Irma had watched her beloved from the corner of her eye, could detect the scent of Old Spice coming off of him whenever he shifted in his seat. As was his driving habit, Bud began softly whistling something by Sinatra. Moonlight In Vermont? Gripping the wheel with those large, sun-darkened, calloused hands, his arms were still strong (not particularly muscular, but stocky and hard, extending from broad shoulders). Arms and hands now peppered with age spots and infiltrations of grey among black, wiry hairs that, nevertheless, still possessed the power to make her feel utterly safe and secure. He husband’s tune, the muted yowling of the tyres, an occasion bump against the asphalt anomalies of the highway, the sporadic whoosh of passing cars, the vastness of the star-field spinning in the night sky just above them – this sudden heartbreaking desire may have sprung from these things, yet seem not to be the thing itself. When Irma was a young girl, the whistle of a distant train at night was little more to her than the indigenous soundtrack to life in her particular Chicago neighbourhood. She thought little about it then, but there were other times, mysterious times, when that forlorn cry suddenly broke through the crustaceous buildup of childish occupations that had otherwise stopped here ears to the deeper questions of being. Childhood was a vast ocean between the unattainable country of the heart and a foreigner named Melancholy. Was in these rare moments that the whistle conjured up in her strangely heartbreaking images of immigrants and prisoners, spies and movie stars, soldiers, baseball players, presidents and assassins, heroes and villains, lovers and lechers, all riding the rails to incomprehensibly distance places. Some to lives of intrigue or unrequited love, loss, sorrow, despair, or perhaps hope, opportunity, wealth, fortune and fame.
