Raymond had high hopes for tonight, but he’d almost given up believing someone right for him would get on the train so late. He was standing, thinking about getting off at the next stop, when the doors opened and the woman walked past him into the car. He glanced over and watched her sit down. She was alone. The tingling feeling he got before he went in for it started to spread across his chest. She was perfect: one of those little old ladies who looks soft. Who no one’s going to notice unless she’s complaining about prices at the grocery store, giving the cashier a wrinkled wad of expired coupons while a line of impatient customers grows longer behind her.
Raymond knew he was good at what he did. He credited his four-point strategy—Surprise, Scare, Steal, and Scatter—for his success with little old ladies on the ‘L.’ I work alone, he told his squad at school. I don’t make eye contact and I move fast. That way they barely know what’s happened, and I’m gone before they can even get words out.
During the three-week period before his “hiatus,” as he was calling it, Raymond had snatched eight cash-filled wallets from open purses (he didn’t deal in credit cards), five cell phones, three small shopping bags filled with food, and a fancy compact mirror he had given to his mother. He was sitting next to that little old lady one morning, late for class again, and when she took her compact out of her purse he saw the cover had bits of glass arranged into a flower that shone bright and pretty when the sunlight hit it. Raymond knew his mother would love it. She wouldn’t ask where or how he’d gotten it; working two jobs made her too tired to ask questions she didn’t want the answers to. When the train stopped near school, he grabbed the compact out of the woman’s hands. She was putting on lipstick and wound up drawing a waxy red line across her face, onto her cheek, as she screamed, “Oh! Oh! Oh!” and he ran. No words.
He’d taken a break the past month because he’d miscalculated badly with the last little old lady. When he’d pulled her cell phone from her hand, as he left the train car packed with evening commuters, she got up and started to chase after him—not as old, surprised, scared, or slow as he’d thought. She yelled, “That asshole has my phone!” at the top of her lungs and came pretty close to him, but when she reached out to him on the exit stairway, two steps above him, she lost her balance and fell through the rush hour crowd onto the metal floor landing. Knocked herself out. People near the landing were giving the lady space, while the ones higher up the stairs were bunching up and wondering what was happening. The group in front of him began to realize what was going on, so he pushed through the crush as hard as he could and ran.
No one caught him—the security cameras didn’t even do their job, because there was a story on Channel 9 that night about how the lady was in the hospital in a coma and they couldn’t identify the guy who had stolen her cell phone. He decided not to use or sell the phone anyway and thought it best to lie low for a little while.
Tonight’s little old lady sat down and gathered her shawl around herself— it wasn’t a coat but a big, soft, drapey thing that reminded him of his favorite blanket—and peered up at the signs over the windows. Raymond did the same without moving the rest of his body. The signs were ads for prescription medicines and restaurants and lawyers and schools Raymond had never heard of. He remembered when he was younger, just starting high school, and they used to put poetry up there. He memorized the ones he liked the best. His favorite was by a guy with a cool-sounding name, William Carlos Williams. It was about plums.
Raymond wondered why they didn’t put poems above the windows anymore. He had liked the rhythms the words made in his head. He hadn’t learned any more poetry this year, but he was going to in his “Words and Works” class next semester. He knew it might be his last chance since college wasn’t in his plans. He’d promised himself he wouldn’t skip, even though the class was right after lunch and most days this fall he’d left campus to eat with other guys who cut school in the afternoons. It was the only class he’d picked himself for senior year.
Raymond surveyed the length of the car and saw there was just one other person on it. A big-bellied guy sitting on the aisle side of two front-facing seats had his back to them, music blaring through his headphones for all three of them to hear. He was air drumming and tapping his foot in time to the music, mouthing the words. Excellent, thought Raymond. He’s in a world of his own. I couldn’t ask for a better situation my first night back.
The woman was now staring out the east-facing windows; her fluorescently lit reflection stared across the aisle back at her. The train sped past tall buildings crowded together, each tower pocked with lights. Raymond, still standing, thought how he liked to sit and look eastward at night too: if you focused beyond the boxy condo dwellings and the people moving around inside them, all you saw was jet black space. Lake Michigan was out there, but you couldn’t see it in the dark. The emptiness of the distance, like a new idea full of possibilities, made him feel less stuck in space and time as he rode along in the ‘L’ car.
Raymond slowly moved from the door and slid into a spot a few seats away from the lady. He hoped he wasn’t freaking her out already. He’d learned that most people squirm in their ‘L’ seats around teenage boys, especially when they’re around boys who appear older than they are, who wear beat-up jeans and raggedy tennis shoes and dark sweatshirts under black jackets. Especially if they’re alone.
Most of the car reeked like overripe bananas, old fried food, dryer lint, and unwashed feet; as he moved nearer to the old lady, he noticed it smelled like toasted waffles and cinnamon.
“Hello,” she said, suddenly turning to Raymond. “I might as well say hello because there are only three of us here, and I think at least one of us is not interested in conversation.” She tilted her head at the air drummer in the frontfacing seats.
Raymond quickly looked away. He glimpsed down and saw her hands, folded in her lap. His eyes widened and he bit the inside of his cheek to hide his surprise: every one of her fingers had a tiny tattoo near the knuckle. Flowers mostly, but a star and a diamond too. Raymond’s friend Emmy had one tattoo near the knuckle on her index finger, a daisy, and she never talked about it without mentioning how much it hurt to get.
She noticed his reaction. “I see you’ve caught sight of my artwork,” she said as she rubbed her hands together. “There’s more, young man.” She pulled up the sleeves of her long-sleeved shirt, and Raymond couldn’t stop himself from leaning closer. She didn’t just have tattooed knuckles. Her hands, her forearms were covered in them. She opened the shawl a little bit—carefully, not like she was flashing him—and lifted her head so that he could see a patch of color and curves above the slight scoop of her shirt. She tilted her head and he glimpsed a small owl on her neck.
Raymond sat back and looked out the window.
He could tell she was smiling. “If it was a little warmer I’d show you they go further up my shoulders, as well as the ones I have on my legs. Summer is more revealing.”
He blurted, “Why? You’re . . .”
“Old. Yes, I’m aware. But why not? I was almost seventy when I got my first one. This.” She pulled her left sleeve further up her arm to show him.
Raymond shifted, and now he could see the outline of a graceful bird that seemed ready to fly off the woman’s elbow, each feather a careful stroke of detail. “This is a Japanese red-crowned crane. A rare bird, as they say— endangered, in fact.” She laughed. “They symbolize love, long life, and good luck.” She pulled her sleeve back to her elbow, and the bird disappeared. “Did you know there are fifteen species of cranes? They live all over the world and come in all sizes, a variety of colorings, and a range of temperaments. Some are timid and delicate; some are mean and tough. They can live a long time. Many have not been treated well in our modern age, but they still have a place in their societies. People continue to find ways to celebrate and nurture them.” She squirmed in her seat. She raised her hands from her lap and Raymond decided to focus on her gesticulations.
“A hundred years ago I would have been quite an attraction. Part of a circus sideshow with a tent and a poster of my own: ‘The Incredible Tattooed Lady! Five Cents to Glimpse Her Canvas of Stories and Learn Your Fortune! Enter to Be Amazed!’” she said.
She continued talking, and Raymond began to study the exposed designs on her forearms. There were clouds, a man dressed in a military uniform, a sand dollar, a moon, and a constellation of stars. A red wagon. Circles and spirals, like music notes. He started to imagine what else was on her spotted and wrinkled pale skin, on the places he could not see.
“I’m going to tell you something,” she said, pausing to put her hand on his arm. He welcomed the interruption of his thoughts about her body. “People stop paying attention to you when you get old. They’ll let you entertain them with stories about concrete things—music and movies, places that no longer exist.” She removed her hand, leaned back against her seat. “But they don’t want to know you still feel the way you did when you were eighteen. How you fell into desperate love on a beach one summer, about the night you danced with a stranger in a hurricane. They don’t want to hear that a caramel-colored hound dog saved you from suicidal loneliness.”
She poked the air with her index finger, and Raymond imagined she was scolding an invisible listener who was laughing at her from across the aisle. “They don’t want to listen to you describe the afternoon you ignored all the road signs and got lost on a haphazard trip but eventually managed to find your way . . .”
Her volume faded. She closed her eyes, sighed, and shook her head. Raymond guessed she was trying to clear something—a bad memory, guilt, doubt—from her mind.
“We’d all like the world to see what we’re really like, wouldn’t we?” Her eyes were still closed. She was quieter now. Her words rustled softly, like the piles of papers and bills on his dining room table did when he turned the window fan on low.
The conductor’s voice, distorted and loud, suddenly flooded the car and announced the upcoming station. Raymond jumped.
“That’s it,” she said. “I’m next.”
She opened her eyes, gathered her shawl around her and pushed herself up from her seat. She motioned for Raymond to get up with her, and he rose. The two of them began to walk toward the door. The lady moved unsteadily and leaned into him. She rested her hand on his upper arm, near his shoulder, and squeezed slightly as the train lurched once and stopped.
“You did all the listening. I’m sorry we didn’t have time for a longer conversation. Now I’m left to wonder about your stories.” She released her hold, patted his arm once again and straightened up as she viewed him from head to toe.
“A young man in the big city,” she said after a moment. “I imagine you already have a few stories of your own to tell.”
The doors opened and she stepped out onto the platform. While the conductor began another garbled announcement, she turned to Raymond. Her voice rose above the noise. He noticed her eyes were a bright, watery blue.
“You know the cranes I was talking about? They stick their necks out when they fly. Regardless of their circumstances, they’re certain of what they want and they’re sure about where they are going. I like that. It takes humans longer to figure those things out.”
She waved and began to walk toward the stairs that went down to the street and into the night.
Raymond stood at the open door and watched her go. Another little old lady got on, lightly brushing by as she entered the train car. Raymond paid little attention to her movements. The doors snapped shut, and the conductor’s voice filled the car with apologies for the slight delay. The train would run express to the end of the line.
The train picked up speed. The car rocked a little from side to side, with the occasional clicks and clacks that were so much louder on a fast and almost-empty late ride. Raymond contemplated the unseen Lake Michigan, the expansive blackness beyond the buildings, as the ‘L’ rushed him home. It would take a while to get where he was going. He imagined what a tattoo of a plum would look like on his shoulder. He scanned the ads over the windows and remembered another poem, a jagged one about old people and youth by the guy who sometimes wrote his name in lowercase letters: e. e. cummings. Second semester would be here soon enough, and he wondered which poets he would study in the class he had chosen. He considered what the tattooed little old lady had said about cranes, and decided to search online for information about them when he got home so he could figure out whether he liked the mean ones or the delicate ones better. He thought he’d tell his mother about this trip.
He looked at the little old lady who had just gotten on. She was alone, and he watched her settle into her seat. The train’s movement remained rapid and uneven. Raymond faltered, and grabbed the metal bar next to the door to steady himself. He hunched his shoulders and drew himself tight. He rode like that for a while. Then, hoping his movement into the car aisle would not cause alarm, he took a curious, uncertain step forward.
She looked soft.
GKS Waller is a former journalist at newspapers, radio and wire services in California, Wisconsin, Chicago, and Belize who now earns a living as a Chicago-based writer, storyteller, and narrative strategist. Waller was named a finalist in the 2018 Hemingway Shorts contest and a runner-up for the Chicago Tribune 2018 Nelson Algren Literary Award. She most recently has been published in the Timberline Review and online at Feminine Collective (@femininecollect).