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

The foremost cars suffer the worst damage. They fold against each other, coming apart at the seams, sending up the groaning gasps of dying dinosaurs, some of them splaying open and spilling their contents across the length of three football fields. Seat cushions and girders and undercarriages slam into deserted engine houses. Fountains of dirt and ancient bricks leap up into the night air. Glass shatters in arrhythmic plumes of glittering chaos. Signal poles snap like kindling across the length of the yard.

The dining car, the last link in the violent chain of destruction, weathers the collision with the least amount of damage: it jumps the track and slides sideways into the massive turnstile before tipping onto its side.

Inside the dark pandemonium of the dining car, Oswald feels the universe tilting on its axis, the plates and silverware and linens and candy wrappers and broken glass levitating upward like a horrifying magic trick into the smoke-choked air, and for one terrible instant Oswald is bull-whipped back in time to the Tilt-A-Whirl, and his stepfather is at the controls, yanking the lever, laughing his evil, hysterical, sadistic laugh, and all Oswald can do is open his mouth and let out a ululating shriek of primal childhood terror.

The great heaving shift in gravity tosses Oswald and the Fed backwards against the broken windows of the starboard wall, which is now the floor, and the floor is now the wall. The booths snap from their moorings and tumble down on top of the two men in an avalanche of contorted metal and broken glass and hot coffee.

The dining car slides another fifty feet and comes to rest in a cloud of dust.

41.

The breathless stillness that follows is almost as jarring and abrupt as the collision. Oswald gasps for air, pinned under a fallen booth, his skull throbbing. Outside, somewhere in the distance, sirens wail. Car alarms howl, the crackle of flames sizzling through the night air. Somewhere to the east, the white noise of a breached water main floods the valley.

Oswald blinks and blinks, and tries to get a breath into his aching lungs. The dining car, resting on its side, sits ticking like a broken clock. Liquid drips somewhere, either blood or coffee. Summoning all his strength, Oswald pushes the broken booth off his midsection and manages to sit up against a cracked window.

He swallows the pain and takes a shallow breath and looks around the capsized car.

Special Agent Brian Cosentino—also known as Jimmy “the Cucumber” Dalessandro—is about fifteen feet away, barely visible in the blue haze, on his hands and knees, trying to catch his own breath. The back of his shiny sport coat is coated in broken glass. He still has his ID tag dangling from his neck, and still grips the cut-down Remington in his big gnarled hand. He manages to rise up on one knee, brushing the glass off himself.

Oswald starts to say something when he stops himself, and listens.

Outside the overturned car, rising over the din of sirens, alarms, and crackling flames, comes a familiar sound that Oswald initially cannot identify. At first it sounds like the rustling of leaves or maybe raindrops falling on a tin roof. But neither of these sounds seems particularly probable or feasible at this point.

Oswald cranes his neck to see through a six-inch gap that has formed between the damaged hatch and the dining car’s undercarriage.

Through the narrow opening he can just make out the southern edge of the switchyard—the barbed-wire fence along the property line, and the thick forest of white pine beyond it—all of it flickering in the roaring flames. A cement viaduct rises above the tree line.

Oswald smiles.

The sound he’s hearing is applause, and the source of the clapping is coming from the viaduct, which stretches a hundred yards across the southeasternmost edge of the switchyard.

* * *

Rows of onlookers line the weathered precipice along the tracks. At least a hundred of them, maybe more. Like carrion crows, they peer down at the wreckage with keen interest, nodding and clapping, their ghostly silhouettes translucent against the black sky, like cut-out figures made of a smoke, the light from the flames reflecting off their cadaverous visages. At the center of the group stands Matilda in her angelic gown, her lustrous blonde hair flagging in the breeze, her laugh lines gone, her skin like satin. Even at this distance, the expression on her lovely, soft face is one of relief, satisfaction, maybe even pride.

Oswald’s victims flank his late wife. Alberta Goldstein is there, waving sadly, fading out like a stain washing away against the night air. The Dead Accountant with the Broken Eyeglasses is clapping robustly next to her, like he always knew Oswald had it in him. The Dreadlock-Wearing Drug Dealer is cheering, and the Crooked Politician with the Neck Scars is whistling, and the Bloated Gambling-Addict Corpse is whooping and hollering, and even the Sucking Chest-Wound Gangbanger Dude looks impressed, nodding and making the raised-fist salute.

Only the Head-Wound Kiddie-Porn Guy is still disgruntled—standing there with a scowl, his arms crossed against his blood-sodden chest. Slowly fading away, the guy holds onto his grudge like a security blanket.

As the row of onlookers evaporates in the moonlight, fading into the fabric of shadows, Oswald sees Matilda lingering like a sparkling hologram in the night... until she stands alone, ghostly and radiant on the precipice.

She smiles. She tilts her head in that adorable fashion that had always melted Oswald’s heart. He knows what that head-tilt means. He knows all the water under the bridge represented by that slight canting of her head. He sees it now, unspooling behind her, a magical flicker show on the dark clouds scudded across the sky.

He sees their awkward-sweet courtship, the night they snuck into the drive-in, the time they made love in a rowboat in the Des Plaines. Even the sad moments flash like fireflies against the sky, the doctor informing Matilda she could never get