Marshall uncovered his eyes again, and looked at him helplessly. “I’ve been wanting to do it. I guess I went ahead and did do it, without knowing it.” And scouring his hair with his hand, he mumbled to himself, “Been having so many of these bad dreams, lately. But every time one ends, I’m back in that faraway town again.”
“Well, we carried you this far without payment; I’m afraid you’ll have to come back rear with me, hear what they’re going to say about it.” And the restraining hand, which had relented for the time being and quitted his shoulder, poised itself to descend once more.
He kept watching it askance, with a sort of horror, his neck acutely twisted to do so. As if that in itself, the return of that hand, would be the sum total of calamity.
“Wait,” he said. “Don’t. Can’t I... can’t you sell me a ticket?”
“Can if you’ve got the money to pay for it,” said the conductor drily.
“How much will it take?”
“All the way to New York, day coach all the way.” The conductor was looking it up, to make sure. “Forty-four seventy-five.”
He fumbled with his money so hectically that it seemed to sprout up loose between his two hands, and several bills jumped to the floor between his feet, and over the seat to the aisle.
The conductor helped him retrieve them, helped him count a part of it. “Take your time. Don’t want you to lose any of it now. I’ve got twenty-two here.”
“And I’ve got thirty here!” Marshall discovered ecstatically.
“You’ve got a ticket, son,” the conductor nodded magnanimously.
Marshall exhaled deeply and went limp against the seat back.
The two wings of his coat had come apart, and the bottle lay semirevealed, coddled against his shirt.
“Reckon I understand how it all came about,” the conductor remarked shrewdly, without appearing to lift his eyes at all. “Here’s your ticket, son. I’ll have the change for you next time through. Sure you want to go there, now?”
“I have to do this till the dream ends,” Marshall told him with the utmost simplicity. “Just follow it through, sort of.”
“Better let me have that. I’ll get rid of it for you,” the conductor whispered, and winked, and smuggled the empty bottle up under his own jacket.
“Can I get another?” Marshall asked him with desperate urgency. “Where can I get another? I can’t make it — I’ll never make it — without another bottle.”
“Probably get yourself one in K. C., we’ll be in there in another hour and there’s a forty-minute layover in the station.”
“I don’t want to get off. I’m afraid I’d never get back on again. Can’t you get it for me? Here, I’ll give you this. You keep what’s over.” He crushed a bill into his hand.
“Well, we ain’t supposed to. It’s against the regulations. But you seem to be in some kind of mix-up. And you don’t ’pear to be the loud kind. Stay out in the vestibule, where nobody’ll notice you, and where I can keep on eye on you. Don’t go into none of the cars where there are women and children. When you take a swig, take it from under your coat, like you’ve been doing. I’ll try to slip you one while we’re standing still in K. C.”
“Thanks,” Marshall whispered fervently. “Thanks.”
“I don’t aim to preach,” the conductor told him half sorrowfully, “but it’s a shame, a young fellow your age. Better think it over, when you get to New York.”
“When will the dream end, this time?” Marshall asked him, with a sort of pleading concern.
“What dream, son?”
“The dream that I’m on the train, the train to New York.”
“Grand Central, son. Lower level. ’Leven ’clock tomorrow night.”
4
The train had died. Every train dies at the end of every journey. The train was dead now, and lying in its coffin: the station.
Its passengers were gone. The platform was empty, and the cars were drained of all life, and their lights were for the most part already turned off. Just here and there, for safety’s sake, one had been left on. Wanly revealing empty seats and ghostly passageways.
The friendly conductor knocked on the door. “Better come out of there now, son. Have to be getting off.”
The door opened and Marshall came out, looking very pale.
“Everybody’s off already,” the conductor said. “Thought maybe you might have fallen asleep, or something.”
“I’ve been awake since Harmon,” Marshall said.
“What’d you do with the bottles?” the conductor asked him.
“I slipped them under the leather seat there.”
“I’ll have to get them out of the way,” the conductor said. Then he looked at him. “Can you walk?” he said.
“I’m not drunk,” Marshall said. “I tried hard enough, but I’m not drunk.”
He started down the empty aisle, pawing the seat tops one by one.
“Here, let me give you a hand,” the conductor said. “You’re my responsibility until I can get you off of here. That’s the last time I ever—”
“Thanks for everything,” Marshall said.
When they came to the lip of the vestibule, just before the top step, Marshall drew back involuntarily, and bunched his shoulders together as if he were cold, and defensively turned up his collar in back.
“This is it,” he said.
“This is it, all right,” the conductor agreed.
“It smells sort of cold,” Marshall said. “It smells like a tomb.”
“Go ’head, it won’t bite you,” the conductor chuckled. “Don’t take so long; I’ve got to be on my way too, you know. If you didn’t want to come here, why did you come here?”
“I thought it was just another dream,” Marshall said. “But the joke’s on me.”
“No, you ain’t drunk,” the conductor said caustically. “In a different kind of way, maybe.”
Yes, I’m drunk, Marshall thought. Drunk with fear.
The conductor armed him down the steps of the narrow, chutelike car exit. “Up that way,” he indicated.
“I know,” Marshall agreed. “Up that way. New York.”
The conductor watched him straighten himself, get the feel of the ground.
“You all right, now? Think you’ll be able to make it, now?”
“I’m all right,” Marshall said. “Sure, I’m all right.”
The conductor watched him take the first steps, like a father anxiously watching a child just beginning to learn to walk.
“Know where you want to go?”
“Yes,” said Marshall. “I know where I’m going.”
“Well, good luck,” the conductor said, with a downward slice of his arm, as though he were a dispatcher sending the train off.
“Wish it to me over again,” Marshall said, without turning his head. “You can never have enough of that.”
He went up the long platform, all alone. As you go through life — all alone. Without any baggage, without even any outer coat, with nothing, just a long shadow spilling out behind him. As you go through life — without any baggage, with nothing. Looking so small, so lost, between the long rows of empty, blinded cars. As you go through life — so small, so lost.
He went up the ramp — to meet New York.
5
It was nighttime in New York when he came out of the station. He looked up and the sky was black over the town, like a lid crammed down on a smoking cauldron. No stars, no anything like that. Stars over New York? They knew better than to waste their time over such a place. It had its own, crawling like gilded lice all over its serrated scalp.
It was too late to go to her tonight, too late to go to her house right now, from the station. He was her husband, and she was his wife, but it was too late to go to her house, to seek her out tonight. He’d only frighten, shock, or maybe alienate her. And then the way he looked, sleepless from the train, clothes unchanged, liquor still in his bloodstream if not in his brain. Tomorrow, the first thing tomorrow; tonight, a bed some place. Any bed, any place.