The Railway Police and the Last Trolley Ride Read Free

holsters. For though this one wore no gold-rims, in every respect there was no doubt otherwise. He was a ringer for the one in Providence. Or else his brother. And suddenly my ungloved hands sought to hide themselves, my nude shins rubbed nervously together, and I shrank away from the window, a warning ringing inside me. “Chickie!” it said. “Watch out for the railroad dicks!”
    At first I was disturbed by this menial response, one so much lacking the insouciance I had expected, but then reminded myself that with my clothes still elegant, my purse stuffed, such a halfway state of mind was at least sensitive; I had after all scarcely touched upon, much less completed, my full conversion. The minute I thought of this latter, the fluttering pulse in my throat was silenced, and an enormous but active peace settled on me; only dwell on the crowning event that was coming toward me, and all the smaller stratagems flew to hand. After that everything went swimmingly.
    I got off at South Station, filled out a telegraph form “Unavoidably detained,” changed the latter to “prevented,” and grabbed a cab to Logan Airport, in time to board a shuttle plane which would even get me back to New York before bank-closing. Though incomes in my line are never impressive, my mixed family inheritance did include money, not enough, alas, to have allowed me that comfortable eccentricity which might have put me to rights in the very beginning, but there is no doubt that in a modest way I am a woman of property. From now on, the problem would be how to disencumber myself, down to the bone as it were, without incurring the verdict of either sainthood or insanity. I had no wish to decamp altogether, like those irresponsibles who dissolved themselves in a puddle of clothes left on the beach at Villefranche, or from an ownerless car on the Golden Gate Bridge. Any one of these eventualities would make me a mystery, not, as I faintly hoped, a statement. I regret that there’s also no doubt that I suffer from a certain ambition, akin perhaps to that of women just before they got the vote—a kind of suffragette swelling, part yearning and part vengeful, of the chest cavity and maybe even the heart. I am well aware that the true vagrant never even knows the nature of what he cherishes, in his case his right to be out of the organized world. Later on, I hope in my own way to achieve that brahma; I see myself holding up my naked head without knowing that I am doing it. Right now, however, though I deplore it, I want all the civil rights in my category.
    And so it’s not surprising that the minute I got on the plane I started mulling what else I could take off, substitute gestures to placate that fire in me raging toward the ultimate one. Inside the washroom again, the only disposal unit that modern transportation allows us, I made friends again with my image. I was wearing my platform wig, its clubwoman curls now blown by airport and emotional currents into a bad semblance of one at home marked in my mental roster as Careful Disarray, but verging more on the brown than the blonde. (It is discreetly known at the office that I dye my hair myself, not always accurately.)
    I regarded it, but was glad to feel full and strong in me the power to delay—“No, not yet. No travesty.”
    As for statutory nudity, it had no charms for me at this point, indeed the reverse; exhibitionism was at all costs to be avoided. Teeth were excellent and personal, eyes never in need of glasses—the clear green eyes born to lucky people of my complexion.
    Just then the stewardess knocked, and I watched my hands seek themselves.
    “Quite all right!” I managed to say—this time, God save us, with some proper daring in it, and a minute later I was taking off my rings.
    To my left there was a ventilator, whose exhaust slot must somewhere reach the outer air. The shuttles don’t fly very high, not nearly so high as the pan-orient jets on which I suppose I started my hunt