I got down to the platform an hour early and sat down on a bench next to a bank of five pay phones in old-fashioned phone booths. I was re-reading The New Republic and wondering what “TRB” stood for when an attractive girl a few years older than me lurched to the phones straining to carry an enormous tan vinyl suitcase along with her. She took a seat in a phone booth across from me without seeming to notice I was there. She retrieved some change from her purse and dropped it into the change slots at the top of the phone—one of the black enamel ones with a rotary dial. She dialed a number and waited, then seemed surprised when all of her change fell out into the coin return holder and she had to re-insert it. After a few seconds, she started talking.
“Hi, honey, it’s me. Miss me?” She frowned a bit, as though she didn’t entirely understand what the voice on the other end of the line was saying.
“Okay, honey, I’m on my way, and I heard what you said…” She paused for a few seconds. “I heard what you said, but honey, the train don’t stop in Clarkesville. It stops in Gainesville. Got that? Not Clarkesville but Gainesville. And it gets there at 9:16. Next stop after Atlanta.” She listened for a minute. “No, honey. Gainesville. It’s closer to you anyhow. And if it got there at 4:30 I’d already be there, wouldn’t I? Meet me at the station at 9:16. Just a little over an hour from now. You know the station.” She paused again. “That’s very sweet.” Pause. “Where must you go? And what do you mean, ‘oh no, no, no’?” Pause. “Have you been smoking dope again? What do you mean you don’t know if you’re ever coming home? Knock off the weed, Tommy, and meet me at the Gainesville station at 9:12.” Short pause. “Love you, too. Remember, Gainesville. There ain’t no train station in Clarkesville.” She hung up and looked at her enormous suitcase with a pained expression. She looked up and saw me for the first time. “He’s sweet but he ain’t no genius.” I smiled. “Got a cigarette?”
“Don’t smoke,” I said.
“I wanted to call Tommy so ‘course I ran right past the smoke shop and now I’m going to have to lug that damned suitcase all the way up ever’ one of those goddamned steps to get me a smoke and that just don’t seem right. They ought’a’ have a cigarette machine down here on the platform.”
A young man in a black suit and open-necked black shirt, with stylishly long-ish hair, sat down on the bench next to me. He had an overnight case and what looked like a guitar case. You don’t see black shirts with black suits too much in Atlanta. He was smoking a very long cigarette
“Got a cigarette?” I asked. He fished a pack of Benson & Hedges menthols out of his coat pocket and shook one out towards me. “It’s for the lady,” I said. He looked at the girl, and she accepted primly, thin pulled a truck driver-sized Zippo out of her purse and lit the cigarette with an enormous yank.
“Why thank you, so much,” she said.
“Where you guys headed?” he asked her. From just those four words, you could tell he was from Brooklyn. Well-educated, but still.
“Oh, we’re not together at all,” she said, making a gesture to indicate that she and I were not familiar. “I’m on my way to Gainesville to see my Tommy and had just asked this gentleman for a cigarette and he was nice enough to find one for me.”
The man nodded and smoked. “You?” he asked, looking at me.
“South Carolina.”
“What for?” he asked.
“To play pool.” He nodded.
“What’s your name?” he asked the pretty girl.
“Cathy,” she said. “And where are you going?” She asked him. She’d lost interest in me entirely. Some women are just fascinated with musicians.
“Saginaw, Michigan,” he said.
“Tell me about yourself,” she said.
He made a kind of half-laugh as he drew on his cigarette. “Well, I’m sitting in a railway station. I have a ticket for my destination.”
“So do you sing for a living?” she asked.
“Yep. On a tour of one night stands.”
“So do you just wander around and look for clubs?” she asked.
“Oh, no,” he answered. “Every stop is neatly planned.”
“Is it fun?” she asked.
“It gets old, being alone and away from home all the time. I’ve been wishing I were homeward bound.”
“Oh, but it sounds like so much fun. Singing songs people love, meeting new people. Traveling. Until I got me a job working for Bell Telephone in Atlanta, the biggest town I’d ever seen was Taccoa, and I wouldn’t have seen that if Tommy hadn’t gotten a DUI up in Stephens County.” The guy in the black shirt laughed slightly.
“Partly it’s because I’m not singing songs they love,” he said.
“Why not?”
“I write my own songs,” he said, “So the audience doesn’t know most of what I sing.”
“So you’re a songwriter, too? Like Hank Williams?” she asked.
He laughed again. “Just like Hank. A poet and a one-man band.”
“Do I know anything you wrote?” she asked.
“Maybe,” he said. “One of my songs got covered by a band called The Cyrkle, spelled with a ‘k’. It was on the radio some.”
“What was it?” she asked.
“It was called ‘Red Rubber Ball.’”
“Oh, shit! I know that! That’s a great song! ‘I should have known/You’d bid me farewell/There’s a lesson to be learned from this/And I learned it very well,” she sang. She sounded to me like she had a good voice, but I’m no judge.
He smiled. “That’s it.”
“You wrote that? Well, that’s fuckin’ great!” she said. She thought about this for a minute. She took a puff off her cigarette and looked at him admiringly. “And you’re tired of this? Goin’ from town to town, singin’ great songs like ‘Red Rubber Ball?’”
He smiled and looked at his shoes, which were a form of zip-up boot I had never seen before. “Sometimes it seems like every day’s an endless stream of cigarettes and magazines. Each town looks the same to me. Movies theaters, factories. Everybody I see is a stranger. It really makes me wish I was headed for home.”
He offered her another cigarette, which she accepted, then moved over to the bench beside him to accept his offer of a light. I made an excuse to move down the platform. Watching them was beginning to feel a little voyeuristic.
A few benches further down the platform, I sat down across from another guy in black shirt, no tie, black suit, black shoes. He was maybe ten years than me. Maybe he and the other guy were in the same band or something. You really don’t see that black on black deal much in Atlanta.
He looked up as I sat down but then looked right back down. “Hey, he said.”
“Hi,” I answered.
“Where you headed, young feller?” he asked.
“Carolinas,” I said. He lit a cigarette. His hands shook, and he seemed a little twitchy. “You?” I asked.
He shrugged in an exaggerated kind of way. “Nashville, eventually,” he said. “Right now, I just want to ride, you know?”
“How’s that?” I asked. There was a pause and he blew a smoke ring. It didn’t bounce, but there was no breeze down there and the smoke ring sailed a really long way. He had the slightly accelerated mannerisms of somebody on speed.
He shrugged again. “I get a sad kind of feeling when I see a passenger train. In this … fast movin’ world we live in nobody rides them much these days. Or maybe I’m just sentimental ‘cause I know things have to change. But I still like to go for a train ride because I’ve got a thing about trains. You know?”
It was my turn to shrug. People don’t usually talk to me much, so I wasn’t used to this.
“Trains. Trains are out of place these days. But they had their days of glory, trains. Trains.” He shook his head at the ground, then looked down the track towards Gainesville, then at the darkening sky. “You know what I’d say to a train if I could talk to it? I’d say ‘They say you’re too slow for travelin’ but I’m gonna miss you some day. When my little boy says Daddy what was it like to ride a train I’ll say it was a good way to travel when things didn’t move so fast and I’m sorry you cain’t ride one but trains are a thing of the past. Train, train, you’re passin’ from the scene, but I’m gonna mourn your passin’.”
Some kind of stimulant had to be involved in this soliloquy.
The train pulled in at 8:21, right on time. The man in black and I got onto the same car. He had no luggage. There were very few people on the car and he took the seat across from me. He kept looking at me intently, then looking away. It was awkward.
“So what do you do for a living?” I asked.
“Nothing much, recently, he said. Just movin’ on a night train. Drinkin’ coffee, doing cocaine.” He shook his head and looked out the window and suddenly looked as sad as anyone I have ever known. Like something terrible was inside him and sometimes it overwhelmed him.
Either that or he was paranoid and crazy from too much coke. “I’m out here on my night train tryin’ to get her safely home,” he said, completing a thought that actually had no end.
There was a pause. “You all right?” I asked.
“Yeah, sure.” He shrugged. “Girl trouble. Can’t seem to get her off my mind.”
“So you been travelling long?” I asked.
“All the live-long day,” he answered.
“What’s her name?” I asked.
“Dinah,” he said.
“So what happened?”
“One day I come home from work early, and there’s Dinah in the kitchen with this banjo player, who was strumming away. I had the feeling I’d interrupted something, but they both said it was all perfectly innocent, that he’d come from Alabama with his banjo looking for someone named Susannah, and there was some mix-up with the address. And then his story just really didn’t make any sense from then on. So what do I do? What would you do?”
“I don’t know, bud,” I said.
He looked out the window into the impenetrable darkness. “Fee, fie, fiddle-eye-oh,” he said, and took a drag off his cigarette.
“So what did you do?” I asked.
“I went out on a train ride,” he said. He shrugged his elaborate shrug again. “I wanted to take the midnight train to Memphis , but it don’t run out of Nashville no more. Second choice was the Hummingbird to New Orleans, but it don’t come to Union Station, either.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. It’s this goddamned Amtrak thing. I don’t know if the Hummingbird don’t run no more, or if it just don’t stop in Nashville, or what, but that ol’ station looked mighty empty when I was there. It was always the same ‘til last year.”
“Union Station is Nashville?” I asked.
“Yeah. So since seems like The Floridian is the only train comes to Nashville any more, that’s the one I took. But I don’t like Florida so I got off in Birmingham and come over here. I don’t know ‘xactly where I’m headed, but these Amtrak guys seem to treat a ticket just like a dollar bill. Which is nice. Not like the old days.”
“What happened in the old days?”
“Oh, Hell. The L&N wouldn’t honor a Southern Lines ticket, even if they was to the same station. I grew up on the Cotton Lines track, and I never could tell what tickets they’d honor.” He looked at the floor.
Conversation stalled. He lit another cigarette from a small wooden match. He shook his head and looked back at the floor.
“You follow baseball?” I asked.
“Yeah sure.”
“Why did the American League adopt the Designated Hitter rule?” I asked.
“Oh, Hell, I cain’t talk about that,” he said.
The train started to move. He looked back out the window. The train picked up speed pretty slowly, and as it got darker it would have been hard o se anything out the windows even if the tracks weren’t enclosed by concrete walls. He took a mournful drag off his cigarette, then looked at his watch, then at me. “Excuse me,” he said, and stood. “Nice talking to ya’,” and left the car, heading towards the rear of the train. Embarassment? Looking for the bar car? Wanting to snort cocaine in privacy? He was upset by the Designated Hitter rule?
I looked around the car. Way up front was a young couple trying to deal simultaneously with two small children and an infant. The kids were bickering and squirming and seemed to be asking for cookies. The parents were trying to calm the kids down but failing because they were focused on bickering amongst themselves about something.
I could feel the wheels turning beneath my feet. I’d heard the sound of trains on tracks hundreds of times before, of course, but the rhythmic click-clack has a feel almost like a heartbeat when you’re on the train. Somehow the rhythm of the machinery becomes your heartbeat as long as you’re on board.
Across the aisle was a woman in a pin-striped navy skirt and matching jacket poring over a file of some sort. A lawyer, maybe. She was so intent on her file she had no idea what was going on in the rest of the car. The only passenger behind me was a hobo-looking man who was smiling a glassy smile and sipping a bottle in a brown paper bag every few seconds.
As I turned back around from looking at the rear of the car, a pretty dark-haired girl in almost-new Levi’s entered from the front of the car, looking side to side for a seat. She paused at my row.
“Do you know if this seat is taken?” she asked me.
“There was somebody there, but he just left, so I think it’s free,” I said.
“Okay. You look safe. Are you?
“Yeah, I’m safe.”
“Groovy,” she said.
I liked her already. She sat but didn’t put her suitcase in the overhead bin. She was wearing perfume and had bright blue eyes. Most blue eyes are kind of wan. She left her suitcase in the aisle as if to stress the fact that she was not committed to her current relationship with her seat.
She glanced at me several times over three or four minutes and seemed to want to talk, but she was too shy.
“I’m Henry,” I said, extending my hand. “Henry Baida.”
She shook my hand briefly. “I’m Barbara McGee,” she said.
“What kind of work are you in, Barbara?”
She paused and thought about it. She sighed before answering. “I
guess I’ve been a drifter for the last few years. Seeing the country. Wandering around.” She looked up briefly and smiled. “It’s been fun, but I think I want to go home now. Settle down. You know.” She shrugged.
“Where’s home?” I asked.
“Baton Rouge,” she said.
“You’re going the wrong way for Baton Rouge,” I said.
There was a long pause while she smiled and stared into the middle distance. “You’re right, but you know, until I just said that, I didn’t know what it was I wanted to do.”
“I didn’t mean to disrupt your plan,” I said. She stared out the window and smiled but didn’t really look at me.
“Not so much a disruption as resumption, I guess,” she said.
“So where have you drifted to?” I asked, after a longish pause in which she seemed to enjoy some kind of melancholic memory.
“Oh, all over. It started out just outside Baton Rouge. I met this really interesting guy.”
“Interesting how?” I asked. She still wasn’t looking at me much. Staring out the window and smiling to herself. She had this way of bringing her fingertips to her mouth as though she wanted to bite her nails, but never did. Her fingertips just seemed to want to be close to her smile.
“Oh, you know. He was a poet. He was a picker. Sometimes he seemed like a preacher. Or a prophet, maybe. He once claimed to have been a pusher, but I didn’t believe him. He was a walking contradiction.” Without really looking at me she reached into her pocket and retrieved a pack of Tareyton 100’s with a Bic lighter stuffed in the pack. She shook out the lighter and a smoke and lit it up, still smiling out the window.
“What’s a picker?” I asked.
“You know, a guitar picker. He had a guitar, a Martin, and he used to sing to me.”
“So where’d you go?” I asked. I don’t really like to hear people talk about singing. I’m not very musical.
She finally looked at me as she took a drag off her cigarette.
“Well, we started outside Baton Rouge. In a switching yard.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“A place with a lot of railroad cars. He wanted to hitch a ride. He told me to kind of lay back in this exaggerated posture and hold my thumb out, and the engineers would stop. He said they like girls. So I did, and just before it rained this big diesel stopped and let us in. I think he would have been happier if it had been just me, but anyway, we sang songs for him and played harmonica and he got us to New Orleans.”
“Not so long a ride.”
“Not really, but Kris thought it was great. I’m not sure he’d ever flagged a diesel down before. Neither had I, I guess, but nobody’s surprised that old men like young girls. After that, we kind of hitch-hiked and rode the rails all over. From Kentucky to California. It was a lot of fun.” She blew out a large cloud of tobacco smoke through lips pursed as though she might want to whistle.
“So why are you travelling alone?” I asked.
There was a long pause in which she smoked. “It’s complicated,” she said. “He was very philosophical. He didn’t want to own anything. He didn’t want to be tied down. He said you could only be free if you had nothing to lose.”
I thought about that for a few seconds.
“I don’t know about that,” I said. “I’m a drifter myself, and I find I’m freer to drift when I have some money.” She didn’t look at me but she laughed and took another drag off her cigarette.
“What kind of drifting do you do?” she asked.
“Gambling. Pool and cards.”
“You good at it?” she asked.
“I don’t think so. I think more about what I did wrong than what I did right. But I never lose. Almost never, anyway.”
“What do you do with your money?” she asked.
“I have a friend who invests it for me,” I answered. She thought about that for a minute.
“What’s a mutual fund?” she asked.
“I’m not entirely sure, but I have some. It’s like a pool of money where some guy who knows what he’s doing takes all the money you’ve invested and buys stocks with it, and if he’s good, you make money, and if he’s bad, you lose money.” She nodded.
“You drink?” she asked, and looked straight at me.
“If you’re asking about alcohol, no.”
“Why’s that?” she asked.
“Can’t tell you,” I said. “I just don’t care for it. To me, the real question is why anybody does. It tastes awful, makes you puke, and makes you feel terrible the next day.”
“True enough,” she said.
“So you were traveling around with no possessions, having a great time, but now all of a sudden you’re thinking you might go back to Baton Rouge.”
“Yeah,” she said, and blew a smoke ring at the ceiling. There was a pause that lasted maybe four minutes. She stared out the window and smiled intermittently, caught up in her own little world. “You know it’s all great to say that freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose,” she said, eventually, “but I’ve been worrying about this tooth that’s bothering me. And hobo-ing around like we’ve been doing, it’s really hard to get my birth control pill prescription refilled every month. And God only knows what would happen if I got pregnant, because I’m not married and have no health insurance. So it started occurring to me that I have a lot to lose even though I thought I had nothing to lose.”
“So what happened?” I asked.
“Oh, somewhere near Salinas I slipped away. I couldn’t bear to say goodbye. I loved him, he was wonderful, he sang the most beautiful songs, but I want to settle down. I want to have kids and all.” She looked down at the floor and raised her eyebrows and lowered the corners of her mouth in an expression that seemed to convey unhappy resignation. She looked up, not at me, but up the corridor of the car. Then she frowned. “Shit,” she said. “The Preacher’s here.”
“Who?” I asked, trying to look where she was looking.
“I guess you don’t travel on trains much” she said.
“Just started,” I answered.
“Okay, well, there’s this guy on the trains. Especially since Amtrak. You bump into him from time to time. All of us who spend a lot of time on trains call him The Preacher and we all avoid him. He just came into this car, so I’m going to leave.”
“Sorry. What?” I asked.
“The Preacher is here, and I think his ‘all aboard’ sermon is just weird, so I’m leaving. Thanks. It was fun talking to you.”
She got up, picked up her suitcase, still in the aisle, and strode towards the back of the car. Almost as soon as she left, John showed up and flopped back down.
“Hey, young feller, was that Bobbie who just left?” he asked.
“Could be,” I said. “She said her name was Barbara McGee.”
“I thought it was her. Met her a couple years ago. I think she was seein’ my friend Kris.”
“She left because she didn’t want to have to deal with somebody she called The Preacher,” I said.
“Oh, Hell, is he here?” John asked.
“So she said, but I don’t know him,” I answered.
John craned his neck and rose slightly in his seat, trying to get a glimpse. “Don’t see him,” he said. “If I have to listen to that speech o’ his one more time, I think I might bust.
“All aboard?” I asked.
“Yeah! You heard it?”
“No. Barbara mentioned it right before she bolted.”
“Oh.” There was a short pause. He was agitated in a kind of unfocused way and seemed to have a hard time sitting still. “It ever occur to you that things just ain’t right?” he asked.
“Yeah, sure,” I said.
“How?” His dark brown eyes bored straight in at me. He hadn’t seemed focused before.
“Well, I play pool for a living,” I said.
“Nine ball?”
“Yes.”
“Where?” he asked.
“Pool halls, bars, bowling alleys.”
“I know that,” he said. “But where?”
“Mainly Tennessee, Georgia and Alabama. Sometimes Louisiana and Arkansas.”
“Them Mississippi boys don’t know how to play, they don’t know how to gamble, and they don’t know how to lose,” he said.
“Well put,” I said.
“But you’re on a train to the Carolinas,” he said.
“Yep.”
“Changing your luck?” he asked.
“Just got out of jail,” I said. “Don’t want to be in Tennessee. Lost my car. Thought I’d try the trains.”
“Ain’t gonna work,” he said.
“Why’s that?”
“You take some money off some peckerwoods in Wadley, you just get in your car and roll. Never see ‘em again. If you’re travelin’ by train you take their money down to the depot and wait. While you’re waitin’, they round up ten of their friends and come beat the snot out of you and take everything you got, whether you won it off o’ them or not. It’s gonna fuck up your game. Plus, in South Carolina they don’t gamble for anything bigger ‘n lunch money on pool, and in North Carolina they put on airs but they’re really just a bunch o’ farmers.”
“Like Mississippi?”
“Like Mississippi with college degrees,” he said. “And mountains. And tobacco, But that’s not what I wanted to talk t’ you about. What’d you notice that just ain’t right?”
“Oh,” I said. “It’s a little weird.” I paused. Still that intense bright stare from John. “I play pool a lot. And particularly when I play alone, I notice that things aren’t right.”
“How?”
“I do the same thing every time, and I get slightly different results. Not something anyone else would notice, but slight variations that can’t be accounted for.”
“That it?” he asked?
“No, there are all sorts of other things,” I said.
“Like what?”
“Sometimes I get the feeling that my life is somehow governed by song lyrics,” I said. I had never voiced this thought before and it felt crazy to have sad it.
“Oh, Hell. Ever’body’s like that,” he said. “The first thing I remember knowin’ was the lonesome whistle blowin’ and a young ‘un’s dream of growing on the ride.”
“So it’s not just me?”
“No. Like I said, ever’body’s like that. I turned twenty-one in prison doin’ life without parole. And Mama did try. What makes them lyrics great is that all of us know ‘em in our hearts.”
“What were you in prison for?” I asked.
“I shot a man in Reno,” he said.
“Just to see him die?” I asked.
“Oh, fuck no,” he said. “What kind of psycho do you think I am?”
“Then why’d you kill him?”
“’’Cause he pissed me off! Why’d you think?” John answered. I let that one sit for a few seconds.
“What strikes you as weird?” I asked. He thought for a few seconds. He was agitated, and he shook his hands while he thought.
“There’s a madness,” he said, “a shuffling madness. You know how the steam used to exhale out of a train, like a dog’s breath in winter? I used to think that was locomotive breath. And I have this persistent dream. No, dream ain’t the right word, ‘cause I think about it when I’m awake. I’m the all-time loser, and I’m runnin’ headlong to my death.”
“Why would you do that?” I asked.
“Because I have to.”
“No you don’t” I said.
“Yes I do. I feel the piston scraping. Sweat’s breaking on my brow. Cain’t you see it?” He was pretty sweaty
“Stop,” I said.
“I cain’t,” he answered. “Charlie stole the handles and the train it won’t stop going. No way to slow down.”
“Who’s Charlie?” I asked.
“Somebody who did something he shouldn’t have done.”
“What did he do?” I asked.
“Can’t say,” he answered. He looked up. “Oh, Hell, I gotta go.”
“The Preacher?” I asked.
“Naw. The conductor. I ain’t got no ticket.” He got up and disappeared towards the back of the train. I looked up and saw the conductor, a rotund red-faced sixty-ish man making his way down the car. I found my ticket and wedged it into the corner of the seat-back in front of me, so he wouldn’t have to ask for it. Now that John was gone, I realized again that I had nothing to read except three magazines I’d already committed to memory. I resolved never again to leave home—not that I had a home, exactly—without either a book I hadn’t read or the Bible.
The conductor got to me a few minutes later. He punched my ticket with one of those funny hole-punchers they have. “You don’t look familiar,” he said, looking up at me. People usually don’t talk to me much, so this surprised me.
“Excuse me?” I asked. He handed me my ticket back.
“I been seein’ you talking to regulars like John and Bobby, but I don’t think I seen you around before.”
“I don’t take trains too much,” I answered.
“Why you startin’ now?” he asked. “Amtrak done fucked everything up.”
“My car got towed away and I couldn’t go get it back.”
“Why’s that?” he asked.
“Long story,” I said. He chuckled.
“All stories on a train are long stories,” he said. “Take care.” He moved on back towards the rear of the car where the man with the bottle in the brown paper bag was smiling blankly towards the black window.
I moved to the window seat, thinking I might attract less attention further from the aisle. I had nothing to read and there was nothing to see out the black window. I could feel the wheels turning underneath my feet as I pulled down the shade on the window. I decided to pray.
I know, that’s odd. An interesting issue. Interesting to me, anyway. I’ve never really decided if I believe in God or not. I think about it a lot. Sometimes I got to church, sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I pray, sometimes I don’t. On the train between Atlanta and Toccoa, I decided to pray that where I was going was better than where I’d been. It felt odd, and pretty disingenuous, to pray to a God I wasn’t sure existed for something for my own advantage. I wasn’t praying for world peace or to end the suffering of children, I wanted an easier travel schedule and smooth pool tables. This was pretty self-centered, and I was aware of this. But I’d prayed. Perhaps that counted for something.
Then out of nowhere a crazy stranger sat down next to me like he was right at home. He touched me and said “I see you’re traveling alone, and by the way, son, you forgot to say ‘Amen’.” Had I been praying aloud? He had long black and grey hair, almost shoulder length, and an unruly black beard streaked with white. He looked vaguely familiar, but it didn’t come right away. How did he know I was praying, or what I’d prayed?
“I guess there’s something I need to explain,” he said. “I try to talk to everyone riding on this train. Some of them listen, but most don’t pay me no mind.” He stood straight up in his aisle seat. “All aboard,” he said, kind of loud, “everybody’s got to get on board.”
The funny thing was that nobody seemed to notice him. He still looked familiar.
“Pastor Leslie?” I asked. He looked at me sharply and I thought for a moment he was going to recognize me. No dice.
“Take that woman with the frown sittin’ across the aisle, with her briefcase open nigh on ninety miles. She never even noticed that lake back at Horseshoe Bend. And that couple with the kids at the front of the car, fussin’ all the way about some cookie jar. I wanna ask them what they see at their journey’s end. And there’s a feller I left sittin’ in the back. Keeps a smile on his face from a paper sack. He’s lookin’ out the window but he can’t see past the pain.”
Pastor Leslie, if that’s who he was, and I really wasn’t sure, stood up again. “And the train keeps rolling . And the world keeps turning.” He shook his index finger at me as if to make a point. “All aboard, everybody’s got to get on board” he said.
“Look, bud,” I said. “You need to calm on down. The other passengers are going to notice.”
“No, they’re not,” he said. “Nobody notices me here.”
He had a point. Nobody was looking up.
Then the train slowed down unexpectedly. The Preacher, or Pastor Leslie, or whoever he was, seemed to be trying to look out the window. As I raised it, he slapped my knee, saying “This is my stop, son, but you won’t be travellin’ alone.” He stood and left. What was he talking about? Who was going to be traveling with me? Jesus?
The train had stopped in Gainesville. The platform was lit so I could see The Preacher leaving the train, then leaving the platform. He seemed to be in a hurry, but that may have been because he didn’t want the conductor to catch him. I tried to wave goodbye, but then it seemed like he’d vanished.
There was a silver glow to the light outside the way there is when the moon’s out but you can’t see it. For reasons I couldn’t explain then, but might now, I lost my breath and my blood ran cold as stone. What had happened? Was it Pastor Leslie? Either way, was he insane?
Then the conductor shouted “all aboard” from the platform, and the train started rolling. I felt the wheels rolling underneath my feet.
This just wasn’t right at all and I knew it. I called Mrs. W at the next stop, Toccoa. I didn’t really mean to call, though. I got off the train to stretch my legs, but it was raining. I looked around for a place to hide from the rain. There was an old water tank across the tracks, and a bunch of hobo-looking guys were huddled underneath it. There was boxcar on a sidetrack near the water tank, both doors open. One of the guys under the water tank waved. “Hey!” he yelled.
“Hey to you,” I answered.
“How’s it goin’?” he asked. He had to yell because the rain was really coming down.”
“Fine. You?” I was trying to be polite but was really looking for someplace dry.
There was a phone booth about ten yards down the platform.
“I’m a million miles away from home,” he called out. “Waitin’ on a train.” I waved and ducked into the phone booth. The door wouldn’t close. This brought me closer to the boxcar. A middle-aged man shot me a peace sign.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey,” he called back.
“How’s it going?” I yelled.
‘Rainy night in Georgia,” he said, and shrugged. Over his shoulder I could see a neon sign flashing, and could hear what sounded like taxis and busses passing through the night. Where were they? There wasn’t a road in sight
“You got that right,” I said.
“Seems like it’s rainin’ all over the world,” he said, and shrugged again. He turned to leave the door of the boxcar, and I could see he was holding a guitar.
“All aboard!” the conductor shouted.
Oh shit. Because it was raining, the conductor hadn’t come out onto the platform, he’d just stuck his head out the door at the last minute, and the train had started rolling immediately thereafter. No chance for me to get back on board. Well, damn.
I took a quick inventory of my possessions. It was not encouraging. I had a little over three hundred dollars and the clothes on my back. Nothing to read. I had several dollars in change, including a 1973 silver quarter. I moved that into the other pocket. I dialed Mrs. W’s number, and then, when prompted, dropped most of my change into the change slot. She answered almost immediately.
“Wertheimer residence,” she said.
“Hi, Mrs. W,” I said.
“Henry!” she said, at first excited, then “Is everything okay?”
“Yes, ma’am. I just missed my train and I had a thought I wanted to discuss with you.”
“Where are you?”
“How are things in Toccoa?” she asked.
“It’s raining here, too,” she said. I thought a second, then decided not to say anything about that. “So what’s on your mind, Henry?” she asked. “You don’t usually call out of the blue.” I could hear the scrape of the thumb-wheel against the flint of her Zippo and the relieved sound of her inhaling her smoke.
“Do I have enough money to go to college?” I asked.
“Oh, Lord, yes, Henry. You have enough for a Ph.D. at Yale. Are you thinking of going to school?”
“I think so. Ever since that fight in Hixson, I haven’t liked the way things are going,” I said.
“Have you been losing at pool? Or cards” she asked. I thought I detected a note of something almost hopeful in her tone of voice.
“Oh, no ma’am,” I said. “But I can’t seem to get anywhere, since I lost my car, and this whole train thing doesn’t seem to be working out too well.”
“What’s happening? You haven’t been gone that long.”
“Since you dropped me off at the bus station, everything that’s happened to me seems highly improbable.”
“Everything that happens to all of us is improbable, Henry. But all of the alternatives are equally improbable. You’re not becoming a conspiracy theorist are you?”
“I have no idea what that is, but I doubt it,” I said.
“Do you think people have been plotting things in secret?” she asked.
“No, ma’am. About what?”
“Oh, you know. The Kennedy assassination. The Trilateral Commission. ”
“The what?” I asked.
“It’s a government deal,” she said.
“Like Amtrak?” I asked.
“I don’t think it’s quite that sinister,” she answered. “What kind of improbable things are you talking about?”
“It’s hard to explain. Somebody came up to me earlier and told me a story that sounded almost like ‘I’ve Been Working on the Railroad.’”
“So?” she asked.
“Well, I’m on a railroad. What are the chances? And then it sounded like one of the other characters in the story was trying to make like he was really acting out ‘Oh, Susannah.”
“So? I still don’t get it,” she said.
“Well, I’m no lawyer, but ‘you’ve got the wrong song’ seems like a pretty lame defense.”
“Listen, Henry. I will admit that whenever you’re around a number of exceedingly improbable things seem to happen. That’s been true since I’ve known you. You have plenty of smarts, but your brain roams all over the place.”
“Okay, about this improbability thing. Have I told you about my problem with pool shots?” I asked.
“About how sometimes when perform the same process you get divergent results?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“You’ve me about it, yes,” she said.
“And?”
“The most logical explanation is that changes or differences that are too small for you to detect account for the variations,” she said.
“What if the rules of the cosmos are set up in a very orderly pattern, like a checkerboard, but there are some disturbances at the margins that are somehow not influencing the larger grid? Some improbable, even impossible, events that never get noticed because they’re happening off in the corners where the scientists and doctors don’t watch?’
“Like in pool halls?” she asked, and I could hear her lighting another cigarette.
“Maybe.”
“Henry, go to college. Take physics from a real physicist. Take chemistry and chemistry lab. You know math pretty well, but math isn’t grounded in reality. It’s just out there. Take some sciences grounded in observation.”
“And you think further education will explain my pool shot problem?”
“In a way, but education has a way of luring you in with a question, then making that question irrelevant.”
“So college.”
“Yes, Henry. You need to go to college.”
I took her advice. I went to college. I studied physics. It didn’t help, but it gave me different ways to ask the question.
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