Herhsel and Marzine

 


Marzinene took the stage with a trance-like gait. The few coughers in the audience settled down, before she plucked the first note on her guitar and remembered her father.

Hershel recently, after 25 years of dutiful service to Western Pacific, had died. He’d become a legend in that time, and it’s still known throughout the Midwest that if it’s quiet enough, and the locusts aren’t in season, you can still hear Herhsel yelling into the night, following the mechanized gallop of 25 tons of roaring steel known as the Thunderbody, coined by Hershel and used by anyone around Abilene, Kansas circa 1935. Hershel was just a boy when he was hired on at Western Pacific; after he was discovered on a westbound train hunkered down at the rear of the caboose, bruised but silent, after chasing the train for 200 yards through the prickly obstacles of Kansas corn.

They kept him on that train, once called Hershel’s train, eventually taking the name Thunderbody, a nickname hurled at it by Herhsel himself, while racing across a Midwestern gorge one night, and his yawp could be heard as far as St. Louis.

On the last night of Thunderbody’s run, on the final stretch of wood and steel known then as the Clark Corridor before she hit the pacific, Hershel was adjusting a wise-ass gas cap on the extended bulge of the rear coal car when he tumbled to his death at the bottom of the Columbia River Gorge, drowning instantly. It was the last time anyone ever heard Hershel call out to the great rail god and it was said that the fish jumped extra high that night and disappeared, for no other fish was ever caught in the 20 mile radius believed to be the spot where Hershel last saw the warm rush of life.

Marzine let the last note ring out, to the occasional implosion of applause in the smoky corridors of the Spartan club. The fern in the corner reflected the house lights, lighting her up like a vaudevillian corpse.

For the past ten years she told her Daddy’s stories, a vague attempt at carrying the torch for this mythical figure whose tales and adventures she could never top.
 She used to hear these tales of braggadocio underneath the rocking of the chair while she lay splayed out painting faces on empty doll heads.