By long distance, he asked if I’d spend Christmas with him. He told me to catch the Coast Starlight Limited from Eugene, Oregon, to Portland, then switch trains and ride the Empire Builder as far east as Spokane. A pain, but what a surprise! On Christmas Eve he picked me up at the station. Chains clanked on the tires of snowplows as they crossed and crisscrossed to keep the downtown streets clear.
My father and I, we hadn’t spent a holiday together since I was in Cub Scouts. In two terms I’d graduate with an undergraduate degree in journalism and begin paying down a mountain of student loans. Journalism because it looked like a safe bet. Not writing fiction because, geez, everyone knew fiction was a colossal crapshoot. We drove to a truck-stop diner where he drank a cup of coffee while I ate a chicken-fried steak. He carried a thick, brown envelope under one arm and set it on the table between us.
To show me, he lifted the flap. He slid out a thick stack of paper, lined sheets of notebook paper. These he fanned across the table between us. Handwriting covered the pages. Words scribbled in pencil and ballpoint pen.
He said, “You want to make your old man rich, don’t you?”
Why was I surprised? This guy, my father, was always holding up a paper clip or the plastic tab used to hold shut the bread bag. He’d say, “The man who invented this never had to work another day in his life!”
He figured he could publish a book and sell it to railroad employees, current and retired. To judge from the union rolls, he said, it would do big business. The handwritten words were sentences were paragraphs were stories he’d collected from co-workers. He’d already promised them a small cut of the profits. To put him on easy street, all I needed to do was edit the material. Maybe doctor the stories a tad, he said. Add color and action, to polish them into rollicking, two-fisted yarns. A Cannery Row, but about freight trains. With me as Steinbeck.
And railroad stories…I’d grown up hearing them. He’d bring them home to tell at breakfast. Stories about the whorehouses along A Street in Pasco, just across the tracks from the roundhouse, a short walk for any crew. Or stories about what crewman had a different wife and family at each end of his run. The stories about tribesmen on the Colville Reservation who’d get drunk on foggy nights, to sit on the tracks with a blanket pulled over their heads, to fall asleep and wait. Long descriptions of the bloody guts and the delay. Ghost stories about the same. Tales about rednecks in Idaho who sat trackside and used rifles to blow out the windows of Cadillacs being shipped to Seattle on open-sided car carriers. Picture a hundred showroom-ready Caddies shot to shit. Stories about these same hillbillies causing derailments—with concrete blocks, with iron bars—so they could loot the crushed boxcars. Stories about the yard bulls who beat the teeth out of hobos they’d found hitching rides.
But these stories, the ones he’d brought me, scribbled down by brakemen and freight conductors, these weren’t like the ones I’d loved. In blocky handwriting, here were scenes of nice guys playing pinochle around the coal-burning, potbellied stoves in old-timey cabooses. No dismembered ghosts or switchyard whores haunted these scrawled notes. If anything, these stories needed un-polishing. They didn’t teach un-editing in journalism school, but I couldn’t say no.
He watched me shuffle the pages. He asked, “You dating anyone?”
By this he meant a girl. When was I going to get married and start a family? By my age he’d been married, had three kids, and had already thrown a bah-zillion track switches for the Northern Pacific. These days he lived by himself in a tiny house deep in the woods on Mount Spokane. While I pretended to read the stories he got up to use the pay phone. Pay phones, like typewriters, were about to disappear from the world, but we hadn’t the foggiest idea, not yet.
He came back to the table smiling. He’d been offered a holiday shift that paid triple time. That kind of big money he couldn’t turn down. He told me to eat up so he could drop me at a cinder-block motel in the fried chicken-smelling fast-food strip at the edge of downtown. Me and my fat envelope of so many censored recollections without tension or suspense.
“I understand,” I lied. Work has always been my family’s noble reason to escape itself. We’d volunteer for double shifts on Thanksgiving and Christmas. “I’d love to be there,” we’d tell each other, shrugging, “but I’m on the schedule at work.”
Typewriter ribbons and landline phones and record players, where did everything go so fast?
My dad went to work.
Cold and alone the next morning, Christmas morning, I turned on the motel television.
A movie was just beginning. A Cat Stevens song played on a record album while an unseen actor lighted a candle. He wrote a suicide note. The actor stepped up on a chair, put his head in a noose. He kicked the chair aside. Over the course of the movie he pretended to cut his throat. To self-immolate. To disembowel himself, and he never died. Instead, he proposed marriage to Ruth Gordon.
What Tom would call, The moment after which everything is different.
Would you believe me if I told you that my father bought me my first dictionary? Back in high school when I’d told him I wanted to write he gave it to me for Christmas. God only knows where he’d found it. Decades before the internet, he dragged home a dictionary the size of a suitcase. Glossy full-color plates filled the middle pages, pictures of precious and semiprecious minerals, the animals native to every continent, the leaves and flowers of the world. Its size and weight made it impossible to carry, but it was the biggest and most expensive he could
