Big Boy: Strangers on a Train Read online

  It’s a quaint museum, neither large nor small, funded entirely with donations, grants, admissions and membership fees. Sort of medium-impressive for a city of a hundred thousand people. Very Green Bay.

  I’d never been there before that night.

  The Aerotrain’s engine was a sleek bullet, but inside, the cars smelled of mouse nests and spent oil, and I had trouble pretending at first. I focused on the wedge of his back moving through the car in front of me. The way his hat sat over his ears.

  Lisa had cautioned me to be safe, to keep my hand on the pepper spray in my purse until I knew he was no psychopath. But as I watched him walk, he became just a guy on a train, and I wasn’t afraid of him. I was Florence from Pottsville, Pennsylvania, taking the Saturday special to visit my sick sister in Harrisburg. If I had butterflies in my stomach, they were only because I wasn’t accustomed to traveling, and because I didn’t normally have opportunities to meet such nice-looking men.

  His name was Philip. He took me up the steps in the dining car to sit where it was quieter, and he bought me coffee and pastry.

  It was an unimaginable relief to talk to him. For one stolen hour, I was somebody else. We swapped stories. Told jokes. We laughed a lot.

  When we finished drinking coffee that didn’t really exist, he escorted me back to my seat, his hand settled at the base of my spine. I would’ve let him kiss me goodbye, but he didn’t try.

  He waited another two months to kiss me.

  I think about him in the days between our dates. I figure out what I’m going to wear when I see him again, who I’ll be. The anticipation is so sweet, sometimes I wonder if it’ll make my teeth ache eventually, turn my stomach, and that will be that.

  We’ve been on nine dates in nine months.

  I didn’t sleep with him until the fifth date, and I might not have done it then, except it was wartime, and my sweetheart had died in the Eastern Theater. I’d decided not to waste any more opportunities. When he kissed me in the stateroom of General Eisenhower’s train, I pulled him down to the floor by the lapels and asked him to make me forget.

  For an hour after I left that night, I drove around in circles, an endless loop on the interstate. I kept touching my lips with my fingers, unable to think about anything but the way he’d felt inside me.

  I wonder if he has other women on other nights. Does his Thursday-night girl search for lipstick that’s just the right shade of red? Does she comb through the Internet to find lingerie appropriate to 1944?

  It’s possible. Nine months since we met, and he’s never taken down all those profiles on the dating site.

  I think sometimes he must be the director of the train museum, but he’s got a workman’s hands. He’s probably the janitor.

  I refuse to figure it out. I’m a scholar, a researcher by training. I could do it easily.

  I don’t want to.

  Instead, I commute the ten miles from my apartment to campus and look for him behind the wheel of every car I pass. He drives a Jetta, I think. He drives a pickup truck. An SUV. An ancient Oldsmobile.

  He’s told me nine different versions of his life story. One night, he was a feed salesman who loved the smell of the ocean. Another, he was a farm kid from Nebraska who’d worked his way through college. He’s an only child, sings a passable tenor, loves heights. He has a good pension coming to him. He’s Philip, Dexter, Rocky, Charlie, Slim.

  I know the way his hair curls at the nape of his neck. I know his body, the way he moves, the way a suit jacket hangs on his shoulders.

  When he moves inside me, I think I know what’s in his heart. But after I leave the museum, I remember it’s all a game. He’s a stranger. He’s nobody.

  Chapter Three

  “Have you met Tyler? He’s here with Soo Yun.”

  It takes me a minute to catch up with the conversation. I’m at a back-to-school-again party for work, talking to my department chair, Jon, and it’s too loud for me to concentrate. There are people everywhere, twinkling white lights wrapped around steel beams.

  The restaurant brewery is known for excellent food and creative cocktails, but I don’t like it here. The floor and walls are concrete, like a meat locker, and the air conditioning makes it feel like one. The ceilings are too tall. There are too many voices.

  “Hmm? No, I don’t think so.”

  “He works at the train museum. I think you’ll like him. Let me introduce you.”

  Jon is gone before I can answer, loping toward a man who has his back to us. A stranger named Tyler who wears blue jeans and a red cowboy shirt with white piping, and whose sandy-brown hair curls at the nape of his neck.

  I know him before he turns around, of course. I know him instantly.

  Jon leads him over by the elbow, makes the introduction, and then abandons us for the bar. I’d suspect him of matchmaking, only Jon isn’t that socially advanced. I think he threw the two of us together from a sense of occupational necessity.

  Tyler is the photo archivist at the train museum. I’m the newest Americanist at the university, a specialist in the intersections of US history, literature and culture. In a city as small as Green Bay, we’re supposed to know each other. He’s my peer.

  He’s my lover.

  He pretends not to recognize me.

  “So how do you like Green Bay?” he asks.

  “It’s nice,” I say. “I grew up in Oregon, so it’s pretty different.”

  “Did you go to grad school out there?”

  He’s holding a glass of beer and offering me just the right amount of polite attention for the situation. Standing close enough that we can converse easily, but not so close as to be inappropriate. He’s very adept at this. That, or he literally doesn’t recognize me—a horrifying thought.

  “No, in North Carolina, actually. NC State.”

  “Oh, yeah? I’ve never been to the South. Did you like it?”

  “Yeah, it was great. They have a real spring down there. The trees bloom and everything. It’s beautiful.”

  He smiles, and it’s like I’ve never seen him smile before. I’m an ordinary woman meeting a handsome man at a party. I’m a creature of whooshing blood and inconvenient perspiration. My conversational skills are severely impaired by how white his teeth are and how nicely his jeans hug his thighs.

  I want him to like me. I admire the pearl snaps on his shirt, which has to be vintage, and I want him to ask me out.

  “What about you, are you from here?” I ask.

  “Yeah, I grew up here.”

  “How’d you get into history?”

  He shrugs. “I always liked it. Seemed like a good fit, and I did an internship at Heritage Hill one semester in college and couldn’t resist the allure of the low pay and complete lack of respect that comes with museum work.”

  “I was the same way. As soon as I found out about the grad-school-debt to starting-salary ratio, I was like, Where do I sign up?”

  I give him half a smile, pushing my hair behind my ear and hoping he thinks I’m pretty. I’m wearing tall brown boots and tight, dark jeans, a cream sweater, a scarf. I look like a college professor at a faculty party. He looks like a really hot photo archivist who moonlights as a cowhand.

  I feel like we’re wearing another set of disguises, alluring and new, until Soo Yun comes up behind him and takes his elbow. Soo Yun, who teaches physics and has perfect skin and no children. Soo Yun, who rises to her tiptoes and whispers something in his ear.

  He smirks, and it’s not for me. It’s for her.

  He extends his hand. “We have to head out. It was nice meeting you.”

  The light scrape of his calluses over my palm makes me wet, a disgusting bit of Pavlovian biology.

  I liked him better when I didn’t know his name.

  The first thing Lisa says when I open the door to her is “He’s not cheating on you with Soo Yun.” She’s all lit up with the news, happy as an elf stuffing stockings.

  “It would be impossible for him to cheat on me. I’m
not his girlfriend.”

  She pushes past me into my apartment, unbuttoning her coat. After dropping it unceremoniously to the floor, she crouches down to say hello to Josh, who’s stumbled his way into the entryway, listing like a drunk.

  “How’s my best guy?” she asks him.

  “Eees!” It’s the closest he can come to “Lisa”. He lunges for her hoop earrings, but she blocks him.

  “Stick with the necklace, Joshie,” she says, guiding his hands to the leather lace around her neck. He finds the beads there and begins manipulating them with total absorption.

  “You’ve been out with him a bunch of times.” Lisa drops her voice to a whisper. “You’re sleeping with him. That makes you his girlfriend.”

  I roll my eyes and walk into the living room, and Lisa scoops Josh up and follows. When she sits down on the beige carpet beside me, he flings himself into my lap and begins humping his butt up and down like an inchworm.

  “What is he doing?” Lisa asks.

  “I don’t know, but he does it all the time lately.”

  He lifts his head and grins, then stands up and totters off, bent on destruction. I need to feed him lunch soon if I want to avoid a meltdown. After that, it’ll be time for his nap, and Lisa and I are going to work on my next date-night outfit.

  On Tuesday, I’ll meet Tyler in the engine compartment of the Big Boy. It’s the largest, most powerful steam locomotive ever built—I looked it up. I’m hoping the engine room is filthy and hot. I have a lot of filthy, hot ideas.

  “You understand that when I say ‘He’s not cheating on you,’ I mean that I asked Soo Yun, and she told me they’re not together?” Lisa asks.

  “Nooo,” I say slowly. “I didn’t understand that. Why would you do that?”

  “Because you like him.”

  I do. I like him. But it’s such a bad idea.

  “Don’t do that again.”

  “Why are you so weird about this guy? You don’t want me to ask around about him, you won’t admit you like him, and you only go out on these bizarre role-playing dates where you don’t tell him your last name or anything important about you.”

  “I don’t know.”

  I do know. I don’t want to explain it.

  “I googled him,” she says. “Want me to tell you what I found out?”

  “No.”

  “He went to college at—”

  “Shut up.” I stick my fingers in my ears, because I know she won’t.

  She doesn’t. I hear her say “Marquette” and then “Civil War”, and I have to start going “la-la-la-la-la” to drown her out.

  Josh finds this amusing, and he runs back over and spazz-tackles me, knocking me down on my back. He pulls up my shirt and puts his cheek on my belly. My stomach is his version of a security blanket, which can be embarrassing when we go out in public.

  I stroke his silky black hair. He looks like Paige’s husband, and I find that comforting. It would be harder if he looked like my sister.

  When Lisa’s mouth stops moving, I take my fingers out of my ears.

  “You should ask him out on a real date,” she tells me.

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because that would be changing the rules.”

  “That’s weak.”

  I know it is. But it’s more complicated than that, because when I met him, what I wanted from him was his ephemerality. I needed him to be a stranger on a train, to snap into existence when I got out of my car and snap back out of it when I walked away.

  For a while, he gave me exactly what I needed. Only, when I wasn’t paying attention, I started needing something different.

  I’m not sure what it is, exactly, but I don’t think I can get it from Tyler. He doesn’t know me. He doesn’t want to know me. When he saw me at the party, his eyes didn’t light up with recognition. His lips didn’t widen into a smile that said, There you are, at last. The real you.

  It was a game to him. It’s always been a game.

  And I knew that, of course. He put all those profiles on the dating site, his way of saying, Anybody want to play?

  I signed up. I agreed to his rules. I can hardly change them now.

  Josh gets up, trips, falls down. He lies still for a second, sprawled on the carpet, as if he’s not quite sure how he got there. Then he pushes himself up and grins at me, and a long strand of drool falls to the floor.

  Such a disgusting mess, babies.

  I pick him up and pat his diapered butt with affectionate vigor. He wriggles violently, craving freedom, so I set him on his feet and wait for him to find his balance before I let go.

  Tyler is deliciously filthy.

  He’s wearing colorless canvas pants, a half-unbuttoned work shirt with the sleeves rolled above his elbows. He’s got a bandana tied around his neck, sweat-stained and greasy, as though he’s been wearing it for endless days of backbreaking labor. He has some kind of cotton work cap on, striped blue and dingy gray.

  I can’t see his face, but there’s coal dust on his neck and a spot of grime on one ear.

  Part of me appreciates all the trouble he’s gone to. Where did he find coal dust? I imagine him breaking into the coal yards by the Fox River and climbing over the piles just for me. I see him leaning in toward a bathroom mirror somewhere, carefully examining his reflection as he smears theatrical crud on his lovely face.

  He’s the fireman tonight. The Big Boy consumes tons of coal on every journey over the Wasatch Range, and it’s his job to make sure the fuel gets to the engines and the fire stays stoked. An auger that’s at least twelve inches in diameter feeds the coal from the tender into the furnace, but it gets stuck. When I reached the top step and passed into the dark cavern of the engine room, he was muttering something about “fucking clinkers”, his face buried between the steel butterfly doors of the firebox.

  He has such a big wrench in his hand.

  He has such a great ass.

  I’m the engineer, I’ve decided. It’s historically improbable, but not unheard of. There were a few female engineers on the western railways. I’m dressed like I imagine Katharine Hepburn would be, or Meryl Streep in that one movie where she has the African coffee plantation: high-waisted flannel trousers with wide legs, a short-sleeved ivory blouse. I’ve swept my hair up and pinned it in place.

  I want to order him around. I intend to tell him to call me “Boss”. Maybe it will be payback for the way he made me feel at the party, I’m not sure. My plans are elaborate but incompatible. I’ve made so many over the past few weeks. I’ve had so many different kinds of feelings about him.

  It turns out not to matter. He suddenly turns around and drops the wrench to the floor of the car with a deafening metallic clatter that wipes my head clean of thoughts, and he stalks toward me with a leer on his lips.

  Angry, and not faking it.

  The sight makes my toes curl inside my sensible black boots. He’s normally so poised. I’ve never witnessed him lose control except during sex, when he’s balancing on the knife’s edge of an orgasm, his face lit with pleasurable agony.

  This is different. He’s just plain pissed off about something and incapable of hiding it. I’m seeing the real Tyler, undisguised. I’m embarrassed to say how instantaneously, shamefully wet that makes me. Just the way his mouth twists up with the force of his fury. The furrow between his eyebrows. God.

  I’ve been waiting, hoping something like this would happen. That he’d open up and give me access to himself. I want to know him better. Even the ugly parts. I want to know everything.

  He gets two fists full of silk at the collar of my blouse and rips it open with one effortless tug. I keep backing up, backing away, until I bump into the edge of the driver’s seat, which faces ahead, ready for forward motion that will never come.

  He’s never been so rough before.

  I’m not afraid of him, far from it. But menace is a presence in the car, joining all the rest of us—the real Tyler, the pretend one wh
ose shirt identifies him as Mack, the real me, the lady engineer, and this ribbon of violence, twisting through the air between us.

  So inexplicably, primally exciting.

  He doesn’t say a word, and that’s not like him either. He’s a talkative man, the kind of guy Mom would say has fallen in love with the sound of his own voice.

  Tonight, it’s just his grimy palm on the pale white of my bare breast. His hard cock grinding into the soft space between my thighs as he crushes me against the seat.

  The edge of the upholstery hits the small of my back all wrong. My knees are bent, I’m on tiptoe, and when he presses into me I lose my purchase on the floor.

  He brings his mouth close. That’s when he hesitates. One breath, his lips hovering. Two.

  “It’s okay,” I whisper. More than okay. I crave this dark, physical truth from him. His passion. His need. “I want you.”

  He crushes his lips to mine, ravenous. Rough hands fumble with his zipper, then with mine, but he can’t find it. It’s on the side. I help him, yanking it down, pushing my slacks to my ankles. He doesn’t bother to remove my peach tap pants with the lacy blue trim. He just shoves them out of the way and takes me, hard.

  I can’t keep my balance, so I cling to him. He drives into me, his eyes squeezed tight shut, and he’s shuddering, trembling with the motion of the train car. Thirty tons of coal. Six thousand horsepower. All that energy and mess.

  I hold on tight and think, This wasn’t part of the deal. He’s a catastrophe tonight, a broken man.

  I take him in. I want to put him back together.

  When he comes, I arch my back into the palm of his hand. My lips make the shape of his name.

  Not Mack. Tyler.

  He staggers from the car afterward, tucking his shirt in as he moves away. He didn’t use a condom. He always uses a condom.

  I’m on the pill. I ought to be afraid of disease, of disaster—of him—but I’m not. I’m afraid for him. He was a cad.

  He’s suffering, and I don’t know why.

  I hear his footfalls on the iron catwalk, then down the steps that connect the engine compartment to the ground fifteen feet below. He stops before he gets to the bottom. I imagine he’s sitting there, thinking, What the fuck just happened?