You can call me Cora. My full name is Cornelia Sand. I had
a middle name once but I didn't like it so I dropped it. Now I
can't even remember it. I can't even recall the initial it started
with. I guess I didn't have anyone around to remind me.
I've always been kind of a loner, always been moving. When
I first met James I was twenty-nine and waitressing at a roadside
diner in the Mojave called Bill's Cup a Joe. It wasn't bad work.
Once I got settled, it actually seemed like it could be a good simple
life.
I was living down the highway at the American Motel, had a
room that cost me about sixty dollars a week. I had brought a lot of
books with me from the lives I'd led before, so I just worked and
read a lot. Sometimes you could hear a train whistling in the
distance but nobody had ever seen any tracks. Musta been like skip
on a radio, some days you can hear France, some days you can't.
Crazy'Ole Paul called it the ghost train. He said that all the dead
souls from Los Angeles were being shipped out to the middle of the
desert on it - where they would become grains of sand or
iguanas or something.
That old man gave me the willies and I tried not to believe
anything he said. He was a sterno mystic who claimed to have had
received a calling from God who had told him that his ministry was
Bill's Diner. Sometimes when he got going he was really something
to hear, he'd spill a tale of angels or devils that sounded so real
that you'd almost forget he was crazy.
As far as the train, I knew that the tracks were probably on
the other side of those hills but I never went there to make sure.
I remember thinking that if I went that far I would just keep on going,
keep driving till I hit the Grand Canyon or the Ozarks or something
and I wanted to just be someplace for a while. I might have been
there still serving short stacks and bacon if it weren't for James
coming into the diner that morning to buy coffee and donuts to go.
Well, I guess you can't call a holdup just a casual purchase.
It happened on a Wednesday about midway through
July. I remember it was about a week into a heat spell. The wind
was wailing in the hills the way it does and I had just heard the
train tooting in the distance and stopped, coffee pot in hand, to
listen, sounded like a wolf baying at the moon. Then there was a
screeching of tires and a blue pickup rolled into the parking lot
right outside that big picture window they had there at Bill's. A
man in a blue parka got out and started walking toward the diner.
Can you imagine that, on a day like that, wearing a parka. He came
in looking wind tossed and a little wild eyed. He was tall and
blonde and looked like he belonged in the middle of a Scottish Moor
or something with his pale skin and those rosy dumpling cheeks. I
swear he had a rogue's smile on him and I knew right then he was
gonna break my heart but I couldn't stop myself. I looked right at
his hands cause those are the most important indicators of a man's
character for me and sure enough he was holding a gun, couldn't be
any plainer. I just smiled and said, "What'll it be."
He transfixed me with his eyes and laughed. Then he asked
me for coffee and glazers and for the entire contents of the cash
register minus change. Incredible as it may seem, I followed him
out the door of that diner and never turned back, with only my
waitress uniform on and the tips I'd gotten so far that morning not
amounting to over ten dollars in my pocket, all my clothes and my
books left in that room at the American Motel. Bet they thought I was in
on it the entire time. Well, I wasn't. No, it just seemed like
the right thing to do at the time. At first, when I followed him
out to the truck, he looked kinda worried but he didn't seem too
surprised and he didn't say anything. It was almost like he
expected it somehow. I slipped into the cab next to him and he
revved the engine and burned rubber out onto the highway headed
east.
I felt just like Katherine Ross must have felt at the end of
the Graduate just after Dustin Hoffman had come to rescue her and she
was sitting there in the back seat of that bus in her wedding dress
looking out the window thinking, "Well, what happens now?"
It was right about then James said, "Take your clothes off,".
I turned to examine his profile as he continued, "There are
some clothes on the mat there under your feet, find something and put
it on, uniforms make me kinda nervous." I felt around under the seat and
pulled out a big red flannel shirt and some blue jean shorts jeans that
were a tad too loose. I started changing right then.
That man kept his eyes on the road the entire time and that was
the beginning of one of the craziest times of my life. If I had had any
idea that I would end up here, like this, I can say that I truly don't
know if I would have done it any differently. James was quite a man, he
taught me a lot about growing up and loving without needing to own
and I experienced some of the best lovemaking of my life with that
man.
2.
Well, it wasn't long before we came to the tracks of
that train I'd been dreaming about all that time - the ghost train.
It's tracks were splayed out by the side of the road like the long
tracked arm of a dead man whose body was hidden by the smooth
sloping breasts of his woman, the hills are like that out there.
I looked around me and the expanse of desert seemed to simmer with
ripples and wisps of steam. I was not at all surprised to see James
swerve on to the side of the road and then turn the car out onto the
sand. We drove between the hillocks and then along the train tracks
for awhile.
"You want a candy bar", he said,tossing me a Kit-
Kat.
"No, I'd rather have one of the glazers you stole,"
He just passed the brown bag over to me and from beneath
the seat he pulled a green thermos.
"Oh, those kind are really good", I said.
"Yeah, it kept coffee warm in here for three days
once. You ever hop a train," he said.
"Can't say I have," said I.
"Well," he said, "like they say there is a first
time for everything."
"Yep."
"Got everything you need?"
"I travel light."
"Woman after my own heart."
"Well, it's good to know you got one," I said
laughing.
"Give me your hand."
I extended him my hand and he slid it under his shirt and held my
hand over his heart for the longest time. I closed my eyes and just
felt. Then at last he let go and my hand floated back to my lap.
"You tell me when it stops ticking okay," he said
"Yeah," I said, "I'll do that."
Then he laughed and knocked the wood on the
dashboard three times.
"Why did you do that?"
"It's bad luck to talk about dying."
"Why, we all know it's gonna happen to all of us."
"Is it," he said. I got this idea that if I die
really fast death might miss it, won't know that I'm really dead
and I'll be able to just get up and keep on going forever."
"Sounds like something you shouldn't try until
you've spent a little more time living."
"Yeah, that's what I think except that maybe when I
am old I won't be able to move fast enough to pull it off," he
paused to eyeball me, and asked, "What do you think?"
Well, let me tell you it had been a long time since
a man had asked me that question and if my heart had not already
gone out to him it would have then.
"I think like the Navaho Indians," I said. "I think that
when I die I will return, like one small tear or drop of water, to a
great river which flows somewhere under the grand canyon, except that I
believe that the great river flows through the universe."
"Are you afraid of dying?"
"I am afraid of pain, I guess."
"Sometimes the pain has been the only thing that has
told me I was still kicking,"he said.
"yeah, I think of death as a place that I will someday
get to travel to after buying the ticket which was life. We all
gotta die why not make it an adventure."
"Girl, I like your spirit."
"I think I hear the train coming."
"Yep."
"Remember don't be afraid and don't look back."
"If I don't make it, don't stop for me."
"I won't."
And we shook on it right there like we was buying and selling
grain or something.Then James gathered up some things from the car seat
and crammed them into his backpack. I thought I saw a glint of
something but I couldn't tell what it was then. A whistle wailed
like a demon lover and we got out of the car. We saw the face
of the train crest the hill,a slick black leviathan lapping up the air
between us. We nodded to each other once and then ran for it. The sand
seemed to suck us back but the side of the tracks was firm with packed dirt
and gravel. The train must have slowed coming over the hill because it was
not all that hard to grab. Holding on was the trick but we did and were
swept away without our legs getting pulled under and crushed beneath the
wheels.
Nothing we did from the very beginning made any
sense to me, it all seemed like the best way to get caught but
everything that man did was charmed. He seemed free of the
consequences of normal people and one could see that having lived
that way for some time had made him exceptionally careless. It was
like he had cartoon physics working around him all the time. You
could expect that he could have a piano fall on his head or
something from a high window and he would just brush off the dust,
clean between his teeth with some fine piano wire and walk away
whistling.
3.
Soon we had managed to pull ourselves atop a flat freight
car and we were laying side by side. His hands were tight against my
arms and he was looking hard into my face like it held some answer
for him that was a matter of life and death. Our eyes met and locked.
He was so good-looking with his face so flushed and his hair flying about
him. It kinda looked like a halo as he pulled me against him and pressed
his lips against mine and it felt like we were two angels floating far
above the world. It felt like nothing we could do could be wrong. I
slid my hand down the front of his jeans and held him. He moved closer
against me and moved a hand to my breast. I unsnapped his levi's and
the train vibrated beneath us. He ran his hand up my thighs to my panties.
I was wet for that man. I scrunched down my pantyhose and my
panties. It was probably pretty dangerous and as I tell you now,
you might think that it could not have been all that comfortable
what with the train rumbling and the wind and all. But it was
better than any I'd even had before. It was so different I could
see how people might find it a kinda good idea to spend the rest of
their lives together. Then the train shrieked and we screamed and
we were plunged into the blackness of a tunnel.
4.
These are the things that I thought of that night lying on the top
of that train. It all made sense to me that I would be strapped to
the top of a train heading into Los Angeles next to a man that I
hadn't know the day before.
My first boyfriend's name was David Haviland and I loved him
because when were in second grade he would not say the flag salute,
even though the teacher would rap his fingers hard with a wooden ruler.
Oddly enough his dad was in the military. And I always wondered,
and do to this day, why a second grade boy would choose to rebel so specifically and bear the cost so casually.
I guess I liked bad boys from the very start but it took me awhile to learn
the difference between an outlaw and a criminal.
You know, all those years I had lived out in the Mojave,
I had never made it all the way into L.A. I was kinda happy just
knowing it was there but I really could never think of a reason to
go all the way to the coast even though I had traveled all the way
from Texas. Those last ninety some miles just didn't seem that important.
Then here I was with this man heading into Los Angeles with no
plan in mind other than to be where he went and see where that took
me. I musta been really bored for a long time without even really
realizing it. And lonely too.
The sun came up all rosy-fingered like they say it did in
those Greek epic poems and the train pulled screeching and
panting steam into a huge yard of trains. We climbed down the side
and made our way between trains, climbed through a tear in a chain-link
metal fence and found ourselves on the streets of L.A.
"Why are we here,?" I asked.
And he replied not looking at me but at the skyline,
"Here to see a man about some money."
Then suddenly I had that feeling I get sometimes like I am in
the middle of a movie and I am missing my cue. What movie had I heard
that line from? I felt like if I could remember I would know what was going
to happen next. I drew a blank and James was already walking away from me
so I ran after him knowing, with that thing they call woman's intuition,
that this town was going to be nothing but trouble for me, nothing but
heartache.
5.
We walked down a dirty street, past stores with brightly
colored wares and people hawking everything. I mean everything.
There were kids running and smoky cars driving by and shriveled men
and women lined up with cans professing their love of god and their
need for cash.
We walked past a shoe store, a Laundromat, a gas
station and a lot of clothing stores till finally we came to a grim
little diner with Scorpion Cafe written on the side and the picture
of a scorpion just about to be squashed by a man's dingo boot painted
next to it. We walked inside.
It was a squalidly furnished little dive sparsely populated with
the kind of people that you see on those old twilight zone movies -
where they only exist in that cafe and they all died some horrible
death and this was hell or something.
We sat down in a booth and a waitress came over to the table.
She did this weird hopping thing on one foot and then asked what we
wanted to drink. James asked if those were on the menu. She asked if
he saw that. He said yes and ordered coffee for each of us and
after she had walked away from the table I asked him what they had been
talking about because except for the coffee part it had all gone over my
head. He told me that she had stepped on a roach and kicked it under the table
and that was that weird hop-step she had done was all about.
I felt like it was a sign somehow. I am from the south, you know,
and there is one thing I really believe in - that life is connected to
itself in such a way that you know some things are gonna happen before
they do because you get warnings. They have that in literature too but
there it is called foreshadowing. I call it "signs and portents" and it
can be all manner of things - like in that Drugstore Cowboy movie when that
one guy knew things were gonna get bad because there was that black hat on
the bed. Well, for me it is roaches, I always see a roach just before
something bad happens. I had a boyfriend once who came with a herd of them.
While he lived with me my small single apartment was infested with them and
after he left they were gone. I had never had them before and never had them
after. It was like he was their Leader or maybe they were some sort of
ectoplasmic extensions of his soul.
I was just thinking that maybe nothing bad would happen because
I did not actually see the roach before or after the waitress had squashed
it when a man came into the cafe and called out to James as soon as he saw him,
"Hey, Deadman, how the fuck have you been?" James smiled tightly and rose to
shake the guys hand and me I was smiling even though ever hair on the
back of my neck was standing on end.
James said, "Hey, Tweek, this is Cora, come sit and have a
coffee with us."
"Sure man," Tweek said, and he pulled up a chair so that he
was sitting at the edge of our table."
I could smell him now and he smelled like stale
cigarettes and used condoms. His clothes looked like he could have
just as easily put them on yesterday or maybe even the month before. He
had a scary way of looking up from the menu at my breasts and back
again. Jimmy asked Tweak if he had seen Creeper about lately and
Tweak said that he had not seen him for months, but the way he said
it, it sounded like there might be something more if...and then Jimmy
put a twenty on the table and said, "What are secrets between friends, T."
Tweak laughed revealing a mouthful of yellowed teeth that would have
looked pretty comely in a rat's mouth and said that Creeper hangs out at the
pool hall on Seventh Street in the evenings now with his girlfriends. Then
Tweak looked at me and smiled widely and a ripple of fear ran through me.
Jimmy said, "How is Happy?"
Tweak looked down at his hands which just happened to be
holding the fringes of a tattered napkin that he had been tearing pieces
off of to make a small pile of confetti on the table. He said, "You
just missed him. He O.D.'d a couple days ago." Then the coffee finally
came and we drank it even though it was the worst tasting stuff I have even,
I mean ever had. You could see to the bottom of cup and some small flecks of
grit at the bottom it was so weak. Then we were all quiet like we were
all having our different thoughts. I was thinking of this dream I had once
about a beach. It was a beach where all the souls went to when they died.
It was an endless stretch of beach going north and south. West was
the endless ocean and east was endless sand and the souls were like the foam
on the waves. People were waiting on this beach to be born. In the dream I
knew the person sitting next to me from my last life. He was an artist too
and we both had sketch books with us. He was painting with only half the
colors of the spectrum. I was painting using only in the opposite colors.
I knew then that we would never really end up together. Suddenly in the
dream, I heard people fighting and it was Paul Newman and Natalie Wood.
She was in a beautiful black spaghetti strap dress and she was yelling at
Paul and he was yelling right back at her. I remember thinking how silly
it was that they were causing such a scene. I looked out at the ocean. It
was so black and I wondered when I would be born.
Chapter 6.
Copyright 1996 Cora Sand is a nom de plume of Victoria Vaughn-Perling
|
