crumpled into my lap, and I fell asleep.
It wasn’t long before a recurrent nightmare hijacked my dream sequence, as it always does. The nightmare is vivid and real, because the events truly happened to me. Now look, I’m not superstitious, and I’m not prone to interacting with ghosts, holy or unholy. But I do know this: I shook hands with the Devil.
The handshake happened three decades ago. I’d joined a band to play a wedding reception in old Rosati Hall, a sweet relic in the vineyards that drape the rolling Ozark hills on the outskirts of St. James. The wedding reception was like a thousand others, at least from the view of a band. Joyous occasion. Happy crowd.
As we set up our instruments in this beautiful old wooden dance hall, a scuzzy man approached the bandstand and watched silently. He looked rough, the kind of rough that makes you wonder how he’d survived forty years, rough years that made him look sixty. His fingernails were tattooed an oil slick brown. His face was streaked where he’d wiped his brow. Among the other guests, he stuck out like a finger poking through toilet paper. But that’s OK, because this is the wild west, the wilderness. And people around here tolerate their neighbors who don’t clean up well, even when they come to funerals or weddings.
“What’s that hole for?” he asked, pointing to a foot-wide hole cut in the front skin of a big bass drum.
“So we can stick a microphone inside the drum,” I answered.
My friendly response prompted him to stick out his hand. “Bill’s my name,” he said as I gripped his handshake. “Bill Zebub,” I think I recall his name, at least in my dream. I could feel the dirty oil on his hand. “I work for Russell Bliss.”
Russell Bliss! The name smacked me. That’s the same guy who spread waste oil on the dirt roads and horse farms around here, to dampen and seal the thick summer dust. The waste oil was laced with deadly dioxin. I’d just been Tased by a handshake.
As I tell this story, Russell Bliss has been dead for many years. But on that warm summer night in a country dance hall wedding reception, if you shouted his name, everybody would know about Russell Bliss. He claimed he didn’t know the waste oil contained dioxin, and he was never convicted of knowingly spreading poison. But the waste oil he spread contaminated roads and fields and horse tracks, even shut down an entire town.
Meanwhile, Bill Zebub kept a strong grip on my hand, one of those grips that lasts while you exchange a few greetings back and forth. I tried not to show panic, looking at my hand when he released it, assuming I’d just accepted my death sentence.
“Excuse me,” I said to Bill the Infector, and dashed to the tiny bathroom in the corner of the hall. I scrubbed my hands vigorously for as long as my skin could stand the hot water, chanting my new death mantra, “parts per billion . . . parts per billion.”
We played the gig without further incident, I steered clear of Bill Zebub, and I’m still alive today, with only one minor side effect from that handshake. I tell a lot of lies.
But the nightmare recurs. It’s vivid because it really happened.
After the dance, the nightmare wasn’t over.
Oh, I made a clean getaway from the reception at Rosati Hall. But I knew I carried the time-bomb poison from Beelzebub’s handshake. So the next morning, death banged on my brain. I needed something to steady my nerves.
Johnnie’s Bar has been serving whiskey in downtown St. James since the Irish laborers built the railroad through here. Even from the outside, Johnnie’s looks foreboding, with its big neon Stag Beer sign over a doorway into cold, smoky darkness. It’s the kind of place that makes you hear your mother’s voice: “I better never catch you going in there.”
“Don’t worry, Mom, I’ll never go in there.”
But in life, a young boy’s perspective evolves. Moms just don’t understand that places like Johnnie’s have the elixir that can subdue frightful images of devils and demons, dioxin and death.
Or bring them out.
Soon I was immersed in the culture of the locals in the low light of this tavern, a delightful throwback to the days when the barroom was filled with rail passengers and conductors and brakemen and engineers laying over.
Hours later, having dipped liberally into John Barleycorn’s reserves, I paid my bill and threw down a liberal tip, and walked out the door.
I was walking to the edge of town, preparing to hitchhike home, when I saw a single car, a sleek silver hearse approaching. It was going my way, but in reverence to its passenger, I showed no thumb, instead placing my hand over my heart and bowing my head. As the hearse passed, it slowed to a stop. Its backup lights told me that the hearse was coming back for me. Even significant whiskey impairment couldn’t dull my panic. As the hearse drew nigh to my startled face, the passenger window rolled down and the voice from the driver’s seat called out.
“John Robinson!”
I swallowed hard and leaned into the hearse’s open window, expecting to meet the Grim Reaper. Instead, I saw the familiar face of an old friend from high school.
“What are you doing way down here?” he asked.
“Son of a bitch!” I think I shouted, as a feeling of relief washed through my veins.
For reasons of good taste and legal advice, I’ll protect the anonymity of the driver and his pallid passenger. I have no idea who his passenger was, since the casket was closed. Suffice it to say the three of us had a pleasant ride to my destination, and two of us had a great conversation.
“So long, buddy, and thanks for the ride.” I hopped out and he drove away in the general direction of his passenger’s final stop.
That’s when I always wake out of my nightmare, always with the same nagging questions. Did Bill Zebub know he was spreading seeds of death? Does my dear departed mother know I stopped at Johnnie’s Bar? Did that stiff in the hearse ever pick up hitchhikers?
She did on her last ride.
Those events happened years ago. But my nightmare serves as a reminder that the next time a hearse stops to give me a ride, it’ll probably be my last.
So this recurring nightmare is a catalyst, of sorts, prodding me to get busy.
I awoke in my seat on the train with my face pressed against the giant window. The passing farms and forests and hemp had given over to the rail bed’s most constant companion, the Missouri River. Rails and rivers and prison escapees seem to end up together a lot, since they all seek the path of least resistance.
For a short century, this same river hosted the golden age of steamboat travel. Now the river is mostly empty on its surface. But hundreds of shipwrecks hide beneath the riverbed, hundreds of paddlewheel steamers that sank before the railroads had a chance to kill them off.
* * *
Brian the Conductor strode back through our rail car. He didn’t stop to chat with me, or even glance at me. I was relieved, but in a way it was sad that we couldn’t resolve a problem that was gonna piss off more unsuspecting passengers down the line.
That’s just the nature of things, I guess.
* * *
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