The Proper Training

by Patricia Abbott

The snake inhabiting the cavity of his stomach never slept, but when it finally demanded feeding- when he could feel its venom rising up in his throat-he took off with some flimsy excuse.

“I’m in the mood for rum raisin,” he’d say. Or “I’d better fill the tank before the station closes.”

Although she never questioned his coming or going, it seemed necessary to continue the pretense of a legitimate errand. He wondered what her response would be if he said, “The boys are waiting for me to blow open the safe inside Standard Federal.” Or “My mistress only rented the motel room for two hours, so chop-chop.”

“Of course, Tom,” she’d probably murmur, her head bent over the partly scoured sink, the open fridge, her laptop. “You should get going.”

Because that- or something very much like it- was what she said every time.

You should get going.

She positioned herself so they seldom made eye contact. Her skill at this was astonishing. There were things they saw in each other’s eyes that could not be ignored, so better not to see them. Better to occupy separate planes whenever possible.

“Need anything?” he sometimes asked before sliding out the door. She never answered. What could she ever need from him now?

He could smell sulfur from her burning match before he reached the door-as if he ceased to exist within seconds. At some point, she’d stopped urging him to quit and resumed smoking herself, although never in his presence.

And both of them were serious drinkers now. He’d stopped placing the empties in the recycling bin last fall when the neighbor’s son knocked it over playing touch football. The kid, who came running over, looked on in amazement at the explosion of glass glinting in the autumn sun.

“Must have been some party, Mr. Bodie.”

Regret at his hasty words swept over the boy’s face before he finished speaking. They cleaned it up together, the kid growing quiet as the same wet label turned up again and again on shards of glass. What host only offers one brand of whiskey to guests at a party? And there were no parties at the Bodie house lately, were there?

Later, splinters of glass flattened a bicycle tire and twinkled maliciously from Jo’s waffle-soled shoes as she lay on the sofa or on their bed, not even bothering with the sham of a book or TV. He remembered when she’d been strict about taking their shoes off at the door, stern about shoes on the bedspread.

On his worst days, he drove out to the spot before dawn, stealthily backing down the driveway. If he looked up, something he tried hard not to do, Jo’s face would be at the window, the street lamp illuminating the pallor of her exposed neck and shoulders. Had she always been so white?

But at some point every day, he found himself in the car headed in that direction. Sometimes he didn’t realize his trip to the dentist or barber or his office had been hijacked until the landmarks popped up in front of him like funhouse props. First came the store advertising live bait in shaky black letters, then the rusting Chrysler plant, next the denuded field looking brown and scraggly or covered with filthy snow, then the check-cashing place that never seemed to close.

The final marker was a deserted storefront church, its façade covered with advertisements from the days when there were events to promote. The posters were in tatters now, looking like signal flags for an auto race, offering a counterfeit gaiety to the casual passersby.

After the church, the rubble cleared, and the object of his trip stretched before him, its metal teeth glistening if the day was fair. When traffic was sparse, which it often was, he pulled over, his eyes focusing on the barren stretch of land.

Until last year, he’d avoided this route into the city, going miles out of his way to escape the disheartening blocks of abandoned houses, potholed streets, boarded-up businesses. Entire sections of the city had disappeared and what remained here seemed unlikely to last another winter. Yet it did, contrarily defying expectations and fading in increments each year, growing smaller-but still there.

The train track, for that’s what the metal teeth were, crossed the wide, arterial street, then quickly disappeared into the muted grays and browns of a bend in the landscape. He could sit for hours, and had on many days, without seeing a single train pass. After investigation, he discovered only four trains a day traveled this stretch. And often only one carried more than a dozen cars. The morning run at 7:25.

The train that killed Karin pulled fourteen cars and was traveling at a speed of forty-five miles per hour. It hit the suburban bus, one of the larger ones in the fleet, and propelled it forward for a quarter mile before the bus detached itself and spun away, flipping twice before coming to a stop.

Karin was the only passenger still onboard at the end of the route. Dozing perhaps, she’d probably sunk so low in her seat that she went unnoticed by the novice driver. At least, that’s what the investigators concluded.

The only witness to the wreck, a man in a northbound car waiting for the train to pass, told the police detective that the bus had smashed through the gate at a speed equal to or exceeding that of the train. There was no vacillation in its plunge, not hesitant lurch to mark indecision. The witness admitted sheepishly that he’d ducked instinctually, fearful of the flying metal and glass, only looking up after the train carried the bus several hundred yards beyond him and when the horrible grating and squealing sounds subsided.

By now, Tom was well-schooled on transportation vehicles and knew everything there was to know about this particular intersection, what bus routes passed through it, what the freight trains carried, how bus drivers and engineers were trained, how many accidents each year involved the two vehicles.

He could quote the statistics on suicides each year occurring on train tracks. Japan boasted, if that was the right word, the largest number of deaths and plans were underway to paint the glum trains a brighter color, to affix mirror to them, to somehow make them too cheery a place to end your life. Whatever it took to deter the dive off the platform, the foot to the pedal, the prone body on the track. He never could figure out why this means of death was preferable to a gun in the mouth. But guns were not easy to come by in Japan.

If it was a suicide at all. He’d never be sure, of course. The investigators exchanged looks when he pressed them, suggesting perhaps it was better not to know. Drivers fell asleep at the wheel every day. The training was thorough, but mistakes were made.

After his daily vigil, Tom jerked the wheel right and headed home via the freeway where the need to concentrate was anesthetizing. Pirate would be at the door, wagging his tail hopefully, as though Tom might have brought Karin home this time, following him from room to room with a low moan that was unbearable. Could dogs keen? No amount of training could subdue him.

Johanna was also waiting when his trip was at night. Tense in her bed, pretending to read in the armchair, the smell from her Marlboros covered with a lime freshener he once liked but now detested. But she was waiting, always waiting, as if her part in this ritual was as fixed as his, bound by something never said aloud.

Afterwards, in the shower, he recited silently the sequence of events.

Karin came home from college unexpectedly, leaving in the middle of her second semester. No reason was given to her white-faced parents, sitting on the sofa near midnight.

“Is this about a boy?” Johanna asked at one point.

Karin shook her head, her dog Pirate at her side, the only one glad to see her apparently.

“Grades, drugs. Is the work too hard?” Tom asked.

She shook her head, threading her slender fingers through the fringe on the pillow she clutched to her middle.

“Are you pregnant? “Johanna finally said.

“No.” The taut threaded fringe was turning her fingers white.

There was something telling about that response, the pause that preceded it perhaps. Later he wondered if an abortion was the event that sent her flying home.

For some reason, Johanna and he decided, without discussion, to bear down. Made Karin get a job, took her car away.

“When you can afford to pay the insurance and gas, you can have it back,’ he said.

It was just a used car, a graduation present intended to take along to college. Was that part of the bargain-that she had to be a student? He couldn’t remember.

The memory of his father doling out hard-won dollars so Tom could go to school stuck, and despite their ability to educate their only child at a state school with little hardship, they made it a lesson, thinking it valuable.

Karin agreed to the regimen or punishment or whatever it was, almost seemed happy to have it resolved. She got a minimum wage job logging newly engaged women into a data base. It was a vaguely disturbing task, but jobs were hard to come by.

“She’ll never go back to school,” Johanna complained a few weeks later. “She likes being taken care of.” She was folding Karin’s clothes, fresh from the dryer.

“So don’t take care of her so well,” he said.

She nodded, putting Karin’s pajamas down and picking up Tom’s flannel shirt, her eyes on his.

Elsewhere, Jasmine Hawkins had acquired a new job as a bus driver. The day was long, beginning at six, and with sporadic long breaks, ending at seven. In between there were long hours when she ran errands, shuffled her kids between daycare centers and her mother’s house, tried to do a load of laundry. She was pregnant with another child according to the medical examiner. A social worker had put her on Prozac, but she said it make her too sleepy to work the long hours.

All of this information appeared in the local newspaper in the days following the accident. Photos of the pair of doomed women appeared together on the front page. Incongruously, both even wore a cap and gown as if they’d been in some sort of post-graduation suicide pact on the bus.

Tom wondered why no one had bothered to take a picture of Jasmine Hawkins in the seven years since her graduation. He studied her face, looking for incipient despair, but at eighteen she’d looked serene, expectant. April was a slow month and it took several days before the story disappeared from print.

The 2:52 was the last train of the night. Normally it pulled between five and fifteen cars, usually passing through this particular intersection at about thirty-five miles an hour. He watched it off and on all fall and winter, noting its regularity. The street was quiet, the automobile plant dark, the check-cashing place open but empty. Only once or twice had a car been waiting on the other side of the gate. Occasionally a police car would pass by but not often. Several times an ambulance had screamed by. He learned where to park his car, how to go unnoticed.

He rented a dark car, a subcompact. Pirate was waiting at the door as usual that night, and on the spur of the moment, he waved him in.

“Going to see Karin, hey, pup,” he lied, not knowing why right away.

Johanna had never been a dog person. She’d secretly be relieved not to have to deal with it.

He stopped the car just in front of the track a few minutes before the train was due, rolled down the windows to hear the horn better and waited. Watched the gate come down behind him. Watched the red lights flash. He’d learned the progression of warnings long ago.

The train, coming out of the mist and still hundreds of feet away, was moving slowly tonight, sounding its horn without pause. It pulled only five cars. Could the fellow inside see him by the track? He’d given this some thought, but from his research he knew the train couldn’t stop quickly enough even if someone should spot him. And looking from light into dark took effort. Practice. Did engineers practice such things? Had the engineer seen the bus that morning, for instance? In the almost-light of seven-thirty in the morning in January in Detroit. The bus plowed through the gate at a speed higher than the train in any case.

The train’s whistle continued to cut through the foggy night. Pirate, on the seat beside him, was making his low moan. His keen. The two noises were unbearable, and Tom wanted to cover his ears, shut the window, leave this place somehow. Then, before he could stop him, Pirate leaped through the window and out onto the tracks. Tom jerked the car into park and opened the door.

“Get off that track, you fool,” he yelled at the dog. The train was coming, coming and the dog seemed content to sit there and die. Had he been waiting for his moment too?

“Here, fellow,” he called out again in desperation. He whistled, but it was lost in the sound of the horn. Pirate had never been an easy dog to train. Tom reached into his pocket, found a knitted winter hat balled up, and tossed it back toward the car. “Fetch!”

Pirate sat there, wagging his tail.

“Fetch the fuckin’ hat,” Tom yelled, inching closer to the mutt.

Finally, and with great reluctance, Pirate retrieved the hat and trotted back toward Tom. During those seconds, the train sped by. Both of them watched the dark blur.

Back at his feet a second later, Pirate barked, ready to fetch again, the train forgotten. Tom slung the cap into the car and watched as Pirate sailed inside after it. Would he have driven across the tracks if Pirate hadn’t pulled his stunt? He didn’t know. Would never know.

They took the freeway home.

Johanna lay in their bed dead, having chosen the gun.

####

Patricia Abbott is the author of the forthcoming collection of stories from Snubnose Press, Monkey Justice. Recent stories have appeared in D*CKED, CRIME FACTORY: FIRST SHIFT, DEADLY TREATS, PULP INK, and Needle. Forthcoming stories will appear in Grimm Tales, Shotgun Honey, Beat to a Pulp: Round Two and Yellow Mama. She lives in Detroit.