One-track Mind

Think of the following as three one-act plays with just one stage set—or short stories by a writer who was too lazy to describe new locales for them. Or maybe the writer just couldn’t get over the fact that trains are so damned suggestive (and not just in the clichéd cinematic euphemism of a train plowing into a tunnel as the music soars and the credits begin to scroll).

Each act is peopled with its own dramatis personae, but they appear together, briefly, in a little collection called, appropriately enough, Ephemera.

Trackside Triptych

Left

Tommy walks down the hill, pausing at the spot where his road crosses the railroad tracks. In one hand. he carries a fishing rod, and he has a bag slung crossways across his white t-shirt. The olive-green canvas bag contains a band-aid box of hooks, some split-shot, and a couple of corks. He doesn’t carry any bait. He can always find worms or grasshoppers near the stream.

He turns to the right at the crossing and starts down the tracks. A few steps in, he notices a used condom on the tracks. It puzzles him. Not what it is… he’s old enough to recognize the thing, even if he’s not yet had an opportunity to use one, himself. Still, he wonders how it got there.

Did someone toss the thing out of a passing car window when it slowed at the crossing?

Had an amorous couple coupled in a sleeper car on a train, and dropped it out a window? A window? Do sleeper berths even have windows? If not, did some guy walk down the car’s aisle to a lurching bathroom, a wet rubber dangling from two fingers of his outstretched hand? Were the rumors true, that toilets on the train emptied right onto the tracks—and that’s why you weren’t supposed to flush when the train was in the station?

Then there’s that curious word, “coupling.” He remembers that the Lionel train cars he’d had as a kid were attached to each other by something called “couplers.” Now that he thinks of it, there is something sexual in the description. The male part of each car’s coupler is inserted into the female part of the next car’s, where it is gripped tightly, no matter which way the train moves. He wonders if actual sex was like that; could something in a girl’s body grip and hold fast to a boy’s penis? Was there some kind of trick to getting lose? It worries him a little, but he suspects that he won’t have to face the problem for several years.

He lets it go.

Still fixated on couplers, Tommy pictures every car—and its occupants—in a frenzy of love-making, tossing from side-to-side, and bouncing up-and-down, to the clatter of steel wheels on uneven tracks. He looks up from his thoughts, realizing that he’s walked over a mile without even noticing where he was. He has already reached one of his favorite stopping points.

Off to the right of the tracks, dense blackberry bushes, thick with ripe berries, stood waiting for him. He pokes the tip of his fishing rod in, shaking it around, so that he doesn’t surprise any snakes that might be hiding there. Reaching into the bushes, he is careful to avoid brushing against the thousands of thorns that cover the stiff canes, or rubbing on the interwoven vines leaves of poison ivy. The poison ivy leaves are easy to spot; a late summer drought has turned most of them orange and red. He picks several handsful of plump berries—or that would have filled his hands if he wasn’t eating them as fast as he picked them.

His perpetual adolescent hunger temporarily diminished, and his musings about all things “coupling” forgotten, he hurries on to his favorite fishing spot. He has only a few hours before he is expected to be home in time for dinner. With any luck, he might have a couple of trout, dangling from a stick, to add to his mom’s menu.

Center

A young man, on leave from the army, stops his red and white convertible at a railroad crossing. He’s young enough to remember the horrible images from films they made him watch in his high school’s Drivers Ed class. There’s no way he would even consider stopping on railroad tracks. Still, he looks up and down the tracks. There’s nothing to see, just parallel rails disappearing in the distance. The tracks on the side facing the late afternoon sun shine golden, even as they merge into one glowing line that curves out of sight, half a mile away. Looking the other way, all he can see is a signal light for incoming trains.

It is not lit.

He loves driving the ’57 Chevy he’d restored as a teenager, but sometimes wishes the convertible had a functional radio. This is one of those times. Stopping at the crossing made him remember an old song, and now he can’t get it out of his head. Even when he was in school, he hated “Teen Angel;” nothing in the intervening years had done anything to improve his opinion of it. Again and again, the words, “That fateful night the car was stalled upon the railroad track… I pulled you out and we were safe, but you went running back” play in his head. With luck, even a staticky AM radio might replace the mawkish and maudlin lyrics that just kept repeating, like a terrible broken record.

He noted that even the obnoxious earworm afflicting him had revealed something positive: today’s teenagers have no idea what a skipping record sounded like. They don’t even know what a 45 looked like. So, progress—contrary to everything else he’d learned—is possible. It surprised him. He’d always prided himself on being a rational (if somewhat bitter) cynic, yet here he was, taking comfort in his recognition of something like this.

If he wasn’t careful, he might turn into a goddam pollyanna.

Looking down the tracks, which are completely empty, something else occurs to him. Depending on when you looked at them, they were either lifeless and silent, or—at the moment when a train rushed by—wild and dangerous. Since most people are unaware of the train’s schedules, there’s a terrible uncertainty about the whole thing. He remembers something someone had told him in boot camp: life in the army was one endless stretch of boredom, occasionally punctuated by abject terror. The train tracks were like that. Hell, life was like that.

He puts the Chevy in gear, and drives on up into town.

Right

Tanya is a sophomore in the small town’s college. It’s not her name but that’s what she’s called herself since her freshman year. She is dressed like an itinerant field hand, or maybe someone who slaves all day in front of some factory’s endlessly-pounding punch press (not that she knows what a punch press actually is). Her overalls nearly cover her work boots—work boots that never accompanied labor more demanding than trying to staying awake through a sociology lecture. Long brown hair flows halfway down the back of her faded blue chambray shirt. Over her shoulder, suspended from a multicolored Mexican strap, hangs an expensive Gibson.

She stops, peering into the distance, both ahead and behind her. She sits down on one of the rails, strumming her guitar, and tapping time on the coarse gravel between the ties. The scent of creosote rises in the warm autumn air. She begins to sing an old Leadbelly song, “All ah hates about linin’ track, these old boards ‘bout to break my back…” Before she gets to the chorus of the work song—“Ho boys, doncha’ line ‘em, jack-alack…”—she remembers that an awful lot of folk songs have been written about trains and their tracks. Off the top of her head, she begins singing one mournful tune after another.

She’s having a damned good time imagining, and empathizing with, the loneliness that must have inspired their creation.

Behind her back, across the tracks, a naked couple peers between the canes under some blackberry bushes. They had been lounging in post-coital euphoria when the traveling minstrel arrived. They recognize Tanya from their English Lit 301 class, but had never known she was an aspiring folksinger. At first, afraid that they will be discovered, in flagrante as it were, they don’t dare move. In time, they realize that—even if the girl turned their way—the bushes would conceal their nakedness. They decide to relax and enjoy their private hootenanny.

The minstrel finishes her set, stands, shakes the stiffness from her legs, and shoulders her Gibson. She begins the slow walk back, along the tracks, to the college. The couple in the bushes smile at each other in silence. Their secret boudoir hadn’t been discovered, and the afternoon had turned out even more magical than they could have imagined. They wait until well after Tanya’s back disappears around a bend, then dress themselves among the multi-colored berry bushes.

Late that night, back in their separate dorm rooms, they begin to itch.

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