Saint Oswald by Jay Bonansinga (motivational novels .txt) 📕

like the touch of a zombie scarecrow from some third-rate horror movie. “Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry,” the kid mumbles with a nervous giggle, banging the back of his head against a giant gear-housing.

The cab is barely eight feet wide, and framed in grimy, riveted steel conduits and control consoles. The single seat, on which the old man currently sits, dominates the greasy corrugated-iron floor. Marky keeps staggering back and forth on the iron like he’s on a boat in a storm. He is barely able to see his hand in front of his face, but when he does see it, his fingers seem to be glowing, streaking radiant artifacts across his line of vision.

“You okay, kid?” The old man is a gnarled specimen clad in oil-spotted dungarees and a greasy CAT hat. His long, tanned face, deeply lined and reflecting the red lights of the control console, appears to be the color and texture of a rotten apple. His grizzled chin sticks out from a perpetual gob of chewing tobacco.

“Absolutely, man, I’m, like, totally great,” the kid says, grabbing a paint-chipped pipe to steady himself. He giggles again.

“You sure?” The engineer glances one more time over his shoulder at the kid. “You don’t look so hot. I could call Mr. Hayes at HQ—”

“No, no, I’m good, I’m fine.” The kid nods robustly in the dim light.

In truth, Mark Ferri is just about as good and fine as he can be, thanks to the fifty milligrams of the designer drug tryptamine—otherwise known as “Foxy”—that he popped a little over forty minutes ago. He took the pills just before climbing aboard the metal monster, not only to smooth out the ride, but also to ease the pain and humiliation of getting verbally thumped by the Cucumber.

In the three short years since Jimmy Dalessandro had been made, Mark had seen Dalessandro rise through the ranks of the Ferri family with the aplomb and upward mobility of a Harvard Law grad. Mark had observed his father giving Dalessandro more and more authority, entrusting him with more and more secrets, accepting him, loving him, coddling him, kissing his ass, verbally jerking him off. It wasn’t long before Mark realized the old man had found—in the form of Jimmy “the Cucumber” Dalessandro—the son he always wished he had. And this tormented Mark Ferri, and this made the insatiable need inside Mark Ferri rage for more and more drugs.

And right now, the latest chemical concoction to placate the kid is fully kicking in, and turning the lights and noise and space around the control cab into a spectacular three-dimensional video game.

“As I was sayin’…” The old engineer turns back to the controls and eases the throttle-stick back just a tad. Through the dark windshield, jumbles of red and green signal lights blur past the train. “When ya round the bottom of the lake, you gotta watch yer speed.”

The kid points at a big red button in the center of the console. “What’s that one do?”

“That there’s the dead man’s switch,” the old geezer informs him.

“What’s it do?”

The old man shrugs. “Not much. Just a safety measure—so you don’t croak at the controls and leave her high and dry.”

“Whattya mean?”

“If you ain’t made no adjustment in two-and-a-half minutes, you gotta hit that dead man’s switch or she shuts down. She thinks you’re dead.”

Marky-Mark giggles. “That is so fucking cool.” He gazes out the side window. The passing lights look like spinning Christmas trees, and floating reindeers, and glittering stardust spewing across the rushing darkness. He feels better. He feels like everything’s going to be okay. He feels loved, he feels brave and powerful and true. “So, like, what’s the speed limit for one of these things?”

“Speed limit for a commercial passenger train is eighty miles per hour,” the old man tells him. “But you gotta back off down here to ’bout sixty-five, seventy.”

The train bumps over the bridge, then keens around a gentle curve in the track, a sudden blizzard of sparks jumping across the darkness.

“Whoa—that is so rad, man!” The kid takes it all in with wide-eyed narcotic wonder. “Those sparks are so fucking radical!”

“Yeah, them things are pretty neat,” the old man says with a nod, and then spits a gob of tobacco juice in a paint can on the greasy floor at his feet. He glances again over his shoulder at the kid. “You love trains... don’t ya, kid.”

“Huh?” Marky-Mark is staring through the windshield at the dark wilderness, curling around the flanks of the train like the wake of a black sea.

“You just love trains.”

“Hell yeah.”

The old engineer measures his words. “You’re pretty sick, ain’t ya.”

“Sick? Oh yeah. Right.” Marky keeps staring at the light show outside the windows. “I got brain cancer, man. It’s a bummer.”

The old man sucks his cheek. “That’s a damn shame.”

“Yeah, I’m totally gonna die and shit.”

The engineer wipes his mouth with his sleeve. “How’d you like to take the stick?”

“Huh?”

Charlie McDaw grins a rotten-toothed grin in the darkness of the cab. “I think you’re ready to take control of this old girl.”

* * *

Five minutes later, Oswald feels the train jerk again, speeding up in fits and starts, and he finally gets out of his seat, head buzzing with nervous energy.

He stands there in the middle of the aisle for a moment, gripping the luggage rack for purchase, as the other passengers murmur nervously around him. Heads are turning. The nun is pressing her face against the window, the businessman gripping his briefcase against his chest like a suckling nfant.

Freddie “Forty-Five,” in the far corner, is sleeping through the whole thing, the paper tented over his face. Across the aisle from Felson sits a woman Oswald hadn’t noticed before, a little Arab lady with a makeshift burqa, her eyes wide and alarmed inside the opening of her veil.

Oswald turns and starts down the aisle toward the metal door between the engine and car number one. Through the portal window he can see the blue strobe-like flare of sparks