The Night Train: A Novelette (The Strange Files of Modesty Brown Book 1) (2 page)

And the train bears her away, past fields
and tracks and tracts of mill housing, past cows and waving grasses and broken down
cars. She feels herself being flung, bodily into the future. She enjoys her
silent and private thrill through another two or three stops. It would be hours
to the City after all – the train would not arrive until morning.

From
her carpet bag she pulls the Manila Folder. She’s already removed the key, and
wears it on a long string around her neck, under her clothes. Paper of varying
sizes and qualities, two holes punched in the top and attached to the stiff
board by brads. Typing sheets, small sheets ripped from a reporter’s notebook,
dry cleaning receipts, at least two cocktail napkins and one open matchbook
taped to a Chinese takeout menu. “FONG”, it says. How is she ever going to make
a neat file of this?

But
she can't have this carriage to herself much longer, can she? That would not be
much of a story. A woman, smoking in a train carriage, looking over her work?
 No, no. That will never do. We must have something else. Perhaps someone
else. But bear in mind, he is a secondary character. But we need him to get to
the next part of the story. So I advise you not to get too attached.

The
carriage door struggles open, revealing the square jaw, crisp hat and long
overcoat of a Man on Business, carrying a case in each hand.

"Well
hiya there, sweetheart. I didn't know this car was occupied."

He
flings an expensive leather suitcase onto the top rack, and despite the
availability of every other seat in the carriage, and defying all rules of good
sense and personal space, he sits down on the seat next to her. Thigh to thigh.

She
wishes now that she'd not tucked the Underwood beside the window, but instead
had put it on the other side. She wishes she'd considered using it as a
colonnade, a castellated structure, a moat.

Still.
Down he sits. He removes his hat, slides his second case beneath the seat, and
smiles at her with a mouth full of teeth and shine, like too many piano keys.
She twitches up a pert smirk and from the endless pocket of her new red coat
draws a weathered paperback of
Murder on the Orient Express
. She is
using a cut out personal ad for a bookmark.

"Traveling
alone?"

It
seems fitting, in a way, that she'd run into a situation like this one, just as
the Night Train hurled her toward the City. She does not want to be friendly
with this man. But does she not want to be friendly because she truly wants to
be left alone? Or because she doesn't want to be seen as the Wrong Type of
Girl? She wants tell him to go fuck right off, but she hesitates. What kind of
woman is she going to be? The kind that regard men like this with reticence and
fear, a Good Girl prudishly turning her back? Or is she the kind of woman who
flirts aggressively, flinging back her head and laughing, raising perfectly
plucked eyebrows at every double-entendre? Neither of these are what she wants.
The Kinds of Women she could be roll past in an endless line, unfurling like a
spool of yarn thrown downstairs, or clowns from a tiny car.

"On
your way to the City, doll? Me, I've got a very important meeting, right here
on the train. Looks to me like it’s your first time on the Night Train. Got
that sweet scrubbed up look to you. So are you excited? To see the bright
lights of the terrible sinful City?"

His
breath smells like beer, sweet and yeasty, and a little like better-take-care.

 Nope.
There is no version of herself she can imagine that will throw back her head
and laugh at this guy's jokes. She lifts the typewriter case from its place
next to the window, slides herself over into the space it left behind and
places the case between them. A castellated structure. A moat.

"Oh
hey, will you look at that, huh? Is that the new Underwood Noiseless Portable?
Looks like we're soul mates, sweetheart." He pulls his own matching case
from under the seat and gives it hearty pat.

"So
what are you, then? Woman Playwright? Girl Journalist? No... no I bet you're a
Lady Poet. You got that soulful poetic look about you.  I know, you see.
Because I'm poet, too. See my soulful poetic look?"

"I'm
a typist."

He
lets out what he hopes is a charming chuckle. It is not. "That's what they
all say. I'll tell you what I say. I say that you
say
you're a typist so
that you don't have to endure that glazed look folks get when you tell them
you're a poet. But I bet you stay up scribbling all hours of the night. I bet you've
come to the big city with a sheaf of poems an inch thick. And I bet you plan on
hoofing it back and forth to every little publisher in the Big Bad City. That's
what I bet."

"You
certainly do like gamble," she mutters through a cloud of Chesterfield smoke.

"What's
that, Sweetheart? Cat got your tongue?"

She
takes a draw from her Chesterfield, and thinks about how her lipstick ought to
be much redder for this sort of thing. Perhaps she can stop at a Woolworth's in
the morning.

"No,"
she says, blowing a plume of smoke just past his head, "but it smells like
one's been sitting on yours for the better part of three days."

Now,
she thinks, he'll be insulted enough to take his shining white teeth to another
carriage. Unfortunately, he laughs.

"Well,
you sure are pip, then, aren't you?"

He
picks up her typewriter case and slides it onto her lap, slides closer to her
and she feels his thigh pressing against her own.

"And
I do like a gal with a mouth on her."

He
walks his fingers up her knee. She brushes that hand with the lit end of her
Chesterfield.

"Hey!" And his smile goes from
shining to sinister, white keys to black keys in a flash. But before she has a
chance to really find out what kind of woman she turns out to be the carriage door
bangs open again.

A
tightly shingled bobbed haircut, a brassy -- almost pink shade of bottle blond
appears in the doorway. Eyes heavily lined in black kohl scan the carriage,
catch Modesty's eye, and thin penciled eyebrows raise in a silent question. The
bottle blond bob jerks barely to the businessman. Modesty widens her eyes and
shakes her head
No, no. A hundred times no.
The pink bob nods knowingly,
then calls over her shoulder.

"This
way gals, carriage is almost empty."

In
streams a bevy of beauties, of every shape and size and color you can imagine.
They are a flock of wild birds, they are a circus train, they are a hundred
scarves tied together up a magician's sleeve. The bottle blond directs all of
them into the car, making wide circles in the air with a battered ukulele. She
wears a long oyster pink coat with a fur collar, which makes her look
remarkably like we've caught her in her dressing gown.  The women pile in,
lugging musical instruments, both in and out of their cases.

A
tall woman in a long silk dress that looks more like a petticoat, she has skin
as black as an ebony box and is trying not to bonk her trumpet case on anyone's
head. Another girl, small but firm-looking, wrestles an upright bass that's
twice as tall as she is with no trouble at all. The one with the clarinet wears
a bright red kimono, the one with the trombone wears her hair tied back with a
black ribbon, and there's a big woman with a saxophone wearing a man's tuxedo.
They clamber onto the seats, tumble over each other's laps in a cloud of Vol de
Nuit perfume and violet face powder and pink stockinged legs and cigarette
smoke.

The
bottle blond leans out the door of the carriage and gestures again with her
ukulele. "It’s fine, Charlotte! We'll make room. Push back, ladies. Push
back. Here comes Charlotte."

And
they did push back to make room for Charlotte who pushed into the car, herding
a giant drum. On the side it read:
Pinky McGee's Totally Splendid Terribly
Wicked Reform School All-Girl Orchestra.

The
Business Man with the Piano Teeth trades his flash of potential violence for an
expression of abject fear. He grabs his case from the seat, grits his teeth,
and mutters something probably terribly insulting as he tries to squeeze past
through the Reform School All-Girl Orchestra.

Pinky
McGee holds her ukulele to her ear like a hearing trumpet. "What's that
bub? Leaving so soon? Come on, Pally! Next show starts in ten minutes. Wouldn't
want you to miss it, would we, girls?"

He
grunts and struggles for the door. From somewhere in the carriage a trumpet
plays a cartoonish two-note
wah-waah
as he exits out the door.

Pinky
McGee turns to Modesty Brown. "Well," she plucks each of her ukulele
strings in turns. My. Dog. Has. Fleas. "He was a charmer."

"Yes,
thanks. That was a moment or two away from becoming ... unpleasant."

"I'd
say it became
unpleasant
a couple minutes before our auspicious arrival.
It was about to become dangerous. What happened with old Piano Teeth,
there?"

"I
burned him with my cigarette."

"Good
girl, good instincts. Trouble is, sometimes the only way to empty a room of
fellas like that is to fill that room with gals like us. We're like a poison
cloud. Works every time."

A
rim shot erupted from someone's drums.

"Very
funny girls. Well, I hope we're not intruding on your solitude, though it looks
like that's exactly what we're doing, but sorry, sister, it couldn't be helped.
So looks like you're stuck with us, for better or worse." 

"And
who exactly am I stuck with?"

"In
case you couldn't see the side of Charlotte's drum, I'm Pinky McGee, and this
is my Totally Splendid, Terribly Wicked Reform School All-Girl Orchestra!"

A
clarinet plays a cheery fanfare.

Modesty
scans their faces. She can only peg two or three that might have been under the
age of 25, the rest are all well over thirty, some maybe into their forties.
It's hard to tell with so much feather boas and eyebrow pencil. And if you look
closer, beneath the powder, past the haze of Vol de Nuit and the glamor of the
brass instruments, if you look really closely, you could see they'd not been
very easy years at that. These aren't sweet little chippies from the sticks. Or
if they once were, they are no longer. They look like they've taken up their
instruments the way cavemen took up the club.

"I
see you giving us the eyeball there, Miss....?"

"Brown.
Modesty Brown."

"Modesty
Brown? You sound like a pilgrim."

"My
buckle hat's in my other bag."

"Anyway,
I see you giving us the eyeball there, Pilgrim. I can tell what you're
thinking."

"Oh
really? And what's that?"

"Well
that we look a bit long in the tooth for Reform School. And I look nothing like
a Wardeness."

"Well,"
Modesty hesitates. "I suppose reform school is sometimes just a state of
mind."

"Exactly.
I like you, Pilgrim." She gestures at Modesty's cigarette. "Say, can
you spare one of those?"

Modesty
peels the foil back on the package and finds two cigarettes left. She shakes
one out for Pinky.

"Ah,
the next to last. The penultimate butt. Very generous of you, I must say. Couldn't
take the last one, and you shouldn't either. That's bad hoodoo right there,
smoking someone's last cigarette. The ghost of a firing squad always hovers
around it. Now. Where was I? Oh yes!"

Pinky
lights Modesty's Penultimate Butt with a gold lighter, "we're on our way
back to the City from the Suburbs." She barely suppresses a shudder and
blows a lopsided smoke ring. "Playing a wedding."

The
Kimono with the Clarinet bleeps out a quick wedding march.

"Do
you play many weddings?" Modesty asks.

Silence
and shuffling feet. "Sometimes. If the money’s right. Especially if she
was one of our own."

The
clarinet cedes to the trumpet playing taps.

"We
were sorry to see Janet go," Pinky says, her little monologue rehearsed
like a politician's stump speech, "that's for sure. But you can't be a
good wife if you're out gallivanting with this lot every night. It'll happen
for most of us, in the end."

The
black woman in the long red dress gives a derisive sniff. 

"Listen,
Louise," pipes the pipsqueak from behind her giant bass. "Just
because it didn't work out for you, doesn't mean it can't work out for anyone.”

"Edith,
our resident romantic," quips the tuxedoed Saxophone.

"Don't
tease me, Dot." She plucks the strings menacingly.

"Nobody's
teasing you. I was sticking up for you."

"You'll
have to forgive Edith, she has an ex-husband with a rap sheet a mile
long," Dot says. "And a rubber arm to match. Makes romantics out of
the best of us."

"I'll
show you a rubber arm!"

And
over the course of the next two hours, there is intermittent music, some
general complaining, several dirty jokes, four flasks in circulation and from
some secret place, a box of caramels appears in a flash and empties out just as
quick.