from GOATWATERSTRIP, Series 2:
Taking the Midnight Bus to the Overnight Success
a Goatwaterstrip tale in three parts
by Tiffany Osedra Miller
© 2015
1.
When an investigator from Rogue Land Developers, Inc. discovered that Missus La Fete merely managed the operations of the Hotel La Fete rather than owning it as she had implied, the true owner, Sir Robert John, branded Missus, via overseas telephone, a loser, a liar and a pig, then fired her. This termination meant that Missus had to move out of her rooms at the Hotel La Fete, where she had resided since the day she was born.
The next evening a brown woman with a red-toned baby wrapped like a bundle of sugarcane against her back watched as Missus made her way down the hotel steps for the last time. She carried a small suitcase in one hand and held a large watermelon in the crook of her arm. The woman sat behind the hotel lobby desk polishing silverware while the baby dozed behind her.
“Good evening, Missus. I know you don’t know me, so I beg your pardon,” the woman said. Her eyes roamed the length and width of Missus from her plaited head to her pigeon toes. Missus paused at the foot of the steps and did not reply.
“I know you must be surprised to find me here,” the woman continued. “Before you go you want me to fix you a last supper? I was about to fry up the plantain and stew the chicken. Would you like a rum whisky?”
Missus had not expected to find anyone working at the hotel so quickly. Two weeks prior, Sir Robert John ordered the hotel closed for renovations. Since then Missus made sure she locked the doors each night. Still, she said nothing and held her head up high as she made her way past the woman and headed for the front doors. The woman slammed the silverware down on the table and the baby started to wail.
“You don’t hear me talking to you, Missus? You don’t want something to eat? Okay! So, what will you do now? Where can you go? And why the piss are you carrying that watermelon?” Missus, her hand on the front door handle, turned back once she heard the child start to cry. The child was an exquisite sight in that gloomy hotel and Missus saw that the mother was lovely in a sad, daft kind of way. She also looked familiar.
“I am Catrice Jacinda the new manager at the Hotel La Fete.” the woman said, relaxing now that she had Misuss’ attention. “And this bundle behind me is Clancy. We come from Quartercoon Point, in the south. You know it? You all up here may know Quartercoon Point as the most forward city in this backward country. For now, me and Clancy will be living here in your old rooms and managing La Fete’s affairs. Ain’t that right Clancy? What a pity for you, though, Missus. With how you get fire and evic’ so quick. But change can be good. You shake your head, Missus, why?” she asked.
“They not going to let you keep that red-toned pickney here. I can tell you that. You know how many of my babies I had to turn loose because I couldn’t raise them here?” Missus said in a loud whisper.
“You think I is stupid, Missus?” Catrice said, standing up. “Clancy is me and the owner’s pickney. My Clancy is a John,” Missus nearly dropped the watermelon.
“Oh now I beg your pardon! Did the owner bother to marry you too? Are you a John?” Missus inquired.
Catrice, pretending not to hear Missus, busied herself with scrubbing down the lobby’s immaculate desk with a wet rag. Clancy bounced in the satchel behind her.
“Mind you don’t bounce up the micro-manager too much,” Missus said. “But isn’t that something?” she continued. “I’ve bore plenty of the owner’s pickneys. But not one of them was allowed to stay here with me,” Catrice threw the rag down.
“Why you tell so much lie, Missus? For donkey years everybody on this island think you does own this place and they hol’ you in them minds with respec’. Why you must lie about owning this place when you own nothing? You think you is better than us?” Catrice shouted from behind the lobby desk. A cutlass and a knife hung from a single nail in the wall behind her. Missus noticed that she had taken down the portrait of Saint Teppers, the patron saint of the Lottery, which Missus had painted herself.
“I was born here. I come out my mother right on the bed you will sleep on. She helped build this house into what it is today. She died there so. Like a rat in the corner.” Missus said, pointing to the corner by the door. “I thought I’d die here, too.” She turned to go and Clancy started to wail.
“But don’t you have a place to stay now, Missus? I know you ain’t have no man, but don’t you have any other family? Any friends?” Catrice called out after her. “Where are you going to go? Maybe I can help. Come, tell me.” Missus paused in the shadows before the front doors.
“Well then Catrice Jacinda, since you seem entitled to know my business, I will tell you. First, I am going to go over to Naught’s Bakery to purchase a map, a bottle of T’ing, some goat jerky, a pack of West Indian cigarettes and then I will play Lotto. And when I finish there I am going to catch the midnight bus to the train called the Overnight Success.” Catrice put her hand to her bosom. Missus adjusted the watermelon in her arm.
“The Overnight Success? But there’s no such thing, Missus. How come you keep lie so? We have to work hard and harder for what we want. Not hardly! And why would you further ruin your bad name by carrying that dreadful watermelon? Don’t you feel ‘shamed a’tall? You might as well skip down the road whistling ‘Dixie’. Come, let me go to the kitchen and bring you back a big mango and you can leave the watermelon behind.”
“I don’t want no mango!”
“Well, you won’t ever catch me carrying around a watermelon like it’s a damned mango. Clancy and I are going places in this world! I mean, why would you carry around such a big stupid thing?”
“Because a watermelon is a just a fruit, Catrice Jacinda, and at some point I am going to eat it.” Missus slammed the hotel’s front door right in Catrice’s lovely, sad, daft-looking face.
***
Immersed in the solace and obscurity of the hot, dark, island road, Missus burned with shame. Though the fire of her humiliation nearly melted her to her knees, she still walked with her black head held high. She would never have walked out of that hotel carrying a watermelon as large as that if she’d known someone would see her. She felt awful that Catrice saw her with it. She hoped that her carelessness wouldn’t ruin little Clancy. And how she just wanted to hold Clancy close to her and kiss his cheeks. She’d make the sign of the cross on his forehead and on his back the way her mother did for her. She’d never let him go. She could still hear him wailing for her in the distance. Clancy’s wails turned into the sweetest songs.
In another life,
On a distant shore
Beams another light
Beyond another door
Oh, to have a child as beautiful as Clancy cling to her as though he were one of her own.
A cruel portrait of a golliwog eating a watermelon hung in the hotel’s dining room. Its presence made Missus feel anxious. Still, she never told anyone how much she enjoyed the way the mud browns and bluish blacks mixed with the tropical colors. She especially adored the menacing and ecstatic expression on the golliwog’s black face. Missus would never admit that she had painted the thing. She could hardly admit it to herself.
During her time as manager of the Hotel La Fete, Missus had coveted watermelon so much that she snuck a platter of wedges into her room every night so she could devour them without hearing off color comments from the guests about how eating a watermelon made her look like a pickney. Or, worse, have a guest beg to take her picture while she ate it. Those watermelon days were over.
***
Many years prior to her termination, Missus had found a flyer advertising the train called the Overnight Success on the counter next to the Lottery Machines at Naught’s Bakery. She placed the flyer in her purse and over the years, whenever she longed to see her children again, she took it out and read it aloud.
“Greetings, Unfortunates!” It read. “Come and take a ride on The Overnight Success Train. Your soul is all we ask in payment. Just kidding! Your pension will suffice. The Overnight Success will take you to a place where you won’t have to lie anymore about how much money you’ve earned when you ain’t have no job or how much power you have when ain’t nobody listenin’ when you talk. You will never again have to mourn your unfinished projects, broken promises, and pathetic declarations, which roll like empty watermelons in the void. But there at that last stop will be love, freely given, along with prophylactics, a clean bill of health, unconditional accolades, unlimited education, food, shelter and much respect. Blessed are the children of dreamers, for they will continue to dream and accomplish nothing. Don’t you want to see your children again? Come onboard the Overnight Success Train. Just don’t litter, okay?-This advert is brought to you by Rogue Land Developers, Inc. care of Sir Robert John Enterprises, International, Affiliated.”
For the length of at least one hurricane season, Overnight Success was all the islanders could talk about. But because the train was so difficult to get to, that even though it promised to be a fairly easy ride once you got there, the islanders quickly lost interest in it, calling the idea of an Overnight Success Train stupider than the Psychic Hotline.
Once Missus located the quickest route to get to the Overnight Success, she left Naught’s Bakery and set out on her way. According to her map, the train station existed in a remote southern part of the island called Quartercoon Point. The Quartercoon’s were once the most prominent family on the island until the family fell apart under obscure circumstances and went their own separate ways. In addition to walking a great distance, Missus would have no choice but to take the Midnight Bus.
Coined “the rolling home of the lout and loser,” the Midnight Bus transported outcasts, unfortunates, runaways and delusional dreamers to liquor towns, drug dens, harlot huts, shelters, lotteries and garbage heaps. So, that is why no one with common sense let alone influence wanted to be associated with the Midnight Bus even though it might take them to the Overnight Success. It was a dangerous bus and those who knew of its existence thought of it less as a bridge over their island’s troubled waters and more as a hell on wheels. But if one took the Midnight Bus to the Overnight Success Train and rode that train the whole night until it reached the last stop, one’s whole life,the claim went, instantly changed for the better.
So what would prompt Missus La Fete, despite the odds stacked against her, to risk such a journey? Well, one theory, in addition to desperation born of having been fired and evicted from her home, is that it was Midsummer, and as with most people who drink rum, covet watermelon and live on the tropical islands of planets that revolve around other heavenly spheres, Missus had vertigo – Or “Mid- vertigo” as the islanders coined it.
2.
To get to the Midnight Bus, Missus traveled along treacherous paths overgrown with vegetation and crawling with insects she had thought long extinct. Many of these paths came to sudden forks in the road, which on several occasions led to hidden cliffs and more than once nearly caused Missus to fall headfirst into the sea.
The special heat on that journey bamboozled and mystified Missus. In the haze of condensation, she witnessed strange figures commit crimes of opportunity and passion. Terrified and intrigued, Missus watched as they coupled and tripled like savages in the dark bush. She met Moko Jumbies so tall they wore constellations for hats. When they walked, their stilts punctured deep into the ground and disturbed the dead. The masked Moko Jumbies lurked, cajoled and seduced like packs of Mephistopheleses They stood so tall that they were able to look out over the clouds, mountains, and hillside shantytowns with their jumbie trees. They demanded offerings of money, chicken, fish, beef or wine to let you know if they saw the train coming or if there was even a train at all. The Moko Jumbies offered other temptations to take you off your path. They also paid generously for souls. It was for these reasons, as well as others, that not many people risked the trip on foot or even dared to ride the Midnight Bus to the train called the Overnight Success.
***
At approximately 1am on that muggy, cricket crooning, mid-vertigo night, Missus boarded the Midnight Bus. The bus had scuttled down the path toward where she waited alone beneath a road lamp. She warmly greeted the bus driver, who reeked of Old Spice, though he sat drenched in new perspiration. His eyes kept darting up to the rearview mirror then back down to the road again while he drank from a bottle in a greasy paper bag. Missus clutched her suitcase and watermelon to her, paid her fare and sat down close to the front. It reeked of foot and fish on that bus but she would have expected nothing less. It was quite a bumpy ride, making her lurch forward then back against her seat. It took Missus a moment to notice that a young woman was standing up before the other passengers, addressing them. Two men stood in complete stillness before the young woman as though they were stunned. Missus caught the gleam of a switchblade in the young woman’s hand as she slashed it through the air. Here is what the young woman said:
“None of you damned losers is going to stop me from getting to the Overnight Success. You hear me? Imagine that! Taking advantage of my youth, my beauty, my vulnerability while I try to make my way in this world. Imagine that! If I were a different sort of person I’d do like Cousin Leopold and cut off all your sodded hands. Or cut out your broken hearts and throw them straight out the window. Better yet I’d throw the terrible broken things into the sea so you could walk around as you truly are, heartless.” The young woman turned and stared at Missus.
“Ma’am,” she addressed her. “These two hat-headed gentleman before me decided it would be fun to fondle my bosoms while I slept. I’m told they focused on one bosom for a spell until one of the imbeciles said ‘well, she’s got two’ and then they both proceeded to fondle the other one at the same time. Tell me, wouldn’t it have made more sense if one imbecile fondled one bosom, while the other fondled my next bosom? It is this kind of backwardness that woke me from a deep sleep. Two men on one bosom is overwhelmin’! Could you believe the imbalance? No wonder I’ve got vertigo. And they did it while I slept, Madame! I assure you I was asleep. And anyone who knows me knows how much I don’t like to miss a thing – including my own defilement. And then, when I woke and realized what they were doing to me, I spat at the both of them, one at a time, uh course, and tol’ them how dirty they made me feel. How soiled. Remorseful, or so I thought, they offered to wash their filthy fingerprints off my bosom. And how were they to do that, I asked them, without a rag? And they said they’d have to do it with their bare hands. Do you see what form of fuckery I am dealing with, Madame? You mean to tell me no one walks with a wet rag anymore? My pimp was right; chivalry has died a hundred thousand deaths. Listen, I didn’t ask to be pretty or even young and I can tell Ma’am that you didn’t either. But I am what I bloody am.” The back of the bus erupted in light applause.
“Say is that a watermelon you got there?” the young woman asked Missus.
“We need to stop the bus right away and call for the police so you can report this abuse. You don’t have to take that,” Missus said.
“Ma’am they are the police.” For the first time, Missus noticed the nightsticks swinging before the two men. As the bus lurched forward, their nightsticks slapped them hard against their legs.
“And they are threatening to arrest me!” the young woman said. Another man near to the back carrying a filthy bucket by its handle started to get up.
“Stand back or I’ll gore you,” the young woman said to the man. “Don’t you dare try to sell me any more of that moonshine. It takes a a special type of person to make moonshine taste any worse. Plus, your moonshine does other things to my head. Like make me see the son of God when I ain’t ready. Where’s the Hooch, I say? Have you any Rum and Ripple? Of course, he don’t have any of the good stuff. And you back there with those devil cards reading fortunes to we doomed, unfortunate souls,” she said to a woman standing in the shadows. “Sit your carny backside down or I’ll cut you in two so that you can truly be what you are, which is a woman in pieces.” The woman sat down, slowly.
“Ma’am, do you want to know what this lady told me after she laid her cards before me after I didn’t even ask her to? As God is my big brother, I closed my eyes to the images, Madame, and their magics, but she said to me, because she couldn’t bother to keep her fat carny mouth shut, that there’s no such thing as overnight success. You have to work long and hard to become successful. When I opened my eyes, I saw that she had turned over a card with the image of a slave carrying another slave piggyback. And the slave riding piggyback held an enormous silver tray, neatly laid out with his master’s meal consisting of a large jive ass looking turkey –that sucker was big – a pig’s head and a huge watermelon. I dashed the card out of her hand and it fell to the floor. I grabbed the card up and threw it out the window into space. A slave! Who, in this free day and age, would dare conjure up a card like that? No, I don’t want to work long and hard for what I want when I don’t even know what it is to want the little that I do have. Nor do I want what is no longer here for me to embrace. I don’t even want to work like a goat – wait, do goats work? – just to survive. I don’t want anything. Except for a decent pimp. Don’t you see what all that hard work does to people?” The knife in her hands gleamed.
“What say you, Madame? You don’t believe that you are a loser like the lot of us, do you? You fancy yourself a hard worker, don’t you? And now you are tired, ain’t it? And desire some overnight success? Don’t you know what wanting does to people? Say, did you ever hear the story about how a certain golliwog was born? Well, this one golliwog had the audacity to grow for nine months inside of a watermelon. When it was time for him to be born, the mother and father opened up the watermelon and saw that their golliwog was as black and beautiful as a watermelon pit. But when they saw that he was already clapping his newborn gums against a watermelon wedge they carefully placed their new golliwog back into the watermelon, kissed him goodbye, sealed up the watermelon and buried it. The End.” Missus felt perspiration drip down her back.
“So what is the deal, Madame?” The young woman slapped the flat part of the knife against the palm of her other hand, turning it red. “That watermelon have your name on it or something?”
3.
Many hours later, though it was still night, Missus, exhausted and peeved, watermelon rinds, juice, seeds and fingerprints mashed against her dress, exited the bus alone. Her head shaved clean, her suitcase stolen, her entire body in pain, Missus crawled into the Overnight Success Train Station where she waited all night for the train to come. The station was so empty that Missus couldn’t even find a ticket counter. The station’s ceilings were vaulted like a church, its walls made of brass; Missus felt small and insignificant inside the station. Beside an altar to Saint Teppers, located in the uppermost corner of the station, sat a Naughts’ Bakery basket full of small watermelons and fresh breads. As was customary, the Saint Tepper’s statuette held a ripped up lottery ticket in his right hand. He pointed toward the heavens with his left. His black body sculpted into an exquisite state of malnutrition, his belly distended and imprinted with flies. Dark, soulful eyes ablaze. A Bible rested on the altar, opened to the Book of Matthew and the following line from Chapter 16, verse 20 was highlighted in red:
So the last shall be first, and the first last
Missus, using the long, bony sides of her hands, cut and ate half a watermelon and placed the other half on the altar before Saint Teppers. Moments later, she devoured Saint Teppers portion of the watermelon. Begging for forgiveness, she kissed Saint Tepper’s hand twice and left him a generous piece of Naught’s Bread.
Missus slept in the waiting room seat during the next day. When she woke, she bathed her weakened body at the washroom sink as best as she could. Although she was entering the second night of her journey, she still waited for the Overnight Success train to come. Many trains passed by the station window moving so fast that Missus wasn’t sure she had seen anything at all.
The next day, when no train had come, Missus walked along the railroad tracks and followed the route the train would take. She walked until her shoes were useless then walked barefoot along those tracks until her feet hardened. She walked into the next day and on into the night. After hearing a horn, she turned around and finally saw the great train hurtling toward her from a distance. Overjoyed, she jumped up on her hard feet and ran as fast as she could hoping to meet the train at the next station and praying that , if she were too slow, the train would wait for her.
It became clear to her as the train approached that she would not make it in time so she attempted to flag it down, waving the empty watermelon basket. She was not surprised when the train passed her by, ignorant of her efforts to attract its attention. She was surprised, however, to discover that she was not at all upset to have been passed by. For though she stood filthy, bald, disgraced, unwanted and ragged, she could see that the Overnight Success, beyond its gargantuan and elegant façade, was in truth a shell of itself. The passengers framed at the windows looked worse than ghosts. Some even looked like awkward collections of bones. Missus felt compelled to pray aloud to Saint Teppers:
“Dear Saint Teppers, please tell me: Is it worth the risk? Will I ever in this life see my children again, even once? Do I want to? And what if nights last much longer than we expect them to? What if there are some nights that will never end? And what if we never reach our destination because where we really want to go is back toward ourselves but we can no longer find where or when it was that we had left ourselves behind? Or what if we desire to go to a place where what we’ve accomplished, acquired and achieved makes no difference at all? Or maybe we don’t realize that we’ve already been to where we think we want to go many, many times before. And what if we aren’t so sure about why we are at all bothering to go where we are going to? And tell me, where in this world are any of us trying so hard to get to anyway?”
Missus, her bald head shimmering like a watermelon seed in the night, was so alone in that world that she heard her own voice echo back to her: “Where in this world are any of us trying so hard to get to anyway?”
END
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
a Goatwaterstrip tale in three parts
by Tiffany Osedra Miller
© 2015
1.
When an investigator from Rogue Land Developers, Inc. discovered that Missus La Fete merely managed the operations of the Hotel La Fete rather than owning it as she had implied, the true owner, Sir Robert John, branded Missus, via overseas telephone, a loser, a liar and a pig, then fired her. This termination meant that Missus had to move out of her rooms at the Hotel La Fete, where she had resided since the day she was born.
The next evening a brown woman with a red-toned baby wrapped like a bundle of sugarcane against her back watched as Missus made her way down the hotel steps for the last time. She carried a small suitcase in one hand and held a large watermelon in the crook of her arm. The woman sat behind the hotel lobby desk polishing silverware while the baby dozed behind her.
“Good evening, Missus. I know you don’t know me, so I beg your pardon,” the woman said. Her eyes roamed the length and width of Missus from her plaited head to her pigeon toes. Missus paused at the foot of the steps and did not reply.
“I know you must be surprised to find me here,” the woman continued. “Before you go you want me to fix you a last supper? I was about to fry up the plantain and stew the chicken. Would you like a rum whisky?”
Missus had not expected to find anyone working at the hotel so quickly. Two weeks prior, Sir Robert John ordered the hotel closed for renovations. Since then Missus made sure she locked the doors each night. Still, she said nothing and held her head up high as she made her way past the woman and headed for the front doors. The woman slammed the silverware down on the table and the baby started to wail.
“You don’t hear me talking to you, Missus? You don’t want something to eat? Okay! So, what will you do now? Where can you go? And why the piss are you carrying that watermelon?” Missus, her hand on the front door handle, turned back once she heard the child start to cry. The child was an exquisite sight in that gloomy hotel and Missus saw that the mother was lovely in a sad, daft kind of way. She also looked familiar.
“I am Catrice Jacinda the new manager at the Hotel La Fete.” the woman said, relaxing now that she had Misuss’ attention. “And this bundle behind me is Clancy. We come from Quartercoon Point, in the south. You know it? You all up here may know Quartercoon Point as the most forward city in this backward country. For now, me and Clancy will be living here in your old rooms and managing La Fete’s affairs. Ain’t that right Clancy? What a pity for you, though, Missus. With how you get fire and evic’ so quick. But change can be good. You shake your head, Missus, why?” she asked.
“They not going to let you keep that red-toned pickney here. I can tell you that. You know how many of my babies I had to turn loose because I couldn’t raise them here?” Missus said in a loud whisper.
“You think I is stupid, Missus?” Catrice said, standing up. “Clancy is me and the owner’s pickney. My Clancy is a John,” Missus nearly dropped the watermelon.
“Oh now I beg your pardon! Did the owner bother to marry you too? Are you a John?” Missus inquired.
Catrice, pretending not to hear Missus, busied herself with scrubbing down the lobby’s immaculate desk with a wet rag. Clancy bounced in the satchel behind her.
“Mind you don’t bounce up the micro-manager too much,” Missus said. “But isn’t that something?” she continued. “I’ve bore plenty of the owner’s pickneys. But not one of them was allowed to stay here with me,” Catrice threw the rag down.
“Why you tell so much lie, Missus? For donkey years everybody on this island think you does own this place and they hol’ you in them minds with respec’. Why you must lie about owning this place when you own nothing? You think you is better than us?” Catrice shouted from behind the lobby desk. A cutlass and a knife hung from a single nail in the wall behind her. Missus noticed that she had taken down the portrait of Saint Teppers, the patron saint of the Lottery, which Missus had painted herself.
“I was born here. I come out my mother right on the bed you will sleep on. She helped build this house into what it is today. She died there so. Like a rat in the corner.” Missus said, pointing to the corner by the door. “I thought I’d die here, too.” She turned to go and Clancy started to wail.
“But don’t you have a place to stay now, Missus? I know you ain’t have no man, but don’t you have any other family? Any friends?” Catrice called out after her. “Where are you going to go? Maybe I can help. Come, tell me.” Missus paused in the shadows before the front doors.
“Well then Catrice Jacinda, since you seem entitled to know my business, I will tell you. First, I am going to go over to Naught’s Bakery to purchase a map, a bottle of T’ing, some goat jerky, a pack of West Indian cigarettes and then I will play Lotto. And when I finish there I am going to catch the midnight bus to the train called the Overnight Success.” Catrice put her hand to her bosom. Missus adjusted the watermelon in her arm.
“The Overnight Success? But there’s no such thing, Missus. How come you keep lie so? We have to work hard and harder for what we want. Not hardly! And why would you further ruin your bad name by carrying that dreadful watermelon? Don’t you feel ‘shamed a’tall? You might as well skip down the road whistling ‘Dixie’. Come, let me go to the kitchen and bring you back a big mango and you can leave the watermelon behind.”
“I don’t want no mango!”
“Well, you won’t ever catch me carrying around a watermelon like it’s a damned mango. Clancy and I are going places in this world! I mean, why would you carry around such a big stupid thing?”
“Because a watermelon is a just a fruit, Catrice Jacinda, and at some point I am going to eat it.” Missus slammed the hotel’s front door right in Catrice’s lovely, sad, daft-looking face.
***
Immersed in the solace and obscurity of the hot, dark, island road, Missus burned with shame. Though the fire of her humiliation nearly melted her to her knees, she still walked with her black head held high. She would never have walked out of that hotel carrying a watermelon as large as that if she’d known someone would see her. She felt awful that Catrice saw her with it. She hoped that her carelessness wouldn’t ruin little Clancy. And how she just wanted to hold Clancy close to her and kiss his cheeks. She’d make the sign of the cross on his forehead and on his back the way her mother did for her. She’d never let him go. She could still hear him wailing for her in the distance. Clancy’s wails turned into the sweetest songs.
In another life,
On a distant shore
Beams another light
Beyond another door
Oh, to have a child as beautiful as Clancy cling to her as though he were one of her own.
A cruel portrait of a golliwog eating a watermelon hung in the hotel’s dining room. Its presence made Missus feel anxious. Still, she never told anyone how much she enjoyed the way the mud browns and bluish blacks mixed with the tropical colors. She especially adored the menacing and ecstatic expression on the golliwog’s black face. Missus would never admit that she had painted the thing. She could hardly admit it to herself.
During her time as manager of the Hotel La Fete, Missus had coveted watermelon so much that she snuck a platter of wedges into her room every night so she could devour them without hearing off color comments from the guests about how eating a watermelon made her look like a pickney. Or, worse, have a guest beg to take her picture while she ate it. Those watermelon days were over.
***
Many years prior to her termination, Missus had found a flyer advertising the train called the Overnight Success on the counter next to the Lottery Machines at Naught’s Bakery. She placed the flyer in her purse and over the years, whenever she longed to see her children again, she took it out and read it aloud.
“Greetings, Unfortunates!” It read. “Come and take a ride on The Overnight Success Train. Your soul is all we ask in payment. Just kidding! Your pension will suffice. The Overnight Success will take you to a place where you won’t have to lie anymore about how much money you’ve earned when you ain’t have no job or how much power you have when ain’t nobody listenin’ when you talk. You will never again have to mourn your unfinished projects, broken promises, and pathetic declarations, which roll like empty watermelons in the void. But there at that last stop will be love, freely given, along with prophylactics, a clean bill of health, unconditional accolades, unlimited education, food, shelter and much respect. Blessed are the children of dreamers, for they will continue to dream and accomplish nothing. Don’t you want to see your children again? Come onboard the Overnight Success Train. Just don’t litter, okay?-This advert is brought to you by Rogue Land Developers, Inc. care of Sir Robert John Enterprises, International, Affiliated.”
For the length of at least one hurricane season, Overnight Success was all the islanders could talk about. But because the train was so difficult to get to, that even though it promised to be a fairly easy ride once you got there, the islanders quickly lost interest in it, calling the idea of an Overnight Success Train stupider than the Psychic Hotline.
Once Missus located the quickest route to get to the Overnight Success, she left Naught’s Bakery and set out on her way. According to her map, the train station existed in a remote southern part of the island called Quartercoon Point. The Quartercoon’s were once the most prominent family on the island until the family fell apart under obscure circumstances and went their own separate ways. In addition to walking a great distance, Missus would have no choice but to take the Midnight Bus.
Coined “the rolling home of the lout and loser,” the Midnight Bus transported outcasts, unfortunates, runaways and delusional dreamers to liquor towns, drug dens, harlot huts, shelters, lotteries and garbage heaps. So, that is why no one with common sense let alone influence wanted to be associated with the Midnight Bus even though it might take them to the Overnight Success. It was a dangerous bus and those who knew of its existence thought of it less as a bridge over their island’s troubled waters and more as a hell on wheels. But if one took the Midnight Bus to the Overnight Success Train and rode that train the whole night until it reached the last stop, one’s whole life,the claim went, instantly changed for the better.
So what would prompt Missus La Fete, despite the odds stacked against her, to risk such a journey? Well, one theory, in addition to desperation born of having been fired and evicted from her home, is that it was Midsummer, and as with most people who drink rum, covet watermelon and live on the tropical islands of planets that revolve around other heavenly spheres, Missus had vertigo – Or “Mid- vertigo” as the islanders coined it.
2.
To get to the Midnight Bus, Missus traveled along treacherous paths overgrown with vegetation and crawling with insects she had thought long extinct. Many of these paths came to sudden forks in the road, which on several occasions led to hidden cliffs and more than once nearly caused Missus to fall headfirst into the sea.
The special heat on that journey bamboozled and mystified Missus. In the haze of condensation, she witnessed strange figures commit crimes of opportunity and passion. Terrified and intrigued, Missus watched as they coupled and tripled like savages in the dark bush. She met Moko Jumbies so tall they wore constellations for hats. When they walked, their stilts punctured deep into the ground and disturbed the dead. The masked Moko Jumbies lurked, cajoled and seduced like packs of Mephistopheleses They stood so tall that they were able to look out over the clouds, mountains, and hillside shantytowns with their jumbie trees. They demanded offerings of money, chicken, fish, beef or wine to let you know if they saw the train coming or if there was even a train at all. The Moko Jumbies offered other temptations to take you off your path. They also paid generously for souls. It was for these reasons, as well as others, that not many people risked the trip on foot or even dared to ride the Midnight Bus to the train called the Overnight Success.
***
At approximately 1am on that muggy, cricket crooning, mid-vertigo night, Missus boarded the Midnight Bus. The bus had scuttled down the path toward where she waited alone beneath a road lamp. She warmly greeted the bus driver, who reeked of Old Spice, though he sat drenched in new perspiration. His eyes kept darting up to the rearview mirror then back down to the road again while he drank from a bottle in a greasy paper bag. Missus clutched her suitcase and watermelon to her, paid her fare and sat down close to the front. It reeked of foot and fish on that bus but she would have expected nothing less. It was quite a bumpy ride, making her lurch forward then back against her seat. It took Missus a moment to notice that a young woman was standing up before the other passengers, addressing them. Two men stood in complete stillness before the young woman as though they were stunned. Missus caught the gleam of a switchblade in the young woman’s hand as she slashed it through the air. Here is what the young woman said:
“None of you damned losers is going to stop me from getting to the Overnight Success. You hear me? Imagine that! Taking advantage of my youth, my beauty, my vulnerability while I try to make my way in this world. Imagine that! If I were a different sort of person I’d do like Cousin Leopold and cut off all your sodded hands. Or cut out your broken hearts and throw them straight out the window. Better yet I’d throw the terrible broken things into the sea so you could walk around as you truly are, heartless.” The young woman turned and stared at Missus.
“Ma’am,” she addressed her. “These two hat-headed gentleman before me decided it would be fun to fondle my bosoms while I slept. I’m told they focused on one bosom for a spell until one of the imbeciles said ‘well, she’s got two’ and then they both proceeded to fondle the other one at the same time. Tell me, wouldn’t it have made more sense if one imbecile fondled one bosom, while the other fondled my next bosom? It is this kind of backwardness that woke me from a deep sleep. Two men on one bosom is overwhelmin’! Could you believe the imbalance? No wonder I’ve got vertigo. And they did it while I slept, Madame! I assure you I was asleep. And anyone who knows me knows how much I don’t like to miss a thing – including my own defilement. And then, when I woke and realized what they were doing to me, I spat at the both of them, one at a time, uh course, and tol’ them how dirty they made me feel. How soiled. Remorseful, or so I thought, they offered to wash their filthy fingerprints off my bosom. And how were they to do that, I asked them, without a rag? And they said they’d have to do it with their bare hands. Do you see what form of fuckery I am dealing with, Madame? You mean to tell me no one walks with a wet rag anymore? My pimp was right; chivalry has died a hundred thousand deaths. Listen, I didn’t ask to be pretty or even young and I can tell Ma’am that you didn’t either. But I am what I bloody am.” The back of the bus erupted in light applause.
“Say is that a watermelon you got there?” the young woman asked Missus.
“We need to stop the bus right away and call for the police so you can report this abuse. You don’t have to take that,” Missus said.
“Ma’am they are the police.” For the first time, Missus noticed the nightsticks swinging before the two men. As the bus lurched forward, their nightsticks slapped them hard against their legs.
“And they are threatening to arrest me!” the young woman said. Another man near to the back carrying a filthy bucket by its handle started to get up.
“Stand back or I’ll gore you,” the young woman said to the man. “Don’t you dare try to sell me any more of that moonshine. It takes a a special type of person to make moonshine taste any worse. Plus, your moonshine does other things to my head. Like make me see the son of God when I ain’t ready. Where’s the Hooch, I say? Have you any Rum and Ripple? Of course, he don’t have any of the good stuff. And you back there with those devil cards reading fortunes to we doomed, unfortunate souls,” she said to a woman standing in the shadows. “Sit your carny backside down or I’ll cut you in two so that you can truly be what you are, which is a woman in pieces.” The woman sat down, slowly.
“Ma’am, do you want to know what this lady told me after she laid her cards before me after I didn’t even ask her to? As God is my big brother, I closed my eyes to the images, Madame, and their magics, but she said to me, because she couldn’t bother to keep her fat carny mouth shut, that there’s no such thing as overnight success. You have to work long and hard to become successful. When I opened my eyes, I saw that she had turned over a card with the image of a slave carrying another slave piggyback. And the slave riding piggyback held an enormous silver tray, neatly laid out with his master’s meal consisting of a large jive ass looking turkey –that sucker was big – a pig’s head and a huge watermelon. I dashed the card out of her hand and it fell to the floor. I grabbed the card up and threw it out the window into space. A slave! Who, in this free day and age, would dare conjure up a card like that? No, I don’t want to work long and hard for what I want when I don’t even know what it is to want the little that I do have. Nor do I want what is no longer here for me to embrace. I don’t even want to work like a goat – wait, do goats work? – just to survive. I don’t want anything. Except for a decent pimp. Don’t you see what all that hard work does to people?” The knife in her hands gleamed.
“What say you, Madame? You don’t believe that you are a loser like the lot of us, do you? You fancy yourself a hard worker, don’t you? And now you are tired, ain’t it? And desire some overnight success? Don’t you know what wanting does to people? Say, did you ever hear the story about how a certain golliwog was born? Well, this one golliwog had the audacity to grow for nine months inside of a watermelon. When it was time for him to be born, the mother and father opened up the watermelon and saw that their golliwog was as black and beautiful as a watermelon pit. But when they saw that he was already clapping his newborn gums against a watermelon wedge they carefully placed their new golliwog back into the watermelon, kissed him goodbye, sealed up the watermelon and buried it. The End.” Missus felt perspiration drip down her back.
“So what is the deal, Madame?” The young woman slapped the flat part of the knife against the palm of her other hand, turning it red. “That watermelon have your name on it or something?”
3.
Many hours later, though it was still night, Missus, exhausted and peeved, watermelon rinds, juice, seeds and fingerprints mashed against her dress, exited the bus alone. Her head shaved clean, her suitcase stolen, her entire body in pain, Missus crawled into the Overnight Success Train Station where she waited all night for the train to come. The station was so empty that Missus couldn’t even find a ticket counter. The station’s ceilings were vaulted like a church, its walls made of brass; Missus felt small and insignificant inside the station. Beside an altar to Saint Teppers, located in the uppermost corner of the station, sat a Naughts’ Bakery basket full of small watermelons and fresh breads. As was customary, the Saint Tepper’s statuette held a ripped up lottery ticket in his right hand. He pointed toward the heavens with his left. His black body sculpted into an exquisite state of malnutrition, his belly distended and imprinted with flies. Dark, soulful eyes ablaze. A Bible rested on the altar, opened to the Book of Matthew and the following line from Chapter 16, verse 20 was highlighted in red:
So the last shall be first, and the first last
Missus, using the long, bony sides of her hands, cut and ate half a watermelon and placed the other half on the altar before Saint Teppers. Moments later, she devoured Saint Teppers portion of the watermelon. Begging for forgiveness, she kissed Saint Tepper’s hand twice and left him a generous piece of Naught’s Bread.
Missus slept in the waiting room seat during the next day. When she woke, she bathed her weakened body at the washroom sink as best as she could. Although she was entering the second night of her journey, she still waited for the Overnight Success train to come. Many trains passed by the station window moving so fast that Missus wasn’t sure she had seen anything at all.
The next day, when no train had come, Missus walked along the railroad tracks and followed the route the train would take. She walked until her shoes were useless then walked barefoot along those tracks until her feet hardened. She walked into the next day and on into the night. After hearing a horn, she turned around and finally saw the great train hurtling toward her from a distance. Overjoyed, she jumped up on her hard feet and ran as fast as she could hoping to meet the train at the next station and praying that , if she were too slow, the train would wait for her.
It became clear to her as the train approached that she would not make it in time so she attempted to flag it down, waving the empty watermelon basket. She was not surprised when the train passed her by, ignorant of her efforts to attract its attention. She was surprised, however, to discover that she was not at all upset to have been passed by. For though she stood filthy, bald, disgraced, unwanted and ragged, she could see that the Overnight Success, beyond its gargantuan and elegant façade, was in truth a shell of itself. The passengers framed at the windows looked worse than ghosts. Some even looked like awkward collections of bones. Missus felt compelled to pray aloud to Saint Teppers:
“Dear Saint Teppers, please tell me: Is it worth the risk? Will I ever in this life see my children again, even once? Do I want to? And what if nights last much longer than we expect them to? What if there are some nights that will never end? And what if we never reach our destination because where we really want to go is back toward ourselves but we can no longer find where or when it was that we had left ourselves behind? Or what if we desire to go to a place where what we’ve accomplished, acquired and achieved makes no difference at all? Or maybe we don’t realize that we’ve already been to where we think we want to go many, many times before. And what if we aren’t so sure about why we are at all bothering to go where we are going to? And tell me, where in this world are any of us trying so hard to get to anyway?”
Missus, her bald head shimmering like a watermelon seed in the night, was so alone in that world that she heard her own voice echo back to her: “Where in this world are any of us trying so hard to get to anyway?”
END
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August 18, 2015