little bitty white pillows sitting on the two empty seats he took me to.
“The rest rooms are back that way,” the porter said. “If you go past the restrooms and into the next car, there’s a snack bar. If you need anything, just ask.”
I had no intention of bothering the young man, but I thanked him and settled into the seat. The train was really chugging along now. It didn’t seem real to me that I was actually doing this, so I tried telling myself where I was going so I maybe I could believe it.
“Doreen,” I whispered. “Stop being scared. You are truly on a train going to San Antonio, Texas. People do things like this every day and they don’t think nothing about it.”
It was the first time I’d been more than fifty miles away from home since my class trip to New York City.
Eventually, the soft rocking of the train soothed my nerves, and I started calming down. Then I started getting sleepy. It was after midnight, after all, and my bedtime is nine o’clock, and I was just worn out from all the excitement. I looked over at that extra seat beside me and wondered if there was any kind of rule against laying down sideways and taking me a little nap. I peeked up over the back of my chair. The two seats behind me were empty, and a couple others were empty further back as well, but for the most part people were sprawled out all over the place. So I took those two little bitty pillows, fluffed them up the best I could, kind of laid over on my side, and the next thing I knew I was gone.
I woke up an hour later when the train came to a stop in Cincinnati. I sat up, rubbed my eyes, and watched a whole pack of people rush in. Every seat that wasn’t already taken had someone storing their suitcases above it. A girl shoved a beat-up duffle bag into the bin above my head, then sat down beside me and introduced herself as Angel. My naptime was over.
The name Angel would normally conjure up the image of a shy, quiet, angelic-looking young girl with blonde hair. This girl named Angel might have been shy and quiet for all I know, but she wasn’t blonde and she had felt the need to decorate herself with quite a few tattoos like every other young person in the world seems to be doing these days.
I felt like leaning over and saying, “Honey, those ain’t going to look so good when you’re all wrinkled up like Yours Truly.”
I didn’t say nothing, though. I figured it would be a good idea to keep quiet. It usually is. Someone that young, they think they won’t never get wrinkled up. I know this for a fact, because I thought the same way when I was young. Didn’t think I’d ever need eye-glasses, either. When you’re young, you tend to think that the only reason people get old is a lack of will power.
Still, the tattoos looked kind of pretty on her skin. If I was younger and my skin didn’t sag, I could probably go for a pretty rose or two. The thought made me smile. My mother would have skinned me alive and nailed my hide to the barn door if I’d ever even mentioned doing such a thing.
“Do you want your feet up?” Angel asked.
I didn’t have no idea what she meant, so she showed me how I could hit a little lever and a footstool flung up. Then she showed me how to touch another button, and how my seat could go back. It was almost as comfy as my recliner back home.
I thanked her and we talked for a few minutes. Both of us with our feet up, and our chairs back. She was a nice girl and I was starting to feel real good about taking this trip.
Angel was going to meet her husband, she said. He had a temporary job in Chicago, and she was going up to spend some time with him. She told me that she had a plan. She was going to take a couple pills and sleep until she got there so the time would go faster.
At my age, time going fast isn’t always a good thing, and I’d already had me a little nap—so I told her I was going to stay awake. That pretty much exhausted our conversation. After taking those two pills, Angel curled up in a little ball on the seat beside me and fell asleep a few minutes after the train chugged out of the station.
It wasn’t long before I noticed that the little puffy coat she tried to use to cover herself up with didn’t cover up much, poor thing. I was plenty warm so I took my old gray sweater off and covered her with it. She didn’t seem to be the kind of girl to take offense at small kindnesses. Besides, it was a little hard to concentrate on my trip with a dragon peeking out at me from her backside where her shirt had rid up.
I noticed that another girl had gotten on the train with a brand-new baby daughter. So help me, that baby didn’t look to be more than a couple weeks old. The girl tried to get a little sleep, but that baby kept needing a bottle or to be jostled around. It cried off and on, and every time it would make a little squawk, the guy with the dreadlocks who happened to be sleeping in the seat in front of me would rouse up, cuss the blue streak and then settle back and nod off again. The young girl would look over at him, like her feelings was hurt, and then go back to caring for her baby.
I felt like thumping that young man on his thick-head for being so rotten-tempered when it was obvious that poor mother was doing everything she could, but I was fairly certain that thumping a young man in dreadlocks was not a good idea when someone is seventy-one-years-old and wearing a housedress and orthopedic tennis shoes. If Bobby Joe had been sitting beside me, I might of tried it, though. Shoot, Bobby Joe might have thumped him, himself.
To my surprise, that wasn’t the only baby on our car. Three babies in little plastic carriers was lined up a couple seats up from me. They looked to be triplets about five months old. Pretty children. Rosy cheeked. That mother was all alone, too, but those were the best children. The rocking of the train kept them asleep—or maybe she’d doped them up on Benadryl.
Of course, I couldn’t help but wonder where the daddies were to all these babies, but that’s not something people’s supposed to talk about anymore. Where the daddies are, that is.
The swaying of the car made my sweater start to slide off Angel, so I covered her up again and was considering getting a little more shut-eye, when two men I hadn’t paid much attention to when they took the two seats in back of me at Cincinnati started talking to each other. I tried not to listen in too closely—that would be eavesdropping—but it’s hard not to hear words when someone is talking right behind you. That’s one thing that has not started going wrong with my body yet—my hearing.
“Do you think they followed us, Dad?” the younger man asked.
“No.” The father tried to whisper, but his voice was gravely and it carried. He sounded like someone who had smoked two packs of cigarettes every day of his life. “If they followed us, we’d be dead by now. That’s how those people operate. You don’t know it’s coming until it’s too late.”
“I wish you never got us into this.” The young man’s voice was strained. “I’m worried about Nancy and the kids.”
“They’ll be fine.” The father’s voice didn’t sound sure at all. “Stop worrying.”
“I hope you’re right.” The kid sounded doubtful.
“Wish I could have a smoke,” the father said. “It’s crazy not letting us smoke on the train.”
“I got one of the kid’s peppermint sticks in the food bag Nancy packed for me. Would that help?”
“Maybe.”
I heard the son rustling around in the bin above us, then the sound of cellophane being peeled off something. “Here.”
“Thanks,” the father said. “Now try to get some sleep. We’ll be in Chicago soon.”
Now I have to admit. That whole exchange jarred me. I strained to hear more, but that’s all they said.
I glanced at my watch with the big, illuminated dial. It was three o’clock in the morning and we’d been gone out of Cincinnati for quite awhile. The son must have been keeping still all this time until he thought everyone in the train would be asleep and he could talk.
My mind started working overtime trying to figure out what in the world those two had gotten themselves into. Then my bladder started to complain. I tried to ignore it, but there are some things that you just can’t ign
ore. It was time to start the trek back to the restroom the porter had told me about—even if I did have to crawl over Angel to get there.
I stood up, and tried to get out of my seat so I could get to the toilet, but it took me a long time to maneuver over Angel who was dead to the world. Of course this also gave me time to take a good, long look at the two men behind me. They were most definitely father and son. The father was starting to go bald, although that didn’t keep him from having his back hair done up in a ponytail. He wore a sort of green uniform, like the kind you see on a game warden or a forest ranger, except it wasn’t the whole uniform. It only looked like it might have been once, like he might have bought it at a thrift store or garage sale or something. The son was wearing a camouflage jacket and a red baseball cap. They both had what the commercials used to call “five o’clock shadows.” The two of them were kinda rough around the edges, except for one thing. Both had these cute little turned-up noses—the kind a person expects on a cheerleader instead of a grown man.
The dad was laid back in his seat, with a piece of peppermint stick sticking out of his mouth that he was a’sucking on and his eyes were closed. While I was trying to maneuver around Angel, he pulled the stick out for a second, licked his lips, and then stuck it back in. I noticed that the end of the peppermint