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

the last shell into the chamber, madly searching for a weak link, a way to cut off the caboose. He has one shell left. One chance. One last-ditch chance. “She got herself in deep with Ferri, and when I heard about that I kept an eye on her.”

“GODDAMIT, I TOLD YOU I DON’T CARE!!”

Right then, Oswald sees a small junction box mounted on the bumper of the caboose. The steel housing is dented and scarred with years of weather and rail-wear, a keyhole between two symbols: the release switch.

Over the space of an instant, Oswald judges the distance as he keeps talking. “The old fuck used to beat her. I helped her out one night—it was before me and Matilda were together—I took your mom to the emergency room.

Oswald aims the barrel at the housing and swallows hard. “I knocked her up that night, Gerbil.” He blurts this out in a hoarse, crestfallen voice. “I found out later, that old geezer Ferri was impotent. He knew she was pregnant with somebody else’s child. That made him want her dead.”

Through the portal glass, their eyes meet. Gerbil’s mouth hangs open.

Oswald squeezes the trigger, confessing a painful truth that is drowned by the blast.

You’re my kid.

Jimmy “the Cucumber” flinches at the roar of the shotgun in the dining car ahead of him.

Clutching onto a headrest in the pitch darkness, he’s got his pistol-grip 8-gauge in his free hand, the hammer cocked. He judges the distance between him and Indian as one car length.

The club car is visible, dead ahead, through two layers of porthole glass, swimming in the darkness, shimmering with each fountain of sparks from outside. The train is coming apart at the seams. At the end of the dining area, the big fat Indian is clearly visible, shooting at somebody or something on the parapet, and the sight of his gigantic back and his broad shoulders as wide as a bulldozer makes Dalessandro’s spine tingle.

Three years…

Dalessandro starts creeping through the flickering shadows, cursing himself for not wearing his vest, a wild thought running through his mind: Be careful, the Indian is a cowboy, he’s erratic and dangerous. At first, the absurdity of this thought does not register, but as Dalessandro reaches the fore-hatch, he realizes the Zen quality of this notion: The Indian is a cowboy.

He yanks the sliding door as silently as possible, the noise leaping up at him, the wind buffeting him. He pushes his way through the parapet. The roar of the wheels beneath the platform is so loud it’s almost palpable, like a cymbal crashing in his skull.

Slipping unnoticed into the dining car, shutting off the wind and noise behind him, Dalessandro raises the sawed-off shotgun.

Dalessandro is twenty-five feet away from the Indian, and his heart is racing. It all comes down to this—three years and endless agonies—all boiling down to this moment.

Gerbil feels the caboose drifting away from the train, a flame licking up the window.

She presses her face against the hot glass, and she stares at Oswald’s face behind the club car’s window, receding into the distance as the hurling Superliner roars away. Gerbil sobs uncontrollably.

Lungs heaving, eyes burning, tears tracking down her face, she pounds and pounds on the window, and she tries to call out to Oswald, tries to warn him: Look out! Behind you! Son of a bitch has a shotgun!

But Gerbil Goldstein cannot utter a sound because she’s literally choking on her tears, fighting the sorrow and rage and regret coursing through her, the knowledge that Oswald Means is her father spreading like a wildfire through her brain. She cannot process it, cannot digest it—it sticks in her throat like an icicle.

Drifting away, Gerbil can clearly see the big, menacing figure in the shadows of the dining car behind Oswald, and she can also see that Oswald is completely oblivious to the imminent threat, staring forlornly out the back window of the parlor car.

Gerbil pounds on the window and sobs and lets out a garbled, “Nnnno—NNO!—NNNNO!”

Approaching silently behind Oswald, coiled and tense like a snake about to strike, the figure raises the blunt-nose double-barrels of the hog-leg, only a few feet away from the back of Oswald’s head now, and Gerbil slams her fists down on the glass hard enough to crack the window.

She cannot get the words out, cannot formulate the agonizing message.

The fact that maybe she has always known in her heart that she has Indian blood in her.

Oswald presses his big, calloused hands against the rear window, watching the caboose coasting away, the desolation squeezing his guts. Behind him, the floorboards creak.

Oswald doesn’t turn around. He doesn’t move. He expected this.

In the reflection off the rear window he can see the shadow of a big greasy-haired shooter coming down the aisle toward him, maybe ten, maybe twelve feet away, the twin-barrels of the large-bore shotgun closing in on point-blank range. Oswald starts to say something.

The cold twin-muzzles of the Remington kiss the back of Oswald’s oversized head, and the pressure forces him against the glass. Oswald drops the 8-gauge. The shotgun clatters to the floor. He closes his eyes.

He braces himself for the inevitable, and in that terrible instant, waiting for the pop, Oswald expects to see his life pass before him like they always say it will: maybe a trip down memory lane, a panorama of the ramshackle reservation he grew up on, the years of neglect and abuse...

... or perhaps a series of flashbacks of the Tilt-A-Whirl, the sinister carnival machine on which his stepfather tortured him, the source of all his pain and rage...

... or maybe a cinematic tour of his lost years as a button man for the Ferri crew, the tawdry places he put bullets in the brains of the doomed...

... or perhaps even a Hallmark card montage of his relationship with Alberta Goldstein, that cold February night he impregnated her in a transient hotel a mile away from Cook County hospital...

... but none of these images pass across the black canvas