“A Town Called Disdain”, Episode 85: Swampoodle

Larry Winchester (author of this second-place prize-winner of the David Goodis Award for Most Unjustly Obscure American Novel) now leaves us in suspense as to the fate of Enid and Hope, and switches scene again to the swingin’ Samba Room, where Dick, Daphne and Harvey have found themselves hosted by Frank and the Rat Pack:

The room had gotten smokier, more crowded, more drunken. Tony Anthony had been replaced by a stripper (“Helen Bedd”, a blond Russ Meyer type), backed up by a jazz combo, four seen-it-all-done-it-all pros in smokestained old tuxedos.

The waiters had cleared away the dinner plates and brought on a fresh round of cocktails.

“Okay,” said Frank, “I’m sure our new friends are wondering, just what the hell is the deal here? Am I right?”

He turned to Dick.

“Well,” said Dick, “I was rather wondering just where the hell we are.”

“An enormous space station,” said Frank, “slowly circling through space between your very lovely green and thriving planet and your almost equally lovely albeit barren and lifeless moon. But, I might add, quite invisible to the human eye, and in fact, immaterial according to your own quaint concept of what is and what is not material.”

“Oh,” said Dick. “Immaterial.”

He didn’t look entirely convinced.

“Ya, see, Mr. Ridpath,” said Frank, “we are in a whatcha might call a different state of reality, a, uh --”

“Another dimension?” said Harvey. He was the only one drinking beer, a Falstaff.

“Right!” said Frank. “Another dimension. It’s kinda like your whatchamacallit dream-state, a universe that co-exists with your universe but cannot be seen from your universe -- although, oddly enough, one can in fact see your dimension from this dimension.”

“So we’re kinda like ghosts up in here,” said Harvey.

“Uh --” Frank hesitated.

“Or angels,” said Daphne.

“Well, yyyeah --” said Frank, seeming to concede some faint but dubious value to the above suppositions.

“And the only way you can get into this, uh, dimension,” said Dick, “is in one of those, those --”

“Flying saucers,” said Frank, “right.”

He clicked open his gold cigarette case, took out a cigarette, tapped its end on the table.

“So,” said Dick, “you -- people -- are from -- this, this other dimension?”

“Oh, no,” said Frank, lighting his cigarette with his thin gold lighter, “we’re from a planet much like yours, ‘cept it’s like a billion trillion whatever light-years away.”

“I knew it!” said Daphne. “What’s the name of your planet?”

“Well --” said Frank, “you won’t laugh, right? Humans always laugh.”

“I won’t laugh,” said Daphne.

“You promise,” said Frank.

“Scout’s honor,” said Daphne, raising her right hand in the Girl Scout salute.

“Swampoodle,” said Frank.

“Swampoodle?” said Daphne.

“Swampoodle,” Frank said again.

Daphne laughed, but put her hand over her mouth.

“See?” said Frank, addressing the rest of the Pack, “they always laugh.”

Dean, Sammy, Joey, Peter, and Richard Conte all murmured in assent, or nodded, or both.

“Sorry,” said Daphne, and then immediately put her knuckle against her lovely lips again.

“So --” said Dick, to the rescue as usual, “uh, if you’re from -- Swampoodle?” Daphne tried but could not suppress another peal of laughter. “Um, why -- “ Dick hesitated, trying to think it out, “why this, this other dimension?”

“Well, ya see,” said Frank, “back on Swamp--” Again Daphne couldn’t hold it in, and now she held both hands over her mouth. Frank sighed and went on: “back on our ‘home planet’ -- about a million years ago, we invented a device which enables us to travel the vast reaches of interstellar space in quite reasonable amounts of time. Now this device, which we call the Reality Woofer --”

“The what?” asked Daphne.

“The Reality Woofer.”

Daphne snorted.

“Oh, my God, Frank, I’m sorry,” she said, speaking through her fingers, her shoulders hunched.

Dick and Harvey just managed to control the urge to laugh, while all the Rat Pack remained stonily impassive, most notably Frank:

“Perhaps I should continue some other time,” he said.

“Oh, no, Frank,” said Daphne, “please. Do go on. I promise I’ll behave.”

“Okay,” said Frank, taking a sip of his Four Roses Manhattan, “so -- we invented this, uh, this ‘device’, which, when installed into one of our flying saucers, enables us to travel through the uh -- the --” Daphne still chuckled from behind her hand, but Frank sighed and went on -- “the, uh, whaddyacallit, the --”

“Vast reaches of space?” suggested Dick.

“Right,” said Frank, “the vast reaches of whatever, by enabling us to enter into this different, uh, dimension in which we can travel these, uh, these --”

“Vast reaches,” said Dick.

“Right,” said Frank. “At the speed of thought. On accounta the normal rules of physics don’t apply here.”

“Like in dreams,” offered Daphne, getting a grip.

“Kinda --” said Frank, as in, Well, no, not really.

“And how quick exactly is the speed of thought?” asked Dick.

“Oh, it’s very quick,” said Frank. “All you gotta do is get out on the road so to speak, build up a little speed, engage the, uh --”

“The Woofer!” cried Daphne. “The Reality Woofer!”

“Right,” said Frank, frowning but going on. “Then you burst through the wall between dimensions and, like, boom -- you’re on your way. One of our top of the line Reality Woofer ships can make it from here to Swamp -- to our world in like two hours, two hours and change. And we’re talking about sixty-nine trillion billion miles, light-years, whatever.”

“Far,” said Joey.

“Right,” said Frank. “Far.”

“So,” said Dick, “it’s like: you use this Woofer thing to go from your world into this other dimension to get to here, and then I guess when you want to go to the earth you have to use the Woofer thing again to get out of this, uh --”

“Twilight zone,” said Harvey.

“Well, we don’t call this dimension the Twilight Zone, Harvey,” said Frank. “It’s called Fishtown.” He turned to Daphne. “You can laugh now, Mrs. Ridpath.”

“I’m not laughing,” she said.

She took a cigarette from the platinum case which had been supplied to her. Sammy reached all the way across the table to give her a light with his lighter which was identical to Frank’s.

“Thank you,” she said.

She exhaled a great cloud of smoke and then burst into uncontrollable laughter.

(Click here for our next swingin' chapter. And please turn to the right hand side of this page for an up-to-date listing of links to all other legally-available episodes of Larry Winchester’s A Town Called Disdain, soon to be a 37-part mini-series from The Pennzoil Hall of Fame, starring Dane Clark, Martha Vickers, Edd “Kookie” Byrnes, Thomas Gomez, Priscilla Lane, and Akim Tamiroff; written and directed by Larry Winchester.)

“Railroad Train to Heaven”, Part 90: the completely unsinkable Miss Gertrude Evans

Arnold Schnabel (the author of this Pall Mall Award-winning memoir) seems to have a knack for finding himself in compromising situations. But is it any fault of his that at the end of our previous chapter he awoke from a nap to find a hot-blooded female novelist gently touching his face?

“Arnold,” she said, “you were talking in your sleep. I could hear you all the way down in the hall as I was coming out of the bathroom.”

She was sitting on the side of my narrow bed.

For a moment I wondered if this was really happening. But her fingers, which were now stroking the hair on my head, felt all too real, as did the quiverings of a nascent and quite involuntary erection.

“Your door was ajar,” she said.

How foolish of me not to have shut the door and bolted it. I would try not to make that mistake again.

Let’s just be clear on the fact that, yes, I was completely naked, and because of the afternoon heat I had lain down without even a sheet over me. I now tried to reach past Miss Evans’s hip to grab the jumbled-up sheet and cover myself, but she was sitting on it.

“I was worried about you,” she said, seemingly oblivious to my tuggings on the sheet.

“Why?” I managed to say.

“I thought perhaps you were talking to God.”

“No,” I said. “Not God. Miss Evans, do you mind getting off my bed?”

“Call me Gertrude, Arnold.”

She was still stroking my head.

“Okay, Gertrude,” I said.

She didn’t get up. I tugged at the sheet again.

“Oh,” she said. “You want to cover yourself.”

“Yes.”

In an attempt at modesty I drew my right leg up, and put my left hand over my mindlessly stirring organ of putative virility.

“You needn’t be ashamed of your nakedness.” She cast her eye along my body. “Don’t be ashamed. You have a beautiful body. A strong, honest, workman’s body.”

“I’d like to cover myself, please.”

“Would it make you feel more comfortable if I removed my dress?”

She was wearing one of these sundress things I suppose they’re called. Some light material with coiling green ivy printed over a pale yellow background. The way she was leaning over me I could see a good deal of her breasts anyway, but now with the hand that wasn’t stroking my head she started to lift off one of its straps while shrugging that shoulder.

“No,” I said. “Please don’t.”

“No one has to know.”

“God will know,” I said, in my desperation.

Fortunately this stopped her before she got the strap off, although she left it dangling halfway down her arm.

“Yes,” she said. “That’s true. I suppose he knows all.”

“Yes,” I said. “Everything.”

With a sigh she got up, and she took the tangled sheet, gave it a little flap, and covered me, at last. Then she quickly sat down again on the side of the bed, effectively trapping me there. She did however lift the strap of her dress up over her shoulder again.
I could still hear the opera music from downstairs. Some woman singing in Italian in a very high voice, God knows about what.

“Arnold,” said Miss Evans, “I know.”

“Know what?”

“That you are a saint.”

“What?”

“Where are your cigarettes?”

“In the little table there, the drawer,” I said.

“May I have one?”

“Miss Evans —”

“Gertrude.”

She opened the drawer, took out my open pack of my Pall Malls. She shook one up and drew it out with her lips, like a bird drawing a worm out of a hole in the ground. She lit it with my lighter, which she’d also found in my drawer.

“Oh. Would you like one, Arnold?”

She offered me the pack.

In fact I wanted a cigarette then more than I’ve ever wanted one in my life, but even more I wanted her out of there, or me out of there, whichever came first, and sitting together smoking cigarettes probably wasn’t going to hasten either of those eventualities, so I said no thanks.

“I knew there was something special about you,” she said, exhaling smoke toward my little window.

“Miss Evans, I mean Gertrude, I’d like to get up now.”

“Don’t let me stop you, Arnold. Do you have some place to go?”

I looked at my little alarm clock. It was 3:48. I had napped for over an hour.

“Yes,” I said.

“Where? To meet your sultry dark bohemian girl?”

“No. I have to meet Mrs. Biddle.”

“Mrs. Biddle? Why?”

“To have tea with her.”

“Tea.”

“Yes. Please, let me get dressed.”

“Okay. If you insist.”

She stood up. Unlike me she was short enough to stand up straight under the inverted V of my attic ceiling.

“Could you turn around, please?” I said.

“I’ve seen naked men before, Arnold. In fact I’ve seen you naked just now.”

“Please.”

“Oh, all right,” she said, turning, but not moving more than a foot from my bed.

“Gertrude,” I said, “could you please move farther away. I have to get my clothes from the dresser.”

“Oh, let me,” she said. “I love looking through men’s dressers.”

She stubbed out the cigarette in the ashtray on my night table and went over to the little-boy’s dresser which is the only sort of dresser that could fit into this small room, and she began to open and rifle through its drawers.

I sat up, keeping my now somewhat quiescent middle parts covered with the sheet.

“Boxer shorts,” she said. “I’m so glad, I detest those other kind. And ironed! Does your mother iron them for you?”

“Yes. Please toss them over.”

She did, side-armed, turning only slightly, and almost reaching the bed with them. I reached down and got them off the floor.

“Polo shirt?” she asked. “Or is this a formal tea? Suit and tie?”

I hadn’t even thought about it, but I wanted to get this over with quick so I said that a polo shirt and Bermudas would be fine.

“No,” she said. “Better wear a suit for such a formidable grande dame as Mrs. Biddle. You do have a suit?”

At this she glanced over her shoulder at me but by this time I at least had my Fruit-of-the-Looms on.

I told her I did have a suit, and that it was hanging on a peg on the wall over there.

“Good,” she said. She took both of my maternally-folded dress shirts out of the drawer, shook them out and held them up to me. “Which one?”

One is short-sleeved, the other is not. Other than that they’re pretty much identical as far as I can tell.

“The short sleeve,” I said.

“No,” she said, “I think the long.” She looked at the label. “Robert Hall.” She tossed it to me, and this time I managed to reach out and catch it before it hit the floor. “You should let me buy you a couple of good shirts,” she said.

“No thanks,” I said.

“You deserve better than Robert Hall.”

“Robert Hall’s fine for me,” I said, putting the shirt on.

She had now gone over to my suit, my dark grey summer Sunday suit, one of the two suits I own, the other one being an even darker grey winter suit now in my closet back in Philadelphia. She looked at the label inside the jacket.

“Who or what is Krass Brothers, Arnold?”

“It’s just a men’s store,” I said. “In Philadelphia.”

She tossed me the trousers.

“Brooks Brothers, Arnold. Not Krass Brothers.”

“Krass Brothers are fine with me,” I said, pulling the trousers on.

“No,” she said, coming over to the bed, holding the jacket, feeling its material and frowning. “Let me take you to Today’s Squire at least. They seem to have some nice things.”

Today’s Squire is the fancy men’s shop on Washington Street, which I’ve never actually been in.

“No thanks,” I said. I stood up, too quickly, and hit my head on the raked ceiling. “Ow,” I said.

“Sit down before you kill yourself. You need socks.”

I sat down. She handed me the jacket and she went back to my ransacked dresser. I shrugged myself into the jacket.

“All your socks are either black or white,” she said.

I did not deny this.

She tossed a rolled-up pair of the black ones in my general direction, and I nabbed them one-handed, my arm outstretched like Willie Mays catching a hard line drive.

“Someday your mother will be gone, Arnold. What will you do?”

“I’ll learn to roll my own socks,” I said, pulling them on.

“I’ve never known a man who needs a woman more than you do.”

Who was I to deny this?

“What is this?” she said, holding up my one and only necktie, with its little embroidered badge.

“It’s my Knights of Columbus tie,” I said.

“So you’re a knight?”

“Only of Columbus.”

“Yes but still. A knight.”

“Give it to me, will you?”

She brought it over, handed it to me.

“A sainted knight” she said. “Or should I say a knighted saint?”

I didn’t answer. I quickly wrapped the tie around my neck and tied it. I stood up, or at least I stood up as much as I was able to.

“Wait,” she said, coming close to me. She straightened my tie, or at least made motions as of straightening my tie. “There,” she said. “I owe you so much.”

I suppose I stared at her bug-eyed, if not agog.

“For what?” she asked. “For showing me a miracle. Don’t make that face. You were in that bathroom. I know you were. And I waited. And when you didn’t come out after my repeated knockings and halloos I was afraid perhaps you had had a heart attack, and I turned the knob and the door wasn’t locked, and I opened it and you were not in there, Arnold.”

“No.”

“You had transported yourself.”

“Um —”

“You had transported yourself through space.”

“Well —”

“A miracle.”

“Um —”

“But why? To teach me? To show me? I’m ready, Arnold. I’m ready to be taught. To be shown. Teach me. Show me.”

“I have to go to Mrs. Biddle’s now.”

“I didn’t mean right now.”

“Okay.”

My wallet was lying on my little bedside table, where I had left it; I picked it up and put it in my pocket. I turned and started to go.

“Arnold.”

“Yes.”

“You’re not wearing shoes.”

“Ah.”

I went over to the corner where my Sunday shoes were, by the wall next to the little chair by my little writing table with my little Remington portable where I type up my little poems. I sat at the chair and began to put on my shoes.

“Listen, Gertrude,” I said. “I’m really not a saint. I didn’t transport myself by a miracle. I climbed out the window.”

“Very funny, Arnold.”

She picked up her book, Ye Cannot Quench, from the night table, looked to see where my book-marker was.

“You haven’t gotten very far in my novel, Arnold.”

“I’m savoring it.”

“So you’re enjoying it?”

“Very much.”

“What do you like about it?”

“Everything.”

All these lies would have to be confessed to Father Reilly next Saturday.

“My next one will be better,” she said.

She closed the book, and put it back onto the night table.

I stood up.

She came over to me again.

She licked her finger and touched up my hair with it.

“Oh, I should comb it,” I said.

“No,” she said. “The tousled look is good for you. The poet, the knight, the saint.”

The Italian lady was still singing downstairs.

(Click here for our next pulse-pounding chapter. And kindly turn to the right hand side of this page to find a complete listing of links to all other published episodes of Arnold Schnabel’s Railroad Train to Heaven, soon to be a major motion picture starring John Garfield as Arnold and Gene Tierney as Miss Evans, directed by Anatole Litvak.)

“A Town Called Disdain”, Episode 84: stand-off!

Larry Winchester (“like Melville, if Melville were not boring” -- Harold Bloom) now returns to our own own humble planet, if only briefly, in this, our uncut serialization of his sprawling (“makes Stephen King look like Raymond Carver” -- Harold Bloom) masterwork:

Down we fly through the stratosphere, zeroing in on the Western Hemisphere and the night-shrouded continent of North America, zooming down to the state of New Mexico and to small bright light in the desert, a light which grows into a circle of lights with another light in its center, and then as the circle of lights grows larger we see the light at its center split into the two headlights of Enid’s truck, surrounded by twenty-five or thirty Motorpsychos with their own headlights blazing, and directly in front of the truck’s headlights lies Hope’s dead pony Whisper with Hope standing next to it, and next to Hope stands Enid, holding her father’s big old .45 out at arm’s length cocked and pointed straight at Moloch’s forehead.

The night breeze gently stirs Enid’s dark hair as she stares down the barrel of the pistol, which she holds one-handed, in her strong sculptress’s hand, and her left hand rests lightly on Hope’s abdomen, as if holding the girl back, and indeed Hope leans slightly forward, as if ready to leap onto Moloch to tear his one good eye out of its socket with her bare fingers.

Moloch’s face is motionless except for a dribble of greenish spit oozing maddeningly slowly from one corner of his scarified mouth and down into his spiky grease-glistening whiskers. In one lens of his mirrored aviator sunglasses gapes the black muzzle of the .45 and far behind it Enid’s steadfast eyes. In the other lens floats the foreshortened pale face of Hope and her dark eyes.

The three of them stand lit as brightly as actors on a movie set by the headlights of the motorcycles and the truck.

The desert air reeks of motorcycle exhaust, of rancid male sweat, of foul denims and leathers.

Smiling slightly, Moloch makes a gentle, almost courtly gesture with his hand, and at once all the Motorpsychos pull out their weapons and the silence breaks metallically with the manifold snicking of racking slides and cocking hammers.

Without moving her head or her gun Enid moves her eyes slowly from side to side and sees various sawed-off shotguns, submachine guns and pistols pointed straight at her.

She takes one firm step forward and now the muzzle of her gun presses solidly into the middle of Moloch’s forehead.

A fresh gobbet of greenish drool oozes out from the corner of Moloch’s mouth.

****

(Click here for our next thrilling chapter. Kindly turn to the right hand side of this page for an up-to-date listing of links to all other extant episodes of Larry Winchester’s A Town Called Disdain™, third-place runner-up for the Carling Black Label Award for Inspirational Fiction.)

“Railroad Train to Heaven”, Part 89: battle tales

In our previous episode of this Dutch Master’s Award-nominated memoir by the man Harold Bloom has called “that saintly Scaramouche”, Arnold Schnabel encountered Mrs. Rathbone in the back yard of his aunts’ Cape May boarding house, and he was last seen escorting this lady to the front entrance of the house, that she might visit with Arnold’s aunts and mother. It’s non-stop action as usual for our Arnold...

As we turned around the corner to the porch I remembered my escapade with Miss Evans earlier that afternoon. What had I been thinking? And perhaps more to the point, what had I not been thinking? She had undoubtedly turned the whole house upside down when I had not replied to her inevitable knockings on the bathroom door, nor to her salutations and queries and quite possibly screams when she finally opened the unlocked door and found no one there, least of all me.

But as so often in life, as so often period because it’s probably the same in death, there is nothing to be done but to face the music, or, as the case may be, the cacophony.

Kevin was sitting quietly enough on the porch in his usual rocking chair, reading a Sgt. Rock comic, but he folded it over his finger as we came to the porch steps.

“Hello, Kevin,” said Mrs. Rathbone, holding my arm as we hobbled together up the steps.

“Hi,” said Kevin. “You’re in trouble, Cousin Arnold.”

“What did Arnold do?” asked Mrs. Rathbone.

“He disappeared from the bathroom.”

“He what?”

Once again I’ll do a kindness for that ideal reader who is no other than myself and I shall not recount word by word the next couple of minutes of conversation, to which I listened but did not take a vocal part in, with Mrs. Rathbone all the while hanging as tightly to my forearm as if we stood on the deck of a small ship in a raging sea.

But I suppose I got bored just standing there, so I went over to my usual rocker and sat down. Kevin’s usual pile of comic books lay on the little table to my right, and I was just about to look through them to see if there were any I hadn’t read yet when I couldn’t help but notice that my own corporeal host was still standing there next to Mrs. Rathbone, with an only slightly resigned look on my face.

I wondered what would happen if I got up from the rocker, walked around myself and Mrs. Rathbone, went down the steps and started wandering invisibly around town. But the thing was I really wanted a nap, so I heaved myself up from the chair, walked back to my body and slipped back into it just as Mrs. Rathbone was saying:

“And where is Miss Evans now?”

“I think she’s still laying down.”

“Lying down,” said Mrs. Rathbone.

“Yeah,” said Kevin. “That’s what I just said.”

“She’s lying down, Kevin, not laying down.”

Kevin gave her one of those looks he so often gives me, the “you really are insane” look.

I could see through the screen door the ghostly figures of my mother and all three of my aunts, standing listening and watching.

“Shall we go inside, Mrs. Rathbone?” I said, as suavely as if she and Kevin had been discussing the weather and not my latest madman’s caper.

She stared up at me.

“Arnold, how did you get out of that bathroom?”

“I climbed out the window and down the drainpipe.” I spoke clearly and distinctly so that my mother and aunts could hear and I wouldn’t have to repeat myself.

“Wow,” said Kevin. “Did you, Cousin Arnold?”

“Yes,” I said.

“But why?” asked Mrs. Rathbone.

“I was trying to escape from Miss Evans.”

“So you climbed out a third-floor window?”

My gentle mother now came out onto the porch.

“Arnold,” she said, “you didn’t really, did you?”

In a flash it occurred to me that this sort of admission might well lead to another and perhaps even longer and more tedious stay at Byberry, so I backtracked, and let the jesuitisms flow:

“That depends on how you looked at it, Mom.”

After all, if one hadn’t been looking at that side of the house one couldn’t know for sure that I had climbed out of the window.

“Then how did you get out of that bathroom?”

“I — just left.”

This in its literal sense was not a lie.

“But Miss Evans said she never saw you leave.”

I shrugged. This also is not a lie, merely to shrug.

“Oh, Mom,” I said, “look, Mrs. Rathbone has come for a visit.”

I lifted Mrs. Rathbone’s hand from my arm.

“Hello, Mrs. Rathbone,” said my mother.

“Hello, Mrs. Schnabel,” said Mrs. Rathbone.

One trick with women I’ve learned in my humble experience is to get them to talk among themselves, and then in the ensuing confusion you can make your getaway.

“Mrs. Rathbone was telling me that my friend Steve wants to marry Miss Rathbone.”

“Is Steve that man who was talking to Miss Rathbone in the back yard all yesterday afternoon?”

Now my Aunt Edith came out through the screen door.

“The one who took her out last night,” said Edith.

“That’s the one,” said Mrs. Rathbone.

“He really upset that DeVore couple, I’ll tell you that much,” said my Aunt Greta, holding open the screen door.

“Mrs. Rathbone,” said my mother, “wouldn’t you like to come in and have some refreshment?”

“I wouldn’t say no to a glass of wine,” said Mrs. Rathbone.

“We still have leftover wine,” called out my Aunt Elizabetta, from just inside the doorway.

“From Arnold’s girl,” said Edith.

Soon enough our little assemblage was moving itself into the living room amidst a whirlpool of feminine verbiage, everyone except for Kevin that is, who stayed on the porch with Sgt. Rock, and who could blame him?

“Good day, Mrs. Rathbone,” I interpolated, and headed for the hall.

“Where are you going, Arnold?” asked my mother.

“Taking a nap,” I said.

“Oh —”

Her little “oh” tumbled beneath the waves of the other ladies’ chatter, and I turned up the stairs.

So far so good. Now I only had to make it past Miss Evans’s room and I was home free.

At the third floor stairhead I could hear opera music coming from her room.

I was glad that I was wearing flip-flops. If I had been wearing shoes I’m sure I would have removed them before tiptoeing past her door.

I made it safely to the doorway and the short flight of steps leading to my attic room, and soon I was lying in my little bed, naked to the soft warm breeze wafting in from the window.

I fell asleep and at once I was back in God’s house.

I came to the door that opened into that office with the man who had given me directions to the bathroom.

“Ah. You again,” he said, looking up from some papers.

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

He looked at me impassively, his finger holding his place on the paper he’d been reading.

“May I ask, sir,” I said, “what is your name?”

He said something but it made no sense to me, it was a combination of sounds that wouldn’t stay in my brain. I didn’t want to be a pest though, so I didn’t ask him to say it again.

“May I help you in some way?” he asked.

“I want to go home,” I said.

“Don’t we all,” he said. He sighed, and shuffled through a stack of papers off to one side of his desk. With a fountain pen he scrawled something on a few of them and then said,

“Here, take these.”

He held up a sheath of about ten or twelve official-looking documents.

I came over and took them from him, and it was then that I realized that I was as naked as I had been lying in bed.

“Oh,” I said.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said, capping his fountain pen. He seemed pre-occupied, and maybe a little bored. He picked up a pipe from a holder on his desk, and began to fill it with tobacco from a zippered leather pouch.

I glanced at the papers. It was all some sort of incomprehensible legal mumbo jumbo.

“Take those to the front, show them to Peter, you should be fine.”

“Um,” I said.

“Yes?” He tamped down the tobacco with his index finger

“Well — can I get some clothes?”

He didn’t answer right away, because he was lighting his pipe with a wooden match. I waited, while he drew and puffed, getting it going. At last he said, “What was that?”

“Can I get some clothes?”

He sighed, more deeply this time. He opened a couple of drawers, fingered through whatever was in them, then brought out another document. He uncapped his fountain pen again, filled in a couple of blanks on the form, and then scrawled what I presumed was his signature.

He handed me the paper with an air of finality.

“Down the hall, to the right this time. Then turn to the left, go three doors down and on the right hand side knock and give the lady this form. She’ll give you some clothes.”

“Okay.”

“Good.”

Puffing on his pipe, he picked up another batch of papers. He wrote something on one of them.

I stood there.

He looked up. Did I mention he was wearing glasses, horn-rim glasses? He sort of peered over the tops of the glasses.

“Anything else?” he said.

“Oh, no,” I said.

“Good day, then.”

“Good day,” I said. “Thank you.”

He was already back to reading his papers, but he gave a little wave with his pipe.
I left the office, closing the door quietly behind me.

I stood in the hall. Let’s see, go right? I went right. Then left? I went left. Three doors down? One, two, three. The door on the right. So far so good, but I wondered if I was going to have to go through all this rigamarole of wandering around God’s house every time I fell asleep or passed out, for the rest of my life. One thing for sure, if this was heaven then it was overrated.

I knocked on the door.

“Arnold?” said a woman’s voice.

“Yes,” I said, wearily. I was not looking forward to facing some strange woman while I was stark naked, but unless I wanted to spend eternity walking these halls in my birthday suit I supposed I had to go through with a little embarrassment. “I’m here for my, to get my, to get some, uh —”

“Arnold,” she said again, louder and closer to the door, and I woke up to see Miss Evans’s face leaning over mine.

From downstairs I could hear the opera music.

Miss Evans put her hand on my face.

(Click here for Arnold's next thrill-packed adventure. Please turn to the right hand side of this page for an exhaustive listing of all other possible episodes of Arnold Schnabel’s Railroad Train to Heaven™, a Val Lewton Production.)