Chapter 15: Physics, Math and Greek

My first class on my first day of class was Physics for Physics Majors, in an amphitheater in a round building in the middle of something called the Math and Science Center. It had been some architect’s attempt to update what a sedate red-brick liberal arts college might want to look like thrust unwillingly into the design notions of the 1960s, but already by the middle of the 1970s it looked exceptionally stupid. For reasons I didn’t understand then and still don’t, architects changed their minds about what all buildings should look like in 1960, and despite the fact that no non-architect agreed with any of the the architects, everything built since the early sixties looks a lot like the Math and Science Center. Sterile and boxy. The exception is single-family residences, and the reason for that is that no one will pay for this junk with his or her own money. Since nobody likes modern architecture, the logical question is: Why? Why do people pay for this crap? Why not design and build something people actually like?

Physics was a 9:00 a.m. class. You walked in from this enormous bricked courtyard to this small circular building with linoleum flooring in a circular hall that led to one of two doors to an amphitheater-style classroom, which was sort of circular. The rows of seats were steeply banked, so that when you sat, if you turned to look behind you, you were looking at someone’s knees. I got there about ten minutes before class was supposed to begin and took a seat near the center at the back, pretty high up. I had nothing to do, so opened my textbook. The preface was about the author’s wonderful colleagues, and the introduction was about the awesome splendor that is Science, so I skipped to Chapter I. It was about vectors. It seemed pretty straightforward. Somebody sat down to my right. After a minute I looked up.

“Hey,” she said. “I’m Toni.” She extended her hand, and I shook it. “You a sophomore, too?” she asked. She had a Memphis/Delta accent. Trim but tall, jeans and a puffy-sleeved shirt in what may have been seafoam green satin.

“Pleased to meet you, Toni,” I said. “I’m Henry. And no, I’m a freshman.”

“Really?” she asked. “You look so mature. Far out! And it’s really, really weird that they let you in here, because I tried to sign up for it last semester and they wouldn’t let me. Said it was too demanding.” She had shoulder-length brown hair, which she flipped behind her right ear. It didn’t catch, so she did it again. She was looking at me, expecting an answer.

“I took a couple of years off between high school and college,” I said, “so I’m a little older than most freshmen.”

“So why do you think they’d let a freshman male take a course that they wouldn’t approve for a freshman female?” asked.

An almost-tall and lanky young man in dark blue corduroy Levi’s and a denim jacket sat down to my right. He had a lot of curly dark-brown hair and hadn’t shaved for two weeks. He was wearing desert boots, an eccentric choice even in 1974. “Hey, Toni,” he said, without acknowledging me. He was carrying a notebook and a textbook. He placed the textbook neatly under his seat, then wrote the day’s date on the top line of the first page of his notebook with a fine-point Bic pen.

“Hey, Rob,” she said, without looking at him. “So are you some kind of physics genius or something?” Toni asked me.

“No, really,” I said. “I’m a double major in Physics and Math, but I never took a Physics course before.”

“What?” both Toni and Rob said. Rob noticed me now.

“I’m a freshman. I haven’t taken any English courses, either.”

“But in high school?” Toni asked.

“No, no. I took General Science and Chemistry. Biology, too. There was a Physics, course, but it wasn’t required for graduation, so I didn’t take it.”

Both of them glared first at each other, then at something else: Toni glared at the toes of her right foot. She’d crossed her legs and was bouncing her right foot in an agitated manner, and she seemed to be staring at the toe of her shoe as she did so. Rob propped his head in his hand and stared, apparently, at the date he’d written at the top of his notebook sheet. I left them to it and continued reading the textbook. It was about vectors. Interesting, but simple.

Almost exactly on time, the professor walked in. He was young-ish, with light brown shoulder-length hair pulled behind his ears and a slightly bushy but not long beard of the exact same color. He was wearing blue wide-wale corduroy jeans, an off-white cable-knit fisherman’s sweater with an enormous turtleneck that looked hot, and desert boots. My second pair of desert boots in as many minutes. What this a Physics thing? The professor was neither tall nor short, and despite perfectly erect posture, unusual on any campus in 1974, he had a casual, fluid way of moving. I looked around. All of the women in the classroom—maybe a third of those present—were watching him with rapt attention, but none of the men had noticed him at all. He took his place behind the large lab-style table that served for a lectern and desk at the front of the amphitheater, opened his textbook to a particular page, put a yellow pad of paper with some notes to his left, then looked over his shoulders at the blackboards behind him, perhaps to verify that they were blank. I was trying to decide how old he was. Twenty-four? Thirty-five? Couldn’t say. He looked at the textbook page and rubbed his hands together as though washing them, then stood up straight.

“Good morning, I’m Lorne Dannhausen,” he said, conversationally. The room immediately became quiet. “This class is Physics 108. Physics for Physics Majors.” His voice was not exactly quiet, but he was making no effort to project. Still, you could hear every word, even as far back in the classroom as I was, and it was a big room, because everyone was listening carefully. “The first thing I want you to know about this class,” he said, “is that we mean it just as we title it. This class is for Physics majors. We expect to challenge those students who are entering our discipline. If you’re looking for a course to fulfill your major’s natural science requirement or a core course requirement because this time fit your schedule, you might want to look at another course. Here, we will explore Newtonian dynamics and its limitations to an extremely thorough degree, and will touch on elements of Einsteinian physics and quantum mechanics that will prepare Physics majors for upper-level courses but are not necessary for practitioners of other disciplines. Does anyone have any questions at this point?” He looked around. No one raised his or her hand.

“Next, he continued, I am going to assume a certain degree of mathematical competence that you may not have if you have not completed a course like Mathematics 104, the introductory Calculus course that the Math department here offers. Is there anyone here who has not taken such a course at the college level?” Three or four of us raised our hands. He looked at me. “The mathematics in this course is very difficult, and I will not slow down. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir,” I answered.

“No need to call me ‘sir,’” he said. “You’re sure you belong here? A bad grade in your sophomore year can adversely affect your future.”

“Yes, sir. I’m a freshman who had a really good high school math experience.”

He smiled, but everyone who was looking at me had a “you don’t belong here you turkey ” expression. “The same goes for the rest of you who raised your hands,” he said. “This is a course for people familiar with calculus. I am not going to slow the pace of the class to teach elementary Calculus to you. You need to know that going in. If you don’t, this may not be the right course for you. Also, the basic concepts of physics need to be familiar to you. Is there anyone here who hasn’t taken either the introductory physics course here at this college or a good high school physics class?” I thought about keeping my hand down, but decided to be honest and raised my hand. Mine was the only hand in the air. He looked at me with a slightly worried expression. “Perhaps you should come talk to me at the end of class,” he said. After warning us for about fifteen more minutes how hard his course was going to be, and how nobody that didn’t want to live inside a particle accelerator belonged in his class, he said we could go.

I was in a middle seat, so it shouldn’t have been hard to wait until the tide of exiting students left to gain access to the aisle and so go speak with Prof. Dannhausen, as he’d requested, but it turned out to be not so easy. Toni to my left and Rob to my right both stood and each of them expected me to leave one way or the other. They both stood and looked at me, neither happy.

“I’m just waiting on everyone to leave,” I said. “I need to speak to Prof. Dannhausen.”

“Dr. Dannhausen,” said Toni. “And we want to leave, too, so you need to go.”

“But I can’t” I said. “You guys are on either side of me.”

“Look, loser, you need to pick right or left, then you need to go. I’m not interested in any more of your undereducated phallocentric bullshit,” said Toni.

“So you want me to leave, right or left, and then you’ll both leave the same way?” I asked, slightly puzzled. All of the rest of the students were long gone, and Prof. Dannhausen was watching us patiently.

“Yes!” said Toni, irritably, as though talking to a five year old to whom she’d explained this point fifteen times.

“Okay.” I picked up my books and turned towards Rob. He pivoted and walked straight out. Behind me Anna sighed an exasperated sigh. “Really. Men!” she said to herself.

Rob and Toni turned right and went upstairs to leave the amphitheater together and I turned left to go downstairs where Prof. Dannhausen was waiting next to the lab table-shaped lectern.

“I see you made friends with Toni and Rob,” he said.

“You know them?” I asked.

“Yes. Since they’re students I shouldn’t comment on them, but I know them. How did you find your interaction with them?” he asked.

“Eccentric,” I said.

“I think they are pretty focused on each other,” he said. He thought about it a second. “Well, he’s focused on her, anyway. But let’s talk about Physics.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Ohay. I will support whatever decision you make, but this has the reputation of being a very difficult class,” he said.

“I understand,” I said. “I can do the work.”

“Everybody else in the class has had a year of high school physics and some college physics. They’re all Physics majors. One might assume they’re better prepared for this course than are you,” he said, then immediately thought he might have gone too far. “I don’t mean to malign your intellect or abilities, but part of what goes into a college education, unavoidably, is preparation. It is possible that many of the students in this class have a degree of preparation that will help them succeed here. You can catch up by taking a few introductory courses. But like I said, I will support whatever decision you make.”

“Professor, I appreciate your interest and your concern. I think I will be able to do the work.”

“Okay,” he said. “The first problems we’ll be addressing have to do with constant acceleration and vectors. Do you know what a vector is?”

“A vector is a mathematical quantity with a magnitude and a direction.” He looked at me funny. He may have been surprised at the simple directness of my answer, I don’t know. I was quoting his textbook.

“Okay,” he said, hesitantly.

“Look, I know I went to City High and don’t have much of a Physics background, but I looked through the first chapter and I don’t have any trouble with kinematics in scalar forms, which is what your getting at, or with several vectors operating at once,” I said.

“Okay,” he said, hesitantly, and thought. “Do you have an analogue for your ability to understand this stuff?’

“Analogue?” I asked.

“I guess I mean explanation,” he said.

“I’m a professional pool player, so the idea of forces acting on masses at an angle comes pretty natural to me,” I said. He nodded. “But mainly, in the time I had before class I looked through the first chapter of your textbook and I really didn’t have any trouble following it.”

He nodded. “Still, you don’t have much background. We’re going to cover all of mechanics, thermodynamics, electromagnetism, and optics. We’re going to discuss it in the context of Newton, Einstein, and quantum mechanics. It’s a tough course.”

“Yes, sir. I think I can do the work.”

“Having talked to you, I’m sure you can do the work,” he said. “Just do it. Don’t fall behind. Don’t get so busy chasing pretty girls or beer that you don’t do your homework.”

“No risk of that, sir,” I said.

“Really?” he asked.

“Not that I’m aware of,” I said.

“You didn’t notice Toni?” he asked.

“The girl sitting next to me in class?”

“Yes. You didn’t notice that she’s extraordinarily pretty?” he asked.

“Yeah, well, I guess I didn’t notice.”

“So, if I ask you to calculate how far an object traveled if it started with an initial velocity of five meters per second and constant acceleration to 15 meters per second, how would you calculate it?” he asked.

“I’d have to think,” I said. He didn’t like that answer.

“What would you think about?” he asked, crossing his arms. He was still holding a chalk, and he deftly held it between two fingers, like a cigarette, so that it didn’t put a mark on his jacket.

“Well, just looking through the problems, it looked like you could restate all of the linear acceleration problems in terms of four or five equations based on what’s missing,” I said.

“Excuse me?” he asked.

“Well, I always liked word problems in math, and it seems like to me it would be more efficient to state all these acceleration problems in terms of what’s missing.”

“Explain,” he said. I had his attention now, but I didn’t understand why. I was just stalling for time on a homework problem.

“Okay, well the book makes a big point of saying that the change in displacement is the same as the velocity times the change in time.”

“Okay,” he said. “How would you write that down?”

“Gack. I don’t know,” I said. ‘But you were asking me how far something had traveled. And these things all seem to be related. Change in displacement, velocity, change in time.”

He wrote Δs = vΔt on the blackboard behind us. “Does that ring any bells?” he asked.

“No, sir,” I said, “but the textbook did use delta for ‘change’ so if displacement is ‘s’, velocity is ‘v’ and time is ‘t’, that’s what I just said, yes, sir.”

“And you never saw this before?” he asked.

“No sir.” We went on for maybe half an hour, and I explained how it looked like four or five equations would suffice to figure out missing variables in straight line acceleration problems. He was very keen on the idea that someone must have explained this to me before.

“I’m sorry, Professsor, and I really didn’t mean to take up so much of your time. This was just an idea that occurred to me while I was looking through the book. I’m sure nothing will come of it.” He’d written five equations on the blackboard. I had no idea what he was getting at.

“And you’ve never been taught physics before?” he asked again.

“No, sir. But I’ll study hard, I promise.”

“That’s not the point,” he said. “I don’t see the world this way, so I don’t teach it as such, but there are many physics instructors who teach their students how to solve uniform acceleration problems with these same five equations that you claim to have deduced in a few minutes before class began. If true, you have a remarkable mind and a remarkable affinity for the subject matter. I’ve never seen anything like it. If it’s true.” Gack. He thought I was lying to impress him. I thought I was bullshitting.

“I know you don’t know me, but I really have no interest in impressing people,” I said, “and I really don’t like calling attention to myself, and really, those five equations seemed to be pretty much calling out from the order in which the problems were presented.”

He thought a minute. “Whichever way it works out, good luck with the class,” he said.

“Thank you sir,” I said, and left. College was weird already.

My first math class was next. The classroom was in a building next door, large for a classroom but still much smaller than the amphitheater. Maybe forty-five desks. I took a seat close to the back. There were a few students already present, all flipping through the textbook. Unlike the physics class, none of them seemed to know each other. The Physics students had tended to clump up in groups of three four or five. The Math students seemed to disperse as far as possible, maintaining the maximum amount of separation. When they sat down, they didn’t look around for people they knew, they looked down. At their books, at their notebooks, at something they were reading. None of them looked around much. Their dispersal in the classroom they would have reminded a chemistry student of an ideal gas obeying Boyle’s law, but since this was math I guess id didn’t count.

Eventually someone took the desk to my right. He looked around before he sat down a little more than the others, but he never really looked at me. He opened his textbook and tried to look at it for a few seconds then looked up again. He fidgeted a little. He was wearing a Texas orange tee shirt , grey pinstriped bell-bottomed suit pants, and brown suede cowboy boots. His jaw-length hair was parted in the middle and kept in place by a beaded headband of a vaguely Hindu design. Or maybe Jain. What do I know?

He saw me looking at him. I looked down at my book, trying to fit in.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey,” I answered.

“This is Math, right?” he asked.

“Mathematics 150a. Single Variable Calculus,” I said.

“Good. Thanks. I’m pretty fucked up and sometimes I walk into the wrong class by mistake. Last year I went into multi-variable differentiation and sat down and was takin’ notes and shit and I could totally follow it all and the fuckin’ prof started raggin’ on me about being in the wrong class and all and I said ‘Cool it man. I can like totally dig this class’ and he asked me a question about differentiating this three variable problem he was working on and I totally knew the answer but when I answered right he was still mad but I thought if I could do the work I oughta be allowed to stay but he was totally like you’re just a freshman and you need to go to Math 140 down the hall and it was a calculus survey that was like totally bogus high school math. I like went to none of the classes and got like the highest grad in the class and all.”

“So you’re high on marijuana?” I asked.

“Yeah, sure. And a little coke. I’m Stoney,” he said, and held out his hand.

“Stoney?” I asked.

“Actually it’s not my name. That’s a nickname. My real name is Tom Jackson, but everybody calls me Stoney on account of my name.”

“I don’t get ‘Stoney’ from ‘Tom,’” I said. “Are you sure it’s your name that got you that nickname?”

“Oh, sure,” he said. “Thomas Jonathan Jackson. That’s me. Also Old Blue Light.” I had no idea what he was talking about, and it showed. “You don’t know Stonewall Jackson? ” he asked.

“Oh, God. Yes. Sorry,” I said. “I’m Henry.” I shook his still-outstretched hand.

“How’s it goin’, Henry?” he said. “So what do you think this class is going to be about?” he asked.

“Let’s look at the book,” I said.

“I don’t know, man,” he said. “I’m pretty fucked up.”

“On reefer and coke,” I said.

“There may have been some tequila involved, too” he said. “I kinda forgot today was the first day of class, then I remembered and came running over, and running got everything kinda churned up inside me. I shoulda maybe cut class, but I’m already here and it’s the first day and all. Besides I don’t really want to walk very far right now.”

Just so you know, the class began at 11:00 a.m.

“Okay, Stonewall, I’ll read you the topics from the table of contents for the first few chapters.”

“Far out. Thanks,” he said. He closed his eyes and composed himself as though meditating.

“Functions. Limits. Differentiation of Algebraic Functions. Applications of Differentiation. Integration.”

After a few seconds he opened his eyes. “What? That’s it?” he asked.

“Afraid so,” I said.

“Aw, fuck. Another fucking high school class.”

“It is pretty lean,” I agreed.

“I’m a fucking sophomore at this Mickey Mouse fucking school and I still haven’t taken a single fucking course that teaches me a single fucking thing. If I could walk I’d leave here right now.”

“I’m with you,” I said.

“You’re stoned, too?” he asked. “Man, you don’t show it.”

“No, no. I’m straight,” I said. He thought a minute.

“You’re a sophomore, too?” he asked, tentatively.

“Nah, I’m a freshman.”

“Then why the fuck aren’t you in that lame-ass Math 140 fucker?” he asked.

“You can skip it with faculty advisor approval.”

“Who’s your advisor?” he asked, after taking a second to focus.

“Dr. Ladd.”

“Mine, too. I begged and pleaded with that motherfucker not to make me take that 140 course, but he said high school math courses were unreliable. Fuck that. I was in AP math and my math teacher’s day job was at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. He fucking owned math,” said Stoney.

“Where’d you go to high school?” I asked.

“Lawrenceville,” he said.

“Where’s that?” I asked.

“New Jersey. It’s right down the road from Princeton. It’s one of the big deal up-east boarding schools. You?”

“City High in Chattanooga, Tennessee.” I said.

“Yeah, I could tell you were Southern,” he said. “And you got good math at City High?”

“Yeah. Like you. Great teacher.”

“Far out. That’s really cool. Wake me when the prof gets here,” he said. He put his head down on his desk and fell asleep immediately.

“Looking through the book, it really was disappointing. In the entire semester, we weren’t going to study anything I didn’t already know.

After a few minutes, a youngish blonde man with slightly buck teeth came in to the classroom, closed the door behind him, and strode purposefully to the desk at the front of the classroom. He put his book and notebook on the desk and looked up. He was expecting us all to go silent, which we did, although it took a few seconds. He was wearing a blue blazer, grey flannel slacks, and a blue dress shirt whose collar did not button down. No tie. Which was wrong, since his collar didn’t button. I couldn’t see his shoes under the desk. “Good morning,” he announced, in a slightly over-loud voice, “I am Assistant Professor Wallace Wolfe. This is Mathematics 150, Single-Variable Calculus,” he said. I tapped Stoney on the shoulder. He’d asked me to let him know when class began. He sat up with a start.

“What the fuck?” said Stoney, under his breath. Prof. Wolfe noticed him.

“Oh, shit, not this fucker again,” said Stoney.

“Is there a problem, Mr. Jackson, I think it is?” asked Prof. Wolfe.

Stoney shook his head a little as if to clear the cobwebs. “No, doc. Sorry. I musta fallen asleep or something. Good to see you again.”

“This course, Mathematics 150, Single-Variable Calculus, is the most important math class you will take as an undergraduate. It will lay the foundation for all of the math you will study later, and mastering it cannot be overemphasized.”

“Jesus, what an asshole,” said Stoney, under his breath. He put his head back on his desk and appeared to fall asleep immediately.

“I cannot overstress the importance of this course,” said Asst. Prof. Wolfe, seeming slightly peeved at either Stoney’s presence or his slumber. “For those of you who have yet to explore Calculus, this course will open up new ways of seeing the world. For those of you who have studied Calculus, you will see the study in a new and more rigorous way. The holes in your understanding will be filled, and you will be prepared for higher math,” he said.

Stoney, who appeared to have been not so much listening as drooling, sat up long enough to fish some Ray-Ban aviators out of a pocket, put them on, and put his head back down, said, under his breath, “Lord fuck a duck, I’m stuck for eternity in Calculus one.”

Asst. Prof. Wolfe continued without commenting on Stoney. The students in nearby desks were ignoring him studiously. “Our methods will be rigorous. Our approach, absolute,” said Wolfe. “There can be no half-right answers in math, so do not expect accommodations. You are adults in the pursuit of higher learning. You must take what is yours, but expect no favors. Knowledge will be presented to you, but you must take it, you must learn it, you must embrace it. We will not feed it to you. You must grasp it and feed yourselves. Read through Chapter 1.6 and do all of the intervening problems before next class. Good day.” He picked up his books and strode manfully out of the classroom.”

Stoney sat up. “Jesus H. Christ. What an asshole,” he said. “Are you planning to come to class?”

“I guess so,” I said.

“Wolfe isn’t spontaneous enough to do pop quizzes. Any way I can convince you to call me if he announces a test?”

“Bud, I’ll do my best, but I’m forgetful, and I don’t want it to be my fault if you fail.”

“I’ll give you some reefer for every test you tell me about,” he said.

“Don’t smoke it,” I said.

“I thought you were a Math major,” he said.

“Double major. Math and Physics,” I said.

He took off his sunglasses to look me in the eye. His were enormously dilated. “Math and Physics and you don’t smoke dope?” he asked, dubiously. I shrugged.

“Nope.”

He thought about it for a few seconds, quite intently. I looked back at him. “If I weren’t so totally in the bag I’d know what to do about this,” he said, and stood up. “But I’d still appreciate it if you’d call me when there’s going to be a test. I don’t seem to know anyone else in this class.” He replaced his sunglasses, picked up his textbook and stood. I stood, too. “Christ on a crutch, but I’m fucked up,” he said, and lurched out.

I had one other class that day, Greek, and it was on the other side of campus, in Furman Hall, a grey stone building that stood out amongst the red brick buildings that made up the rest of the campus. The night before I’d walked around and located the building but wasn’t sure about the room because the building had been locked up. I found the building again, and the classroom was up a flight of heavily, if indifferently, carpeted stairs that were part of a large central staircase that led both up and down from the ground-level entrance and seemed to render the entire floor-numbering idea somewhat ambiguous. There was no floor at ground level, although there was one a half floor below the entrance and another a half-floor above. My classroom, number 212, had a high-school-style glass panel door, a floor of various glossy beige linoleum squares, the requisite blackboard up front, and about twelve of those movable desks you have in high school. None were occupied, and they were all jumbled together in the right rear corner of the classroom, so, I pulled one out and sat in it. This felt very vulnerable. After sitting there for less than a minute but more than thirty seconds I got up and moved several other desks out into the classroom space. I spaced them randomly. I put maybe seven in various places around the classroom, most, but not all, vaguely pointing towards the desk at the front of the classroom. There was a lectern, too, but it was off in the corner. I sat back down at my desk and opened my textbook about twelve minutes before class was scheduled to start. I was still alone in the room. I began reading the first lessons. Greek is wonderful. From the start. Really. Not everybody can do math or physics, but you can learn Greek. And you’ll be much happier if you do.

A few minutes later, a young blonde woman in sunglasses, bell-bottomed jeans, a red, white and blue striped tube top, and wooden platform shoes maybe three inches high tossed the door open, looked around disapprovingly for a second, then strode on in. The shoes made a pronounced clip-clop sound on the linoleum as she walked. She selected a desk not far from me, straightened it out in a way that brought it closer to and in line with my desk, sat, and then stretched like someone waking up from a long sleep. It was odd, but eye-catching. She stared off into the middle distance for a minute. I looked back at my textbook. Another young woman appeared a few minutes later as if by magic. I hadn’t heard her entrance, but there she was, standing nearby, tall and slender, with shoulder-length brown hair and dark brown eyes. She was wearing beige linen slacks and a white cotton button-down shirt, only the collar tabs weren’t buttoned. She had a light dark brown cotton sweater tied around her shoulders and some kind of grey-to-beige leather shoes that seemed to be high heeled, although I couldn’t really see. She looked around, then pulled a desk in line with the other student and I. Ours seemed to be a self-organizing universe.

At this point we had desks arrayed in a straight line defined by three points determined by choice. Each of the women to my left and right had selected a classroom-appropriate distance, but both had chosen me as their apparent point of reference, which seemed weird. All I’d done was get there first. I was looking at my textbook—my feeling for Greek was love at first sight and this was the first time I’d ever really started looking at it—but both of them seemed to be glancing at me from time to time as though they knew me. Or expected me to say something. Or something. I smiled at first one, then the other, but was already memorizing the Greek alphabet. α…β…γ…δ…ε…ζ… It was rote work, but it felt good to look at it. Three or four more students came into the classroom, looked around, and moved desks into an indifferent line behind us. If’ I’m not mistaken, the two women to my left and right moved a tiny bit closer to me. Primary squatter’s rights, because we’d gotten there first?

I looked up to check out a noise behind me and to my left and in so doing, caught the eye of the young woman in jeans and a tube top. Pretty girl.

“Hey,” she said. She was still wearing her sunglasses. Round ones with gold rims. “I don’t recognize you.”

“I’m Henry,” I said. “I’m new here.”

“A transfer student?” she asked.

“No, no,” I said. “I’m a freshman.”

“And you’re taking Koine ?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said. I’m not good at this kind of social chitchat. It seems odd to me for a stranger to ask me questions, but there wasn’t really a reason not to answer.

“I was expecting most of the people in here to be philosophy majors,” she said. “I don’t recognize anybody though.” She looked at me for a minute with what seemed like a strangely piercing stare. “I’ve got it,” she said after a few seconds. “You were in Viet Nam.” I could sense the woman to my right looking up at this.

“No,” I said, “I just want to study Greek.”

“So you weren’t in the military?” she asked.

“No, ma’am.” What in the world was she getting at?

“Well, that’s good,” she said. “I’m a Philosophy major, and we talk about the War a lot.”

“Isn’t it kind of over?” I asked.

She looked at me somewhat judgmentally for having asked this question. “It’s true that the worst of the hostilities seem to be over, and that Ho Chi Min’s freedom fighters seem to have won. But as philosophers we’re still sifting through the political and ethical detritus of the debacle to place the entire episode in its proper historical and moral perspective.”

“I know an Amtrak employee you should talk to,” I said.

“Amtrak?” she asked.

“Yes. Amtrak.”

“What’s Amtrak?”

“It’s what’s left of passenger rail service in the United States following the Nixon administration’s reorganization of everything.”

“Well. We know Nixon is a criminal, but I don’t know much about this train thing,” she said.

“Four years ago, there was passenger rail service to thousands of little towns all over the South. Nixon took over the passenger rail service with this Amtrak deal, and all that’s gone now. Outside of Georgia, you can only catch passenger rail at big cities on major lines. All the feeders are gone,” I said. She looked at me for a few seconds. Two or three more students wandered into the classroom and pulled up desks behind those of us already there.

“I really think bombing Cambodia and deciding to bug the DNC headquarters are bigger issues than this train trip you’re on,” she said. As soon as she said that the classroom door swung open again and Prof. Krawiec came in. He paused at the door to survey us, and we all turned to look at him. He clearly paid attention to his clothing and hair. He was wearing an extremely carefully tailored, custom-made, dark caramel brown polyester suit, a canary yellow cotton shirt, and a dark brown and blue striped tie. He had an extremely full head of hair, carefully coiffed in an attempt to conceal an ear-to-ear comb-over, and a well-groomed beard. Hair and beard may have been dyed a walnut brown.

“Good morning boys and girls,” he said, from the doorway. “I am Prof. Kraweic, chairman of the Classics Department. This is Koine Greek. I don’t know most of you, so by way of introduction, I’d like to go around the room and ask everyone here why they want to study Koine. I’ll start with you,” he said, pointing to the young woman to my right, the pale blonde in the tube top. He walked to the front of the classroom, placed his books on the desk and moved the lectern to the center of the front of the classroom, a few feet in front of me.

“Me?” she said, removing her sunglasses. She looked around a bit as Prof. Krawiec nodded. “Hi. I’m Mary,” she said. “I’m a philosophy major, and I want to read Plato and Aristotle in their original language. I think subtleties can be lost in translation.”

“Thank you,” said Prof Krawiec, and looked at me.

“I’m interested in the New Testament,” I said. “Also Aristotle, I guess.”

“And your name is?” he asked.

“Henry. Henry Baida.”

“Ah. Mr. Baida, are you aware that your initials have a numerical significance in Greek?”

“Yes, sir. I think my father planned it that way. He was born in 1927 and believed in symmetry.”

“You’ll have to explain that to me later. And what parts of Aristotle interest you?” he asked. I got the feeling that he didn’t like me for some reason.

“The æsthetics, mainly. The Poetics and Rhetoric. I really like his writings on rhetoric.” He looked at me briefly as though I were trying to con him about something.

He looked at the young woman to my right. “And you are?” he asked.

“Mary Roberts,” she said. “This is my language elective.”

“And why did you choose Koine Greek as your language elective, Miss Roberts?” he asked.

“I’ve heard that you get a much clearer idea of what Jesus actually said if you read His words in Greek,” she said.

“Ah,” he replied. “I must presume you are right. The rest of the students were named Meg, Randy, Ginny, and Ralph, and their aspirations were somewhat vaguely expressed. They all just seemed to want to know Greek, and when Prof. Krawiec asked Meg why she chose Koine over Attic Greek, her answer, that the Attic course conflicted with one of her nursing courses, seemed to irritate him. His questions to the remaining few of my classmates was perfunctory. At the end of our introductories, he grasped the lectern in a meaningful way and sighed.

“I expect you’re wondering why such an important course is so poorly attended,” he asked. “I share this wonderment. It is singular that in Shakespeare’s day, grade school students in small villages could translate Greek into Latin and conversely, but now, 410 years later, a rudimentary understanding of either language is considered exotic. Here, though, you will learn Koine Greek, the lingua franca of the Mediterranean world at the time of Nero, at the time of Aristotle, at the time of Christ. When the Roman Empire was at the height of its powers, the citizens of Rome were much more likely to speak Greek than Latin. When Marcus Aurelius wrote his Meditations, fluency in Greek was assumed even in Rome, and fluency in Latin was not, at least outside the nobility. Thus Greek was the language of both philosophy and commerce.” In what sounded like a well-rehearsed speech, he talked about the history of Greek, and how a wide variety of island and other local dialects, and several different writing styles, had boiled down to three or four dominant dialects by the time of Thucydides, and then how Alexander’s army had taken Koine, probably a Macedonian variant of Attic, with them around the Mediterranean as they conquered everything they encountered, then pressed the conquered locals into Alexander’s army, where they learned Koine Greek at spear-point. What could be fairer than that? Aristotle, Alexander’s teacher, wandered around with him on his conquests, recording his thoughts in Koine and leaving an intellectual legacy that it would take the Reformation, the Renaissance, Sir Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, and hundreds of years of biological and botanical observation to overcome. “I want you to read all of chapter one. You should plan to have the Greek alphabet, both capital and small letters, memorized by this coming Monday, to be able to write all the letters, and recite the alphabet in order as well. Until you accomplish that, we will make little progress, so do it quickly. That will be all for today.”

We all gathered our things and walked out. The young woman in the tube top seemed irritated with me, the one in the linen slacks seemed to like me. Or something.

First day of college done.

Chapter 15: Higher Learning

I started college in 1974. College in the seventies was weird, although it didn’t seem so at the time. We had become accustomed to a steady decline of the role of rules and standards in our lives, and most people my age assumed that they could do whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted, and resented the imposition of any limits whatsoever. Drugs? Sure. All kinds, on demand. Sex? Sure. Every day. Strangely colored clothing that followed no conventions whatsoever? Of course. Plot-free films that made no sense at all? Routine. Having some minimal requirements for graduation, or a major? What the fuck kind of Nazi regime is this?

Students fell into categories. There were lots of categories, but everybody you met fit into one of them. Greeks. Stoners. Engineers. Musicians. English majors. Math Majors. Gay men. The professors fell into categories, too, but not quite as neatly as students. So, for example, you could discriminate between “Greeks” and “stoners,” pretty much on sight. It was harder to discriminate between “Professors who will have sex with their students” and “Professors who will not have sex with their students,” but both groups of professors were well-represented.

If you were a freshman in college in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1974, nothing about the way the school was organized would help you focus on a field of study or a career. College was a process, not a means to a degree, certainly not a means to an occupation. We were encouraged to explore and to make alternative suggestions.

All of which was bullshit, of course. Employers everywhere value the baccalaureate credential because it demonstrates that you can stick with the program, some program, for four years or however long it takes you to get that bachelor’s degree. That you stuck with the complicated, if amorphous, rules of some institute of higher learning long enough that it gave you a diploma says several things about you. It could be Harvard or Pinson State, but it says the same thing.

Let me take something I said earlier back. It did feel weird, it just didn’t feel weird to anybody but me.

All freshmen who didn’t hail from Nashville were required to live in student housing. Most freshman men lived in what was called the Freshman Quad, which was incomplete, if not silly, name because all the freshmen women lived somewhere else. We were all assigned a faculty advisor based on where we lived, so everyone in the south end of the third floor of Hemingway Hall on the Freshman Quad had the same adviser, one Walter Ladd, a Mathematics professor. He showed up a few days before classes started and commandeered José’s room to talk to us all, one at a time. José was a Cubano whose parents had fled right before Batista fell. His father was a doctor of some sort who’d had to deal with more straitened means after moving to Florida in 1959. José’s appreciation of American culture was a little limited because he’d grown up in Catholic, Spanish-speaking, Castro-hating private schools.

When it came my turn to talk to Professor Ladd, he seemed both glad to seem me and worried.

“Mr. Baida. Welcome,” he said, as I sat in José’s desk chair. “I am Dr. Ladd, professor of Mathematics. And I’m delighted to note that you are interested in my field of study.” He was in his mid-forties, had long-ish, dark-approaching-black hair, balding but not graying, erudite-looking and slightly indifferent, with a slight whiff of complete asshole in his mannerisms.

“Yes, sir,” I said. “I’m fascinated with math.” I looked around José’s room. There was a poster on the wall of two ducks having sex in flight over the legend “Fly United!” The only object on his bookshelves was a candle in the shape of a naked man with an erection picking his nose. José was a class act.

“Excellent, excellent,” he said. I couldn’t tell that he’d noticed José decorating tastes. “I see where you won the Tennessee State High School Mathematics Competition in 1971,” said Dr. Ladd. “I was on the committee that selected one of the problems.” He seemed very pleased with himself.

“Which one?” I asked.

“It involved three variables,” he said, smiling.

“The a2-b3+c3=0 one?” I asked.

“Well, there were two other equations, as well,” he said.

“Yeah, sure. It was fun.”

“Fun?” he asked.

“Yes, sir. We learned how to solve those in Algebra II. Line ‘em up right and they kind of solve themselves, once you know the trick. As I’m sure you know.”

“You learned to solve three variable equations as a senior in high school?”

“I think it must have been junior year, because I already knew how when I was in the contest.”

“Young man, none of the high school algebra texts have that particular set of problems. Some of the pre-calculus texts do, but none of the junior-level Algebra textbooks have them.”

“Well, Mrs. Wertheimer gave us lots of handouts that weren’t in the textbooks. I think …”

“Mrs. Wertheimer?” he interrupted.

“Yes, sir.”

“You aren’t referring to Dr. Margaret Wertheimer, are you?”

“‘Doctor’ I don’t know about, but her name was Margaret Wertheimer,” I said.

“You took high school algebra from Dr. Margaret Wertheimer.”

“I guess. If she has a doctorate,” I answered. Where was this going? How did he know Mrs. W?

“All right, my Mathematics prodigy, how would you have altered the three variable, cube-level factoring problem in the 1971/72 Tennessee State Math Competition to have made it more challenging?” he asked.

“Well, it would have been harder if you’d only given two variables with each equation.”

“Excuse me?” he asked.

“It would have been more fun if you’d given three equations, each of which has only had two of the variables in it. That would have required either good induction or powerful intuition. I mean, it was a good problem and all, but it’s the kind of thing that if you know how to solve it, it just lines up,” I said.

“And how would you, Mr. Baida, set up the equations so that each equation only contained two variables?”

“Just solve each one for zero,” I answered. “Set ‘a’ at zero and work out the other two.”

“All three variable equations are not amenable to that solution,” he noted.

“Oh, for sure. But some sets of three equations are. And I’m not sure how I’d solve that. It would be hard. You might need four equations to make it solvable. I’d need to work on that with a pencil for a while.”

“The problem wouldn’t be solving it, it would be proving that you’d found a solution,” he said.

“I get what you’re saying, but you could solve it so that two different equations with dissimilar components were solved to the same value. Say a2-c2=72 and b2+a3=72. Then a2-c2=b2+a3 states all three.”

“More difficult to pose,” he said. “I was asked to provide an algebra problem for a high school math competition.”

“Ah,” I said. He expected me to say something else. I didn’t.

“What’s this about a double major?” he asked.

“I’d like to double major in Physics and Math,” I said.

He had this odd reaction. He shuffled his cards and changed his posture. He shifted again in his chair. “An odd selection,” he said.

“Really? I thought it would be quite common,” I said. “They seem so closely related.”

“No,” he answered, firmly. “Pure mathematics is pure reason. A completely intellectual exercise. Physics and engineering and computer programming and that kind of thing is an attempt to describe observations in mathematical terms. Physics is much more like Botany or Journalism than it is like Mathematics. Math is pure. We don’t think about how it meshes with the observable universe.”

I wanted to ask why every math book I’d ever opened had so many word problems in it if math was so divorced from reality, but decided I’d probably irritated him enough already.

He looked at me expectantly, hoping he’d convinced me to give up this Physics foolishness, but I had nothing much to say, so I just looked back at him.

“Well, I guess we’re going to put you down as a double major, for now, but I will make a note to revisit this idea with you next semester,” he said. “Or perhaps next year. You won’t take much of either subject your freshman year.”

“Okay.”

“That leaves the question of your minor,” he said.

“Aside from Physics and Math, all I really want to learn is languages,” I said.

“Which ones?”

“Greek and Italian,” I said.

“Modern Greek? Attic?” he asked.

“Koine,” I said.

“Why?” he asked. He disliked me already, and his bafflement was colored by his asshole-ishness.

“To read Aristotle, Josephus, and the New Testament.” He instantly deduced that I was a Jesus Freak and adjusted his attitude accordingly.

“I see,” he said, and raised his eyebrows. “Greek is in the Classics department, and Italian is its own department. Neither will amount to a minor on its own. If you add Latin, you could get a Classics minor.”

“I already know Latin,” I said.

“You already know Latin,” he said, plainly disbelieving me.

“Yes, sir.”

“And just where did you pick it up?” he asked.

“My mom had a textbook from her grammar school on the shelves when I was a kid, and I read that. Then I took it in high school.”

He’d had about enough of me. “Translate ‘da mihi castitatem et continentiam, sed noli modo,’ he said, enunciating carefully.

“Roughly, ‘make me pure and virginal, but not just yet,’” I said.

He was surprised. “You know the quote?” he asked.

“I’ve heard it in English, but never before in Latin. I think St. Augustine said something like that when he was still sinning but thinking of saintliness.”

“So you could have just recognized the quote,” he said, looking at me critically. “Let’s have you translate some modern English phrase into Latin.”

There was a knock at the door. A young man with a ginger beard and long frizzy hair, black-rimmed glasses, and absurdly loud pants opened the door. His name was Milton, from the far end of our hall. The night before he’d been stoned beyond belief and was trying to remember whether his favorite Captain Beefheart song was titled “Big-Eyed Dudes From Venus” or “Big-Eyed Beings From Venus,” and the fact that he was unable to remember had him on the verge of tears.

“Mr. Ladd?” asked Milton.

“Doctor Ladd,” he answered. “Yes?”

“I have the 1:30 appointment,” he said, and came in.

“As you should be able to see Mr. …”

“Milton.”

“Mr. Milton, Mr. Baida and I are not done. So if you will wait in the hall…” Milton made a sheepish face and left, closing the door behind him. Ladd looked at me. “Where were we?” he asked.

“You don’t think I know Latin,” I said.

“Ah, yes. Translate some common modern phrase into Latin,” he said.

“Ad praesens ova cras pullis sunt meliora,” I said. He drew his head back and frowned.

“What’s that mean?” he demanded.

“Roughly, ‘a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.”

“No it doesn’t,” he said. “I didn’t hear anything about bushes. That was something about eggs.”

“Well, yes,” I answered. “Literally, ‘better eggs now than chickens tomorrow.’”

“But you’re still remembering, not translating,” he said. True enough. “Translate ‘to boldly go where no man has gone before.’”

I thought for a second. “I’d say ‘praecessi audacter qua haud vir has antea viator,’ I guess,” I said. I realized as I tried to translate it that my Latin was really rusty, but it didn’t matter. He couldn’t follow. He would need to write it down and look at it to decipher it, and he wasn’t going to do that. He thought a few seconds.

“I’m not so sure about that,” he said, either briskly or dismissively, depending on your point of view. “What courses do you want to register for?” he asked, re-opening his file folder on me.

“Calculus 201, Physics 202, English 101, Greek 108, and History 101.” He didn’t seem to be listening. He looked up at me.

“It says here you graduated from high school in 1972,” he said.

“I did.”

“What have you been doing for the last two years?” he asked.

“Travelling. Odd jobs. Deciding what I wanted to do. Playing pool.”

“And now, it appears, you are ready to resume your education.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And what classes do you want to register for?” he asked.

“Calculus 201, Physics 202, English 101, Greek 108, and History 101,” I said.

“Pre-Calculus, Mathematics 105, is a prerequisite for Calculus 201,” he said.

“According to the catalogue, that’s waivable with academic advisor approval.”

“How do I know you’re ready for Calculus?” he asked.

“I took Pre-Calculus in high school,” I said.

“High school programs are notoriously spotty,” he answered.

“I made straight A’s in high school,” I said. “I won first place in the won the Tennessee State High School Mathematics Competition in 1972. I’m a highly motivated student.” I shrugged.

“So you’re choosing to ignore my strong advice that you take Mathematics 105.”

“That’s not the way I’d put it,” I said.

“And this Physics course you want to sign up for. It’s called “Physics for Physics Majors.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You don’t need to take that. You’re a Math major.”

“I’m a double major.”

He glared at me for a few minutes. “I don’t know when I’ve encountered a more pig-headed young man,” he said. “You’re going to find that this university isn’t like a pool hall. Constant work is required, and the sage advice of elders and experienced academics is something to be prized, not ignored. I’m going to approve every one of these courses you want to sign up for. You’re going to quickly find out you’re in over your head. Then we’ll talk about your real academic goals. Thank you. You may go.”

Milton was dutifully standing in the hall. He smelled faintly of marijuana. I wondered if Prof. Ladd would notice.

If you'd like a copy of the novel this series of posts is turning into, or at least the first third of it, please send an e-mail to donmccrmck@aol.com

Thanks.

Chapter 13: Waiting for a Train. Which would make lots more sense if Blogger allowed footnotes.

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.

Chapter 12: A Trip That Wouldn’t Have Been Necessary in 1970

I wandered into the Chattanooga Trailways station with no specific plan. It was early afternoon. It was hot outside and it was unclear to me whether the station purported to be air conditioned or not. The only one ticket agent on duty did not appear to be an energetic man. The line of people waiting to talk to him was long and the walls were painted a strange green. The station smelled of stale cigarette smoke and diesel exhaust. When my turn came I told the ticker clerk I was headed for Atlanta. He told me I had options. I could leave in an hour and get there at ten or leave in three hours and get there at five. I took the latter. That gave me three hours to kill.

Three hours is a surprisingly long time if you have few plans and nothing to do. I also realized the three hours in which I had nothing to do while waiting on the bus were to be followed by three more hours in which I had nothing to do on the bus.

I spent a dime on a Chattanooga Times and then visited the station diner for a patty melt with grilled onions. I lingered at the counter for fifteen or twenty minutes after eating, enough time to complete the crossword puzzle, the Crypto quote, and the Jumble. I paid and went back to the waiting room and re-read the paper thoroughly, learning that someone named John Dean was testifying to the Senate about President Nixon, that my classmate Ricky Snopes had been arrested on suspicion of murder , and that another classmate, Gaylon Martin, was selling his car. From the Sports section I learned that the Dodgers were doing well but not great and that the American League now had something called a Designated Hitter. I couldn’t figure out what it was a Designated Hitter did. I really hadn’t been paying attention since I went out on the road.

Having thoroughly digested the paper, I had slightly less than two hours until the bus left for Atlanta.

I went back to the shop and bought Time, Newsweek, The New Yorker, and The New Republic. None had crossword puzzles.

By the time I boarded the bus I had a growing realization that President Nixon was in trouble because of something called Watergate.

I really hadn’t been paying attention.

The bus finally arrived and I got to Atlanta without cooking too much in boredom. When I got there it was still light and about ninety degrees, so I decided to take a cab to the train station. The cab rank was easy to find—short but right outside the station. My bag was so small I it into the back seat ahead of me and slammed the door behind me as I sat. The cabbie eased into traffic using the side-view mirror but without turning his head to check. “Where to?” he asked. His cab smelled strongly of nicotine, and he was listening to the Braves game on the radio.

“Terminal Station,” I said.

“You mean the train station?” he asked.

“You got it.”

“Can’t,” he answered.

“You have some prejudice against trains?”

“No. You can go wherever you want. But they tore down Terminal Station two years ago. It’s gone,” he answered.

“Why?”

“Amtrak,” he said.

“The Nixon train deal?” I asked.

“Yeah. When he’s not busy pulling out of Viet Nam, he’s concentrated on fucking up passenger rail. So where to?”

“Union Station, then,” I said.

“Sorry pal. Gone too. Last year. Same deal. The only place around here you can catch a train is Brookwood.”

“Why?”

“Amtrak,” the cabbie said. “The railroads were all losing money and wanted to shut down all passenger rail service, so Mr. Nixon, sweetheart that he is, turned it all over to Amtrak. You wanna go to Brookwood?”

“How far is it?” I asked.

“Not far. We’re almost there.”

“Okay. Let’s go.” There was a pause during which I heard a few pitches from the Braves game on his radio and he negotiated Atlanta traffic. I thought about asking him to take me to the Varsity for a chili dog, but wasn’t sure how far it was.

“You follow baseball?” I asked.

“Yeah, sure,” the cabbie answered.

“What’s a Designated Hitter?” I asked.

“The ruination of all that is holy,” he answered.

“Can you be more specific?”

“An abomination unto the Lord,” he said.

“How does it work?” I asked.

“Imagine the most fucked up thing in the world, and then fuck that up a lot more, and then put Atlanta traffic planers in charge of it, then translate it into Urdu.”

“Yeah, but how does it work?” I asked.

“It takes the game of baseball and fucks it up completely,” he answered.

“You may not realize it, but you give off a faint vibe of criticism about the Designated Hitter idea,” I said.

“That’s the most stupid fucking rule to be added to the stupid fucking rule book in the history of the whole fucking game. What those fuckers were thinking about is fucking beyond me. It’s something only a bunch of rich asshole owners who don’t want to retire fuckers who can still hit but who can’t field worth a shit could come up with and it’s the stupidest fucking thing in the world.”

“So how’s it work? I’ve been out of touch,” I said.

“Okay. In the American fucking League, The line-up can include one player who bats but does not otherwise take the field, and one player who takes the field but does not bat.”

“Why?”

“More runs.”

“So I’m guessing it’s always pitchers?” I asked.

“Always,” he answered.

“If you change the pitcher, do you have to change the designated hitter, too?”

“No. You can change the pitcher nine times, DH says put. Lineup card never changes except for the pitcher spot, which isn’t in the batting order, so the manager can do whatever he wants.”

“Can you still use pinch hitters?”

“Yeah. Only you don’t need them so much because the pitcher never bats.”

“And this is only in the American League?”

“Yeah. National League wouldn’t go for it,” he answered.

“So what are they going to do in the World Series? Designated Hitter or no?”

“DH in the American League parks, no DH in the National League parks.”

“This is stupid,” I said.

“I told you it was fucked up.”

“Okay, what’s Watergate?” I asked.

“Another Hungarian cluster-fuck. But you’re here at Brookwood, and I can’t wait around. Three bucks.”

I paid and left.

Brookwood Station was tiny. If that’s what it was. All the signs were marked “Peachtree Station.” It was right next to a freeway, ant the train tracks were way down below at the bottom of what might be the longest staircase I’ve ever seen.

There was one redcap standing outside, smoking a cigarette and ignoring the world around him in favor of an elaborate inner dialogue that involved demonstrative hand gestures. I passed him and entered the station house, which was about the size of a sub-development ranch split-level. Remember, this was Atlanta, proud city of over a million inhabitants. Its only train terminal was the size of our house in Chattanooga. It just didn’t seem right. Atlanta should have something like Penn Station. But no. It had a brick cottage with a long staircase.

There was one ticket agent on duty, head propped on hand, reading a Penthouse magazine with no apparent sense of impropriety, let alone shame. He seemed to know I was there, but left me alone while I looked at the schedule. It looked like the next train through was the Crescent, departing just before ten.

“So if I buy a ticket to Spartanburg but get off at Greenville, can I use the rest of the ticket later?” I asked. He gave up his study of a naked teenaged girl reluctantly but without protest.

“Yeah, sure,” he said. There was a pause. “Sir,” he added, as an afterthought. I was younger than he was, so he forgot. “You can get a voucher you can apply to a future ticket or a cash refund.”

“Cool,” I said. “Gimme a ticket to Spartanburg. Can I ask you a question?”

“Sure.”

“What is Amtrak?” I asked.

He thought a few seconds. “Can’t tell you, sorry. I just don’t know. It’s Federal, but that’s all I know,” he said.

“So your paycheck comes from the Federal government?” I asked.

“It’s from Amtrak. Whether that’s the Federal government or not, I couldn’t tell you. All’s I know is, it clears.”

“What happened to the Southern Lines, and the L&N, and the Atlantic Coast Lines?”

“Couldn’t tell you. When I got home from Viet Nam there was an ad in the Journal saying Amtrak was hiring, and I applied. That’s all I know.”

“Thanks. Army or Marines?” I asked.

“Army.”

“How was it?”

“Fucked up,” he answered. “Did you go?” he asked.

“No. Didn’t get drafted.” I shrugged.

“What was your number?”

“72.”

“And you didn’t get called?”

“Nah. War’s winding down. Or so they tell me.”

“Jesus. Is that fucked up, or what? My number was 159. I thought I was going to skate,” he said.

“Well, glad you made it back, bud. Is there a magazine store or a book store anywhere around here?” I asked.

“Not really,” he said. “There’s a drug store with a magazine rack two blocks down.”

I never found it. The result was that I more or less memorized my magazines.

I caught the Crescent towards the Carolinas just before ten.

Chapter 11: Prime Numbers Rarely Lead to Anything (footnotes omitted)

They let me out on a Tuesday. This was years before cell phones. I had no way of letting Mrs. W know when I was going to get out or of getting in touch with her after I got out. I figured I’d be hanging around for a while as all these incommunications worked their way out and I located a pay phone, but of course I was wrong. She was waiting in a parking space across the street when I was released, although I didn’t see her at first. I walked out onto the corner of Walnut and Sixth, blinking from the bright sunlight and wondering where I could sit down to wait when I saw her waving across the street, in a in a great big Chrysler Imperial.

When I got across the street to her car, sitting beside her on the passenger seat was a luminously attractive young woman, thin and spare, with pale, pale white skin, soot-black shiny hair and deep brown eyes.

“Hey, Mrs. Wertheimer thanks for picking me up,” I said, glad to see her as always.

“No, problem,” she answered. “No problem at all.” After I got in the back seat she said “Henry, this is my niece, Ginny McCoy.” Ginny turned around and offered me her hand, and smiled. She had perfect, improbably white teeth. Mrs. edged her Chrysler into traffic.

“Okay, Henry, we have to decide what to do,” said Mrs. W. “Today is my bridge club, and I need to be there in just a few minutes. What do you need to get done?’

“I guess I need to go back to Hixson,” I answered. “My wallet and my car are still at that bowling alley.” Mrs. W kind of nodded and dealt with traffic.

“Ginny, would you mind if I drive over to Mrs. Pope’s house and then you drive Henry out to Hixson?” she asked.

“Oh, no ma’am. Not at all. What time will you be done with bridge club?”

“About four, but Mrs. Zander can take me home,” she asked.

“Oh, no, no, no. I’ll be back by four. Hixson’s not so far away,” she said. There was a kind of a long pause.

“Henry?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am?”

“What you did with the police was wrong,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You misled them and then failed to contest something that should have been contested. Both of those things made the world a worse place.”

“Yes, ma’am.” She was right, and she knew I knew she was right. She didn’t say anything to hammer it home, which I appreciated.

In a few minutes we got to Mrs. W’s friend’s house, and then Ginny took over driving.

“Come on up front,” Ginny said. It would have been awkward to have stayed in back.

She was a very pretty girl.

“This is all kind of weird and far out for me,” she said, laughing a little bit. “Aunt Maggie is extremely protective of me, but she leaves me with this skinny, scrubby guy who just got out of prison. How weird is that? She once wouldn’t let me go out with a baseball player because she didn’t think he would be nice to me. And now she’s let me loose with a guy she told me nothing about except that he makes money playing pool. Strange world.”

“Jail, not prison. If I’d just been released from prison, she wouldn’t have left me alone with you. Who was the baseball player?” I asked.

“Jimmy Quarles,” she answered, “and why not?”

“Yeah, well, she was right,” I said. “He’s not nice.” Jimmy had a nasty temper and once picked a fight with me at the Frosty Mug after I beat him six games straight in eight ball. Silly game. Takes too long, but Jimmy didn’t know nine ball well enough to play it reliably. “And penitentiaries are places where felons go to serve sentences of more than one year. Jails are where people go for lesser sentences for more minor crimes, or while they’re awaiting trial, or haven’t made bail. Its lots easier to end up in jail than in prison, according to my friend and formerly fellow prisoner Sparky, who referred to himself as an ‘experienced criminal defendant.’ Where do you go to school?” I asked.

“G.P.S.,” she said. Girls’ Preparatory School was the high-end private school for rich girls in Chattanooga. “But I just graduated. I start at Vanderbilt in the fall.”

“Good for you,” I said.

“I take it you’re not in school?” she said.

I shrugged, then shook my head. “When I was done with high school, I was ready to do something else, so I just headed out on the road.”

“Yeah. Aunt Maggie says you’re really good at pool.”

“Good enough,” I said. “I practiced a lot when I was a kid.”

“Well, practice always pays off,” she said.

“I don’t know. Maybe if I’d practiced a lot at tennis, I’d be Jimmy Connors now instead of a guy bumming a ride to a bowling alley.”

She laughed. “You know, I play tennis. I practiced a lot. All I did growing up was play tennis and soccer, and it was the best when I got to play both in the same day. Anyway, I haven’t played Jimmy, but I’ve played Charlie Owens and Roscoe Tanner at Manker Patton several times each, and they’ve played Jimmy. I played them in singles and mixed doubles. I’m really pretty good. All-State and junior champion for Tennessee and all that. On one of the mixed doubles games Chrissie Evert was Charlie’s partner. All of them hit it hard. What I learned from those games was that the pros are orders of magnitude better than the rest of us, but those orders of magnitude are expressed in finer and finer layers of detail.”

“Explain?” I asked.

“Roscoe has a wicked fast serve, but if that was all he had, I could play him. But he also has this ridiculous ability to make you think it’s going one place when really it’s going somewhere else, and if you manage to return it, he has this far-out ability to be right where he needs to be to drop a sneaky dead volley wherever it is you aren’t. Charlie can hit a backhand service return while he’s waving at a girl he sees in the stands, or when he’s feeling too lazy to hit a backhand, he’ll just change the racket to his left hand and knock out a forehand. I never knew anybody else who could do that. And he’s not even ranked that high. Chrissie shoots it past me at a hundred miles an hour and if I’m lucky I get my racket in front of it, but where it goes is partly random, because I’m not quick like she is. I can return, but I can’t return well. She doesn’t beat me in straight sets, but she almost always beats me. And she has this two-handed backhand that makes her backhand just as strong as her forehand. There’s no weakness there. Anywhere.”

“But you have beaten her?” I asked.

“Yes and no,” she said. “I’ve beat her, but not when she was trying to win. I’ve beat her in practice matches when she was concentrating on changing her serve, or trying some new topspin shot at every opportunity. If she’s focused on winning, she’ll win every match. I’ll win a few games and even a few sets, but she’ll beat me pretty much every time. Don’t get me wrong. I’m good, and I can play with her and with all of them. But I’ll lose. Or maybe, I’ll never win consistently. It’s never a big thing, and I don’t ever lose by a lot. But they always beat me. The difference between amateur and pro is thin, and it’s made up of very small differences, but it’s insurmountable.”

“Interesting,” I said.

“And you’re a pro.”

“Do you ever notice things going wrong? I asked.

“How do you mean?”

“A shot that always goes the same way when you hit the ball a certain way, that then goes someplace unexpected?”

“I don’t think so,” she said, after thinking a few seconds. “But you know, in tennis, there are more variables than in pool, I think. It’s more like soccer. You never hit the ball from the exact same place in the racket, or to the same place on the court. I think it may be more difficult to reproduce similar circumstances with confidence in tennis than pool. In soccer, you have a curved foot hitting a curved ball, both of which are in notion. Skill allows the player to achieve predictable results, but there are a lot of variables that make precision difficult in ordinary game circumstances. Before you make contact with the ball in pool, everything is still. That never happens under any circs in tennis and only in penalty kicks and that kind of thing in soccer. Maybe you should ask a golfer.”

She probably had a point, but I had never played tennis once in my life, so had no way to know. I also had no idea who he was talking about. I had a sense that letting on that Roscoe and Charlie were complete unknowns to me would be uncool in some terribly important way, so kept it to myself.

She was driving down Hixson Pike, and we were getting close to Hixson Lanes. “You’ll have to tell me how to get there,” she said. “I can get to Hixson, but I don’t know where the bowling alley is.” I agreed to do so and there was a lull in conversation.

“So Aunt Maggie says you’re good at math,” she said, after a few minutes.

“I don’t know. I got good grades. I think it’s because she’s such a good teacher.”

“No, no, no. We were talking while we were waiting for you to get out and she said he used to give you different homework than everybody else.”

“Well, that’s true,” I said.

“Why? You came out before she had a chance to explain.”

“Well, she gave ten homework problems every day. And they weren’t always that hard, especially in Algebra I and Geometry. And then the next day, as she called roll, we were supposed answer with how many of the homework problems we’d done. They were so easy that I never did them ahead of time. I’d just work them out while she called roll,” I said.

“What’s your last name?” she asked. Smart girl.

“Baida,” I said.

“So you answered all of your homework problems by the time she got to the letter ‘B’ in roll call?”

“No. That’s how she caught on. I’d be working on it and writing out my answers when she got to my name and I’d ask her if she could call on me at the end, I was still looking over my answers, and then she’d come back to me at the end, and by that time I could generally have worked out the answers to most of them. For the first few months she let me do it. Then she started saying she wouldn’t pass, I had to tell her how many I’d done when she got to my name.”

“And you couldn’t just tell her you’d done all ten and finish them while she took the rest of the roll?”

I paused to think. “I’m not sure there is any set of circumstances that would warrant lying to Mrs. W,” I said. “It just wouldn’t be right.” Ginny laughed. “You want to turn here,” I said. She did. “So what I’d do is I’d do my homework problems in the last few minutes of my English class, so that I had them ready when I went to the next period. Then one day Ms Bettis asked me what my Algebra book was doing on my desk during English class. That same day, Mrs. W kept me after class and told me she wanted me to actually focus on my homework and learn something from it and so from now on she was going to give me ten special problems.”

“What were they like?” she asked.

“Do you like math?” I asked.

“Oh, for sure,” she said. “Aunt Maggie had me plotting parabolas when I was in fourth grade.”

“Think Fermat’s last theorem, then,” I said. “They were awful. Took hours. I couldn’t play pool on weeknights.” Ginny laughed.

“Aunt Maggie also says she put you up for this math competition,” she said.

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “I forgot about that. That was fun. And it was nice of Mrs. W to put me up for it.”

“And so how’d that come out?” she asked.

“You know, you have a lot of interest in my academic career,” I said. “especially as your own is undoubtedly more accomplished than mine.” After all, she didn’t just get out of jail. She had recognized the Hixson Lanes and pulled into the parking lot.

I was looking around the parking lot for the Valiant and it just wasn’t there. Damn.

“Aunt Maggie said you won that state math contest and that you were at the top of your graduating class, academically,” she said, or something like that. I was coming to grips with the fact that my car and all my worldly possessions save my wallet and its content were now gone.

“Well, I’ll be dipped in shit,” I said.

“Excuse me?”

“Fiddle-sticks, I said.

“Something wrong?”

“My car is gone,” I said. “It had most of my stuff in it.”

“What kind of stuff?”

“Suitcase. Clothes. Shoes. A few books.”

“What kind of car is it?” she asked.

“A 1965 Plymouth Valiant. I think it was a ’65, anyway. Not glamorous, but it ran.”

“Maybe it got towed away,” she said.

“That’s the more likely of the two options.”

“And the other option is that it was stolen?”

“Yes. You may think that a 1965 Valiant is an unappealing target for a thief, but he or she may have just needed a ride, and pre-72 cars are easier to hotwire. Now that I think about it, the first car I hotwired may have been a ’65 Plymouth. But Sparky, who I mentioned earlier, occupied the cell across the aisle from me because he’d boosted a ’62 Impala because he wanted the starter motor. He had no use for the rest of the car. So stranger things have happened than the theft of a ’65 Valiant. Unfortunately, whatever happened to it will remain a deep, dark mystery, I’m afraid. If it was towed, I can’t get it out of hock, and if it was stolen, I can’t report it. So it’s just gone.”

“If money’s a problem, I could loan you some,” she said. “I mean, I don’t have a lot, but I could loan you a few hundred bucks, if that would help.”

“Very nice of you, but no, money’s not the problem. The problem is that when I got arrested I told them my name was Leon Trotsky.”

“No, no, you didn’t,” she laughed.

“So I can’t do anything that will show I was lying, or I can be convicted of the felony of treason, according to Mr. Atchling.”

“Fieldey Atchling?” she asked.

“That’s him,” I said. “You know him?”

“Yeah. He’s kind of cute. He wrote my parents’ wills, I think. Strange taste in clothes. And you don’t mean treason, you mean perjury, I’ll bet.”

“Right. Slip of the tongue.” I scanned the parking lot in somber silence.

“So are we done here?” she asked.

“No, I still need to go into the grill and get my wallet,” I answered.

She cocked an eyebrow with a quizzical expression and turned off the engine with the ignition key. “You mentioned this before, but I didn’t realize that wallet and car were separate acquisitions. You are a man of strange habits, Henry Baida, and everything you say leads to more questions. Lead on.”

We opened our respective car doors and got out, and I saw her standing for the first time. Somehow she seemed even more slender, and was shorter than I was expecting. Slender as she was, there was nothing at all skinny about her, and no physical awkwardness of any kind. As we began walking through the dusty grey gravel parking lot at the bowling alley in Hixson, Tennessee, she seemed to kind of drift, the way a mist or a vapor does. I was suddenly very aware of my own awkwardness.

She was wearing snug Levis, a striped, knitted, long-sleeved top and bluish leather low-heeled shoes that were not like the ones the girls wore at City High.

“Nice shoes,” I said.

“Oh, I love shoes,” she said. “These are Ferragamos. Love ‘em.”

It was about three in the afternoon on a nice spring day and I was walking through a parking lot with a pretty girl who was wearing good shoes and it suddenly occurred to me that I wasn’t in jail any more. The idea that I was free again would have occurred to me earlier had the sentence had been longer or the stay been worse. Still, the thirty days had cost me my car and suitcase. I couldn’t remember what books I’d lost, but there had been some.

Ginny would just look at me every now and then and smile. People who know what Fermat’s Last Theorem is generally aren’t perky smilers.

We got to the double glass front doors of the Hixson Lanes and they parted as in Star Trek or the Kroger. To me, walking into a bowling alley is always a little like going home, but also a little disorienting. No matter how many times I do it, I’m struck by the horizontality and expansiveness of bowling alleys—that’s about as large an uninterrupted enclosed indoor space as you’re going to find outside of domed stadiums , and it always surprises me how big they are once you get inside. I paused at the door, Ginny smiled slightly and quizzically as the glass doors closed behind us. “We want the grill,” I said.

“Right,” she said, then saluted and led the march.

The grill was the same. Ridiculously so. Debbie was behind the bar, Ford and Thomas were in front of it. Thomas was dressed all in black so that he looked like a priest. He was drinking either soda water or a gin and tonic. Ford had a beer and an empty shot glass. They waved as we walked up.

“The prodigal returns,” said Thomas.

“Can we buy you a drink?” Ford asked. “I’m keen to hear about your stay in the county facilities.”

“Not much to tell,” I shrugged. “I caught up with some old friends, made a few new ones. How have things been here?”

They looked at each other for a minute and thought.

“Well, after your fight, Rosie broke up with Willis,” said Thomas, after a few seconds

“Well, then some good came out of it,” I said.

“Oh, Christ, no,” said Ford. “Willis joined Alcoholics Anonymous, only there’s no anonymity to it at all as far as we can tell. He talks about it constantly. He just can’t seem to keep to himself about it. Any time I order a drink he reminds me, kindly and empathetically, that he was once like me, but that alcohol is addictive and that I should embrace the twelve steps. I cannot possibly express how tedious it all is. That’s why we’re here.”

“Excuse me, I’m forgetting myself,” I said. “This is my friend Ginny McCoy. Ginny, this is Ford and that is Thomas, and behind the bar is Debbie, who was dating Donnie last time I was in here. How’s that going?” I asked.

“I ain’t heard from that sumbitch since the night you dropped Willis. And Willis going all preachy on everybody has cut into bidness in no small way. I grew up Babdist and all, but a girl’s got to make a living.”

I wasn’t sure what to say.

“Well, maybe Donnie just went off to college,” I said.

“College? One of them boys? And a pool player to boot? I expect not,” she said. She took an angry drag off of her More.

I was grappling with what to say next and failing. Ginny was looking at the scene in smiling rapt wonder.

Thomas and Ford acted as though they hadn’t heard a word Debbie said, although they had heard my introduction to Ginny. Thomas stood and bowed towards Ginny, and Ford shook her hand. “Charmed,” he said.

“Can I interest you in a beverage of some sort?” asked Ford. “Thomas is having his accustomed club soda with lime wedge and I am drinking any variety of things. What will you have?” Ginny looked at me. “Oh, he doesn’t drink,” said Ford.” One of many marks against his character.”

“How do you know that?” I asked.

“We watch,” said Thomas.

“They’re right,” I said to Ginny. “I don’t drink.”

“I’ll have a white wine spritzer,” said Ginny.

Debbie nodded. “And you want a glass of water,” she asked me. Well, yes.

“Um, can I ask a question?” Ginny asked of Thomas and Ford, kind of generally.

“Certainly,” they said, in unison.

“You were talking about Willis and how his AA participation has become a nuisance, and then you said that’s why you’re here. I didn’t quite follow.”

“Oh, well, that’s why we’re here at right now,” said Ford. “We can’t come here when Willis can be expected. And nuisance about describes it. We have to leave about 6:30, just before he comes in.”

“So you wouldn’t normally be in a bar at 3:00 on a weekday, you have to do it because you want to avoid Willis?” she asked.

“Exactly,” they both said, nodding.

“What would you be doing?” Ginny asked.

They both kind of shrugged. “You know, this and that,” said Ford. “See, we used to come in here at about 7:00 and have a few drinks and then have something to eat and watch the pool players. But since Willis got all preachy we come in earlier and then go down to the Dew Drop Inn for dinner.”

“Do you then have a few drinks at the Dew Drop Inn?” I asked.

“Of course,” said Ford.

“Do you ever leave before closing time?” I asked.

“Umm, well, sometimes, I suppose,” said Ford. Thomas scowled at his soda water.

“So Willis joining AA has meant your drinking day starts at 3:00 rather than 7:00?” I asked.

“Yes, well, we really hadn’t much choice. He’s such a bore.”

“Actually, to be honest, we generally meet here at 2:00,” said Thomas. There was something vaguely foreign about his accent. Spanish, maybe, but not quite.

“If dinner and drinks and avoiding Willis are what you’re after, why not just start at 7:00 at someplace else?” asked Ginny.

“That would be kind of hard on Debbie, wouldn’t it?” said Ford. “She depends on us, poor thing.”

“Oh for heaven’s sake,” I said. Debbie scowled at me. Pretty girl with an ancient woman’s glare.

“Plus,” Ford said, “There’s no billiards table at the Dew Drop, and we rather like watching customers play pool.”

“There’s one at the Rancho Bar down the street,” I said.

“Ah, but Thomas cannot eat there,” said Ford. We all looked at him with puzzled expressions, Debbie included.

“I am a vegetarian, mostly, although I eat some seafood,” Thomas said.

“What did you eat here?” Debbie, asked, looking for a menu.

“The tuna salad sandwich and the tuna salad salad are both edible,” he said.

During the previous discussion I’d been looking for the ceiling tile that had a blue chalk mark on it and had found it. “Okay, guys,” I said. “I want you all to either look away or not to worry about what I’m going to do next. All eyes were on me, except for Ford’s, whose gaze strayed to me only when he wasn’t staring at Ginny. I stood on the booth seat underneath the chalk-marked acoustic ceiling tile, lifted up the marked tile, and reached inside. My wallet was right there, no searching required. Ginny applauded.

“You found it,” she said. I looked inside. Everything was still there.

“Might I ask why hour wallet is in the ceiling of the Hixson lanes?” Ford asked.

“Misbegotten expediency,” I said.

“So what is it you guys do for a living?” Ginny asked. Thomas and Ford both made a hand gesture that’s something like a shrug and looked at each other.

“I write for a sort of travel publication,” said Ford. “I got stuck here unexpectedly, but will be moving on soon, I hope.”

“And you, Thomas? Or is it Mr. Thomas?” she asked.

“Saint Thomas,” he said. Ginny laughed.

“Which one?” I asked.

“The apostle.”

“Doubting Thomas?” I asked.

“That’s me.”

“Does this line get you anywhere, as a rule?” I asked

“Not really,” he answered.

“Okay. We need to be going. Ginny has to pick up her aunt at bridge club at 4:00. Debbie, give me the tab, and I’ll pick up for Linus and Charlie Brown here as well.”

“Alas,” said Ford.

“Alack,” said Thomas

“But thank you,” said Ford. I thought he was thanking me for picking up the tab, but then he continued to say “Rarely do we see such a lovely young woman, or one with such admirable shoes.”

I gave Debbie a 25% tip which, given the way Ford had been drinking, was significant.

We made our way back to the car and were underway before Ginny said anything. “So how many cars have you hot-wired?” she asked.

“Well, maybe four or five.” I answered. “Or eight. How do you count it if I hot-wired one car maybe six times?”

“Each time you hot-wire is a separate instance,” she said, after a few seconds of reflection.

“Then maybe twenty or thirty. Fifty max. Maybe 75 max,” I said. She thought.

“What if we change the counting criteria, and we just count the number of cars you’ve hot-wired?” she asked.

“Lots easier,” I said. “Five.”

“Hmm. I can see one, two, or three, but I don’t see five,” she said.

“Five is also a prime number,” I said.

“Yes, very clever of you to notice, far out and all, but I still can’t see a narrative in which you need to hot-wire five cars. So I was thinking you should start at the beginning and tell me about hot-wire number one.”

“Okay, well, I don’t remember exactly what I said, but the first car I hot-wired was a Plymouth Valiant about the same vintage as the one I just lost.”

“How did you come to hot-wire any cars at all?”

“Well, that one was on a Boy Scout campout,” I said.

“What?”

“It was on a Boy Scout campout,” I said.

She was just interested. “I heard,” she answered. “But I was never in Boy Scouts, or even Girl Scouts, so I’m confused. There can’t possibly be a Car Theft merit badge, can there?”

“Cute. Okay. Well, we were out in the country near the Chattahoochee River down in Georgia. All our tents were pitched in this field between a dirt road and the river. For some reason there weren’t any adults around. Not many, anyway. I can’t remember why. When we woke up the next morning, there was this Plymouth Valiant in a ditch about fifty yards from our campsite. We all wandered over to look at it, and then realized there was someone in the back seat. A woman in a silk dress, either asleep or dead, we weren’t sure which. We didn’t know what to do, but eventually our senior patrol leader, an Eagle Scout named Kevin Magid, decided to open the back driver’s side door to see if she was all right. Punching the door button made a noise that woke her up and she sat bolt upright and was confused for a minute and very surprised to see all of us looking in on her. “Where’s Henry?” she asked Kevin. Everybody looked at me. ‘Do you mean me?’ I asked. ‘No, of course not,’ she said. ‘Henry who was driving last night.’ Nobody said anything. We were all kids, except for Kevin, who was sixteen. Nobody even shrugged. She hauled herself up far enough to look over the front seat and ascertain that there were no car keys in the ignition, which prompted a question. ‘Do any of you boys know where the keys are?’ she asked. Kevin, who was still closer to her than the rest of us, hand still on the back door handle, silently shook his head once and pulled back and stood up. She was pretty but looked very tired. We all kind of backed away from the car as she rubbed her eyes and ran her hands through her hair. She took a minute, then opened the car door and got out and looked at us all. She sort of smiled at us, then said ‘Have a nice day’ and started off down the unpaved road. She was wearing heels, but took them after a few steps and walked in her bare feet shoes in. We all watched her walk off in silence. Then she stopped and looked back. ‘Henry?’ she called out. My heart raced. ‘Yes, ma’am?’ She smiled at me. ‘Would you look in that car one more time and make sure my purse isn’t still there?’ she asked. ‘Yes, ma’am!’ I called back, and bolted for the car. All of the other boys except Kevin did so as well. We looked everywhere, but there was nothing purse-like in the car. I went running after her to report, and the other boys followed. ‘I’m sorry, ma’am, but there’s no purse in the car. We looked everywhere,’ I said. ‘Oh, well, ‘she said. ‘I expect it will turn up somewhere. Thank you, Henry. And goodbye, boys.’ She walked off down the dirt road, strolling down a country road, not a care in the world, and we all watched her go, in puzzled amazement. It was maybe five miles from where we were back to the paved road, and she wasn’t thirty yards away from us when she started singing.

Ginny interrupted to ask a question. I was expecting “What song was she singing?” and the answer would have been “Amazing Grace” but instead she asked “What kind of shoes was she wearing before she took them off?” and I had to stop and think.

“Heels,” I said.

“I know that. How high?” she asked. Again, I had to stop and think.

“I’d say maybe three inches,” I said.

“Color?”

“I think black. Maybe navy.”

“What was he dress like?” she asked.

“White silk. Knee length. With black polka-dots and black trim,” I answered, confidently.

“And you think it’s possible somebody was wearing navy shoes with that dress?” she asked.

“I take it you think it unlikely,” I said.

She was just pulling up in front of Mrs. Pope’s house, where the bridge club was.

“Boys are so funny,” she answered. “You should go to the door for her. She’ll get a kick out of that.”

When I got back to the car, Ginny was in the back seat. I opened the driver’s side door for Mrs. W and then crossed to the other side. She backed up out of the driveway and we were on our way.

“So what didn’t work out?” she asked. If my and wallet had been where expected, I wouldn’t still be in her car.

“Car was gone,” I said. She nodded.

“But you got your wallet?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Henry, that car wasn’t really worth a lot. Was anything worth much in it?”

“No, ma’am. A few books I was going to send to you. My clothes and shaving kit. Not much,” I answered.”

“So you want to buy a new car?” she asked.

“I don’t think so. I’m thinking of trying the trains.”

“Why?” she asked.

“It has to do with Thoreau,” I said.

“The no possessions thing?” she asked.

“Exactly,” said Ginny. Mrs. W looked at her in the rear view mirror, I craned my neck to look at her, and she smiled brightly at me.

“You have no clothes,” said Mrs. W.

“Not other than the ones I’m wearing, no ma’am.”

“And your checkbook was in that car?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“All right, Henry. Let’s take you over to Sears to buy you a change of clothes and a suitcase, then over to the Hamilton National Bank to order some more checks, and then I’ll drop you off at the train station. You okay for money?”

I thought I was just moving into a slightly different chapter in my life as a pool hustler, but in fact it was almost over.

Mrs. W had a way of sifting through problems pretty quickly, though,S and her niece has a very pretty smile.