Among the Dead (14 page)

The conductor came through the car, calling out, ‘Fullerton, next stop Fullerton.' Frank had lived in Los Angeles his whole life, but how much of the city did he really know? Was Fullerton named for Fuller, or was it named for Fullerton, or was it named by some Iowan who bought the land, and built the town, and named it for his home in Iowa? At least he knew Culver City, a little. He'd once fucked a woman in Culver City. Why was he thinking of her? Culver City, the drive through the morning. And the woman, yes, of course. He had met her on an aeroplane. He smiled, the circuits of his associations! Silly how they do that, charming.

The train stopped at Fullerton. It was an insipid thought, something to say to his brother, a way to keep Lowell's sympathy high. If's an ugly city, he thought, a stain, an ashtray. Well, that's a tired idea too.

What was Fullerton? Frank wanted to know. He thought of getting off the train, finding a taxi, and asking for a tour of Fullerton. Their father could have been wealthy. Lowell would make them wealthy because he did not hate the world. Their father used to tell them that a good developer was an explorer, and his car was his ship, and the roads were oceans and rivers, and he sailed around this world looking for rich harbours, those fabulous intersections where people would want to shop and eat and set up their businesses, place where people would want to live. But it was as though someone had told him this once, when he was young, and it was a lesson he repeated but never seemed to have learned, or if he learned it, there was another lesson that he must have ignored, the lesson of exploitation, of enrichment, the lesson of conquest. While Frank imitated his father, and his fears, his hollow pretensions to an aristocratic equilibrium borrowed probably from magazine advertisements for Scotch whisky, Lowell was his mother's son, and from her he inherited an impatience with his father, and her clarity.

The train left Fullerton, and the track went through a neighbourhood of small houses before finding its way past factories.

Behind him Frank heard an accordion playing Chopin's Funeral March. He turned around. The conductor with the black armband walked down the aisle in front of four men and one woman, dressed in black, with black armbands, holding a four-foot-long pine coffin over their heads. One of the men was tall – Frank thought he might have been six and a half feet – and he had to bend to keep the coffin level. There was something in the coffin, but not a body, they could never have held a body overhead so easily. At the end of the parade was the second conductor, playing a small electric keyboard on a guitar strap around his neck.

Across the aisle from Frank a man shouted, ‘No, no!' It was a cry of joyful disbelief. He stood up and shook a finger at the conductor, and said, ‘Dave, Dave, you didn't. Don't tell me. Dave, do not tell me.'

The funeral procession stopped beside Frank. The woman rested the coffin on the edge of Frank's seat. She winked at him. ‘This' just take a minute.'

‘What's in the coffin?' asked the man.

‘Dearly beloved,' began the conductor.

‘That's for weddings, you dork,' said the woman.

‘The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want,' said the conductor.

‘What's in the casket?' asked the man.

‘Just open it, you dingleberry,' said the woman. She turned to Frank. ‘Right? Doesn't everybody want to know what's in the coffin?'

Frank nodded.

The excited man across the aisle said, ‘You guys. You guys.'

The pallbearers settled the casket on to the floor and lifted the top. Inside was a birthday cake in the form of a grave, with flowers and a headstone, and the inscription, in red jelly:

HERE LIES THE YOUTH OF
CHRIS BENTINE
1953-1993

Set around the cake on a bed of napkins, paper plates and stacks of plastic cups, were a hundred miniature bottles of vodka.

‘Christopher Bentine,' said the conductor, ‘on this, the occasion of your fortieth birthday, your friends and fellow passengers would like to extend our deepest heartfelt sympathies on the loss of your beloved youth.' The conductor with the electric keyboard held one
note, and the pallbearers hummed together, found a note, and then sang ‘Happy Birthday' in a minor key.

Frank felt that everyone in the car had been embarrassed by the procession, but at the same time they were thrilled to have seen it, to have had something in their day that would make a story, something to tell when they got to wherever they were going, and spent the night with whomever they were seeing, and that the spectacle of the party did not throw them back into the role of audience, that somehow they were also in the party too, that they were lucky, that they were privileged. And Frank saw that no one was singing along with the group, because the singers were good, they had the authority that comes from practice and devotion and the love of making music together. They had rehearsed the song, and the melody they had chosen, or that had been chosen by the conductor with the keyboard, was close enough to the tune everyone knew that to sing the variation, in a difficult five-part harmony, without being dragged back to dullness by the familiarity of the major key, was something to respect. The mood in the car changed, and as the singers finished the ditty, everyone could hear the sound of the train, which reminded them, even in a way that the more cynical among them (Frank) would call sentimental and common, of the things that trains in the night are supposed to mean, of all the romances, of leavings and arrivings, of moments that are important. Now even silly Chris Bentine was quiet, staring at the sugar-frosted gravestone, at 1953-1993, at the awful brevity of a life cut off at forty. His face lost all of its stupid vigour, and the pallbearers and conductors stopped smiling at him. Frank saw in Chris Bentine the reflection of a man haunting his own life, suddenly aware that his youth really was over, that if he lived another forty years he would be an old man, and that if he died even in thirty years, no one would say he had died young. He had become his own ghost.

Something had been violated. Chris Bentine's friends should never have played with him like this. For that moment, before Chris Bentine sliced the gravestone in half and licked the knife and had his picture taken by the woman, and everyone in the railroad car applauded, and the pallbearers handed out the miniature bottles of vodka to all the passengers, Frank was not alone in his complicated stew of feelings, he was not so alone in an icy universe in which everyone is born alone and dies alone. He had company.

The woman handed him the vodka and the plastic cup and a piece of cake on a paper plate. He got the edge of 9 and all of 3.

He thought of what his mother has asked him: ‘What can anyone say?' They could say that chocolate and vodka were a good combination. The cake was heavy, and he needed to drink something to clear his mouth, and all he had was the vodka. He could have told his mother that anyone could say, ‘I want to tear my hair out,' or, ‘Now I know there is no God,' or, ‘I want revenge, I want blood for blood.'

Blood for blood. Even when they say it, they don't mean it, thought Frank. He rested his head against the window; the glass was cold and the vibration was unpleasant, not like on a plane, where all the pieces fit together and the window's hum is synchronous with the floor, until the floor drops away and the window shatters and you're strapped to a seat that's sucked backwards past the tail and pieces of the plane are burning and falling around you and the air is cold and thin and you have enough clarity to know that in a few seconds, thirty-two feet per second per second, silence. And if a baby was sleeping in your lap, and you lost it in the explosion?

What happens in a train wreck? Frank thought of the awful job of lifting the trains from the side of the tracks, setting the tracks right; the work seems endless and impossible, railroad cars on their sides, sliding down a wet hill, maybe into a swollen river. And the trains don't have to move fast to fall off the bed, just a little too fast, or else for no reason over the rusted legs of a badly aged bridge. No warning. But the impact? So many shredding metal panels, so many windows out of which a person could fall, and then the train could roll over you while you're half out of the window, that would hurt, squeeze you like a heel on a worm. There would be no time to say ouch. The slow rolling, not like a plane, how many seconds and you're dead? Thirty-two feet per second per second. What is the law of motion that applies to a Pullman car rolling down the embankment? And the way all trains smell vaguely of cigarettes and farts, and the toilet tanks, burst, that smell, and wet sand, and oil. To be in charge of the rescue, what a job, thought Frank. So many facts and so many decisions, but one clear law: clean it up, get the trains running again. That man does not have to think. Everything he has to do is obvious.

The pallbearers carried the open casket down the aisle, collecting the plastic cups, the vodka bottles and the paper plates and plastic
forks. Chris Bentine sat on the arm-rest and braced himself with one foot on the seat across the aisle. People had to step over his leg to get down the car, but he didn't move.

Chris Bentine had no face. Almost no one in the car had a face. What kind of name was Bentine, and when did the first Bentine come to America, and was that progenitor of the American Bentines so aggressively without distinction? Chris Bentine was forty, but he must have been without a face for fifteen years; Frank recognized in him a beer drinker from college, someone neither handsome enough, nor athletic or rich enough, to get into a fraternity, but someone who still was friendly enough to run with a crowd of other noisy boys. And what was this facelessness? There was nothing to read in his eyes. But a lot of them were married. Somewhere along the way they had met a woman who was not repulsed into sickness, into seizures, weeks of crippling dry heaves, by the idea of committing what remained of their only chance at life to these men with no faces. And they didn't live long. They die at sixty. You don't see a lot of old men with no faces in California.

‘Rack race!' yelled Chris Bentine.

‘Rack race!' yelled the pallbearers, together.

‘Not a rack race,' said the conductor.

The woman pallbearer unpinned a brooch from her shirt and took off her pearl necklace. ‘Would you hold these?' she asked Frank.

‘Where are you going?' asked Frank.

‘I guess you've never taken this train,' she said.

‘Once.'

‘But you've never taken the Friday afternoon five-fifty?'

‘No.'

‘This is the best party in California.'

‘Is it like this every Friday?'

‘We don't always have a funeral.'

She ran to the back of the car and joined everyone else from the birthday party. Chris Bentine climbed on a seat and pulled himself into the luggage rack. The woman did the same on the other side of the aisle. The conductor raised his hand.

Frank looked back and tried to read the faces of the passengers. They were all regulars, he was sure of that. Some hid from the embarrassment of this display of the small scale of the human imagination by burying themselves in newspapers and horror novels. A few stared at their reflections in the window, wearing
earphones, listening to music. Others looked back to the start of the race, and many of them, thought Frank, were jealous of the racers, they regretted their own poor social skills, their inability to carouse with a happy group.

The conductor dropped his arm, and the race began. Not too many people were travelling with suitcases; the biggest obstacles were cardboard boxes sealed with tape, but the racers had to pull themselves over small dividers every five feet. Frank was surprised that Chris Bentine was keeping up with the woman, since her small size should have favoured her. She had a better reach than Bentine, and she took advantage of the edge of the rail, so that she pushed off against her outside arm, her left, when it was by her waist, and then with her right hand she grabbed the next divider. Bentine had a less developed system, but a stronger grip with his feet. He pressed his inside knee, his left, into the junction of the wall and the rack, then brought his other foot over the next divider. His hands were bent under his chest, the effect was of a salamander crawling around the roots of a tree. By the middle of the car the passengers over whose heads the racers had not yet passed reached up and took down their bags and coats, and the rest of the way was clear. The woman was ahead. The pallbearers were keeping pace with the racers and urged them on, clapping their hands and pounding the luggage rack before them. There were still some passengers who refused to follow the race. Frank, holding the brooch and the pearl necklace, stood up as the woman came closer. He took down his soft suitcase and put it on the seat. There was nothing in front of her now except for one flat cardboard box, which probably held a framed poster. Frank looked for the owner, but no one seemed worried about it, and he decided not to move it, since the woman, who was now gaining, with a half-length on Chris Bentine, would, at worst, put a hand on a corner of the box, but not let all of her weight attack the middle.

Bentine called out to her, ‘Let me win, it's my birthday!'

‘No discounts for senior citizens, Chris Bentine!' she cried in return. She was over the flat box, and Frank surprised himself with a little smile when she avoided any contact with it. She was good. She deserved to win. She won.

Bentine stopped when she touched the far end. He was two lengths behind.

‘Vodka! I need vodka!' he said, pretending to be a thirsty man in a pitiless desert.

The train stopped in Del Mar for a minute, and then left the ocean. There were lights on the right side; San Diego was near. Everyone around Frank was getting ready for the end of the line. The party was over now, and people were nodding their goodbyes to Chris Bentine as they closed their briefcases or folded up their newspapers. The conductors went down the car, but they were already thinking about their drinks or their dinners, or the next trip, and by their abstract concentration on a duty too involved for the passengers to understand, they were like dead men, and no one talked to them, or even smiled.