One More for the Road Read Online Free PDF

and find you an unmarked grave.”
    In the Machine, I stared up the now empty street.
    â€œSimon Cross,” I whispered. “Godspeed.”
    And threw the switch and vanished in the future.

A FTER THE B ALL
    Â 
    S omewhere above the building whose flake-painted sign read MYRON’S BALLROOM the lights flickered as if to go out and a small orchestra of truly fragile size played “Good Night Ladies,” and there was a murmur of regret and then a chorus of conversation and the rustle of bodies and shuffle of feet as shadows moved toward exits and the orchestra stopped and half the lights blinked and went out completely.
    After a moment a side door opened below and the five—or was it six?—musicians emerged carrying their now-heavy instruments and loped to the only visible cars as if to avoid the larger flood of people talking and laughing, coming down the main staircase to the pavement. By the time the ballroom dancers, for that is what they were, touched ground by the dozens, and finally a hundred in all—sixty old women and an almost similar number of old men—the musicians’ cars had long since sped off into a night with high fog above and a low fog coming in from the sea.
    Roughly thirty of the celebrants lined up on the south side of the street awaiting rides on the inbound electric trolley, while the rest, somehow much louder and more jolly, waited across for the larger big train-size trolley that would charge and bang them off toward the Pacific Ocean shore.
    Lined up and beginning to shiver in the late-night always-familiar California air (it had been 85 degrees at noon), the men cursed while the ladies in flower-print evening gowns peered down the tracks imbedded in asphalt as if staring would bring locomotion.
    Which, miraculously, it did.
    â€œThere, see!” cried the ladies.
    â€œI’ll be damned,” said the men.
    And all the while, not looking at each other, even when the huge cross-country-size double car train pulled up in sparks and brake steam, the men in their perspiration-crumpled tuxes helped the evening-dressed women up the iron steps without glancing at their faces.
    â€œUpsy-daisy.”
    â€œThere we go.”
    â€œAtsa girl.”
    And the men clambered on like castaways, at the last moment leaping aboard.
    With a clang of bell and a horn blow, the huge cross-continental train, only going to Venice, thirty miles away, cast all adrift and bucketed toward a one-o’clock-in-the-morning perdition.
    To the clamoring delight of ladies exhausted with inexpensive joy, and men longing to dislodge the stiff white shirtfronts and unstrangle their ties.
    â€œIt’s hot, throw the windows up!”
    â€œIt’s cold, put the windows down!”
    And then, with equal parts arctic and equal parts equatorial, the old children of late Saturday plunged toward a sea with no icebergs, a shore with wild hopes.
    In the first car, a man and woman sat just behind a motorman deeply influenced by orchestra conductor’s baton gymnastics, as he rapped the brass handles left, right, between, and glared out at a fog without cars, from which at any moment some wreck might fully wreck itself.
    Steel on steel, the train thundered them safely off from Myron’s toward Neptune’s.
    For a long while the couple sat silently swaying until at last, watching the motorman’s acrobatics, the woman of some years said, “Let me sit by the window, do you mind?”
    â€œNo, no, please, I was going to suggest that.”
    She slid in along the hard wooden bench and gazed out the window at the dark buildings passing and the night trees, and only a few stars, and barely a sliver moon this night, this month.
    â€œWhat are you thinking?” he asked.
    The shadows passed, the shadows passed, the shadows passed.
    â€œYou ever think,” she said, quietly, half-seeing her silhouette, also a shadow, on the window glass, “my land, being in a rickety