Now later, on Prytania, Uncle Oscar hands Aunt Edna into the station wagon — they are bound for their Patio-by-Candlelight tour — and goes huffing around to his door, rared back and with one hand pressed into his side. Sam tiptoes to the screen. “Well now look ahere, Brother Andy. Ain’t that the Kingfish and Madame Queen? Sho ’tis.”
In this vertigo of exhaustion, laughter must be guarded against like retching.
“Brother Andy, is you getting much?”
“No.” My stomach further obliges Sam with a last despairing heave. Oh Lord.
Later there seems to come into my hand — and with it some instructions from Sam of which there is no more to be remembered than that they were delivered in the tone of one of my aunt’s grand therapeutic schemes — a squarish bottle, warmed by Sam’s body and known to my fingers through the ridge of glass left by the mold and the apothecary symbol oz or 
SURE ENOUGH, THREE hours later we are rocking along an uneven roadbed through the heart of the Ponchitoula swamp.
No sooner do we open the heavy door of Sieur Iberville and enter the steel corridor with its gelid hush and the stray voices from open compartments and the dark smell of going high in the nostrils — than the last ten years of my life take on the shadowy aspect of a sojourn between train rides. It was ten years ago that I last rode a train, from San Francisco to New Orleans, and so ten years since I last enjoyed the peculiar gnosis of trains, stood on the eminence from which there is revealed both the sorry litter of the past and the future bright and simple as can be, and the going itself, one’s privileged progress through the world. But trains have changed. Gone are the uppers and lowers, partitions and cranks, and the green velour; only the porter remains, the same man, I think, a black man with palms the color of shrimp and a neck swollen with dislike. Our roomettes turn out to be little coffins for a single person. From time to time, I notice, people in roomettes stick their heads out into the corridor for some sight of human kind.
Kate is affected by the peculiar dispensation of trains. Her gray jacket comes just short of her wide hips and the tight skirt curves under her in a nice play on vulgarity. On the way to the observation car she pulls me into the platform of the vestibule and gives me a kiss, grabbing me under the coat like a waitress. In celebration of Mardi Gras, she has made up her eyes with a sparkle of mascara and now she looks up at me with a black spiky look.
“Are we going to live in Modesto?”
“Sure,” I say, uneasy at her playfulness. She is not as well as she makes out. She is not safe on a train after all; it is rather that by a kind of bravado she can skim along in the very face of the danger.
The observation car is crowded, but we find seats together on a sofa where I am jammed against a fellow reading a newspaper. We glide through the cottages of Carrollton cutting off back yards in odd trapezoids, then through the country clubs and cemeteries of Metaire. In the gathering dusk the cemeteries look at first like cities, with their rows of white vaults, some two- and three-storied and forming flats and tenements, and the tiny streets and corners and curbs and even plots of lawn, all of such a proportion that in the very instant of being mistaken and from the eye’s own necessity, they set themselves off into the distance like a city seen from far away. Now in the suburbs we ride at a witch’s level above the gravelly roofs.
It gradually forces itself upon me that a man across the aisle is looking at me with a strange insistence. Kate nudges me. It is Sidney Gross and his wife, beyond a doubt bound also for the convention. The son of Sidney Gross of Danziger and Gross, Sidney is a short fresh-faced crinkle-haired boy with the bright beamish look Southern Jews sometimes have. There has always been a special cordiality between us. He married a pretty Mississippi girl; she, unlike Sidney, is wary of such encounters — she would know which of us spoke first at out last encounter — so she casts sleepy looks right past us, pausing, despite herself on Kate’s white face and black spiky eyes. But Sidney hunches over toward us, beaming, a stalwart little pony back with his head well set on his shoulders and his small ears lying flat.
“Well well well. Trader Jack. So you slipped up on your plane reservations too.”
“Hello, Sidney, Margot. This is Kate Cutrer.”
Margot becomes very friendly, in the gossipy style of the Mississippi Delta.
“So you forgot about it being Mardi Gras and couldn’t get a plane.”
“No, we like the train.”
Sidney is excited, not by the trip as I am, but by the convention. Leaning across the aisle with a program rolled up in his hand, he explains that he is scheduled for a panel on tax relief for bond funds. “What about you?”
“I think I am taking part in something called a Cracker Barrel Session.”
“You’ll like it. Everybody talks right off the top of their head. You can take your coat off, get up and stretch. Anything. Last year we had this comical character from Georgia.” Sidney casts about for some way of conveying just how comical and failing, passes on without minding. “What a character. Extremely comical. What’s the topic?”
“Competing with the variable endowments.”
“Oh yass,” says Sidney with a wry look of our trade. “I don’t worry about it.” He slides the cylinder of paper to and fro. “Do you?”
“No.”
Sidney suggests a bridge game, but Kate begs off. The Grosses move to a table in the corner and start playing gin rummy.
Kate, who has been fumbling in her purse, becomes still. I feel her eyes on my face.
“Do you have my capsules?”
“What?”
“My capsules.”
“Why yes, I do. I forgot that I had them.”
Not taking her eyes from my face, she receives the bottle, puts it in her purse, snaps it.
“That’s not like you.”
“I didn’t take them.”
“Who did?”
“Sam gave them to me. It was while I was in the hammock. I hardly remember it.”
“He took them from my purse?”
“I don’t know.”
For a long moment she sits, hands in her lap, fingers curling up and stirring a little. Then abruptly she rises and leaves. When she returns, her face is scrubbed and pale, the moisture still dark at the roots of her hair. What has upset her is not the incident of the capsules but meeting the Grosses. It spoils everything, this prospect of making pleasant talk, of having a delightful time, as Sidney would put it (“There we were moping over missing the plane, when Jack Bolling shows up and we have ourselves a ball”) — when we might have gone rocking up through dark old Mississippi alone together in the midst of strangers. Still she is better. Perhaps it is her reviving hope of losing the Grosses to gin rummy or perhaps it is the first secret promise of the chemicals entering her blood.
Now, picking up speed, we gain the swamp. Kate and I sway against each other and watch the headlights of the cars on the swamp road, winking through the moss like big yellow lightning bugs.
The drowsiness returns. It is unwelcome. I recognize it as the sort of fitful twilight which has come over me of late, a twilight where waking dreams are dreamed and sleep never comes.
The man next to me is getting off in St Louis. When the conductor comes to collect our tickets, he surrenders a stub: he is going home. His suit is good. He sits with his legs crossed, one well-clad haunch riding up like a ham, his top leg held out at an obtuse angle by the muscle of his calf. His brown hair is youthful (he himself is thirty-eight or forty) and makes a cowlick in front. With the cowlick and the black eyeglasses he looks quite a bit like the actor Gary Merrill and has the same certified permission to occupy pleasant space with his pleasant self. In ruddy good health, he muffles a hearty belch in a handkerchief. This very evening, no doubt, he has had an excellent meal at Galatoire’s, and the blood of his portal vein bears away a golden harvest of nutrient globules. When he first goes through his paper, he opens it like a book and I have no choice but to read the left page with him. We pause at an advertisement of a Bourbon Street nightclub which is a picture of a dancer with an oiled body. Her triceps arch forward like a mare’s. For a second we gaze heavy-lidded and pass on. Now he finds what he wants and folds his paper once, twice and again, into a neat packet exactly two columns wide, like a subway rider in New York. Propping it against his knee, he takes out a slender gold pencil, makes a deft one-handed adjustment, and underlines several sentences with straight black lines (he is used to underlining). Dreaming at his shoulder, I can make out no more than