The Black Train

“I…missed you,” he uttered, and then felt ridiculous afterward.

“Good,” she said, and took his hand. The chattering precongregation—mostly middle-aged and elderly couples—began to enter the church when the steeple bell began to clang.

She said very chirpily, “Let’s go in now and ask God to forgive us for our sins.”

“Sure,” Collier said. In my case, it better be a long fucking service… II

“All right, bitch. You want it bad, so you’re gonna get it. Bad.”

“Yes, yes!” J.G. Sute had huffed.

That’s how it had started, but how it had ended was another story…

Naked on the bed, the 300-pounder looked like an obese cartoon. It was less than an inspiring image, and worse were the dream fragments that haunted Jiff from last night’s nightmare. Jiff had dreams like that sometimes, and never understood it. Civil War dreams, along with the most awful images, and last night had been the worst. He’d seen wagons full of people so skinny they looked like living skeletons. Most were naked but the ones still clothed were stripped by slaves. Several male Indians stood around, waiting, with knives in their belts, their eyes keen and patient. The place was so hot. Next thing Jiff knew he was shoveling coal into a vast furnace, and he’d been able to see people bubbling inside…

Jiff bit his lip till the images were gone.

He stood naked in front of his prone and cringing client. For the course of the next hour came pleas, like: “I love you, I love you,” then a hard slap! and “Please! I deserve it! I deserve the pain because I’m not worthy of your love,” then a harder smack! and, “Jiff, my love. I need you to hurt me…”

Like that.

Throughout the regimen, however, shreds of Jiff’s nightmare kept pecking at his mind: women and old men, plus children, bald and starving, standing in a line but—

A line for what?

Aw, God…

Exactly what use Jiff made of the rubber glove need not be mentioned, nor need it be mentioned what and how many areas of J.G. Sute’s corpulent body he’d used the “Naughty Girl Clips” on. His client had wanted pain this time, and it was pain he’d received, until he was a sobbing, sniffling, quivering mass.

Debasement, too, was on this morning’s one-hundred-dollar agenda; hence, the wine goblet. It need not be mentioned what fluid other than wine Jiff filled it with and then forced Sute to consume.

“I’m so unworthy—I’m scum! Shit on me if you like!”

Even for a hundred bucks, Jiff was not quite up to that. As a “grand finale,” however, he slapped his client up a few more times, then took a big hock in his face, but while he was engaged in these final tweaks, he swore he could still see the stoked flames from the dream furnace, thought sure he could still hear the screams…

When services had been properly rendered, J.G. Sute sobbed tears of joy as his elephantine body shuddered.

“My love, I could die now…”

Freak show’s over. Jiff loped to the bathroom sink to wash up. I just cain’t do this shit anymore. When he returned to the bedroom, he was relieved to see that Sute had wiped his face off and donned his robe. The man looked dreamy-eyed now, his demented needs slaked. “That was wonderful,” he sighed.

“Yeah, yeah.” Jiff stood listlessly at the liquor cabinet. He wasn’t going to tell the man that this was his last trick with him. “Mind if I have a shot?”

“What’s mine is yours, my love.”

Jesus. Jiff’s eyes scoured the shelves: Asombroso tequila, Macallan thirty-year-old scotch, Johnnie Walker Green. Shit, he ain’t got no Black Velvet? He poured himself an inch of something and sat down bare-assed on a William and Mary wing-back chair.

Now that his perverse duties were over, his nightmare filtered back into his head.

“Jiff, you look inconsolable.”

The liquor bit hard. “Huh?”

“You appear to be troubled by something…”

“Bad dream, is all. I get ’em sometimes—don’t rightly know why.” The horrid images felt like bruises in the back of his brain. “Dreamed I was a coal shoveler, back durin’ the war.”

“Heaver,” Sute corrected. “That was the official job title in those days. A coal heaver. They shoveled sixteen hours a day, for about fourteen dollars a month.” Sute’s “afterglow” left him relaxed, or perhaps it was just Jiff’s presence. It was a conversation, not a demented sexual scenario. “A contributing factor to the C.S.A.’s surrender was its inability to mine coal as effectively as the North. You were a Confederate coal heaver I take it?”

Jiff’s nude pecs popped when he rubbed his brow. “Naw, and I weren’t paid no fourteen bucks a month, neither. See, in this dream, I was a black man. I was a slave.”

Sute’s bulbous face creased in concern. “You seem terribly upset, Jiff. It was only a dream. But this is interesting. Where were you working?”

“What’s that?”

“Where were you shoveling this coal? A supply ship? A locomotive?”

Jiff shook his head. “A big furnace, and I mean really big.”

Sute’s attention became more focused. “And how do you know it was during the war?”

“On account’a the place was full up with Confederate guards all walkin’ ’round with bayonets on their rifles. They was all callin’ me nigger’n tellin’ me I’m dead meat if I don’t keep shovelin’. Bunch’a other black fellas with me doin’ the same thing. Seemed like the dream went on forever: me throwin’ in one shovel fulla coal after the next. Place was so hot I could feel my skin blisterin’.” Jiff took another inch of scotch and sighed. “I been havin’ weird dreams every now and then long as I can remember, always durin’ the war, but each time I’m someone else, and it’s always horrible.”

“Slavery was a horrible thing, Jiff.”

“Aw, shit, that ain’t what I mean. The really horrible part was what they was usin’ that furnace for.”

“Smelting ore, I presume.”

Jiff shook his head. “Weren’t no ore in the place that I could see. It was more like a prison camp. See, we was shovelin’ the coal into the fuel chutes on one side, but on the other side, the soldiers was throwin’ people into the furnace.”

“What?”

“Yup. They’d bring folks in a few at a time; women and kids, mostly, and most of ’em were naked—see, they come offa these wagons outside. Some still had their clothes on but they was all shit’n puke-stained and fulla bugs. Then every now’n then some Indian fellas’d bring in more women, and each time they done so, a soldier’d give ’em some money.”

“Delivery fees,” Sute said. “Same thing as a bounty. Gast’s deputies frequently recruited nearby Indians to round up civilians who’d fled their homes as the Union forces encroached. Strange that you should dream something so accurate.”

“Aw, shit, but that weren’t the worst part,” Jiff went on, beating down his disgust with the liquor. “Lotta the women they brung in was pregnant, and the kids, too, just little girls, all starin’ out with big hollow eyes in their skinny faces like they ain’t et in weeks. And the soldiers just fed ’em all right into the furnace. Didn’t even think twice about it.”

Sute went silent.

“Babies, too, they was throwin’ in. We could see inside’n the fire was so hot sometimes the person they throwed in would just explode. Others looked like they was melting. Like they’d just turn into vapor.”