No Train To Cheyenne

"Where does your connection leave from, ma'am?"

I asked it quietly. A moment earlier she had told Paulette she had a connection in Cheyenne that could not be moved, so everyone should stop wasting time. It had sounded busy and important. It sounded a good deal less so after I said it back to her.

"That's not your concern," she said.

"The Night Heron goes north," I said. "Sioux Falls, Billings, then west. Cheyenne is on the other line. My father rode this route with a lunch pail most of his working life and could name every stop in his sleep."

"You're splitting hairs."

"I'm reading a map."

Paulette looked from her to me. She had gone the color of skim milk. Behind her a door thumped and Raymond Lockhart came down the corridor at the pace of a man who has walked ten thousand corridors and refuses to run in one. Navy coat, gold buttons, navy brimmed cap, gray mustache, a brass whistle on a chain.

"What's holding my departure?" he said.

Paulette got it out in one breath: room released, passenger refusing to leave, threatening. She used the word threatening. I had not raised my voice once.

Lockhart looked at me, then at the ticket jacket, then at the brass slot. His gaze stopped on the card.

"Rooney," he said. "Des Rooney? From the yard signals?"

"My father," I said. "He passed on Sunday. This is the room he booked. I have the transfer stamped."

Something moved in his face, a kindness he did not have time for. Then he checked his watch and it shut again. "Two minutes forty."

"Raymond," the woman in the camel coat said, warm as a hand on a shoulder, "I'm seated in a room I was assigned. This man is upset, and I understand, but the train cannot wait on his feelings."

"His father's name is still on the door," the woman in Roomette 5 said from across the corridor. It was the first thing she had said. She said it evenly, the way a person notes an exhibit.

Lockhart rubbed his mustache. He looked at the woman in the coat, the attendant with her white knuckles, the man in work boots holding a stamp, and the door with a dead man's name on it. Everyone in the corridor was waiting for him to pick a story.

"I can't hold a train for two stories," he said. He unclipped the radio from his belt and set his thumb on the key. "One of you is about to be on the platform."