Rock Springs

Empire

Sims and his wife Marge were on the train to Minot from their home in Spokane. They had left Spokane at five, when Marge got off her shift, and it was after nine now and black outside. Sims had paid for a roomette which Marge said she intended to be asleep in by nine, but she wasn’t in it yet. She had talked Sims into having a drink.

“How would you hate to die most?” Marge said, waggling a ballpoint in her fingers. She was working a crossword puzzle book that had been left on the seat. She had finished the hardest puzzle and gone on to the quiz in the back. The quiz predicted how long people would live by how they answered certain questions, and Marge was comparing her chances to Sims’s. “This will be revealing,” Marge said. “I’m sure you’ve thought about it, knowing you.” She smiled at Sims.

“I’d hate to be bored to death,” Sims said. He stared out at the glassy darkness of Montana where you could see nothing. No lights. No motion. He’d never been here before.

“Okay. That’s E,” Marge said. “That’s good. It’s ten. I’m ten because I said none of the above.” She wrote a number down. “You can see the psychology in this thing. If E is your answer for all of these, you live forever.”

“I wouldn’t like that,” Sims answered.

At the front of the parlor car a group of uniformed Army people were making a lot of noise, shuffling cards, opening beer cans and leaning over seats to talk loud and laugh. Every now and then a big laugh would go up and one of the Army people would look back down the car with a grin on his face. Two of the soldiers were women, Sims noticed, and most of the goings-on seemed intended to make them laugh and to present the men a chance to give one of them a squeeze.

“Okay, hon” Marge took a drink of her drink and repositioned the booklet under the shiny light. “Would you rather live in a country of high suicide or a high crime rate? This thing’s nutty, isn’t it?” Marge smiled. “Sweden’s high suicide, I know that. Everywhere else is high crime, I suppose. I’ll answer E for you on this one. E for me, too.” She marked the boxes and scored the points.

“Neither one sounds all that great,” Sims said. The train flashed through a small Montana town without stopping — two crossing gates with bells and red lanterns, a row of darkened stores, an empty rodeo corral with two cows standing alone under a bright floodlight. A single car was waiting to cross, its parking lights shining. It all disappeared. Sims could hear a train whisde far off.

“Here’s the last one,” Marge said. She took another sip and cleared her throat as if she was taking this seriously. “The rest are … I don’t know what. Weird. But just answer this one. Do you feel protective often, or do you often feel in need of protection?”

At the front of the car the Army people all roared with laughter at something one of them had said in a loud whisper. A couple more beer cans popped and somebody shuffled cards, cracking them together hard. “Put your money where your mouth is, sucker. Not where mine is,” one of the women said, and everybody roared again. Marge smiled at one of the Army men who turned to see who else was enjoying all the fun they were having. He winked at Marge and made circles around his ear with his finger. He was a big sergeant with an enormous head. He had his tie loosened. “Answer,” Marge said to Sims.

“Both,” Sims said.

“Both” Marge said and shook her head. “Boy, you’ve got this test figured out. That’s an extra five points. Neither would’ve taken points off, incidentally. Ten for me. Fifteen for you.” She entered the numbers. “If there weren’t twenty taken off yours right from the start, you’d live longer by a long shot.” She folded the book and stuck it down between the seat cushions, and squeezed Sims’s arm to her. “Unfortunately, I still live five years longer. Sorry.”

“That’s all right with me,” Sims said and sniffed.

One of the Army women got up and walked back down the aisle. She was a sergeant, too. They were all sergeants. She was wearing a green shirt and a regulation skirt and a little black tie. She was a big, shapely woman in her thirties, an ash blond with reddish cheeks and dark eyes that sparkled. She was not wearing a wedding ring, Sims also noticed. When she passed their seat she gave Marge a nice smile and gave Sims a smaller one. Sims wondered if she was the jokester. BENTON was the name on her brass name tag. SGT. BENTON. Her epaulettes had little black-and-white sergeant’s stripes snapped on them. The woman went back and entered the rest room.

“I wonder if they’re on duty,” Marge said.

“I can’t even remember the Army, now,” Sims said. “Isn’t that funny? I can’t remember anybody I was even in it with.” The toilet door clicked locked.

“You weren’t overseas. You’d remember things, then,” Marge said. “Carl had a horror movie in his head. I’ll never forget it.” Carl, Marge’s first husband, lived in Florida. Sims had met him, and they’d been friendly. Carl was a stumpy, hairy man with a huge chest, whereas Sims was taller. “Carl was in the Navy,” Marge said.

“That’s right,” Sims said. Sims himself had been stationed in Oklahoma, a hot, snaky, hellish place in the middle of a bigger hellish place he’d been glad to stay in instead of shipping out to where everybody else was going. How long ago was that, Sims thought? 1969. Long before he’d met Marge. A different life altogether.

“I’m taking a snooze pill now,” Marge said. “I worked today, unlike some people. I need a snooze.” She began fishing around inside her purse for some pills. Marge waitressed in a bar out by the airport, from nine in the morning until five. Airline people and manufacturers’ reps were her customers, and she liked that crowd. When Sims had worked, they had had the same hours, and Sims had sometimes come in the bar for lunch. But he had quit his job selling insurance, and hadn’t thought about working since then. Sims thought he’d work again, but he wasn’t a glutton for it.

“I’ll come join you in a little while,” Sims said. “I’m not sleepy yet. I’ll have another one of these, though.” He drank the last of his gin from his plastic cup and jiggled the ice cubes.

“Who’s counting?” Marge smiled. She had a pill in her hand, but she took a leather-bound glass flask out of her purse and poured Sims some gin while he jiggled the ice.

“Perfect. It’ll make me sleepy,” Sims said.

Marge put her pill in her mouth. “Snoozeroosky,” she said, and washed it down with the rest of her drink. “Don’t be Mr. Night Owl.” She reached and kissed Sims on the cheek. “There’s a pretty girl in the sleeping car who loves you. She’s waiting for you.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Sims said and smiled. He reached across and kissed Marge and patted her shoulder.

“Tomorrow’ll be fine. Don’t brood,” Marge said.

“I wasn’t even thinking about it.”

“Nothing’s normal, right? That’s just a concept.”

“Nothing I’ve seen yet,” Sims said.

“Just a figure of the mind, right?” Marge smiled, then went off down the aisle toward the sleeper.

The Army people at the front of the car all laughed again, this time not so loud, and two of them — there were eight or so — turned and watched Marge go back down the aisle toward the sleeping car. One of these two was the big guy. The big guy looked at Marge, then at Sims, then turned back around. Sims thought they were talking about the woman in the rest room, telling something on her she wouldn’t like to hear. “Oh, you guys. Jesus,” the remaining woman said. “You guys are just awful. I mean, really. You’re awful.”

All the worry was about Marge’s sister, Pauline, who was currendy in a mental health unit somewhere in Minot — probably, Sims thought, in a straitjacket, tied to a wall, tranquilized out of her brain. Pauline was younger than Marge, two years younger, and she was a hippie. Once, years ago, she had taught school in Seattle. That had been three husbands back. Now she lived with a Sioux Indian who made metal sculptures from car parts on a reservation outside of Minot. Dan was his name. Pauline had changed her own name to an Indian word that sounded like Monica. Pauline was also a Scientologist and talked all the time about “getting clear.” She talked all the time, anyway.

At four o’clock yesterday morning Pauline had called up in a wild state of mind. They had both been asleep. The police had come and gotten Dan, she said, and arrested him for embezzling money using stolen cars. The F.B.I., too, she said. Dan was in jail down in Bismarck now. She said she knew nothing about any of it. She was there in the house with Dan’s dog, Eduardo, and the doors broken in from when the F.B.I, had showed up with axes.

“Do you want this dog, Victor?” Pauline had said to Sims on the phone.

“No. Not now,” Sims had said from his bed. “Try to calm down, Pauline.”

“Will you want it later, then?” Pauline said. He could tell she was spinning.

“I don’t think so. I doubt it.”

“It’ll sit with its paw up. Dan taught it that. Otherwise it’s useless. It has nightmares.”

“Are you all right, honey?” Marge said from the kitchen phone.

“Sure, I’m fine. Yeah.” Sims could hear an ice cube tinkle. A breath of cigarette smoke blown into the receiver. “I’ll miss him, but he’s a loser. A self-made man. I’m just sorry I gave up my teaching job. I’m going back to Seattle in two hours.”

“What’s there,” Marge asked.

“Plenty,” Pauline said. “I’m dropping Eduardo off at the pound first, though, if you don’t want him.”

“No thanks,” Sims said. Pauline had not taught school in ten years.

“He’s sitting here with his idiot paw raised. I won’t miss that part.”

“Maybe now’s not the best time to leave Dan,” Sims said. “He’s had some bad luck.” Sims had had his eyes closed. He opened them. The clock said 4:12 A.M. He could see the yellow light down the hall in the kitchen.

“He broke my dreams,” Pauline said. “The Indian chief.”

“Don’t be a martyr, hon,” Marge said. “Tell her that, Vic.”

“You’re not going to make it, acting this way,” Sims said. He wished he could go back to sleep.

“I remember you,” Pauline said.

“It’s Victor,” Marge said.

“I know who it is,” Pauline said. “I want out of this. I’m getting the fuck out of this. Do you know how it feels to have F.B.I, agents wearing fucking flak jackets, chopping in your bedroom with fire axes?”

“How?” Sims said.

“Weird, that’s how. Lights. Machine guns. Loudspeakers. It was like a movie set. I’m just sorry” Pauline dropped the receiver and picked it up again. “Oh shit,” Sims heard her say. “There it goes.” She was starting to cry. Pauline gave out a long, wailing moan that sounded like a dog howling.

“Monica?” Marge said. Marge was calling Pauline by her Indian name now. “Get hold of yourself, sweetheart. Talk to her again, Vic.”

“There’s no reason to think Dan’s a criminal,” Sims said. “No reason at all. The government harasses Indians all the time.” Pauline was wailing.

“I’m going to kill myself,” Pauline said. “Right now, too.”

“Talk to her, Victor,” Marge said from the kitchen, “I’m calling 911.”

“Try to calm down, Monica,” Sims had said from his bed. He heard Marge running out the back door, headed for the Krukows next door. Death was not an idle notion to Pauline, he knew that. Pauline had taken an overdose once, back in the old wild days, just to make good on a threat. “Monica,” Sims had said. “This’ll be all right. Pet the dog. Try to calm down.” Pauline was still wailing. Then suddenly the connection was broken, and Sims was left alone in bed with the phone on his chest, staring down the empty hall where the light was on but no one was there.

When the police got to Pauline and Dan’s house it was an hour later. Pauline was sitting by the phone. She had cut her wrists with a knife and bled all over the dog. The policeman who called said she had not hit a vein and couldn’t have bled to death in a week. But she needed to calm down. Pauline was under arrest, he said, but she’d be turned loose in two days. He suggested Marge come out and visit her.

Sims had always been attracted to Pauline. She and Marge had been wild girls together. Drugs. Overland drives at all hours. New men. They had had imagination for wildness. They were both divorced; both small, delicate women with dark, quick eyes. They were not twins, but they looked alike, though Marge was prettier.

The first time he had seen Pauline was at a party in Spokane. Everyone was drunk or drugged. He was sitting on a couch talking to some people. Through a door to the kitchen he could see a man pressed against a woman, feeling her breast. The man pulled down the front of the woman’s sundress, exposed both breasts and kissed them; the woman was holding on to the man’s crotch and massaging it. Sims understood they thought no one could see them. But when the woman suddenly opened her eyes, she looked straight at Sims and smiled. She was still holding the man’s dick. Sims thought it was the most inflamed look he had ever seen. His heart had raced, and a feeling had come over him like being in a car going down a hill out of control in the dark. It was Pauline.

Later that winter he walked into a bedroom at another party to get his coat, and found Pauline naked on a bed fucking a man who was naked himself. It had not been the same man he’d seen the first time. Later still, at another party, he had asked Pauline to go out to dinner with him. They had gone, first, out on a twilight rowboat ride on a lake in town, but Pauline had gotten cold and refused to talk to him anymore, and he had taken her home early. When he met Marge, sometime later, he had at first thought Marge was Pauline. And when Marge later introduced Pauline to Sims, Pauline didn’t seem to remember him at all, something he was relieved about.

Sims heard the rest-room door click behind him, and suddenly he smelled marijuana. The Army crew was still yakking up front, but somebody not far away was smoking reefer. It was a smell he didn’t smell often, and hadn’t for a long time. A hot, sweet, thick smell. Who was having a joint right on the train? Train travel had changed since the last time he’d done it, he guessed. He turned around to see if he could find the doper, and saw the woman sergeant coming back up the aisle. She was straightening her blouse as if she’d taken it off in the rest room, and was brushing down the front of her skirt.

The woman looked at Sims looking at her and smiled a big smile. She was the one smoking dope, Sims thought. She’d slipped off from her friends and gotten loaded. He had smoked plenty of it in the Army. In Oklahoma. Everybody had stayed loaded all the time then. It was no different now, and no reason it should be.

“Where’s your pretty wife?” the sergeant said casually when she got to Sims. She arched her brows and put her knee up on the armrest of Marge’s seat. She was loaded, Sims thought. Her smile spoke volumes. She didn’t know Sims from Adam.

“She’s gone off to bed.”

“Why aren’t you with her,” the woman asked, still smiling down over him.

“I’m not sleepy. She wanted to go to sleep,” Sims said. The woman smelled like marijuana. It was a smell he liked, but it made him nervous. He wondered what the Army people would think. Being in the Army was a business now. Businessmen didn’t smoke dope.

“You two have kids?”

“No,” Sims said. “I don’t like kids.” She looked down at her friends who were playing cards in two groups. “Do you?” Sims said.

“None that I know about,” the woman said. She wasn’t looking at him.

“Are you a farmer?”

“No,” Sims said. “Why?”

“What else is there to do out here?” The woman’s look unexpectedly turned sour. “Do you say nice things to your wife?”

“Every day,” Sims said.

“You must really be in love,” she said. “That’s the coward’s way out.” The woman quickly smiled. “Just kidding.” She ran her fingers back through her hair and gave her head a shake as if she was clearing her thoughts. She looked down the aisle again and seemed, Sims thought, not to want to go back down there. He looked at the name BENTON on her brass tag. It also had tiny sergeant’s stripes stamped on it. Sims looked at the woman’s breast underneath the tag. It was in a big brassiere and couldn’t be defined well. Sims thought about his own age. Forty-two.

“Your friends are having a good time, it sounds like.”

“They’re not my friends,” she said.

This time the other Army woman in the group got up and looked back where Sergeant Benton was standing beside Sims’s seat. She put her hands on her hips and shook her head in a mock disapproving way, then waved an arm in a wide wagon-train wave at Sergeant Benton. “Get back down here, Benton,” the woman shouted. “There’s money to be made off these drunks.”

The other sergeants said, “Whoa!” then laughed. Another beer can popped. Cards were shuffled. The other woman was fat and short with black hair.

“They think they’re your friends,” Sims said.

“Let ’em think it. I just met them tonight,” the woman said. “It’s the easygoing camaraderie of the armed forces. They’re all nice people, I guess. Who knows? Where’re you going if you’re not a farmer?”

“Minot,” Sims said.

“Which rhymes with why-not. I remember that from school. Pierre rhymes with queer.” She shook her head again and touched her palm to her forehead. She had big hands, red and tough looking. Hands that had worked. Bigger than his own hands, Sims suspected. “I feel a little light-headed,” the woman said.

“Must be the dope you smoked,” Sims said.

She grinned at Sims. “Well, do tell.” She look scandalized but wasn’t scandalized at all. “You’re just full of ideas, aren’t you?”

“I’m a veteran myself,” Sims said.

“What of? Modern life?”

“I was in Vietnam,” Sims said. The words just popped out of his mouth. They shocked him. He didn’t want them back, but they shocked him. How many people had been there, after all? He tried to guess how old Sergeant Benton was, if she might’ve been there herself. Thirty. Thirty-five. It was a long time ago.

“When was that?” the woman said.

“When was what?” Sims said.

“Vietnam? Was that a war or what?” She looked disgustedly at Sims. “I don’t believe you were in Vietnam. Do you know how many of you guys I’ve met?”

“How many?”

“Two million,” the woman said, “possibly three.”

“I was in the Navy,” Sims said.

“And you were probably on a boat that patrolled the rivers shooting blindly in the jungle day and night, and you don’t want to discuss it now because of your nightmares, right?”

“I worked on an air base,” Sims said. This seemed safe to say.

“That’s a new one,” Sergeant Benton said. “The nonviolent tactic.”

“What’s your job in the Army?” Sims felt a big smile involuntarily crossing his face. He wished he’d never mentioned Vietnam. He wished he had that part of his life story to tell over again. He was relieved Marge wasn’t here.

“I’m in intelligence,” Sergeant Benton said brazenly. “Don’t I look smart?”

The fat woman stood up and faced Sergeant Benton again. “Stop harassing the civilians, Benton,” she shouted. A laugh went up.

“You look plenty smart,” Sims said. “You look great, if you ask me.” Sims realized he was still grinning and wished he weren’t. He wished he’d told her to go to hell in a rickshaw.

“Well, aren’t you nice?” the woman said in a voice Sims thought was vulgar. The sergeant kissed her fingertips and blew him a kiss. “Sweet dreams,” she said and walked off down the aisle to where the other soldiers were laughing and drinking.

Sims took a walk back to the sleeping car to check on Marge. Two of the sergeants turned and watched him leave. He heard someone chuckle and somebody say, “Gimme a break.”

When he stepped out onto the vestibule he noticed it was colder, a lot colder than Spokane. It was September the eighteenth. It could freeze tonight, he thought. Canada wasn’t far north of where they were. That was not an appealing world, Sims thought. Cold and boring.

The train was coming into a station when he looked in on Marge. There was one main street that came straight up to the main tracks. The sky was cloudy in front of a big harvest moon. Down the street were red bar signs and Christmas lights strung across one intersection. Here was a place, Sims thought, you’d want to stay drunk in if you could.

Marge was asleep on top of the covers, still in her clothes. The reading light was on. She had a mystery novel open on her chest. She was dead to the world.

Sims took down the extra blanket and covered Marge up to her neck. He put the book on the window ledge and turned off the light. It was cold in the roomette. There was hardly room for him in the bed.

Out the window on the station platform he saw the big sergeant walk past, then the other Army people. He could see a green Army van waiting in a parking lot, its motor running in the chilled air. A few Indian men were standing along the wall of the station in their shirt sleeves. Two dogs sat in front of them. One of the Indians saw Sims looking out and pointed to him. Sims, leaning over Marge, waved and gave him the thumbs-up. All the Indians laughed.

The Army sergeants, seven in all, carrying their bags, walked down to the parking lot and climbed in the van. The one fat woman was with them, and the big man was giving the orders. They looked cold. Where could they be going, Sims wondered. What was out here?

A bell sounded. The train moved away before the Army van left. Sims kept watching. The Indians all gave him the thumbs-up and laughed again. They had bottles in Sneaky-Pete sacks.

“What’s happening?” Marge said. She was still asleep, but she was talking. “Where are we now?”

“Nowhere. I don’t know,” Sims said softly, still leaning over her, watching the town slide by. “Everything’s fine.”

“Okay,” Marge said. “That’s good news.”

She went back to sleep. Sims slipped out and headed back to his seat.

It was quieter in the car now. A couple of new people had gotten on, but it seemed less smoky, the lights not as bright. Sims bought a ham sandwich and a soft drink at the snack bar and sat back in his seat and ate, watching die night go by. He thought he should’ve taken Marge’s mystery novel. That would put him to sleep fast. He wasn’t going to be able to sleep in the roomette anyway.

Out the window, a highway went along the train tracks. Trucks were running in the night. A big white Winnebago seemed to be trying to keep up with the train. Lights were on in the living quarters and children’s faces at the windows. The kids were pointing toy guns at the train and bouncing up and down. Their parents were up front, invisible in the dark. Sims made a pistol with bis fingers and pointed it at the Winnebago. All the children — three of them — abruptly ducked out of sight. Suddenly the train was onto a long trestle, over a bottomless ravine, and the Winnebago was lost from view in the dark.

Sergeant Benton rose out of a seat at the far end of the car and looked back toward the rest room. She looked like she’d been asleep. She grabbed her shoulder purse and walked back toward Sims, pushing the sides of her hair up.

“What happened to your friends?” Sims said, though he knew perfectly well what had happened to them.

Sergeant Benton looked down at Sims as if she’d never seen him before. Her blouse was wrinkled. She looked dazed. It was the dope, Sims thought. He’d felt the same himself. Like a criminal.

“Nothing but bars in these towns,” the woman said vaguely. “All social life’s in the bars. Where do you eat?” She shook her head and put her fingers over one eye, leaving the other looking at Sims. “What’s your name?”

“Vic,” Sims said and smiled.

“Vic.” The woman stared at him. “How’s your wife?”

“She’s fine,” Sims said. “She’s locked away in dreamland.”

“That’s good. My friends left in a hurry. They were loudmouths. Especially that Ethel. She was too loud.”

“What’s your name” Sims asked. He was staring at the woman’s breasts again.

Sergeant Benton looked at her name tag and back at Sims. “Can I trust you?” she said. She covered her other eye and looked at Sims with the one that had been covered.

“Depends,” Sims said.

“Doris,” she said. “Wait a minute. Stay right here.”

“I’m up all night,” Sims said.

The woman went on down to the toilet and locked herself in again. Sims wondered if she’d smoke another joint. Maybe he ‘d smoke one himself this time. He hadn’t been loaded in ten years. He could stand it. If Marge were here, she’d want to get loaded herself. He wondered what Pauline had on her mind tonight. He wondered if she ‘d stopped howling yet. Maybe things would get better for Pauline, Maybe she’d go back and teach school someplace, some small town in Maine, possibly, where no one knew her. Maybe Pauline was a manic depressive and needed to be on drugs.

He thought about Sergeant Benton, in the head now, washing up. His attitude toward “lifers,” which is what he assumed she was, had always been that something was wrong with them. The women, especially. Something made them unsuited for the rest of life, made them need to be in a special category. The women were always almost pretty, yet not quite pretty. They had a loud laugh, or a moustache or enlarged pores, or some mannishness that went back to a farm experience with roughneck brothers and a cruel, strict father — something to run away from. Bad luck, really. Something somebody with a clearer oudook might just get over and turn into a strong point. Maybe he could find out what it was in Doris and treat her like a normal person, and that would make a difference.

Out the window, running along with the train, was the big white Winnebago again. The kids were in the windows, but they weren’t shooting guns at him this time. They were just staring. Sims thought maybe they weren’t staring at him, but at something else entirely.

Sergeant Benton came out of the toilet and this time no dope smell came out with her. She had puffed up her hair, straightened her green blouse and her tie, and put on some lipstick. She looked better, Sims thought, and he was happy for her to come back. But Sergeant Benton looked straight down the aisle past him, patted her hair again, raised her chin slightly and made no gesture to suggest she had ever known Sims was alive or on the earth at that moment. She turned and walked straight out through the door and into the next car.

Sims watched through the window glass as her blond head crossed the vestibule and disappeared through the second door into the lounge car. He felt surprised and vaguely disappointed, but it was actually better, he thought, if she didn’t come back. He’d wanted her to sit down and talk — all a matter of being friendly and passing the time — but it wasn’t going anyplace. Killing time led to trouble, he’d found. It even was possible Sergeant Benton was traveling with someone else, somebody asleep somewhere. Another sergeant.

A year ago, Marge had gotten sick and had had to go in the hospital for an operation. Marge had seemed fine, then suddenly she’d lost twenty pounds and gotten pale and weak, so weak she couldn’t go to work — all in the space of what seemed like ten days. The doctor who examined Marge told her and Sims together that Marge had a tumor the size of an Easter egg deep under her arm, and in all likelihood it was cancerous. After a dangerous operation, she would have to undergo prolonged treatments at the end of which she would probably die anyway, though nothing was certain. Sims took a leave from his insurance job and spent every day and every night until nine in the hospital with Marge, who needed to be there two weeks just to get strong enough for the surgery.

Every night Sims kissed Marge good-bye in her bed, then drove off into the night streets alone. Sometimes he’d stop in a waffle house, eat a sandwich, read the paper and talk to the waitresses. But most of the time he would go home, fix his own sandwich, eat it standing at the sink and watch TV until he went off to sleep, usually by eleven. Sometimes he’d wake up in his chair at three a.m.

When he’d been alone at home for three weeks, he began to notice as he stood at the sink eating his sandwich and staring into the dark, that the woman in the house next door was always at her kitchen table at that time. A radio and an ashtray were on the tabletop, and as he stood and watched, she would start crying, put her head down on her bare arms and wag it back and forth as if there was something in her life, an important fact of some kind, she couldn’t understand.

Sims knew the woman was the younger sister of Mrs. Krukow, who owned the house with her husband, Stan. The Krukows were away on a driving trip to Florida, and the sister was watching the house for them. The sister’s name was Cleo. She had dyed red hair and green eyes, and Mrs. Krukow had told Sims that she was “betwixt and between” and had no place to go at the moment. Sims had seen her in the backyard hanging out clothes and, often late in the day, walking the Krukows’ dachshund on the sidewalk. He had waved several times, and once or twice they’d exchanged a pleasant word.

When Sims had stood in the kitchen drinking milk and eating a sandwich three days running, and watching Cleo alone and crying, he decided he should call over to the Krukows’ and ask if there was something he could do. Maybe she was worried about the house. Or maybe something had happened to the Krukows and she was in shock about it and hadn’t come out of the house for days. He didn’t know what she did all day. It would be an act of kindness. Marge would go herself if she weren’t in the hospital.

At ten-thirty on the fourth night, just as he saw Cleo’s head go down on her folded arms on the kitchen table, he called the Krukows’ number from the kitchen phone. He saw Cleo wagging her head in unhappiness, then saw her look at the phone ringing on the wall, then look at the kitchen window and out into the night, as if whoever was calling was watching her, which of course was the case, though Sims had turned off his own light and stood far back in the room where he couldn’t be seen. Somehow he knew Cleo was going to look his way the moment the phone rang.

“Hi, it’s Vic Sims from next door,” Sims said from the darkness. “Are you okay over there?”

“It’s what?” Cleo said harshly. Again she turned and furrowed her brow at the window above the sink. She frowned into the night, then her eyes seemed to widen as if she could see something specific.

“It’s Vic Sims,” Sims said cheerfully. “Marge and I were just concerned that you were all right over there. Stan and Betty asked us to check on you and see if you needed anything. I was up late over here anyway” This was a lie, but Sims knew it could’ve been the truth. Stan and Betty were not good friends of theirs and had never asked them to do anything for Cleo at all.

“Where are you?” Cleo said.

“I’m at home. In my living room,” Sims lied, staring at Cleo, who, he could see, had on shorts and a long T-shirt. She sniffed into the receiver.

“Are you watching me?” Cleo said, looking at the window, then up at the ceiling. She sniffed again, then Sims thought he heard her sob softly and swallow. He couldn’t tell from looking through the two windows and the dark. She was turned toward the wall phone now.

“Am I watching you?” Sims laughed, “No, I’m not watching you. I’m watching the news. If you’re fine, then that’s all I’m calling to find out. Just checking. What are you crying about, anyway?”

“Nothing. Oh, Jesus,” Cleo said. Then she was overcome by tears and sobbing. “I’m sorry,” she said after what seemed to Sims like a long time. “I’m just at my wit’s end over here. I have to hang up now. Good-bye.”

Sims watched her hang up the phone, then turn and lean against the wall and cry again. She wagged her head just as she had when she was seated at the table. Finally, Sims saw her slide down and out of sight to the floor. It was a dramatic thing to see.

Sims stood in the dark against the kitchen wall of his own house. She could hurt herself, he thought. She could be in some real trouble and have no one to help her, whereas if someone would just talk to her she might work out whatever it was and be fine. Sims thought about calling back, but suspected she wouldn’t answer now. He decided he would go over, knock on the door and offer help. He took a bottle of brandy out of the cabinet, walked across the dark grassy yard and up the back steps, and knocked.

Cleo came to the back door with tears still fresh on her cheeks. Her red hair was frizzy and damp, and she was barefooted. She looked grief-stricken, Sims thought. She also looked vulnerable and beautiful. Coming over and having a drink with redheaded Cleo seemed like a good idea for both of them.

“Who are you?” Cleo said suspiciously through the screen. She glanced down at Sims’s brandy bottle and hardened her mouth.

“Vic,” Sims said. “From next door. Remember me? I thought you might like a drink. It sounded like you were crying. I can leave the bottle here.” He hoped leaving the bottle wouldn’t be necessary, but he didn’t want to seem to hope that. He hoped she’d ask him to come in.

“Come on in, I guess,” Cleo said and turned around and walked away, leaving Sims on the doorstep, watching her through the screen as she disappeared back into the kitchen.

Cleo, whose last name was Middleton, told Sims her entire story. How she and Betty, who was five years older, had grown up on a farm in Iowa; that Betty had gone off to college and married Stan and Stan had enjoyed a nice, unexamined life of advancement and few financial worries working as an executive for a chain of hardware stores. She herself, Cleo, had gone to a cosmetology school and had somehow ended up in California hanging out with a motorcycle gang who robbed and beat people up for fun and sold drugs and generally rained terror on anybody they wanted to. She didn’t say how this involvement had started. She showed Sims a tattoo of a Satan’s head she had on her ass. She pulled up her shorts and turned her back to him from across the table, and smiled when she did it. This tattoo was involuntary, she told him, and later she showed him some cigarette burns on the soles of her feet. Cleo said she’d had two children in her life — she was twenty-nine, she said, but Sims didn’t believe her. She looked much older in the dim kitchen light. Forty, Sims guessed, though possibly younger. One child had died soon after birth. But the other, a little boy named Archie, was still living with his father down in Rio Vista, but Cleo couldn’t see him because his father, who was a biker, had threatened to cut her head off if he ever so much as saw her again. “The courts are helpless against that kind of attitude,” Cleo said and looked stern. She told Sims about waking up one night and finding herself being dragged out of her bed by a bunch of her husband’s biker friends — Satan’s Diplomats. They put her in the back of a car and drove off to the mountains. She could hear them talking about Satan, she said, and his evil empire, and she heard one man, a biker named Loser, say they were going to sacrifice her to Satan and then laugh about it. She said she’d screamed and yelled but no one paid attention. Eventually, she said, the car ran out of gas, and all the bikers had gotten out and abandoned it with her left in it. The next morning a policeman came along and that was how she got out. She said she hadn’t gone back home after that, but that her husband, whose name was Savage, sent her a letter care of Betty telling her all he would do to her if he ever laid eyes on her.

Cleo shivered when she told this story, then she took out a cigarette and smoked it, holding it between her teeth. There was a sense about Cleo, Sims thought, that all she said might not be true. Yet she’d obviously had a kind of life that made inventing such a story an attractive possibility, and that was enough.

Cleo told Sims she knew his wife was in the hospital, and she encouraged him to talk about that. Sims had no idea how she’d found out about Marge, but he didn’t really want to talk about it. Marge’s illness was his terrible worry, he thought, and he didn’t know what to say. Marge was sick and might die. And he hated the whole thought of it. He loved Marge, and if she died his life would be over. No ifs or ands. It would just be over. He’d already decided he’d go out in the woods and hang himself so no one but animals would ever find him. That didn’t make good conversation in the middle of the night, though. Nothing he or Cleo could say would help any of that. He was happy to sit across from Cleo, who was very pretty, and get peacefully drunk and forget about illness and hospitals and people’s puny insurance claims he wasn’t processing.

Cleo drank brandy and said that since she’d left California, five years before, she’d had several jobs but couldn’t seem to find herself, “couldn’t get focused.” She’d lived in Boise, she said, doing hair. She’d lived in Salt Lake. She’d gone back to California and gotten married again, but that hadn’t lasted. She’d gone to Seattle, then, and come as close as she ever would to a steady job in her field, in a shopping center up in Bellingham. After that she’d gone on unemployment for a year. And then she’d accidentally run into Stan one day on the Winslow ferry. And that had panned out in her staying in Stan and Betty’s house for a month. “A real cross-patch life pattern.” Cleo shook her head, smiling. “A long way from Iowa, though not in actual miles.”

“Things seem better now, though. Here, at least,” Sims said.

“Not really,” Cleo said. “What’s next? It’s anybody’s guess.”

“Maybe there’ll be work here.”

“I don’t ever want to touch another head professionally,” Cleo said. She looked down then, and Sims thought she might be ready to cry again. He didn’t want that, though he didn’t think he could blame her. She’d told him her whole life in ten minutes, and once the telling was finished the life itself seemed over, too. His was not that way. Not yet, anyway. Marge could get well. He could go back to work. Different and good things could happen to them. They were young. But that wasn’t Cleo’s lot in life. She had plenty to regret and cry about, and it wasn’t over yet, not by any means.

Cleo started wagging her head again slowly, and he knew she was about to start sobbing, maybe even cracking up completely, and he would be there alone with her for that. He thought of himself waiting outside a dingy emergency room inside which Cleo, someone he didn’t even know, lay strapped to a gurney, heavily sedated, while Marge, his own wife whom he loved, was asleep and dying and alone three floors up.

He could see Cleo’s red head begin to lower toward the tabletop. Suddenly Sims stood up, leaned across the table over the brandy bottle, took Cleo’s damp soft face in his hands. “Don’t cry now, Cleo,” he said. “Things’ll be all right. Things’re going to be a lot better. You’ll see. I’ll see to it myself.

“You will?” Cleo said and blinked at him. “How exactly will you do that?”

That night he slept with Cleo in Stan and Betty Krukow’s big king-sized bed upstairs. Cleo insisted on leaving the television tuned to a rock music channel, but without the sound. This made the room flash with light all night long and made Sims regret he was there. Once or twice he saw Cleo peeping over his shoulder at something going on in the fantasy world where the silent music came from, a world of smoky, dark streets and Halloween masks and doors opening onto violent surprises. This was an act of kindness, Sims thought, and there was no use letting anything bother him. This was not his life and wouldn’t ever be. None of it made any sense, but it didn’t make any difference, either. Months from then, if Marge lived, he’d tell her about it and they’d have a big laugh together. Cleo would be long gone. Maybe he and Marge would’ve moved, too, to another house or to another state.

Sometime before dawn, when the light was gray and the room was still except for Cleo’s breathing, Sims woke up starded out of a terrible dream. On the TV screen children were dancing and smiling around a man wearing a goat’s head and playing an electric guitar. But in his dream Sims had hanged himself from a tall pine-tree limb in a forest somewhere. He’d written letters explaining everything — he’d already seen them being opened by his friends. “When you read this,” the letter said, “I, Vic Sims, will already be dead.” Yet, even though he was dead and hanging from a new rope with birds perched on top of his head, Marge was somehow still alive and in her hospital room, smiling out of a sunny window, looking better than she had in weeks. She would survive. But it was too late for him. All was lost and ruined forever.

When he woke up later in the morning, the TV was off and Cleo was gone. The dog was not downstairs, and Stan and Betty’s other car was missing from the garage. Cleo had left the coffee pot on, but there was no note.

Sims couldn’t get out fast enough. He slipped out the back door and ran across the backyard — relieved not to see Cleo drive up in the Krukows’ van. Inside, he took a long shower, shaved and put on a clean suit. Then he drove straight out to the hospital, arriving an hour late with a bunch of flowers. Marge said she’d assumed he’d slept in and just unplugged the phone. She said he looked exhausted and that her illness was having bad effects on him, too. Marge cried then, and afterward said she felt better.

Marge stayed in the hospital another three weeks. At home, Sims stayed inside and saw Cleo mostly out the window — the way he’d seen her before the night he’d slept with her in the Krukows’ bed — walking the dog, hanging out laundry, driving into and out of the driveway with sacks of groceries. But Cleo had begun to seem different. She never called him, and on the times he couldn’t avoid seeing her outside she never acted as if he was anything more than her sister’s neighbor, which was a big relief. But she referred to Sims by his first name whenever she saw him. “Hello, Vic? she would say, across the fence, where she was walking the dog. She would smile a kind of mean, derisive smile Sims didn’t like, as if there was a joke attached to his name that he didn’t know about. “How’s Marge, Vic?” she’d say other times, though he was certain Cleo had never seen Marge. Before, Cleo had seemed out-of-luck, vulnerable, vaguely alluring and desirable. A waif. Now she seem experienced and cynical, a woman who had ridden with Satan’s Diplomats and told about it. A hard woman, a woman who could cause you big trouble.

In two weeks, Sims noticed a big black Harley-Davidson motorcycle in the Krukows’ driveway. It was a low, sleek thing with chrome parts and high handlebars, and after a few minutes Cleo and a big, nasty-looking biker came out, got on, and rode away with a terrible roar. The biker had on black leathers, earrings, and a bandanna over his head like a pirate. Cleo had on exactly the same clothes.

For a week, the biker hung out in the Krukows’ house. The bike had California plates that said LOSER, and once or twice Sims saw Cleo and the biker hanging clothes on the line in the back, smoking cigarettes and talking softly. The biker wore no shirt most of the time and drank beer, and kept on his pirate’s bandanna. His chest and arms were stringy and pale and hard-looking, with tattoos. Sims understood this was the friend of Cleo’s former husband, the one who’d tried to sacrifice her to Satan. He wondered what the two of them could have in common.

The Krukows came back two days before Marge was released from the hospital. The biker disappeared the same day, and the next morning Sims saw Stan carry Cleo’s bags and some boxes out to the car, drive away with Cleo, then in a little while come back alone. Sims never saw Cleo again, though he did see the biker in a gas station while he was on his way to the hospital to bring Marge home.

Marge stayed home in bed another three weeks, but as it turned out she didn’t have to take the horrible and prolonged treatments the doctor had predicted. She started getting better almost immediately and in a month was ready to go back to her job at the bar. The doctor said that sometimes people with strong dispositions just couldn’t be held down, and that Marge was lucky and would probably be fine and live a long life.

On the morning Marge was getting ready for her first day back at the bar, the phone rang in the kitchen and Sims answered it. It was almost nine and he was reading the paper while Marge was getting dressed.

“Vic,” a voice said, a man’s voice, a voice he didn’t know. There was a long pause then, during which it sounded like the receiver was being muffled and talking was going on.

“Yes,” Sims said. “Who is it?” It occurred to him that it was probably Marge’s boss calling from the bar, needling Sims about being a housewife or something like that. Marge’s boss, George, was a fat, good-natured Greek guy everybody liked. “Is this Big George?” Sims said. “I know what you’re going to tell me, George. You better watch your step out there.”

“Vic,” the voice said again. Sims somehow sensed it wasn’t George — though it could’ve been — and in the same instant he realized he had no earthly idea who it was or could be, but that it wasn’t good. And in the silence that followed his own name, the feeling of a vast outside world opened up in him, and scared him so that he stood up beside the wall phone and stared at his own phone number. 876-8076. This was somebody calling from far away.

“This is Vic,” Sims said stiffly. “What do you want? What’s this about?” He heard Marge’s footsteps in another room, heard her closet door close, smelled her perfume in the air.

“We’re going to kill Marge, Vic,” the man said. “If you let her out of your sight, anywhere, we’ll be waiting for her. The devil needs Marge, Vic. You’ve given up your right to her by being an asshole and a slime, by fucking somebody else. And now you have to pay for it.”

“Who is this?” Sims said.

“This is the devil calling,” the voice said. “Everybody’s a loser today.”

Someone, a woman in the background, laughed a long, witchy, raspy laugh until she started to cough, then laughed through the cough and laughed until she couldn’t stop coughing. Then a door slammed in a room at the end of the line, very far away. Sims knew who it was now. He turned and looked out the window and across the yard between his house and the Krukows’. Betty Krukow was standing at the sink, her hands down and out of sight. She looked up after an instant and saw Sims looking at her. She smiled at him through the two panes of glass and across the sunny yard with the fence in between. When Sims stared at her a moment longer, she held up a plate out of the sink, dripping with suds and dishwater, and waved it in front of her face as if it were a fan. Then her face broke into a wide laugh and she walked away from the window.

“Cleo,” Sims said. “Let me speak to Cleo. Let me speak to her right now. Right this instant.” Things didn’t have to be this way, he thought.

“He wants to speak to Cleo,” the man said to someone there where he was.

“Tell him she died,” Sims heard a woman’s voice say casually. “Like Marge.”

“She died,” the man said. “Like Marge. Who’s Marge?” he heard the man say.

“His wife, you numb-nuts,” the woman said, then laughed raucously.

“Let me speak to her,” Sims said. “If that’s Cleo, I want to talk to her. Please.”

“Don’t forget us,” the man’s voice said, suddenly very close to the receiver. Then almost immediately the connection was broken.

Sims stood holding the buzzing phone to his ear. And after a moment of looking out the window into the daylight brightening the blue shingles of the Krukows’ house and reflecting his own brown house in their kitchen window, reflecting, in fact, the very window he could see out of but not himself, Sims thought: this is not a thing that happened, not a thing Fll hear about again. Things you do pass away and are gone, and you need only to outlive them for your life to be better, steadily better. This is what you can count on.

In the chill night, the train passed slowly through another small Montana town. The business section ran along both sides of the track. Yellow crime lights were shining. Sims saw a bar with a sign that said LIVE ENTERTAINMENT and two car lots with strings of white bulbs stretched above the rows of older cars. A convenience store with customers parked into the curb was open at the end of the street. Several boys wearing football uniforms stood in front drinking beers, holding up the bottles in salute. In the rear windows of their cars, girls’ faces were looking out at the train.

Down the highway, out of town, was a motel with a white neon sign that said SKYLARK. A soaring bird was oudined in delicate blue lights. He saw a woman and a man, the woman very fat and dressed in a white shift dress, walking down the row of motel rooms to where a door was ajar with light escaping. The woman was wearing high heels. Sims thought she was probably cold.

“Can you imagine a drink, Vic?” Sims looked up and Sergeant Benton was back and wearing a big grin. She was also wearing perfume and she looked fresher, Sims thought, as though she’d had a shower since he saw her.

“I thought you’d gone to sleep,” he said. She had her big hands on her hips, and she wasn’t wearing shoes. Just stockings. Sims noticed her feet weren’t particularly big.

“Are we going to argue about this all night, or what?” Sergeant Benton said.

“I’m fresh out here,” Sims said. He held up his plastic cup. “I guess the bar’s closed now.” He thought unhappily about the flask in Marge’s purse.

“The Doris bar’s still open,” Sergeant Benton said. “No cover.”

“Where’s the Doris bar?” Sims said.

“In Doris’s suite.” Sergeant Benton raised her plucked eyebrows in an exaggerated way to let Sims know she was having some fun. “Vic’s wife wouldn’t care if he had a drink, would she?”

Marge would care, Sims thought. She’d care a lot, though Marge would certainly be happy to go herself with him and Doris if somebody were to ask her. But she was asleep and needed to get her rest for Pauline’s next crisis. Meanwhile, he was here by himself, wide awake with no chance of sleep and nothing to do but stare at a dark, cheerless landscape. Anything he decided to do he would do, no questions asked.

“She wouldn’t mind,” Sims said. “She’d come herself if she wasn’t asleep.”

“We’ll drink a toast to her.” Doris held up an imaginary glass.

“Great,” Sims said, and held up a glass himself and smiled. “Here’s to Marge.”

He followed Sergeant Benton into the lounge car, which was smoky. The snack bar was closed. Padlocks were on each of the steel cabinets. Two older men in cowboy hats and boots were arguing across a table full of beer cans. They were arguing about somebody named Heléna, a name they pronounced with a Spanish accent, “It’d be a mistake to underestimate Heléna,” one of them said. “I’ll warn you of that.”

“Oh, fuck Heléna,” the other cowboy said. “That fat, ugly bitch. I’m not afraid of her or her family.”

Across from them a young Asian woman in a sari sat holding an Asian baby. They stared up at Sergeant Benton and at Sims. The woman’s round belly was exposed and a tiny red jewel pierced her nose. She seemed frightened, Sims thought, frightened of whatever was going to happen next. He didn’t feel that way at all, and was sorry she did.

Sergeant Benton led him out into the second, rumbling vestibule, tiptoeing across in her stocking feet and into the sleeping car where the lights were turned low. As the vestibule door closed, the sound of the moving train wheels was taken far away. Sergeant Benton turned and smiled and put her finger to her lips. “People are sleeping,” she whispered.

Marge was sleeping, Sims thought, right across the hall. It made his fingers tingle and feel cold. He walked right past the little silver door and didn’t look at it. She’ll go right on sleeping, he thought, and wake up happy tomorow.

At the far end of the corridor a black man stuck his bald head out between the curtains of a private seat and looked at Sims and Doris. Doris was fitting a key into the lock of her compartment door. The black man was the porter who’d helped Marge and him with their suitcases and offered to bring them coffee in the morning. Sergeant Benton waved at him and went “shhhh.” Sims waved at him, too, though only halfheartedly. The porter, whose name was Lewis, said nothing, and drew his head back inside the curtains.

“Give me your tired, right?” Doris said, and laughed softly as she opened the door. A bed light was on inside, and the bed had been opened and made up — probably, Sims thought, by Lewis. Out the window he could see the empty, murky night and the moon chased by clouds, and the ground shooting by below the grass. It was dizzying. He could see his own face reflected, and was surprised to see that he was smiling. “Entrez vous,” Doris said behind him, “or we’ll have tomorrow on our hands.”

Sims climbed in, then slid to the foot of the bed while Doris crawled around on her hands and knees reaching for things and digging in her purse behind the pillow. She pulled out an alarm clock. “It’s twelve o’clock. Do you know where your kids are?” She flashed Sims a grin. “Mine are still out there in space waiting to come in. Good luck to them, is what I say.” She went back to digging in her bag.

“Mine, too,” Sims said. He was cold in Doris’s roomette, but he felt like he should take his shoes off. Keeping them on made him uncomfortable, but it made him uncomfortable to be in bed with Doris in the first place.

“I just couldn’t stand it,” Doris said. “They’re just other little adults. Who needs that? One’s enough.”

“That’s right,” Sims said. Marge felt the same way he did. Children made life a misery and, once they’d finished, they did it again. That had been the first thing he and Marge had seen eye to eye on. Sims put his shoes down beside the mattress and hoped they wouldn’t start to smell

“Miracles,” Doris said and held up a pint bottle of vodka. “Never fear, Doris is here,” she said. “Never a dull moment. Plus there’s glasses, too.” She rumbled around in her bag. “Right now in a jiffy there’ll be glasses,” she said. “Never fear. Are you just horribly bored already, Vic? Have I complctely blown this? Are you antsy? Are you mad? Don’t be mad.”

“I couldn’t be happier,” Sims said. Doris, on her hands and knees in the half-light, turned and smiled at him. Sims smiled back at her.

“Good man. Excellent.” Doris held up a glass. “One glass,” she said, “the fruit of patience. Did you know I look as good as I did when I was in high school. I’ve been told that — recently, in fact.”

Sims looked at Doris’s legs and her rear end. They were both good looking, he thought. Both slim and firm. “That’s easy to believe,” he said. “How old are you?”

Sergeant Benton narrowed one eye at him. “How old do you think? Or, how old do I look? I’ll ask that.”

She was taking all night to fix two drinks, Sims thought. “Thirty. Or near thirty, anyway,” he said.

“Cute,” Sergeant Benton said. “That’s extremely cute.” She smirked at him. “Thirty-eight is my age.”

“I’m forty-two,” Sims said.

Doris didn’t seem to hear him. “Glass,” she said, holding up another one for him to see. “Two glasses. Let’s just go on and have a drink, what do you say?”

“Great,” Sims said. He could smell Doris’s perfume, a sweet flowery smell he liked and that came from her suitcase. He was glad to be here.

Doris turned and crossed her legs in a way that stretched her skirt across her knees. She set both glasses on her skirt and poured two drinks. Sims realized he could see up her skirt if the light in the compartment was any better.

She smiled and handed Sims a glass. “Here’s to your wife,” Doris said. “May sweet dreams descend.”

“Here’s to that,” Sims said and drank a gulp of warm vodka. He hadn’t known how much he’d wanted a drink until this one was down his throat.

“How fast do you think we’re going now?” Doris said, peering toward the dark window where nothing was visible.

“I don’t know,” Sims said. “Eighty, maybe. I’d guess eighty.”

“Hurding through the dark night,” Doris said and smiled. She took another drink. “What scares you ought to be interesting, right?”

“Where’ve you been on this trip?” Sims said.

Sergeant Benton pushed her fingers through her blond hair and gave her head another shake, then sniffed. “Visiting a relative,” she said. She stared at Sims and her eyes seemed to blaze at him suddenly and for no reason Sims could see. Possibly this was a sensitive subject. He would be happy to avoid those.

“And where’re you going? You told me but I forgot. It seems like a long time ago.”

“Would you like to hear a little story?” Sergeant Benton said. “A recent and true-to-life story?”

“Sure.” Sims raised his vodka glass to toast a story. Doris extended the bottle and poured in some more, then more for herself.

“Well,” she said. She smelled the vodka in her glass, then pulled her skirt up slightly to be comfortable. “I go to visit my father, you see, out on San Juan Island. I haven’t seen him in maybe eight years, since before I went in the Army — since I was married, in fact. And he’s married now himself to a very nice lady. Miss Vera. They run a boarding kennels out on the island. He’s sixty something and takes care of all these noisy dogs. She’s fifty something. I don’t know how they do it.” Doris took a drink. “Or why. She’s a Mormon, believes in all the angels, so he’s more or less become one, too, though he drinks and smokes. He’s not at all spiritual. He was in the Air Force. Also a sergeant. Anyway, the first night I get there we all eat dinner together. A big steak. And right away my father says he has to drive down to the store to get something, and he’ll be back. So off he goes. And Miss Vera and I are washing dishes and watching television and chattering. And before I know it, two hours have gone by. And I say to Miss Vera, ‘Where’s Eddie? Hasn’t he been gone a long time?’ And she just says, ‘Oh, he’ll be back pretty soon.’ So we pottered around a little more. Each of us smoked a cigarette. Then she got ready to go to bed. By herself. It was ten o’clock, and I said, ‘Where’s Dad?’ And she said, ‘Sometimes he stops and has a drink down in town.’ So when she’s in bed I get in the other car and drive down the hill to the bar. And there’s his station wagon in front. Only when I go in and ask, he isn’t there, and nobody says they know where he is. I go back outside, but then this guy steps to the door behind me and says, Try the trailer, hon. That’s it. Try the trailer.’ Nothing else. And across the road is a little house trailer with its lights on and a car sitting out front. And I just walked across the road — I still had on my uniform — walked up the steps and knocked on the door. There’re some voices inside and a TV. I hear people moving around and a door close. The front door opens then and here’s a woman who apparently lives there. She’s completely dressed. I’d guess her age to be fifty. She’s younger than Vera anyway, with a younger face. She says, ‘Yes. What is it?’ and I said I was sorry, but I was looking for my father, and I guessed I’d gotten the wrong place. But she says, ‘Just a second,’ and turns around and says, ‘Eddie, your daughter’s here.’

“And my father came out of a door to the next room. Maybe it was a closet, I didn’t know. I didn’t care. He had his pants on and an undershirt. And he said, ‘Oh hi, Doris. How’re you? Come on in. This is Sherry.’ And the only thing I could think of was how thin his shoulders looked. He looked like he was going to die. I didn’t even speak to Sherry. I just said, No, I couldn’t stay. And I drove on back to the house.”

“Did you leave then?” Sims said.

“No, I stayed around a couple more days. Then left. It didn’t matter to me. It made me think, though.”

“What did you think,” Sims asked.

Doris put her head back against the metal wall and stared up. “Oh, I just thought about being the other woman, which I’ve been that enough. Everybody’s done everything twice, right? At my age. You cross a line. But you can do a thing and have it mean nothing but what you feel that minute. You don’t have to give yourself away. Isn’t that true?”

“That’s exactly true,” Sims said and thought it was right. He’d done it himself plenty of times.

“Where’s the real life, right? I don’t think I’ve had mine, yet, have you?” Doris held her glass up to her lips with both hands and smiled at him.

“Not yet, I haven’t,” Sims said. “Not entirely.”

“When I was a little girl in California and my father was teaching me to drive, I used to think, ‘I’m driving now. I have to pay strict attention to everything; I have to notice everything; I have to think about my hands being on the wheel; it’s possible I’ll only think about this very second forever, and it’ll drive me crazy.’ But I’d already thought of something else.” Doris wrinkled her nose at Sims. “That’s my movie, right?”

“It sounds familiar,” Sims said. He took a long drink of his vodka and emptied the glass. The vodka tasted metallic, as if it had been kept stored in a can. It had a good effect, though. He felt like he could stay up all night. He was seeing things from the outside, and nothing bad could happen to anyone. Everyone was protected. “Most people want to be good, though,” Sims said for no reason. Just words under their own command, headed who-knows-where. Everydiing seemed arbitrary.

“Would you like me to take my clothes off?” Sergeant Benton said and smiled at him.

“I’d like that,” Sims said. “Sure.” He thought that he would also like a small amount more of the vodka. He reached over, took the bottle off the blanket and poured himself some more.

Sergeant Benton began unbuttoning her uniform blouse. She knelt forward on her knees, pulled her shirttail out, and began with the bottom button first. She watched Sims, still half-smiling. “Do you remember the first woman you ever saw naked?” she said, opening her blouse so Sims could see her white brassiere and a line of smooth belly over her skirt.

“Yes,” Sims said.

“And where was that?” Sergeant Benton said. “What state was that in?” She took her blouse off, then pulled her strap down off her shoulder and uncovered one breast, then the other one. They were breasts that went to the side and pushed outward. They were nice breasts.

“That was California, too,” Sims said. “Near Sacramento, I think.”

“What happened?” Sergeant Benton began unzipping her skirt.

“We were on a golf course. My friend and I and this girl. Patsy was her name. We were all twelve. We both asked her to take off her clothes, in an old caddy house by the Air Force base. And she did it. We did too. She said we’d have to.” Sims wondered if Patsy’s name was still Patsy.

Sergeant Benton slid her skirt down, then sat back and handed it around her ankles. She had on only panty hose now and nothing beyond that. You could see through them even in the dim light. She leaned against the metal wall and looked at Sims. He could touch her now, he thought. That was what she would like to happen. “Did you like it,” Sergeant Benton asked.

“Yes. I liked it,” Sims said.

“It wasn’t disappointing to you?”

“It was,” Sims said. “But I liked it. I knew I was going to.” Sims moved close to her, lightly touched her ankle, then her knee, then the soft skin of her belly and came down with the waist of her hosiery. Her hands touched his neck but didn’t feel rough. He heard her breathe and smelled the perfume she was wearing. Nothing seemed arbitrary now.

“Sweet, that’s sweet,” she said, and breathed deeply once. “Sometimes I think about making love. Like now. And everything tightens up inside me, and I just squeeze and say ahhhh without even meaning to. It just escapes me. It’s just that pleasure. Someday it’ll stop, won’t it?”

“No,” Sims said. “That won’t. That goes on forever.” He was near her now, his ear to her chest. He heard a noise, a noise of releasing. Outside, in the corridor, someone began talking in a hushed voice. Someone said, “No, no. Don’t say that.” And then a door clicked.

“Life’s on so thin a string anymore,” she whispered, and turned off the tiny light. “Not that much makes it good.”

“That’s right, isn’t it?” Sims said, close to her. “I know that.”

“This isn’t passion,” she said. “This is something different now. I can’t lose sleep over this.”

“That’s fine,” Sims said.

“You knew this would happen, didn’t you?” she said. “It wasn’t a secret.” He didn’t know it. He didn’t try to answer it. “Oh you,” she whispered, “Oh you.”

Sometime in the night Sims felt the train slow and then stop, then sit still in the dark. He had no idea where he was. He still had his clothes on. Outside there was sound like wind, and for a moment he thought possibly he was dead, that this is how it would feel.

Sergeant Benton lay beside him, asleep. Her clothes were around her. She was covered with a blanket. The vodka bottle was empty on the bed. What had he done here? Sims thought. How had things exactly happened? What time was it? Out the window he could see no one and nothing. The moon was gone, though the sky was red and wavering with a reflected light, as though the wind was moving it.

Sims picked up his shoes and opened the door into the corridor. The porter didn’t appear this time, and Sims closed the door softly and carried his shoes down to the washroom by the vestibule. Inside, he locked the door, ran water on his hands, then rubbed soap on his face and his ears and his neck and into his hairline, then rinsed them with water out of the silver bowl until his face was clean and dripping, and he could stand to see it in the dull little mirror: a haggard face, his eyes red, his skin pale, his teeth gray and lifeless. A deceiver’s face, he thought. An adulterer’s face, a face to turn away from. He smiled at himself and then couldn’t look. He was glad to be alone. He wouldn’t see this woman again. He and Marge would get off in a few hours, and Doris would sleep around the clock.

Sims let himself back into the corridor. He thought he heard noise outside the train, and through the window to the vestibule he saw the Asian woman, standing and staring out, holding her little boy in her arms. She was talking to the conductor. He hoped there was no trouble. He wanted to get to Minot on time and get off the train.

When he let himself into Marge’s roomette, Marge was awake. And out the window he saw the center of everyone’s attention. A wide fire was burning on the open prairie. Out in the dark, men were moving at the edges of the fire. Trucks were in the fields and high tractors with their lights on, and dogs chasing and tumbling in the dark. Far away he could see the white stanchions of high-voltage lines traveling off into the distance.

“It’s thrilling,” Marge said and turned and smiled at him. “The tracks are on fire ahead of us. I heard someone outside say that. People are running all over. I watched a house disappear. It’ll drive you to your remotest thoughts.”

“What about us?” Sims said, looking out the window into the fire.

“I didn’t think of that. Isn’t that strange?” Marge said. “It didn’t even seem to matter. It should, I guess.”

The fire had turned the sky red and the wind blew flames upwards, and Sims imagined he felt heat, and his heart beat faster with the sight — a fire that could turn and sweep over them in a moment, and they would all be caught, asleep and awake. He thought of Sergeant Benton alone in her bed, dreaming dreams of safety and confidence. Nothing was wrong with her, he thought. She should be saved. A sense of powerlessness and despair rose in him, as if there was help but he couldn’t offer it.

“The world’s on fire, Vic,” Marge said. “But it doesn’t hurt anything. It just burns until it stops.” She raised the covers. “Get in bed with me, sweetheart,” she said, “you poor thing. You’ve been up all night, haven’t you?” She was naked under the sheet. He could see her breasts and her stomach and the beginnings of her white legs.

He sat on the bed and put his shoes down. His heart beat faster. He could feel heat now from outside. But, he thought, there was no threat to them, to anyone on the train. “I slept a little,” he said.

Marge took his hand and kissed it and held it between her hands. “When I was in my remote thoughts, you know, just watching it burn, I thought about how I get in bed sometimes and I think how happy I am, and then it makes me sad. It’s crazy, isn’t it? I’d like life to stop, and it won’t. It just keeps running by me. It makes me jealous of Pauline. She makes life stop when she wants it to. She doesn’t care what happens. That’s just a way of looking at things. I guess I wouldn’t want to be like her.”

“You’re not like her,” Sims said. “You’re sympathetic.”

“She probably thinks no one takes her seriously.”

“It’s all right,” Sims said.

“What’s going to happen to Pauline now?” Marge moved closer to him. “Will she be all right? Do you think she will?”

“I think she will,” Sims said.

“We’re out on a frontier here, aren’t we, sweetheart? It feels like that.” Sims didn’t answer. “Are you sleepy, hon,” Marge asked. “You can sleep. I’m awake now. I’ll watch over you.” She reached and pulled down the shade, and everything, all the movement and heat outside, was gone.

He touched Marge with his fingers — the bones in her face and her shoulders, her breasts, her ribs. He touched the scar, smooth and rigid and neat under her arm, like a welt from a mean blow. This can do it, he thought, this can finish you, this small thing. He held her to him, her face against his as his heart beat. And he felt dizzy, and at that moment insufficient, but without a memory of life’s having changed in that particular way.

Outside on the cold air, flames moved and divided and swarmed the sky. And Sims felt alone in a wide empire, removed and afloat, calmed, as if life was far away now, as if blackness was all around, as if stars held the only light.