TRAIN
Excerpt from “Train", published in Relief, Spring 2016 Issue
TRAIN
Wyn's hope had always been for the Depot to become a family business—nothing that would make anyone rich, least of all him, but a modest kind of legacy anyway. He put pictures of his father's and grandfather's families and farms up on the walls, some in faded color but mostly black and white. Back then there'd been almond and olive groves, vineyards, fields of artichokes and the promise of more of the same from the rich dirt he’d run barefoot through his whole childhood, ground he thought of as his own. But no Phelps owned the farms anymore. Wyn came back from Fort Irwin in 1956, having fought in no wars, to find out his father had sold all the land. Hadn’t even asked Wyn’s opinion on it. And now Wyn ran a business his kids didn’t want. Davis had a military career. Griff lived downstate and Carrie decided to go and be a civil engineer. Decided a long time ago not to have anything to do with Wyn’s ideas. In fact, Carrie worked for the county, on the team that advocated for the commuter rail that would put Wyn out of business sooner or later. Probably sooner.
The train ran through the eastern part of town, on tracks half-hidden by pampas and desert sage, alongside the fence separating the old Union Pacific right-of-way from brick houses and kiddie pools and gas grills. There was a station between the high school and the new office park, with a break in the fence on one side so passengers could cross from the commuter lot to the platform. But on the school side, only a high concrete barrier. If students wanted to take the train they had to walk nearly half a mile to the intersection at Washington and Vine to cross over. Wyn felt it was a conspiracy against him and his business. He could admit the barrier made things a little bit safer for neighborhood kids and dogs, but mostly what it did was cut him off from customers.
Wyn had captained the failed insurgence against the whole idea. The town didn’t need this station, or for that matter the train. Why couldn't everyone drive their cars to work, as they had always done? He knew he came off as a pugnacious old crank, proving to Carrie he was exactly who she had him pegged for, but he couldn’t mind it just then, he only wanted to save his business. Look at how much it’s going to cost tax payers, he said at the town council meeting. And there was no proof there’d be less traffic and pollution.
“What do you want us to do, Phelps?” Rolly Jenkins was on Wyn’s side but gave up too easy. “Lay our bodies down on the tracks? This is the state of California we’re talking about and if it wants to run the train through here it’s going to run the train through here.”
He’d opened his restaurant thirty-five years before and it was a success. He made it a success, by serving up reliable food at a reasonable price, every day of the week and all through the year excepting major holidays. He went into it knowing nothing about the restaurant trade and worked his tail off to figure it out because he sure as shit wasn’t going to work for anybody else. Not after growing up expecting to run his own farm, and not after his years in the Army where you couldn’t fart without the staff sergeant’s say so.
It was a small diner, built in the rectangular clapboard tradition of train station buildings from the golden age of rail travel. Wyn named it The Coffee Depot as an homage to the town’s history, a nod to the freight trains that had passed through in the middle of the night for decades. He drove railroad spikes into a beam by the door and that’s where folks hung their coats. He printed menus to look like train schedules. ALL ABOARD FOR BREAKFAST it said on one side, PLEASE PROCEED TO THE DINING CAR it said on the other.
Now the rail was going to ruin him. Not only would half his customers have to come around the barrier to get to him, now the office park that came in with the station had a Starbucks and a Chili’s and taco place. Wyn figured he’d be out of business in less than two years.
Well, now everyone who’d been so gung-ho about the train was sorry.
Three students from the high school killed themselves on the tracks, concrete wall be damned. Damon Hastings went first, in March. An honor student, a junior, he did it at night as the very last train hurtled toward the station, leaving no note. His mother and stepfather kept the funeral private, but everyone in town heard that his older sister came home from Afghanistan to attend. She’d been at the Coffee Depot with Reverend Van Der Linden, the family's minister. Wyn served them breakfast and made sure word spread. Despite the tragic circumstances, them coming to his place gave him a certain sense of satisfaction, proof that the Depot still mattered.
On April second, senior Greg Adler took his turn in broad daylight. His parents held a public funeral, and public memorial, but hardly anyone showed up. All Wyn heard about it was Greg was a bully and a poor student and once was caught with a knife at school.
Beth Sanchez, three weeks later, was a quiet girl from a big family, known around town for her babysitting skills and for her loyal and attentive care to her grandfather. Eugenio Sanchez had been sent to live at a state-run facility in January and no longer recognized any of his family members, Wyn heard. That was no reason for Beth to do what she did, people said. For a few days a rumor circulated that Beth had been pregnant, maybe by one of the dads in town she babysat for, but that didn’t seem plausible to anybody who knew her.
“It's catching,” Wyn told the customers at his counter, whenever he had them. “We've got the kids all shot up with vaccines and supplied with condoms, but we got no way of keeping them from making the jump.”
Don, his prep chef, line cook, and only friend, tried to tell him it didn’t work that way. “Depression is depression. It ain’t like the flu.”
“You think if the tracks weren’t right there, these same kids would be calling it quits?”
“I do.”
“Well I don’t.”
“Go ahead and have the last word, Wyn, doesn’t bother me.”
“I will.”
“Good.”
“Great.”
--
Wyn’s granddaughter, Nicola—a name you wind up with if you marry a Greek, as Carrie had done—worked afternoons at the Depot. She walked over every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to help clean up and get the place ready for the dinner rush that hadn’t quite materialized since the station went in. She was a good worker, if a little sullen.
She and Beth Sanchez had been friends. No, that wasn’t right, because every time Wyn used the word when talking about Beth in relation to his granddaughter, Nicola corrected him. “We shared a locker. That’s all.”
The student body had outgrown the school, and they’d be voting on a bond measure that fall for a new building. Carrie’s idea, of course. Wyn was against bonds on principle. Now the pro-bond side had started using the suicides to make their case. The stark building, from an era of austere institutional architecture, contributed to depression and anxiety, they said. It was toxic, environmentally and emotionally. Wyn didn’t know how that worked. How could any one building be more toxic than the whole world they were all living in?
“You shared a locker and you weren’t friends?” Wyn asked Nicola. He sat on his stool behind the register, under his Uncle Jimmy’s Purple Heart and the framed American flag. His knee was acting up; he rubbed it while Nicola topped off ketchup bottles and salt shakers.
“We weren’t enemies.” She knocked a salt shaker against a table edge to break loose a clump. “She got me some babysitting jobs. We did a project together in bio.”
“I call that friends,” Wyn said.
Nicola only shook her head, concentrating on her work. She was so like her mother that way, quick to get impatient with Wyn and unwilling to engage in the sparring that he only saw as making conversation. He didn’t know how else to communicate. Arguing was the entire basis of his friendship with Don. The women in his life had never cared for it.
He pretended to read his paper, watching Nicola methodically work through her tasks. She had a good system, didn’t waste steps, was thorough. A natural at the restaurant business, Wyn thought. And she was good with customers, when they had them—she knew how to keep them happy without making herself into a doormat. Her pace would pick up with experience if he could get her to stay, the thing he’d failed to do not only with his three kids but also his wife.
“How about coming in tomorrow?” he asked from behind his newspaper. “This place could use some extra attention. Run your finger along the window sills and you’ll see.”
“I can’t,” she said.
“Can’t or won’t? Don’t you want some extra money?”
“I have too much homework.”
“On the weekend? Sounds like an excuse to me.”
“Think whatever you want,” Nicola said in a voice so quiet Wyn knew she hadn’t meant for him to hear it.
Just like her mother, and her mother’s mother before her, thinking they had one over on him by sneaking in the last word. He thought to tell Nicola that, show her he wasn’t as clueless as she believed, when the commuter train rumbled through and he decided to hold his tongue.
