You Bet Your Life

Miami at 5:25 and be in Chicago by 9:55 tomorrow night.”

My bag was in the back of his car. I hadn’t even had time to check into a hotel after I got off the morning plane from Atlanta.

“I thought I might stick around here for a few days,” I said.

He pursed his lips, shook his head no and said, “You wouldn’t like it.”

Before I could think of a comment, he turned on his car radio with the volume high. Instead of police calls, we got Artie Shaw playing “Frenesi.” The rest of the ride was uneventful, if we don’t count the kid on the bike we almost killed on Biscayne Boulevard and the two pregnant women who dodged out of our way as we screeched around a corner onto Second Street. Artie Shaw’s clarinet seemed to match the action. I saw what looked like a train station coming, so I braced myself without touching the window.

Simmons reached back for my suitcase, lifted it effortlessly into the front seat, dropped it in my lap and reached past me to open the door when we stopped.

“Does this mean you don’t want to be pen pals?” I said.

“Have a nice trip,” he replied through a white-toothed grin. “Got a feeling people are going to be expecting you in Chicago.” He pronounced it She-cawh-goo, with as much contempt and Vitamin C as he could squeeze into an orange juice drawl. I got out. He got out and followed, but not closely enough so I could reopen conversation. Inside the station, he leaned against a wall after checking it carefully for cleanliness. I bought my ticket.

The ticket man told me to hurry and I did, leaving foot-print puddles across the tile floor. The City of Miami had its steam up, and I cleared the iron step as the train jerked forward. Simmons was on the platform with his arms folded, making sure I didn’t get off. I had spent less than six hours in the sun and fun capital of the world.

Instead of heading for a seat and making it too wet to sit in for the next twenty-four hours, I balanced my way to a rocking washroom. I hailed a porter, got a hanger, and changed into my only other pair of pants. The pants had a crease in the knees where they had been folded into the case over a wire hanger. The crease wouldn’t come out.

I hung up my suit and opened the window to dry it as fast as possible. It might be a little stiff, but it would be wearable.

Outside the window I caught a glimpse of a station that said we were going through Hollywood. For a second I thought time had slipped me a Mickey, or I had taken one too many in the head. I decided instead that there were two Hollywoods. Florida’s was a little burg we shot through in less than six seconds.

A guy with a pot belly, tweed suit, vest, and a grey-brown beard came into the washroom humming. He looked at me and decided not to hum and not to stay. I looked in the mirror to see what had scared him and I saw. My hair tumbled over my bloodshot eyes and my teeth were clenched.

I brushed my hair back with my hand, soaked my eyes in cold water, and persuaded my teeth to relax. The water began to slosh around the toilet as we picked up speed. By the time we flew through Fort Lauderdale ten minutes later, I had had enough. I left my suit hanging and headed for the dining car. A little red flower bounced in a glass holder on the table where I was led by a waiter. Two fat women with that Southern accent I so loved sat across from me, talking about Corine’s children. I tried not to listen, but I discovered anyway that Corine’s children were disrespectful and should have been given the stick by Andy. The rest of the diners heard it too. The fat woman who suggested the stick looked up at me. I nodded in agreement of corporal punishment for children as I took a big bite of tuna on white and looked out the window at a lake. An alligator slithered out of the water. I had never seen an alligator before. I had never found a piece of wood in a tuna sandwich before either, but I did now and spat it out while the fat women watched me in disgust. By West Palm Beach the two ladies were gouging chasms in their peach melba, and I was nibbling soggy potato chips and drinking beer while I looked for more gators in the sunset. I didn’t see any. I should have been thinking about where I was going and what I was going to do when I got there.

By Fort Pierce my suit was dry and slightly stiff. I carried it on a hanger to my seat as the sun went down and the Florida East Coast Railway carried me through New Smyrna Beach. When Louis Garner Simmons ran me out of Miami, I had acted cheap and bought a coach seat without even asking about compartments, even though the freight was being paid by Louis B. Mayer. Habits are hard to break. My seat was next to one of the fat ladies from the dining car. She looked up at me over bifocals as we went through Daytona Beach, and then she turned back to the book on what remained of her lap.

I glanced over her shoulder at the book-no mean task considering the size of her shoulder.

“How’d you like an elbow in your neck?” she said, giving her subtle opinion of literary eavesdropping. Her voice rang clear enough to be heard back in Miami in spite of the noise of the train. Her eyes didn’t leave the page. Then she turned her gaze on me. We had clearly begun a beautiful friendship-the start of a trainboard romance.

“No thanks,” I said.

The book she was reading was The Grapes of Wrath. I hadn’t read it, but I had seen the movie. I decided to cement our relationship.

“Tom Joad joins the Commies at the end,” I whispered.

The fat lady threw her elbow back, hitting my shoulder and letting out a massive grunt. The conductor, who looked old enough and mean enough to have been John Wilkes Booth’s accomplice, came running down the aisle. His lip was turned up on one side in a pained sneer, and his ticket punch was held high like a weapon.

“What’s the trouble he-ah?” he said, making it clear that he and the woman were of the same tribe. I was outnumbered. If I struggled, four hooded Klansmen might thunder out of the baggage room and trample me.

Before anyone could answer, the lady hit me in the neck with a second book. A car full of people rose to stare and an infant began to howl. I could swear that it howled with a Cracker accent.

“Now listen, mister,” sighed the conductor, “we don’t want no trouble from your kind and no smart talk.”

The lady tried to punch me with her chubby arms but I backed away.

“He’s bothering me,” she said. “Insulting me.”

“That true?” said the conductor.

“No,” I said, “but-”

“Come with me,” he said, and hurried down the aisle. I grabbed my suitcase and picked up the book the woman had thrown at me. It was an Agatha Christie novel, The Peril at End House. I had read that one.

I picked up my suit and leaned toward the woman over the conductor’s outstretched boney arm and his hand holding a ticket puncher.

“Sorry ma’m,” I whispered with a smile, knowing my smile resembled a twisted grimace, “but the girl did it in this one. She set up the whole thing to make it look like she was the victim.”

The book came back at me as I tripped up the aisle escorted by the conductor and dozens of eyes. I could hear the pages flutter open as Hercule Poirot hit a wall and came down on some soprano who sang, “Hey?”

Nobody tripped me as I tried to keep up with the old conductor. I had a lot to be proud of. A Southern cop had run me out of Miami, so I had gained my revenge against the South by doing battle with a rotund belle of the rails. Maybe if the South had enough fat women, and I had enough time to provoke them, I could eventually gain my confidence back and destroy the Union.

Two cars down the old conductor stopped and pulled his blue cap firmly over his eyes to show he meant business. His face was filled with lines of grandfatherly wrath.

“Don’t know what you did or said, son, but she deserved it and more. Been shushing up the kids and making loud remarks ’bout people. Come on. I’ll buy you a beer and you can take the rest of the trip in those two empty seats over there where you can spread out some.”

His accent had come out soft and warm in spite of an aged rasp, and I decided that it could be a pleasant sound.

He was as good as his skinny word, and with a second beer in me I was almost asleep when we hit Jacksonville. Most of the lights were out in the car. It was about midnight. Out the window on the platform a couple of people were getting on. One was a skinny kid in an orange shirt who looked up at the windows. I thought his eyes rested on me. They were the glazed eyes of a drunk, a junk, a punk, or all three. I looked at him because he