Thomas was at a time in his life when he felt on the verge of doing great things. What those things might be remained vague. He was tall and thin and looked younger than he was; he had turned thirty earlier that year. It was now mid-summer 1980, a year that saw a failed attempt to rescue American hostages taken in Iran, and the eruption of Mt. St. Helens. He had just spent a week in Seattle visiting a friend he had known since the mid-seventies and had left mid-morning on the Coast Starlight train’s once-a-day run to San Francisco, which would arrive early the next morning.
The train trip was long, and he found the part through Washington mostly uninteresting. He thought he might see the smoke from Mt. St. Helens, but it was cloudy and overcast. The timetable showed that the train would be in Dunsmuir – the stop near Mt. Shasta – by one in the morning, which meant that there wouldn’t be much to see. By late afternoon, the train entered Oregon and what little he could see through the plastic windows that were highly scratched, appeared to be more scenic than Washington. Occasional orange and yellow glints of light giving evidence of a river somewhere in forested mountains.
When he wasn’t dozing off, he tried to read but would lose interest. When he wasn’t reading, he would walk to the snack bar car hoping to find someone to talk to, a pattern that continued into the night when the lights in the cars were off. Sometime after eleven the snack bar car was empty except for a tall woman in her late twenties sitting at a table. Two hours earlier he had seen her at the same table playing cards with two men. She sat with perfect posture staring straight ahead, her lips open slightly as if she were whistling to herself.
She was pretty, he thought, and remembered telling a girl years ago that she was pretty. The girl told him later that whenever she was with him, she felt pretty. He had wondered if there were girls who knew they were pretty without someone telling them and whether the woman at the table was one such person.
She looked up as Thomas approached the table. “Still here, I see,” he said.
“Yep, still here.” Thomas saw what looked like sadness in her eyes, but it may have just been tiredness, he thought.
“I saw you playing cards here a while back.”
“
About the Author
Barry Garelick writes about time, memory, and people facing transitions in their lives. His fiction is published in Cafe Lit, Opiate, and Fiction on the Web. He lives in Morro Bay, California with his wife.
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