SEVEN REASONS by Katherine Karlin
1. Rage
Not the kind of rage that swells and bursts and leaves you ragged. Just the normal, everyday rage that expands and contracts with your pulse, that can be brought on simply by sitting in the dispatcher’s office with Pidgen, Stepple and Moroni and listening to Pidgen tell, for the twenty-third time, about the night he nearly ran out of gas on the I-95 South, and how he had no choice but to exit in a bad section of Wilmington and stop at a Chevron station where everyone, everyone – the other motorists, the girl behind the bulletproof Plexiglas, the panhandler stumbling around with a squeegee – was (here Pidgen passes a hand over his face to indicate they were black), and Stepple, whose lazy eye watches you even though he’s looking at Pidgen, whistles yet again in appreciation of Pidgen’s courage, and Stepple dribbles a wet tobacco leaf on his lip like a parsley garnish, and Pidgen again recites how he manfully ordered his wife to lock all the doors and seal the windows as he pumped gas, to save herself, if she needed to, and not to worry about him. And one more time Pidgen sighs, I was lucky to get out alive.
Or the heat you experience when you drive home listening to the sports radio station poll its listeners on the Greatest Sports Moment of all time and the winner is not the obvious (Jackie Robinson bunting in the seventh to bring home the winning run in his first game at Ebbets Field) or the second most obvious (Billie Jean King trouncing Bobby Riggs) or even the third most obvious (Ali. Foreman. Rumble in the Jungle) but the U.S. Olympic hockey team beating the Russians in 1980. Any world that crowns a hockey game as the Greatest Sports Moment of all time is a world that’s too depressing to live in.
Now my co-worker Sammy Bonavitacola, wearing his bright yellow slicker fastened with Velcro at the collar and open at the tails and flying behind him like a cape, strolls toward me on the catwalk, clanging a pipe wrench along the railing just to hear it ring. He isn’t five years old, by the way. He’s thirty-five. His yellow slicker is the only splash of color against the fall day: not quite raining, but not dry, either, and add to that the clouds of steam rising from the cooling towers beyond the railroad tracks, the patches of dead weeds, the rail ties drenched in creosote, the slate-colored tank cars lined up on each side of the walkway, and we’re working within a pretty narrow range of grays and blacks.
“Thought you might like some company,” he says.
I’m loading a railcar with liquid propane. Pipes, articulated like spider legs and coated with frost, run from the catwalk to the open hatch of the car. The last thing I want is Sammy Bonavitacola’s voice jamming up my brainwaves.
“Hey, look,” he says, pointing. “Some poor slob is coming down the track.”
We watch a figure to the south. But I think Sammy’s wrong. It’s not a person. It’s one of those person-shaped signals along the right-of-way. You’ve seen them from the coach window: round head, red and green lights like eyes and mouth, cross bar like arms. That’s what it looks like anyway. But I know where all the semaphores are, and this one is new, and seems to be approaching.
2. Opportunity
Hasn’t everyone who’s worked around railcars faced the temptation? That swift twelve-foot drop from hatch to ground. Of course the fall is complicated by the curve of the vessel. If you ride down, as you would on a playground slide, you land on your feet with a couple of broken ankles. Head first and you may end up like Christopher Reeve, minus the good looks and the Superman residuals.
But there are other methods. The safety valve, for example. Don’t open the vent line, and once the pressure tops four hundred psi the safety valve will rupture with a force that can shear your head from your neck. And you’ve got the tank car wheels, each taller than you are, and the smooth and silvery groove where the rim of the wheel hugs the rail. The cars are braked and chocked, of course. But release the brake, kick the chock out from under the arc of the wheel, and the car will roll. It may look as though it’s on flat ground, but it will roll and gather speed like a horse, and it will have the sense to head out the gate and back to the switching yard.
Especially if you are not the type to seek revenge, if you have no one to punish and would just as soon avoid the grand gesture, the Biblical language, the opera. If it’s simply a case of not being able to move from one minute to the next, the railroad provides a barrel of choices, any of which can look like a credible accident. Just pick one.
And if there are people who work along the railroad who haven’t thought of this, well, they’re just not thinking.
Sammy is playing with the gas sniffer, slung around his neck like a tourist’s camera, and he shakes the wand this way and that as if he were prospecting for gold.
“Hey, let’s see which of us is more toxic,” he suggests.
He unsnaps the fly of his coveralls and sticks the wand in his pants, squeezes his eyes shut, inflates his cheeks, and farts. The needle on the dial springs to eight on the scale, bordering the red zone.
“Can you top that?”
I let him stick the wand down my back. It tickles my spine, and when I feel the tip cool against the crack of my ass I let one rip.
“Sweet fucking Christ,” Sammy cries. “Ten on a scale of ten.” He pulls the wand out of my coveralls. It feels creepy, like getting an IV pulled out of my veins. “You are way too much woman for me. At least you got a marketable skill to fall back on if you decide to quit loading tank cars.” He wipes the wand with an oil rag and aims it south. “It’s definitely a dude.” He’s right: the semaphore has arms and legs. It carries a suitcase.
3. Futility
Check out this newspaper story. Single mom moves out of Wilmington, into the suburbs to raise her boy. Even though she’s working on the GM assembly line and has a second job delivering flowers out of a van, she reads to him, attends teacher-parent conferences, helps him with his homework, saves her pennies to send him to Catholic school. Kid plays basketball, gets good grades, wins a full scholarship to Penn. Goes out with some friends to celebrate the scholarship, cops pull over their car, spread the kid against the wall, kid starts mouthing off, cop shoots him in the head.
The point is, there’s no point to doing anything. Remember that the next time you go to the gym.
Sammy is babbling about a stripper he had yesterday in a room over Walt’s House of Calamari in Claymont, a woman whose talents, according to Sammy, include munching a banana without having to open her mouth. “A wonderful girl,” he says, “and still I couldn’t close the deal.”
I wait for Sammy to finish his sordid tale and leave. I got something I got to do.
“It’s a question of hygiene,” he says.
Sammy has a Prince Valiant haircut he’s much too old for. I suspect he dyes it. His bangs flatten with sweat beneath the vinyl band of his hard hat. He peers down the track. From the catwalk we can see all the way to Wilmington or to Chester, depending which way you turn.
“That guy’s coming this way. Look.”
A man in a beige suit, just discernible against the fog.
4. Fear
Not of heights: heights are easy. You couldn’t last one day on this job if you had a fear of heights. Same goes for a fear of being alone, of loud noise, of rats. But you should hear the ice cream truck that prowls these streets at night. No one seems to be driving; it skulks on its own between the empty warehouses and maintenance sheds, crawling around the industrial landscape where you wouldn’t spot a child within five miles. And that tinny melody coming from its speakers. Not a normal ice cream jingle, like “Pop Goes the Weasel” or “Für Elise.” No, this truck broadcasts “Bohemian Rhapsody,” as it might sound on a demented harpsichord. God only knows what’s festering in the bowels of its freezer compartment. Get off work after double overtime – two, three in the morning – and there it is, turning towards the river, its silver hasps catching the light of the flare stack.
“If I was by myself I’d think I was hallucinating,” Sammy says. The man in the beige suit is close enough that we can see something is not quite right. It’s not that he’s missing an arm or walking with a limp or that his jacket is buttoned wrong.
“That’s the problem with this job,” Sammy continues. “Too much time alone. When you’re up here loading these cars six or seven hours can go by and you don’t talk to a soul. It’s not healthy. Hey, do you do that thing where the cars talk back to you?”
I stare at him.
“You know, like each car’s got a personality,” he says. “For me they’re characters out of black and white movies. You know those Southern Pacific cars, the ones with the hatches that are really tough to crack, when you gotta get a four-foot wrench with an extension? I hear them talk like a gangster. I’m tellin’ ya, copper, you’ll never take me alive.” Sammy holds out his wrists and dangles his fingers like Cagney. “Or the white propane cars, the ones that are stiff at first, but once you give them a good yank the fitting comes off like butter?” He smoothes his hands over his hips and undulates. “All right, big boy, I guess you – unh – got me where you want me.”
Mae West.
“Then you got your Conrail cars, the new ones, which always behave when the others are acting up. I hear them as a guy with a little moustache and an English-type accent. Now see here, gentlemen: what seems to be the trouble?”
Potential Reason Number Eight: the people you work with appear to be insane.
5. Fatigue
Even if you can remember being a fairly energetic person, someone who jogged around the neighborhood as the storekeepers cranked open their awnings and hosed down the sidewalk, now there are whole hours when you cannot move a finger. Finish loading the tank cars and sit in the tool shed while the gray of the day turns to purple and then black. It’s all you can do to walk back to the locker room, peel off your coveralls, and step into the shower. And tomorrow you have to do the same thing. See Reason Number Three.
“It’s a hobo.” Sammy perches on the lower rung of the handrail to get a better look. “You don’t see that too much anymore. When we were kids we used to see them all the time. Railbirds. Sometimes one would come around the backyard and my mother would make him a sandwich.”
The hobo is even with us, on the tracks that Conrail shares with Amtrak – still a good thirty yards away and separated from us by the cyclone fence. He is sure-footed, accustomed to walking railroad tracks. And his suit isn’t so much beige as worn down to its batting. It must have been a good suit, once; he even wears a vest. And now that he’s close we can see what makes him look peculiar: he’s smiling. Then he does a funny thing. He stops walking, lowers his suitcase, opens it up and starts fishing around. It’s a cheap cardboard suitcase, and his belongings seem to consist of balled-up scraps of newspaper. He pulls something out and holds it in the air to inspect it.
“What’s he got there?” Sammy asks.
The hobo moves his hand with a flourish. The object open and closes.
“Scissors,” Sammy says.
As we watch, the hobo reaches behind his head, curving his arms with a dancer’s grace, then lifts a hank of hair and snips it. The clump of hair flies toward Wilmington. He snips again. Another chunk of hair is carried away on the breeze. Snip, snip, snip. When he is done he pats his scalp, feeling for tufts he may have missed.
Sammy takes off his hardhat and pushes his matted bangs from his forehead. “I could use a touch-up myself.”
6. Humiliation
The most underrated of emotions. All those Greek plays we had to read in high school, the ones about high crimes and the high sentiments that triggered them, they got it all wrong. Jealousy, desire, grief – they don’t compare to humiliation. Those other emotions eventually fade. But think back to your most embarrassing moment. Maybe it happened five years ago, maybe ten. Bet you anything it still has the power to make your heart rush and your face prickle and the back of your neck grow warm, as fresh as if it were yesterday. Maybe you went to the company picnic in a white sundress on what turned out to be the first day of your period, and while you were balancing your paper plate full of egg salad and pickled beets, a stain like a rose bloom spread from your crotch. Maybe you returned the flirtatious wave of a boy you hankered for, only to realize he was looking at the girl standing behind you. Maybe you once pleaded with a man to abandon his wife, your eyes running, your nose running, your voice choked with sobs. And maybe a year later you ran into the same man, after you’d told everyone you know how you would cut out your heart (pound chest for emphasis) to get him back, and you noticed that he uses phrases like “if you will,” that the lenses of his glasses are smudged with fingerprints, and that he has an odor on him like sour milk.
Humiliation is the king of passions. That’s why when people recount their worst anecdotes they always end up saying “I felt like dying.”
After the hobo cuts his hair, he packs up his scissors and his balls of paper, collecting a few shreds from the ground where they scattered, buckles up his suitcase and sets it along the rail tie. Then he jiggles it, testing its stability, and sits on top of it facing north towards Chester. He places his hands on his lap and leans into the draft, closing his eyes like a collie hanging its head out the car window.
“I guess he’s taking a rest,” Sammy says.
We feel the plate rumble beneath us and the valves clatter in their casings. Our bones vibrate. Sammy looks at his watch. “The two-thirteen freighter from Philly to Baltimore,” he says. “Right on time, too.”
7. Regret
Say you’re fourteen, and you’re making out with Gary Pilecki in your parents’ basement. And say Gary Pilecki is seventeen, and already has enough facial hair to grow a real three-day stubble, and you’re seeing that stubble closer than you’d ever dreamed of, and it’s scratching your face, and his hand grazes your breast, and pinches your nipple, and rests on the zipper of your jeans, and you think he’s going to put his fingers inside your pants, when your eight-year-old brother who has been playing upstairs discovers how to shift his transformer from robot to car, and he charges down the steps to show you, carrying his toy in front of him like a torch. Say, then, you jump up and scream, “Jesus, you are such a stupid idiot.” And the little brother’s face dissolves from pride to a whole blend of things, like surprise, hurt, love. Not anger. If there’d been anger you could live with it. And you remember this ten years later when the brother signs up for the army, even though military service is as far outside your family’s experience as contortionism. And again when he returns, his skin unbroken but what’s inside of it different, somehow, and now, when he drifts around North Carolina, operating carnival rides in the summer and poaching Christmas trees in the winter, getting blow jobs in the back rooms of pool halls, phoning you every few months and demanding six thousand dollars so he can go to Oregon and raise alpacas. And you remind yourself that, despite this turd of a life he leads, this is your brother, his body is the body you lifted out of the tub and swaddled with towels, the baby who wriggled his toes and said “Don’t forget my feets!” as you patted him dry.
The worst part is this: even as you gazed at that shiny face, all you could think about was whether you still had a shot at getting Gary Pilecki’s fingers inside your pants.
Actually, the worst part is this: given the right circumstances, you still have it in you to say it again.
Sammy says, “I hope he’s not on the wrong track. When that freighter comes, it comes fast.” He checks his watch again. Sammy’s yellow raincoat starts to billow in the headwind of the oncoming train. Then we hear the signal: two long toots followed by a short and a long, standard for an engine approaching a town. A few seconds later the headlight over the cowcatcher glitters to the north. “Here he comes.”
The hobo still leans forward. He opens his eyes and slaps his knees three times.
“Come on, champ,” Sammy mutters. He wants the hobo to jump off the track. Not me. I respect the tramp’s dedication. In fact I haven’t felt this alive in months.
The train signals again, only this time it’s three long blasts. Some one or thing on the track. My teeth chatter.
“Ten bucks he brakes,” Sammy says. The engineer is not supposed to brake. Everyone knows that. Even though the instinct kicks in hard and human, it’s an instinct he has to override. He can’t stop the train in time, and he runs the risk of a derailment: ninety cars packed with liquefied petroleum gas, tumbling off the track like toys. It takes a lot of training and experience and presence of mind, but once a jumper is in his sights, the engineer’s best choice is to comply with his wishes.
Beads of moisture from the cooling tower collect on our faces and start to freeze. The engine dwarfs the man on the suitcase. His heroism is dreadful. A lump turns in my stomach as if I swallowed a cough drop, and the space between the catwalk and the ground opens up beneath me like a trapdoor. I grab Sammy’s wrist and yell, “What are we supposed to do?”
“Nothing we can do.”
The hobo looks up at the engine and raises his right hand to his forehead in a military salute. Sammy returns the salute with his free hand. “Godspeed, pal.”
The hobo teeters back on his suitcase and crumples beneath the wheels. I look at the engineer in his cab. His jaw is open; he must be screaming. But to his credit he doesn’t brake. The draft slaps our faces and whips up the hem of Sammy’s slicker; the grommet hits my cheekbone.
“Good set of nerves,” Sammy says.
As the cars pass by I release his arm and turn away. “I don’t want to see.”
The last car recedes in the distance. We’re back to the usual noises: pumps running, the tank cars humming as they fill with product.
“Not much to see,” Sammy says. “No body parts or nothing. Just a bundle of clothes on the track.”
My knees buckle. I grab the railing on the way down and pretend I’m stooping.
“You okay?”
“I dropped something.” My legs won’t work. I sit on the metal plate of the catwalk.
“You sure you’re okay?”
“Just taking a seat.”
Sammy disappears into the tool shed. When he reappears he says, “I called dispatch. They’re gonna notify the rail cops.”
He sits next to me on the floor. We prop our backs against the handrail and stick our legs out in front of us. The catwalk is so narrow the soles of his Red Wings tap against the kick guard. “Tic Tac?” He pulls a box from his breast pocket and rattles it. Then he pours a few green ones into my hand. They don’t have much of a flavor, but put enough of them in your mouth at once and you can detect a trace of mint. It’s something, I guess.
Katherine Karlin’s short stories have appeared in ZYZZYVA, North American Review, Other Voices, and The Pushcart Prize anthology.