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The sun rises over the tracks, illuminating the day Stud Stampler has a gnawing feeling will be his last alive.
They’re just outside Chattanooga, approaching the city from the southwest, and the green-dark foliage on the looming face of Lookout Mountain is cast in brilliant gold as the valley wakes. Stud slides one of the engine’s doors open and slips out onto the slim platform there and sucks in a deep gulp of cool Appalachian air. The wind pushes him back against the smooth metal skin of the train. One breath, now two, slowly now, in and out. He needs to breathe. Inside, Robert and Hildy are rushing around, trying to create some plan for what happens when the engine trundles into the station in Oak Ridge. Stud’s been handed a gun, taught how to use it. He was repulsed by its weight in his hand.
He doesn’t know what they’re getting into, none of them do, really, and that’s the problem. There’s an inkling crouching in his brainstem that whatever is going on in Oak Ridge, whatever caused the conflagration in the studio, the battle at the observatory, is much bigger, much more terrible, than anything they can even comprehend. Hildy read the script to him; its words slid off the folds of his brain like water off oil, and left him heavy with disgust and dread. It makes him want to turn tail and run, go rogue, head back home to San Dimas. Stud Stampler is no hero. He isn’t, and yet he knows that the four of them must try, at the very least, to keep their families, their futures, safe from this looming darkness. He thinks about Willy, sullen, quiet, haunting the steps of the crumbling apartment building on Foothills Boulevard. He wants that kid to have a bright future. He hopes he’s not gotten into much trouble in his absence.
Stud thinks that’s probably an empty hope.
The door that he closed behind him rattles open again; he jumps. It’s Meryl, hovering in the doorway, one hand on the frame, the other suavely in his coat pocket. He gestures with an eyebrow at Stud to move to the side. He does, shuffling over against the railing. Meryl sidesteps onto the platform, slotting in like a puzzle piece between the doorframe and Stud’s side. It’s a tight squeeze. Meryl radiates warmth, even through his suit. The heady smell of his cologne almost overwhelms Stud; he closes his eyes and tries to push down the untoward feelings he harbors for the star of stage and screen currently standing next to him.
“Mr. Streep,” he says, guarded, hoping Meryl thinks the red on his face is just chap from the wind.
The actor wags a hand at him. “Please,” he says, projecting over the cacophony of the engine. “Meryl is more than fine.”
Stud nods at that, and begins to tip into a dizzying awkward silence, but Meryl is there to pull him back from the edge. “I don’t know about yourself, but I needed some fresh air. Invigorating, isn’t it?”
“Uh, yeah,” Stud stammers. Houses, ramshackle, clapboard and tin, begin to appear on the horizon, populating the valley. They look something akin to Los Angeles’ Hooverville but the mountain scenery, with its sunkissed fog and tall pines, makes the whole visage look like something out of a fantasy novel.
“I just love exploring new places,” Meryl continues, filling the loud silence. “I don’t get to enough, even with my fame.” The words sound fabricated, corrugated aluminum, propped up over a gaping wound.
“I…well, I never do,” Stud says, shrugging.
Meryl tilts his head. “What about when you moved to California? Surely, that must have been a wild adventure for you.”
It was. Or, it should have been. Leaving Bensonhurst for the first time in his life, peeling across the Allegheny, then the plains, then ascending the Rockies, then tumbling down the Sierra Nevada, should have been the thrill of a lifetime. But Carl had just passed, may his memory be for a blessing, and Stud spent nearly all of the ride inside, fighting tears as he settled his poor brother’s paltry estate. Every once in a while, a flash of joyous open space, silver and gold, dashed with azure, out the windows. But Stud had a task. A child with nowhere to go, nowhere to call home, waiting at the station in San Dimas.
“I was…a little busy at the time,” he admits.
Meryl freezes. Stud can see a small current of discomfort, the phantom of a social misstep, race across the actor’s face.
“Ah,” he says. “Right. Your brother.”
“Are you okay, Meryl?” Stud decides to ask.
Meryl smiles wistfully, a curl of soft-spoken agony simply and eloquently stated on his face. Stud wants to wipe it away with a thumb, soft and sweet. He chooses to avert his gaze from Meryl and look at his hands. His thumbs, as it turns out, aren’t soft, nor sweet. They’re splintered by wood shavings from construction work, calloused, boiled by the sun. Would Meryl accept such a caress?
“I can’t say I know for sure,” Meryl finally says. Stud’s gaze snaps back up to the actor. “The other two back in there are cooking up some mighty plans, and I still haven’t quite been able to swallow that our dear friend Hildy seems to be some sort of sorcerer now!”
Stud brings a hand up to his brow, touches the razor-thin line of scar tissue whipped across his face. “No,” he says, and a surprised chuckle escapes him, “me neither.”
He drops his hand to see that Meryl has shuffled impossibly closer to him. The actor has his head tilted a hair. He’s gazing at Stud with an affect that the understudy can’t quite determine: it’s either desperation or jealousy. Either are confounding. Both make Stud squirm. “What?” he asks.
“It’s just that—” Meryl cuts himself off. He places a hand to the back of his collar sheepishly. The thought that he’s a pretty blusher, dammit, flings itself across Stud’s mind. “—Well, I suppose I’ve found myself a little bit taken with you, Stud Stampler.”
Stud blinks. “Um. Would you mind repeating yourself, there?”
Meryl laughs and hangs his head. “Maybe that was strongly worded. I’m proud of you, Stud. You’re a real role model.”
Stud places a hand next to Meryl’s to brace himself in the tight space and turns. The wind buffets Meryl’s tie; it flips without abandon against the lapels of Stud’s coat. “If you don’t mind me asking,” Stud says, doing his best to ignore how Meryl’s open gaze makes something odd happen in the tiny space between his belly and his lungs, “what’s there to be proud of? I’m just a Jewish fella from Brooklyn, a real bonafide nobody, right?”
It’s Meryl’s turn to shrug. Stud continues, a little less sure. “I lost my job because I barked up the wrong tree.” He pauses. No reaction from Meryl, no pity or disgust. “My poor nephew despises me.”
He falls silent.
The train’s brakes squeal as it trundles deeper into Chattanooga. The wind lessens and Stud can hear the sound of the city, waking up. A troupe of schoolchildren traipsing along the tracks dash along the side of the train, and wave and shout to the two men. Some of them point at Meryl. Stud somehow doubts that these little ones know the washed-up star, but Meryl waves back anyways, his winning smile crinkling apart his face wonderfully. Stud waves too.
“Had you met your nephew before moving to San Dimas and taking custody of him?” Meryl asks, drawing Stud’s attention back to him. There’s a plaintive look on his face, like he’s letting Stud paint a scene for him.
“Sort of?” Stud says. “Once Carl visited New York with Willy, but he was just a tiny baby back then.”
The plaintive look gets brushed over by a warmth that dizzies Stud, sets his hand twisting tighter around the cold metal bar that keeps him from tumbling off the train.
“This is what I’m saying,” Meryl says. “I admire that. He’s not your child, but you love him as if he was your own.”
Stud blinks. “I mean, he’s family. That’s what you’re supposed to do.”
Meryl looks away from Stud and over the scenery they are gliding past. The Tennessee River, wide, murky, sluggish, creeps into view, buttressed by wickedly tall mountains. Across it, Stud sees a swarm of little houses climbing the terraces, dutiful and proud, unaware of the pulsing organ of dread, sickly and dark, looming in a hidden valley just a few hours away.
“See, you find that easy, and I admire that,” Meryl says. The wind tugs at his perfectly coiffed hair, trying to unstring it, set it free. “I’m certain I have family. Children. Kids who’ll do great things and bad things, and who’ll have their own kids who’ll tear up heaven and earth like little demons, but I don’t know ‘em. Probably never will.” His voice takes on a mournful timbre that does not become the usually blustery man.
“Oh,” Stud whispers. “You’re lonely.”
Meryl doesn’t respond for a moment too long; Stud realizes that the actor is studying his lips. It makes his face heat, and as he averts his gaze, he realizes that he’s spoken too low to be heard and Meryl is reading his lips.
The actor chuckles drily. “I suppose that’s right.” He bumps his shoulder against Stud’s, who lets himself be jostled easily. For a guy who gets pushed around a ton, he doesn’t seem to mind it when it’s the great Meryl Streep’s kindness made manifest. “That doesn’t…confuse you?” Meryl continues. “That a cat like me, with all the riches fame can deliver, can feel so alone?”
“What’s there to confuse me?” Stud shoots back. “You’re like me, if you think about it. You’ve been shut out, forced into irrelevancy, and ignored. You’re just fighting to stay afloat. Trying to keep some of the love you’re owed.” He thinks just how easy it is to save a kernel of love for the actor pressed against his side, and wonders why the world thinks differently.
Meryl doesn’t respond to that for a long time. Stud eventually looks over, and is alarmed to see Meryl beaming at him, radiance shining across the whole river valley, turning even the dull muck of the floodplain into star-studded brilliance.
“And you wonder why I like you,” the actor says at last, and drapes a heavy arm over Stud’s shoulder. Meryl’s fingers softly, idly, easily toy with the edge of his handkerchief poking up from his breast pocket. Stud looks up and breathes in, trying his very best to keep his composure. Meryl’s face is very close to Stud’s neck. When the actor breathes, he feels warmth, blissful against the early morning valley chill, ghost across his skin. He gulps.
“You know how to read people, Stud. You make it an art. You know how to read me . I’d say you’re an excellent understudy.”
“That—that’s real nice of you, Meryl.”
On the railing, Meryl’s free hand finds Stud’s. His fingers whisper warm like his breath. “I’m not really being nice, I’ll have you know.” Stud hears Meryl’s voice crack into a wider smile, a dangerous thing. “Just saying how I see it.”
Stud wants to settle into this buzzing, flying feeling, but he can’t. His anxieties from the recently departed evening, vanquished by the rising sun and the man next to him, creep back and tug on his ankles, pulling back down. He doesn’t want to lose himself. He doesn’t want to lose his nephew, his friends. He doesn’t want to lose Meryl.
He doesn’t even have him yet.
“Do you think we’re—all of us—are doomed?”
To Stud’s dismay, the easiness scrawled across Meryl’s face shrinks away. “Us? As in what’s ahead of us in Oak Ridge?”
Stud nods.
The smile that alights on Meryl’s face is a new one: small and desperate, hopeful. “I’d say so, Stud,” he says. The words are so warm, but Stud feels his heart break anyways.
“We don’t have a choice, though. This whole thing, whatever dark deeds are afoot, is bigger than any of us.”
“I know,” Stud says quietly. “But that doesn’t make it any easier, now does it?”
“No,” Meryl considers, “I doubt it.”
The actor presses closer to Stud’s side and tightens his grasp around him. Stud finds himself, despite it all, despite the looming monster, leaning in, eager to soak up whatever warmth he can before Meryl is dashed away from him and the gap between them is made infinite. Together, they watch as downtown Chattanooga slides by. Stud wishes the train would stop. He almost wishes him and the wonderful man sharing breath with him could hop off and flee into the anonymous streets of this alien city.
Who is he kidding, he’d never forgive himself if he did that. He’s needed. The show must go on.
The heavy door behind them slides open noisily. Stud jumps and whirls around to see Hildy poking her head out. Meryl drops his arm from Stud’s shoulder and slowly steps back, giving the understudy some space. Instantly, he feels the cold, the absence of touch. He longs for it, and curses himself. Hildy raises an eyebrow and gives the pair a once-over, making Stud cringe. Then, she shrugs, unbothered. Stud deflates in relief.
“Mr. Streep, Stud,” she says with a crisp nod at each of the two men. A gust of wind powers by; she barely manages to grab onto her hat and keep it pressed against the top of her head. “Me and Robert have hatched a plan about what we should do when we arrive at Oak Ridge. We’d like you to hear it.” She nods to the train’s interior, beckoning.
“I suppose I’ve gotten enough fresh air,” Meryl says, crisply slipping his hands into his pants pockets. He leans towards the open door; Hildy withdraws into the train’s interior to give him room to pass. “You coming in, Stud?”
Stud swallows and forces a smile to his face. It feels wan, watery. “Yeah, of course. Just give me another minute, please.”
Meryl nods, understanding, eyes reflecting pain unspoken, words forged into steel but never branded, and claps him once on the shoulder. Stud closes his eyes and drinks in the weight, heady and surefire, his hand leaves on his coat. Another moment, and the actor departs, following Hildy into the guts of the engine. Stud turns to see him go, disappearing down the narrow corridor. His lips are dry in the inexorable rush of cool air. They crack when he opens them.
Stud is certain the four of them are doomed, and just as he did when Carl passed, just as he did when he stepped off the train in San Dimas and saw the rocky foothills, dry and unforgiving, line the streets, just as he did when he first met Willy, eyes downturned in the funeral home, mouth forever warped into a miserable frown, he finds himself searching in the deepest recesses of his brain for the old Yiddish proverbs his bubbe left him. They’re humbling, rooting, reassuring, all in one.
The train jumps over a rough spot on the rails. Stud feels his stomach soar up into his chest and he hugs the railing in front of him to keep his feet planted. Doomed or not, he thinks, everyone deserves a benediction, a plea for good health, a long life.
He thinks of the warmth against his side that he can still just barely feel.
“Meryl,” he mutters, voice shaking, peeling, and wishes him the best. “ Gezunt ahf dein kop .” Good health on your head.
Stud hopes the words aren’t weightless. He takes a few more deep breaths, feels the air pass through his lungs, cleaning him out. Then he steels his shoulders and follows Meryl and Hildy back into the train, ever closer towards their destruction.