American Masculine Read Online Free PDF Page B

temperature of early winter outside. The air in the compartments, especially those closest to the heat of the locomotive, is heavy, thick to the lungs, and lined with body odor.
    Middie has succeeded, through a forceful combination of the billy club Prifflach issued him and a jackknife he carries, in slightly opening the casement adjoining his seat. Air slides through the sliver of space he’s created and Middie can feel it, even if the chug of the train taints it all, he feels the clean blade of pine, the rich taste of high mountains, the snicker of winter, windy and subliminal. He feels Bearhat Mountain and Gunsight out there, the draw of Going to the Sun Road lining the opposite side of the valley, spare of people now, the park locked in the grip of September, closed to visitors but for the oil and punch of the train, and the Blackfeet nation in the expanse below the great rocks.
    Looking out he feels the calling an eagle might feel in the drafts over the backbone of the continent, that something of light and stone and water, perhaps fire, has created him and breathed life through the opening of his lips, and there is a violence in that, he thinks, and a tenderness, and he sees as if with the eyes of a child the wings of the eagle thrown wide over the body of the beloved, the scream of the bird in the highborne wind.
    YET A DARK PALL covers Middie’s eyes; he stares at everyone suspiciously. When Prifflach rises, Middie follows. They walk a few steps and sit down again in another couplet of chairs, aimed back down the corridor, to the next car, and the next. People are seen in a long line, from compartment to compartment, bumped by the small clicks and turns of the train, jilted forward, hitched to the side, bumped back. The people say nothing. They clutch their bags.
    The scenario sickens him. Too many people. Too public. If he was alone, or in the dark of barrooms, he’d feel clear, free to do as he wished, but here the fray of his mind annoys him. He brushes the tips of his fingers over his left shirt pocket, the cloth there housing his mother’s comb, he feels the form of it, the tines like a small alien hand. He’s already checked them all three times by order of Prifflach. Once each after the last three stops: Wolf Point, Glasgow, Malta. The first time, he apologized, comforting an older woman on her way to see her son in Spokane. Prifflach had sent a wire out at Glasgow, inquiring what to do. The second check more of the same, this time soothing the worry of a young woman off to the state agricultural school in Pullman. Prifflach called it coincidence—two different burglars, two different towns, a little over three hundred dollars missing. But after the third stop, at Malta, when an elderly man was found dead, his head askew, a small well of blood in his right ear, the rumors poisoned every compartment.
    He had money, said the help in the dining car. Paid for his meals in crisp new bills. But when Middie checked the body, Prifflach looking over his shoulder, there was nothing, no money, not even any silver. Middie felt the minds of the people beginning to hum and move and he sensed the interior of Prifflach, angry as if cornered, pushing him to take action. Middie hated it, but the line chose him, and he was big.
    On the first check no one resisted; everyone simply wanted the thief caught. Even the second check people remained polite, just grimaced some while Middie displaced their bags and Prifflach went through them. Middie had to pat the people down, search their coats, their clothing, have them empty each of their pockets. It took far longer than he wished, but mostly the people smiled and tried to be helpful. On the third round the death had changed things. The women whispered and shrank back from him. The body itself, alone in a sleeping car until the next stop, was like an imprint of the predator among them. Middie felt the tension of it, the people’s thoughts in fearful accord, like a dark vein of