A Night in Durango

Jack Steele                                                                                               1043 words

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jacksteele1@comcast.net

A Night in Durango

By

Jack Steele

     The mountains were so far away that they never became more than pale blue streaks on the horizon, and soon the train’s red vinyl seats were dusted with a thick layer of gray sand.  His hands smelled like lard, but there was no place to wash or even to pee, the toilet backed up down the aisle.  Once when the train made one of its mysterious stops in the middle of nowhere, the boy saw families living in box cars next to the tracks.  Across the aisle an old Mexican couple ate soft white cheese, oranges and roasted chicken that they’d packed in a wooden crate lined with dish towels.  They were all wrinkles and smiles and courteous nods.  A blind man with a concertina got on, the bellows patched with duct tape.  His fingernails were dirty, and he wore a blue suit that made him look like a baseball umpire.  The lean, handsome conductor was unaccountably friendly and happy the whole way.  He seemed about to burst into song when the blind man played.

     Besides himself there were two other gringos on the nearly empty train.  An old man with stringy white hair, wire-rimmed glasses tinted blue, and a turquoise and silver string tie, and his companion, a woman half his age and size, who read aloud to him.  She rarely looked up from her book, and her mouth never stopped moving.  Her hair was brown and cut in a page boy.  The book in her hand and the old man’s head swayed in time with the train.

     In Durango the conductor pushed back his cap, loosened his tie and pointed with a smile at the hotel, a short walk in the cool mountain air through the dusk and the clinking of pop bottles.  The desk clerk was immaculately dressed, fussy, impatient.  The boy had just received his key when he heard the clerk say to the old man and the small woman, “No more rooms.  Too many schoolteachers.”  “You can have my room,” the boy said, not even thinking about it.  “I can sleep in the bus station.”  “We wouldn’t hear of it,” said the old man.  He had a booming voice that bounced off the marble walls of the huge lobby.  He looked around as if about to plead his case to the multitude.  “Can’t we get a cot or something?” he asked the annoyed clerk. The small woman frowned but said nothing.  She was actually pretty in a simple if not plain sort of way.  A cot was found.

     He and the old man sipped bourbon and smoked Raleighs while the woman showered.  Over the black iron rail of the balcony, the lobby was nearly all white, the exceptions an aloe plant by the entrance and an old photograph of Pancho Villa behind the front desk.  The old man did nothing but complain about Mexico.  “Don’t know why I’m here.  Hate the food, the music.  Can’t half see the scenery or the architecture anymore and probably wouldn’t like that either.”  The boy noticed War and Peace on the bedside table, and that the old man smoked his cigarettes like joints, all the way down to his fingers. 

     At dinner the boy and the woman ate quail smothered in a bright green chili sauce.  The old man had a bowl of  pineapple sherbet.  The woman had changed into a white dress, a kind of peasant dress, and put on long copper earrings.  She wore white sandals and pink polish on her fingernails and toenails.  The old man ate so slowly that half the sherbet melted, but he ate it anyway.  Now and then he dozed off.  The woman wiped his mouth for him with a cloth napkin.  She paid the bill for all three of them.

     In the lobby, after they’d put the old man to bed, the boy and the woman sat in the lobby at a small wooden table and shared a bottle of Mexican brandy.  They held hands.  He told her he’d saved all his money for two months, a summer job, and was now spending it to see the world.  She said that she and the old man had ridden trains all over the world.  “It’s all he wants to do.  Ride trains and have me read to him.”  “And you like it?” he asked.  “Sure,” she said, shrugging.  “It’s not hard.  I’ve been just about everywhere, and he’s not cheap.  When there are nice trains available, that’s what we take.  And he gives me the time and money to explore wherever we land for awhile.”  He tried to think of the most tactful way to ask about their arrangement, but could think of nothing that satisfied him.  Finally, she read his mind and said, “We’re not related but he never touches me, even when we share a bed.  He’s in his own little world, and I exist only to read to him.  He listens when I make a request, and he’s generous more often than not, but he has no interest in me as a person.  Just a voice.”     

     Inspired no doubt by the brandy, he kept his mouth shut about her looks, and simply looked at her face as if he admired it, which he did.  She returned his look with a smile that brought them closer together.  He didn’t know what she saw, and she didn’t say.  No one had ever called him handsome.  Rugged, not pretty, is what they usually settled on.  He saw an intelligence in her eyes that drew him to her.  He even thought he could see a constant irony, the trace of a steady gleam, as if everything amused her a little.  He thought they shared that outlook on life, and their brief conversation over the brandy seemed to confirm it.

     Later, when he held her up against the stone wall in the shadows of the landing, her legs wrapped around his waist, her fingers squeezing the back of his neck, her tongue in his ear, he imagined the gleam, saw it clearly in his mind’s eye, as the the old man’s snoring reached them through the wall.