Red Plaid Shirt Read online

  If the train on the spur line did not actually wake Lesley up, then it slid instead into her dreams, disguised as a shaggy behemoth with red eyes and silver hooves, shaking the snow from its curly brown fur as it pawed the rails and snorted steam.

  TRAIN TRACKS

  As a teenager, Lesley walked along the train tracks every morning to Glengarry Heights High School. On the way, she usually met up with a boy named Eric Henderson, who was two grades older and dressed all year round in faded blue jeans, a teeshirt, and a black leather jacket with studs. Occasionally he condescended to the cold weather by wearing a pair of black gloves.

  After a couple of weeks, Eric took to waiting for Lesley on the tracks where they crossed her street. He would be leaning against the signal lights smoking when she came out her front door. They never walked home together at four o’clock because, even though Lesley sometimes loitered at her locker hoping, Eric was never around at that time, having, she assumed, other more interesting, more grown-up things to do after school.

  Every morning Lesley and Eric practised balancing on the rails with their arms outstretched, and they complained about the way the tar-coated ties were never spaced quite right for walking on. Lesley kept her ears open, looking over her shoulder every few minutes, just in case. Her mother, Amelia, had often warned her, “Don’t get too close to a moving train or you’ll get sucked under.”

  Sometimes Eric would line up bright pennies on the silver rails so the train would come and flatten them. Lesley would watch for the pennies on her way home from school, would gather them up and save them, thin as tinfoil, in a cigar box she kept under the bed. She never put pennies on the tracks herself because she was secretly afraid that they would cause a derailment and the train would come toppling off the tracks, exploding as it rolled down the embankment, demolishing her house and her neighbours’ houses and everything in them. It was okay though when Eric did it, because somehow he could be both dangerous and charmed at the same time.

  Every morning Eric told Lesley about what he’d done the night before. Lesley was not expected to reciprocate, which was just as well, since all she ever did in the evening was homework and dishes and talk on the phone.

  One Monday morning Eric said he’d gone to the Gardens on Saturday night to see the Ike and Tina Turner Revue. He said Tina Turner was the sexiest woman in the world and the way she sang was like making love to the microphone right there on stage. He said he thought he’d die just watching her, and all the other guys went crazy too.

  On the phone every night after supper, Lesley told her new best friend, Audrey, every little thing Eric had said to her that morning, especially the way he’d said, “I like your new haircut a lot,” and then the way he’d winked at her in the hall between History and French.

  “Do you think he likes me?” she asked Audrey over and over again.

  “Of course he likes you, silly! He adores you!” This went on all fall, all winter, all spring, until the raging crush which Lesley had on Eric Henderson could be nothing, it seemed, but true true love.

  The week before final exams, Eric asked Audrey to the last school dance.

  Lesley spent the night of the dance barricaded in her bedroom, lying on the floor with the record player blasting Tina Turner at top volume. She propped a chair against the door and would not let her parents in. She was mad at them too: at her father, Edward, because he’d laughed and said, “You’ll get over it, pumpkin!” and at her mother, Amelia, because she was old and married, probably happy, probably didn’t even remember what love was really like, probably hadn’t explained things properly in the first place, should have warned her about more than freight trains.

  She would, Lesley promised herself savagely, spend the entire summer in her room, learning all the lyrics to Tina Turner’s songs, and reading fat Russian novels which were all so satisfyingly melancholy, so clotted with complications and despair, and the characters had so many different, difficult names. Especially she would read Anna Karenina and memorize the signal passage where Anna decides to take her own life:

  … And all at once she thought of the man crushed by the train the day she had first met Vronsky, and she knew what she had to do ….

  “… And I will punish him and escape from everyone and from myself ….”

  … And exactly at the moment when the space between the wheels came opposite her, she dropped the red bag, and drawing her head back into her shoulders, fell on her hands under the carriage, and lightly, as though she would rise again at once, dropped on to her knees ….

  … She tried to get up, to drop backwards: but something huge and merciless struck her on the head and rolled her on her back ….

  … And the light by which she had read the book filled with troubles, falsehoods, sorrow, and evil, flared up more brightly than ever before, lighted up for her all that had been in darkness, flickered, began to grow dim, and was quenched forever.

  And she would probably carve Eric Henderson’s initials into her thigh with a ballpoint pen, and she would probably not eat anything either, except maybe unsalted soda crackers, and she would not wash her hair more than once a week, and she would stay in her pyjamas all day long. Yes she would. She would languish.And for sure she would never ever ever ever fall in love or have a best friend ever again so long as she lived, so help her.

  NIGHT TRAIN

  When Lesley moved away from home at the age of twenty-one, she took the train because there was an air strike that summer. Her parents put her on the train in Winnipeg with a brown paper bag full of tuna sandwiches and chocolate chip cookies, with the three-piece luggage set they’d bought her as a going-away present, and a book of crossword puzzles to do on the way. They were all weeping lightly, the three of them: her parents, Lesley assumed, out of a simple sadness, and herself, out of an intoxicating combination of excitement and anticipation, of new-found freedom, and, with it, fear. She was, she felt, on the brink of everything important. She was moving west to Alberta, which was booming.

  Seated across the aisle of Coach Number 3003 (a good omen, Lesley thought, as she had long ago decided that three was her lucky number) was, by sheer coincidence, a young man named Arthur Hoop who’d given a lecture at the university in Winnipeg the night before. His topic was nuclear disarmament and Lesley had attended because peace was one of her most enduring interests.

  After an hour or so, Lesley worked up enough courage to cross over to the empty seat beside him and say, “I really loved your lecture.” Arthur Hoop seemed genuinely pleased and invited her to join him for lunch in the club car. Lesley stashed the brown-bag lunch under the seat in front of hers and followed Arthur, swaying and bobbing and grinning, down the whole length of the train.

  Arthur Hoop, up close, was interesting, amiable, and affectionate, and his eyes were two different colours, the left one blue and the right one brown. Arthur was on his way back to Vancouver, where he lived with a woman named Laura who was sleeping with his best friend and he, Arthur, didn’t know what he was going to do next. Whenever the train stopped at a station for more than five minutes, Arthur would get off and phone ahead to Vancouver, where Laura, on the other end, would either cry, yell, or hang up on him.

  By the time the train pulled into Regina, Lesley and Arthur were holding hands, hugging, and having another beer in the club car, where the waiter said, “You two look so happy, you must be on your honeymoon!”

  Lesley and Arthur giggled and giggled, and then, like fools or like children playing house, they shyly agreed. The next thing they knew, there was a red rose in a silver vase on their table and everyone in the car was buying them drinks and calling out, “Congratulations!” over the clicking of the train. Arthur kept hugging Lesley against him and winking, first with the brown eye, then with the blue. They spent the dark hours back in Arthur’s coach seat, snuggling under a scratchy grey blanket, kissing and touching and curling around each other like cats. Lesley was so wrapped up in her fantasy of how Arthur would get off the train with
her in Calgary or how she would stay on the train with him all the way to Vancouver, and how, either way, her real life was about to begin, that she hardly noticed how brazen they were being until Arthur actually put it in, shuddered, and clutched her to him.

  Lesley wept when she got off the train in Calgary, and Arthur Hoop wept too, but he stayed on.

  From her hotel room, Lesley wrote Arthur long sad letters and ordered up hamburgers and Chinese food from room service at odd hours of the day and night. On the fourth night, she called her mother collect in Winnipeg and cried into the phone because she felt afraid of everything and she wanted to come home. Her mother, wise Amelia, said, “Give it two weeks before you decide. You know we’ll always take you back, pumpkin.”

  By the end of the two weeks, Lesley had a basement apartment in a small town called Ventura, just outside the city. She also had two job interviews, a kitten named Calypso, and a whole new outlook on life. She never did hear from Arthur Hoop and she wondered for a while what it was about trains, about men, the hypnotic rhythm of them, relentless, unremitting, and irresistible, the way they would go straight to your head, and when would she ever learn?

  It wasn’t long before she was laughing to herself over what Arthur must have told the other passengers when she left him flat like that, on their honeymoon no less.

  TRAIN TICKET

  All the way home to Winnipeg to spend Christmas with her parents, Lesley drank lukewarm coffee out of Styrofoam cups, ate expensive dried-out pressed-chicken sandwiches, and tried to get comfortable in her maroon-upholstered seat with her purse as a pillow or her parka as a blanket. She tried to read but could not concentrate for long, could not keep herself from staring out the window at the passing scenery, which was as distracting as a flickering television set at the far end of the room. All the way across Saskatchewan, the train seemed to be miraculously ploughing its way through one endless snowbank, throwing up walls of white on either side of the tracks.

  She didn’t feel like talking to anyone and closed her eyes whenever the handsome young man across the rocking aisle looked her way hopefully. She had just started dating a man named Bruce back in Ventura and she did not like leaving him for Christmas. But this was her first Christmas since she’d moved away from home and the trip back for the holidays had been planned months ago. Once set in motion, the trip, it seemed, like the train once she had boarded it, could not be deflected. She was travelling now with a sorrowful but self-righteous sense of daughterly obligation that carried her inexorably eastward. For a time she’d believed that moving away from her parents’ home would turn her instantly into a free, adult woman. But of course she was wrong.

  She kept reaching for her purse, checking for her ticket. She memorized the messages printed on the back of it, as if they were a poem or a prayer:

  RESERVATIONS: The enclosed ticket is of value. If your plans are altered, the ticket must be returned with the receipt coupon intact, for refund or credit. If you do not make the trip, please cancel your reservations.

  ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES: Alcoholic beverages purchased on board must be consumed in the premises where served. Provincial liquor laws prohibit the consumption of personal liquor on trains except in the confines of a bedroom or roomette.

  BAGGAGE: Personal effects consisting of wearing apparel, toilet articles, and similar effects for the passenger’s use, comfort, and convenience (except liquids and breakables) are accepted as baggage. Explosive, combustible, corrosive, and inflammable materials are prohibited by law.

  The train trip took sixteen hours. The inside of Lesley’s mouth, after thirteen hundred kilometres, tasted like a toxic combination of diesel fuel and indoor-outdoor carpeting.

  Her parents were there to meet her at the Winnipeg station, her father, Edward, smiling and smiling, his shy kiss landing somewhere near her left ear; her mother, Amelia, looking small in her big winter coat with a Christmas corsage of plastic mistletoe and tiny silver bells pinned to the lapel. The train pulled away effortlessly in a cloud of steam and snow.

  FREIGHT TRAIN

  They had a saying in Ventura—when Lesley was still living there with Bruce—a saying that was applied, with much laughter and lip-smacking, to people, usually women, who were less than attractive.

  “She looks like she’s been kissing freight trains,” one of the boys in the bar would say, and the rest of them round the table would howl and nod and slap their knees. Lesley would laugh with them, even though she felt guilty for it, and sometimes, calling up within herself noble notions of sisterhood, sympathy, and such, she would sputter uselessly something in defence of the poor woman they were picking on.

  But she would always laugh too in the end, because she knew she was pretty, she knew she was loved, she knew she was exempt from their disgust and the disfiguring, inexorable advent of trains.

  RUNAWAY TRAIN

  There was a story they told in Ventura—when Lesley was still living there with Bruce—about the time Old Jim Jacobs stole the train. It was back in the winter of 1972. Old Jim was a retired engineer who’d turned to drink in his later years. He sat in the Ventura Hotel day after day, night after night, ordering draft beer by the jug with two glasses, one for himself and one for his invisible friend. He would chat amiably for hours in an unintelligible language with the empty chair across from him, politely topping up the two glasses evenly and then drinking them both.

  “At least he’s never lonely,” Bruce would always say.

  On toward closing time, however, Old Jim, or his invisible friend, or both, would start to get a little surly, and soon Old Jim would be jumping and cursing (in English), flinging himself around in the smoke-blue air of the bar.

  “I hate you! I hate you!” he would cry.

  “Let’s step outside and settle this like men!” he would roar, hitching up his baggy pants and boxing in the air.

  “So what, then,” Bruce would wonder, “is the point of having invisible friends, if you can’t get along with them?”

  Lesley knew Old Jim from when she worked in the grocery store and he’d be standing in the lineup in his old railway cap with a loaf of bread, a package of baloney, and some Kraft cheese slices. By the time he got to the cash register, he’d have made himself a sandwich and, wouldn’t you know it, he must have left his wallet in his other pants—as if he even owned another pair of pants.

  When he wasn’t drinking or shopping, Old Jim was sitting in the long grass beside the cpr main line, counting boxcars, and waving at the engineers.

  At the time of the great train robbery, he’d been bingeing, so they said, for eight days straight (this number could be adjusted, at the storyteller’s discretion, up to as many as ten days but never down to less than six) in Hawkesville, a nearby town twelve miles west of Ventura. He’d been barred for two weeks from the Ventura Hotel for sleeping on the pool table, which explained why he was drinking in Hawkesville in the first place. So Old Jim was getting to be a little homesick after all that time away from his old stomping grounds, and on the Friday night he decided it was high time to get back, seeing as how his two weeks were up on Saturday. But he was flat broke after his binge, pension cheque long gone, no money for a cab, and it was too damn cold to hitchhike. So he decided to take the train.

  So he hopped right in, so they said, to the first engine he found in the yard, fired her up, and off he went, hauling forty-seven empty boxcars behind him (this number too could be adjusted, interminably up, it seemed, because, after all, who was counting?). He made it back to Ventura without mishap, parked her up on the siding behind the Ventura Hotel so he’d be good and ready when they opened in the morning and he knew they’d give him credit for a day or two. He curled up in the caboose and went to sleep. Which was where the railway police and the rcmp found him when they surrounded the runaway train, guns drawn, sirens screaming, at 5:36 a.m. (the time of his legendary capture was unalterable, a part of the town’s history which could not be tampered with).

  “But what, then,” Br
uce would wonder whenever he heard the story again, “is the point of stealing a train, when you can never take it off the tracks, when you can only go back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, and you can never really get away?”

  EXPRESS TRAIN

  One summer Lesley and Bruce took the train up to Edmonton where his brother was getting married. Halfway there, they were stopped on a siding in the middle of nowhere, waiting for a freight train to pass. Bruce was getting impatient, sighing huge conspicuous sighs as he fidgeted and fussed in his seat, while Lesley beside him read on peacefully.

  Spotting a white horse from the window, he said, “Sometimes simple things glimpsed in the distance can bring great comfort.”

  TRAIN TRIP EAST

  All the way back to Winnipeg for her Uncle Mel’s funeral, Lesley drank beer out of cans and wrote postcards to Bruce in Ventura. She bought the cards at various train stations along the way and then she mailed them at the next stop. She suspected that Bruce was on the brink of having an affair with a French-Canadian woman named Analise who was spending the summer in Ventura with her sister. All of this suspicion, sticky and time-consuming as it was, had left Lesley feeling sick and tired, a little bit crazy too. On the back of a green lake, she wrote:

  I tried to take pictures from the train, of a tree and some water, some sky, but they wouldn’t hold still long enough.

  On the back of a red maple tree:

  I saw a coyote running from the train, also white horses, brown cows, black birds, and a little girl in Maple Creek wearing a pink sunsuit with polka dots, running. All of them running away from the train.