Cheryl Duke and I were really inclined to put a bottle between us and see which one of us could kill it first. Our hands would go up the bottle neck like one of those children’s games where you grab the stick hand over hand and see whose hand winds up on the top. But it didn’t matter whose hand wound up on top. All that mattered was who could grab the bottle the fastest and take a giant choking swig of booze. We were a strange drinking pair since we both worked for the Norfolk Southern Corporation in vastly different capacities. She was a lawyer who answered directly to one of the more influential vice presidents and I was a locomotive engineer. We wouldn’t have had a thing to do with each other except that she happened to be my neighbor and one day we both met down by the blackberry bushes in a drunken stupor. It was amazing to realize later how alcohol can melt social differences like butter in a volcano. We just both happened to wander down to the boarder between our yards. I heard something rustling around in the field over on the other side of the black berry bushes and she heard something too. We both crept down in a grey haze to see what each other were. I’ll never forget seeing her face pop up from behind the bushes with a reticent smile that just made me want to reach over and pet her hair like she was a cat or dog. Within two or three words we both ascertained that the other was drunk and we bonded on nothing more than a slight slur backed up by the warm sweet smell of keytones on one another’s breath. Just so you understand how a high ranking lawyer can live next to a low ranking worker. We both lived in Virginia and one of the hallmarks of a southern state like Virginia is that royalty can live about thirty feet away from pure trash. Cheryl lived on a beautiful old farm of about 400 acres and I lived in a trailer home set on about a quarter acre. My crappy quarter acre was, I’m sure, some remnant of a card game gone bad or a whore’s debt from the family that used to own the estate. You couldn’t really see my place from the main house where Cheryl lived because of the prodigious black berry bushes so it just didn’t matter that I was there. Really, the owners of the four hundred acre farm could have just had me shot if I happened to cause any trouble and that’s an end of it. But I didn’t cause any trouble. At least not until I met Cheryl. I swear to god we loved each other like brother and sister within ten minutes of meeting. I had a bottle in my back pocket and when I pulled it out and held it up to Cheryl she beamed like a happy saint and grabbed that bottle in a second and started swigging. I mean, that was that. After that first day we started meeting down there every afternoon that we could. One of us, usually both of us, would have a bottle and we’d go back into the woods where there was an old half rotted shack with a torn out car seat inside it. We could sit on that car seat and look out the door into the woods while we drank. She explained to me about how her husband was a somewhat fickle scion of business who made millions but didn’t know a thing about having fun, i.e., drinking to the edge of consciousness. He would have a glass of wine with their dinner and she would have a glass of whiskey in a wine glass. At first she told me that she was a lawyer for a large corporation and left it at that so I didn’t know we worked for the same company. I told her that I was involved with an industrial job and often had to work at night. Our conversations were of that special kind that can only take place below the haze of an alcoholic umbrella. We’d see a squirrel and start talking about the governor or see a leaf fall off a tree and talk about the soft pretzels at Target. It was just miles of senseless blather but it didn’t matter because we couldn’t perceive disorder.
Well, one day I went down to the blackberry bushes and Cheryl didn’t show up. It wasn’t a real big deal since it had happened before but this time I felt particularly susceptible to her absence. The next day when she didn’t show up I really felt uneasy and the third day I couldn’t stand it so I went to my trailer, cleaned myself up as best as I could and went up to Cheryl’s house. I’d never been up to the place before and was interested in the way things looked up close on the house. I’d only seen it from a distance and found myself looking at little details which appeared to be somewhat different from what I’d imagined them to be like. For instance, I could tell from a distance that there was some sort of big knocker or decoration on the front door. But when I got up to it I was surprised to see that the thing I was seeing was a giant brass rat door knocker. I only mention it because this rat’s head was huge and it looked like it would be heavy enough to tear the door off. Also, on a house that other wise appeared to be very elegant this brass ornament struck me as gaudy and unusual. I mean, who would want to impress some guest with a giant rat face at the stoop? What’s more the tongue of the rat sort of hung out and it was obviously to be moved as a knocker. So I grabbed the tongue and knocked. About ten seconds later the door was answered by a plump black woman who was dressed up in what appeared to be the old fashioned garb of a maid. I told her I was a neighbor and that I needed to see Cheryl on business. She nodded her head and told me to wait on the portico. “Wait on the portico.” I thought. What a strange thing to say. When the maid turned I saw that the back of her apron where it wound around her back said, “Bess” on it. It just so happened that I was familiar with the story Porgy and the character Bess which was what popped into mind when I saw that name on her back. “What an odd thing to have your maid’s name stenciled on her back.” I thought. A minute later the door opened and a distinguished looking gentleman was standing there wearing a nice suit. It was a really nice suit actually so that’s why it was so strange to see that on a patch over the breast pocket was sewn in the word “husband.” It was very odd. Or that is, it would be very odd to a normal person. But you must remember that before I’d gone up to Cheryl’s door I’d had about half a gallon of Jim Beam so I was not a normal person. If you had gone up to the door you probably would have turned around the second you saw the rat. That’s what I would have done had I not had a drink. Actually, looking back on it I guess you wouldn’t have known that I’d drunk half a gallon of Jim Beam if I hadn’t told you but now I’m telling you. The gentleman with the beautiful suit said, “What can I do for you?” and I replied that I was looking for Cheryl. Just then there was a terrible sound like a body tumbling down some stairs and when I looked past the gentleman who was evidently Cheryl’s husband I saw Cheryl lying in a heap on the floor. The husband ran over to her and I followed. Cheryl was lying there with a big smile on her face and her dress bunched up enough so that you could see she was wearing underwear with a Mickey Mouse motif on them which just struck me as unreal. “Cheryl! Are you all right?” asked the husband in a loud voice. “I’m fine. I’m fine.” She replied. I could smell the fumes coming off her breath and my first thought was that I hoped there were no open flames anywhere lest she might cause an explosion. On the front of her dress over her heart was a sewn name tag that said, “drunk wife” on it. I rubbed my eyes because not only was it odd to see name tags on rich people but the fundamental nature of the names was blunt to say the least. The maid and a man who appeared to be a butler came to the bottom of the stairs to see if they could help. When the butler bent over to look more closely at Cheryl I saw that it said in big letters on his back “Uncle Tom.” I couldn’t imagine a more bizarre thing to be written on the back of a modern black man but even as I tell you that you have to understand that my brain was partially capsized with liquor. That’s why I said to Cheryl, “I wanna take you to work with me Cheryl. We can have a drink while I’m working!” This gave her enough energy to sit up and with the help of the maid, stand up. She was wobbly but she could walk and she motioned for me to follow her to the door while her husband just stood there with an baffled look on his face. The maid said, “Now you watch yourself Missy. Don’t take no wooden nickels or drink crappy wine again.” And then she patted Cheryl on the butt like she was child being sent out onto the play ground. When we got down to where my car was parked, Cheryl said her husband was into labels which would have thrown me for a loop if my brain weren’t crooked with drink. Then she got in without saying another word and immediately began reaching under the seats looking for booze. Lots of times we kept a couple bottles under the torn out car seat in the rotting shed so it was natural that she would do what she did. I said, “I keep it in the glove compartment.” So she pulled out a fifth of Jack Daniels and went to it. It felt so good to have Cheryl by my side again and I realized that I really relied on her for good drinking times. It felt just like we were sitting in our shed on the torn out car seat except that the entire panorama was moving as the car rolled down the roads and we looked out the windshield with wonder as we spoke about which bugs bit worse and why the moon was round and other such things like that. That day I was scheduled to run a freight train from Lynchburg Virginia which was near where we lived, to Charlestown West Virginia. Lord knows what I thought I was going to do with Cheryl in Charlestown. We’d never gone anywhere together except into the shack. Well I pulled into the rail yard and parked behind some old cabooses so no one would notice that I had an unauthorized person with me. The railroad was very strict about not bringing anyone onto the property who didn’t work for the company. If only I’d known that Cheryl was a high ranking official for my very own corporation! Really though, it wouldn’t have made much difference since we were both extremely tipsy which was also looked at negatively on the railroad. And then somewhere in the bottom of my brain pan it occurred to me that it was strange that I was worrying about a trespasser but not worrying about operating a 10 thousand ton machine while drunk as a coyote. The train I was to operate was already assembled and waiting. On the way, as we were walking towards the train, Cheryl was looking around her and kept saying, “The railroad. The railroad. Those fuckers!” but I didn’t know what she was talking about and just assumed it was the booze acting up in her. Now before we got onto the locomotives I went in front of the train and threw a switch so that we’d be going down the track I wanted to be going down. Cheryl climbed onto the lead engine and opened the door to the cab like she was right at home and then flopped down into the seat usually occupied by a conductor. She was carrying the bottle of Jack Daniels and put it on the floor next to her. I climbed into the engineer’s seat and flipped a few switches and pulled the throttle to get the thing moving. There were some other things that I should have done before moving the train like communicating with the dispatcher, obtaining a track warrant, waiting for my conductor, etc, but with Cheryl there beside me all those things were subsumed by my lovely drinking mate and I just revved those engines up like I was going to be driving straight to Eden. The locomotives strained to get the train moving and as metal started creaking and vibrating I took the bottle from the floor and downed half of what was left. Goddamn it tasted so good! I looked over and saw Cheryl smiling at me as she slouched back in the seat with one of her legs flung over the control stand. She pointed out the window to some ducks flying over the river and said, “Look! Some ducks! Beep the horn at them!” Well I blasted on the horn a few times and the ducks didn’t seem to notice since they were about two miles away anyhow. Then Cheryl asked me if she could drive and I told her she could sit on my lap and drive away. She came over to me, grabbed the bottle out of my hand and sat on my lap. She said she wanted to run the throttle and I said, “Go to it.” Well she pulled the throttle back to full blast and the engines stated heaving in that way I recognized which presaged them spitting fire and black smoke out of the exhaust stack. This was a very looked down upon practice among the train supervisors because of the damage it did to the engines and the fuel it wasted. I didn’t say anything though because I figured no one would see us even though we were driving through the middle of a city. The whole cab was shaking and it felt good to have Cheryl sort of buzzing on my lap. She turned to me with a big smile on her face and said, “This is fun! Gimmy that bottle.” But she already had the bottle and she was tilting it straight up and into her mouth when there was a jolt like we’d run over something. “Opps,” Cheryl said. “I think we just ran over a car.” We got up and looked back out the side window where sure enough there was half a car hanging down by the side of the tracks. Incredibly, it looked like it was a railroad security car which was really hard to believe. What we’d just done took about a full minute to register in our addled minds but it was amazing to realized how harmonious were our thoughts when we both said at the same time, “We’ve got to get out of here!” I looked at some of the engine controls and then said, “Hell, we’re already going full blast! We’ll be out of here soon enough!” Cheryl looked out the window again and said, “You think they’ll be able to track us?” I had to think about it for a minute and then it dawned on me how drunk we were. “Of course they’ll be able to track us! It’s not like we can cover our tracks!” We were going about twenty five miles an hour towing a mile of empty coal cars and when I looked out the front window I noticed that I didn’t recognize anything. I’d made the Lynchburg–Charlestown run a million times and all the scenery in front of us was completely foreign. “Could they have rebuilt this much of the city since last Monday?” I thought out loud. Then we came around the corner just as my brain went around a corner. In my brain, the corner I went around was the one that lead me to understand that I’d thrown the switch the wrong way and was now lost on the railroad if such a thing were possible. The real corner we went around came out into the middle of an old cobble stoned street. The tracks went right down the middle of the street like they often used to do in the old days and in the middle of this street were about a hundred little stands where there was a farmers market or some sort of crafts fair going on. People started screaming and running as the train ran over carts and tables full of stuff that bounced off the street and rolled all over the place. Dogs and children were crying and people were shaking their fists up at the locomotive. Some tomatoes came flying through the side window and Cheryl said, “We’re being booed off stage!” I shook my head and rubbed my face, “Off stage?” I said. But then I thought, “Yeah, it is like we’re on stage. Look at all those people looking at us.” Then I said it out loud, “It really is like we’re on stage isn’t it? Every one loves to watch a train and wave at it!” Cheryl and I started waving out the windows at all the people looking at us and Cheryl even leaned out the window while she took a giant swig out of the Jack Daniels bottle. Then someone threw an apple at her and it bounced off the side of her head and nearly knocked her out. She sort of slumped down to the deck in the cab but she didn’t drop the liquor bottle. I picked her up and sat her in the engineer’s seat then grabbed her chin and shook her a little bit. Someone was pelting the windows with bottles and rocks but most people don’t know that locomotive windows are essentially bullet proof because of so much hooliganism on and around the railroad. I shut the side window and then laid on the horn. I could see people falling to their knees in front of us and dropping bags and children as they clamped their hands over their ears. Train horns really are extremely loud! Cheryl came to and said, “Hey, let me beep the horn!” I told her to go to it while I got up to look out the rear cab window. It was a real trail of destruction. I was guessing that a train hadn’t been down this street for 50 some years and the people just weren’t prepared for it. I told this idea to Cheryl and she agreed. She said she’d check into it when she got to work Monday. That was when I finally asked her where she worked. She said, “Norfolk Southern Corporation.” I couldn’t believe my ears. “We work at the same place!” I said. “No wonder we hit it off so good! What do you do?” She smiled and took the last of the booze down her throat. Then she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand like a real trooper and said, “I’m a lawyer for the vice president of operations and by God nothing I like more than a drink!” We were just staring into each others eyes thinking who knows what when we went through the side of an old building where the tracks must have entered an old industrial opening. Bricks rained down on the top of the engine and Cheryl said, “They’ll pay for our paint job by God!” I too went on the predictable drunk’s offensive and said, “By God there should have been a red signal there!” We seemed to be going through a mall of some sort with the wheels cutting through the linoleum floor seeking out the ancient buried rails while stunned shoppers fled and threw their hands into the air. Cheryl wanted to beep the horn again and I told her she could do whatever she wanted to do since she was my superior. She laid on the horn and giant windows blew out of the storefronts like a hurricane was inside the mall. Smoke and fire were pumping out of the three poor locomotives obscuring the lights and setting off alarms and sprinkler systems left and right. I think we would have kept going and blasted out the other side of the complex but for the one thing that would get through out muddled brains. We were out of booze! We both looked at the empty bottle at the same time. I “blew the hole” which was train talk for putting the train into emergency braking. It wasn’t really necessary though since we’d been slowed down to about one half mile per hour by all the concrete and linoleum. After about ten seconds we realized that we were sitting still with the diesels clicking and huffing like living creatures oblivious to our crimes. The police showed up along with the fire department. Cheryl and I stood on the front of the locomotive and told the police chief that he was not welcome aboard the train. Cheryl made the legal argument that we were private property an therefore could not be boarded by anyone other than official corporate employees. Then I said that we were like a little piece of America that could move and carry our sovereignty with us where ever we went. Cheryl pulled my head right up next to hers and said “That’s ships you’re thinking of. Naval ships. They’re little pieces of America.” I pulled her head next to mine and asked, “Why can’t we make the same arguments for trains? They’re almost as big a ships and they’re made of metal!” Cheryl smiled and patted me on the shoulder. By then the police had come onboard despite our warnings and handcuffed us. When they had us in the back of the squad car we both looked out at the train sitting there in the middle of the mall with gentle plumes of smoke coming from the stacks. There was a sort of pond nearby with a fountain in it squirting water from the mouth of a fish woman. It was a strange thing to watch because it looked so unnatural next to the train. At least that’s what I thought until I looked at Cheryl’s face. I could see her looking at the train and I knew exactly what she was thinking and so I started thinking it too. What looked like a big mess to everyone else just looked like a real good time to us. A really good time!
