TrainWrite

A Train to Somewhere

Poppa took me on my first train ride when he thought I was going soft. I was fourteen years old and hadn’t scored with a girl yet, and he had this inkling I didn’t want to.

“Every real man has taken a train ride,” he told me when we pulled in to the train station’s parking lot.

“Can’t we just drive there?” I asked even though I wasn’t really sure where there was.

“This nation was built by trains,” he said. “Didn’t you learn about John Henry and all the railroad men in school?”

I shrugged. I’d heard it. There’d been something in one of our history books about all that. But it never really struck a chord with me. Learning about guys building stuff wasn’t my thing.

Poppa had some grand ideas about me wearing a conductor’s hat and shoveling some coal into the furnace. Truth is that he probably hadn’t ridden a train in his life, at least not in the last century. His idea of trains was clouded in smog.

We walked to the ticket booth without any luggage. “Real men just travel. We don’t worry about packing stuff.” His walk was more of a march with me dragging my feet in the rear. “Pick up your feet when you walk,” he finally told me when we entered the line.

He hadn’t been the same since Mom died three years back. He didn’t have the heart to replace her, but deep down he thought that not having a woman himself was having a negative impact on me. It really didn’t. I was who I was, and no woman or train ride was going to do anything about that.

“Two tickets to Kansas City,” he said. “We’d like VIP seats if you’ve got ‘em. I want my son to meet the conductor and work some shifts in the engine room.” He ruffled my hair when he said it even though I was far too old to have my hair ruffled.

“We don’t have anything like that,” the lady at the ticket window said. “But I can get you two tickets to Kansas City. The train leaves in twenty minutes. You can board right away. $90 total.”

Poppa frowned as he handed her his credit card. I could tell he was secretly thinking of ways to get me into the engineer’s room.

When the lady handed the tickets to Poppa he practically snatched them out of her hand. He didn’t even respond when she told him to enjoy the ride.

“They just don’t make women like your mother anymore,” he mumbled to the sidewalk as he stormed to the train. I tried to pick up my feet when I walked, but it took too much effort so I fell quite a bit behind him.

He waited for me on the platform and asked where I wanted to sit. I told him that anywhere was fine, so he took me to a car near the front. “Real men sit in the front,” he said. “Now park yourself by that window and watch history unfold as we roll through the country.”

I sat by the window just like he told me, and within ten minutes of the bobbing of the train I was asleep. He poked me and told me to sit up and look at the magic. I glanced out the window and saw a bunch of farmland and drifted back to sleep.

When I woke up, the train was stopped in what seemed to be the middle of nowhere. Poppa had left his seat and I rubbed my eyes while I tried to figure out what time it was and where we were. After a few minutes of sitting by myself on a stationary train I decided to have a walk around and see what this mode of transportation had to offer. Really, I just had to go to the bathroom, but I might as well explore while I had the chance.

After wandering around the train and finding nothing special, I asked a pretty train attendant where the bathroom was. She smiled at me and said she’d show me. She was nice and smelled like daffodils. She would’ve been a perfect woman for Poppa.

“Thank you,” I said to her when she showed me the bathroom.

“You’re welcome. Have a good ride,” she said with a big flowery smile.

I vowed that I would tell Poppa about her.

When I got back to my seat, Poppa still wasn’t there, so I curled up under a blanket and went back to sleep. When I woke up again we were in Kansas City and Poppa told me that we were going to go see a ball game. I liked the sound of that.

It wasn’t until the fifth inning that I remembered the pretty train attendant. I was about to tell Poppa about her when someone hit a homerun. We all stood up and cheered like crazy and Poppa forgot all about how I was going soft. I gave him a high five and thanked him for the trip. He shrugged and said that’s just what dads did. When we sat back down I hoped that the train attendant would be on the ride back, but deep down I knew I’d never see her again.

Nathaniel Tower writes fiction, teaches English, and manages the online lit magazine Bartleby Snopes. His short fiction has appeared in over 100 online and print magazines and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. His story “The Oaten Hands” was named one of 190 notable stories by storySouth’s Million Writers Award in 2009. His first novel, A Reason To Kill, was released in July 2011 through MuseItUp Publishing.