Train by Pete Dexter Read Free Book Online Page B

to walk by, they always give it enough room that he couldn’t reach out and grab them.
     
     
Sweet counted the money with his left hand, moving the bills back one at a time from the roll, keeping track in his head.
     
     
“I’ll take care of this,” he said when he’d finished. Plural sat back against the locker, no longer interested. He picked up the Nehi again and had another drink.
     
     
“It’s for Florida’s people,” Train said.
     
     
Sweet nodded, but he’d quit listening back when he saw the money. “The man told me I was supposed to take it over,” Train said.
     
     
Sweet looked up from the money. “Where you gone go?” he said.
     
     
“That’s what I was asking, where Florida live.”
     
     
“And how you gone get there if you find out?”
     
     
Train had thought about that too, and didn’t know the answer. “Take the bus,” he said.
     
     
“The bus don’t go where Florida live. He clear the hell out somewhere in the valley. And the missus is jumpy, ain’t let you in the door.”
     
     
“He must of got home somehow,” Train said.
     
     
“I tole you I’ll take care of it,” he said. “I got to go over there anyways tonight and tell them Florida passed on. That’s in my description here, what I’m supposed to do.”
     
     
Train stood still a minute, then turned around and went back to his spot next to Plural. He thought about the Mile Away Man offering to bet three hundred and fifty dollars that he would do the right thing.
     
     
Sweet gave him a good tote that afternoon, and it wasn’t till sunset, when he was walking the road out to the street and Sweet came past him in his Cadillac, blowing dust and little pieces of rock behind him, that Train remembered that five dollars of the money was supposed to be his.
     
     
It made him feel better somehow, that Sweet had stole five dollars from him too.
     
     

He went to the movies that night, thinking of Florida. The show was Gene Autry, and Train went in even though he’d sat through it one night the week before. The horse was named Champion, and it had guns for a bridle. Train preferred movies where nobody sang, but sitting in the theater kept him out of the way until his mother’s new friend went to sleep. The friend’s name was Mayflower. He had some beers last Sunday, dropped his arm across Train’s shoulders while they was all talking, his hand at the nape of his neck, and then squeezed Train and tried to pull him closer, tried to controlled his head. Train tightened himself and held away, and they fought secretly in front of his mother over that two or three inches of space, with polite looks on their faces, Mayflower squeezing so hard Train felt the shaking in his arm.
     
     
And then the squeezing stopped and the hand slid off, and he and Mayflower looked at each other with a cold understanding of what was possible between them. And his mother was sitting there the whole time, seeing what was happening, hoping that everything she knew about men and their territory didn’t apply to her own house. Train could feel the weight of Mayflower’s hand a long time after it left, and there was a numbness down the back of his head.
     
     
“You two stop that roughhousing,” she said, “before you tear up my kitchen.” She wished one of them would leave; he saw that, and knew which one it was.
     
     
Mayflower was a short, powerful man with a shiny scar that ran the width of his neck, like a collar. It rose up off his skin half an inch, and his mother kissed it sometimes and said it suited him, kept him from being too pretty. And so there was that too. Somewhere along the line Mayflower had found out he could be helpless himself, probably lying on the floor while people watched him bleed.
     
     
Train was glad of that, and when he looked back up on the screen, Gene Autry was sitting on the back of that beautiful horse, playing his guitar.
     
     

It was midnight when the last show finished. He walked