Patrick Dobson, short story

An excerpt from Harry Dreams of Jupiter, a book of 16 short stories

1132 E. 65^th St., Kansas City, MO 64131, 816-333-7303

Quiet

Sheila was reliable, that was sure. Artie knew he could rely on her for a number of things. She would always lie to him about the bank account and how much she used the credit card. She always had an aura of noise about her, television, radio, telephone, something.

But he could also rely on her to make love whenever he wanted. That’s what he wanted now. It was late evening, and tomorrow he would be piloting a freight to the marshalling yard in Emporia, trading coal cars for grain bins and airplane fuselages. He would be gone three days, and it was time to pay the bills. He thought he’d better raise the issue the credit card pointed to; despite the fact he already knew where it might lead.

“Sheila, you’ve been using the credit card to buy crap again,” he said. He sat at the table in the small dining room, a single light burning above it. Receipts and bills formed a half-wreath around him. Sheila had just climbed out of the shower and pulled a towel tight around her as she came through the tiny kitchen. She opened a bottle of beer she had taken from the refrigerator. The radio blasted in the bathroom. She turned on a small television in the kitchen.

“I told you, you have to stop wasting money if we want to save for the down payment,” he said over the noise.

He looked down at the stack of printed envelopes and invoices. He knew what these kinds of credit card charges meant: Joyous Liquors, Brando’s (a “bistro”), and The Westport Coffee House. When he asked her about them, she had offered that she was lonely when he was out of town with the railroad. She needed a few things to cheer herself up and had taken herself out to dinner. “I hope you don’t mind, honey,” she said. “I’m just so alone here, you know.”

“I don’t mind,” he had said, and had kept on saying. “I just think we want to keep expenses down. For a while, anyway.”

“Come on, sug, it’s just for a couple of things,” she said now, as she nearly always did. She put the bottle on the counter and pulled a towel up around her hair. Leaning against the doorframe, she reached back for the bottle and took a long draw, her long, smooth neck contracting as she swallowed.

“Couple of things?” He didn’t want to go on, he wanted her to have a different story, something that would be new. Something he could hold on to for a while longer. “Every month it’s a couple of things, hon. This time it’s Mel’s Fine Wines. And Le Chocolatier? Seventy-five bucks here, fifty there. Here’s something from Jeri’s Lingerie for $213.”

“That was a little present for you. I’ll show it to you later.” She smiled and struck a pose that he didn’t see.

“Hon, I’m sure it’s a nice thing, whatever it is,” he said as he looked up. He wanted to say he didn’t want a gift that had already been used, but didn’t. “A better present would be to come home after a long time out and find that you’ve just gone to work, taken a long walk, and read a book. Is there something I need to do to make sure you are all right when I’m out?”

Sheila poked her finger into the towel and scratched her head. “No, baby. I know how it looks, all that when you’re gone. It’s just that when you’re here I don’t think of those things.”

“Listen. When I’m gone, think work, walk, and read. Nothing else. Not until we get the down payment for the house.”

He closed his eyes and squeezed the pen in his hand, and actually prayed it would end there. Funny thing, prayer. He used it in extreme circumstances, when things were great, when things were hopeless. He couldn’t remember the last time when things were great.

Sheila curled her lip at him as he was looking down at his work. She pulled on the beer one more time and walked out the other door of the kitchen. “You’re such a poop.”

He looked farther down the list of charges. His heart froze when saw an entry from Lighthouse Inn for $243. The Lighthouse was an expensive bed and breakfast on the edge of town noted for fine dining and rich appointments. He put his head in his hands and listened to the television and the radio. The charges at restaurants were red flags, and he had seen them but ignored them. He could let her have an affair or affairs while he was away, as long as he didn’t have to see them when he was home. He paid the charge bill in full every month so he wouldn’t have to pay interest, and so he wouldn’t have to be reminded of what she had done in months past. He wanted home to be a routine he could rely on. He wanted to believe her when she said she treated herself to nights out when he was out of town, and he sometimes never brought up the charges, ignored them for months. This time was different. The Lighthouse charge was for a room. The red flag had become a flare.

He went on his bill-paying routine, removing each invoice from the envelope, writing down the amount in a column with the others on the back of an envelope, and putting the invoice in the return envelope with one end hanging out. But the charge bill was out on the table on its own, and he couldn’t help looking at it. And when he saw it, there was only one line on the invoice—the one with the charge to the Lighthouse Inn.

When he was done sorting through the advertisements, separating the invoices from the lists of charges, and putting the invoices with the return envelopes, he pulled a pocket calculator from the box he kept everything in—bills, checks, important papers—and added up the column of numbers. Then, he looked into his account envelope, where he had put the checking information and wrote his account balance down. The former was larger than the latter by $237 dollars. He looked again at the charge bill.

He wrote all the checks and sealed them in the envelopes, peeling stamps from the glossy backing and placing them haphazardly in the corners. He reached into the drawer of the sideboard and rooted around a little until he found a sheet of return address stickers:

Artie and Sheila Douglass

1519 Maple St.

Waldorf, MO 64108

The sticker reminded him that 1519 Maple was rented. It was a good house, but it was rented. It was temporary. He grabbed the sides of the table, felt the solidity of the chromed metal and the smooth top. It was a good table, had been with him for a long time, was something to rely on. He tightened his hands over the sharp edge of the metal. Over the last two years, a lot of his life that he thought was permanent had become temporary.

He let go of the table and planted his elbows on the top and rubbed his forehead. Artie had bought a small house before he and Sheila were married. It was perfect for him, with two large rooms, one a bedroom. It was a good place, a comfortable place to unwind from the jarring work of coupling and uncoupling boxcars, to put his feet up and let his back ease out. Being single and often gone for days at a time, he liked the way he could keep the place up. It was also easy for his neighbors to look after when he was out of town, pick up the papers and the mail. It had been easy to buy, the mortgage well within his railroad conductor’s salary.

But after he and Sheila made their vows in the room that was the living room-dining room-kitchen, the place seemed to contract. At first, he hadn’t minded or even noticed the constant chatter of the radio and the television. It was love. They worked, made love every night he was home, and nearly every morning, and rarely tired of it. But after a couple of months, he found himself volunteering for service in marshaling yards some distance from Waldorf. He took longer to get home, relishing the quiet of the drive, letting his head clear before he had to go back into the anarchy of broadcast advertising and constant ringing of the telephone.

But he went home because Sheila was there. When she turned off the appliances and the electronics, turned the ringer off on the telephone, she was smart and witty. She had a line of nearly perfect teeth with just a little kink in the top row that highlighted her smile. She had the body Greek goddesses in marble and bronze statues had, only with larger breasts and longer, curlier hair. When he ran hands and face over her smooth skin, he came alive in a way he had never know with any other woman. He fanaticized about her when he wasn’t making love to her. When he made love to her, he rarely thought other women. Even when he had had enough of the cacophony that surrounded her and escaped to work or to the bar, he thought of her.

When the time neared for him to go to locomotive engineer school near Atlanta, he decided he needed at least one room to go into and a door to shut against the television and the radio, against her. He would finish school and start making more money. He figured the time was right to find another, bigger house, and to rent or sell the small one. Sheila would have a larger place for a while to herself while he was away. When he had presented the plan to her, she agreed.

They found a larger house to rent not far from the small house and finished moving into the new place a week before he went to the three-month engineer’s training. It was open, too, with a spacious living room and dining area. The kitchen had doors, as did both bedrooms. One bedroom was his alone, and there he had put a comfortable chair, a small couch, a lamp table, and a reading lamp near the window. He put up a little bookshelf next to the chair and a notebook to write thoughts into. They made love in every room of the house before he left for school.

The small house they had just moved from sold within a month, and they arranged the closing for a weekend. He had driven up from Georgia in a rain that sometimes turned to sleet and ice. He had left early on a Friday night, staying overnight in a hotel in Arkansas and making the drive to Waldorf on Saturday morning after a few hours of sleep. He arrived at the new house in time to find Sheila coming in. She seemed to have been out all night.

“I had a rough time sleeping,” she had said. “I’m just back from breakfast at the diner on Broadway.”

He didn’t doubt her. But he was annoyed when she nearly fell asleep at the closing, her head chicken pecking throughout explanations of the fees and small print, She was barely awake for the signatures. When they arrived home, she went right to bed and didn’t seem to have any problems falling asleep. While he was home, he wanted to make sure of his accounts before he left for Georgia again and checked his credit card balance over the phone. It was much greater than he expected. He walked into the bedroom where she was sleeping and woke her and asked her about the new expenses.

“Babe, there’s nothing to do while you’re gone,” she offered as an explanation. She pulled her t-shirt down to uncover most of one of her breasts. She was sleepy, and her face was warm, her lips soft and wet. Artie had been away for a month with nothing but his thoughts and time alone in a hotel room. He had craved Sheila.

They made love, roughly. When they had finished, Sheila slept and Artie thought. Money. House. Bills. But even if engineers didn’t make a ton of money, he and Sheila they wouldn’t be on edge, like they’d been before. That was good.

When he came home after the second month of engineer’s school, he found Sheila had added a dog, a little yapper named Jack, to the television and radio. The new place was bigger, he had his own room, but the place was alive all the time. Static, almost. He took to wearing earplugs, especially at night.

He also found that the credit card bill was even higher than before. A pattern emerged. It was consistent, at least. She offered the same explanations of loneliness.

When he had finished school and began to take control of the trains, his biggest concern was watching for whistle signs, some of which he almost missed no matter how many times he took the trains across the same crossings. He had a monitor that helped with the larger, more important crossings. But at the small, rural crossings, the gravel “dirt-farmer crossings”, the railroaders called them, he would be lost in thought, looking into the Kansas River and out over the wheat fields. Sometimes as the sun was setting, he would think of Sheila just before they married. In the fall, they had come out to Prairie State Park and hiked out to the middle of the meadow to spread a blanket. They set the water jug and sandwiches to the side and slipped off their clothes and made love in the yellow-orange light of late evening. After, they sprayed each other playfully with cold insect repellent and slept under a sheet, making love again under great chiffon layers of stars, and again in the first light of dawn. He remembered making love on the porch swing at her mother’s house just after the neighbors went to bed, and making love in their own bed. He thought of their warm tangles of legs and arms, the wondrous feel of her lips, breasts, and the curve of her back against his face, the way she pulled him close when she came.

Before the training and the long apprenticeship, he thought driving a train would be complicated. But after, as he was piloting the trains, he was disappointed. Driving a train most often consisted of a hard-on in his pants, his foot on the deadman and hand on the rev control, and a look at the speedometer from time to time. If he had a good conductor, which was often, he had something to talk about. But even that wore out after a while and he wished he could read a book or go back to thinking about Sheila.

He came quickly to like the job best when he and the conductor reached the end of a shift and they “died” on the tracks. Usually it was because a stop at a rural terminal had gone too long, and union and federal work rules kept them from working after their eight-hour shift had ended. It burned up the railroad managers because of the time it took to get a new crew to a train, and many of the men though it was stupid not to be able to put in another hour or two to get a train into the yard. But Artie thought the rule was good because some men hated their homes and wives, or were so in debt they would suffer the monotony until they dropped. When he and his conductor died, they would have to wait for a fresh crew to take over the train. Then, he would have a little time to read some, or write down a few thoughts in his notebook before the van arrived to take them in.

At the end of every month, he sat down at the dining room table to pay bills if he was in town, or at a hotel writing table if he was away. The routine didn’t change because it didn’t need changing. He liked to think of his house, his job, Sheila’s part-time work at the hospital coffee shop as running a business. He encouraged Sheila to go full-time or find another job. But she liked what she did and he understood how hard it was to find something you liked to do. Since his work took him out of town several nights in a row a couple times a month, and often overnight on weekends, he didn’t mind her not getting a full-time job. She knew best how to spend her time.

But after those first few months, he knew about the other man. She never drank wine or ate expensive deserts when he was around. They rarely, if ever, went out, and then never to an expensive restaurant. Still, he was happy with home, outside of the television, the radio, and the dog. He kept earplugs next to his armchair on the small bookshelf and found that with the door closed and the plugs in, he did just fine. And they made love two or three times a week when he was home. She seemed excited and anxious to do so.

After a few months, he had seen no increase in their savings. He was getting anxious to buy a house with the money they had made from the sale of the old house. He was frustrated.

“Sheila, come in here and sit down. And please, turn off that TV and the radio,” he said one evening as he sat down to pay the month’s bills. He had just come back to Waldorf from a series of runs that had taken him to North Platte, Nebraska. When he arrived earlier in the day, Sheila had picked him up at the yard and made love to him in the car down by the river. They had napped for a long time, eaten food he grilled on the patio, and had ice cream. Now, he sipped a cup of coffee amid the piles of receipts. She pointed the remote at the television and turned it off as she stood from the rocking chair. She walked through the kitchen and turned off the radio before picking up Jack and holding him in her arms like a baby.

“What is it, sug?” She sat in one of the chairs at the dinette set.

“You’re out of control spending money when I’m out of town.” He had a pen in his hand, his elbows on the table. “You have to tell me why you can’t stop.”

“Honey, I’m alone.” She looked pouty.

“Babe, you’re killing me with this thing. We can’t go on like this. You will have to fill your time with other stuff.”

She put the dog down and opened the front of her dress slowly. He licked the credit card company envelope as she pushed her pudenda against his shoulder, her dress caressing her smooth hips and dropping down onto his forearm. She brushed her breast against his face. He looked up the curve of it to her neck and chin. Her mouth was open in a small oval and her breath was hot and good. He reached down and felt the curve of her calf as she stood up on the ball of her foot. His penis pushed up against the edge of the table, and everything seemed all right.

He often wondered who he was, this man who was living the good life and sleeping with Sheila while he was away. He wondered how he stacked up to the stranger, how wide the man’s shoulders were, if the man was thicker or thinner than him. Did he make love better or differently? Did he run his face over her body the way he did, eliciting soft, wet moans from her? Had he ever made love to her just after the stranger? Or before? Did he have money? Drive a better car or had a better job or set of clothes?

None of that bothered him especially. He hadn’t ever been a jealous person, but he never like being manipulated or lied to. He still lusted for Sheila, often painfully while away from home. He had frequently thought of ending the misery of being home with her, the noise of the television and the radio, and the dog. The routine, however, and the passion for her were things he never wanted to lose, things that had become a part of him. He had been as enthusiastic as ever, but noticed lovemaking was becoming a chore for Sheila, something she tried to get through fairly quickly. For the last few months, the house was often a mess when he came home from the road. He had begun to smell the other man’s shampoo on his pillow.

He could overlook a lot of things, he decided, but the Lighthouse Inn charge was too much to overlook.

After he put the return address labels on the envelopes, he took his pen and carefully drew a line through “and Sheila.” Taking a scissors from the box, he cut the credit card and dropped the plastic strips in with a check and the invoice. After, he clothes pinned the stack of bills to the mailbox and came in and called the automatic teller at the bank and transferred $240 from Sheila’s account—which had some $7,331 in it—to his.

“Sheila,” he said loudly as he turned the television in the kitchen off. He sat back at the table and tapped his pen. “Turn that radio off.”

Sheila clicked the radio off in the bathroom and came through the kitchen, taking a second beer from the icebox. She cinched up the towel around her chest and pulled loose the one turbaned around her head. “What’s the deal, sug?”

“Get your stuff and get out,” he said.

“What?” she said, shaking out her hair. “What are you sayin’?”

Artie breathed deep. His heart pounded in his chest. She was still beautiful, still very much the creature with whom he felt he became one with in lovemaking, a feeling he had never experienced before. He was giving that up. He wanted her now more than ever.

“I’m leaving tomorrow for Emporia. I’ll be gone for three days. When I come back, you can’t be here. And I’ll expect you will have called a lawyer. I recommend Jackson Willis, a good man, and fair. He’ll get you through this cheap.” The blood drained from Sheila’s face. Her shoulders drooped. He was disappointed. He wanted her to fight back, to shed the towel, to sit on the table and arc her calves over his shoulders. He wanted to bury himself in her, for them both to lose control one more time.

She leaned forward, one hand on the counter top, the other with the beer hanging low in front of her. “You can’t do this.”

“I can, too. I just did. For two years you have been lying to me, spending my money and putting cash from whoever he is into your account.”

“How can you?” She shook her head, suddenly looking bedraggled.

“In the meantime, I have taken the credit card and enough money from your account to make ends meet. And I’m changing my account before I leave so you won’t have access. You’ll have to use your money to get you wherever you’re going.”

“I won’t move out.”

“You will. I’ll talk to my lawyer in the morning when he gets in and arrange to have the papers drawn up. I trust you won’t try to take anything because you’ll lose.”

Sheila’s mouth hung open. She was speechless.

He stood in the empty living room of the rented house, waiting for something to happen. The clutter was gone. The furniture had belonged mostly to her, as had the items that made all the clutter for his mind, the noisemakers. Train whistles echoed up the valley and tires whined on the interstate. There were no other sounds. He had bent over and unhooked the wedding ring from the dog’s collar. Jack, the yapper dog, was silent and still, looking up at Artie.

He sat down in the lone rocking chair and looked at the empty television stand. He’d miss her. He’d be a long time finding anyone like her again. Maybe sometime. Maybe never, if he was lucky. He had a few problems of his own to solve. Like Jack. They would have to get to know each other, Artie supposed. A dog, after all, can’t be all that bad on its own. Artie folded his hands behind his head. He prayed a little. Just a little. Then, he thought about what he’d do next. Take Jack for a walk, maybe read a book. The only thing he knew was he was going to sit a while and listen to all the quiet.

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