Росс Макдональд - Trouble Follows Me

We made our way to the platform at the rear of the car. Topeka was a scattering of lights, a series of warehouse walls broken by glimpses of almost deserted streets stretching drearily into darkness, then a quickly extinguished vista of neon lights grinning in many colors on the unheeding heads of after-movie crowds, finally the long irregularly lit platform of the station. One of a hundred such cities that one saw for the first time with remembering boredom, and left immediately with relief. My jag was running down like an unfuelled engine, and I felt very sorry for all Topekans, whose city was a poor gathering of feeble lights in the immense darkness of the hemisphere.

Mary slipped her warm hand between my arm and my side. “When I was a little kid I was very poor,” she said dreamily. “I used to watch the passenger trains come into the station. It was the bottom of the depression, but there were still plenty of rich people to ride them. I had never been on a train, and it seemed to me that the men and women behind the lighted windows were like kings and queens on thrones.”

I was touched by what she said, but distrusted the sentimentality. “Every kid feels that way about riding on trains,” I said. “But once you’ve taken a few trips the illusion collapses. The parts of cities you see from trains always seem to be on the wrong side of the tracks.”

“I’ve still got my illusion. I feel more alive when I’m on a train. It gives me a feeling of power to ride across the country and leave the rest of the world sitting.”

“I guess you’ve never grown up. Maybe you’re lucky.”

“Maybe I am, but it’s sort of painful. Now I’m the lady in the lighted window, but I still see myself the way I did when I was a kid. I’m on the inside looking out, but I’m on the outside looking in, too.”

“You’re schizophrenic,” I said, and kissed her.

The baggage and mail had been loaded, the travellers taken aboard and the doors closed behind them. The brakemen swung their lanterns and the train began to move, laboring toward the staccato frenzy of speed.

Her mood changed suddenly, and she said:

“I shouldn’t have spent so much time with the Tessingers, but I couldn’t resist the situation. Mrs. Tessinger must know as well as I do that Teddy isn’t interested in her, but she’s a woman, and she just can’t help being grateful for his flattery. He’s been saying the most outrageous things, and she eats them up.”

“Such as?”

“Oh, everything. Her beauty, her youthful spirit, her energy, her clothes. Tomorrow, I expect, he’ll go into all the anatomical details.”

“What’s Rita’s reaction?”

“Admiration, so far as I can see. She knows what he’s doing, and she seems to be all for it. She’s spent the last few years in a very conservative girls’ school.”

I took hold of Mary and kissed her again, hard.

“You are a little drunk, aren’t you?” she said.

“Do you mind?”

“No, I’m very tolerant.” She put her hand on the back of my neck, drew my head down, and kissed me. “Let’s go in now, shall we? I’m cold.”

We turned toward the door but before my hand found the knob, the door opened and Hatcher’s long lean face appeared in the opening:

“Say, mate, I was looking for you. I been all the way up to the club car looking for you. How’s about another drink?”

“Go ahead if you like it,” Mary said. “I’m going to bed.”

She kissed me lightly on the cheek and disappeared down the passageway.

“She’s a sweet number,” Hatcher said. “How did you happen to get in so close with such a sweet number?”

“I met her in Honolulu at a party. Then I met her again in Detroit.”

“Some guys are born lucky. She looks like warm stuff to me.”

“Even if I am not entirely a gentleman,” I said with a certain pomposity, “Miss Thompson is a lady.”

“Don’t let her kid you. They all have the same instincts. The same beautiful instincts.”

“Shut up, God damn it! I’m thinking of marrying this girl.”

“Sorry. Sorry. You got your angle and I got mine. Play it the way you like it. How about that drink?”

“Anderson didn’t have any. We’ll have to drink yours.”

“O.K., I was weaned on moonshine. Come on, I left the bottle in the smoking-room. Hope it’s still there.”

It was under the seat where he had left it. He fished it out and took a long pull from the mouth. I poured a little in a paper cup and drank it, but the interruption had spoilt my taste for drinking. Besides, the stuff was even more nauseous than I remembered. My stomach flopped over like a dying fish.

“Jesus,” I said, “this stuff is terrible. Worse than any jungle juice I ever had.”

“Oh, it’s not so bad.” In a spirit of bravado, Hatcher tipped up the bottle and took another long gulp. In the next few minutes he swallowed his adam’s apple more frequently than was normal, but he managed to control any other symptoms of queasiness.

He sat back and lit a cigarette and told me some of the things he had seen as a merchant seaman. The sailor in Canton who had his belly slashed by a razor and came running down the street with his bowels exposed. “Yeah, I heard they sewed him up and he got over it.” Once on a little tramp steamer on which he shipped out of Australia he had a mad captain who slept every night with a lifesize rubber woman. Her painted rubber face, the captain’s steward said, gradually grew paler from his kisses.

As he told that story, Hatcher’s own face gradually grew paler. His bright blue eyes became glaucous and rolled slowly in their sockets. His speech became blurred as if someone had swaddled his tongue in cotton batting. “’Scuse me,” he said finally. “Don’t feel s’good.”

With his jaw hanging beneath pale parted lips he got up with an effort and lumbered through the door to the men’s toilet. For a few minutes I could faintly hear the sounds of retching, like heavy paper tearing.

I didn’t feel so good myself. The smoking room rocked cumbrously like the cabin of a ship riding a long deep swell. The lights in the ceiling divided like amoebas and danced like elves. I raised my right hand to my face in order to cover one eye and stop their insane reproductive dancing, but my fingers struck me across the bridge of the nose. I discovered that my hands were exceedingly remote objects, only partially animate and only nominally under my control. My whole body was growing numb, as if my nervous system were a live wire gradually going dead as the battery ran down.

It seemed to me that the train was slowing but perhaps, I thought, it was only my metabolism. Suddenly the train stopped with a jerk, lights outside the window became as fixed as my eyes could hold them, and my stomach flopped over again like a dead fish turning in its grave.

Hatcher was still in the men’s room, so there was only one thing for it: I had to get outside. On legs which were as hard to handle as rubber stilts I got out into the passageway. The walls seemed to expand and contract on either side as I edged my way between them across the buckling floor to the door.

I stumbled out onto the open platform into cool night air under a high clear sky. The stars descended upon me like an elevator in a shaft.

AS THE falling stars entered the narrow field of my consciousness they patterned themselves in circular groups which began to turn. Rotating towards each other the wheels of stars clustered like grapes into a turning silver fist, a rolling white eyeball, a seed of light which eloigned itself in darkness until it was a remote chink in a bellowing heavy curtain and finally swallowed up. Then the low sallow sky of unconsciousness, starless as the skies of hell and roiled and weaving at the desolate horizon with dusky orange smoke, blossomed suddenly in an intricate array of turning wheels. In time with a low humming which rose and fell like the sourceless ululation of cicadas, the wheels spun monstrously in geometric patterns.