Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 114, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 697 & 698, September/October 1999

Train to Nowhere by Tom Tolnay

©1999 by Tom Tolnay

Tom Tolnay has worked, as an editor-in-chief (for Backstage Magazine), a publisher (for his own small publishing company), and as a managing editor (for The Smith Publishers). His first profession, however, is writer. For many years, Mr. Tolnay has been turning out fine short stories for magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, Woman’s World, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, EQMM, and many other publications.

Bruce March had a dilemma. He had a secure job selling ad space for a newsletter and magazine published by a printing trade association in Philadelphia; at the same time, he and his wife Bonnie, and their children Andrew, Barbara, and Charlie, had long outgrown their two-bedroom apartment in the city. Working, playing, eating, and sleeping this close together fostered not a togetherness of spirit but a tightness of mind. An apartment with a single extra bedroom would’ve nearly doubled their rent, however, so it was finally decided — accepted is more like it — that it would be better to acquire a mortgage and commute than to throw a son or daughter or wife or husband out the window.

The house they ended up with was located only eighty-something miles west of the city. It had three bedrooms, a full basement, and came at a lower price tag than expected. At first. Built thirty-five or forty years earlier, it needed roof shingles, windows replaced, doors rehung, electrical and plumbing repairs, not to mention aluminum siding. These unanticipated expenditures forced the Marches to be more budget-wise than they had been in the city, and if they didn’t want to trip over cables and pipe they had to move about as carefully as they’d had to in their old apartment. Nevertheless, the added space seemed to improve their dispositions: Mom and Dad argued less, and the children rarely threw punches at one another. As the workmen cleaned up and cleared out, and as the family slowly began to catch up with their bills, they took to roasting hot dogs in a hibachi in the little yard out back. Life hadn’t been this relaxed since they were just starting out together, before the kids had arrived. There was a catch, however, for there is always a catch.

Driving to the station, boarding a train, and being able to read the newspaper en route to work — sometimes abetted by coffee in a paper cup (when he’d gotten to the station early enough to line up at the snack wagon) — was a pleasing change from pushing into a subway car with crowds of strangers, some of whom pressed up against him in a most personal way. But it didn’t take him very long, perhaps half a year, to see this adventure for what it really was: a very long haul which, under the continual pressures of the clock, and a continual rattling of one’s organs, wearied the mind and body. It took him somewhat longer to learn what it did to the soul.

Each weekday morning Bruce March would fall out of bed at 6 A.M., pull on his trousers in the chilled dimness, gulp down a cup of stale coffee, peck his wife’s sour mouth, race the car fifteen miles to the railroad station, and leap into the train just as it was pulling away. In the city he used to get up at 8, sometimes 8:15, and he still got in around 9 A.M. via the subway — except when they had a derailment or a fire in one of the tunnels. Nowadays he used so many forms of transportation in the course of a single trip that he never knew when he’d arrive, nor in what condition.

First there were the mornings when the four cylinders in the maroon 1990 Dodge refused to kick over. But assuming it did get going, then the train might be held up due to “signal trouble,” or the “lights and heat went down,” or a “shortage of rolling stock” would force many of them to stand. These verbal vaguenesses were delivered by men in dark blue uniforms, near as Bruce could tell, to keep passengers off balance, as if the railroad believed the less the passengers knew, the better. Even when the car started, and the train got through without mishaps or a “labor action,” Bruce still had to deal with the subway, which had its own tendencies toward instability — and for reasons that were kept equally secret via worthless statements over staticky loudspeakers: “We have encountered a red signal.” Bruce March now understood why conductors on trains and subways wore zookeepers’ hats.

The distances involved should’ve meant a two-hour journey in each direction; usually it worked out, door-to-door, to around two and a half hours and, on rarer occasions — a snowstorm, power outage, or a train farther up (or down) the line had flattened a car (and its driver) at a crossing — it could be as long as four hours one way. One morning when the train showed up fifty-four minutes late, a brooding Bruce March tallied the average commuting time and found he was spending five to five and a quarter hours in transit nearly every weekday — about twenty-six hours a week, or more than three eight-hour work days. He was astonished, and immediately shared these findings with the attorney for a collection agency, a regular on the train, seated next to him. Slowly the man shifted his gray eyebrows away from the lined yellow pad he was scribbling on and inquired of Bruce: “How long have you been on this route?”

“About a year.”

The attorney laughed with regulated condescension. “There is a woman in the first car who has been riding this line every day for thirty years.”

This news stunned Bruce. Pulling the thin calculator out of the inside pocket of his suit jacket, he began poking the yellow buttons with his index finger and figured that the tenacious woman who rode in the first car had been traveling no fewer than 39,000 hours, and had used up the equivalent of four and a half years, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, in a train or subway car! And when he thought of how many things could be done with one thousand, six hundred and forty-two days of one’s life — the love to be made, the books to be read, the stamps to be put in his album, the movies to be watched on the VCR, the recreation room to be paneled, the camping trips to be taken with the kids... or just that extra hour or two of shut-eye in the morning, Bruce lowered his lids so he could be depressed in private.

A few weeks before Bruce had completed the second year of his tour of duty, the 5:33 P.M. diesel broke down between stations, halfway home. Everyone was ordered to get off; they had to wait for another engine to arrive and pull the dead locomotive out of the way and then to hook up with the passenger cars. Standing out on the large, unstable chunks of railroad gravel in the bleakness, leaning into the damp, raspy wind with several hundred icy-lipped commuters, he questioned whether it was all worth it. Late that night — when he finally threw his briefcase down on the sofa at home, tired and hungry and frustrated — he complained sharply to his wife (his children had already gone to bed) about the “constant torture” and “financial drain” of commuting. “One trip takes more out of me than a full day of selling those lousy one-inch ads!”

Bonnie was surprised, and slightly alarmed; her mind had entirely foreclosed on those four rooms back in the city, and she could not have moved back into an apartment any more than she could have gone to work in a coal mine. Patting her brown (beginning to gray) hair nervously, she quickly scraped the stiff pink spaghetti out of the pot onto a plate and said, “But honey, look at all the space we have.”

Bruce made the mistake of aiming his bloodshot eyes through the archway into the living room: The armchairs and end tables were cluttered with shampoo bottles and pens and used tissues and earrings and dirty socks and magazines and dog biscuits. It seemed to him that the house was closing in on them, that more space merely created the need for more things they couldn’t afford in order to fill that space. Peering down at the sticky jumble of spaghetti before him, he declared, “That’s not space, that’s chaos!”

“You have to get up early,” Bonnie replied. “Why don’t you go to bed?”

Next morning, even before unfolding his Philadelphia Inquirer on the train, Bruce March said to Jim Bulge, “Our lives are not made of inches or dollars. Our lives are made of minutes and hours.”

This comment, out of nowhere, smacked a little too much of philosophy to suit a man who sold hardware wholesale all day, so Jim grew defensive: “The bums on skid row have all the time in the world, but not a nickel to spend or a square foot of their own to stand in.”

Although they never had the time to get together “on the outside,” Bruce and Jim considered themselves good friends — confidants and advisors who shared the trials of selling goods and services along with the tribulations of the daily commute, and whose perspective, therefore, could be trusted. Just like that Jim had enabled Bruce to see that he was a lot better off than a lot of other people. From that day on Bruce complained less and less about “the grind,” as the regulars affectionately called the round-trip, and thought less and less about returning to the city. Anyway, the rents had tripled since his family had moved out, and he really did enjoy having a yard and basement and all that went with it. On his workbench sat a Stanley plane, plus a circular saw from Sears; he had a dream of one day building his own pool table. Unfortunately, he rarely seemed to have the time to use his tools — at least not for making things. Weekends he spent recovering from the week of travel and repairing whatever had gone wrong with the house and car during the week. By 6 A.M. Monday he was exhausted.

On a bright spring morning, a young man whom Bruce did not know sat down beside him in the train. Bruce was a little put off because the regulars liked to sit with regulars. But the younger man, who seemed as free and easy as a traveling salesman, started talking to him in a friendly way and, to Bruce’s surprise, turned out to be fairly agreeable. Employed at a stock brokerage, he was hoping to get his broker’s license one day so he could live comfortably without working too hard, he said with a smile. At one point in the conversation about their jobs and homes, however, the younger man said something that made Bruce wary: “How long have you been doing this commute?”

Without flinching, Bruce replied, “Five years.”

“Phew!”

Bruce cranked up a superior smile. “You’ll get used to it.”

“I doubt it.”

“There’s a woman in the first car who’s been riding these rails thirty-five years.”

The younger man looked at Bruce with stretched, stricken eyes, and then grew untalkative. Bruce remembered how he’d felt years earlier, before his hair had acquired a salt-and-pepper look, but it didn’t seem so terrible any longer. It was just something that had to be done, so he did it. Besides, he had made some lifelong friends on the train — they played cards, analyzed the Eagles football games, discussed the accomplishments (or failures) of their kids, told bitterly amusing anecdotes about their mothers-in-law, read racy passages from paperbacks aloud, described in detail how they’d told off their bosses, rehashed some grisly murder they’d seen reported on television, complained of how increasingly difficult it was getting to sell whatever it was they happened to sell, and in general managed to kill the time very effectively; five or six hours only seemed like two or three at most.

At the end of a long day at the office, Bruce would look forward to pulling himself up on the 5:33 to be reunited with his comrades, to find out how certain situations — the stories put on hold when they’d reached the station in the morning — had turned out for them during the day. Or to resume their card game. Or to tell a hot new joke. Or to hear how someone had landed (or lost) a huge sale. Since the regulars spent the best part of their days and evenings with each other, stimulated by their conversations, as well as by the beer and wine and whiskey some brought on board, by the time they lowered themselves off the train, somewhere between 7 and 9 P.M., depending upon their particular destination and how late the train was, their vitality and imagination and equilibrium were shot. After a luke-warm — often cold — dinner, and an hour or so of TV, a quick shower, and another sexless night, the process was begun all over again.

At home on Saturdays, Bruce would keep jumping up out of his armchair, as if late for an appointment. “Why don’t you relax?” Bonnie would say with annoyance. This only made him more nervous, and he would stomp around the house barking for no apparent reason, making unreasonable demands on his wife and ordering his children about. Once he even kicked the dog: Andrew, Barbara, and Charlie stared at him as if he were one of those escaped lunatics who chatter to themselves on city streets. Since he loved all of them, including Dusty the dog, Bruce knew he was behaving badly. But he didn’t know why, having come to believe he’d gotten used to the relentless travel required to enable him to peddle trade advertising all day long.

Each of the regulars expressed this frustration in his or her own special way. Quite a few became functioning alcoholics or got into cocaine (the cocaine crowd, according to his pal Jim, occasionally shared a snort with Nicko, the train’s engineer). Some beat their wives and children. One accountant, it was rumored, started embezzling funds from her company, hoping to amass enough to escape the grind permanently. Several tried to write books (in transit) that were loaded with sex and violence. Yet others fell in love on the train, carrying on more or less complete relationships on the plastic-covered coil-springs without, as far as anyone knew, meeting in the world beyond the railroad car. And two or three gave their lives in the line of duty. Such was the fate of the woman who had been riding the train thirty-seven years. As the story was told on the 5:33, the regulars in the first car had simply assumed she was sleeping, as she often did, until her stop came and they couldn’t wake her up. A newcomer (only fourteen months on track) in Bruce’s car had joked that she’d died at the office and simply showed up on the 5:33 out of habit.

After years and years of rolling back and forth over the rails, an incident occurred that linked the commuters in Bruce’s train in a permanent way. As usual, his crowd began to gather in the last car from about 5:10 P.M. on, saving seats for their pals who couldn’t get out of the office as early, thereby excluding the onetime or part-time riders from their circle. Seats were swung back so that four of them could face each other, and they pulled cardboard and posters off the wall to use as tables across their knees; this was done in different sections of the car, spreading their domination throughout. Their community had developed to the degree that none of them felt comfortable, safe, until all the regular faces were accounted for, as though they would all be slightly less able to undergo the rigors of the trip unless they all did it together.

On this particular winter’s night, just as the train rolled out from under the sloped tin roof of the terminal, Bruce came scrambling up the stairs from the subway and made a last desperate dash to catch up, running so hard he felt a sharp pain in his chest. But the boarding gate was closed, and the train pulled entirely free of the station; with briefcase in hand, he stood there rattling with outrage. It wasn’t merely that the last of his energy had been completely wasted, that he would get home late again. What made it much worse was that he would be deprived of the company of his friends, of the beer and potato chips at day’s end that made the routine seem less oppressive, of telling the story about a typographical error in an ad which became a profanity in print. Over and over he cursed the subway which had made him late. At last he turned and dragged his feet, like an obstinate child, toward a food stand, where he swallowed two hot dogs (mustard and sauerkraut) without tasting them.

In the last car on the train, his pals felt equally deprived, vaguely hollow; they began, as they did in all such cases, to speculate why Bruce wasn’t on the train, starting with the most likely — a late subway train — but including a sales meeting that had run on too long. “You don’t suppose he had to stay downtown to do some shopping?” one of them wondered out loud. “Definitely not; he would’ve mentioned it this morning.” After reviewing all possibilities, they relented, agreeing to get to the bottom of this matter the next morning. The regulars settled into their conversations and card games and drinking and romances. But something was missing inside each of them.

In a wooded stretch of eastern Pennsylvania the 5:33 plunged into a dense, driving snowstorm; the train slowed down, hesitated a few times, then rolled forward more smoothly, though more slowly. When the interior lights went out, the card players moaned with annoyance, and someone called out, “Here we go again!” But the lovers were delighted by the darkness, snuggling deeper into their seats, squeezing each other’s knees, touching breasts and brushing lips. The regulars were so attuned to the syncopations of the train that any alteration in its rhythm was a signal to them, so when the train began to pick up speed despite the storm, someone said, “What the hell’s Nicko trying to prove? — hope no one gave him a whiff tonight.” The commuters laughed nervously in the darkness. Now the train began to hesitate again with a series of short, jarring jerks. Many of the passengers peered out the windows, something they rarely did on the return trip, but it was impossible to see anything in the snow-blown night.

At the station Bruce March entered the waiting room, a cavernous opening between a marble floor and metal-ribbed skylight, and gazed up at the huge round clock: 5:41. He checked it against his watch: 5:41. With forty-two minutes to kill before his next train, he started wandering around between the shellacked wooden benches, finally stopping before the newsstand at one end. Reading the headline of the evening daily — MAD DAD SLAYS SON & EX-WIFE AT BIRTHDAY PARTY — he was tempted to pick up a copy, but he felt too edgy to read. Though he’d been trying to stop smoking, he bought a pack of cigarettes instead and drifted among the white and black and gray faces of the commuters. Occasionally a face seemed familiar, though not enough to speak to. He looked up at the clock again: 5:47. Thirty-six minutes to go.

After another five minutes had passed Bruce sat down on a bench, not far from a woman with short-clipped hair who was tapping her black shoe impatiently on the shiny floor.

“Missed your train, too?” he inquired.

“I don’t know why else I’d be sitting around this dump!” she spat, getting up and striding toward the coffee machine.

The whole world has gone nuts tonight, Bruce thought. Instead of increasing his annoyance, however, the sight and sound of the woman’s agitation enabled Bruce to see himself more clearly. He moved to the door of the station, opened the pack of cigarettes, tapped one out, lit it, and took a few puffs. Soon he felt more relaxed. As a result, the hands of the clock seemed to skid along at a more merciful pace, for when he looked at his wrist it was 6:11. By this time he had pretty much accepted the separation from his traveling mates.

Bruce collected his briefcase and went out to where the trains nosed into the station. But the 6:23 had not pulled in at Gate 9. This was unusual: Generally a train would be in the station twenty to thirty minutes ahead of departure to receive passengers; this also allowed time for the engineer to check out the locomotive and for the conductors to clear out the leftover tabloids and coffee cups and snack wrappers. By 6:17 the train still had not arrived, and Bruce’s stomach began to tighten like a fist again. By 6:30 the train had not appeared through the fine snow which had begun to fall, and the railroad personnel standing around with hands in pockets could tell the inquiring passengers no more than what was obvious. By 6:37 Bruce was muttering curses at the train, the station, at the unseen figures who ran the railroad.

At 6:44 he decided to call Bonnie and tell her to go ahead and eat dinner without him. The phone was busy. He dialed again and again. “I’m going to beat the hell out of those kids — they’ve got to stop tying up the phone when I’m trying to call home!” Bruce said this out loud, and as a means of getting back at whatever it was that seemed determined to complicate his life, he slammed down the receiver with a crash. The noise caused him to look around, and standing not fifteen feet away was a policeman in his navy blue uniform and cap, looking directly at him. His left hand rested on his hip, and his right was at his hip, too, only the heel of this hand rested on the handle of the revolver, his fingers drumming the black leather holster, as if itching to pull out the gun and aim it at Bruce.

No law against slamming down a receiver, Bruce said to himself, wondering if the cop had heard him threaten to beat his kids. Bruce turned away from the phone and pretended to look for the train, but he could feel the policeman’s eyes on him. You keep spying on me, he thought with a smirk, and I’ll take that gun out of your holster and shoot you, the dispatcher, the ticket clerk, and maybe a redcap for good measure. Bruce March was not a violent person, but at that moment he was able to appreciate how that father had gone berserk and gunned down his own son and ex-wife.

By 6:53 there was no sign of his train, nor any indication of when it could be expected, so Bruce left the cop standing there and pushed into the Commuter’s Cafe. He climbed up on a stool and demanded a Stroh’s. The bushy-faced bartender growled. As Bruce took a long, steady swallow from the mug, he wondered who was winning the pinochle game on the train. After a few more swallows of beer, he glanced out the window and saw the cop standing near the door of the cafe, hands on hips. “What does he want?” Bruce mumbled.

“Did you ask for another beer?” said the bartender, looking away from the television to face his customer.

“I wasn’t talking to you.”

The bartender slapped a towel across the bar and turned his back on Bruce.

Bruce looked up at the television. It was too early for the 76ers game; instead they had a game show on — the host, flashing long white teeth, was spinning a large wheel with red, green, and black numbers. Four dumpy-looking men and women were standing before the host, giggling. Typical American consumers, Bruce thought. To kill more time he fantasized about walking into the television station waving that cop’s revolver, and he even imagined himself squeezing off four shots until all the contestants lay in a heap. By the way, he said silently to the host, I’ve saved the last two bullets to blast that grin off your face.

Bruce wasn’t sure what time it happened, but the picture went off the screen and there appeared a man with thinning hair in a pale blue shirt and purple tie, seated at an oval desk, holding a sheet of paper. The words NEWS BULLETIN kept blinking along the bottom edge of the screen as the man spoke in short, tight sentences: “The five thirty-three express out of Philadelphia, destined for Harrisburg, has collided with another train that had broken down earlier in a heavy snowstorm. Initial reports indicate the engineer of the five thirty-three ran a flashing red stop signal. At this hour firemen and rescue workers are attempting to free passengers from the fiery wreckage. While it is too early to assess injuries and damage, authorities fear that many have died. Our news team is on the scene to bring you the following live report...”

A woman in a short fur coat blinked onto the screen and began speaking quickly into the microphone in her hand, the frosty breath shooting out of her bright red mouth, the snow swirling around her blond head. Now the camera turned away, presenting images of twisted and crumpled steel, of dense smoke pouring out of shattered windows, while men in rubber coats and hard helmets moved like rats over the carcass of the train. A collective cry arose in the cafe, followed quickly by silence. Everyone sat so still, staring at the TV, that they seemed to be bolted to the heavy stools, the wooden bar and tables. Wondering if his friend Jim Bulge had gotten out of the wreckage okay, Bruce peered at the scene to see if he could recognize anyone. Now Bruce noticed a narrow white thing lying parallel to a sprung section of track; he realized it was a human arm, and a not unpleasant shiver passed through his body.

Just as suddenly as it had gone off the air, the game show returned, and the host, that same grin stuck on his flat face, was in the act of spinning the painted wheel. The cafe grew noisy again, a congested sound of humanity rising slowly, steadily. Bruce glanced out the window. The cop had disappeared. Sliding off the stool and pushing through the swinging door, he went out into the station without realizing he’d left his briefcase behind. Others came out of the cafe, rushing past him, and as the news of the accident spread through the terminal, the movement around Bruce seemed to become as herky-jerky as Keystone Kops dashing about in a silent movie. Peering over his shoulder, he saw no sign of the policeman and, without checking the clock, he entered Gate 9.

The snow was whipping thickly over the platform, but he did not bother to button his coat. For a long while he looked out along the pair of rails, polished by the immense weight they had supported over the years, searching for the great white eye of the train. The distant darkness held together in one piece. Though it was cold in the wind and snow, and though the passengers counting on the 6:23 had dispersed, Bruce March continued to stand out and wait for his train. It was printed on the timetable. Eventually it had to show up. And when it did, he wanted to move close to those shiny rails, so comforting in their parallel harmony, and watch the giant wheels of steel roll toward him.