The Passenger

Hank Lovett pulls himself into the train cab and sets on the floor the plastic shopping bag containing his two bologna and mayonnaise sandwiches, potato chips, and three cans of cream soda. Through the windshield the morning twilight glow begins to yellow. Each of his weekday mornings starts in Wilmington, his home, from where he runs the last leg down to D.C. before making a swing up to Newark and back down to Wilmington. The whole high-speed line from D.C. to Boston is a 456-mile stretch—parts of which Hank knows better than one would think a person could. He used to make the full trip to Boston and spend half his nights in cheap hotels, as per the 10-hour driving cap. Seven hours up one day and seven down the next. Now he has the half-shift because of Kate.

The train is already hot and running when Hank has to jump in. Driving the express isn’t how he’d imagined it when they first offered him the job. He’d fantasized there’d be a kind of peace one couldn’t find in local, midday transit: the passengers silent veterans accustomed to the long stretches of morning thought that come with intercity travel, and the shifts so early that whoever makes the world each morning wouldn’t be finished yet—still throwing down the last bit of track, spraying some dew onto the side window, attaching the final tree leaves. Instead, Hank wakes to a ready-made world, one already good and worn by the time he opens his eyes. The roads are always flush with taillights. John usually pulls in a few minutes past five, throwing a nod Hank’s way as he hops out. The cab is a vibrating, roaring box. With few switches and fewer knobs, operating a train is like being inside a predatory animal’s head: what little control one has is all that’s needed. It’s mostly instinct.

Hank sits in his chair, the fabric of which was once blue, but has grayed under many an engineer. At the conductors’ signals, he grips the acceleration lever with his right hand, pushes it forward, and the train lurches. The station falls back over his shoulder and the tracks vanish under the nose of the train. The track ahead winds past Christina River, the handful of glass-faced high-rises downtown, grocery stores with their lights just crackling awake. Cars wait on either side of the tracks on perpendicular streets. Hank passes the drivers too quickly to see their faces, but he imagines them sipping coffee, leaning over to their radios when talk-show hosts announce commercial breaks. Cars, Kate. Kate dropping him off at the station earlier. Kate crying into the remote last night when she couldn’t find the volume buttons, Kate hugging herself on the other side of the bed, Kate biting her lip as she presses the knife through Hank’s bologna sandwiches, Kate. She would just have to get over it, Hank decides. He’d been married to her for almost five years. Marriage made him feel older than 35, but he didn’t have much of a desire to be young. Young men were always coddling the Kates of this world, always asking what the fucking matter was, always dropping everything to help when there wasn’t really anything to be done. Each passing house marks another 50 feet further from her, and he begins to relax. He reaches to the back of his neck and rubs a knot in his muscle.

Before his parents died, Hank told them he’d never get married, never have kids. They were seated around the dinner table like ambassadors of countries on the brink of, at the very least, embargo. Hank’s dad had been an engineer, too, but the kind who would build trains, not “push a button.” Hank’s mom had taken to ordering products from the television and was perpetually shaking off the last thing her husband said. Hank ground his cigarette butt into the glass ashtray as he told them, and when he looked up, they didn’t say a word. His father rolled his eyes as he tipped back the last sip from a beer can.

Then he met Kate. She had brought some summer vacation film to be developed at the ShopRite by his apartment and was picking it up while Hank waited on line behind her. She drummed her fingernails on the counter, which meant she was a girl who wanted attention and Hank knew enough about that kind of girl to know he shouldn’t give her any. When the man handed her the photos, she peeled out a few to check them over. Hank saw they were beach photos, saw the black bikini, the smack of light across her thighs. He turned on the sweet and brought her home that night, thinking that’d be all there was to it. Keep it short, keep it honest. But she kept surfacing all over town—the bank, the auto-body shop, the movies— and he’d know it was her before she even turned, her straight blonde hair like a dim flame he could never snuff. At first, she’d pan over his face like she didn’t recognize him. They’d exchange pleasantries though she just as easily could’ve been making conversation with a stranger in a dentist’s waiting room—bored, with air to fill.

When they met on the platform weeks later, she was different. He had just stepped out of the cab and was leaning against the station house, lighting his post-shift cigarette, when he saw her emerge a few cars down. She ought to know he’d driven her there, that she was there because of him—on-time, in one piece, all that— so he cut through the crowd to meet her. She pointed to his uniform, smiling. She’d just returned from her sister’s wedding, she told him. They walked to the parking lot together as she recalled some of the uglier decorations, the cheesy speeches. But all those couples dancing had kicked up some old dust for her, and a few salutational mimosas that morning had her thinking she liked Hank’s persistence, his hard jaw. She asked him about driving the trains, and he told her that sometimes it’s so loud in there and you can hardly think. You’ve got to make decisions with a train-full of people behind you.

The suburbs start to thin out as the forests close in on the manicured lawns. This means they’re in Maryland. Hank increases the train’s speed to 75 miles per hour. He glances at his clock, timing his arrival in D.C., and cracks open a can of soda, places it in the cup holder one of the other conductors had duct-taped to the siding. Kate had always laughed at him for drinking cream soda. Something about him being a little kid. It was one of the few sodas without caffeine that didn’t taste like medicine. Caffeine made Hank “worry about things no one has business worrying about,” as his dad would say, usually in reference to his whereabouts on a given Saturday afternoon. His dad wasn’t sneaking anything; he just didn’t like people asking questions for the sake of it. Hank wonders what the world would be like if everyone only spoke when absolutely necessary. Or if everyone was only allotted so many words in a lifetime. Quiet, maybe. He sips his soda. Each house looks like the next: white with dark shutters, hackneyed landscaping, toys erupting out the doors and windows. Whoever invented children was crazy, Hank thinks, and smirks. Kids, Kate. Kate talking about babies, Kate waving a little plastic stick in the air, claiming it was God telling them what to do, Kate. You remember that thing about Eve? he had asked her the previous night. How God made her ‘cause Adam was lonely? she snapped. What did she know about God? God’s never liked kids. Have you ever seen a kid try to sit through church? Let me guess, she said, and then Hank stopped listening. There are whole cities without Kate in them. Whole countries.

The sun is up, but still low enough for Hank to need the headlights, though they could never be turned off. He never understood why trains had headlights. By the time anything turned up in that light, it would already be too late to stop for it. Something about seeing, knowing, even if you can’t stop—people need that, Hank thinks. The tracks plunge into thicker woods and now there is only the occasional house, the kind with built-in swimming pools and custom-made decks. Made for the kind of people who can afford the quiet—quiet besides the sound of the train, of course.

This part of the track used to have a lot of local stops that are out of service now. Their elevated wooden platforms and small station houses are still there. Most are covered in graffiti and littered with empty malt liquor bottles. Hank tries to think about driving the train straight down to Florida, or at least taking some weekend shifts. Whole cities, whole countries. He tries to think about Florida beaches but Kate won’t stop, even now. Kate on the Rehoboth beach boardwalk, Kate squinting in the sun of their back porch, strawberries seeds in her toothy smile. Kate, warm skin. Kate in jean shorts at the movies, goose bumps on her forearms. Kate’s voice from under the covers, Kate laughing Kate. No, how Eve ruined everything with her damn curiosity, he had said, speaking over her. She threw the test at him and it bounced off his chest. Some urine flecked his cheek.

The orange light cuts through the trees and the pebbles packed around the tracks glow like hot coals. Hank reaches into his bag for a bologna sandwich and frees it from the plastic wrap. He leans forward to take a bite but decides he isn’t hungry and throws it back down into the bag. He tries to focus on the houses. Once she talked about wanting to move out here. She was bent over the sink, her sleeves rolled. The damp tips of her hair clung to her chest. He liked the idea of a long winding, wooded driveway, all that fresh air. But he’d known why she said it; she wanted some Better Homes and Gardens bullshit, with the puppy and the bibs and the ottomans. He didn’t marry this Kate. I just think it’s time I use this body, she said, meekly, not looking at him. I use it all the time, he teased, waiting for her head to snap up, for the splash of water, the thrown sponge, anything. It never came.

The train follows the track in a hard curve to the right, which means the abandoned Kingston station is a mile or so ahead. Hank sees something upright on the platform. As the train gets closer, he sees the figure is naked, a naked person, a woman. She is waiting on the platform, unmoving. Red hair, down to her waist. Hank slows the train a little, his eyes hanging off her. She remains facing the train. He is only a couple hundred feet away now, and the train’s light further illuminates her body—soft pink nipples, hipbones, dark patch of hair between her legs. Kate stepping out of the shower, Kate beneath him, Kate’s open mouth. The woman is barefoot, a heap of clothing next to her feet. He is closing in on the platform. She begins to run toward the track. Hank screams, resists slamming his palm down onto the red mushroom button. She leaps out, into the train’s path. She collides with the windshield, her legs splayed, her head exploding in blood. Her body falls away to the side of the train. Hank pulls the lever back towards him hard.

They spot half a mile down from the Kingston platform. Hank is shaking. He isn’t allowed to leave the train, but he stumbles out of the cab and sprints down the track, alongside the passenger cars, their little ugly faces staring at him, pointing. How could he not have known? How could it have been anything else? He doesn’t realize he’s crying until it becomes too hard to breathe, and he has to slow down his run, rubbing the wet off his cheeks with his sleeves. The look on her face a split-second before the blood: the open mouth, the eyes wide. He loses his footing in the gravel. The open mouth. Her face and then the blood. Her open legs.

Hank sees her body near the edge of the woods, slumped over, almost fetal. Her cracked head is cradled in her legs. She has no face. Her skin, so luminescent on the platform, looks gray. He couldn’t be blamed for this. The emergency break could have derailed them. He’d been told not to use it. But how could he not have known? Hank trembles and drops to his knees, places his hands on the cold rocks. He hears himself sobbing, his body heaving. How could he? He wants to move her, touch her, but does nothing. He’d just stared at her on the platform and did nothing. Just saw her pale body against the black thicket of trees in all that orange light, her red hair. That is how to use a body, he had thought. The idea makes him feel sick now. He vomits but little comes of it. He untucks his uniform shirt and wipes his face; the buttons scrape his mouth. Her shoulders are matted with blood, as is the gravel around them. Goddammit. He grabs her hand, holds it.

— 2012