5
“You sure you don’t
want to do anything? You already paid, you know.”
“I just want to lie
here.”
“In the
darkness?”
“Yes.”
“Till it’s time for
your train?”
“Yes.”
Liz said, “You seem
very different from last night.”
He said
nothing.
“I’m sorry about your
uncle.”
“I know.”
She paused. “I’d like
to kiss you, James.”
He said
nothing.
“I’d like to kiss you
like a friend, James. Like somebody who cares about you very
much.”
She kissed him. He
held her there a long time. He liked the warmth of her body against
his. In the room next door a man laughed and his whore
giggled.
“You shouldn’t stay
here a lot longer,” James said.
“I been thinking that
myself lately.”
“Do you s’pose you’ll
really do it? Get out of here, I mean?” She said, “I sure like to
think so, James. I sure like to think so.”
***
The train was a
Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul. A Short Line with Pullman
sleepers and a long dining car.
James got a seat and
the train rumbled away and was then hurtling through the vast
prairie night. The rain had stopped and there was a hazy moon out
now, casting silver on the cornfields and wheatfields and the cows
in silhouette on the distant hills.
And James sat there
alone, no longer James, not the old James anyway, but somebody else
now, somebody he was not even sure he liked at all.