Warm Whiskey in a Cold Ditch: Installment #9

My admiration for my brother was strong, but as his snoring got louder, I stuffed Kleenex into my ears and leaned away from him. Settling against the window, I remembered another train ride that ended up interrupted for a couple of months. I was drinking a bit more then and had reached a precarious balance between complete obliviousness and mistaken confidence. That's not always an unpleasant place to be, but it's often difficult to leave behind.

I was headed west to east on that trip, but lost over the years is where I was actually going. I know I was alone. Where I ended up, was Helper, Utah, a main street of a town in which there are few violent crimes but many thefts and burglaries. The Amtrak train stopped in Helper about seven in the morning, not long after sunrise, and I stepped outside for fresh air. For some reason I also started walking, and then the train continued on without me. I returned to the station for an hour, probably thinking the train would return for me. I felt glad that I still had my wallet and a few hundred dollars, but my duffel bag was still on the train. I've started over again at several points in my life, but that was the first time without a change of clothing.

When I walked back into town, I found the Golden Rule Mission where I got a free breakfast and directions to the Phillips 66 gas station where the owner gave me more directions, this time to a 3-room strip of a motel. There I paid for a week's worth of lodging and met Susan, who managed the Gateway Lanes bowling alley. When my week was over Susan took me in and said that if she earned the money, I had to cook and clean and walk her home from the lanes late at night.

"Three years," Susan said one night when I asked her how long she had been there.

"Three years?" I pictured Helper and wondered who could live there for that long.

"Legend is that the town keeps people," Susan said.

"Keeps people? What does that mean?"

"Like you'd find in the Twilight Zone keeping," she said. "The town draws people in. Look at you--you didn't show up on purpose, did you?"

"I just missed my train," I said.

"Nobody just misses a train in Helper," she said.

"How did you get here?"

"Bad transmission in a Chevy Nova," she said. "On my way to someplace other than Utah, and this is as far as I got."

But one day she was gone. I had walked to the bowling alley to walk her home, and Nate, the bartender-cook-security guard said that Susan had met someone a couple nights earlier, then had left with him just a couple hours earlier. That was enough for me, so a few days later I boarded the Amtrak train and never looked back.

The train with my family--including my dead aunt and uncle--was headed toward Helper again. Steven was still sleeping and the train had grown a bit too quiet for so early in the evening. I switched on the overhead light and opened the Rhodia. Leafing through the pages, I found paragraph of small text toward the end of the notebook. Above the paragraph was the note, "I have started writing a novel called The Golfer's Wife. Here is the first paragraph."

I knew the nature of my marriage had changed when I walked into the house and found that my wife had packed her clothes, killed the cat, and moved out of my life. "Angie?" I called tentatively as I walked from room to room, my voice bouncing off the sheetrock of what no longer seemed to be the cozy home I had left nine hours earlier.

I closed the Rhodia and thought about that paragraph, about how everything in it seemed so plausible.