When the Railroad Comes by Leila Allison

1985

There comes a moment when God stops everything and shines the Big Light on you. You’re presented with a problem that has no solution, and doing nothing isn’t possible. When that first happened to me in 1985, I learned the truth: the closer you get to God, the further you are from your humanity. I have yet to decide if that’s sarcasm, irony, or the wages of being holy. But none of it mattered at that moment. It was up to me to select the least shitty course of action, and I had to choose now.

“Don’t use the suicide spoon,” Tess said.

“The what?”

“The big one.”

This was the first time I’d ever looked inside her kit. In it lay two spoons. Both faux gold. The smaller of the two was slightly mangled and heavy with scorch marks. The other was basically untouched. A soup spoon? I wondered, because I ask myself stupid questions when I get nervous.

I showed her the smaller one. “This cool?”

She nodded.

“You shouldn’t cook coated stuff … gives you brain damage.”

“Har-dee-har-har, Sar-duh—I’m dying and you make jokes.” She lay on my sofa, used up, dopesick, but knowing she’d be getting well within seconds had perked her up.

“You’re not dying.”

But she was and had been ever since dope became the love of her life. Tess was an artist. Even though she sold a few paintings, the money they brought didn’t legitimize her. You have to be born an artist. Whether it’s a gift or a defect is a matter of perspective. Some called her a genius, but they didn’t have to clean up after her. The clichés are true. Genius does consort with madness, and it also creates a single-minded ruthlessness that gives genius a license to shit on people, especially those closest to them. Regardless, Tess was mine and always would be.

It all began and ended with what Tess called the dreampurple light. The anxious expression on a welfare mother’s face waiting for the mail to come on the first was dreampurple. The old drunk she saw burst into tears at the little store because old Graydon had caught him boosting a bottle of wine was hell dreampurple; giving the fellow her lunch money, oddly, wasn’t. There was no set rule for the condition except nothing in the natural world, no matter how stunning or powerful, could ever be dreampurple. Tess was born with a dreampurple mind, but it began to fade in her late teens. That’s when she discovered the pills that led her to heroin. She swore that it gave her back the thing she loved and needed most.

It’s not my object to present a DIY on fixing. Let’s say it involves powder melted in a (in this case a smaller) spoon by using a (in this case a red cricket) lighter, then carefully drawing the stuff into a hypodermic needle without air bubbles. Everyone said the bubbles go to your heart and kill you. No one knew anyone that had happened to, but junkies are like anyone else when it comes to needing stupid shit to believe in.

I hesitated … Now was my big moment, and I felt God’s Hot Light on the back of my neck.

“C’mon big sister, be a nice guy. Slide it in easy-like.”

“Say that again, and you’ll be picking up teeth,” I whispered as I shot her up. The effects were immediate, like what Oswald did to Kennedy’s head. Tess was a different breed of junkie. Smack usually turns the user into a useless drooling mess. Although that would happen to her later in the day, she was someone who became very happy, funny, witty, and alive when she was high. Her pupils shot into pinpricks. Tess was on top of the world, but I’d never felt lower: I just fixed my little sister, has it really come to this?

“Is that good? Not gonna die on me?”

“Nope.”

She couldn’t do it herself. Tess had a strange complex about not being able to shoot herself up after she’d been dry for a few days. But just the first one, she’d be fine after that. Some sort of mental hangup. Usually one of her tenth-rate boyfriends did it for her (all of whom she called “Earl”), but the last Earl almost killed her. I made her promise me in the hospital to come see me for that first dry hit in the future. She knew I wasn’t fucking with her, and I knew that she would turn up sooner than later.

“You mean it? No rehab? No speech? Just bring it and you’ll do it?”

I rose, went to the window, and peeked between the drawn drapes. Junkers do not like bright light. The world was going on in the 1985 fashion. It was the year of the power ballad and mall rats. A pastel, dayglo season that smelled vaguely of clove cigarettes and cinnamon. There was something hopeful about the mid-eighties that I could never lay a finger on. It was more than Michael Jackson moonwalking or power tie money, or the vast amount of teen girls imitating Madonna, lips painted as red as a chimp’s cunt. There was a certain optimism that didn’t last. Alas, sometimes forever comes in 1985. Yet I was a bystander of that world. Even though I was only twenty-six, the era had already passed me by. I had but one purpose, I served the Saint of the Unknown Martyr. Anyway, I figured a world like that would keep moving along without my input, and that God would do the same after watching my big moment come and go. He has yet to tell me if I’m wiser; some things a person cannot judge herself.

“What’s the big spoon about?”

Tess seldom lied to me, in the technical sense, but she had the irritating habit of releasing information a bit at a time, usually when it was too late to do anything about it. I really didn’t want to know, but since I’d taken responsibility for her, it was my duty to know as much as I could. She was a tremendous bundle of contradictions that somehow added up to the truth. That’s art, I guess.

“It’s my marilyn-monroeverdose,” as though that explained everything.

“Again, this time in dumb fucker.”

“Only if you tell me why you kept your promise.”

“Because I’m a dumb fucker,” I said.

“What a coincidence! Me too. Got anything to eat?”

Junkers crave sweets. You get used to watching them dump ten packets of sugar into a cup of hot chocolate. It usually brings them to dentures, if they have state insurance. By 1985, I’d been dealing with Tess’s habit for eight years. When she was nodding I avoided being in public with her. She’d be up and even charismatic, then all of the sudden, without warning, the smack in her system dropped into low gear, and the result was a half-awake blob of protoplasm. It was the same as hauling a drunk around. At least dope doesn’t stink.

I kept her limited food groups stocked in my apartment. Vanilla ice cream, Hershey’s syrup, Mountain Dew soda, Pop Tarts, and “Chocolo’s,” which was a fudge Twinkie-like thing that was only on the market for a couple of years; I figure it got the hook after spreading all the diabetes the FDA would allow from one item.“How come I never see you eat anymore?”

I was like Mom and could survive on cigarettes and black coffee for days on end. Tess was the only non-smoking junker I knew. She considered the habit disgusting and even “bad for you”; I’ll let the irony lay as is.

Do you know what you’re doing to me? was the big question I never asked Tess. The answer was sprinkled like ashes on our lives. Mom asked her that plenty. Her answers were the usual “defensive wound” sort of slogans that sound right, but actually deflect the guilt back to you.

Sometime during her disgusting feeding, she again asked why I had fixed her.

“The same reason why you disappear into the bathroom with your kit, like I don’t see,” I said. “Some shit must happen—like there’s a law.”

She laughed. “You’re such a cunt, you know?”

“I am what I am,” I said. “Hey–flash quiz!–Do you know how many times I’ve dragged you to rehab?”

Tess scrunched her face sarcastically, as though seriously pondering the question. It was a gesture from childhood that coasted on nostalgia, for without that I would have wanted to beat it out of her face.

“Um, one too many?”

I made a sound like the buzzer on game shows when the answer’s wrong. “Seventeen, not including jail. On average, every six months. I have finally got the picture. Everyone wants you off the shit but you.”

“The big spoon’s my ticket out,” she said mainly because she was quick to change that subject. “I figure a big-ass shot from it should do the job, should it need doing.”

“That little bit more will do it?” I thought, somewhat horrified because there really is not much of a difference in sizes.

“It’s symbolic, Sar-duh.”

And I’m a cunt? I thought, putting out one smoke then lighting another. But what she said released an old memory from the dungeon.

1975

Our mother’s best friend Nora had a thing about trains. Sometimes I’d walk with her to where we could see the freighters enter and leave the shipyard. Often she would go alone. Mom never went with her on these trips, even though they did most everything together.

“The Choctaw had a saying,” Nora said. “‘Then the railroad came.’”

I was thirteen or fourteen and knew everything. “Injuns say lots of things.”

“Meaning goes two ways,” Nora said, ignoring me, which was my good luck because she could bring me down like no other person. “It’s like those trains. For the Indians, it meant whitey was coming to take everything. But it also meant that you could go away too—at least that’s what I thought threshing in the field, when I heard a whistle blow.”

That has stuck with me through the years. Then the railroad came. For the Natives, it brought smallpox, alcoholism, jail and subservience. But even after the tribes had been wiped out, the railroad never stopped coming. It comes to this very day, always creating new ways then obliterating them when they get old.

The railroad came for Nora late in 1974.

Mom seldom spoke directly to me when I was a teen. That began when I was twelve or so. But none of that mattered when Nora got sick. For a while, a truce was in order.

On Nora’s last day, Tess and I were in the kitchen playing hearts. Mom was at the hospital. We were waiting for a call. We played a lot of cards during the death watch. Mom forbade us from the hospital.

The phone finally rang. Nora had named death Roy and she had told Mom that Roy was coming soon. She wanted all of us to be together one last time. I knew that wasn’t Mom’s idea. She wanted Nora to herself.

The hospital was about a mile and a half across town. The bus system was a joke, and we would have walked if it hadn’t been raining. Nora wanted rain on the day she died, she got that much. The dope that made her uterine cancer bearable often caused her to share such things. We decided to get fancy and use three of our combined fortune of eight bucks on a cab.

I’ve come to an understanding with hospitals and rehab centers and hospices. I quit being artificially cheerful while in them, and they no longer close in on me like one of those squishing rooms used by silly-assed villains on Batman or The Man From Uncle. Still, their ceilings remain too close to my head.

At sixteen, I’d yet to make the deal, and I felt like I was suffocating. Tess was drawn to places of pain because of that fucking dreampurple light; in her mind, faces that absorbed suffering and kept coming back for more were the only beautiful things.

I never experienced dreampurple. Tried once. Tess gave me a swallow of methadone, which tasted like poison. And for a glittering moment, I felt lifted and expanded. Everything I so worried over meant nothing, and there was a sense of well-being utterly alien to me. Then I got sick, everywhere, and for long enough that a trip to the hospital was looking to be in order. It was like a door had shut in my face. When reality came slinking back, I met it with scorn. I couldn’t believe that the physical universe could be so easily swept aside by a teaspoon of a substance that tastes like cherry-flavored Clorox.

At fourteen, Tess was nearing the end of her free-range dreampurple experience. When we arrived at the hospital, it was on her. She was excited, and her pupils were blasted open as though they were set to feed. She was connected to every atom of electricity. Only I noticed. She was otherworldly and utterly amoral; something in her sought the dreampurple beauty in dying. I wanted to slap it out of her.

It never felt possible, yet Nora was going to die. She was not going to pass away or go to a better fucking place. I had hung onto false hope much longer than I should have. The last of it vanished when Tess and I entered her room. It seemed impossible that a person could still be alive in Nora’s condition. She had gone from one-twenty to under seventy pounds in less than six months. Mom was holding a cigarette for Nora, and when she saw us, I caught a glimpse of her shoving something that glinted into her purse with her other hand.

“Hi, Kid. Hey, Sister,” Nora whispered, in an underwater voice. Her skin was the color of old paper, and her eyes were yellow. She always called me Sister. Nothing has ever meant more to me.

I mumbled something and smiled.

I wanted to smack Tess (a long running theme in my life). Her ravenous eyes were sopping up every detail. But that gave over to tears and she sat down and lay her head on Nora’s shoulder.

After a few moments of just standing there, Mom glared at me and nodded at Tess. Nora was increasingly in and out of it, and it was clear that Mom wanted the final moments to herself. So I peeled Tess off Nora. I didn’t know what to do. I kissed Nora on the cheek and hustled Tess out of the room. Without speaking, we left the hospital.

We walked home. The rain had backed off, but it really didn’t matter, we weren’t dying, we’d dry. Even if it had poured, we still would have walked. Nobody wants to make small talk with a cabbie after they have seen death. And I remember that the world was in black and white that day. A huge part of our world lay in ruins, and yet even there, the railroad would still come.

“Mom hid a spoon,” Tess said. “You see it? Bet it had something in it; something for the pain.”

Tess was always too perceptive for her own good.

“Maybe,” I said, “but we won’t talk about it.”

I later dismissed the poison spoon theory. I locked it in the place I used to stick the things I did not want to think about. I convinced myself that Mom hadn’t helped Nora out the door, even though such potions have always been extremely easy to get in our neighborhood. I mean, fuck, she was as good as gone, why hasten it by what—an hour—and risk a murder charge? But I learned that it was the sort of thing lovers do. I’ve never been in love, but I bet that is the sort of thing lovers do.

2015

Tess died in 2008. Dope wasn’t the precise cause, and she never used her suicide spoon. But it had weakened her system bit by bit. She was compliant with her methadone treatment plan (for a change), so the official cause was a heart attack. Mom latched onto that. I figure she did so because an overdose would make her look like a shitty mother. Compared to the ideal standard of motherhood she was lacking, but since the ideals exist only on television, I will say she did her best and let it go at that.

Kidney disease came for Mom in 2015. She died on a Saturday morning. Just like Nora and Tess, in her sleep–while I somehow managed to be out of the room every time. I want to be awake when the blade swings my way. I keep imagining that for the briefest glimmer of a thought that I will know why, and it will all make sense. I guess we all have the things we latch onto.

I last spoke to her a few hours before the end. I snuck her out for a smoke. The CNA’s didn’t squawk about it–they are the real people you meet at the end. Usually Asian and capable of caring to a degree that makes you wonder what’s wrong with you.

It was Friday night. Mom and Nora loved Friday nights. Nora had an apartment upstairs from ours in the same old tenement that was always threatening to burn itself down. They both worked at Howe’s Hardware and when Tess and I were older it was as though Mom and Nora lived upstairs and we had the other to ourselves. Considering how it was with Mom back then, it was a wise move.

Yes, Mom and Nora used to love Friday night. I recall with crystal clarity them getting ready to go out to the Sportsman or White Pig Tavern, the apartment reeking of hairspray and cigarette smoke, everyone talking at once. The radio on. The energy was exciting even though I was not in on it.

And I’d hear them coming home after last call–bumbling but not drunk–just giggling and oh shitting and accusing each other of losing the keys, which always turned up. There were never any men. They were attractive young women, but everyone knew they were a couple and left it at that.

Then the railroad came.

Mom was high on morphine, and we had to bring her drip along. But she was mostly coherent, and kept breathing and producing just enough urine to remain alive. She didn’t speak much toward the close. She was more content than resigned. I think she had been ready for the train since Nora died. Forty years is a hell of a lot of loneliness.

“I can do for you what you did for Nora, if you want,” I said. It would have been easy. And I would have done it if she wanted me to. I figured God might be watching again, maybe giving me a second chance in case I had blown the first.

Christ how she resembled Nora on her last day. Mom looked at me, skin the color of old paper, the whites of her eyes yellow. “I knew you knew …” she said with a feeble laugh. “It was all over Tessie’s face.”

“I can, if you want.” I knew where to get it, but I also knew her answer, which is why I hadn’t bothered. And I couldn’t shake the ridiculous notion that I’d made a polite offer of euthanasia, to my own mother, like offering coffee to a guest.

“No, Sarah,” she said, savoring the final drag off her last cigarette. “Hell ain’t big enough for the both of us.”