At the back of the train, the view of the prairies was beautiful. Those who sat further up the train saw the prairies slip past the windows like raindrops skipping across the glass. But if you stood on the back of the train and looked out, the harvest of gold and emerald slowly sank into the vanishing point in the horizon, like watercolors washing down the drain. And with the setting sun lighting up the grains in the fields like matchsticks, the moment was Monet.
The moment was lost on those in the refrigerated car, though. Its usual cargo being slabs of meat, the car had to be tightly insulated to prevent the summer heat from putrefying the goods. There were no windows on the car as a result, and the darkness and the stink of meat would make anyone feel that they were literally trapped inside of their own body.
And in the center of the car, chained to a metal pole that stuck in the floor like a conqueror’s flag, was the sticky black bile that clings to your liver. The dirty man sat sprawled on the blistering floorboards, his legs twisting as he tried to find a better sitting position. But it was hard – his wrists were bound tightly to the pole, so intimate that he hadn’t felt his fingers in hours. Like the last icicle of winter, the sense of touch was trickling down his arms. There was a loose anaconda of rope that coiled around his torso up to his neck, further pinning him down. It would not be long before he would feel one with the pole, as if he couldn’t feel any less human.
Although a curtain of chill fluttered in the air, his face still felt salty. He tried to rub his forehead against the pole, but he couldn’t quite manage it. It seemed as if everything was sloughing off him, and would continue to do so until his bones clattered to the floor.
The animal winced as sweat pooled in his eyes – he blinked hard but the saltwater was stubborn and his dark blue eyes looked like the seafloor. But the sting woke him up – until that moment, the numbness had been crawling under his skin like cancer. He tried to gurgle something, not like a baby learning how to speak, but like a bear that had just woken up after a long winter.
He called out to the darkness around him, speaking the tongue of fever dreams come to life, but the darkness did not answer. But where most would have become frightened in a jail like this, the monster just laughed – it was the kind of laugh that comes with finally understanding the punchline to a joke heard years before. He then tried to keep busy, pretending that the dice in his pocket was clattering around in the hollow of his loose fist. He was a lucky craps player in what felt like another life, when his world was larger than the length of chain that kept him to the pole.
His game of craps was interrupted by another slap of nausea, this one overwhelming him to the point that he threw up. Since he was essentially paralyzed by the chain, he could not turn his head, and so he vomited all over himself. As he felt the vile taste dripping off his beard, staining his only shirt he had to his name, he idly wondered what he could have possibly thrown up. He hadn’t had anything to eat for two days now.
“Is there enough room at the table for one more, Sheldon?” A sweet voice asked in the darkness.
The beast wasn’t startled in the slightest by the voice. He rasped, “Always.”
A slender hand birthed out of the dark, and Sheldon could feel the electricity of the hand as it brushed past his face and took the imaginary dice from his chained hands. As the hand rolled the dice, Sheldon heard the familiar clatter of the ivory as the sides of the dice collided with one another and created new math problems. The hand launched the dice and they scampered across the hard floor like a stone skipped across the pond. The dice clapped against the wall and came to an abrupt stop, and a few seconds later the voice called out with a laugh, “Seven.”
“Liar,” Sheldon coughed.
“You don’t trust me, Sheldon?” The voice pouted. “We’ve known each other our whole lives. When have we ever lied to each other? Well, we only knew each other for one night, but that night felt like a lifetime – especially because I died at the end of it.”
More than anything, Sheldon wanted to tell her that she looked more beautiful in death than she had in life, but he couldn’t find the right words to express just what he meant. Instead, he said, “Drink.”
“You want something to drink? Hold on,” the sweet voice said Sheldon heard the sound of something being poured into a glass and felt the rim of the cup press against his cracked lips. He could smell the strong, antiseptic smell of aged bourbon. The voice tipped the glass forward and the drink went down his throat like blood rushing through a dried vein. Sheldon sputtered and felt awake in a way he hadn’t felt in days, like a marionette that figured out how to use its own strings.
“Thank…thank…”
“You’re welcome,” the voice said. “Now try to get some sleep. It’s a long ride to Cheyenne.”
Sheldon nodded and leaned his head back on the metal pole and drifted off into a long sleep as the slender arm wrapped around his back and a tight cocktail dress pressed against his heaving ribs.
And that was how Sheldon McKenna finally found his peace, in a refrigerated train car as they crossed over the border with Nebraska, with the temperature dropping like leaves in autumn and with four armed marshals posted just outside the door, both to keep him in and to keep others out.
And Sheldon’s soul – and he did have a soul – was the only one inside of the train car.