Same Place, Same Things Read online

  Then with a jolt, loose wrenches and lunch boxes flew forward in a convulsion of iron, and Jesse was knocked from his seat, his thermos flying over his head and sailing out into the thundering darkness. The locomotive lurched as though a giant hand had grabbed it from behind and wiggled it like a toy. Leaning out the window and looking back along the mile-long trail of tankers, he saw a whirlwind of sparks thirty cars back, and his heart divided in two and hid up under his shoulder blades. Somewhere an air hose parted, and the brakes jammed on with a squeal. He remembered to shut off the throttle, and as the engines bucked and ground rails for a quarter mile, he saw a white tanker turn sideways in the distance. Then he knew the train was breaking apart, the rear section running in like an accordion, and here he was in the dark woods at the edge of town, more than half-drunk, witnessing a catastrophe that would have happened even if he had been stone-sober and riding the rails with a Bible in his back pocket.

  The black locomotives trembled to a stop, jumping as derailing cars smacked into those tankers still on the tracks. The brakeman and conductor hit the ground, running toward all the thunder. Jesse McNeil climbed down the engine steps carefully and put his hands in his pockets, wondering what he would do, what he would tell everybody. Then the first chemical tanker exploded, pinwheeling up into the night sky, slinging its wheels and coming down into a roadside 7-Eleven, the building disappearing in an unholy orange fireball. The strange pounding Jesse heard was the sound of his own feet running north along the railroad, scattering rocks and dust until he reached a spot where he could get down to the highway and lope along the blacktop. He ran until he had no wind and his heart pounded like a fist. Then he turned and saw the sky lit up a smoky yellow. He began to stumble backward through an unnameable fear, and when an old pickup pulled out of a side road and drove north toward him, he stuck out his thumb.

  Jesse hitched to the next jerkwater town up the line, and even there he could see a poisonous glow on the horizon. A log-truck driver gave him a lift to the interstate, and he was faced with the choice of going north, farther into the trash-woods sand hills where he was raised, the land of clapboard fundamentalist churches and mildewed trailers, or south toward the alien swamps and that Sodom of all Sodoms, New Orleans. He crossed the median to the southbound lane. No one would look for him in New Orleans.

  After a while, a black sedan approached, and he stuck up his thumb, thinking that if he could get away long enough for his system to clear of bourbon, maybe he could tell the company officials that he’d had an attack of amnesia, or anxiety, or stupidity, and had run off like a fool to sort things out for a day. What could they do to him for being stupid? Fire him? He didn’t need much money anyway. His frame house was paid for, and the only reason he worked at all was to spend time away from Lurleen, his prune-skin wife, who was always after him to paint or fix something. But if they had found him stumbling around by the engine, drunk, maybe the law would get involved. Maybe it would mean a great big fine, and if he ever did want to work for a railroad again, they wouldn’t hire him to run a windup locomotive around a Christmas tree.

  To his surprise the black sedan stopped, and soon he was cruising south in the company of an old Catholic priest, a Father Lambrusco, semiretired, who was filling in for a vacationing assistant pastor at St. Louis Cathedral.

  “You out of work?” the priest asked, speeding past a gravel truck.

  “Yeah,” Jesse said, studying the eastern sky through the windshield. “I’m a carpenter.”

  “Ah. Joseph was a carpenter.”

  “Joseph who?”

  The priest checked his rearview. “Joseph, the father of Jesus.”

  Jesse frowned at himself. A priest talks about Joseph the carpenter, and Jesse thinks at first that maybe he’s talking about Joseph Wiggins from McComb, Mississippi. “Oh yeah, that Joseph,” Jesse said.

  “You go to church?”

  “Well, some. I’m sort of a fundamentalist.”

  “Isn’t going to church fundamental? No, never mind. I didn’t pick you up to preach. To tell the truth, I was falling asleep at the wheel.” He turned his bald head toward Jesse and smiled, keeping his mouth closed, as though he had bad teeth. “Tell me, Mr. Carpenter, do you believe Catholics worship statues?”

  Jesse assured him he did not, that one friend he had made in the service had been a Catholic chaplain.

  “Were you baptized by total immersion in your church?” the priest asked.

  “All the way under. We got our own special tank.”

  “Was your life changed?” The priest swung around a Volkswagen.

  Jesse pursed his lips and looked far down the road, as if he might see his life changing up ahead. “The minister said it might take some time in my case.”

  He and the priest talked for an hour and a half about snake-handler preachers and why nuns didn’t have any spare time.

  At two in the morning Jesse checked into the Night O’ Delight Motel on Airline Highway in New Orleans. The desk clerk, a young Asian man, asked him if he wanted a fifteen-dollar room or a sixty-dollar room with a bed warmer. “What fool would pay sixty dollars just to sleep in a room?” he told him. He gave the man three fives, plus the tax, thankful that he had just cashed his paycheck and held back a few hundred to pay Lurleen’s cousin to come over and paint the house. When he got to the room he turned on the television to check for news, flipping through channels until he reached the last station on the dial, which was showing a vividly pornographic scene. Jesse mashed the off switch and drew back his finger as though it had been burned.

  He looked around at the warped paneling and the window unit, which labored without a grille in its hole near the ceiling. Tomorrow he would call in his story. Things would go fairly rough with him for running off, but he would worry about that the next day. He pulled off his coveralls and climbed into the bed, which jittered and rang, sagging badly in the middle.

  * * *

  The next morning his bladder woke him in time for the eight o’clock news, and as he fumbled with the dials, he wondered if the wreck would even be mentioned. The fire probably had been put out by now. The railroad would have to buy somebody’s 7-Eleven, but they could have the line clear by late afternoon.

  However, on Channel 4 was a helicopter view of Satan’s living room, fifty tank cars crashed together and burning. Black-and-green smoke rose a mile into the air, and on both sides of the track, seed elevators, storehouses, and shops flamed in fierce amber heaps. Jesse stepped back and cupped a hand to his forehead. He tried to say something like “What in God’s name?” but he couldn’t make a sound. The voice narrating the video told that the town had been evacuated and that fire-fighting teams were driven back by a mix of a dozen chemicals spilled from ruptured tankers, that the town’s ditches were running with vinyl chloride and paint stripper. Then the voice told the world that Jesse P. McNeil, the train’s engineer, had disappeared from the scene and it was thought that he had run off into the woods east of the derailment, where parish posse members were searching for him with teams of dogs.

  When he heard his name fly out of the television, Jesse sat down hard on the creaking bed. Hardly forty people knew he existed, and now his name had sailed out into the region like parts of his exploded train. Why, he wondered, was it important to name him at all? And sheriff’s officers were in the woods searching for him like he was a criminal. When the news report ended, he turned off the television and wondered if his blood would now test free of alcohol. He decided to eat a big breakfast. Stepping out of his room, he walked over to a run-down strip of glass and blond-colored brick businesses across the highway, entered a smoky café, and sat at the counter. On a shelf over the coffee urn, a grease-stained television blinked and buzzed. A local channel was showing the wreck from ground level. A handsome announcer listed twenty evil-sounding names of chemicals that were burning, spilling, or threatening to explode. He also mentioned that the engineer was a man of average build, with red hair combed straight back, last see
n hitching a ride north of the wreck site. The waitresses were absorbed in the broadcast and didn’t see Jesse slowly turn away from the counter and head for the door. Outside, he stood on the curb and felt light-headed, anxious that the next person to lay eyes on him might recognize who he was. He looked up and down the neon-infested highway for escape. Next to the café was a cubbyhole-sized barbershop, and he sidled over to its door and backed inside. Jesse found an Italian-looking gentleman stropping his razor and watching a TV mounted on a rack in the corner. The engineer sat in the chair and wondered how he could ask for his hair to be combed in some new way, maybe with a part on the side, anything different from the straight-back crimson mane he sported at the moment. The barber smiled and clicked his scissors in the air twice.

  “Hey, what you think of the train wreck? Some mess, right?” He ran a comb through Jesse’s hair slowly, as though admiring it.

  Jesse looked at him warily. He hated the big-city accent of New Orleans folks. They sounded like New Yorkers to his piney woods ear. “I ain’t heard of a wreck,” Jesse said.

  The barber bobbed his head. “Aw yeah. You just come in from the forest, hey? You from Mississippi, right? Hay-baling time and all that shit.”

  Jesse found himself nodding, glad to be given some kind of identity. Just then the television screen flashed a stern company photograph of his face. “Look here,” he said, grabbing the barber’s arm and pulling his attention away from the TV, “can’t you give me kind of a modern look? Something maybe a little younger?”

  The barber sucked in his cheeks and studied Jesse’s head the way an expensive artist might. “Yeah, man. I could wash all that oil out, shorten everything up, and kinda spike it.” He clicked his scissors once. “But your friends back in the woods gonna think you a Communist rock star or somethin’.”

  Jesse took in a deep breath and watched the white-hot center of the chemical train pulse over the barber’s shoulder. “Do it to me,” he said.

  * * *

  After his haircut, he spent the entire morning in the café next door, reading the newspapers. The noon TV news devoted a full five minutes to the train wreck. At that point he decided he would not call in for a while, that he would wait a few days until this was past and everyone would begin to forget, that he would lie low along Airline Highway in the Night O’ Delight Motel until everyone and everything cooled off and the poisonous fumes of his train wreck had blown clear of the unlucky town. It took him a good while to decide this, because out-of-the-ordinary decisions seldom came up in his life. The engineer had been running the same routes with the same trains for so many years that lately he found it hard to pay attention to the usual telegraph poles and sweet-gum trees sailing past his cab window. In the same way, the stunted pines along the road to his house, and the little house itself, had become unseeable. Sometimes he imagined himself an unseen part of this faded, repetitive background.

  * * *

  The sense of being invisible made Jesse think he could not be taken seriously, which was why he never voted, hardly ever renewed his driver’s license, and paid attention in church only once a year at revival time. He thought of the plywood church at the end of the dirt lane and wondered what Father Lambrusco would think of it.

  During the afternoon he watched soap operas, amazed at all the little things the characters could get upset about. He laughed as he thought of Lurleen watching the same shows, a cup of coffee in her lap, a cigarette mashed in the saucer. He began to feel some of the gloom brought on by the noon newscast evaporate, and he looked forward to the five o’clock news because he knew it would tell that the crisis was over, people were returning to their homes, and the railroad would be repaired in a day or so. Waiting for the evening news, Jesse pondered life’s good points, how most injuries healed up, most people changed for the better, and whatever was big news today was small potatoes on page thirty tomorrow. He lay back on his bed and studied the rain-stained ceiling and the mismatched paneling on the walls. Even this room would be remodeled someday and no one would suspect how ugly it had been. Things would improve.

  But when the local news theme began to play over his scratched motel television, his face froze in a disbelieving stare. A black sky coiled and spread for miles above a crossroads town, and an evil-looking copper blaze flashed at the heart of a mountain of wreckage. The announcer stated that the train’s brakeman had accused the engineer of being intoxicated at the time of the accident. Jesse balled up a fist. “Son of a bitch,” he shouted at the television, “that hop-head smokes weed day and night.” The announcer went on to say that the parish sheriff’s department had a warrant out for the engineer’s arrest and that railroad officials were hiring private investigators to locate the runaway employee. Meanwhile, firefighters were having to let the wreck burn because of an overheated propane tanker and the danger that two cars of chemicals would rupture and mix, producing mustard gas. Jesse’s mouth fell open at this last awful announcement, and he began to fear that somehow everything was being blamed on him. He watched aerial shots of the fire spreading into the town, and as he did, another propane tanker went off like the end of the world, skyborne rills of fire torching a poor neighborhood of wooden houses to the east of the tracks. He sat on the floor, gathering fistfuls of cheap shag carpet, holding on, anchoring himself against the TV’s revelations.

  At the end of the report, he was shaking, so he snapped off the set. His name was on the air again, broadcast all over two states. And why did they want to arrest him? The train had come apart on its own. A wheel rim had cracked off, or a rail broke. He hadn’t been speeding. Nobody knew what went wrong. Billy Graham could have been at the throttle of that locomotive and the same thing would have happened. He left the room, crossed the highway, and bought a deck of cards, returning to the little table by the window and dealing a hand of solitaire. He hoped the game would take his mind off the wreck, but after a while he began placing red eights on red nines, and he wished for his wife’s face over his shoulder, telling him where he’d missed a play.

  * * *

  The next day he woke up and glared at the dark set a long time before deciding to shave. He refused to watch the news. Each broad cast injured his notion of who he was, and he would have no more of that. He caught a bus to the French Quarter and in Jackson Square sat on a wrought-iron bench, amazed that no one looked like his friends from his shriveled-up hometown. Jesse missed the red clay ditches and the boiled turpentine smell of Gumwood, Louisiana. He had never seen so many weak-looking men dressed in baggy, strange clothes, but he envied their anonymity, for at the moment he felt as obvious as the soaring statue of Andrew Jackson that rose before him, splattered by pigeons.

  He spent all day in the Quarter, poking his sharp face into the doors of antique shops and bars, hankering for a hot charge of supermarket whiskey but holding back. Whenever he passed a newspaper vending machine, he saw a smoky photograph on the front page and felt a twinge of remorse. He wondered if he should turn himself in.

  At the motel, he avoided the local news, deciding to turn the set on only for the national stuff, where, he was thinking, he would see the really important events, nothing about some local train burning a pissant town off the map. But as the CBS evening news played its intro theme over a film snippet of the main story, Jesse let out a pained yelp.

  There on the screen was his wife, Lurleen, shaking her rat-gray hair and telling a reporter, “I don’t know where he run off to leaving a blowed-up train behind like that.” She sniffed and pointed a finger toward the camera. “But it don’t surprise me one bit,” she said to the world. “No sir, not one thing that man would do would surprise a jumpy cat.” Jesse interlaced his fingers and placed his hands on top of his brushy head. On the screen, Lurleen looked powerful and almost attractive, in a dirt road kind of way. The program cut to an anchorman, and Jesse was thankful, for he half-expected Lurleen to start telling about him not paying her nephew for painting the house, and then everyone in red-white-and-blue America would
know he was too lazy to paint his own damned living room. The announcer, low-voiced and serious in a blue sport coat, told how a white cloud of escaped chemical had rolled over a chicken farm and killed ten thousand hens, how three firemen were seriously injured when the wind shifted and they were overtaken by a toxic blanket.

  “But the real mystery,” the announcer continued, “is Jesse McNeil, the fifty-year-old engineer from Gumwood, Louisiana, who ran away from the scene of the accident. There are many speculations about his disappearance. Fellow workers suggest that McNeil was depressed because of his fiftieth birthday and was having marital and family problems. Whatever the reasons, he left behind a growing scene of destruction and pollution perhaps unequaled in American railroad history. Our live coverage continues from southeast Louisiana.” And there it was. Jesse’s eyes widened as a camera did a slow pan of his home on Loblolly Road, and he watched his partially bald yard, his house, which from this angle looked like a masonite-covered shoe box, and his carport, which seemed wobbly and anemic under its load of pine straw. He imagined voices all over America saying, “Is that the best he could do after fifty years?” And there was Lurleen, sitting on the sofa in front of the big picture of the ocean surf, talking to the reporter about her husband. What could be worse than this, Jesse wondered, to be introduced to the English-speaking world by Lurleen McNeil, a chain-smoking canasta dragon whose biggest ambition in life was to have everything they owned painted sea-foam green by a dopehead nephew who never got out of the sixth grade? He listened as Lurleen told the world about him.

  She leaned back on the couch and he saw her checkered shirt tighten at the shoulders. She looked thoughtful and not as dowdy as usual; he had never seen her like this. “Sometimes he’s a little out of it,” Lurleen said, blowing a stream of smoke from the side of her mouth and looking off in the opposite direction. “I don’t mean to say he’s a bad man, but whenever he gets upset he tends to drink a little too much, if you know what I mean.”