Peter Alterman

Dream of the Midnight Flyer

It’s two in the morning. He’s awake. Again. Robbie hears the moan of the coal train’s horn as it lumbers through the silent dark on its way south through Denver to Las Animas and the wastes beyond. He can almost hear the gondolas clanking along miles of rail paralleling Interstate 25 and the South Platte.

His fragile mind imagines it is the ghost of the Midnight Flyer. He sees its headlight slicing through the vast emptiness of the North American prairie that stretches from New Mexico north to the Beaufort Sea. He’s known Union Pacific trains from early childhood, though the Flyer was discontinued in 1953 after the Korean War was over, a lifetime before he was born.

In his nightmare he stands frozen on the tracks. He imagines its thousands of horsepower throbbing inside his ribcage and shivering his heart as it bears down on him, a million tons of steel rolling over him, crushing him into the dust like a cigarette butt.  

He fears sleeping will relax his guard and he will not wake. He is exhausted by the effort to resist.

Only the woman asleep beside him keeps what’s left of him from blowing away on the breeze like a dying ember. He rolls over against her, his face buried in the nape of her neck, his leg stumps pressing the backs of her thighs. Carolina is a small woman, a nurse at the VA hospital in Aurora where she found him and for reasons he can’t fathom fell for him. Her black hair smells of her work, soap and disinfectant.

Because of her he is healing. He’s out of the wheelchair and up onto prosthetic legs so he doesn’t need the toilet seat safety rails any more. The VA provides pills to ease the pain and a psychologist he still keeps memories from but it is Carolina’s devotion that anchors him. He doesn’t know if he loves her but what she gives him is what he’s always needed so he clings to her.

In return she says, “You give me what you can. I know that. For now, it’s enough.”

It’s the ‘for now’ that worries him. What if there is no more? What if all he can give her in return is his need? This is the trench his mind travels in the hours between bedtime and dawn.

The first hint of light in the east releases him and he sleeps a fitful hour or two.

She wakes him before eight. It is her day off. He’s got physical therapy at nine-thirty and she will drive him to his appointment because he hasn’t yet mastered pedals with his artificial feet and anyway his stepfather Roy sold his truck when he joined the Army.

Over a bowl of Cheerios he says, “I’m too tired. I won’t be able to do anything. Call and tell them I can’t make it.”

She pours more coffee in his mug. “Drink this. You’ll be fine.” Her coffee is awful, brown-black acid, but it’s a caffeine bomb. His nerves shiver when it explodes.

She is unwilling to relent and he has no strength to insist so they ride together in silence across town to the VA hospital in her second-hand Civic. He senses she is tense but cannot guess why.

Carolina drops him at the outpatient entrance. “Have a good session,” she says as he closes the car’s door.

It makes a cheap tinny tink as it latches. He’d like to buy her something nicer but he can’t afford to unless Roy agrees to sell the ranch to a developer. Then he’ll have money.

He half-owns the ranch with his stepfather courtesy of his mother’s will. It lies out east where the suburbs give way to the Great Plains, its two hundred acres sitting somewhere between DIA to the northwest and the Union Pacific tracks south. The ranch used to be much farther away from Denver but the suburbs are expanding towards it. Climate change has turned once-fertile prairie to scrub. It isn’t worth much as a working ranch but the land is worth millions, or will be when development reaches it and the signs are already appearing on the State Road a few miles back.

Robbie shakes his head to focus on the present and makes his way through the lobby on titanium legs and aluminum canes.

The physical therapy session is torture. After thirty minutes his tee shirt is soaked and he’s burned off all the caffeine. He droops with exhaustion, half-dangling by his upper arms on the support bars of the stopped treadmill. The ligaments in his hips and thighs throb and his stumps are blistering.

His physical therapist pretends not to notice but ends the session early. “Good job,” he says, “You’re making progress.”

But Robbie knows that if anything today’s session is a step backwards and the unearned praise angers him. He told Carolina he wasn’t up for this today. “Fuck,” he says, “Fuck fuck fuck.”

The prostheses needs to be adjusted. At the PT desk he schedules an appointment for Carolina’s next day off and then makes his way painfully to the outpatient lobby, staggering through the corridors like a misaligned robot. Usually her car is idling just outside but today she’s not there so he sits in one of the molded plastic chairs lining the lobby walls and waits for her. Though there is snow covering the grass and shrubs outside, sunlight shining through the atrium warms the air and he dozes and dreams of running.

He wakes when she taps him on the shoulder. She smiles into his face tentatively. Her eyes are deep brown, dark as her coffee.  He can see she wants something from him.

“Robbie,” she says. “We’re going to have a baby.”

She’s been to the OB clinic. How could he have not noticed the soft rounding of her belly? She can’t take birth control pills for some medical reason men aren’t expected to understand so yeah, they tried their best to be mindful but sometimes they weren’t. He can see she is waiting to find out if she will be a single mom but she has nothing to worry about. He’ll be responsible for them just as he is responsible for the three men dead under the Afghan sun.

“That’s great, babe,” he says, smiling up at her. “When?” But his tone belies his words and he sees that she hears it because her mood deflates and she shifts her body away from him and drops her head.

“Around Christmas,” she says, almost a whisper. 

There’s so much he’s wanted from life and it’s given him so little and now he has to support a family on metal legs. But he is surprised to find he wants to make her happy and a shard of that wish for happiness warms him. He thinks, so that’s love.

 He reaches out and takes her hand. “I mean it. It’s just…look at me. I’ll have to find a job,” he says. “If I can find someone who will hire half a man.”

She rubs her belly and says, “You’re more than enough man to do this.”

It breaks his mood and he barks laughter. “There’s the ranch,” he says. “Bears thinking.”

Reassured, on the drive back she is chatty, full of ideas and plans, questions he has no answers for. Wedding? Sure, soon as they can fit it into her work schedule. She’s like him, not much family, a brother somewhere in Arizona or California, she’s not sure. All he has is Roy who doesn’t even rate an invitation. A ring? He thinks it should have a small red stone in it to symbolize his heart; maybe an Afghan garnet? Baby names? Boy or girl? A condo in town or the burbs? Or move to a bigger apartment? Religion: Catholic like her or whatever he is? Be the stay at home parent? No, the hospital has a day-care center for after the baby comes. Once he’s steady on his feet the VA will help him find work, maybe even at the medical center. He can fix anything mechanical or electrical. He’ll talk to the vocational counselor.

“It’ll be tight in our apartment for now,” she says, pulling into the parking lot near the University. “But we’ll make do.”

“Or we could move out to the ranch,” he says. “Lots of room there.” After all, it’s half his. Like the baby.

“Oh, no. The commute would take me at least an hour.”

“Maybe less,” he says. “Highway’s building out towards it.” It’s something to consider. “We could drive out there next time you have a couple of days off.”

“I don’t know.”

#

The ranch is weathered wood and dust. They sit on the covered porch of the house where Robbie grew up. It’s needed paint since before he went into the Army four years ago, really before that, before his mother died, but now it just looks dilapidated. Carolina is showing now and sits in the only chair, a hand resting protectively on her belly. He’s sitting on the top step of two, his newly-comfortable titanium legs splayed out within his jeans, his plastic feet hidden in the old black Frye boots whose heels rest on packed dirt.

A barn is off to the right and Roy’s old pinto sticks its head out of its stall to watch them, occasionally tearing a mouthful of hay from the hanging bag beside it, content to rest out of the sun. Beyond the empty corral Robbie sees the dots of a handful of cattle grazing.

His stepfather leans against a post smoking a Lucky, squinting northwest where gleaming dots in the air are planes landing at DIA. Roy is an anachronism, a bandy seventy-five year old, bow-legged from a lifetime in the saddle.

The acrid tobacco smell brings Robbie back to Afghanistan. The Afghan soldiers smoked Camels the Army imported, which he thought was hilarious.

“You kidding?” his stepfather says, “With them stumps you won’t stay in the saddle more’n five paces.”

Robbie is used to Roy’s contempt and it no longer touches him. He says, “We don’t use horses no more. We use ATVs now.” He shifts his weight on his hips and shakes a thigh, making the false leg jiggle. “I can drive one of them with these just like I can drive Carolina’s car.” He’s installed straps on the pedals like stirrups to slip his plastic feet into so he can control the old Honda. Took practice to drive that way but it’s second nature now.

“There’s no room here for you and your Mex girlfriend,” Roy says.

“Watch your mouth there, Roy.” Menace, honed by combat, is in his voice.

The old man takes a drag on his cigarette and mumbles something like an apology wreathed in smoke.

Robbie looks to Carolina. She shakes her head. He says, “You owe me money for the truck.”

“Fuck, boy, this place ain’t run a profit since your Ma died and the truck money paid for a new water pump out yonder.”

“How long you think you can keep the place going then? Let’s sell it for the land. You’re going to need money for when you can’t work no more.”

“Nah.” Roy pushes himself off the post and walks off, flicking the still-burning cigarette butt with a practiced motion of papery fingertip and yellow nail. It sails through the deep blue sky in an arc scribed by the orange embers at its tip and lands on dirt where it glows like a danger flare.

“Nursing homes are expensive, Roy,” Carolina calls after him.

Robbie says, “So we won’t raise Junior here.” She knew it was a bad idea from the start.

To the south an Amtrak train glides west silently, little more than a worm crawling along the horizon. Robbie watches it until it disappears.

In bed that night he can’t sleep. The visit to the ranch, long delayed, disturbed him, feeling the hole left when his mother died and there was only Roy and him, sitting at the kitchen table staring at each other. He hadn’t remembered that but now it was changed, now what was in that hole was the Midnight Flyer and he knows there is something he has to do, so he rises from their bed and dresses in the dark.

He’s about to walk out the door when she appears from the bedroom in her nightgown. “Where you going?” she says.

It’s past ten. He’s wearing his old denim jacket over a wool plaid shirt and black jeans. Carolina has sewn his First Division patch onto the left shoulder of his jacket, a big red 1 on a squared olive shield. He’s about to walk out the door when she appears from the bedroom in her nightgown.

“Sorry if I woke you.” He jiggles her car keys. “There’s something I gotta do.”

She is cross. “What something you gotta do?”

He turns back to her, puts his arms around her and kisses her. “I gotta go to the ranch. I’ll be back in a couple of hours.”

She lays her head against his chest. “But we just came from there.”

“Something I gotta do that I couldn’t do then.”

Maybe she knows what he means, maybe even better than he does, because his nightmare is the third shape in their bed, the demon attached to him like a leech that he must cast off, so she pulls herself away and says, “Okay.”

He kisses her and leaves.

He can see their bedroom from the parking lot. She’s standing at the window watching him. He waves to her and climbs into the car, tossing his canes on the passenger seat, and slips his plastic feet into the pedal straps. He doesn’t look back as he drives away.

It is a chilly Fall weeknight. Without traffic the drive out to the ranch takes half as long but it is still long enough and dark enough for the memory of the operation that removed his legs to force itself on him.

He’s back in the OR, awake. His legs are on fire, searing pain that runs up his thighs into his spine to his open, screaming mouth. A monitor screeches. A masked surgeon raises bloody gloved hands away from him. He sees a shapeless mass of meat, deep red and stark white, lying on a cart at the end of the table. One of his perfectly untouched feet lies at the end of the mass. He counts the toes.

A nurse in scrubs looms over him. She smells of soap and disinfectant. A clear plastic mask descends onto his face. A name tag on her breast reads Carolina. It is the last thing he remembers as he burns up in the bonfire of pain and knows nothing.

But that’s wrong.

Carolina was never in Afghanistan.

The mistake is jarring and he’s back on the road out past Aurora heading for the farm. Robbie turns off before he comes it and heads south on the county road the ranch’s western border and continues past the corner where his land ends, driving carefully around the potholes in the asphalt. The ranch’s property line is miles back.

He parks on the side of the county road north of the unmarked railroad crossing. Interstate 70 lies not far beyond the Union Pacific tracks but he hardly knows it’s there. It’s nearing midnight.

He is two people, the boy who loved trains and the man who dreams they will kill him. He knows it’s all in his head. He’s not stupid. It’s obvious, the connection between his nightmares and his lost legs. But the nightmares continue.

He’s here because he doesn’t have time for nightmares. He’s going to be a father, a real one, not the lie his mother told and retold until she married Roy. So he sits in the Civic with the engine running and the heater going though he cannot feel the warm air blowing on his jeans. He is looking at the Union Pacific app on his cellphone. The train is coming soon, a freight designated only by a number, not a name, pulled by a pair of ugly diesel-electric locomotives that look like a collection of yellow packing boxes sitting on flatbeds. Nothing like the Midnight Flyer’s legendary steam behemoths but everything like them at the same time.

So he turns off the engine and climbs out of the car, grabs his canes and walks east along the side of the tracks, stumbling from time to time on the uneven ground. The line here curves in from Kansas towards the Denver rail yards.

It’s coming now. He sees the headlights aimed at him from miles away. He plants his titanium legs and aluminum canes and plastic feet and stares it down. He hears the sound of millions of pounds of steel on steel setting the rails singing, feels the weight crushing him to dust, and it is upon him, its horns deafening.

As the locomotives blow past he screams wordlessly into the wind of their passage.

Then he turns and sees the last car disappear into the night and the train is merely receding red lights. He limps back to the Civic, exhausted, and climbs in. He rests his forehead on the steering wheel and sobs, chest heaving, tears streaming down his face. After a while he is calm. He opens the window and takes a breath of fresh prairie air. He wipes his face and blows his nose.

Robbie starts the car and drives back to Carolina. He climbs the stairs to their third floor apartment slowly. She is asleep on the sofa where she’s waited for him but wakes and sits up when he opens the door. He kneels beside her and runs fingers through her hair. “I’m back,” he says.

Peter Alterman has published science fiction, literary fiction, mainstream fiction and literary criticism since 1974.  A complete bibliography is at www.peteralterman.com.