—
There’s no God, no face, you weak, lying—you lying sack of shit! There is just the woman and the roaring and the world and the pit. Jim fell into the pit, and as he fell, all the people in it screamed things at him. Teachers, foster parents, social workers, kids, parents, all the people he’d ever known standing on ledges in gray crowds, screaming at him as he fell past. He landed hard enough to break his bones. He was under an overpass, standing with his backpack and crying while his father drove away, with his mother yelling in the front seat and his sister crying in the back, looking out with her hands on the window. Paulie sat next to him with no head and blood pouring up. His uncle said, No, I cannot take those children. Paulie fell backward and blood ran from him. Dancing children lay in pieces; guns shot. The woman and the child ran, fell, ran, far away. His foster mother opened the door and let in the warm light of the living room; the bed creaked as she sat and sang to him. The trees shivered; the giant fist slammed the ground; they shivered. The long grass rippled in the machine-gun fire. The pit opened, but Jim stayed on the shivering ground. He did not fall again. His sister came to him and held him in her arms. La la la la la la la la la means / I love you. He closed his eyes and let his sister take him safely into darkness. She could do that because she was already dead. He didn’t know it then. But she was.
—
The door between cars exploded open and they came rolling down the aisle, two conductors and a human bomb, the bomb saying, “And we on our honeymoon! In Niagara Falls! The only reason we even took the train is she’s afraid to fly — and this happens?”
“I know just the one you mean.” The black conductor sighed. “I know just the one.”
“And she’s pregnant!”
“Don’t worry, we’ll get him off,” said the white conductor. “We’ll have the cops come get him. He won’t bother you no more.”
—
Carter had no pleasure in putting the man off the train. He could barely look at his sad, weak-smiling face. He even felt sorry for the blond woman sitting there with her dry, pale eyes way back in her head, looking like she’d been slapped. He got the clanking door open, kicked down the metal steps, handed down the man’s bag, and thought, Cheney should have to fight this war. Bush should have to fight it, Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden should fight it. They should be stripped naked on their hands and knees, placed within striking distance of one another, each with one foot chained to the floor. Then give them knives and let them go at it. Stick their damn flags up their asses so they can wave ’em while they fight. “Utica,” he yelled, “this stop, Utica.”
—
He didn’t seem to mind being put off the train; he was even pretty cheerful about it. Jennifer looked out the window to see what happened to him once he got off, and saw him talking to two policemen who stood with folded arms, nodding politely at whatever it was he was saying. She heard the big guy up ahead of her, still going over it. “I heard him talking to you,” he said to someone. “What was he saying?”
“Crazy stuff,” replied a woman. “I was real quiet, hoping he’d go away, but he just kept on talking.”
“Why did he do that?” asked the big man. “I don’t usually do nobody like that, but he—”
“No, you were right,” said the woman. “If you hadn’t done something, the next person he grabbed might’ve been a little girl!”
“Yeah!” The big man’s voice sounded relieved. Then he spoke to his wife, loudly enough for Jennifer to hear him several seats away. “Why didn’t you say anything?” he asked.
—
Because he like my brother. I could feel it when he touch me. My brother grab a teacher’s butt in the sixth grade; he do it for attention, it’s not even about the butt. I can’t talk about it here, Chris, with all these people listening; I can feel them, and this is too private. But my brother coulda turned out like this man here. Kids beat on him when he was like six, he had to be in the hospital, and for a long time after, he talked in this whisper voice that you can hardly hear, like he’s talking to himself and to the world in general, talking like a radio with the dial just flipping around, giving out stories that don’t make sense, but all about kicking and punching and killing people. He gets older and anything anybody says to him, he’s like, “Ima punch him! An then do a double backflip and kick him in the nuts! An then in the butt! An then—” It so annoying, and he still doing it when he gets older, only then he talks ’bout how somebody does this or that, he’s gonna pull out a gun and shoot him. He talks like he a killah but he a baby, and everybody knows it. My brother now, he works as a security guard in a art museum, where he sits all day and reads his books and plays his games. But he coulda got hurt real bad — and looked at one way, he talk so stupid, he almost deserves it. But look the other way, Chris. You do that, you see he lives in Imagination, not the world; shit don’t mean for him what it do for us. You see that and you wanna protect him even if he is a damn fool, and also I don’t want you into any trouble over me; our baby is in me, and it is our day. I love you; that’s why I don’t say nothin, Chris—
She put her hand on his arm and felt him withdraw from her without moving. Her heart sank. She looked out the window; they were moving past people’s yards. Two white kids, just babies, were standing in wet yards with their mouths open, looking at the train, one with his fat little legs bare, only wearing shoes and a hoodie. Her heart hurt. Please come back, she said with her hand. I love you. Don’t let this take away our beautiful night.
—
Disgraceful all around, thought Perkins. That they would treat a vet like that, that a vet would act like that. He looked out the window at small homes set in overgrown backyards: broken pieces of machinery sitting in patches of weeds, a swing set, a tied-up dog barking at the train, barbed wire snarled around chain link. A long time ago, he would’ve gone home and told his wife about the guy being put off the train; they would’ve talked about it. Now he probably wouldn’t even mention it to her. They used to talk about everything. Now silence and routine were where he felt her most. He looked out on marshy land, all rumpled mud and pools of brown water with long grasses and rushes standing up. His reflection in the glass floated over it, a silent, impassive face with heavy jowls and a thin, downward mouth. And there, with his face, also floated the face of Heinrich Schmidt, PFC.
—
He didn’t touch that lady’s breast; he touched her shoulder. Maybe the train rocked or something, made his hand move down, but he was just trying to talk to her. The conductor knew that — he told him so — but they’d had to take him off the train anyway. It wasn’t good, but it wasn’t that bad. The police said there would be another train, sometime. But there was no lake to look at here. Where you sat down here, there were just train tracks and an old train that didn’t work anymore. He would sit for a while and look at them and then he would call his foster mother. He would tell her there’d been a problem he’d had to solve, a fight to be broken up, and he couldn’t get back on the train. His foster mother had strong hands; she could break up fights, using the belt when she had to. She served food; she rubbed oil into his skin; she washed his back with a warm cloth. She led a horse out of the stable, not her horse, the horse of some women down the road, the one that sometimes his sister, Cora, would ride. She was so scared to get up on it at first, but then she sat on it with her hands up in the air, not even holding on, and they took her picture.
They said Cora died of kidney failure and something that began with a p. They had the letter when he got back to the base. He read the letter and then he sat still a long time. Before he left for Iraq, she’d had her toes cut off, and she said she was going to get better. When she took him to the airport, she walked with a fancy cane that had some kind of silver bird head on it. He couldn’t picture her dead. He could picture Paulie, but not Cora. When he came home, he still thought he might see her at the airport, standing there looking at him like he was an idiot, but still there, with her new cane. He thought he might see her up in Syracuse, riding her horse. Even though he knew he wouldn’t. He thought he might see her on her horse.