did not make the attempt very successful. But the dark
line that filled his vision went on and on and on.

Leaning back, he felt more than just a bit awed. He was
actually seeing the famous Japanese cherry trees of the Western Plains; one of
the Great Cherry Roads that stretched along the tracks from mid-continent to
the Black Hills of the Dakotas.

Turning, he glanced at his wife. She was sleeping, her
attractive, sharp-boned face marred by the pout of her mouth and the tight
lines around her eyes. That look was a perpetual item she had cultivated in the
last few years, and it stayed in plate both awake or asleep. Once her face held
nothing but laughter, vision and hope, but now it hurt him to look at her.

For a while he turned his atttention back to the trees,
allowing the rhythmic beat of the tracks, the overhead hiss of the fire line
and the shadows of the limbs to pleasantly massage his mind into white
oblivion.

After a while, he opened his eyes, noted that his wife had
left her seat. Gone back to the sleeping car, most likely. He did not hasten to
join her. He took out his pocket watch and looked at it. He had been asleep
just under an hour. Both he and Mary Jane had had their breakfast early, and
had decided to sit in the parlor car and watch the people pass. But they had
proved disinterested in their fellow passengers and in each other, and had both
fallen asleep.

Well, he did not blame her for going back to bed, though she
spent a lot of time there these days. He was, and had been all morning, sorry
company.

A big man with blonde goatee and mustache came down the
aisle, spotted the empty seat next to Hickok and sat down. He produced a pipe
and a leather pouch of tobacco, held it hopefully. "Could I trouble you
for a light, sir?"

Hickok found a lucifer and lit the pipe while the man
puffed.

"Thank you," the man said. "Name's Cody. Bill
Cody."

"Jim Hickok."

They shook hands.

"Your first trip to the Dakotas?" Cody asked.

Hickok nodded.

"Beautiful country, Jim, beautiful. The Japanese may
have been a pain in the neck in their time, but they sure know how to make a
garden spot of the world. White men couldn't have grown sagebrush or tree moss
in the places they've beautified."

"Quite true," Hickok said. He got out the makings
and rolled himself a smoke. He did this slowly, with precision, as if the
anticipation and preparation were greater than the final event. When he had
rolled the cigarette to his satisfaction, he put a lucifer to it and glanced
out the window. A small, attractive stone shrine, nestled among the cherry
trees, whizzed past his vision.

Glancing back at Cody, Hickok said, "I take it this is
not your first trip?"

"Oh no, no. I'm in politics. Something of an
ambassador, guess you'd say. Necessary that I make a lot of trips this way.
Cementing relationships with the Japanese, you know. To pat myself on the back
a bit, friend, I'm responsible for the cherry road being expanded into the area
of the U.S. Sort of a diplomatic gesture I arranged with the Japanese."

"Do you believe there will be more war?"

"Uncertain. But with the Sioux and the Cheyenne forming
up again, I figure the yellows and the whites are going to be pretty busy with
the reds. Especially after last week."

"Last week?"

"You haven't heard?"

Hickok shook his head.

"The Sioux and some Cheyenne under Crazy Horse and
Sitting Bull wiped out General Custer and the Japanese General Miyamoto
Yoshü."

"The whole command?"

"To the man. U.S. Cavalry and Samurai alike."

"My God!"

"Terrible. But I think it's the last rise for the red
man, and not to sound ghoulish, friend, but I believe this will further cement
Japanese and American relationships. A good thing, considering a number of
miners in Cherrywood, both white and yellow have found gold. In a case like
that, it's good to have a common enemy."

"I didn't know that either."

"Soon the whole continent will know, and there will be
a scrambling to Cherrywood the likes you've never seen."

Hickok rubbed his eyes. Blast the things. His sight was good
in the dark or in shadowed areas, but direct sunlight stabbed them like
needles.

At the moment Hickok uncovered his eyes and glanced toward
the shadowed comfort of the aisle, a slightly overweight woman came down it
tugging on the ear of a little boy in short pants. "John Luther
Jones," she said, "I've told you time and again to leave the Engineer
alone. Not to ask so many questions." She pulled the boy on.

Cody looked at Hickok, said softly: "I've never seen a
little boy that loves trains as much as that one. He's always trying to go up
front and his mother is on him all the time. She must have whipped his little
butt three times yesterday. Actually, I don't think the Engineer minds the
boy."

Hickok started to smile, but his attention was drawn to an
attractive woman who was following not far behind mother and son. In Dime
Novels she would have been classified "a vision." Health lived on her
heart-shaped face as surely as ill-content lived on that of his wife. Her hair
was wheat-ripe yellow and her eyes were as green as the leaves of a
spring-fresh tree. She was sleek in blue and white calico with a thick, black
Japanese cloth belt gathered about her slim waist. All the joy of the world was
in her motion, and Hickok did not want to look at her and compare her to his
wife, but he did not want to lose sight of her either, and it was with near
embarrassment that he turned his head and watched her pass until the joyful swing
of her hips waved him goodbye, passing out of sight into the next car of the
train.

When Hickok settled back in his seat, feeling somewhat worn
under the collar, he noted that Cody was smiling at him.

"Kind of catches the eye, does she not?" Cody
said. "My wife, Louisa, noticed me noticing the young thing yesterday, and
she has since developed the irritating habit of waving her new Japanese fan in
front of my face 'accidently', when she passes."

"You've seen her a lot?"

"Believe she has a sleeping car above the next parlor
car. I think about that sleeping car a bunch. Every man on this train that's
seen her, probably thinks about that sleeping car a bunch."

"Probably so."

"You single?"

"No."

"Ah, something of a pain sometimes, is it not? Well,
friend, must get back to the wife, least she think I'm chasing the sweet, young
thing. And if the Old Woman were not on this trip, I just might be."

Cody got up, and with a handshake and a politician wave,
strode up the aisle and was gone.

Hickok turned to look out the window again, squinting
somewhat to comfort his eyes. He actually saw little. His vision was turned
inward. He thought about the girl. He had been more than a bit infatuated with
her looks. For the first time in his life, infidelity truly crossed his mind.

Not since he had married Mary Jane and become a clerk, had
he actually thought of trespassing on their marriage agreement. But as of late
the mere sight of her was like a wound with salt in it.

After rolling and smoking another cigarette, Hickok rose and
walked back toward his sleeping car, imagining that it was not his pinch-faced
wife he was returning to, but the blonde girl and her sexual heaven. He
imagined that she was a young girl on her first solo outing. Going out West to
meet the man of her dreams. Probably had a father who worked as a military
officer at the fort outside of Cherrywood, and now that Japanese and American
relations had solidified considerably, she had been called to join him. Perhaps
the woman with the child was her mother and the boy her brother.

He carried on this pretty fantasy until he reached the
sleeping car and found his cabin. When he went inside, he found that Mary Jane
was still sleeping.

She lay tossed out on the bunk with her arm thrown across
her eyes. Her sour, puckering lips had not lost their bitterness. They
projected upwards like the mouth of an active volcano about to spew. She had
taken off her clothes and laid them neatly over the back of a chair, and her
somewhat angular body was visible because the sheet she had pulled over herself
had fallen half off and lay draped only over her right leg and the edge of the
bunk. Hickok noted that the glass decanter of whiskey on the little table was
less than half full. As of this morning only a drink or two had been missing.
She had taken more than enough to fall comfortably back to sleep again, another
habit of near recent vintage.

He let his eyes roam over her, looking for something that
would stir old feelings -- not sexual but loving. Her dark hair curled around
her neck. Her shoulders, sharp as Army sabres, were her next most obvious
feature. The light through the windows made the little freckles on her
alabaster skin look like some sort of pox. The waist and hips that used to
excite him still looked wasp-thin, but the sensuality and lividness of her
flesh had disappeared. She was just thin from not eating enough. Whiskey was
now often her breakfast, lunch and supper.

A tinge of sadness crept into Hickok as he looked at this
angry, alcoholic lady with a life and a husband that had not lived up to her
romantic and wealthy dreams. In the last two years she had lost her hope and
her heart, and the bottle had become her life-blood. Her faith in him had died,
along with the little-girl look in her once-bright eyes.

Well, he had had his dreams too. Some of them a bit wild
perhaps, but they had dreamed him through the dullness of a Kansas clerkery
that had paid the dues of the flesh but not of the mind.

Pouring himself a shot from the decanter, he sat on the wall
bench and looked at his wife some more. When he got tired of that, he put his
hand on the bench, but found a book instead of wood. He picked it up and looked
at it. It was titled:
Down the Whiskey River Blue
, by Edward Zane
Carroll Judson.

Hickok placed his drink beside him and thumbed through the
book. It did not do much for him. As were all of Judson's novels, it was a
sensitive and overly-poetic portrayal of life in our times. It was in a word,
boring. Or perhaps he did not like it because his wife liked it so much. Or
because she made certain that he knew the Dime Novels he read by Sam Clemens
and the verse by Walt Whitman were trash and doggerel. She was the sensitive
one, she said. She stuck to Judson and poets like John Wallace Crawford and
Cincinnatus Hiner.

Well, she could have them.

Hickok put the book down and glanced at his wife. This trip
had not worked out. They had designed it to remold what had been lost, but no
effort had been expended on her part that he could see. He tried to feel
guilty, conclude that he too had not pushed the matter, but that simply was not
true. She had turned him into bad company with her sourness. When they had
started out he had mined for their old love like a frantic prospector looking
for color in a vein he knew was long mined out.

Finishing his drink, and placing the book behind his head
for a pillow, Hickok threw his feet up on the long bench and stretched out,
long-fingered hands meshed over his eyes. He found the weight of his discontent
was more able than Morpheus to bring sleep.

____________________

When he awoke, it was because his wife was running a finger
along the edge of his cheek, tracing his jawbone with it. He looked up into her
smiling face, and for a moment he thought he had dreamed all the bad times and
that things were fine and as they should be; imagined that time had not put a
weight on their marriage and that it was shortly after their wedding when they
were very much on fire with each other. But the rumble of the train assured him
that this was not the case, and that time had indeed passed. The moment of
their marriage was far behind.

Mary Jane smiled at him, and for a moment the smile held all
of her lost hopes and dreams. He smiled back at her. At that moment he wished
deeply that they had had children. But it had never worked. One of them had a
flaw and no children came from their couplings.