Warm Whiskey in a Cold Ditch: Installment #12

After finishing "The Map-Reader," I got as comfortable as I could in the observation car. I watched telephone poles pass by and imagined that they were moving but the train was not. When I was seven or eight my was taking me to see a counselor because "he doesn't seem to want to talk to anyone." My parents might have thought I was suicidal, but at seven or eight I'm sure I hadn't reached that stage yet. During the ride to the counselor, I watched the broken lines in front of the car and asked my father how we knew the car was moving, not the road and lines. He didn't say a thing. He just tapped on the break pedal so I could feel the car slow down. Later I wanted to say that the lines had slowed down, too, but I knew his point was for me to feel something.

But the telephone poles. I watched them long enough to sense there was a pattern there, and I removed the BIC pen from the Rhodia's spiral binding. My sister had given me the pen when she'd stopped to check on my brother and me an hour or so earlier. "You still have that notebook?" she asked. I showed it to her. "Then you might need this," she said and handed me the pen before walking away. She had been encouraging me to do things since I was a kid, and this was no different.

I first noticed that some poles had a plate with a number on it, which I guessed was a mile marker. Then, 10 poles later was one that had a single reflective strip wrapped around it. Pole 20 had two strips, pole 30 had three, and pole 40 had four as well as a plate with a number one less than the first pole: 40 poles per mile, I assumed. I used the stopwatch on my Timex to see how long the train took to pass from one numbered plate to the next, then used Margie's pen on the palm of my hand to write the calculation that showed our speed. I felt like the boy in "The Map-Reader" learning something new about navigation.

Margie found me not long later, after I had watched hundreds of telephone poles. She sat down in the adjacent seat and pointed to my hand. "You've got a notebook full of paper. Why did you write on your hand?"

I looked at my palm, at how much of the ink had smeared into the narrow lines and folds of skin. "I guess I was saving the paper for something important," I said.

"You going to write something?" She took the Rhodia and leafed through some of the pages. She handled the paper carefully, with a delicacy that must have suited her profession.

"I don't have a lot to write about," I said.

"Sure, you do. Write about how crazy it is to be riding on this train with a couple of dead relatives."

"You write it," I said.

She shook her head. "Not me. This isn't my story. I'm just along for the ride."

"That doesn't make much sense, Margie."

"Probably not." She stared out the window. It was getting dark outside the train, and our faint reflections looked back at us. "Remember when we were kids?" she asked. "When Mom and Dad would go out to dinner or something an leave the three of us alone? How we'd turn off all the lights until someone finally got scared enough to turn them back on?"

I laughed. "You never did give in."

"I used to cheat. I'd keep a tiny flashlight under my pajama shirt so that only I could see it. Then I'd wait for you or Steven to break down."

"You did that?"

"I did."

I shouldn't have been surprised. Margie had always been very smart, but she also had a certain sneaky streak that probably continued to serve her well.

Margie stood up. "I'm going to see if I can call Mom. You staying in here for awhile?"

"Might as well," I said.

She moved away, heading for the next car. "Write something."