BIG GRIMY FREIGHT TRAIN like nobody’s business—

A west-southwest-bound black line rolled hard on frozen prairie and slow on its way to Polk Plastics where PVC resin was turned out to make credit cards, traffic cones, carpet backing, dildos, and so on.

Downtown: arm went down, signals, dinging. At Bess and Second, the village lawyer was in his ’90 burgundy LeBaron. His big, soft belly neared the bottom portion of the steering wheel on an inhalation, but his body’s neck was hard because that was his powerhouse. The back of his neck was packed full of fights and arguments. It was a system—when he needed fire in a courtroom, he went to his neck. It was a storage facility, the back of his neck. The other parts of his body capsule tended to be nice and soft.

The lawyer rubbed his tongue on the gold crowns on the top premolars and molars located on the right side of his head-face and thought, in his mind, of a recent probate client: one Cloris Barcewski, whose big concern was her dead mother’s gold crowns and fillings. She wanted all the dental work pried out and auctioned off on the International Internet. She’d seen this commercial. Her idea appeared to be a heartless thing, but Cloris needed the money. After all, she told the lawyer, she bathed her mother when her mother was too old, fat, sick, and tired to do it herself. Cloris physically got in the tub and washed out the old lady’s weird body with a washcloth; washed the holes, washed the undercarriage, washed the boobs. You want to talk about love and reverence. I mean it isn’t fear of the rod makes a daughter do that.

One time at bath time, the old lady stepped out of the tub and went down like scrap metal. Cloris couldn't reach her brothers on the cell phone, so she dragged her mother out to the driveway herself, loaded her in the Olds, and went to the E.R. X-rays showed a shattered knee and, of course, the hip went—the hip always goes. It must go. You don’t even want to know what the doctor bill came to. Cloris hung in there and took care of her mother, washing it out, making meals, driving her around. It was that that made Cloris’ mother change the will down the stretch to cut the brothers out and give everything to her daughter.

And then when Cloris’ mother died, her sons came out of nowhere—you should’ve seen. Actually, they came from Danville, where they lived. They carried on and fought like tigers for the belongings. They kept saying Cloris got Mother all doped up on painkillers and forced her to change the will. One of the brothers was able to cry on command, like a movie star—he was the one Cloris said broke in and stole all the cash from their mother’s coffee can under the bed. And so there was this big probate stink, and Cloris hired the village lawyer to represent her. That turned out to be a good move, for she ended up with not only the gold crowns and fillings, but with the house, the Olds, antique stuff, riding mower, fireplace pokers, boxes of tissue, tubes of toothpaste, light bulbs, and everything else. It was so much belongings, it took weeks to sort through it—a by-product of going with a lawyer who’s got a neck full of fights and arguments.

Snow flurries in the lawyer’s headlights and up in the street lamp. There was the train: black Norfolk Southern locomotive bound for the Polk spur. The horn was real loud and slow. On and on and on. You know how a train horn can empty out a town. Everybody gets smote and blown down the road; it’s him and a train.

The train didn’t mind the cold but the lawyer did. The windows on the LeBaron were sealed and fogged up and the lawyer had his coat on. The man driving the train had his elbow hanging out of the window.

The old lawyer leaned his head and looked at the train. Warm air went from the heating vents, into his nose, and his belly pressed against the bottom portion of the steering wheel and enfolded it.

Chris Erickson is a writer from Decatur, Illinois. His work has appeared in The Hobo-Tramp Voice (as Boxcar Whitey) and McSweeney's Internet Tendency (as Whitey Eckerson). His interests include Sherwood Anderson, "Little House," "Highway to Heaven," and "The Andy Griffith Show." He is currently at work on his first book of stories, Henrytown.