Stuart Dybek - Ecstatic Cahoots - Fifty Short Stories

Dear Mr. O strikes his head despairingly against the chrome handrail. Advertisements to which he’s long been oblivious swim before his eyes. So these are the daydreams of silkier hair and ageless complexions upon which the hordes filing past him each day dwelled as they embarked on their journey together. He remembers all those days, weeks, years that he and the streetcar, now improbably named Ravenswood, have shared, intimately connected no matter how much traffic or how large the crowd. While commuters sat gabbing, or lost in newspapers, or gazing blankly out the window, Martin had registered, just below the threshold of consciousness, each nick in the track, hitch in the cable, surge of current, subtle whir, and shifting of gears. Oh, for those luminous hours between morning and evening rush, merrily clanging along on schedule down sunny streets.

He becomes bitter, glares at the Nun bouncing and chuckling on his air cushion seat, and wishes he could beat her knuckles bloody with a ruler, could make her stand in a corner with aching arms outstretched balancing a Bible on each palm, could deprive her of recess and banish her to the wardrobe closet.

But the Nun, now no longer a nun but a conductor in her own right, seems oblivious to all but the streetcar. Throttle open, bell clanging, and a fine sweat gathered like a mustache along her upper lip, suddenly boisterous as a gondolier, she breaks into song, its melody a cross between “funiculi funicula” and a hymn, its lyrics a psalm.

Although the Lord be high above

He doth recall the lowly

And deep within the secret heart

The Lord shall surely know thee

Her flashing teeth bite into the apple from the Conductor’s lunch bag. Each crunch of the apple seems transmitted to the streetcar as if spikes of electricity were driving it forward in a more and more abandoned way, and Martin remembers drives down a country two-lane in his old Camaro with the Girl of His Dreams beside him, unzipping his trousers, urging him, Faster, faster , as if the way she touched him were actually propelling the car. If a motorcycle cop had been pursuing them then the way cops are pursuing the streetcar now, it would have looked to him as if the female passenger suddenly vanished, and though Martin was gripping the wheel and it was his foot on the gas, the Camaro was responding to what her tongue was doing.

I’ll love Thee with mine own true heart

Before the world I’ll praise Thee

Your love was there before the start

Thy mercy doth amaze me

With an enormous jolt, haloed in blue lightning, the streetcar leaps the track, and as it hurtles airborne Martin glances out the back window to see if he might catch one last glimpse of that woman who’d reminded him of GOYD. Instead, he sees the motorcycle cops pitching headfirst over their handlebars and the crowd pulling up in a way that’s almost ceremonious, like a procession of mourners who have allowed the hearse to escape, as the streetcar plunges through a canopy of trees.

Ex-Conductor Martin, who was once so aware of any imperfection in the smooth steel rails, now feels the streetcar grinding savagely over earth, kicking up dust, crashing through bush. He feels his connection with the machine of whose identity he was once a part, slipping away, its familiar track a fading memory. He thinks of all the streets they’ve been down together, streets with their misleading, disappointing names: Blue Island — just an asphalt aisle through bankrupt factories; Sunset — a street perennially in the shadow of tenements; Tree Haven — an artery of concrete paved in broken glass. Why don’t those streets bear the names that tell their stories? Grand View with its pawnshops, bars, and crack houses should be called Dead End. When was the last time the stains on treeless Mulberry actually came from ripened berries? Better to call it Blood Street. And that noble-sounding intersection of Lincoln and State deserves to be Hooker and John. But Ravenswood is Ravenswood.

The doors whoosh open long enough for the commuters of the woods to file on. Their somber dress makes Martin grateful for the first time that he is wearing the black robes of the Nun. The shadows of their cloaks darken shafts of sun. The Nun who has become the Conductor continues her hymn:

How precious are Thy thoughts to me

How great Thy loving kindness

How blind the man who cannot see

That God will ease his blindness

But the commuters of Doowsnevar can only croak in a split tongue that must be older than any dead language.

A blur of vegetation streams by, limbs whapping the windows; humidity beads into sweat on Martin’s shaved head and streams down his wimple. He joins with his fellow commuters in croaking a hymn he didn’t know he knew, like when he was a child and prayed in Latin, never really understanding the words or what it was for which he prayed.

Their pale, plump skins scorched almost to bursting, the Thuringers invited a plaster of brown mustard.

The stacked pastrami was decked out in zooty 1950s colors: blushing pink meat in a carapace of black pepper.

There was corned beef awaiting horseradish, kosher franks and kraut, dangling salamis, tukus , house hickory-smoked turkey, trout, sablefish, and two kinds of knishes — thin kasha and golden squares of potato — slaw, paprika-dusted potato salad, fried onions and schmaltz, green tomatoes, kaiser rolls, baguettes, pumpernickel. I’d been walking around all day in the cold and it all looked good. But finally, when my turn in line arrived, I decided to invest my last few dollars in the garlic-kissed brisket on rye.

“Young man, I’m going to make you a very nice sandwich,” murmured the old, bald server, wearing a stained white apron.

He said it conspiratorially, his lips barely moving, drawing me toward him in order to hear, as if it were something he’d rather the owners of the establishment not get wind of. A secret between the two of us, not for the ears of the others behind me in line.

He glanced up into my eyes and held them as if he’d taken a personal interest in me, which was more than I could say for the secretaries and interviewers in the personnel offices where I’d spent the last six weeks filling out applications for jobs while my money ran out and I moved from friend to friend, crashing from apartment to apartment, sleeping on sofas and floors as if I’d never grow up if I stayed poor. His face, crosshatched in lines, was set in the comically tragic expression he’d practiced until it had become his permanent physiognomy. He must have been making sandwiches for a long time, must have seen a lot of hungry faces staring back at him from the other side of the glass partition.

Maybe he’d learned to read faces at a glance and could read in mine that a desperation I’d never felt before was setting in. That I needed a helping hand. That I’d caught enough of a glimpse of what it meant to be down, homeless, jobless, walking the streets hungry to last a lifetime.

Or maybe to get through the day he allowed himself now and then to take a liking to the face of a perfect stranger. A face that perhaps reminded him of himself when he was young, or of someone in his past, the way that, riding the subway and watching all the people with jobs filing on, I’d sometimes see a woman who would remind me of an old girlfriend in another city, a city I should have stayed in, a girlfriend I should have stayed with. That same girlfriend who once told me, “You’ve got a working-class face.”

Maybe he thought so, too.

“See?” he said, surgically trimming off the fat with the tip of his carving knife, and then scraping the trimmings across the cutting-board counter, leaving a trail of grease. That’s when I noticed the numbers tattooed on his wrist. I’d seen the faded marks of the death camps on the wrists of tailors in that neighborhood before. Those tattooed numbers still shocked me into a sense of dislocation. The brutal reality of history crowded out the mundane present. I wondered what he thought when he looked at his wrist every day. What horrible memories did he overcome each morning? When I saw those numbers I felt ashamed. Here I was spending my last few bucks — big deal! I would survive.