Four Minutes To The Bell

Four minutes to the bell, and the attendant in the maroon vest had a grip on my forearm.

"Sir, this corridor has to be clear," Paulette Bassett said. Her brass name pin caught the amber light. She kept her voice pleasant, the way people do before they call for someone bigger. "Coach is cars nine through twelve. Walk back now, or I radio rail police and you finish this trip on the platform."

I did not move. My boots stayed on the burgundy runner outside Roomette 4. In my free hand I held a cream ticket jacket with a red stamp on the flap, worn soft from my pocket, one gray thumbprint of diesel on it from the shift I had covered until seven Wednesday morning.

"Check your handheld," I said. My voice came out hoarse. I had not slept properly since Sunday. "Roomette 4, Jonah Rooney. The transfer was stamped yesterday afternoon."

Through the open door a woman sat on the window bench as if she owned the train. Camel coat, cream turtleneck, gold-rimmed glasses, a paper cup of tea steaming on the fold-down table. Her handbag sat on the cushion where I had meant to set my father's box. She did not look at me. She watched the platform lamps slide blue across the glass.

Paulette's gaze went over my chore coat, my scuffed boots, the duffel strap across my chest. Two doors down, a man in a fleece vest leaned out of Roomette 2 to watch.

"That room was released," Paulette said. "Your paperwork is not valid for this car."

Against my ribs, inside the coat, I carried what my father left me: an envelope of cremation papers, a small green notebook with a pencil stub through the wire, and his flip phone, dead since Sunday, its screen cracked from the kitchen floor where I found him. He had saved family-pass points for two years so we could ride the Night Heron home to Baker City, to my mother's grave. He picked Roomette 4 himself, in September, with me on speaker, pleased with it.

"My father died four days ago," I said. "This was his room."

"I'm sorry for your loss," Paulette said, in the tone of a woman reading off a card. She tightened her hold. "Three minutes."

I did not shout. A raised voice hands them the word disruptive, and disruptive gets written down. I held the ticket jacket steady and looked at the brass slot beside the door, the one where the railway slides the passenger's name card.

The card was white. The ink was black.

ROONEY, D.

Nobody had taken it out. Whatever had released this room, it had not reached the door.