Edward Lee - The Black Train

Don’t freak out, Collier warned himself. Up front, it seemed impossible, but coincidence more easily explained it. I noticed them when I first saw the desk, but wasn’t consciously aware of it…

Or so he hoped.

The stack seemed about sixty pages thick, and some were white instead of the heather gray. He’d seen one before already, in one of Mrs. Butler’s displays. They were paychecks from the era, and he supposed they might even be moderately valuable to a collector. He read the first one.

RECEIVED OF: Mr. R.J. Myers , AGENT OF THE EAST TENNESSEE AND GEORGIA RAILROAD COMPANY, Fifty DOLLARS.

The date: April 30, 1862 , and at the bottom was scribed a signature: Windom Fecory.

Windom Fecory, Collier thought back. The man whom the bank is named after. The man with the gold nose…

Collier peeled off a few of the checks and put them in his pocket. Maybe Mr. Sute knows exactly what these things are. The rest he put back in the slot.

But what of the rest of the nightmare?

Morris, the john in the whorehouse, he thought. Didn’t I see his name on something in one of the display cases? One of Harwood Gast’s rail workers, no doubt. But it could still be explained by a subconscious recollection; even the dull but precise pain in his left nipple could be explained. Collier had to wonder if he was hunting for proof of something supernatural now. I wonder what a therapist would say. “Well, Doctor, last night I dreamed I was a woman and I got corn-holed by a rugged railroad worker. Oh, and I also got drunk with a bunch of gay guys earlier.”

Why bother trying to figure it out?

The morning air outside refreshed him; he was at the church in less time than he thought. As he waited for Dominique, some other people standing outside the church door seemed to be eyeing him, so he moseyed away so not to seem abrupt.

“What are you doing over here?” Dominique asked, appearing around the corner. Collier was stunned. She wore a refreshing camel tan wrap-dress with a smart belt. Her eyes glittered in the morning light.

“Oh, I—”

“I keep forgetting, the Prince of Beer doesn’t want to be made,” she giggled.

“Exactly. Especially at church.”

Collier wasn’t prepared when she gave him a peck on the lips. Her soap and shampoo, as usual, turned him on in a big way; even her mouthwash and toothpaste seemed enticing.

“I…missed you,” he uttered, and then felt ridiculous afterward.

“Good,” she said, and took his hand. The chattering precongregation—mostly middle-aged and elderly couples—began to enter the church when the steeple bell began to clang.

She said very chirpily, “Let’s go in now and ask God to forgive us for our sins.”

“Sure,” Collier said. In my case, it better be a long fucking service… II

“All right, bitch. You want it bad, so you’re gonna get it. Bad.”

“Yes, yes!” J.G. Sute had huffed.

That’s how it had started, but how it had ended was another story…

Naked on the bed, the 300-pounder looked like an obese cartoon. It was less than an inspiring image, and worse were the dream fragments that haunted Jiff from last night’s nightmare. Jiff had dreams like that sometimes, and never understood it. Civil War dreams, along with the most awful images, and last night had been the worst. He’d seen wagons full of people so skinny they looked like living skeletons. Most were naked but the ones still clothed were stripped by slaves. Several male Indians stood around, waiting, with knives in their belts, their eyes keen and patient. The place was so hot. Next thing Jiff knew he was shoveling coal into a vast furnace, and he’d been able to see people bubbling inside…

Jiff bit his lip till the images were gone.

He stood naked in front of his prone and cringing client. For the course of the next hour came pleas, like: “I love you, I love you,” then a hard slap! and “Please! I deserve it! I deserve the pain because I’m not worthy of your love,” then a harder smack! and, “Jiff, my love. I need you to hurt me…”

Like that.

Throughout the regimen, however, shreds of Jiff’s nightmare kept pecking at his mind: women and old men, plus children, bald and starving, standing in a line but—

A line for what?

Aw, God…

Exactly what use Jiff made of the rubber glove need not be mentioned, nor need it be mentioned what and how many areas of J.G. Sute’s corpulent body he’d used the “Naughty Girl Clips” on. His client had wanted pain this time, and it was pain he’d received, until he was a sobbing, sniffling, quivering mass.

Debasement, too, was on this morning’s one-hundred-dollar agenda; hence, the wine goblet. It need not be mentioned what fluid other than wine Jiff filled it with and then forced Sute to consume.

“I’m so unworthy—I’m scum! Shit on me if you like!”

Even for a hundred bucks, Jiff was not quite up to that. As a “grand finale,” however, he slapped his client up a few more times, then took a big hock in his face, but while he was engaged in these final tweaks, he swore he could still see the stoked flames from the dream furnace, thought sure he could still hear the screams…

When services had been properly rendered, J.G. Sute sobbed tears of joy as his elephantine body shuddered.

“My love, I could die now…”

Freak show’s over. Jiff loped to the bathroom sink to wash up. I just cain’t do this shit anymore. When he returned to the bedroom, he was relieved to see that Sute had wiped his face off and donned his robe. The man looked dreamy-eyed now, his demented needs slaked. “That was wonderful,” he sighed.

“Yeah, yeah.” Jiff stood listlessly at the liquor cabinet. He wasn’t going to tell the man that this was his last trick with him. “Mind if I have a shot?”

“What’s mine is yours, my love.”

Jesus. Jiff’s eyes scoured the shelves: Asombroso tequila, Macallan thirty-year-old scotch, Johnnie Walker Green. Shit, he ain’t got no Black Velvet? He poured himself an inch of something and sat down bare-assed on a William and Mary wing-back chair.

Now that his perverse duties were over, his nightmare filtered back into his head.

“Jiff, you look inconsolable.”

The liquor bit hard. “Huh?”

“You appear to be troubled by something…”

“Bad dream, is all. I get ’em sometimes—don’t rightly know why.” The horrid images felt like bruises in the back of his brain. “Dreamed I was a coal shoveler, back durin’ the war.”

“Heaver,” Sute corrected. “That was the official job title in those days. A coal heaver. They shoveled sixteen hours a day, for about fourteen dollars a month.” Sute’s “afterglow” left him relaxed, or perhaps it was just Jiff’s presence. It was a conversation, not a demented sexual scenario. “A contributing factor to the C.S.A.’s surrender was its inability to mine coal as effectively as the North. You were a Confederate coal heaver I take it?”

Jiff’s nude pecs popped when he rubbed his brow. “Naw, and I weren’t paid no fourteen bucks a month, neither. See, in this dream, I was a black man. I was a slave.”

Sute’s bulbous face creased in concern. “You seem terribly upset, Jiff. It was only a dream. But this is interesting. Where were you working?”

“What’s that?”

“Where were you shoveling this coal? A supply ship? A locomotive?”

Jiff shook his head. “A big furnace, and I mean really big.”

Sute’s attention became more focused. “And how do you know it was during the war?”