Read Wolverton Station Page 2


  The wolf didn’t look at him directly—­he remained behind his paper—­but he did lean into him and speak in a gravelly bass. “I hope they bring the dinner trolley through. I could do with a bite. Course, on this line they’ll charge you two quid for a plate of lukewarm dog food without blinking.”

  His breath stank; it was dog breath. Sweat prickled on Saunders’s brow and in his armpits, a hot, strange, disagreeable sweat, not at all like the perspiration he worked up jogging on the treadmill. He imagined this sweat as yellow and chemical, a burning carbolic crawling down his sides.

  The wolf’s snout shriveled, and his black lips wrinkled to show the hooked rows of his teeth. He yawned, and a surprisingly bright red tongue lolled from the opening, and if there had been any doubt in Saunders’s mind—­there hadn’t been, really—­that was all for it. In the next moment, he fought with himself, a desperate, terrible struggle, not to issue a soft sob of fear. It was like fighting a sneeze. Sometimes you could hold it in, sometimes you couldn’t. Saunders held it in.

  “Are you an American?” asked the wolf.

  Don’t answer. Don’t talk! Saunders thought, in a voice he didn’t recognize—­it was the shrill, piping voice of panic. But then he did answer, and his tone was his own: level and certain. He even heard himself laugh. “Hah. Got me. ’Scuse, do you mind if I use the bathroom?” As he spoke, he half rose to his feet. He and the wolf were in chairs that faced a spotted Formica table, and he couldn’t quite stand all the way up.

  “Right,” said the wolf. He said it “Ro-­ight,” had a bit of a Liverpoolian accent. Liverpudlian, Saunders corrected himself mentally, randomly. No, Scouse. They called it Scouse, which sounded like a disease, something you might die from after being bitten by a wild animal.

  The businesswolf turned sideways to allow Saunders by.

  Saunders edged past him toward the aisle, leaving behind his briefcase and his eight-­hundred-­dollar overcoat. He wanted to avoid making contact with the thing, and of course that was impossible—­there wasn’t enough space to get by without his knees brushing the wolf’s. Their legs touched. Saunders’s reaction was involuntary, an all-­body twitch. He flashed to a memory of sixth-­grade biology, prodding the inside of a dead frog with tweezers, touching the nerves and watching the feet kick. It was like that, a steel edge pressed right to the nerves. He could keep the fear out of his voice, but not his body. Saunders believed that one atavistic reaction would be met by another, and the wolf in the suit would lunge, responding to his terror by grabbing him around the waist with his paws, opening his jaws to sink his fangs into Saunders’s belly, hollowing him out like a skinned pumpkin: Trick-­or-­treat, motherfucker.

  But the wolf in the suit only grunted, low in his throat, and twisted even more to the side to let Saunders past.

  Then Saunders was in the aisle. He turned left and began to walk—­walk, not run—­for coach. The first part of his plan was to get to other ­people. He hadn’t worked out the second part of the plan yet. He kept his gaze fixed straight ahead and focused on his breathing, just exactly as he’d been taught in Kashmir, way back down the long and winding road. A smooth in, drawn through parted lips. A clean out, puffed through his nostrils. I am not going to be killed and eaten by a wolf on an English train, he thought, quite clearly. Like the Beatles, he had gone to India as a young man to get himself a mantra and had come home without one. On an unconscious level, though, he supposed he had never stopped yearning to find one, a single statement that resonated with power, hope, and meaning. Now, at sixty-­one, he had a mantra he could live by at last: I am not going to be killed and eaten by a wolf on an English train.

  In and out went his breath, and with every step the door to coach was closer. In eight steps he was there, and he pressed the button that opened the door to the next car. The lights around the button turned from yellow to green, and the door slid back.

  He stood looking into coach. The first thing he saw was the blood. A red handprint had been planted in the center of one window and then dragged, to leave a long, muddy-­ocher streak across the Plexiglas. A mess of other red smears and splashes made a Jackson Pollock out of a window directly across the aisle. There was a red swipe dragged impossibly down almost the full length of the ceiling.

  Saunders saw the blood before he saw the wolves—­four in all, sitting in two pairs.

  One pair was on the right, in the back. The wolf who sat on the aisle wore a black tracksuit with blue stripes, honoring a soccer team. Saunders thought it might’ve been Manchester United. The wolf who sat by the window sported a worn white T-­shirt advertising an album: WOLFGANG AMADEUS PHOENIX. They were passing something wrapped in a napkin, something brown and circular. A chocolate doughnut, Saunders decided, because that was what he wanted it to be.

  The other pair of wolves was on the left, and much closer, only a ­couple yards from where Saunders stood. They were businesswolves, but less well dressed than the gray wolf in first class. These two wore sagging, wrinkled black suits and standard-­issue red ties. One of them was looking at a newspaper, not a Financial Times but the Daily Mail. His great black furry paws left red prints on the cheap paper. The fur around his mouth was stained red, blood streaked back almost to his eyes.

  “Sez Kate Winslet ’as broke up with that bloke of ’ers wot made American Beyootie,” said the one with the paper.

  “Don’t look at me,” said the other businesswolf. “I didn’t ’ave nuthink to do with it.”

  And they both yapped—­playful, puppylike yips.

  There was a fifth passenger in the car, a woman, a human woman, not a wolf. She was sprawled on her side across one of the seats, so all he could see was her right leg, sticking into the aisle. She wore black stockings, a very bad run in the one that Saunders could see. It was a nice leg, a handsome leg, a young girl’s leg. He couldn’t see her face and didn’t want to. She had lost her heel—­it had dropped into the heap of her entrails that were piled in the center of the aisle. Saunders saw those entrails last, a glistening pile of fatty white coils, lightly basted with blood. A string of gut stretched back out of sight in the direction of her abdomen. One of the woman’s high heels rested on that mound of intestines, set there like a single black candle on a grotesque birthday cake. He remembered how they had seemed to wait at Wolverton Station forever, the way the train shook now and then as if something were being forcibly loaded into coach. He remembered hearing a woman’s sob of laughter and a man yelling orders, Stop! Stop it! He had heard it the way he wanted to hear it. He had known what he had wanted to know. Maybe it was always that way for almost everyone.

  The businesswolves hadn’t noticed him, but the two louts in the back had. The one in the rock T-­shirt elbowed Manchester United, and they rolled their eyes meaningfully at each other and lifted their snouts to the air. Tasting the scent of him, Saunders thought.

  One of them, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, called out. “ ’Ey. ’Ey there, mate. Comin’ to sit with the lower classes? Goin’ to roost with the plebes?”

  Manchester United made a choked sound of laughter. He had just had a bite of that glistening chocolate doughnut that he held in the white napkin, and his mouth was full. Only it wasn’t a napkin, and it wasn’t a doughnut. Saunders was determined to see and hear things as they were, not as he wanted them to be. His life depended on it now. So. See it and know it: It was a piece of liver in a bloodstained hankie. A woman’s hankie—­he could see the lace trimming at the edges.

  Saunders stood in first class, fixed in place, unable to take another step. As if he were a sorcerer who stood within a magical pentagram and to cross the line into coach would be to make himself vulnerable to the demons that waited there. He had forgotten about breathing, no clean in-­and-­out now, just that feeling of paralysis in the lungs again, a muscular tightening that made it difficult to inhale. He wondered if anyone had ever suffocated to death from fear, had been so afraid to brea
the that he’d passed out and died.

  The door between cars began to slide shut. Just before it closed, the wolf in the Manchester United tracksuit turned his snout toward the ceiling and uttered a derisive howl.

  Saunders backed from the door. He had buried both his parents, and his sister, too, who had died unexpectedly, when she was just twenty-­nine, of meningitis; he had been to a dozen stockholder funerals; he had seen a man collapse and die of a heart attack at a Jets game once. But he had never seen anything like guts on the floor, a whole battered train car painted with blood. Yet he did not feel any nausea and did not make a sound, not a single peep. The only physical reaction he was aware of was that his hands had gone to sleep, the fingers cold, tingling with pins and needles. He wanted to sit down.

  The door to the bathroom was on his left. He stared at it in a blank, thoughtless kind of way, then pressed the button, popped the door open. An eye-­watering smell hit him, a disheartening human reek. The last person through hadn’t bothered to flush. Wet, filthy toilet paper stuck to the floor, and the little trash can next to the sink was overflowing. He considered going in there and bolting the door shut. He didn’t move, though, and when the bathroom door closed on its own, he was still in the first-­class aisle.

  That little bathroom was a coffin—­a coffin that stank. If he went in there, he understood he would never come out, that he would die in there. Torn apart by the wolves while he sat on the toilet, screaming for help that wasn’t going to come. A terrible, lonely, squalid ending, in which he would be separated not just from his life but his dignity. He had no rational explanation for this certainty—­how could they get the door open if it was locked?—­it was just a thing he knew, the way he knew his birthday or his phone number.

  His phone. The thing to do was to call someone, let somebody know (I am on a train with wolfmen?) he was in trouble. His cold, dead hands sank to the pockets of his slacks, already knowing that the phone wasn’t there. And it wasn’t. His phone was in the pocket of his eight-­hundred-­dollar overcoat—­a London Fog overcoat, actually. Everything, even clothing, had, in the last few moments, taken on heightened meaning, seemed significant. His phone was lost in a London Fog. To get to it, he would have to return to his seat and squirm past the businesswolf, something even more impossible than hiding in the bathroom.

  There was nothing in his pockets he could use: a few twenty-­pound notes, his ticket, a map of the train line. The woodcutter was alone in the deep, dark forest without his ax, without even a Swiss Army knife, not that a Swiss Army knife would do him any good. Saunders was seized by an image of himself knocked flat on his back, the wolf in the scally cap pinning him down, his wretched breath in Saunders’s face, and Saunders raking at him frantically with the dull, ridiculous, inch-­and-­a-­half-­long blade of a Swiss Army knife. He felt a laugh rise in his throat and choked it back, understood he was quivering on the edge not of hilarity but of panic. Empty pockets, empty head—­ No. Wait. The map. He jerked the map out of his pocket and unfolded it. It took an effort of will to focus his eyes . . . but whatever his other flaws, Saunders had always had will to spare. He looked for the Liverpool line and began to follow it north from London, wondering about the stop after Wolverton Station, how far it might be.

  He spotted Wolverton Station about two-­thirds of the way to Liverpool. Only it wasn’t Wolverton Station on the map, it was Wolverhampton. He blinked rapidly, as if trying to clear some grit out of his eyes. He supposed it was possible that he had misread the sign at the last stop and that it had always been Wolverhampton. Which made the next stop Foxham. Maybe there would be foxes waiting on the platform there. He felt another dangerous, panicky laugh rise in his throat—­like bile—­and swallowed it down. Laughing now would be as bad as screaming.

  He had to insist to himself there would be ­people in Foxham, that if he could get off the train, there was a chance he might live. And on his map, Foxham was barely a quarter inch from the Wolverhampton stop. The train might be almost there, had been rushing along at a hundred-­plus miles an hour for at least fifteen minutes (No. Try three minutes, said a silky, bemused voice in his mind. It’s only been three minutes since you noticed that the man sitting beside you wasn’t a man at all but some kind of werewolf, and Foxham is still half an hour away. Your body will be room temperature by the time you get there.)

  Saunders had gotten turned around and started, unconsciously, to walk back the way he had come, still staring at his map. At the last moment, he realized he had pulled abreast of the wolf reading the Financial Times. At the sight of the giant dog-­faced thing on the periphery of his vision, he felt icy-­hot skewers in his chest, needling toward his heart: Saunders, the human pincushion. You aren’t too old for a cardiac arrest, buddy, he thought—­another notion that wouldn’t do him any good right now.

  Saunders pretended to be lost in the study of his map and kept walking, wandering down to the next row of seats. He looked up, blinking, then settled into a seat on the opposite side of the aisle. He tried to make it look like an absentminded act, a thing done by a man so interested in what he was looking at that he’d forgotten where he was going. He didn’t believe that his performance fooled the wolf with the Financial Times in the least. Saunders heard him make a deep, woofy-­sounding harrumph that seemed to express disgust and amusement alike. If he wasn’t fooling anyone, Saunders didn’t know why he went on playacting interest in his map, except that it felt like the safest thing.

  “Did you find the loo?” asked the businesswolf.

  “Occupied,” Saunders said.

  “Right,” the wolf said. Ro-­ight. “You are an American.”

  “Guess you could tell by the accent.”

  “I knew by the smell of you. You Americans have different accents—­your southern accent, your California-­surfer accent, your Noo Yawk accent.” Affecting an atrocious faux-­Queens accent as he said it. “But you all smell the same.”

  Saunders sat very still, facing straight ahead, his pulse thudding in his neck. I am going to be killed and eaten by a wolf on an English train, he thought, then realized that somewhere in the last few moments his mantra had turned from a statement of negation to one of affirmation. It came to him that the time for pretend was well past. He folded his map and put it back in his pocket.

  “What do we smell like?” Saunders asked.

  “Like cheeseburgers,” said the wolf, and he barked with laughter. “And entitlement.”

  I am going to be killed and eaten by a wolf on an English train, Saunders thought again, and for a moment the idea wasn’t the worst notion in the world. It was bad, but even worse would be sitting here letting himself be taunted before it happened, taking it with his tail between his legs.

  “Fuck you,” Saunders said. “We smell like money. Which beats the hell out of stinking like wet dog.” His voice shaking just slightly when he said it.

  He didn’t dare turn his head to look at the wolf directly, but he could watch him from the corner of his eye, and he saw one of those erect, bushy ears rotate toward him, tuning in on his signal.

  Then the first-­class businesswolf laughed—­another harsh woof. “Don’t mind me. My portfolio has taken a beating the last ­couple months. Too many American stocks. It’s left me a bit sore, as much at myself as at you lot. It aggravates me that I bought into the whole thing, like everyone else in this blighted country.”

  “Bought into what whole thing?” Saunders asked. A part of his mind cried out in alarm, Shut the fuck up! What are you doing? Why are you talking to it?

  Except.

  Except the train was slowing, almost imperceptibly. Saunders doubted that under normal circumstances he would’ve noticed, but now he was attuned to fine details. That was how it worked when your life was measured in seconds: You felt your own breath, were aware of the temperature and weight of the air on your own skin, heard the prickling tic-­tic of the rain on the wind
ows. The train had hitched, slowed, and hitched again. The night continued to blur past the windows, some rain splatter sprinkling against the glass, but Saunders thought there was a chance they were closing on Foxham, or whatever was next down the tracks. And if the businesswolf was talking to him, then he wasn’t attacking.

  “The American fairy tale,” the wolf said. “You know the one. That we can all be like you. That we should all want to be like you. That you can wave your American Tinker Bell dust over our pathetic countries and abracadabra! A McDonald’s here and an Urban Outfitters there and England will be just like home. Your home. I am honestly humiliated to ever have believed it. You would think a bloke like me, of all ­people, would know it isn’t true. You can stick a Disneyland T-­shirt on a wolf, but it’s still a wolf.”

  The train hitched and slowed another degree. When Saunders looked out his window, he could see brick town houses flashing by, some lights on behind a few of the windows, and bare trees tossing in the wind, clawing at the sky. Even the trees were different in England. They were the same varieties you found in the States but subtly unlike American trees, more gnarled and bent, as if twisted by colder, harsher winds.

  “Everyone is dead in the other car,” Saunders said, feeling curiously removed from himself, from his own voice.

  The wolf grunted.

  “Why not me?”

  The wolf didn’t look at him, seemed to be losing interest in the conversation. “This is first class. If you can’t get civility here, where can you get it? Besides. I’m wearing a Gieves & Hawkes. This suit set me back five hundred quid. Wouldn’t do to stain it. And what’s the point of riding first class if you have to chase down your own grub? They bring a trolley through for us.” He leafed to the next page of his Times. “At least they’re supposed to. They’re taking their fucking time about it, aren’t they?” He paused, then added, “Please pardon my language. The thing about civility—­it’s hard to maintain when you’re barking mad with hunger.”