Steampunked (2 page)

*****

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 is 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.

She bent to kiss him and it was a warm kiss that tingled him all over. In that moment he wanted nothing but their marriage and for it to be good. He even forgot the young girl he had seen while talking to Cody.

They did not make love, though he hoped they would. But she kissed him deeply several times and said that after bath and dinner they would go to bed. It would be like old times. When they often performed the ceremony of pleasure.

*****

After the Cherokee porter had filled their tub with water, and after she had bathed and he had bathed in the dregs of her bath and they had toweled themselves dry, they laughed while they dressed. He kissed her and she kissed him back, their bodies pushed together in familiar ritual, but the ritual was not consummated. Mary Jane would have nothing of that. “After dinner,” she said. “Like old times.”

“Like old times,” he said.

Arm in arm they went to the dining car, dressed to the hilt and smiling. They paid their dollar and were conducted to their table where they were offered a drink to begin the meal. As if to suggest hope for later, he denied one, but Mary Jane did not follow his lead. She had one, then another.

When she was on her third drink and dinner was in the process of being served, the blonde girl with the sunshine smile came in and sat not three tables down from them. She sat with the matronly woman and the little boy who loved trains. He found he could not take his eyes off the young lovely.

“Are you thinking about something?” Mary Jane asked.

“No, not really. Mind was wandering,” he said. He smiled at her and saw that her eyes were a trifle shiny with drunkenness.

They ate in near silence and Mary Jane drank two more whiskies.

*****

When they went back to the cabin, she was leaning on him and his heart had fallen. He knew the signs.

They went into their cabin and he hoped she was not as far along in drunkenness as he thought. She kissed him and made movements against his body with hers. He felt desire.

She went to the bed and undressed, and he undressed by the bench seat and placed his clothes there. He turned down the lamp and climbed into bed with her.

She had fallen asleep. Her breath came out in alcoholic snores. There would be no love-making tonight.

He lay there for a while and thought of nothing. Then he got up, dressed, went into the cars to look for some diversion, a poker game perhaps.

*****

No poker game was to be found and no face offered any friendly summons to him. He found a place to sit in the parlor car where the overhead lamp was turned down and there was no one sitting nearby. He got out the makings, rolled himself a smoke, and was putting a lucifer to it when Cody fell into the seat across from him. Cody had his pipe like before. “You’d think I’d have found some lucifers of my own by now, wouldn’t you?”

Hickok thought just that, but he offered his still burning light to Cody. Cody bent forward and puffed flame into his packed pipe. When it was lit he sat back and said, “I thought you had turned in early. I saw you leave the dining car.”

“I didn’t see you.”

“You were not looking in my direction. I was nearby.”

Hickok understood what Cody was implying, but he did not acknowledge. He smoked his cigarette furiously.

“She is quite lovely,” Cody said.

“I guess I made a fool out of myself looking at her. She is half my age.”

“I meant your wife, but yes, the girl is a beauty. And she has a way with her eyes, don’t you think?”

Hickok grunted agreement. He felt like a school boy who had been caught looking up the teacher’s dress.

“I was looking too,” Cody said cheerfully. “You see, I don’t care for my wife much. You?”

“I want to, but she is not making it easy. We’re like two trains on different tracks. We pass close enough to wave, but never close enough to touch.”

“My God, friend, but you are a poet.”

“I didn’t mean to be.”

“Well, mean to. I could use a bit of color and poetry in my life.”

“An ambassador is more colorful than a clerk.”

“An ambassador is little more than a clerk who travels. Maybe it’s not so bad, but I just don’t feel tailored to it.”

“Then we are both cut from the wrong cloth, Cody.”

Hickok finished his cigarette and looked out into the night. The shapes of the cherry trees flew by, looked like multi-armed men waving gentle goodbyes.

“It seems I have done nothing with my life,” Hickok said after a while, and he did not look at Cody when he said it. He continued to watch the night and the trees. “Today when you told me about Custer and Yoshii, I did not feel sadness. Surprise, but not sadness. Now I know why. I envy them. Not their deaths, but their glory. A hundred years from now, probably more, they will be remembered. I will be forgotten a month after my passing-if it takes that long.”

Cody reached over and opened a window. The wind felt cool and comfortable. He tapped his pipe on the outside of the train. Sparks flew from it and blew down the length of the cars like fireflies in a blizzard. Cody left the window open, returned his pipe to his pocket.

“You know,” Cody said, “I wanted to go out West during the Japanese wars: the time the Japanese were trying to push down into Colorado on account of the gold we’d found there, and on account of we’d taken the place away from them back when it was part of New Japan. I was young then and I should have gone. I wanted to be a soldier. I might have been a great scout, or a buffalo hunter, had my life gone different then.”

“Do you sometimes wonder that your dreams are your real life, Cody? That if you hope for them enough they become solid? Maybe our dreams are our trains not taken.”

“Come again.”

“Our possible futures. The thing we might have done had we just edged our lives another way.”

“I hadn’t thought much about it actually, but I like the sound of it.”

“Will you laugh if I tell you my dream?”

“How could I? I’ve just told you mine.”

“I dream that I’m a gunman-and with these light-sensitive eyes that’s a joke. But that’s what I am. One of those long-haired shootists like in the Dime Novels, or that real-life fellow Wild Jack McCall. I even dream of lying face down on a card table, my pistol career ended by some skulking knave who didn’t have the guts to face me and so shot me from behind. It’s a good dream, even with the death, because I am remembered, like those soldiers who sided at The Little Big Horn. It’s such a strong dream I like to believe that it is actually happening somewhere, and that I am that man that I would rather be.”

“I think I understand you, friend. I even envy Morse and these damn trains; him and his telegraph and ‘pulsating energy.’ Those discoveries will make him live forever. Every time a message is flashed across the country or a train bullets along on the crackling power of its fire line, it’s like thousands of people crying his name.”

“Sometimes-a lot of the time-I just wish that for once I could live a dream.”

They sat in silence. The night and the shadowed limbs of the cherry trees fled by, occasionally mixed with the staggered light of the moon and the stars.

Finally Cody said, “To bed. Cherrywood is an early stop.” He opened his pocket watch and looked at it. “Less than four hours. The wife will awake and call out the Cavalry if I’m not there.”

As Cody stood, Hickok said, “I have something for you.” He handed Cody a handful of lucifers.

Cody smiled. “Next time we meet, friend, perhaps I will have my own.” As he stepped into the aisle he said, “I’ve enjoyed our little talk.”

“So have I,” Hickok said. “I don’t feel any happier, but I feel less lonesome.”

“Maybe that’s the best we can do.”

Hickok went back to his cabin but did not try to be overly quiet. There was no need. Mary Jane, when drunk, slept like an anvil.

He slipped out of his clothes and crawled into bed. Lay there feeling the warmth of his wife’s shoulder and hip; smelling the alcoholic aroma of her breath. He could remember a time when they could not crawl into bed together without touching and expressing their love. Now he did not want to touch her and he did not want to be touched by her. He could not remember the last time she had bothered to tell him she loved him, and he could not remember the last time he had said it and it was not partly a lie.

Earlier, before dinner, the old good times had been recalled and for a few moments he adored her. Now he lay beside her feeling anger. Anger because she would not try. Or could not try. Anger because he was always the one to try, the one to apologize, even when he felt he was not wrong. Trains on a different track going opposite directions, passing fast in the night, going nowhere really. That was them.

Closing his eyes he fell asleep instantly and dreamed of the blonde lovely in blue and white calico with a thick, black Japanese belt. He dreamed of her without the calico, lying here beside him white-skinned and soft and passionate and all the things his wife was not.

And when the dream ended, so did his sleep. He got up and dressed and went out to the parlor car. It was empty and dark. He sat and smoked a cigarette. When that was through he opened a window, felt and smelled the wind. It was a fine night. A lover’s night.

Then he sensed the train was slowing.

Cherrywood already?

No, it was still too early for that. What gave here?

In the car down from the one in which he sat, a lamp was suddenly lit, and there appeared beside it the chiseled face of the Cherokee porter. Behind him, bags against their legs, were three people: the matronly lady, the boy who loved trains and the beautiful blonde woman.

The train continued to slow.

By God, he thought, they are getting off.

Hickok got out his little, crumpled train schedule and pressed it out on his knee. He struck a lucifer and held it down behind the seat so that he could read. After that he got out his pocket watch and held it next to the flame. Two-fifteen. The time on his watch and that on the schedule matched. This was a scheduled stop-the little town and fort outside of Cherrywood. He had been right in daydreaming. The girl was going here.

Hickok pushed the schedule into his pocket and dropped the dead match on the floor. Even from where he sat, he could see the blonde girl. As always, she was smiling. The porter was enjoying the smile and he was giving her one back.

The train began to stop.

For a moment, Hickok imagined that he too were getting off here and that the blonde woman was his sweetheart. Or better yet, would be. They would meet in the railway station and strike up some talk and she would be one of those new modern women who did not mind a man buying her a drink in public. But she would not be like his wife. She would drink for taste and not effect.

They would fall instantly in love, and on occasion they would walk in the moonlight down by these tracks, stand beneath the cherry trees and watch the trains run by. And afterwards they would lie down beneath the trees and make love with shadows and starlight as their canopy. When it was over, and they were tired of satisfaction, they would walk arm in arm back towards the town, or the fort, all depending.

The dream floated away as the blonde girl moved down the steps and out of the train. Hickok watched as the porter handed down their bags. He wished he could still see the young girl, but to do that he would have to put his head out the window, and he was old enough that he did not want to appear foolish.

Goodbye, Little Pretty, he thought. I will think and dream of you often.

Suddenly he realized that his cheeks were wet with tears. God, but he was unhappy and lonely. He wondered if behind her smiles the young girl might be lonely too.

He stood and walked toward the light even as the porter reached to turn it out.

“Excuse me,” Hickok said to the man. “I’d like to get off here.”

The porter blinked. “Yes sir, but the schedule only calls for three.”

“I have a ticket for Cherrywood, but I’ve changed my mind, I’d like to get off here.”

“As you wish, sir.” The porter turned up the lamp. “Best hurry, the train’s starting. Watch your step. Uh, any luggage?”

“None.”

Briskly, Hickok stepped down the steps and into the night. The three he had followed were gone. He strained his eyes and saw between a path of cherry trees that they were walking toward the lights of the rail station.

He turned back to the train. The porter had turned out the light and was no longer visible. The train sang its song. On the roof he saw a ripple of blue-white fulmination jump along the metal fire line. Then the train made a sound like a boiling teapot and began to move.

For a moment he thought of his wife lying there in their cabin. He thought of her waking in Cherrywood and not finding him there. He did not know what she would do, nor did he know what he would do.

Perhaps the blonde girl would have nothing to do with him. Or maybe, he thought suddenly, she is married or has a sweetheart already.

No matter. It was the ambition of her that had lifted him out of the old funeral pyre, and like a phoenix fresh from the flames, he intended to stretch his wings and soar.

The train gained momentum, lashed shadows by him. He turned his back on it and looked through the cherrywood path. The three had reached the rail station and had gone inside.