I was now on a train, a train to not exactly anywhere, I had bought my own caboose, two really, one for me and the wife and the other for the boys, my traveling companions, my partners, we sold our secret hot sauces at every train stop. People loved them, people waited for our chili train to return, they would stop working to visit with us, they would forget their children and chores, they say that the towns clocks would stop to give everyone a respite; I believe it, we make good chili salsa.
My wife, I better tell you about her now before I forget, she likes to clean a lot, she cleans all the time, these train carts get dirty a lot, they are dust collectors, as they move they pick up everything, from flies to traveling salesmen to lurid lovers, to secret agents, to dirty, dirty people, my wife cleans all the time; right now she is scrubbing the wooden floor, it will look pretty clean to me and to you after she is done, but not to her. I think she needs a kid, we don’t want to have children, or so we tell ourselves.
I am 62 now, the wife is 54, yeah I think she can still have children, but there are telling signs that we have endured and besides its just that on a train, well, what kind of life is that. We are always moving, I don’t know any other way to make a living than on this train, selling hot sauce, it’s a good ride, we don’t spend much money, we buy the ingredients at various ends of the continent and then while on the track we make it adding our secret touch, and there you have it, we circle the continent in an endless loop.
The train halts, the mountains cease to move backwards, the birds beat the train passing glances with an inching of pride, as the roaring of the diesel engines quiets into a loud humming perseverance of continuance. Diesel engines will run forever, something in them is bred for longevity, the workhorse of trade and industry are these engines, not those weaklings, maintenance heavy gasoline engines; our train is powered by a diesel and I always like to hear that roaring silence as silent as a diesel can get while we stop, the diesel keeps humming saying I am set to go on and on, it is not about speed, it is about endurance.
As our train eases into town you stop hearing the wind crossing from every direction, the squeaks and creaking noises disappear and instead you hear the children of Barington, a town full of life and yet of less than 8000 people, of which maybe thirty-five percent are children, we want to get them started early on our hot sauce train culture, and since they all love Emma, my wife, well that makes it all that much easier.
Emma comes to life when the children come up to her, they know she brings candy and trinkets from far away places that they will mostly never see, there are little plastic elephants smiling with their trunks way up in the air, and there are tigers made of wood which we pick up from a fellow in Obregon; a cold town with a hostile people with perhaps the best trinket maker in all of Asia, Stapho, or so he calls himself, I doubt he ever had a mother or a father but he was always a child and as such has always been his craft to make wooden lions and tigers and too many cobra snakes for my taste; still Obregon is a cold place, and there isn’t any heart there, the bandits are hardly welcoming though they eat our aji as raw chew for their teeth and we accept their money without questioning its origins; but we really enjoy Obregon because Stapho offers us his trinket craft, and his eyes get painfully happy when we tell him how the children, from far away places, react when we give them his trinkets. His brow lights up, you can see a fire sprinting from behind his old and dirty tunic, his bonny thorax heaves, and swirls of kisses reach us from his palms touching our faces in gratitude. This even as we don’t pay him but the bare minimum for it, Emma is a bargain shopper, she takes care of too many children and so she has to be careful with her spending, and besides that it would be rude to pay Stapho more than what the bandits pay him to make knifes of hardened tree stumps. It would be rude, or worse, unconscionable.
The kids love those toys, I keep some in our salsa kitchen, which is also where our bedroom is, they are soothing to the eye, like Stapho they are not looking for anything just a little appreciation perhaps, and that is not that hard to give to little creations of well crafted wood, with golden or green eyes, with dotted or striped bodies, and all in vivid primary colors, enchantingly simple.
Emma has a perfect memory of which kids she gave tigers to, or elephants or eagles and throughout the continent she remembers the names of each as if indeed they were all her children; which some would like to think themselves ours as dreams come to them of getting on our train and drifting off into those storied lands made up by Emma for them. These are not the lands we actually see, not those dry desserts, or those freezing mountains, nor the nutrient faulty lands, nor the hungry and poor folk that by far dominate our route, not the sting of cadavers occasionally badly disposed, not the disrobing hangings that happen along the way so as to warn the train travelers not to stop, no Emma leaves an imprint of a world full of marveling and merit, a world that everyone of the children will yearn to see until their elder years make them blind.
“No, no Yuri you already got a tiger, you show me your tiger or I will not give you anything, show it to me.”
Its sort of a game they play, she wont see Yuri for a few months to come and they just see each other long enough to argue that he would like to have two tigers while Emma would prefer that first all of the other children have tigers, and there are so many of them that we will subside before that happens.
But Yuri wants a second tiger, “My tiger madam is sad, very sad, he is lonely, he needs lady tiger to have children with and to marry and to get food for her.”
Emma looks askance “…get food for her?”
Yuri yells to make sure she hears above the roaring of the other children, “He is not eating he tells me he needs to be a father and a husband that he wants to hunt for someone else, he wants to feed his wife.”
Emma retains a small quiet because she wants to burst into laughter, but she holds back because she realizes that in some way Yuri is serious and serious in a way that could be painful to realize, she reconciles this and speaks in a gentle voice, “Well I think your green tiger better eat or there wont be much hope of him finding a wife, maybe on the next trip tiger lady will come with me, I will try to find her for you, but I cannot promise anything.”
With those words resonating in his mind, Yuri sort of despondently walks away and Emma calls him back, “Yuri.” He doesn’t turn around he is looking off at the distance, “Yuri!” He pauses and turns back, where Emma is right there to meet him hunkering down and hugging him, “You forgot your candy, its green like your tiger, its tiger food promise me you will eat it.”
Yuri retains his seriousness, “When will you return to us?”
“Oh it be a few months, maybe they will come faster,” she tries to hide the moisture in her eyes, “…you know the earth is shrinking Yuri, every year now the world is getting smaller, so we might return much sooner.”
He softens a little upon the news of a shrinking world. “I will eat the green candy then, but I will wait some days, just some days before I do.” And he grabbed the candy from her hands, pausing to feel with his eyes the pattern of her empty palm, as if a map of her whereabouts revealed itself to him, where he could be with her through some geography.
Emma watched Yuri fade into the sands of dry bush, she watched the skinny boy fading into the blades of grass, and from the station I was watching her; her long light grey skirt, picking up some sand, her white shirt reflecting the fragrance of the hot sun, her long burgundy-brown hair bundled into restraint, and still I kept on yelling that last sale. “Get your Aji now, wont be back for a while, get your Aji now, buy enough to last you till our next time…”
Only my words were drowning in the rubbing up sounds of a diesel engine roaring to go, the water tank was full, the conductor rang the air plummeting whistle three times fast, whole mechanics and hydraulics were throbbing through the dusty air, the children began to quiet in awe upon hearing the machine come to life; every time it was an amazing thing for them, they never got used to trains, they were other worldly, and we were other worldly too. Everyone started to clear out so as to make room for this huge black locomotive to engorge the scenery with its essence, even as it could not leave the tracks its immensity pounded itself throughout the surroundings engulfing everyone’s senses. Mirk, our conductor, felt all their attention laid upon him and this made him want to roar off even more, his kick was in arriving and in leaving, those two moments made him love his chu-chu train, in-between the stops and gos there was a lot of senile boredom.
When the train begun to rumble movement I realized that Emma was still hunkering down as if Yuri were still there, “Emma, Emma! The train, the train, we have to go. It is leaving Emma.”
My wife looked at me with her light blue eyes, without a word saying, “Yes I know darling, I am coming.”
And she did come, but first she had to swallow her insides whole.
RC
1 comment:
stunning, stunning, stunning
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