Murder On The Texas Eagle

 

Frankly, if it hadn’t been my baby brother, Ralph, doing the asking, I never would have gone on this trip. Even now, sitting here in my Amtrak “roomette” watching the state of Texas fly by, I’m coming real close to regretting the family loyalty that ever made me step onto this train. I’m already as tired as sin, and there is still a lot of miles to go before my brother picks me up in San Antonio.

“Why don’t you hop on a plane and come down for a nice, long visit,” Ralph had said, off-handed-like, during our once-a-month phone visit. He acted as though traveling so far wouldn’t be no trouble to me at all. “I’ll pay for your ticket.”

I held the phone away from my ear and gave it a good, hard look. Was this man serious?

“I’m seventy-one years old, Ralphie. I don’t just ‘hop’ anywhere anymore.”

It made me feel good that he thought enough of me to want me to come, but it wasn’t no hop-skip-and-a-jump from South Shore, Kentucky to the state of Texas. It ain’t that easy for someone like me to claw my way up out of the hills of Kentucky. I ain’t been more than fifty miles away from home in sixty years, and he wanted me to just grab a plane and fly to San Antonio? My brother didn’t realize how much prayer and planning and hard thought I’d have to put into such a thing.

Texas has always felt like it was on the other side of the world to me, especially since Ralph and his wife, Carla, went there on a vacation and decided they wasn’t never moving back home. It like to broke mama’s heart and mine, too—truth be told.

“If it’s all that easy, how come you ain’t done it yourself since Aunt Edith’s funeral six years ago?” I asked. “The plane flies both ways, you know.”

“I’ve been busy, Doreen.” His voice took on that pouty sound he used to have whenever he was a little boy and I smacked his hand for doing something he shouldn’t be doing. I could almost see his lower lip poking out, even if he is in his sixties. Mama spoiled my baby brother rotten when he was little and him getting older don’t seem to have taken one bit of the spoiled out.

I was working up a huff over that “busy” comment when he said the words that shut my smart mouth and rocked me back on my heels.

“Carla’s sick, Doreen. Real sick. She has to have chemo. I need someone to help me take care of her so I can keep working.”

“Oh, Ralphie,” I felt sick at heart. “I am so sorry.”

Carla, is a sweet girl. I’ve always liked her and I was real sorry I’d snapped at him like that.

“I need you, Doreen,” he pleaded. “You gotta come help me. I don’t have anyone else to turn to.”

“Let me think on it,” I said. “I’ll call you back tomorrow.”

I hung up the phone wondering what in the world I was going to do. I didn’t want to let my brother and sister-in-law down, but I couldn’t hardly face going all the way to San Antonio, neither.

Our home town of South Shore, Kentucky is good enough for me. Always has been. Always will be. I don’t understand why people feel the need to move far, far away. We’ve got that pretty Ohio river and all them beautiful hills to look at all the time. I figure that if you can’t find what you’re looking for in South Shore, or across the bridge in Portsmouth, or just down the river in Ashland or Ironton—you don’t need it.

It’s my brother who left and went far, far away. Ralph and me never did see eye to eye about him staying here where he belongs. Carla, was never any help at keeping him home, either. She’s a local girl, but she’s one of those women who do whatever her husband tells her to. If Ralphie told her he wanted to go live on the moon, she’d go to Goodwill and start looking for a moon suit. San Antonio seems like such a strange place for a Kentucky boy, born and raised, to end up but there’s something about it that caught Ralph’s attention twenty years ago and just never let go.

I’m not afraid of flying. Not that I’ve ever flown, but I’m not afraid of the principle of it. The way I figure it is that if a person has lived right with the Lord, and is on the other side of seventy, there are worse ways to go than a plane crash. Like Vera Adkins. After that stroke, she’s lingered for years now not able to speak one word unless it is a cuss word. I’m telling you the God’s honest truth—and her a good church-going woman who never said a bad word in her life.

Sometimes I suspect that she might have said a few in her head through the years, though, for ‘em to be in there. Vera still comes to church, of course, but we try not to let her get too excited or try to testify for fear that she’ll attempt to say something like “Praise the Lord” and something else entirely will shoot out of her mouth. Her daughter took her to a church pot luck last month and when Vera forgot herself and tried to say “Please pass the salt” a string of bad words came out of her mouth and the pastor was sitting right across from her. It would have been funny if she hadn’t started to cry, poor thing.

I forgot my train of thought. What was it I getting ready to say?

Oh yes, big airports and how we ain’t got any around here.

One of the few bad things about living in South Shore, Kentucky is that all the nearest airports are at least two hours away. Columbus, Cincinnati, Lexington. There’s just no easy way to get to a plane from here. To fly, I’d have to ask my neighbor, Bobby Joe to drive me there. I don’t like having to ask someone who isn’t close kin for favors and everyone who was ever close kin has moved away. Bobby Joe is a second cousin, though, and helps me out from time to time. His new little wife, Esther is a sweet girl and I’m grateful to have them living next door to me.

Problem is, even though I’m not afraid of crashing, I am afraid of trying to find my way around an airport even if Bobby Joe didn’t mind driving me all the way there and dumping me off at one. I’ve seen them airports on the television set, and I can just picture myself wandering around, lost and old, carrying that suitcase my mama bought for me to go to New York City that time we took our senior class trip way back in high school. I’d probably end up missing my plane and then where would I be?

As far as I was concerned, Doreen Sizemore had no business wandering around an airport unless someone smarter than her took her by the hand and led her around like a little child. I hate to say it, but it’s true. This is one old woman who knows her limitations.

Not that I can’t get around. I do all right. I’m not on a cane or anything. I still got me a big ole garden and I take care of it all by my lonesome. My people never did run to fat like some folks do, so that helps, too.

I even killed me a big rattler that got in my garden last summer. I was still nimble enough to jump back out of the way when it tried to bite me. Of course, I’m scared enough of snakes that I’d a probably jumped out of the way even if I was as old as Methuselah. I killed that old meanie with a garden hoe. Chopped him up into a million little pieces I was so scared. Frank Fuller, over at church told me I’d wasted good meat. He said rattlesnake was tasty. I can’t imagine eating snake. I hate those things. Just hate ‘em.

Shoot. I lost my train of thought again. What was I saying?

If I remember right, it didn’t have nothing to do at all with snakes. Oh yes. I was talking about Ralph wanting me to come out to San Antonio and help him take care of his wife who has cancer. No doubt she’s as scared of that disease as I was finding that rattler in my beans—except there’s no hoe big enough to help her with that.

I seen a lot in my life. Carla might make it through. She might not. But I figure she might feel a mite better with Doreen’s homemade chicken noodle soup in her belly while she’s fighting it.

There’s no getting over the fact that I’m worried sick about her. I know I’d worry less if I could take charge of her kitchen while she goes through chemo. Mama got all picky about her food, like most people do who go through that. I’m no nurse, but I’ve learned a few things about caring for sick people during bad times.

Ralph’s not going to be any help to her, that’s for sure. I know my brother. The last I checked, he barely knows how to use a can opener to feed himself—let alone deal with the kind of bird appetite Carla is going to have.

I was going somewhere with this. I know I was, but this news about Carla has me so shook up I hardly know which end is up.

Oh yes, I was talking about trying to get there.

Bobby Joe’s truck has been acting up, plus he’s been a tad grouchy ever since he got into that fuss with his foreman over at the OSCO stove company and lost a perfectly good-paying job which don’t come easy around these parts let me tell you!

Then Esther had little Maggie—only four weeks old and a more colicky child I never did see. Ever since that baby was born, if I started getting blue and lonely, I would just trot over there and spell Esther by walking that fussy baby up and down her living room floor and then I’d feel a little bit better. Besides being a fussy baby, Maggie looks just like her mama… poor little thing. Esther’s a sweet girl, but she’s no looker.

Anyway, Esther and Bobby Joe don’t seem to mind taking me to the grocery store or doctor from time to time, but I didn’t think it would be a good idea to ask either of them to drive me all the way to Columbus. Wasn’t sure Bobby Joe’s truck would make it.

It ain’t that I can’t drive—I can. It’s just that I’ve been having a few dizzy spells here lately, and it’s one thing to accidentally kill myself in a car wreck. I’d be willing to take that risk to keep my independence. But it’s a whole other thing to accidentally take someone else’s life. What if I was to plow into a young family? I’d never forgive myself, and I don’t think the Almighty would be none too happy with me, either. So I sold my old car a couple years back and put that money in a little account that I’m intending to give to Bobby Joe—except he don’t know about it and I thought I’d make him work for it a bit while I’m still around. Won’t hurt him none. Bobby Joe is a little on the lazy side.

I can talk about him. I got the right. He’s kin. Not saying anything that ain’t true.

It would be nice if I had someone to drive me to Texas, but I don’t. Even if Bobby Joe’s truck was working good, I wouldn’t ask him to drive me that far. The way he’s been acting since that colicky baby showed up, I’m not sure he’d come back. He’s not been known for sticking to things. Bobby Joe is a good boy, but he likes things easy. He hasn’t lived long enough to figure out that easy ain’t always best.

I worried at the problem all day like an old dog with a bone and no teeth. That night I lay in bed, puzzling over what I was going to do. I prayed a good bit too. Figured it would be good idea to talk to Someone a whole lot smarter than me about the problem.

The toughest thing about getting old isn’t so much the aches and pains. The toughest thing is that you lose so many people. All the one’s you were friends with back when you were young are either sick and all crippled-up or dying off. The only thing good about growing old is that you tend to grow closer to the Lord if you’re a mind to. You have to. You run out of people to sop up all your time and after while it’s just pretty much you and God and the telephone that don’t ring all that much.

Tonight, though, God was being awful silent and I just couldn’t get any peace at all.

It was in the middle of the night. I was tossing and turning and flipping my pillow every which way trying to get comfortable when I heard the clackety—clack of the train behind my house. I’m so used to it I seldom pay any attention to the sound anymore. It’s kind of like my Mama’s old regulator clock that I stopped hearing go tick-tock about seventy years ago.

My nerves was in such a state, thought the sound of that train seemed to shake the house like it was going to run right through it. It was then that the thought hit me like a ton of bricks.

I could take a train to San Antonio. It might take a whole lot longer than a plane, but I didn’t have nothing else I had to do.

You might think it strange that it didn’t occur to me earlier to take the train, but people in South Shore just don’t do things like that very often. For one thing, it ain’t all that handy. Number 51 Cardinal passenger train only chugged through town three times a week in the middle of the night. Sometimes I might be awake at eleven o’clock or so when it was due—it never was too reliable—and it would stop to pick up or drop off a passenger, but it didn’t happen a lot.

I knew that it went through Cincinnati and on to Chicago where a person could climb on trains going all over the nation. I didn’t know what the name of the train was that went to Texas, but I was pretty sure it was possible to get one that went close enough to Ralph in Texas that my brother could come pick me up.

There wasn’t no real train depot in South Shore. Don’t think for a minute there was. All we had was a small boxy building on the corner of Main Street and Route 23 with plastic windows that was kept lit up at night. The only thing in it was a long, blue bench with plenty of graffiti carved in it and a heater if you was lucky. There was never any to-do made about our train station. The train just kind of sneaked up when no one was looking and whisked a person off from time to time. Most of the time we just ignored it.

Amazing thing was—that little plastic train-stop building was only a half-mile from my house and I could walk to it—even carrying my old suitcase. If I could figure out how to take that train, I wouldn’t have to ask no one for a ride or nothing!

I lay there all excited at the thought of the freedom of it. For a couple seconds I felt almost giddy with the idea of the adventure of it. Just walking to the train stop, getting on, and going where I wanted. Then reality started to creep in. I was seventy-one years old and sometimes I do get these dizzy spells.

So I went from being giddy at the thought, to being scared. Who was I kidding? I was too old to do this. Wasn’t I? I didn’t even know how to buy a ticket. There weren’t no ticket agents in that little-bitty train passenger box. I’d be lucky if it had all its light bulbs in it. There’s been an awful lot of thieving going on around here since some of our local boys started taking meth. I’ve heard some of ‘em are foolish enough to try cooking it, too. There was an explosion not too far from here that made the papers. Sometimes I’m glad I won’t have to live to see how bad things get around here. Other times I wish I could live forever just to see what in the world is going to happen next. One thing for sure, there’s no predicting.

Now I’m off the subject again. I’ll try real hard not to do that.

So I laid there, thinking how scared I was. Then I got to thinking about Carla again, and how scared she must be with all she’s facing. I got upset all over again because I knew for sure that I was gonna try to ride that dang train whether I wanted to or not—‘cause that’s the kind of person I am where family is concerned. If they need me, I’m going to try to find a way to help them. Then I got mad all over again at Ralph for choosing to live so far away that he went and put me in the middle of this mess.

It was a rough night.

When the light of dawn finally cracked through my window blinds, I gave up and got out of bed. First thing I did was feed the old tomcat that’s usually hanging around my house in the morning. He’s a tough one, that cat is, and suspicious. My lands that cat is surely careful not to get too close to folks. It’s been three months I’ve been feeding him and he just yesterday let me pet his head real careful. He kind of closed one eye and squinted up at me like he couldn’t believe I’d be foolish enough to try, but he didn’t bite my hand off so I think we’re making progress. Then I boiled some water, made me some Sanka, put enough sugar and evaporated milk in it to cut the bitterness, and worked up the nerve to call Ralph and tell him about my idea of riding the rails to Texas.

I rolled that phrase around in my mouth a minute, liking the sound of it. “Riding the rails.”

“Doreen,” I say to myself. “If you can cut a three foot rattlesnake to smithereens with a garden hoe, you can manage to go ride on a train for a couple of days to help your little baby brother in his hour of need.”

My brother, Ralph, is not exactly a little boy anymore. We run to big-boned in my family and he’s a six footer with a solid three hundred pounds on his frame, but whenever I think about him, I always see that little fellow what used to crawl into bed and cuddle with me whenever the thunder and lightning started up and he got scared.

I dial the number. He picks up on the first ring like he’s been sitting there worrying about what I was going to decide. The minute I tell him what I’m thinking, he gets all excited and says he’ll pay for it. I tell him my money is as good as his if I can just figure out how to get a ticket. He says not to worry about a thing, that he’ll take care of everything. He calls back later and tells me he got a good deal so that’s all right. He explains the details to me and then we hang up.

I figure there’s no turning back now. I’m grateful when I look at the clock and see it’s just about time for my appointment at Betsey’s Beauty Boutique. With me getting ready to go to Texas, if I ever needed me a good perm, it’s now. I walk on over, thinking it might be a long time before I see Betsey’s Beauty Boutique again.

The girl who usually does my hair is Holly, a sweet girl with a pretty face. She always gives me an extra-curly perm because I like to get as much value for my money as possible. I do not know why the girl thinks a nose ring is attractive—but I hope it’s a phase she’ll grow out of someday, poor thing.

I tell her all about my new adventure, and I tell her I’m thinking about getting Bobby Joe to take me across the bridge to the Big Lots store so I can buy one of those suitcases on rollers I seen there.

“I tell you what, sweetie,” she says. “Don’t go and do that I got a suitcase you can borrow.”

She’s like that, Holly is. She calls people sweetie and honey and baby doll and don’t even realize she’s doing it half the time. Just trying to make them feel good, I guess, and truth be told, most of us can certainly use a little of that. The girl’s got a big heart. She’s Elmer Stoker’s granddaughter, and I think she must get that sweetness from him. I always liked Elmer when we were kids. He was always such a kind child. I surely did hate it when he got that Leona Beardsley in the family way and had to marry her. Poor man has been hen-pecked half to death ever since.

I suppose some people might say that it served him right, but Leona has the sourest temperament I never did see. Humiliates Elmer even in Sunday morning Bible class, harrumphing and rolling her eyes if the poor man makes the slightest remark. So help me, I think if Elmer said for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosever perish might have eternal life…..I think Leona would find fault.

Thank goodness Elmer’s granddaughter took after him in the personality department. If she took after Leona, I’d have to find someone else to give me my perms.

“I’ll tell you what, baby doll,” Elmer’s granddaughter says. “I got me the prettiest roller suitcase the other day. It was on sale and I couldn’t pass it up. I’m not going anywhere for awhile, so you’re welcome to take it on your trip.”

I hate taking her pretty suitcase away from the girl. I ask her where the good deal was.

“Oh,” she says, like it’s the most normal thing in the world. “I got it on Amazon.”

For a minute, I wonder if the ammonia in my perm is addling my brain. That doesn’t make no sense to me.

“Amazon is a river in South America,” I say. “When did you go there?”

Well, Holly just about peed her pants laughing over that. Then she had to tell the other two girls what I said. I sat there feeling stupid with half my hair up in perm rollers, until she let me in on the joke and explained what Amazon she meant.

Sometimes I feel like I’m living in a different world than everyone else I know. My cold feet over getting on the train got worse. I felt a panic setting in.

“Maybe I shouldn’t go after all,” I said. “Maybe I’m too old.”

“Don’t be silly.” She tapped me on the shoulder with a comb. “My boyfriend rode that train to Chicago and then onto Oregon and back again when he was out there looking for work. He said it was a cinch.”

The girl could not have said any words that would of made me feel better. I happen to know her boyfriend and that child really did get the short end of the stick when it came to smarts. He didn’t even know enough to blow his own nose when he was a kid. He’d just stand there looking at you like he didn’t see anything wrong with having all that stuff hanging down over his upper lip. I always kept a box of tissues in my Sunday school class, knowing that he would need a good wipe and blow before the class was over.

He turned into a right handsome boy after he got done growing up and I think he finally figured out how use a handkerchief, but it kinda gags me to remember what he looked like when he was seven. Poor thing.

Now, I figure that if that boy has enough smarts now to figure out how to travel by train, it’s something I should be able to manage.

Holly brought me her little wheeled suitcase later that night after she got off of work. Brought it right to my door. That’s the way things are in a small town.

It was red and had a lot of zippers. I wondered what I was supposed to put in all them zippered pockets.

“Now, you take care, Miss Doreen.” Holly gave a little wave after she’d sashayed back to her truck. Hers has a gun rack in it. I think it’s her daddy’s.

The next day, I gave Esther next door all my cat food so she could take care of my stray tomcat. She had seen the scars on that old tomcat and the bit-off ear and she looked doubtful. I told her he wouldn’t hurt her if she didn’t hurt him. I could hear the baby crying in the living room and Bobby Joe trying to sing it to sleep. That surprised me and I gave Bobby Joe points. He might grow up to be a decent father after all.

I walked down to the bank and paid all my utilities for the next two months. No telling how long I’ll be there, but paying that far ahead took about everything I had. Then I ironed and folded five housedresses and a couple slips into the suitcase plus one good dress for church. I put enough unmentionables in there to get me through a week and some ankle socks. It was funny how shabby everything looked inside of that new, pretty suitcase but I couldn’t help that.

I used the zippered pockets to store my plastic pink rollers, some Pepto-Bismol tablets, some Vicks Vapor Rub, a toothbrush and my extra eye glasses. I’ve never been a person who wore a lot of makeup, but just in case, I stuck in a tube of Red Sin I’d bought one day when I lost my mind in the Dollar Store and thought I might try to fancy myself up a little. Thoughts like that come over me from time to time and usually I ward them off—but that unused tube had been sitting there on my bureau for a couple years, so I figured maybe it would be a good item to put in one of them little zippered pockets. I’ve heard Texas women are kind of fancy.

Then I made me some peanut butter sandwiches, put some carrots and celery in a bag, and a whole new package of Juicy Fruit, found my Bible and handkerchief, stuck everything in my biggest purse and figured I was as ready as I was ever gonna get.

I watched the television set until long past my normal bed time of nine o’clock. I watched until ten o’clock. The time had come to turn off the lights, lock the doors and start walking. I took a big breath and steeled myself. The train would arrive in one hour.

It is only a fifteen minute walk to the blue bench in the little plastic train-waiting shed beside the tracks, but I like to get places plenty early.

I don’t usually go walking around after dark. South Shore is a nice, quiet town—but like most places these days, not nearly as safe as it used to be. I didn’t have to worry none after all, though. Bobby Joe had been watching for me, and the minute I left my house, he came out of his and said, “How about I carry that suitcase for you, Doreen?”

Someday Bobby Joe is gonna have a big old pot belly like his daddy, but right now, he still has all the muscle he had when he was playing football for the Greenup County Musketeers. Plus he can be as mean as a timber rattler when someone riles him or threatens someone he cares about. Bobby Joe ain’t as work-brickle as I’d like, but I surely did feel a lot safer with him by my side.

 

“That would be right nice, Bobby Joe.”

He didn’t just walk me to the train, he actually waited there beside me all protective-like until the engine came chuffing into town. Bobby Joe has his moments.

I jumped up and waved, but the train just kept going. I thought the engineer had gone and forgot me, but it started slowing down, then the brakes squealed, it came to a stop, and a porter popped out of a silver door. He sat a little yellow step-stool down on the ground and motioned for me to come on.

The train stood still, but it kept huffing and huffing, like it was getting impatient, and I nearly tripped trying to hurry. Bobby Joe grabbed me by my arm and kept me upright. He also handed my suitcase to the porter. The boy hadn’t used the wheels even once all this time. He just carried it by the handle like it weighed nothing at all. We grow some strong boys here in northern Kentucky.

“You take good care of Miss Doreen here,” Bobby Joe told the porter real stern-like. “She’s a special lady.”

Then those two young men, one white, one black, helped me up those step stairs. I have to admit, my legs were wobbly, and I needed the help. I had barely gotten to the top of them when the door whooshed closed and the train took off again. I grabbed hold of a handrail sticking out of the wall, and held on while I took a good look down that darkened, narrow aisle with seats on both sides. There was nothing I wanted to do right at that moment except to turn around and get right back down off that train! I didn’t know where to sit. I didn’t know what to do. It seemed like all I could manage was hang on to that hand hold like my life depended on it while the train swayed and shook beneath me.

Just then, the nice porter started talking to me in a calm, voice.

“Seat number 37, ma’am,” he said. “I think that would be a good place for you.”

I looked back over my shoulder wondering where Holly’s suitcase got to.

“Don’t worry, ma’am.” He said. “I’ve got your luggage. Just take it nice and slow and you’ll be fine. Your seat is about half-way down the car.”

The seats were filled with all kinds of people, most of ‘em asleep in miserable-looking positions. Some were light-skinned, some were dark-skinned, some even had those things I’ve heard called dreadlocks sticking out of their heads. The lights were dimmed so that everyone could sleep since it was nearly midnight.

It took me awhile, with the train rolling and pitching, before I got my sea legs and could walk half-way steady, but me and the porter made it to seat 37 and he lifted my suitcase into the overhead bin. There were even two little bitty white pillows sitting on the two empty seats he took me to.

“The rest rooms are back that way,” the porter said. “If you go past the restrooms and into the next car, there’s a snack bar. If you need anything, just ask.”

I had no intention of bothering the young man, but I thanked him and settled into the seat. The train was really chugging along now. It didn’t seem real to me that I was actually doing this, so I tried telling myself where I was going so I maybe I could believe it.

“Doreen,” I whispered. “Stop being scared. You are truly on a train going to San Antonio, Texas. People do things like this every day and they don’t think nothing about it.”

It was the first time I’d been more than fifty miles away from home since my class trip to New York City.

Eventually, the soft rocking of the train soothed my nerves, and I started calming down. Then I started getting sleepy. It was after midnight, after all, and my bedtime is nine o’clock, and I was just worn out from all the excitement. I looked over at that extra seat beside me and wondered if there was any kind of rule against laying down sideways and taking me a little nap. I peeked up over the back of my chair. The two seats behind me were empty, and a couple others were empty further back as well, but for the most part people were sprawled out all over the place. So I took those two little bitty pillows, fluffed them up the best I could, kind of laid over on my side, and the next thing I knew I was gone.

I woke up an hour later when the train came to a stop in Cincinnati. I sat up, rubbed my eyes, and watched a whole pack of people rush in. Every seat that wasn’t already taken had someone storing their suitcases above it. A girl shoved a beat-up duffle bag into the bin above my head, then sat down beside me and introduced herself as Angel. My naptime was over.

The name Angel would normally conjure up the image of a shy, quiet, angelic-looking young girl with blonde hair. This girl named Angel might have been shy and quiet for all I know, but she wasn’t blonde and she had felt the need to decorate herself with quite a few tattoos like every other young person in the world seems to be doing these days.

I felt like leaning over and saying, “Honey, those ain’t going to look so good when you’re all wrinkled up like Yours Truly.”

I didn’t say nothing, though. I figured it would be a good idea to keep quiet. It usually is. Someone that young, they think they won’t never get wrinkled up. I know this for a fact, because I thought the same way when I was young. Didn’t think I’d ever need eye-glasses, either. When you’re young, you tend to think that the only reason people get old is a lack of will power.

Still, the tattoos looked kind of pretty on her skin. If I was younger and my skin didn’t sag, I could probably go for a pretty rose or two. The thought made me smile. My mother would have skinned me alive and nailed my hide to the barn door if I’d ever even mentioned doing such a thing.

“Do you want your feet up?” Angel asked.

I didn’t have no idea what she meant, so she showed me how I could hit a little lever and a footstool flung up. Then she showed me how to touch another button, and how my seat could go back. It was almost as comfy as my recliner back home.

I thanked her and we talked for a few minutes. Both of us with our feet up, and our chairs back. She was a nice girl and I was starting to feel real good about taking this trip.

Angel was going to meet her husband, she said. He had a temporary job in Chicago, and she was going up to spend some time with him. She told me that she had a plan. She was going to take a couple pills and sleep until she got there so the time would go faster.

At my age, time going fast isn’t always a good thing, and I’d already had me a little nap—so I told her I was going to stay awake. That pretty much exhausted our conversation. After taking those two pills, Angel curled up in a little ball on the seat beside me and fell asleep a few minutes after the train chugged out of the station.

It wasn’t long before I noticed that the little puffy coat she tried to use to cover herself up with didn’t cover up much, poor thing. I was plenty warm so I took my old gray sweater off and covered her with it. She didn’t seem to be the kind of girl to take offense at small kindnesses. Besides, it was a little hard to concentrate on my trip with a dragon peeking out at me from her backside where her shirt had rid up.

I noticed that another girl had gotten on the train with a brand-new baby daughter. So help me, that baby didn’t look to be more than a couple weeks old. The girl tried to get a little sleep, but that baby kept needing a bottle or to be jostled around. It cried off and on, and every time it would make a little squawk, the guy with the dreadlocks who happened to be sleeping in the seat in front of me would rouse up, cuss the blue streak and then settle back and nod off again. The young girl would look over at him, like her feelings was hurt, and then go back to caring for her baby.

I felt like thumping that young man on his thick-head for being so rotten-tempered when it was obvious that poor mother was doing everything she could, but I was fairly certain that thumping a young man in dreadlocks was not a good idea when someone is seventy-one-years-old and wearing a housedress and orthopedic tennis shoes. If Bobby Joe had been sitting beside me, I might of tried it, though. Shoot, Bobby Joe might have thumped him, himself.

To my surprise, that wasn’t the only baby on our car. Three babies in little plastic carriers was lined up a couple seats up from me. They looked to be triplets about five months old. Pretty children. Rosy cheeked. That mother was all alone, too, but those were the best children. The rocking of the train kept them asleep—or maybe she’d doped them up on Benadryl.

Of course, I couldn’t help but wonder where the daddies were to all these babies, but that’s not something people’s supposed to talk about anymore. Where the daddies are, that is.

The swaying of the car made my sweater start to slide off Angel, so I covered her up again and was considering getting a little more shut-eye, when two men I hadn’t paid much attention to when they took the two seats in back of me at Cincinnati started talking to each other. I tried not to listen in too closely—that would be eavesdropping—but it’s hard not to hear words when someone is talking right behind you. That’s one thing that has not started going wrong with my body yet—my hearing.

“Do you think they followed us, Dad?” the younger man asked.

“No.” The father tried to whisper, but his voice was gravely and it carried. He sounded like someone who had smoked two packs of cigarettes every day of his life. “If they followed us, we’d be dead by now. That’s how those people operate. You don’t know it’s coming until it’s too late.”

“I wish you never got us into this.” The young man’s voice was strained. “I’m worried about Nancy and the kids.”

“They’ll be fine.” The father’s voice didn’t sound sure at all. “Stop worrying.”

“I hope you’re right.” The kid sounded doubtful.

“Wish I could have a smoke,” the father said. “It’s crazy not letting us smoke on the train.”

“I got one of the kid’s peppermint sticks in the food bag Nancy packed for me. Would that help?”

“Maybe.”

I heard the son rustling around in the bin above us, then the sound of cellophane being peeled off something. “Here.”

“Thanks,” the father said. “Now try to get some sleep. We’ll be in Chicago soon.”

Now I have to admit. That whole exchange jarred me. I strained to hear more, but that’s all they said.

I glanced at my watch with the big, illuminated dial. It was three o’clock in the morning and we’d been gone out of Cincinnati for quite awhile. The son must have been keeping still all this time until he thought everyone in the train would be asleep and he could talk.

My mind started working overtime trying to figure out what in the world those two had gotten themselves into. Then my bladder started to complain. I tried to ignore it, but there are some things that you just can’t ignore. It was time to start the trek back to the restroom the porter had told me about—even if I did have to crawl over Angel to get there.

I stood up, and tried to get out of my seat so I could get to the toilet, but it took me a long time to maneuver over Angel who was dead to the world. Of course this also gave me time to take a good, long look at the two men behind me. They were most definitely father and son. The father was starting to go bald, although that didn’t keep him from having his back hair done up in a ponytail. He wore a sort of green uniform, like the kind you see on a game warden or a forest ranger, except it wasn’t the whole uniform. It only looked like it might have been once, like he might have bought it at a thrift store or garage sale or something. The son was wearing a camouflage jacket and a red baseball cap. They both had what the commercials used to call “five o’clock shadows.” The two of them were kinda rough around the edges, except for one thing. Both had these cute little turned-up noses—the kind a person expects on a cheerleader instead of a grown man.

The dad was laid back in his seat, with a piece of peppermint stick sticking out of his mouth that he was a’sucking on and his eyes were closed. While I was trying to maneuver around Angel, he pulled the stick out for a second, licked his lips, and then stuck it back in. I noticed that the end of the peppermint stick was sucked down to a sharp point instead of being bit off. Guess he was trying to make it last as long as possible. Angel had already confided to me her need for a cigarette and the fact that she wouldn’t get to smoke one until we got to Chicago. That was another reason she was trying to sleep the trip away, she said, so she wouldn’t sit there craving a cigarette so much.

The boy—he looked to be about twenty or so—was laid back in his seat with ear plugs in that was attached to a little box laying on his chest. Esther has one of them things. I think she calls it an I-pod or an I-pad or something.

So anyway, I made it out of my seat and found the teeny-tiny restroom. It was no bigger than a broom closet. It took awhile to figure out how to lock the door and work everything. I managed to take care of business, although in the name of hygiene I did not sit all the way down. I usually don’t with public restrooms—too many germs. This toilet was a special challenge, though. That toilet seat moved with every turn the tracks made. It was a challenge trying to take aim while a toilet seat moves from side-to-side beneath you, but I did the best I could.

After washing my hands at the sink that was hardly any bigger than a soap dish, I decided to try my luck at the snack bar. It was through two doors that whooshed when I pressed on them. I realized that I’d just passed through one train coach to another and it kinda took my breath away.

The snack person was sitting on a little stool. “What can I get for you?” he said.

I’d given it some thought. I asked for a bottle of water and a candy bar. It came to four dollars, which I found excessive, so I did not contribute any money to the tip jar he had sitting on the counter. I figure he probably made a whole lot more than my social security check anyway. It wouldn’t take much to make more than me.

I kind of spraddle-legged my way all the way back to my seat, holding my balance against the sway of the train. Then I had to straddle Angel to climb over her again and get to my seat. Then I covered up that dragon on her back side again, settled down and took a bite of chocolate and a sip of cold water. I couldn’t have been prouder of myself if I’d scaled Mt. Everest.

Then it hit me. What I’d seen out of the corner of my eye while I was getting back into my seat. The boy was gone, and the father was laying kinda different and awful still.

With a scared feeling in the pit of my stomach, I turned around and peeked over the top of my seat. Sure enough the seat near the window—the one where the son had sat—was empty, and the one with the daddy in it was—well, let’s just say that the peppermint stick wasn’t sticking out of his mouth anymore.

It was a’sticking out of the side of his neck.

I’m not usually a screaming woman and I saw no reason to start screaming now. Instead, I swallowed down the bile that was trying to claw its way up out of my stomach, scrambled over Angel as quick as I could, side-stepped past the body and went on a search for the nice porter who had said to ask if there was anything he could do for me.

I most definitely had something he could do for me, and this time I didn’t mind asking.

It’s interesting, watching people try to pretend nothing has happened when something big has happened. The porter didn’t hardly know what to do about a man a’layin’ there dead with a peppermint stick a’sticking out of his neck and blood all over everything like some stuck pig. The lights were still low, and people were still sleeping all over the place.

“There was a young man with him a’calling him ‘Dad,’” I said. “Where’d he go?”

I was back in my seat where I’d had to crawl over Angel again to get to. The girl was so sound asleep I would have been worried about her being dead, too, if she hadn’t been snoring. I couldn’t help wondering what was in those pills to make her sleep so good.

“We’ll take care of this, ma’am.” The porter was polite as always, but he dismissed me like I didn’t have sense enough for him to even bother talking to. “Please just take your seat.”

Mama once said that there was nothing as invisible as an old woman and I’ve found her to be right. I knew I looked every year of my age and then some. My hair is snow white and Holly had given me a fuzzier perm than usual. I’ve never worried much about skin care. I just wash with soap and water and head back out into the sun to work in my garden. I’m spotted and speckled and wrinkled and exactly the kind of person a young porter would want to ignore. Problem was, I had no intention of that happening.

“Where’s the boy?” I ask again, louder. I know I talk with a Kentucky accent, which some people think sounds ignorant, but there’s nothing wrong with my mind. I know I didn’t dream up no second person in the seat beside of the dead man.

“Please, ma’am,” the porter says, and I could tell he was getting exasperated with me. He almost sounded like he was annoyed that I found a dead man and interrupted his coffee break—the one I found him having back at the snack bar.

There’s nothing I could do, so I sat down and hope that the boy with the red ball cap would come back from using the bathroom or taking a stroll or something, but that didn’t happen. What did happen was that the train made what the conductor called over the loudspeaker an “unscheduled stop.” He told everyone to stay in their seats, and then some police people from whatever town we’d stopped in came aboard to see about the dead man and the porter had to turn on the bright overhead lights, and that waked one of the triplets, and it started crying and that waked up the other babies and they started crying, and the louder they cried, the more they scared the others and before long we had four babies screaming their heads off in our train car, and the man in the dreadlocks rouses up and says, “What the…” (I can’t print the things he said but I learned a couple new words.)

In the middle of this Angel kinda roused from her coma and asks, “What’s going on?” And I pull my sweater back up over her and give her shoulder a pat and say “The police are here to take away a man with a peppermint stick a’sticking out his neck.”

Angel blinked a couple times, tried to fluff up the little pillow she was using—although those things don’t fluff much. Then she said, her voice all drowsy, “that’s nice,” and fell back to sleep. I made a mental note to find out what it was in those little pills she took. If they’re something that can be got in a drug store I’d like to get me some sometime. I don’t always sleep as good as I’d like.

Everyone except Angel was full awake, the whole car was watching wide-eyed as the police inspected the body—except I got a ring-side seat cause I’m turned completely around now, sitting on my knees, watching them do their thing with their rubber gloves on.

“Where’s his son?” I try again to make them notice that there oughta be another one sitting there.

No one took no mind of me except an older man in an old brown coat who came on board with them. He wasn’t dressed like a policeman at all and looked like he got out of bed in a hurry. He took note of me and said, “What do you mean?”

“He had a young man sitting beside him who called him Dad. He was laying there asleep when I got up to go to the toilet, and he was gone when I got back and he never showed up again.”

The man in the brown coat sidled past the others and planted himself in front of me. Well, Angel, too, but she wasn’t really much of a part of the conversation.

“Did you see or hear anything else?” he asks.

Finally. Someone acting like I maybe got the sense the good Lord gave me.

“I heard the kid say, ‘Do you think they followed us, Dad?’ And the father said, “No. If they did, we’d already be dead.”

The brown coat man’s eyes lit up. “Anything else?”

I repeated the entire conversation pretty much word for word. I have to admit. It was pretty much burnt into my mind.

“Anybody else see anything?” the man in the brown coat asked.

Nobody stepped up to say they had seen anything. It was just as I thought. Everyone had been pretty much asleep.

I was still worried about the boy in the red cap. He wasn’t a real big kid. Kinda scrawny-looking and short and he’d sounded really worried when he’d talked to his dad.

I added that to my conversation with the man in the brown coat. “I’m really worried about that boy,” I said. “He wasn’t very big. I’m afraid something has happened to him.”

The man in the brown coat was nice enough to look me straight in the eyes and agree with me. “I’m worried about him, too, ma’am. That’s why I have people already combing all over this train to see if we can find him.”

Well, that made me feel a little better. Finally someone was paying attention to the boy. The way I figured it, either he killed his own daddy—which meant he needed to be behind bars, or he had gotten cross-ways of those people he was scared of, or he was off somewhere else on the train not knowing his daddy was dead. Anyway you sliced it, he needed to be found.

As I stood there watching the police people do their thing, I noticed a large man sitting behind the murdered man’s seat. He was big in the way that those muscle-men get, not fat, and he was reading one of them hunting magazines that men like. He wasn’t paying as much attention to what was going on in front of him as I thought most people would be. His nonchalance seemed odd to me.

In the seat next to him, was a person who was obviously still sound asleep, all curled up in a blanket, like Angel was in my sweater. The only thing visible of the big man’s seatmate was his nose—a cute little turned-up thing. The kind that you’d expect to see on a cheerleader.

I felt one of them dizzy spells coming over me and I tried to fight it off. Especially when I saw that the big man was holding that magazine upside down. Then he glanced up, saw me looking at him with my mouth hanging open, and I knew that he knew that I knew.

My chest got to pounding and the dizzy spell got worse and I fell back into my seat and started fanning myself. If I’d thought I was feeling sickish over traveling on this train before I got on, it weren’t nothing compared to what I was feeling now.

The man in the brown coat noticed me trying to keep from passing out. He bent way over Angel, his face close to mine.

“Are you okay, ma’am?” he asked.

I emphatically shook my head “no.”

“Do you need a doctor?”

I shook my head “no” again and then jerked my head toward the back of the train and motioned with my thumb, trying to tell him that there was something BACK THERE that he needed to investigate AT ONCE!

He glanced at me, then at the big man.

The big man must have figured out something was up, because I heard this commotion back there, and some women started screaming, which set the babies off again—the poor little things had started to quiet down earlier.

“Stop him!” The man in the brown coat yelled.

I forgot all about being dizzy and stuck my head up over the seat again and I saw the man in the brown coat practically climbing over the police people’s backs to get past them—everything on the train was so narrow and crammed up. And the big man was lumbering through the train like he was a locomotive, knocking people this way and that. By the grace of God, the little babies were in the front of the car and weren’t in the way of any danger. The man in the dreadlocks gave up trying to sleep and just sat there looking at the ceiling shaking his head like he was having a conversation with himself over how bad he was being mistreated on this train trip.

The last I saw of the man in the brown coat, he was headed out the back of the coach with his coat tails flying going after that bad man. Several regular-dressed police people were right behind him.

As soon as the train people could, they uncoupled that train car and set it off to the side so the police could remove the bodies and I surely hope they cleaned those two seats good. They scattered the rest of us throughout the rest of the train wherever there was a seat and we made it back to Chicago a few hours later almost like nothing had happened. I never did see Angel again. We got put in separate cars. I hope she finally woke up long enough to say hello to her husband.

It seemed strange walking into that giant terminal in Chicago. Especially after all that had happened. I finally got to use the little wheels on Holly’s suitcase.

I didn’t know where to go or what to do again. Then a man driving around on a cart asked me if I was lost, and I said I was. After finding out what train I was going to be waiting for, he put me on the cart and drove me to a counter where they asked me my name. When I told them, the girl behind the counter said that she had a message for me. That the chief of police from some town in Indiana had called with some information for her to give me.

She said the doctors had been able to save the younger man who had been unconscious from the bad man nearly strangling him to death. They’d caught the murderer and he’d told them everything, and it had all had to do with drugs. Everything seems to have to do with drugs anymore, of course. The father in the forest warden clothing actually did work in the park service as a sort of custodian. He cleaned toilets and trails and such. He’d gotten mixed up in some stuff he’d had no business getting involved in.

Turns out that the parks we got in northern Kentucky makes a nice place to hide stuff if you know where to hide it, and he knew all the good places. Some of them have a whole lot of caves in them, and not all of them are well-known to the public. The father had dragged his boy into it with him cause the boy had a wife and two children and needed money. The two of them knew they were in trouble and were trying to get away. It turns out that the big man thought it would be funny to kill the father like he did, with nothing more than a sharp peppermint stick to the jugular vein. The boy, leaned so far back in that recliner, had been little effort for the muscle-man to strangle and then slide right off into the empty seat beside him and cover up. It was a deliberate killing meant to send a warning to others who might try to cheat the cartel who had been running the drugs.

It certainly sent a warning to me. I’d been thinking about asking Angel where she got those little pills that knocked her out—but I don’t think I want to know anymore.

I thanked the girl for all that information and went over and sat down at a seat she showed me to. It turned out the man in the cart had taken me to an old-fashioned lounge they reserved for important people, or those who had first-class accommodations. The girl behind the counter said I reminded her of her grandma, and then she went and got me some coffee and a doughnut. They had coffee and drinks and doughnuts set out in that lounge place for free.

The train people have been real nice to me. Since the man in the brown coat, who turned out to be a chief of police, contacted them about me, they decided a woman my age who had been through the trauma of discovering a dead body on their train, needed to go to San Antonio in more comfort, and since they had extra empty rooms anyway, they upgraded my coach ticket to first-class accommodations and that’s why I’m sitting here in my own little private room staring at the Texas landscape as it flies by.

These “roomettes,” as they call them, include three meals a day. I get to go to breakfast, lunch, and dinner in a real dining car with elegant settings and good food instead of that little-bitty snack bar. It feels like I’ve stepped back in time to a more gracious age than the one I’ve been living in. I’ve never done or had anything first class before. I’m a little ashamed to admit that I like it a lot.

During the day I got two nice recliners to sit in. I take turns looking toward the front, and then I switch seats and look out the back. It seems a waste to just use one chair. I found a paperback novel someone left behind that had gotten stuffed in the crack of a cushion. It had a picture of a man and woman on the cover hugging each other. I’ve always liked a good love-story, but there’s things in that book that would curl your hair, so I put it in the little trash bin I got in my room. After I finished it. I hope the porter won’t think it’s mine. I tried to skip over the curl-your-hair parts, but it was a good story and hard to put down. I’m thinking about reading extra chapters in the Bible to make up for it when I get to Ralph and Carla’s.

At night, a different porter than the one I had on the other train comes to turn the chairs into a bed. He makes it up with white sheets all fresh and clean. Then he brings me a new, cold bottle of water to get me through the night.

I’ve never flown in an airplane before, but I’ve read about how cramped and miserable people are on those flights, and I’m pretty sure I’d rather travel like this—even if it does take a lot longer. It ain’t like I got anything else important to do. It might be nice to see the topside of clouds sometime from a plane, but for my money, not much can beat watching out the window of a train. I had no earthly idea how big our country was. I’ll never forgive Ralph for permanently moving far, far away, but I think I’m starting to get an inkling why he wanted to see places and do things he couldn’t see or do if he lived forever in South Shore, Kentucky.

I sometimes wonder if I hadn’t taken so much time going to the toilet and snack bar if I might have somehow prevented what happened to that young man and his father. Maybe I could have started screaming or something. But I wasn’t there, and I didn’t, and there are just some things in life you have to let go of and leave in the Lord’s hands.

There’s one other thing about being given this little room that I like. In addition to a nice bed, comfortable seats, free meals, and control of my own thermostat—it has a sturdy lock on the door and I’m using it.

The food on this train is some of the fanciest and best I’ve ever eaten, but I can’t hardly wait to make some plain old bean soup and cornbread for Ralph and Carla. I think I’ve had quite enough adventure to last me these past three days.

They say that travel changes a person. I know for a fact now that is true. There is no doubt in my mind that I will never taste another peppermint stick again as long as I live.