“Railroad Train to Heaven”, Part 132: falling

Our previous episode of this Kresge’s 5 & 10 Award-nominated memoir left our hero Arnold Schnabel walking hand in hand with the disturbingly animated Victorian doll Clarissa, on this eventful August evening in 1963, on quiet and leafy Lyle Lane, in the slightly decrepit seaside town of Cape May, New Jersey...

Her hand was soft and warm but she had a strong grip. Every few steps or so she would lift her feet off the pavement and let me carry her along.

“Just like flying!” she said, holding up her free arm. “I’m not too heavy, am I?”

“No,” I said.

She added her right hand to the left one that was already holding my right hand, and she did a chin-up, turning to look up at me.

“You seem awfully calm about my antics, Arnold. Most men would toss me into the nearest bush and run screaming. Why are you so nonchalant?”

“It’s all in a day’s work for me,” I said.

“I knew it! You’re special!”

“That’s one way of putting it,” I said.

“Can you lift me higher?”

I lifted her up a bit more, so that her face was almost at a level with mine.

“Lift me higher, Arnold!”

I stretched my arm all the way up.

She swung back and forth, kicking her legs.

“Higher!” she said.

“That’s as high as I can go,” I said.

“Oh, we can go much higher!” Keeping a grip on my hand with her left hand, she let go with her other hand and stretched her arm up into the air. “Hold tight now!”

And all at once it was not me lifting her but she lifting me, pulling me up off the pavement, swerving out over the street and up past the thick leaves of an old elm tree, beyond the dappled pools of light from the street lamps and up perhaps a hundred feet or so.

“Which direction shall we go in, Arnold?”

“Your choice,” I said. (Perhaps I should mention here that I still held her grey cardboard box under my left arm.) “But let’s make it quick. I really have to get back to my friends.”

“To the ocean then?”

“Okay, a quick run to the ocean, then right back.”

“Splendid!”

We flew over the rooftops, past Washington Street, Carpenter’s Lane, Hughes Street, no one looked up, and so no one noticed man and small child flying above their heads, and on we sailed past Columbia Avenue and Beach Avenue and over the promenade flowing with strolling people, over the slivery beach and the ebbing and flowing surf and on about a hundred yards or so out over the gently undulating dark and gleaming ocean.

Clarissa then zoomed straight up for a couple of minutes until we were perhaps three or four hundred yards above the sea. Her dark curls floated around her head as if she were underwater. She continued to hold me up by my right arm, gripping my hand in her small but powerful fist.

“Right, now kick your feet, Arnold,” she said, “as if you were treading water. Like this.”

By the thrashing of the folds of her dress I could see she was rhythmically working her small legs, almost as if she were riding a tricycle. I did the same, and now we were holding our height at a steady level, looking down at the glowing and sparkling town.

“It looks very beautiful from up here, doesn’t it, Arnold?”

“Yes, it does,” I admitted. The air was cool and fresh up here, smelling faintly of the ocean. “Can we go back now?”

“In a minute. I want you to try letting go of my hand. Don’t worry, I’ll catch you if you fall.”

“I don’t know,” I said.

I suppose I shouldn’t have been afraid. Hadn’t I just flown into outer space an hour or so ago? Or had that only been a dream?

Perhaps this was a dream also.

If this were indeed a fantasy, then I had no reason to fear falling.

On the other hand, if this were real, then why not let go of her hand? What was the worse that could happen?

“All right,” I said. “I’ll give it a try.”

“Oh good, now, when I let go, just sort of wave your arms up and down, just as if you were doggy-paddling in the ocean, like so.” She demonstrated with her free right arm.”

“You forget I’m holding this box.”

“Just wave with your one arm then. It’s only to keep you steady in one place.”

“Okay.”

“And keep kicking your legs. That’s key.”

“Okay.”

“Legs up and down, and sort of steady yourself with your right arm, in a paddling motion.”

“Got it,” I said.

“All right. Leave go now.”

I let go of her hand, she let go of my hand, I continued to kick my feet, I started to wave my arms downwards, and I dropped like a stone, straight down toward the ocean like a sack of potatoes.

In the next few seconds as I plummeted I experienced that which I hadn’t had time to experience in my two earlier near-death experiences that day* (or was it three?**), namely a vision of my entire absurd life from my earliest memories to the present moment, all of it, the grey childhood, the boring and sometimes dangerous (but somehow boringly dangerous) work on the railroad, the tedium and ennui of the army, the return to home and work, all the hours wasted in church, the innumerable evenings spent quietly obliviating myself in taverns, the hundreds of hours of dull conversations with my fellow humans, not forgetting the private world of my poems, my poems so dogged in their endless mediocrity, and then my insanity, and my alleged partial recovery, my grudging hejira to Cape May and my meeting Elektra and finally starting to live at the age of forty-two, my new friends, Jesus, my travels into other times and other lives, all of it now about to end thanks to this dubious doll and my own naiveté.

All in all at least I was able to say to myself now what I could not truly have said before this summer, to wit, it was worth it, my life that is, and I was sad to be leaving it, which was another thing I could not truly have said before this summer.

For some reason I still held onto that cardboard box, don’t ask me why.

But then just as I was about to crash into the water back-first the doll Clarissa swooped me up in her arms and carried me skimming along the crests of the waves and then up high into the dark air again. I couldn’t believe her strength, but there it was.

“Well, Arnold, I suppose you’re not so special after all,” she said into my ear.

And I supposed she was right.

****

*See Episodes 82 and 83.

** See Episode 126.


(Continued here. Please refer to the right hand side of this page to find a purportedly up-to-date index of links to all other recovered chapters of Arnold Schnabel’s Railroad Train to Heaven™; imprimi potest, Msgr. Francis X. “Frank” Fahey, S.J., Censor Librorum.)

“A Town Called Disdain”, Episode 126: wasted

Our previous episode of this critically-acclaimed* epic found our heroes (plus Brad, who may be a hero in his own way) successfully escaped from the flying saucer just before it sank forever into the atomic sink hole, only to confront, emerging from the swirling dust, the bloodied but unbowed Moloch, armed with a sub-machine gun, on this fateful night in September of 1969, in the wasted desert some several miles beyond the outskirts of a town called Disdain...

*”Larry Winchester is the Homer of our age, and A Town Called Disdain is both our Iliad and our Odyssey.” -- Harold Bloom

“You,” said Moloch, and, Sten gun pointed at Dick, he limped closer, his broken leg making a revolting crunching sound with each step.

“Now, let’s not go off half-cocked here, pal,” said Dick. He tossed away his cigarette.

“You,” said Moloch again.

Repetitive motherfucker, thought Dick.

“You.”

Daphne grabbed Dick’s right biceps with both hands. He really wished she wouldn’t do that. He was armed to the teeth of course, revolvers in both jacket side pockets, his Browning stuck in his belt, but the problem was getting one of these out and shooting this idiot before getting shot oneself.

Moloch stopped about ten feet away from their little group. The Sten remained pointed at Dick.

“Fucking hell,” said Brad.

“Shit,” said Harvey.

“Who’s this joker?” said Buddy.

“Zip it, Buddy,” said Mac.

“Yes,” said Moloch. “Zip it, Buddy.”

“So consider me zipped,” said Buddy.

“You,” said Moloch to Dick. “Do you remember -- Songjin? a certain joint British/American commando raid?”*

“Songjin?” said Dick. “Um, sure. Sure I do.”

“And do you remember a certain thin, perhaps to your American perceptions slightly effeminate, British marine subaltern?”

The shock of recognition, through the chaos of more than sixteen years, of the clean-cut earnest young officer in Korea and this bearded, one-eyed, bloody-faced, shambling leather-clad evil wreck before him now.

“No,” said Dick.

“Yes,” said Moloch. His normally euphonious if raspy voice was now rather nasal because of his broken nose, which still sputtered and bubbled fitfully with thick blood. “Oh yes,” he repeated.

“Jesus fuck,” said Dick. “What’s your name again?”

“I am called Moloch.”

“No,” said Dick. “Your real name. Nigel? Ian? Vyvyan?”

“Moloch will do, thank you very much.”

“So,” said Dick, “we’re like -- comrades-in-arms and all.”

“Oh please.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that I despise you.”

“What?” said Dick. “’Cause I shot your friend the other day? Come on, pal, as I recall it he was coming at me with a goddam blackjack.”**

“I don’t care a fuck about him. I don’t even care that you and your associates have just smeared my gang into the dust with what appears to be a flying saucer.”

“Well, uh, Moloch, I assure you that that was not intentional. You see, we lost control of the ship and --”

“I just told you I don’t give a fuck about that.”

“Oh. Good.”

“What I care about is you. You. You fucking hero,” said Moloch. “You know, Songjin was my first combat mission. And my last real one, actually. My one chance to prove myself. And I never even got to fire a shot. Whereas you got to be the big Yank hero.”

“What a lot of horse shit,” said Dick.

“And then,” continued Moloch, “just to add insult to injury, you -- you turn up years later, and -- and --”

“And what?”

“And embarrass me in front of my men.”

Dick paused a moment.

“What an incredible load of horse shit,” he said.

“I’ll show you what horse shit is,” said Moloch.

“Now wait a minute, fella.”

“No. I won’t.”

“Look,” said Dick. He was trying unsuccessfully to pry Daphne’s fingers off of his arm. “Moloch, a couple of months of therapy with a good shrink, you’ll be over the whole deal.”

“I have a better idea. I’m going to kill you. Now. And then I’ll kill your friends. I think that would be jolly good therapy. I think that would be jolly good therapy indeed.”

As Moloch spoke Dick was deciding to dive sharply forward and to the left, and, hoping that Daphne would let go of his arm, to pull out the Browning with his right hand, and, provided he was still alive, to squeeze off a few as soon as he hit the ground, all the time knowing that he had a snowball's chance in hell unless of course Moloch’s Sten should jam -- when the oddest thing happened.

A baseball came out of the sky and struck Moloch in the head, ripping a great gash in his skull above his right ear and down he dropped like a sack of shit as the ball rolled along the ground, teetered on the edge of the sink hole, then dropped in and disappeared.***

Well, so much for that, Moloch was able to think. He thought he had been shot, who knew by whom. It didn’t matter now. Some fucker. He looked up at the stars and noticed they were beautiful. So what.

And now I’ll be extinct, he thought. And about fucking time.

And so as flights of demons sang him to his rest he felt his chi hissing out of the hole in his head like air from a punctured tire and then the voices faded out and he felt himself fading out.

All right then, fuck you, he thought.

Fuck

you

Jack

I’m

all

right.

****

* See Episode 34.

**See Episode 13.

*** See Episode 78.

(Continued here and until the last loose plot strand is sorted. Meanwhile, please feel free to look to the right hand side of this page for a possibly up-to-date listing of all other published episodes of Larry Winchester’s A Town Called Disdain™, available absolutely free for a limited time only (offer void where prohibited).)

“Railroad Train to Heaven”, Part 131: Mrs. Davenport...and little Clarissa

Let us rejoin Arnold Schnabel (“...that Walt Whitman of the age of anxiety” -- Harold Bloom), in the quaint seaside town of Cape May, New Jersey, on a warm night in August of 1963...

(Go here to see our previous chapter, or here for the first chapter of this third-place prize-winner of the Catholic Standard & Times Award for Confessional Literature.)

“Mr. Jones?” said a woman, and Mr. Jones’s shoulders flinched again.

His interlocutor was a lady behind the screen door of the entranceway. Mr. Jones swiveled deftly about to face her, almost falling down as he did so. I reached forward with my left hand and grabbed his upper left arm.

The woman pushed the door open.

“Ah, Mrs. Davenport,” he said, “Looking lovelier than ever.”

She stood there with her shoulder holding the door open, her arms folded, and she looked from Mr. Jones to me. She was about forty or so, slender, wearing shorts and a flowered sleeveless top. Her hair was red, and wavy, almost curly.

“Who’s your friend, Mr. Jones?” she asked.

“Arnold,” said Mr. Jones. “He was nice enough to walk me home. Chivalry is not quite dead.”

It seemed to me that Mrs. Davenport was looking at me suspiciously, or at least warily.

Then Mr. Jones collapsed, again, falling back against me. I still had the doll box under my right arm, so I continued to hold him up awkwardly with my left hand gripping his upper left arm.

“Oh no,” said Mrs. Davenport, and she came down the two or three steps to us, the screen door closing behind her.

“Can you take this box?” I said.

“All right.”

She took the box, and I was now able to get my right arm around Mr. Jones.

“Sorry,” I said. “I just met him on the street, and I thought I’d better get him home.”

“That was nice of you,” she said. “Do you mind helping me get him to his room?”


“Not at all,” I said.

She went ahead up the steps and held the door open. I lugged him up through the doorway.

“He’s on the third floor?” I asked.

“He told you that?”

“Yes.”

“No, he’s no longer on the third floor. I couldn’t have him climbing those stairs drunk every night. He’s got the first room on the left in here.”

I dragged him into the hall, I was holding him up with both arms around his chest. His straw hat fell off.

“I’ll get his hat,” said Mrs. Davenport, and she did so. “Here, let me get the door.”

The door was unlocked, she opened it, flicked on an overhead light.

“Bring him in.”

It was a small neat room, with a small brass bed. I laid Mr. Jones down on it.

Mrs. Davenport put the hat on the bedpost. She handed me back the doll box, then she slipped off Mr. Jones's shoes, cordovan loafers, and laid them side by side on the rug next to the bed. Then she came up and removed Mr. Jones’s glasses, folded them and placed them on the night table. She bent over to loosen his tie and unbutton his shirt collar, then she stood up straight and looked at me.

“I refuse to undress him,” she said.

“I don’t blame you,” I said.

He lay there on his back in his grey suit, his mouth slightly open, his arms at his side.

“I’ll put the window fan on,” she said. There were two windows, and a fan was installed in the one closest to the head of the bed. She went over and turned it on.

“All right, he’ll be okay now,” she said.

I went back out into the hall and the lady followed me, putting out the light and closing the door. She turned and looked at me, and then at the box.

“What’s in the box, anyway?”

“An antique doll,” I said.

“Ah. For your daughter?”

“Well, no, I’m actually holding it for a friend of mine, who’s going to give it to his girlfriend, I think.”

“I see. What was your name again?”

“Arnold,” I said. “Arnold Schnabel.”

“I’ve seen you around town. I’m Myrna. Davenport.”

She offered her hand. I transferred the box from my right arm to my left, and I took her hand.

“Well, I have to get back to the end of my movie. I only got up because a commercial came on. They’re showing Sayonara.”

I could hear Marlon Brando’s voice from down the hall.

“Good night,” I said. I was about to turn and go but she said:

“Are you staying here all summer?”

“I -- yes, I suppose so,” I said.

“With your family?”

“With my mother. And my aunts.”

“Oh. You’re not married?”

“No.”

“Never been married?”

“No.”

“I’m a widow. My husband died of a heart attack a couple of years ago.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said.

She shrugged.

“He was fourteen years older than me,” she said. “He left us a nice nest egg.”

“Well --”

“I have two teenagers, a boy and a girl. One is at band camp, the other one is a counselor at another summer camp.”

Marlon was still talking, in the background, but Mrs. Davenport didn’t seem concerned.

“I enjoy running my little house,” she said. “I teach school here in the winter. So what do you do that you can take the whole summer off?”

Finally someone in this town who didn’t know my whole sad history.

“I’m on a disability leave from my job with the railroad,” I said.

“You don’t look ill.”

“I’m recovering.”

Amazingly she didn’t ask what my illness was.

“Well, good night, then, Mr. --”

“Schnabel,” I said. “Arnold Schnabel.”

“Good night, Arnold. Thank you for bringing Mr. Jones home safely.”

“Good night, Mrs. Davenport.”

“Myrna.”

“Good night, Myrna.”

I turned and opened the screen door, went down the steps and around the house and to the front path.

“Very much the ladies’ man, aren’t you, Arnold?” said the doll.

“Not really,” I said, going through the gate and turning right.

“Could she have been any more obvious?”

“She was only being friendly,” I said.

“Desperately friendly. Open the box.”

I stopped and took the lid off. She sat up in the box. She touched my face. Her touch was warm and soft.

“I think I’d like to walk a while,” she said, and, she leaned forward and put her little arms around my neck. “Let me down now.”

I bent forward till her feet were about a foot from the pavement, and she let go and landed gracefully, her long dress billowing up a bit as she did and then slowly deflating.

“Been rather a long time since I’ve been out of that dusty shop,” she said. She smoothed out her dress with her tiny hands. “Now take my hand and let’s stroll.”

She held up her hand.

“I can’t walk you into the Ugly Mug like this,” I said.

“We’ll just walk till we get to the corner of Decatur Street, then I’ll pop back into my box. Until we get to the bar of course. I so want to meet your friends.”

She wiggled the fingers of her upraised hand.

“But you’ll promise to be still and not talk?” I said.

“Of course."

“Well, all right."

I put the lid back on the box, put the box back under my arm, and took her hand. She had to hold her arm all the way up in order to put her hand in mine. We strolled along the pavement, the trees making their wishes above the streetlamps.

A young couple came walking along in our direction and when they came near us the woman said:

“Oh, what a darling little girl!”

She had a southern accent. She was a pretty blond young woman in a puffy dress, her hair sprayed into the shape of a mushroom, or a rutabaga.

The woman stopped and bent forward in front of the doll, which of course forced us to stop as well.

“What’s your name, sweetheart?”

“Clarissa,” said the doll.

“Clarissa, what a darling name! And how old are you, Clarissa?”

“I’ll be seventy-three years young next October.”

“Seventy-three?”

“Next October.”

The woman touched Clarissa’s dark curly head.

“Aren’t you just darling?”

She straightened up and addressed me.

“You are very lucky, mister.”

“Yes,” I said. “I know.”

“Now, let’s go, honey,” said the young man, smiling. He had a southern accent too, and he wore a light-grey shiny suit with a thin tie.

“Goodbye, Clarissa!” said the woman, waving her hand.

“Goodbye,” said Clarissa.

The young couple walked past us, and Clarissa and I continued on, hand in hand.

“I have that effect on the female of the species,” said Clarissa.

(Continued here. Kindly go to the right hand column of this page to find an allegedly current listing of links to all other published chapters of Arnold Schnabel’s Railroad Train to Heaven™; Nihil Obstat, Bishop John J. “Smiling Jack” Graham.

“A Town Called Disdain”, Episode 125: pointed

Relax, literature-buffs, Larry Winchester hasn’t forgotten about that Shakespeare-quoting motorcycle bandit leader you all hate to love (but you love him anyway anyway): Moloch. Not to mention the glamorous Dick and Daphne, as we return to this fateful September night in 1969, and to the desert somewhere beyond the darkness on the edge of a town called Disdain...

(Click here for our previous chapter, or here to go to the beginning of this novel, of which former president G.W. Bush has said, “I like to read it right before I go to sleep, ‘cause it makes me have cool dreams.”)

Moloch was still conscious and he was not in pain, not yet.

He had tumbled along like a fucking tumbleweed in the saucer’s wake, sucked along by that hideous hot metallic wind. Then the thing had finally skidded to a stop over the edge of that depression beneath that butte-thing, and the sucking wind had abated, leaving Moloch sprawled in the dirt a hundred feet away.

Rising up on his left knee, as an enormous cloud of dust descended gently about him in this starlit desert gloaming, Moloch turned and looked back whence he had just rolled and saw, stretching back, a faintly iridescent swath of broken and dismembered motorcycle and human parts, of gleaming blood and petrol and oil.

So much for the Motorpsychos.

They were a boring lot anyway.

Moloch tried to stand up and he fell.

He looked at his right leg and saw that the foot was twisted one hundred and eighty degrees the wrong way and that a bloody and jagged shard of calf bone stuck out three inches through a tear in his leather trousers.

He looked down at his right arm and saw by its odd angle that it too was broken in at least two places, at the elbow and the wrist, possibly the forearm as well.

With his left hand he reached into a jacket pocket and took out a handful of pills: Dilaudids, Black Beauties, Pink Footballs and the Devil knew what else.

The Dilaudids would kill the oncoming pain while the speed would keep him alert and maleficent. As he swallowed them down he gazed through the dust at the saucer, which still glowed quite green.

He looked around for his Sten gun, and was pleasantly surprised to see it about ten feet away. He dragged himself over to it on his one good knee and with his one good arm. He picked up the gun and looked it over. It seemed in workable condition. He wiped the weapon on his leg, then blew as much dust from it as he could. The gun was cocked, set to full automatic, and it held an almost full 32-round magazine. It would be difficult to fire with one hand but not impossible. He would dare say he could still do some damage with it, provided the fucking British-made thing didn’t jam.

He forced himself to stand up.

The drugs were already working.

He felt no pain, he felt comfortably cushioned from the universe within his self, he almost felt detached from his body, as if his brain and his one good eye were floating by themselves six feet above the ground. But though he could barely feel his body he could feel his life force, what the Chinese called chi, roiling and pulsing from the top of his head to the soles of his feet. He concentrated his energy on feeling the steel of the gun in his left hand. At first it seemed so distant, as if it were not the reality but the memory of holding a gun, but then he felt it, heavy, hard and cold, and he willed his energy into it. He felt his hand grow warm on the gun, felt the steel of the gun grow warm. He caressed the trigger and felt an electric shock from it up his hand and along his arm into his chest and down his torso to the tip of his penis. Oh yes. Oh fucking yes indeed.

So, outer space creatures. Yet another vile race polluting the universe. Well then perhaps it would behoove him to give them a cozy warm earthling welcome in the form of a few well-aimed bursts of hot lead.

****

“So we’re all climbing out and running like mad over the top of the saucer which all the time is sliding, um, inexorably into the sink hole --”

“A mad dash, and believe you me, I was in the lead.”

“But we made it.”

“And you were the last to jump, darling.”

“Well, maybe --”

“You were.”

“So, anyway, I jump off just in time and this great big flying saucer just goes sliding down into the quicksand, and then -- nothing. It was gone.”

“Not a trace.”

“So, we’re all -- Daphne, Harvey, Mac, Buddy --”

“Brad --”

“Brad, yes, and myself, we’re all just sort of standing around lighting up cigarettes, wondering what happens next, when we hear this kind of crunchy-shuffling sound and we peer out into the desert which was very dust-cloudy from the space ship crash-landing, and who should we see come shambling up but this motorcycle guy, this Moloch character -- nose all smashed in, one eye out, one leg and one arm broken, and one Sten gun pointed right at me.”

(Oh dear. Go here to see what happens next. Kindly look to the right hand column of this page for an allegedly up-to-date listing of all other available episodes of Larry Winchester’s A Town Called Disdain™, soon to be a major motion picture from the Rank Organization, featuring Lawrence Harvey as Moloch and Rock Hudson and Audrey Hepburn as Daphne and Dick.)

“Railroad Train to Heaven”, Part 130: “Something’s happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?”

Return with us now to a warm night in August of that forgotten year of 1963 and to the slightly shabby seaport and resort of Cape May, New Jersey, where our saintly memoirist Arnold Schnabel has walked his new acquaintance Mr. Jones to the side entrance of that inebriated old gentleman’s boarding house...

(Go here to review our previous chapter; newcomers may go here to see the first chapter of this memoir which President Obama has called “a masterpiece we can believe in”.)

“What was that?” said Mr. Jones.

“Pardon me?” I said.

“I heard a voice. Like a girl’s.”

He spoke more quickly now, with fewer and shorter pauses.

“A slightly muffled voice,” he said, “but still --”

“Just the breeze,” I said. “In the trees.”

He looked up, around, then down.

“Can it be I’m finally losing my mind?” he asked. “At the age of eighty-three?”

There was a light on in a yellow fixture above the doorway, and I could see the consternation in the old man’s eyes behind their glasses. (I have neglected to mention he wore glasses, as do most people who reach the age of eighty-three, at least those who still want to see anything.)

Above our heads the branches and leaves of a tree made a hushing sound. The crickets continued to snicker, and from inside the house came the sound of a television set, Saturday Night at the Movies I think, they were showing Sayonara tonight. Various gnats, mosquitoes, and other insects added their respective parts to the evening’s symphony. But none of these sounds could remotely be mistaken for the small voice we had both just so clearly heard.

“Well, let’s get you up to your room, Mr. Jones,” I said, with attempted bonhomie.

“You went insane, didn’t you, Arnold?” he asked, not budging.

“Well, I did have a slight nervous breakdown last winter,” I said, shifting my weight around on my Keds. “But I’m much --”

“I heard you were hospitalized for three months.”

“Not quite three months,” I said.

“And you weren’t able to go back to work on the railroad.”

“Well, I did go back --”

“And they sent you home again, didn’t they?”

“Well, yes.”

“So did you hear voices?”

He was swaying again now, facing me, swaying back and forth on his heels, holding his cigarette at shoulder height.

“Yes,” I said. “I heard voices.”

“So I’m going mad.”

“Not necessarily,” I said.

“No?”

“No,” I said, trying to put at least an ounce of conviction in my voice.

He paused, taking a drag of his Old Gold, staring off into the darkness with his filmy old eyes behind their glasses, his body swaying gently, forward and back.

“Good night’s sleep you’ll be fine,” I posited.

“I haven’t had a good night’s sleep in ten years,” he said. “Fifteen years.”

I had no response to this. Now he looked straight at me, into my eyes.

“So this is how it ends,” he said. “Dementia.”

I stood there, holding the doll box. At least she was keeping quiet through this, for the time being, I thought.

But then:

“Try not getting absolutely drunk every single night of your life,” she said. “Then perhaps you won’t hear any strange disembodied voices.”

“What?” he said.

“Pardon me?” I said.

“You didn’t hear that?”

“Um --”

I struggled with a moral quandary. I could admit that I had heard the voice also, which would be admitting that I was insane, or I could deny having heard it, which would be tantamount to telling Mr. Jones that he was insane.

But then I remembered that he was drunk; chances are he would remember none of this.

“I didn’t hear anything,” I said.

“A voice just suggested I stop getting drunk every night. Or at least not absolutely drunk.”

“Oh. Well -- maybe it was, uh, just -- uh --”

“What?” he demanded.

“The voice of reason?” I offered.

He stopped swaying. He looked at his cigarette. He opened his fingers and let it drop to the old flagstone at our feet. The cigarette bounced, shooting up tiny sparks, and rolled off the slate into the grass, still lit and smoking. I stepped over, ground it out with the sole of my sneaker.

“What am I supposed to do if I don’t drink?” asked Mr. Jones, opening his arms as in supplication.

This was a question I’d asked myself often enough.

“You could read,” I suggested.

He stared at me.

“You know -- books, Mr. Jones,” said the doll.

He flinched ever so slightly.

“Yes, books,” he said, after a pause. “I used to like to read. Jack London. H.G. Wells. O. Henry. Even some of these newer authors -- Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis, James Branch Cabell -- although I must say my favorites among the younger boys were Zane Grey and Edgar Rice Burroughs.”

“You can still find their books,” I said.

“Yes. Yes, I suppose I could.”

“You could even take them out from the library. Wouldn’t cost you a dime.”

“Yes, true, true. But --”

He took one of his long pauses here.

“Get to the point!” said the doll.

“Well,” said Mr. Jones, “isn’t it a bit pathetic to spend one’s last days reading? Reading instead of living?”

“Is it any less pathetic just to get drunk every night?” (This was me, not the doll.)

Mr. Jones paused again.

I realized that a mosquito was feasting itself on the tender flesh on the reverse side of my left knee. I refrained from swatting him. I didn’t want to spoil the mood, and after all the mosquito was only doing what it had to do.

“You have a point,” said Mr. Jones.

"I do?" I asked.

“Getting plastered every night is no great accomplishment,” he said.

He then resumed his gentle swaying, back and forth, staring off into God knows what.

The mosquito continued to draw my blood.

Both the doll and I remained silent.

(Continued here. Please refer to the right hand column of this page to find a supposedly up-to-date list of links to all other recovered chapters of Arnold Schnabel’s Railroad Train to Heaven™, absolutely free of charge for a limited time only.)

Skeeter Davis and Bobby Bare: let it be me --

“A Town Called Disdain”, Episode 124: “Some experiences just ain’t meant to be took straight.”

Larry Winchester, acceding to an onslaught of cards and letters from his fans, returns again to two of his more beloved characters, Captain Alexis Pym (USN) and Big Jake Johnstone, on this historic night in September of 1969, in the wasted New Mexico desert some several miles outside of a town called Disdain…

(Go here for our previous chapter, or here to go to the beginning of this novel, which Harold Bloom has called, “perhaps the greatest novel of our time, or, fuck it, any time”.)

Pym had a few seconds to think as the great warm body of the spaceship pressed him down into the sand.

He thought, fondly, Dick tried to save me.

Then, embarrassed, he remembered saying “I love you” to Dick. If only it had been something like “Thanks for trying, fella!” or “Thanks anyway, Dick, see ya around!”, or even better, “Au revoir, tout le monde!”

Well, too late now.

If only Dick had saved him. Perhaps they could have become real friends. Perhaps he and Daphne (whom Pym had never had the privilege to meet, but he was sure she was charming, delightful), perhaps Dick and Daphne might even have come for a visit to Pym’s split-level in Virginia. Dick and he could watch football while their wives baked pies, and, perhaps their knees would have lightly touched as they leaned forward to watch some particularly interesting play, that would have been enough, perhaps, maybe, but no, no, that wouldn’t have happened…

Then Pym began to asphyxiate in earnest, and unfortunately he spent his next few moments in panicked pain, which at last subsided as he slid down into unconsciousness and death, all this final little time longing for life, and, oh, forget about the pork chops and the call girls and the friendship with Dick that could never happen, yes, give him back even the wretched life he had lived, send him back to the warren, to those happy intense hours rooting and grubbing in Ridpath’s desk, oh if only...

****

I guess there is a good Lord up in Heaven and I reckon he did answer my prayer, ‘cause that flyin’ saucer just bounced right over my vehicle, I could feel it brushin’ the top of my hat, and it went right on skiddin’ and bouncin’ across the desert toward Dead Horse Mesa, and there was some weird kinda suction thing goin’ on, tryin’ to drag my Caddy and me right after that damn thing, but I just pressed that pedal to the metal and pulled that steerin’ wheel hard to the left with all my might, damn near turned that automobile over, too, but finally I got all four tires back down on the dirt, that engine squealin’ like a gut-shot elephant, and I roared on outa there and gradually I felt the pull of that infernal suction slackin’ off, and I just kept on goin’.

Kept on goin’ and I didn’t stop till I was maybe a mile away. And then when I looked back across that dark starlit desert that big ol’ flyin’ saucer was gone, and I reckoned that it had just slid into the sink hole there and disappeared forever beneath the sand.

So I took out a cigar with a tremblin’ hand and bit off the end and lit it up to steady my nerves and then I had a couple or three good hits of Jack Daniel. Then I had me another one.

If I had had some of the Doc’s medicine I woulda took a couple three good swigs of that, too, believe you me.

Some experiences just ain’t meant to be took straight.

(Click here for our next thrilling chapter. And please go to the right hand column of this page for what purports to be an up-to-date listing of all other extant episodes of Larry Winchester’s A Town Called Disdain™, currently being serialized on the Comet Cleanser Dramatic Showcase, on the DuMont Television Network (where available), featuring Farley Granger as Pym and Burl Ives as Big Jake.)