Later that night, when I had finished sweeping up, I moved to the front of the store, where my grandmother sat in a folding chair, dozing. Once a week or so during this time, I would clip a few gray whiskers that grew on her chin. She was the least vain person I ever knew, but she always put on a show of being greatly pleased by this ritual. When she awoke I said, “Gram, are you sad about Jack Buffmeir?”

“Sad? No. I’m not sad. He wasn’t really fit to live. He was not right. Never. They were drawing up papers to send him to Elgin,” she said.

I thought those would be her last words on the subject, but as she looked at my yearning eyes she had one further pronouncement: “In the end the fool got what he really wanted—hit by a train and out with a great splash. And who was stuck paying for his funeral? Me!” She looked at the wall clock. It was eleven-thirty. She said, “Come on, now. Let’s lock up and go to bed.”

It was a hot night. After I brushed my teeth, I lay in bed waiting for a car to zoom past on Lake Street to stir up a little breeze, but there was no traffic. My grandmother rubbed her legs with liniment and picked up her prayer book. I wanted to ask her if Oyster was in heaven. I was pretty sure Jack Buffmeir was in hell, and I knew what her answer would be anyway. When you are dead, you are dead, unless you were very bad, in which case you were in hell. If by some off chance there was a heaven, less than ten souls inhabited the place.

The blare of a distant night train resonated from the southeast. In less than an hour people from Washington, Utah, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, and lowa would be disembarking at Union Station in Chicago—to do what? I guessed they would be tired and eager to get into the safe cars of relatives: either that or they would have to flag down cabs to find hotel rooms. Soon they would be ejected from the comfortable haven of the plush coach cars and scrambling for shelter in a big and mean city. As my grandmother shut off the night-light, I waited for the rattle of steel wheels on iron rails. It seemed the train would never come. But when it did, I began counting cars by the sound of wheels rocking over the spliced rails.

Volcanoes from Hell