Trainfishing

I give up on trying to read the Irvine Welsh novel, what with the bloke across from me yammering on.

“David Bowie was such a big fan of Shallow Grave, that’s why he let Danny Boyle use his music in Trainspotting.”

I nod along and out the corner of my eye tick off the people shuffling past periodically up and down the car. Much like Lavrentiy Beria, I have a knack for names and faces, but mostly faces, a nack which I, much like Stalin’s personal bitch-boy, use to screw over just about everyone I lay my eyes on. Know that bit in Fight Club, when Edward Norton’s on the shitter, pouring over an Ikea catalogue, and you see his flat fill up with furniture and nick-nacks and doo-da’s, all fading in, all with the appropriate price tags superimposed on screen? That’s how I see the world. Every mark has a price tag. I can tell you how much a bloke has in his checking account just by lookin’ at ’im. The price a his shirt, his shoes, his keks and socks, all displayed, following them as they waft by. You wouldn’t realize just by lookin’ a’ it, but the dining cart, jam-packed this time a day, is essentially another form of that pile a gold coins Scrooge McDuck waddles around in.    

The steady clack drones on, assuring me in no uncertain terms of the near-impossibility of derailment, but you can never be too sure. Life is short, so grab whatever you can.

See, I got this band around my middle digit and it’s a neat little thing I did wi’ it. It’s essential to my grift. It’s got an elastic band grafted on, the end of which is securely looped around a small but powerful magnet. Someone bristles by callous enough to have, say, one a them new ‘n trendy metal wallets poking outta their back pocket – it’s happened - I just Spider-Man that shit. My sticky little web darts out, then yo-yo’s back into my palm and it’s gone.

I clear out maybe a quarter of the car before some wide-o wises up to what’s happenin’. I swipe up my Welsh novel – no, it’s not one a the skag ones – and duck outta there, with the mouth-breather – lookin’ like Biff Tannen like all mouth-breathers do – in tow. Finally the smart cunt grabs me by the shoulders and pulls me into the pisher. He smacks me around but before he can start wailin’ on me proper, the car jolts and I know what’s comin’ next.

So the train derailed. Like a plot point indicting the incompetence of slacking-ff on an industrial scale in an Ayn Rand novel, the goddam train came off the tracks, rolled down a slight incline sliding and stopping on its side, and I rolled out. Ok, maybe I wasn’t quite so smooth. I picked myself out of shattered glass and buggered outta there. Without thinking I pulled a shard outta my left eye. That’s gone now. Shot to shit. The bloke I was talking to at the start a this reminiscence, I passed his torn-up body. He was flung out a window and nearly decapitated on the jagged glass in the frame.

There’s a ringing down deep in my ear. I pro’ly got tinnitus now. Crashing and burning in the heart of fly-over country, the first response crowd are pretty fuckin’ slow. I wander back over to my sputnik – that’s “travelling companion” in commie talk – and above the continued ringing, I hear Frances McDormand’s voice at the end a Fargo sayin’ “There’s more to life than a little money y’know” as I crouch over the bloke with the split jugular and pat’im down on the off-chance he’s got a pack a smokes on him. I knock out a loosie from his front pocket and pocket his wrist watch while I’m at it.

“Don’t you know that? And here ya are, and it’s a beautiful day.” Whatever ya say, Frances. That’s why they gave ya the goddam Oscar. Me, I’m here holdin’ a tube of snuff over a burnin’ engine, so what the hell do I know?

I walk past the chorus line of Buck Dharma’s hit single one last time – an’ I think of something Jeffrey Eugenides wrote, a line from The Virgin Suicides: ‘There was a lot of confusion at the cemetery that day. You’re talking a year’s worth of departed. The place was pretty well dug up.’ Hummin’ Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day”, not sure if I’m in pitch since I can’t hear myself, I shit-kick over to the edge of the wreckage, upwind from the char and gasoline and gore so I can’t smells it. I swing my head around like a meerkat on the look out for a jackal: I don’ see Biff Tannen anywhere, but the unwritten rule is: if you didn’t see them die on-screen, you best watch your ass.  

I look across the acres of stalks. Joel Cohen’s wife was right: “it’s a beautiful day.”   

I don’t got much time to enjoy it from over on this side, since I dart my one good eye back and see Biff hulking across the gravel at me. I duck into the corn. No children like in that Stephen King story, so that’s one thing I got goin’ for me. Marty McFly’s bully gives up after a while and come out the other side, only to nearly wind up as road kill crossin’ the highway tryin’ to put more distance between us.

Now, it’s later and I’m by a creek and there’s elms drooping on all sides and to my right there’s kids tossing stones into the water from a bridge – they don’t pay me no mind - and no search party is lookin’ for me and I’m thinkin’ if I hold out long enough, the responders will check the passenger manifesto and not finding my smoldering ribcage will shrug their shoulders and declare me dead. Maybe I’ll be like the character in that Kafka novel about the Kraut who’s parents ship his ass off to Amerika. The Man Who Disappeared. It’s a big country and there’s sights to see and people to grift. From swampy coast to swampy coast and maybe on into the great white north. If the Mounties spot me at the Derby Line, I’ll just duck down and slip out from beneath their horses’ legs and while their lookin’ around – duh, where’d he go? – I’ll be in the brush. Scrub and pine and every shade of green. That’s the scenery. Inside and out.