Train
A Novel
Pete Dexter
DOUBLEDAY
New York
|
London
Toronto
|
Sydney
|
Auckland
For my friend Dr. Ploof
1
PHILADELPHIA
January 1948
A
T THIS POINT IN THE STORY, PACKARD HAD never fallen in love, and didn’t trust what he’d heard of the lingo (forever, my darling, with all my heart, till the end of time, more than life itself, with every fiber of my being, oh my darling Clementine, etc.). It sounded out of control to him, and messy.
He had spent maybe a thousand Sundays in church, though— make that four hundred— and then two edgy years on a battleship in the Pacific Ocean, and then five very edgy days in the Pacific Ocean without the battleship, and before any of that, he’d deliberately and often put himself in places where he saw awful things happen not only to people who deserved it but also to people who just seemed to stumble in at the wrong time, walking into the picture as the shutter clicked, through no fault of their own.
Which is to say that by now Packard recognized praying when he heard it, and knew the kind of deals people would offer up, the promises they would make, when they were in over their heads. And that, from what he’d heard, was what it— love— was about.
Later on, however, something in the feminine line, in fact, came along, custom-fit, and Packard, to his enormous surprise, found himself apeshit in tow. Although not
every-fiber-of-my-being
apeshit in tow. Of long habit, Packard only gave in quietly, without losing his dignity.
And much later on, when he was tamed and had the advantages of maturity and the long view, he would come to realize that everything that had happened was inevitable, that he was, after all, a human being, and it was therefore not in his nature to keep things simple.
Even the psychologist who did the preemployment interview had seen something on Packard’s horizon.
“Perhaps,” he said, “you need someone to share this with.”
Packard had just described for the psychologist not his loveless life but his heavy cruiser, the
Indianapolis,
burning to the waterline in the night, and the days and nights of floating around in the Pacific Ocean with the sharks and burned and dying shipmates. The sharks came morning and evening, at mealtime, and stayed about as long as it would take you to eat dinner. Packard to this day did not eat at regular hours, but aside from that, on the occasions when he asked himself how he felt, he felt approximately like the same person.
People he’d known before the war, on the other hand, said he’d changed, but he couldn’t see it himself. As his grandmother had pointed out a long time ago, he wasn’t a real sweetheart to begin with.
Packard, by the way, had not brought any of this up to the psychologist himself. All he wanted was a job, and all the psychologist wanted was to keep his job, and he was required by the city’s insurers to review applicants’ military records and inquire specifically in regard to Purple Hearts.
The psychologist assumed a certain casual baritone authority that made Packard want to slap him, and he sat beneath his diplomas in a cheap suit, absently listening to an abbreviated history of Packard’s wartime adventures, pinching his chin, making fifteen-dollar-an-hour dimples and grunts. He nodded from time to time, as if he’d heard it all before.
Then, when the half hour was over, he said, “Perhaps you need someone to share this with.”
But it was all a dance anyway. War heroes could get work at any fire department they wanted.
Before this, right after the war, Packard had run into a nun in a bar in San Diego. The kind that didn’t talk, although she did play the English horn. She’d given that up, though— her vows, not the horn— and was on the way to Philadelphia, trying to make up for lost time. He was given to understand the city had quite a symphony orchestra.
Packard was not by nature an optimist, but it was encouraging, coming home to America and being fucked half to death night and day for a month, but even in all the confusion and maneuvering— she seemed to expect him to bend back over himself, the way her horn bent— Packard became gradually aware that he was no closer to the girl than he’d been to all the other bodies, alive and dead, that he’d been around since he left home.
So he got closer for a little while, and then spent twice that long getting farther away. He stayed in Philadelphia, though, and thought he might never leave.
He loved the Italian neighborhoods; the Irish, he could take or leave. He loved the baseball, and the movement of the city— the Mummers and the restaurants and the clubs. He snuck off once in a while to the art museum when he was looking for women. He even went once to the symphony orchestra, thinking she might throw him a bone for old times’ sake, but she wasn’t there in the horn section, and he guessed she hadn’t practiced enough at the convent to make the cut.
The city, though, was crawling with life. At least it had been then. Lately, it was slower.
Lately, he’d lie in bed after a fire, naked, hawking up soot, his eyes stinging, lying in the smell of smoke and sweat and rubber, and see himself being walled in. Something was building around him, always at the same numbing crawl, walling him in. He witnessed this phenomenon from a familiar, removed perspective— from his earliest memory, he’d had a facility to see himself from a distance. Sometimes when he thought about it, it seemed like he’d been someplace else, watching himself, for most of his life.
He’d been in the department two years now, and was already famous for the chances he took. The feeling afterwards wasn’t the same as it had been in the beginning, though. By now, in fact, there was no feeling afterwards. He was disconnected.
And so, needing a hobby, Packard became a runner.
Here was Packard’s training schedule: Midnight, he would walk into a neighborhood where he did not belong, say Kensington or the Devil’s Pocket. He’d sit down in a bar, order a beer, and insult one of the locals. The easiest way to insult one was to use a word he didn’t understand.
Avuncular, bulbous, crescendo.
Say the word
avuncular,
the next thing you knew, fifteen of them had bats and were chasing you down the street, screaming “Kill the queer.”
And the beauty part, as they said in the Pocket, was that they meant it. If they caught you, you were dead. Packard, however, was in excellent shape and undefeated, and eventually went looking for better competition.
Packard had his hands in his jacket, feeling around for his keys, when he noticed the car. His pockets were full of his regular stuff— change, matches, a couple of wieners for the dog, loose cigarettes, rubbers that had fallen out of a vending machine in a bar down on Race Street in Chinatown when he’d pulled the lever for Alka-Seltzer. The dog was a stray, all mange and scabs, with hideous black tits and a fifty-pound head. She didn’t want to be touched, and Packard didn’t want to touch her; it was enough for them both just to hand over the wieners— one when he left his place, one when he came back. The dog would bare her teeth before she accepted it— reminding him of the rules— and then swallow it whole. It wasn’t much, but the truth was it felt better the next morning than it had with the nun.
The dog wasn’t around tonight, and Packard had a sudden, unsettled premonition that something had happened, that she wasn’t coming back. He was loyal, even if he hadn’t been a real sweetheart to start with.
It was snowing, and the whole city had stopped. The neighborhood streets were narrow and clogged with cars, some of them packed to the windows by the snowplows, some high-centered or simply stuck in ice ruts and left in their own tracks. Earlier in the winter, a fire had burned half a block in Tasker Homes before the trucks could even get to the houses. Four dead, trapped and innocent of everything except not having money to heat the apartment. At least that night, they were.
Packard looked again at the car, knowing who it was. He stood motionless, the dog still on his mind, trying to focus, trying to get the moment to hold still and feel it. Nothing.
The snow was filthy and wet and black all around him. Traction could be a problem. He’d left his car on South Street tonight and walked back to the apartment from a pool hall. He had tennis shoes on and his feet were freezing. Where would the dog be, a night like this?
