stick was sucked down to a sharp point instead of being bit off. Guess he was trying to make it last as long as possible. Angel had already confided to me her need for a cigarette and the fact that she wouldn’t get to smoke one until we got to Chicago. That was another reason she was trying to sleep the trip away, she said, so she wouldn’t sit there craving a cigarette so much.
The boy—he looked to be about twenty or so—was laid back in his seat with ear plugs in that was attached to a little box laying on his chest. Esther has one of them things. I think she calls it an I-pod or an I-pad or something.
So anyway, I made it out of my seat and found the teeny-tiny restroom. It was no bigger than a broom closet. It took awhile to figure out how to lock the door and work everything. I managed to take care of business, although in the name of hygiene I did not sit all the way down. I usually don’t with public restrooms—too many germs. This toilet was a special challenge, though. That toilet seat moved with every turn the tracks made. It was a challenge trying to take aim while a toilet seat moves from side-to-side beneath you, but I did the best I could.
After washing my hands at the sink that was hardly any bigger than a soap dish, I decided to try my luck at the snack bar. It was through two doors that whooshed when I pressed on them. I realized that I’d just passed through one train coach to another and it kinda took my breath away.
The snack person was sitting on a little stool. “What can I get for you?” he said.
I’d given it some thought. I asked for a bottle of water and a candy bar. It came to four dollars, which I found excessive, so I did not contribute any money to the tip jar he had sitting on the counter. I figure he probably made a whole lot more than my social security check anyway. It wouldn’t take much to make more than me.
I kind of spraddle-legged my way all the way back to my seat, holding my balance against the sway of the train. Then I had to straddle Angel to climb over her again and get to my seat. Then I covered up that dragon on her back side again, settled down and took a bite of chocolate and a sip of cold water. I couldn’t have been prouder of myself if I’d scaled Mt. Everest.
Then it hit me. What I’d seen out of the corner of my eye while I was getting back into my seat. The boy was gone, and the father was laying kinda different and awful still.
With a scared feeling in the pit of my stomach, I turned around and peeked over the top of my seat. Sure enough the seat near the window—the one where the son had sat—was empty, and the one with the daddy in it was—well, let’s just say that the peppermint stick wasn’t sticking out of his mouth anymore.
It was a’sticking out of the side of his neck.
I’m not usually a screaming woman and I saw no reason to start screaming now. Instead, I swallowed down the bile that was trying to claw its way up out of my stomach, scrambled over Angel as quick as I could, side-stepped past the body and went on a search for the nice porter who had said to ask if there was anything he could do for me.
I most definitely had something he could do for me, and this time I didn’t mind asking.
It’s interesting, watching people try to pretend nothing has happened when something big has happened. The porter didn’t hardly know what to do about a man a’layin’ there dead with a peppermint stick a’sticking out of his neck and blood all over everything like some stuck pig. The lights were still low, and people were still sleeping all over the place.
“There was a young man with him a’calling him ‘Dad,’” I said. “Where’d he go?”
I was back in my seat where I’d had to crawl over Angel again to get to. The girl was so sound asleep I would have been worried about her being dead, too, if she hadn’t been snoring. I couldn’t help wondering what was in those pills to make her sleep so good.
“We’ll take care of this, ma’am.” The porter was polite as always, but he dismissed me like I didn’t have sense enough for him to even bother talking to. “Please just take your seat.”
Mama once said that there was nothing as invisible as an old woman and I’ve found her to be right. I knew I looked every year of my age and then some. My hair is snow white and Holly had given me a fuzzier perm than usual. I’ve never worried much about skin care. I just wash with soap and water and head back out into the sun to work in my garden. I’m spotted and speckled and wrinkled and exactly the kind of person a young porter would want to ignore. Problem was, I had no intention of that happening.
“Where’s the boy?” I ask again, louder. I know I talk with a Kentucky accent, which some people think sounds ignorant, but there’s nothing wrong with my mind. I know I didn’t dream up no second person in the seat beside of the dead man.
“Please, ma’am,” the porter says, and I could tell he was getting exasperated with me. He almost sounded like he was annoyed that I found a dead man and interrupted his coffee break—the one I found him having back at the snack bar.
There’s nothing I could do, so I sat down and hope that the boy with the red ball cap would come back from using the bathroom or taking a stroll or something, but that didn’t happen. What did happen was that the train made what the conductor called over the loudspeaker an “unscheduled stop.” He told everyone to stay in their seats, and then some police people from whatever town we’d stopped in came aboard to see about the dead man and the porter had to turn on the bright overhead lights, and that waked one of the triplets, and it started crying and that waked up the other babies and they started crying, and the louder they cried, the more they scared the others and before long we had four babies screaming their heads off in our train car, and the man in the dreadlocks rouses up and says, “What the…” (I can’t print the things he said but I learned a couple new words.)
In the middle of this Angel kinda roused from her coma and asks, “What’s going on?” And I pull my sweater back up over her and give her shoulder a pat and say “The police are here to take away a man with a peppermint stick a’sticking out his neck.”
Angel blinked a couple times, tried to fluff up the little pillow she was using—although those things don’t fluff much. Then she said, her voice all drowsy, “that’s nice,” and fell back to sleep. I made a mental note to find out what it was in those little pills she took. If they’re something that can be got in a drug store I’d like to get me some sometime. I don’t always sleep as good as I’d like.
Everyone except Angel was full awake, the whole car was watching wide-eyed as the police inspected the body—except I got a ring-side seat cause I’m turned completely around now, sitting on my knees, watching them do their thing with their rubber gloves on.
“Where’s his son?” I try again to make them notice that there oughta be another one sitting there.
No one took no mind of me except an older man in an old brown coat who came on board with them. He wasn’t dressed like a policeman at all and looked like he got out of bed in a hurry. He took note of me and said, “What do you mean?”
“He had a young man sitting beside him who called him Dad. He was laying there asleep when I got up to go to the toilet, and he was gone when I got back and he never showed up again.”
The man in the brown coat sidled past the others and planted himself in front of me. Well, Angel, too, but she wasn’t really much of a part of the conversation.
“Did you see or hear anything else?” he asks.
Finally. Someone acting like I maybe got the sense the good Lord gave me.
“I heard the kid say, ‘Do you think they followed us, Dad?’ And the father said, “No. If they did, we’d already be dead.”
The brown coat man’s eyes lit up. “Anything else?”
I repeated the entire conversation pretty much word for word. I have to admit. It was pretty much burnt into my mind.
“Anybody else see anything?” the man in the brown coat asked.
Nobody stepped up to say they had seen anything. It was just as I thought. Everyone had been pretty much asleep.
I was still worried a
bout the boy in the red cap. He wasn’t a real big kid. Kinda scrawny-looking and short and he’d sounded really worried when he’d talked to his dad.
I added that to my conversation with the man in the brown coat. “I’m really worried about that boy,” I said. “He wasn’t very big. I’m afraid something has happened to him.”
The man in the brown coat was nice enough to look me straight in the eyes and agree with me. “I’m worried about him, too, ma’am. That’s why I have people already combing all over this train to see if we can find him.”
Well, that made me feel a little better. Finally someone was paying attention to the boy. The way I figured it, either he killed his own daddy—which meant he needed to be behind bars, or he had gotten cross-ways of those people he was scared of, or he was off somewhere else on the train not knowing his daddy was dead. Anyway you sliced it, he needed to be found.
As I stood there watching the police people do their thing, I noticed a large man sitting behind the murdered man’s seat. He was big in the way that those muscle-men get, not fat, and he was reading one of them hunting magazines that men like. He wasn’t paying as much attention to what was going on in front of him as I thought most people would be. His nonchalance seemed odd to me.
In the seat next to him, was a person who was obviously still sound asleep, all