Майкл Суэнвик - Tales of Old Earth [A collection of short-stories]

All the while I was talking, I was just about dying inside of curiosity. Through the window behind the old lady I could see that we’d stopped in a small clearing in the pines. We were miles from the nearest town. The only light here was what came from the moon and the greenish spill from the windows of the train itself. There were maybe half a dozen dim figures out there. I could see them hoist up a long crate of some kind. Somebody—and who else could it be but Billy Bones?—leaned out from the caboose with a lantern and waved them forward.

The damned stared out the windows with disinterest. Most likely they thought we were picking up more passengers. Only the crew knew different.

Still, I take pride in my work. I fussed over that little lady and by the time I left her she was actually smiling. It was only a tense little smile, but it was a smile still.

People can fool themselves into believing anything.

Soon as I got myself clear, I made straight for the baggage car. I had got me a real bad feeling about what was going on, and I intended to pry a few answers out of Billy Bones. But I didn’t get beyond the door. When I tried to slide it back, it wouldn’t budge. I seized it with both hands and applied some muscle. Nothing.

It was locked from inside.

I banged on the door. “Mister Bones !”

A silence, and then the peephole slide moved aside. A cadaverous slice of Billy Bones’s face appeared. Flesh so tight it didn’t hide the skull. Eyes as bright and glittery as a rat’s. “What is it?”

“Don’t you give me that what-is-it bullshit—why did we stop?” The pines made a dark, jagged line against the sky. I could smell them. If I wanted, I could step down off the train and walk into them. “Just what kind of unholy cargo have you taken on?”

Billy Bones looked me straight in the eye. “We ain’t taken on no cargo.”

“Now don’t get me started,” I said. “You open up and-”

He slammed that little slide-door right in my face.

I blinked. “Well!” I said. “You may think you’ve had the last word, Mister Billy Bones, but you have not, I assure you that!”

But I didn’t feel nowhere near so brash as I made out. Billy Bones was a natural-born hustler down to his fingertips, the kind of man that could break you a quarter and short-change you a dollar in the process. Ain’t nobody never outbluffed him. Ain’t nobody never got nothing out of him that he didn’t want to give. In my experience, what he didn’t wish to say, I wasn’t about to hear.

So back I strode, up the train, looking for Sugar. My old stomach ulcer was starting to act up.

“Diddy-Wah-Diddy!” Sugar bawled. He strolled briskly through the car, clacking his ticket punch. “Diddy-Wah-Diddy, Ginny Gall, WEST Hell, Hell, and BeluthaHATCHie! Have your tickets ready.”

I gave him the high sign. But a portly gent in a pinstripe suit laid hold of his sleeve and launched into a long complaint about his ticket, so I had to hold back and wait. Sugar listened patiently to the man for a time, then leaned over him like a purple storm cloud. The man cringed away. He’s big, is Sugar, and every ounce of him is pure intimidation.

“I tell you what, sir,” he said in a low and menacing way. “Why don’t you take a spoon and jab it in your eye? Stir it around good. See how clean you can scrape out the socket.” He punched the ticket. “I guarantee you that a week from now you gone look back upon the experience with nostalgia.”

The man turned grey and for an instant I thought he was going to rise up out of his seat. But Sugar smiled in a way that bulged up every muscle in his face and neck and the man subsided. Sugar stuck the ticket stub in the seat clip. Then, shaking his head, he came and joined me between cars.

His bulk filled what space there was pretty good. “Make it brief, Malcolm. I got things to do.”

“You know anything ’bout why we stopped?” Those dim people were trudging away into the pines. None of them looked back, not even once. They just dissolved into the shadows. “I saw Billy Bones take on a crate and when I asked him about it, he clammed right up.”

Sugar stared at me with those boogieman eyes of his. In all the three-four years he’d been on the train, I don’t recall ever seeing him blink. “You ain’t seen nothing,” he said.

I put my hands on my hips. “Now, don’t you start in on me! I was a porter on this train back when your mama was sucking tittie.”

Sugar seemed to swell up then, a great black mountain with two pinpricks of hellfire dancing in his eyes. “You watch what you say about my mother.”

The hairs on the back of my neck prickled. But I didn’t back down. “Just what you intending to do?” I shook my finger in his face. “You know the regs. If you so much as touch me, you’re off the train. And they don’t let you out in Manhattan, neither!”

“Can’t say I much care.” He put those enormous hands on my shoulders. His voice was small and dreamy. “After this run, I don’t much care whether I keep this job or not.”

All the while he spoke, those hands kept kneading my shoulders. He laid one huge thumb alongside my face and shoved my head to the side. I didn’t much doubt he could crush my bones and snap my spine, if he wanted to. He was that strong. And I could see that he’d enjoy it.

“I ain’t said nothing!” I was terrified. “I ain’t said nothing about your mama.”

Sugar considered this for a long time, that sleepy little smile floating on his face. At last he said, “See that you don’t.”

And he turned away.

I exhaled. I can’t say I knew Sugar at all well. He was a recent addition to the crew; the conductor before him took to visiting the juke joints and gambling dens of Ginny Gall during stopovers and lost his precariously-held spiritual balance. But if ever anyone was meant to be a badman, it was Sugar. He was born just naturally brimming-over with anger. They say when the midwife slapped his bottom, the rage in his voice and the look on his face were so awful that straightaway she threw him down on the floor. He was born with a strangler’s hands and a murderer’s eyes. The rest of him, the size and bulk of him, just grew, so’s to have a package big enough and mean enough to contain all the temper there inside.

And they also say that when the midwife lifted up her foot to crush Sugar to death, his mama rose up off of the bed and thrashed her within an inch of her life. She was one of those tiny little women too, but her love for her baby was that strong. She threw that midwife right out of the room and down the stairs, broken bones and all. Then she picked up Sugar and put him to her breast and cooed at him and sang to him until he fell asleep. That’s the kind of blood flowed in Sugar’s veins, the kind of stuff he was made from.

There was a sudden lurch and the train started to move again. Whatever was going down, it was too late to stop it now.

With Billy Bones and Sugar refusing to talk to me, there wasn’t any chance none of the girls would either. They were all three union, and Billy was their shop steward. Me, I was union too, but in a different shop.

The only remaining possible source of information was Old Goat-foot. I headed back for the concession stand to fetch a bottle of rye. I had it in a paper bag under one arm and was passing through the sleeper cars when a door slid open and a long slim hand crooked a red-nailed finger.

I stepped into the compartment. A ginger-colored woman closed the door and slid between me and it. For an instant we just stood there looking at each other. At last she said, “Porter.”

“Yes’m?”

She smiled in a sly kind of way. “I want to show you something.” She unbuttoned her blouse, thrusting her chest forward. She was wearing one of those black lacy kinds of bras that squeeze the breasts together and up. It was something to behold.