Chapter Twenty-Seven
Jimmy didn’t get much sleep on the train. The coach seat was hard, the duffle bag pillow was lumpy, and his cold bologna sandwich didn’t do much to fill the empty hole in his belly. As the train sped towards its destination, he wished he could
slow it down, make time stop, reverse it, and return to Coady’s Creek so he could give Ellie back what he had stolen from her; her virginity, her innocence, and her future.
The words of her letter kept rolling around in his head; I am pregnant with your baby. What are you going to do about it? What could he do about it? He wasn’t the one making the decisions now. The United States Army was in control of his life, and now he was on “their” train speeding away from Ellie and his baby and towards what he knew was his certain fate. His little, white cross was patiently waiting for him somewhere in Europe.
The train seemed to stop in every little town between Cincinnati and New York City. Every time it stopped, Jimmy had thought about getting off and disappearing, but he knew he couldn’t let his team down. When the train finally arrived at Grand Central Station, he was exhausted. So he stopped in a room set aside for the USO, got a snack, a cup of coffee, and directions to the small hotel where they had all agreed to meet.
Walking out of Grand Central station’s Forty-Second Street entrance, the first impression Jimmy had of New York City was how windy and cold it was. His second impression was how large everything seemed, and his third impression was how small everything about New York City made him feel. Even though it was late afternoon
and the sun was shining, the streets seemed to be in perpetual darkness. The shadows cast by the nearby tall buildings engulfed the streets that were filled with cabs honking their horns and dodging pedestrians. It was not at all like downtown Cincinnati where the drivers stopped for pedestrians crossing Fifth Street by the Tyler Davidson Fountain with the nearby Camel cigarette advertising sign on the side of the Albee Theater blowing fake smoke rings.
Crossing Forty-Second Street and dodging the speeding cabs, he looked all around for the Grand Central subway station, but it was nowhere in sight. Confused, he tried to stop a couple of passersby and ask for directions, but they ignored him and kept walking. When he turned around, he realized he was lost, and for a moment, he panicked. Now he realized he should have paid more attention in the map-reading class at Fort Knox. The person at the USO had told him to get off at the Broadway–Lafayette-Bleecker Street subway station, and it wouldn’t be a unusually long ride, but she hadn’t told him where to get onto the subway, just where to get off. Taking a deep breath, he finally found his way back to Grand Central Station and asked a soldier where to catch the subway. He told him the station was back inside Grand Central Station. Jimmy’s first of many New York City lessons.
It was the first time he had ever ridden a subway, and halfway down the stairs he started feeling confined, trapped, and he wanted to turn around and run back up the stairs. But, he figured if he could ride cramped in a Sherman tank with four other guys, he could ride a subway. As he stood waiting for the next train, he was struck by the number of people who didn’t seem to be waiting for a train. It looked as though they were just trying to get out of the cold and find a warm place to spend the night. Some of them even held signs asking for donations while others sat on the floor, their backs against the wall, their heads down between their knees obviously sleeping, often with a brown paper sack by their side.
Getting on to the next train and not finding a place to sit, he put his duffle bag onto the floor and grabbed one of the overhead straps. When the train started, he held on tightly as the sudden jerk almost knocked him over, and he accidentally bumped into the person standing next to him. He apologized and was promptly ignored. That seemed a little strange to him, and then he noticed everybody in the subway car was absorbed in their own little worlds; nobody seemed to be talking or acknowledging their fellow passengers. It was a silent world only interrupted by the ever-screeching brakes and the sound the car made bumping over the rails. He was relieved when he finally got off at his destination. His first impression of Greenwich Village was that the buildings were smaller,
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Historical FictionA woman named Sandy discovers love letters in her mother's closet from an unknown man she soon discovers is her father who she was told had been killed in the Battle of the Bulge. She decides to try and find him fifty years later. The next story...
