“You have to at least be a Fish.”
“The boys are all excited.”
“I could be a Fish.”
The Mohawk that was the new museum’s pride was evidently a romantic symbol. People nowadays seemed to resent the railroads for abandoning romantic steam power in favor of diesel. People didn’t understand the first goddamned thing about running a railroad. A diesel locomotive was versatile, efficient, and low-maintenance. People thought the railroad owed them romantic favors, and then they bellyached if a train was slow. That was the way most people were — stupid.
(Schopenhauer: Amongst the evils of a penal colony is the company of those imprisoned in it.)
At the same time, Alfred himself hated to see the old steam engine pass into oblivion. It was a beautiful iron horse, and by putting the Mohawk on display the museum allowed the easygoing leisure-seekers of suburban St. Jude to dance on its grave. City people had no right to patronize the iron horse. They didn’t know it intimately, as Alfred did. They hadn’t fallen in love with it out in the northwest corner of Kansas where it was the only link to the greater world, as Alfred had. He despised the museum and its goers for everything they didn’t know.
“They have a model railroad that takes up a whole room!” Enid said relentlessly.
And the goddamned model railroaders, yes, the goddamned hobbyists. Enid knew perfectly well how he felt about these dilettantes and their pointless and implausible model layouts.
“A whole room?” Gary said with skepticism. “How big?”
“Wouldn’t it be neat to put some M-80s on, um, on, um, on a model railroad bridge? Ker-PERSSSCHT! P’kow, p’kow!”
“Chipper, eat your dinner now,” Alfred said.
“Big big big,” Enid said. “The model is much much much much much bigger than the one your father bought you.”
“Now,” Alfred said. “Are you listening to me? Now.”
Two sides of the square table were happy and two were not. Gary told a pointless, genial story about this kid in his class who had three rabbits while Chipper and Alfred, twin studies in bleakness, lowered their eyes to their plates. Enid visited the kitchen for more rutabaga.
“I know who not to ask if they want seconds,” she said when she returned.
Alfred shot her a warning look. They had agreed for the sake of the boys’ welfare never to allude to his own dislike of vegetables and certain meats.
“I’ll take some,” Gary said.
Chipper had a lump in his throat, a desolation so obstructive that he couldn’t have swallowed much in any case. But when he saw his brother happily devouring seconds of Revenge, he became angry and for a moment understood how his entire dinner might be scarfable in no time, his duties discharged and his freedom regained, and he actually picked up his fork and made a pass at the craggy wad of rutabaga, tangling a morsel of it in his tines and bringing it near his mouth. But the rutabaga smelled carious and was already cold — it had the texture and temperature of wet dog crap on a cool morning — and his guts convulsed in a spine-bending gag reflex.
“I love rutabaga,” said Gary inconceivably.
“I could live on nothing but vegetables,” Enid averred.
“More milk,” Chipper said, breathing hard.
“Chipper, just hold your nose if you don’t like it,” Gary said.
Alfred put bite after bite of vile Revenge in his mouth, chewing quickly and swallowing mechanically, telling himself he had endured worse than this.
“Chip,” he said, “take one bite of each thing. You’re not leaving this table till you do.”
“More milk.”
“You will eat some dinner first. Do you understand?”
“Milk.”
“Does it count if he holds his nose?” Gary said.
“More milk, please.”
“That is just about enough,” Alfred said.
Chipper fell silent. His eyes went around and around his plate, but he had not been provident and there was nothing on the plate but woe. He raised his glass and silently urged a very small drop of warm milk down the slope to his mouth. He stretched his tongue out to welcome it.
“Chip, put the glass down.”
“Maybe he could hold his nose but then he has to eat two bites of things.”
“There’s the phone. Gary, you may answer it.”
“What’s for dessert?” Chipper said.
“I have some nice fresh pineapple.”
“Oh for God’s sake, Enid—”
“What?” She blinked innocently or faux-innocently.
“You can at least give him a cookie, or an Eskimo Pie, if he eats his dinner—”
“It’s such sweet pineapple. It melts in your mouth.”
“Dad, it’s Mr. Meisner.”
Alfred leaned over Chipper’s plate and in a single action of fork removed all but one bite of the rutabaga. He loved this boy, and he put the cold, poisonous mash into his own mouth and jerked it down his throat with a shudder. “Eat that last bite,” he said, “take one bite of the other, and you can have dessert.” He stood up. “I will buy the dessert if necessary.”
As he passed Enid on his way to the kitchen, she flinched and leaned away.
“Yes,” he said into the phone.
Through the receiver came the humidity and household clutter, the warmth and fuzziness, of Meisnerdom.
“Al,” Chuck said, “just looking in the paper here, you know, Erie Belt stock, uh. Five and five-eighths seems awfully low. You sure about this Midpac thing?”
“Mr. Replogle rode the motor car with me out of Cleveland. He indicated that the Board of Managers is simply waiting for a final report on track and structures. I’m going to give them that report on Monday.”
“Midpac’s kept this very quiet.”
“Chuck, I can’t recommend any particular course of action, and you’re right, there are some unanswered questions here—”
“Al, Al,” Chuck said. “You have a mighty conscience, and we all appreciate that. I’ll let you get back to your dinner.”
Alfred hung up hating Chuck as he would have hated a girl he’d been undisciplined enough to have relations with. Chuck was a banker and a thriver. You wanted to spend your innocence on someone worthy of it, and who better than a good neighbor, but no one could be worthy of it. There was excrement all over his hands.
“Gary: pineapple?” Enid said.
“Yes, please!”
The virtual disappearance of Chipper’s root vegetable had made him a tad manic. Things were i-i-i-looking up! He expertly paved one quadrant of his plate with the remaining bite of rutabaga, grading the yellow asphalt with his fork. Why dwell in the nasty reality of liver and beet greens when there was constructable a future in which your father had gobbled these up, too? Bring on the cookies! sayeth Chipper. Bring on the Eskimo Pie!
Enid carried three empty plates into the kitchen.
Alfred, by the phone, was studying the clock above the sink. The time was that malignant fiveishness to which the flu sufferer awakens after late-afternoon fever dreams. A time shortly after five which was a mockery of five. To the face of clocks the relief of order — two hands pointing squarely at whole numbers — came only once an hour. As every other moment failed to square, so every moment held the potential for fluish misery.
And to suffer like this for no reason. To know there was no moral order in the flu, no justice in the juices of pain his brain produced. The world nothing but a materialization of blind, eternal Will.