“You were right, Mr. Hitchens. This was a win-win situation. Only there were three sides to it, not two.”
Round Trip by Rail
by Gwen Davenport
Kentucky resident Gwen Davenport has produced several appealingly offbeat short stories for EQMM over the past few years. It is our good fortune that she seems to be concentrating on short story writing these days, but she is, of course, the author of many novels for Doubleday, at least one of which was made into a Hollywood movie.
Hamilton Stone had been missing from home for two weeks before anyone I even noticed. He lived with his wife, Olive, in a mid-size city in a mid-South state, where he worked as a pharmacist in the largest hospital. They had a ranch-style house in a commonplace suburb and a male golden retriever on which, being childless, they both doted. He was forty-two when he disappeared and she thirty-nine. They had been married for fifteen years, during which they had developed a real hatred for one another — quite understandably, as each brought out the worst in the other: He was always punctual, she invariably late; he liked meals to be served on time and well cooked; she picked up takeout food and ate when she felt like it, which was throughout the day plus a midnight snack. Constant conflicts and quarrels served to intensify each spouse’s individual proclivities until, gradually, habits had become obsessions and airing of grievances had developed into temper tantrums. The little eccentricities and mannerisms that become endearing when the spouse is beloved were irritants that could start full-fledged fights. Since the Stones had no children and no immediate family except Olive’s mother, Mrs. Edna Treadle, Olive was overly attached to that lady, who had always spoiled her.
Ham Stone had sought solace in his hobby, which was model railroads. The elaborate scale model of a mountain railroad was his pride and joy. He had built it over the years on a platform which took up the whole basement, a space fifty by thirty feet. The three diesel locomotives and a log loader were bought complete; everything else he had either scratch-built or assembled from kits: depots, water towers, passenger coaches, freight cars, track-inspection sheds. On one end, on a spur at the entrance to a national park, he had opened a miniature railroad museum, displaying outdated narrow-gauge pieces like steam locomotives and refrigerator cars.
It was an expensive hobby, and a time-consuming one. Olive understandably resented the money and hours it required. Even Ham’s weekends and vacations had been given to the railroad as he attended model shows and conventions of model owners all over the country.
Sometimes while running his trains — through tunnels, across switches, over bridges, along riverbeds, into stations — Ham had imagined himself a passenger, traveling far from the basement room and from the sound of Olive’s voice into a world of his own, where he, Ham Stone, would disappear and become an eternal passenger, borne away on never-ending tracks. Alas, the tracks did not, in fact, end, but always returned to the starting point in the basement.
Nevertheless, Ham’s harmless dream of riding away for good on some future day enabled him to bear his present situation. Over the years he had carefully planned his imagined disappearance. A search through the hospital’s personnel records had rewarded him with a possible new identity: Frank Johnston, deceased, who had worked as a hospital security officer for fifteen years before his recent death at the age of forty-five. Frank’s whole life was there, laid out, every detaiclass="underline" date and place of birth, names of parents and grandparents, graduation from Central High, marriage date with name of bride. An identification badge was easy to come by, and Ham’s picture substituted on it in place of Frank Johnston’s.
Ham opened a savings account in the name of Frank Johnston and began making regular deposits, starting with the money he and Olive had been saving to pay off the mortgage on the house. Small but regular weekly deposits from his pay followed, until, over the years, he had accumulated about eleven thousand dollars. He was not a reckless or adventuresome person; he had no real intention of disappearing into the void of Frank Johnston’s identity, but the possibility of doing so, the knowledge that he had this tremendous secret from Olive, made life with her more nearly bearable.
The Stones’ last bitter altercation had been, in a way, about the railroad. It took place in the basement, where Olive seldom went because the steep, narrow stairs were difficult to negotiate because of her extreme obesity. She moved like a pitching ship at sea, as her weight was transferred from one foot to the other. It was a Friday afternoon in mid July, at the start of Ham’s two-week vacation. He wanted to spend it riding railroad trains in the Western mountains. Olive could not see train travel without a destination as being a vacation, particularly in their case. They had been arguing about it for some time, and whenever the subject came up, Ham would just go down to the basement and work on his railroad. With his vacation time already begun and the argument not settled, she was forced to take her case into his territory.
Ham had a habit, when concentrating on his work, of emitting a tuneless humming of which he was himself unaware but which got on Olive’s nerves like a dentist’s drill. She heard this continuous, monotonous sound during her journey down the basement stairs, and when she reached the bottom, out of breath from the exertion, she wheezed, “Stop that!”
He stopped working on a signal that was stuck at a siding and the humming automatically stopped also.
“I’d like to go to Miami Beach,” she said.
“No one with any sense would go to Florida in July,” said he.
“No one with any sense spends half his life playing with toy trains.”
“Don’t you call it a toy! It’s a railroad, and there’s no finer model railroad in the country!”
“I’d like to smash it to pieces!” cried Olive.
“Just you try and we’ll see who gets smashed to pieces!”
“You care more about that contraption than you do about me!” she shouted.
“You bet I do!” he shouted back.
The golden retriever, which had been lying on the floor in a corner, came forward, twitching his tail, upset by the sound of the raised voices. Olive, now trembling with rage, laid hands on a water tower alongside the railroad track where a car was waiting to take on water. Ham seized both her hands and pulled her away roughly. She fell. He stood over her, fists clenched, glaring down. The dog pushed between them, separating them, not taking sides. There was an awful moment when neither husband nor wife moved, each fearing she might have broken a hip or an ankle, despite the padding of fat, but she managed to get to her feet laboriously, without help.
“I’m leaving this house,” she declared, short of breath. “I’m going to go to Mom’s and stay there till you come to your senses.” She climbed the stairs with difficulty, stopping on each one to catch her breath. At the top she turned back and called the dog. “And I’m taking Rex,” she said. “You needn’t drive us over, Mom will come for us.” (Olive had never learned to drive a car.)
Ham heard her telephone to her mother and then move about overhead, presumably packing a suitcase. After a while, the front door was opened and closed, followed by the faint sound of an automobile being driven away.
He sat down to think and let his wrath subside. His present anger, brought on by present grievances — about the train, the vacation, the dog, the leaving for Mom’s — began growing bigger like a snowball, gathering to itself other grievances of long standing: Olive’s laziness, her unpunctuahty, bad housekeeping, childlessness, until he was consumed by an anger greater than he had yet known.