Robert W. Tompkins, click
here to update your pages on AuthorsDen.
Like a Train Far Away by Robert W. Tompkins
Tuesday, January 31, 2006
Rated "PG" by the Author.
"Bill," he said to himself, "it's your teeth that's bothering you."
He had been feeling a little cranky lately, which was unlike him, and it's true that he had had a frightful pain in his jaw several times lately. Once he had bitten down on a raspberry seed in just the wrong way—a raspberry seed in a piece of pie that Sadie had saved out just for him, knowing his love for raspberries—he had bitten down just the wrong way, and the pain shot from his tooth like the blade of a shiv straight through the top of his head, bringing tears to his eyes and causing him to moan and whistle at the same time, a sound like a freight train heard far away. "Whooooooooo … ooh!"
Bill was glad that Sadie hadn't heard him moan, though he liked to impress her with the sounds he could make: not only train whistles, but bird calls, and engine sounds, and the voices of a few actors he had seen in movies long ago when he was young. Bill was glad that Sadie hadn't heard him moan, for she was a dear, fat thing, twenty years younger than he, whose great quality of life was that she cared. "She cares," Bill said out loud.
"Here's Sadie's place now," he murmured to himself. He always thought of it as Sadie's place, even though she was just a waitress, not the owner. The official name of the diner was Marie Antoinette's or Joan of Arc's or something like that. It was written on a sign above the front door in letters that once were bright but were now weathered. Bill didn't look up there anymore, because his neck would rather not bend backward that far, and lately it had been making his teeth hurt, and besides, he really didn't care. He knew every crack in the sidewalk, every tuft of grass at the corners of the buildings, knew every poster-board sign in every storefront window on the block. The diner's name was only its name. "Here's Sadie's place now, here it is, here it is," he warbled his gruff monotone song.
Bill shambled up to the front door and rapped on it softly. Marie or Joan looked up expressionlessly, and looked away again. "She can't stand you, Bill," he said to himself. "Who cares?" he said. "Not you."
Sadie looked up from the order she had been taking, and smiled his way. He gave her a grizzled grin and a wave of his hand. She held up one finger toward him as if to say, Just a minute, Bill, and he mirrored the gesture in acknowledgement.
Off he shuffled to the side of the building, where a stroll down the alley would bring him to the back door, from which Sadie would eventually appear bearing a plate of something hot or something sweet.
"How many times've you been down this alley, Bill?" he asked himself. "Must be six hundred," he calculated. Like the sidewalk in front of the diner, this alley was his world. He recognized every bit of graffiti, took note of each new piece of litter, gathered up each unbroken beer bottle for return to the Sav-More for a little spending money.
He was looking forward to getting to the end of the alley today so he could sit on his crate and wait for Sadie. He was feeling a mite peaked lately and had been getting more prone to being out of breath when he finally reached the various resting places he had picked out for himself over years of choosing his route through the streets and alleys of Mecklenberg. He was looking forward to getting to his crate.
He looked down the alley towards the back of the building. "Holy Jesus, but that's a long way away," he mumbled. "Well, Bill, it ain't getting any closer by you just standing here."
He took a step and again his jaw throbbed. "Dang, Bill, it's them teeth again," he cursed. Suddenly, he felt a piercing pain in his chest. His eyes opened wide in terror, and he cried out, "Bill, it's your ticker!"
He stopped, clutching his flannel shirt in his fist, and waited to see if the pain would pass.
After a moment, the pain did indeed subside, leaving no trace except a beaded line of sweat along his forehead, and the wispy memory of his fear. "Well, Bill, if you're going to die, you might as well do it out back as here in the alleyway," he said. And in a moment more, he was feeling pretty much like himself again, except for a persistent ache where he had bitten the raspberry seed. He thought to himself again, "It's your teeth, Bill. It ain't your ticker. Jeez, but you've felt that before, and here you still are." He shuffled on, head down, inspecting the alley and humming nervously to himself.
At last he made it to the building's back door, where there was a plastic milk crate left for him to sit on. One time a trash man had taken it away, and Bill had raised an unholy ruckus about it. "Joan of Arc told the garbage man to take away my crate, damn it all!" he told Sadie mournfully. The next day, though, there was another crate there, and it had not been taken away.
Bill lowered himself onto the crate, his aching knees protesting their new position temporarily. An ugly cat, orange and brown with unkempt tufts of fur jutting out at odd angles, sauntered from behind the garbage cans and moved toward Bill, already purring. "Well, Rufus, what've you learnt today?" Bill issued his standard greeting for the cat. Once Sadie had told him that the cat's name wasn't really Rufus, that Marie had given the cat some ungodly stupid name or another (Bill forgot what), but it was always "Rufus" to Bill, and the fact that Rufus liked Bill better than he liked Sadie's boss was a secret to no one who saw them together.
Rufus jumped into Bill's lap, and suddenly the world seemed to move in slow motion, as Bill toppled gently backward from his crate and found himself, to his great surprise, staring upward at the sky. He was confused—his teeth and chest hurt mightily, but he could feel Rufus softly rubbing against his cheek, and he felt like laughing because of the impropriety of the position he found himself in.
He saw Sadie come through the back door, dropping a bowl of stew, with a horrified look on her round, caring face. "That's all right, Sadie," he thought he said to her, "Rufus'll take care of it." He saw her, in slow motion still, mouth the words, "Oh, no! Bill!" but he didn't hear them.
Gleefully, he said, "Don't worry, Sadie. It's just my teeth that're hurting." And then he realized that he hadn't spoken. And then he realized that his teeth didn't hurt any more.
