The Black Train Read Free Page A

rail: “Hey, I work, too!”
    “Honey. Caterers in L.A. are like old people in Florida, i.e. too many. ”
    Collier knew he shouldn’t have referred to her failed business endeavor. He knew what she would say even before she said it:
    “I’m glad your stupid show’s getting kicked off the air, you pompous asshole!”
    Ahh, the good life, Collier thought. True love and domestic bliss. “Evelyn, let’s not fight. I’ll be back in a week to sign the papers, okay? I’m not evading the issue, if that’s what you think. But I have to do this.”
    “What do you have to go to Tennessee for? You write books about beer.”
    “I only have one more entry before the book’s done, and I think I may have found it here. I need it to be unique. I can’t just throw in some run-of-the-mill microbrew.”
    “Well…fine.” She simmered down.
    “I’ve got to go now. I left the airport four hours ago, and I’m still lost. Tell you what, I’ll call you midweek to see how you’re doing.”
    “Okay. ‘Bye.”
    click
    Collier felt as though a large animal had just climbed off his back. He banged his elbow when he put the cell phone away. Why’d I ever get married? All my married friends told me not to. When married people tell you to NEVER get married? That’s like the chef coming out of the kitchen and telling you the food sucks. Pretty qualified advice. Evelyn was beautiful, of course, but quite a few other men in L.A. seemed to think so, too. It’s the way of the modern world. You have great sex; then you get married; then you get divorced. And the man gives the woman HALF.
    Great sex wasn’t worth it. By now, in fact, he’d forgotten what great sex was.
    Deliriously green pastures and farmland swept by oneither side. Collier loved the view, especially after four years in L.A. It wasn’t a city, it was a city- state. Hollywood! Spago! Venice Beach! Rodeo Drive! They can have it, he thought. Had the town lost its charm, or was it something else? He found that the older he got, the less interested he was in things. His Food Network TV show, Justin Collier: Prince of Beer , paid enormous money for the first three seasons but now they were giving his slot to some hotshot chef from San Francisco. Seafood Psycho , they were calling it. Just as well. Collier hated L.A., and the show—though it had turned him into a semicelebrity—was wearing him down. At forty-four, most of his hair was gray now, and he felt like a ninny having some makeup girl at the studio dye it for him. His books on craft-made beer always did well enough to make him a solid living, and that’s what he yearned to go back to.
    Maybe I’m just getting old, he considered. But forty-four wasn’t old, was it?
    Damn…
    The only thing Hertz had to rent at the airport was this awkward VW Bug. It looks like a kiddie car, was the first simile that came to mind when the clerk gave him the keys. Worse was the color: sherbet green. Yeah, I can see me driving THIS on the 405. The inside was aggravatingly cramped, but he could still see Lookout Mountain, site of a famous Civil War battle that had put the final nail in Confederate pomp. The image soothed him, not that the mountain signified a wartime slaughter, but the assurance it brought that he was nowhere near L.A.
    More miles passed behind him. When he’d run a Map-Quest for Gast, Tennessee, he kept getting that PAGE EXPIRED message. He’d found it on a 7-Eleven map but the convolution of minor roads had turned into a maddening webwork. How hard could it be to find a town with such an unlikely name? It took another hour before he came upon a sign: GAST, TENNESSEE—TOWN LINE. A CIVIL WAR HISTORICAL SITE .
    Finally!
    The town stood bright in its reincarnated anachronism: fine clapboard buildings lining a cobblestone main drag called NUMBER 1 STREET . Normal-looking middleclassers walked to and fro on immaculate sidewalks, past the expected antique shops, bistros, and collector’s warrens. MINIE BULLETS! one