He refused to weep. He believed that if he heard himself weeping, at two in the morning in a smoke-smelling motel room, the world might end. If nothing else, he had discipline. The power to refuse: he had this.
But his exercising of it went unthanked. The bed in the next room thudded against the wall, the man groaning like a ham, the girl gasping in her ululations. And every waitress in every town had spherical mammaries insufficiently buttoned into a monogrammed blouse and made a point of leaning over him.
“More coffee, good-lookin’?”
“Ah, yes, please.”
“You blushin’, sweetheart, or is that the sun comin’ up?”
“I will take the check now, thank you.”
And in the Olmsted Hotel in Cleveland he surprised a porter and a maid lasciviously osculating in a stairwell. And the tracks he saw when he closed his eyes were a zipper that he endlessly unzipped, and the signals behind him turned from forbidding red to willing green the instant he passed them, and in a saggy bed in Fort Wayne awful succubuses descended on him, women whose entire bodies — their very clothes and smiles, the crossings of their legs — exuded invitation like vaginas, and up to the surface of his consciousness (do not soil the bed!) he raced the welling embolus of spunk, his eyes opening to Fort Wayne at sunrise as a scalding nothing drained into his pajamas: a victory, all things considered, for he’d denied the succubuses his satisfaction. But in Buffalo the trainmaster had a pinup of Brigitte Bardot on his office door, and in Youngstown Alfred found a filthy magazine beneath the motel telephone book, and in Hammond, Indiana, he was trapped on a siding while a freight train slid past him and varsity cheerleaders did splits on the ball field directly to his left, the blondest girl actually bouncing a little at the very bottom of her split, as if she had to kiss the cleat-chewed sod with her cotton-clad vulva, and the caboose rocking saucily as the train finally receded up the tracks: how the world seemed bent on torturing a man of virtue.
He returned to St. Jude in an executive car appended to an intercity freight run, and from Union Station he took the commuter local to the suburbs. In the blocks between the station and his house the last leaves were coming down. It was the season of hurtling, hurtling toward winter. Cavalries of leaf wheeled across the bitten lawns. He stopped in the street and looked at the house that he and a bank owned. The gutters were plugged with twigs and acorns, the mum beds were blasted. It occurred to him that his wife was pregnant again. Months were rushing him forward on their rigid track, carrying him closer to the day he’d be the father of three, the year he’d pay off his mortgage, the season of his death.
“I like your suitcase,” Chuck Meisner said through the window of his commuter Fairlane, braking in the street alongside him. “For a second I thought you were the Fuller Brush man.”
“Chuck,” said Alfred, startled. “Hello.”
“Planning a conquest. The husband’s out of town forever.”
Alfred laughed because there was nothing else for it. He and Chuck met in the street often, the engineer standing at attention, the banker relaxing at the wheel. Alfred in a suit and Chuck in golfwear. Alfred lean and flattopped. Chuck shiny-pated, saggy-breasted. Chuck worked easy hours at the branch he managed, but Alfred nonetheless considered him a friend. Chuck actually listened to what he said, seemed impressed with the work he did, and recognized him as a person of singular abilities.
“Saw Enid in church on Sunday,” Chuck said. “She told me you’d been gone a week already.”
“Eleven days I was on the road.”
“Emergency somewhere?”
“Not exactly.” Alfred spoke with pride. “I was inspecting every mile of track on the Erie Belt Railroad.”
“Erie Belt. Huh.” Chuck hooked his thumbs over the steering wheel, resting his hands on his lap. He was the most easygoing driver Alfred knew, yet also the most alert. “You do your job well, Al,” he said. “You’re a fantastic engineer. So there’s got to be a reason why the Erie Belt.”
“There is indeed,” Alfred said. “Midpac’s buying it.”
The Fairlane’s engine sneezed once in a canine way. Chuck had grown up on a farm near Cedar Rapids, and the optimism of his nature was rooted in the deep, well-watered topsoil of eastern Iowa. Farmers in eastern Iowa never learned not to trust the world. Whereas any soil that might have nurtured hope in Alfred had blown away in one or another west Kansan drought.
“So,” Chuck said. “I imagine there’s been a public announcement.”
“No. No announcement.”
Chuck nodded, looking past Alfred at the Lambert house. “Enid’ll be happy to see you. I think she’s had a hard week. The boys have been sick.”
“You’ll keep that information quiet.”
“Al, Al, Al.”
“I wouldn’t mention it to anyone but you.”
“Appreciate it. You’re a good friend and a good Christian. And I’ve got about four holes’ worth of daylight if I’m going to get that hedge pruned back.”
The Fairlane inched into motion, Chuck steering it into his driveway with one index finger, as if dialing his broker.
Alfred picked up his suitcase and briefcase. It had been both spontaneous and the opposite of spontaneous, his disclosure. A spasm of goodwill and gratitude to Chuck, a calculated emission of the fury that had been building inside him for eleven days. A man travels two thousand miles but he can’t take the last twenty steps without doing something—
And it did seem unlikely that Chuck would actually use the information—
Entering the house through the kitchen door, Alfred saw chunks of raw rutabaga in a pot of water, a rubber-banded bunch of beet greens, and some mystery meat in brown butcher paper. Also a casual onion that looked destined to be fried and served with — liver?
On the floor by the basement stairs was a nest of magazines and jelly glasses.
“Al?” Enid called from the basement.
He set down his suitcase and briefcase, gathered the magazines and jelly glasses in his arms, and carried them down the steps.
Enid parked her iron on the ironing board and emerged from the laundry room with butterflies in her stomach — whether from lust or from fear of Al’s rage or from fear that she might become enraged herself she didn’t know.
He set her straight in a hurry. “What did I ask you to do before I left?”
“You’re home early,” she said. “The boys are still at the Y.”
“What is the one thing I asked you to do while I was gone?”