The Sleeping Car Porter by Suzette Mayr

Author:Suzette Mayr
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Coach House Books

Flinging along metal tracks in his luxurious prison, somewhere between Medicine Hat and Calgary, Baxter thinks about Edwin Drew.

Mr. Drew in his finely cleaned and pressed monkey suit sailing around like a King of England with his precise pronunciation, his brain a full set of Encyclopaedia Britannica, as he showed the new porters all stuffed into the off-duty car how to make down and make up a berth, how to fold a blanket exactly by drawing the blanket from the foot to the head, how to shake the curtain to quietly wake up a passenger who has to detrain in the night, how to use the whisk broom on a male passenger’s jacket, an ostrich feather duster for cobwebs, how to sponge then dry off a washstand without leaving smears or blots or cloudy patches, the code names for mice (diamonds) and rats (sapphires) and roaches (rubies) and bedbugs (pearls) in a car, how to deal with ladies having lady issues, how to deal with men having men issues, how to deal with drunk passengers (Make them drunker, declared Mr. Drew, and he winked at Baxter while all the student porters laughed), how to deal with passengers who’d had too much to drink the night before, how to deal with a disorderly woman or sporting girl plying her wares on the train, how to calm down the sleeptalkers, the sleepwalkers, how to know the time it takes for a train to travel from Chicago to Smiths Falls, or from Duluth to Sault Ste. Marie. The infinite number of protocol crimes that could earn demerits (disloyalty, dishonesty, the use of intoxicating liquors or frequenting of places where they are sold, immorality, insubordination, incompetence, gross carelessness, untruthfulness). The infinite crimes that could earn dismissal (disloyalty, dishonesty, the use of intoxicating liquors or frequenting of places where they are sold, immorality, insubordination, incompetence, gross carelessness, untruthfulness), how to look in the little instruction handbook with its cardboard covers they all have to carry if they have any questions about the rules. Mr. Drew had a wide, clear face, sported wide shoulders, and Baxter wondered if he engaged in calisthenics.

But when Baxter took a turn to show how he knew how to make up a berth, he had to shove the lower mattress into the upper berth and shove the berth back into place with all his might, sweat pouring down the sides of his head, his eyeglasses sliding down his nose, skating down the nervous moisture. He suddenly understood why Mr. Drew’s shoulders and arms wielded so much power, how he swirled and folded sheets like a bullfighter, and snapped up and snapped down the ponderous, heavy berths from the ceiling as though they were made of cloud.

He will not think about his parents back home. He hasn’t written a letter in months. Maybe even a year. He smooths out his upper lip as he chews a cold perogy. His mother praying over him, the times she slapped his face because he twirled one too many times in front of his female cousins.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.