by Ellen Datlow
They’d be thinking about murder.
They’d be thinking about killers.
And then, one of them would find me.
In bed maybe, or in my reading chair.
Nothing quite so dramatic as a knife across my throat or a decapitation.
Just me.
That’s the way I was going to go. No fuss, no bother. Good old Richard, he always knew how to treat his friends right. He even died right. No fuss, no bother.
I hadn’t planned on leaving this way at all.
But that Wednesday when it started had been pretty nice, the sun warm enough to let me take off my coat, walk around the streets a little and stretch my bones. The gardens were mostly already in bloom, or looking as if all that green-held color would explode any second. The dogs were out, sniffing the earth. The kids were out, playing ball in the street, playing baseball in the park. The women were out, legs finally showing after so many months of cold, faces up, eyes bright.
I don’t know if they knew I was watching.
I don’t know if they cared.
It didn’t matter.
The fact that I knew, the fact that I could still look and smile, told me I had made it through another winter without dying.
By Thursday, the warm had settled in, and I took the car out of the garage, drove over to the train station and parked behind it. There were no other cars. Just me. And dead leaves on the blacktop.
Hands in my pockets, I walked around to the platform and stood on the edge, breathing deep, my eyes partly closed. I could smell it then, and not just the spring air.
The tracks.
I could smell the tracks.
It sounds silly, I suppose, but then, folks as old as me remember too much, I think. Remember the feel of the wheels beneath your feet, the sound of them, the call of them; remember the sway of the cars, the people who sat there, waiting for me to take their ticket, talking to the young ones, reminding them of their stops as they looked out the window, saw the world passing, and dozed.
Remember how glad I was when we finally left the city—Hartford, New Haven, New York, they’re all the damn same—and headed back to a place where I actually cared about the folks I saw every day.
Leaning out of the car, checking the platforms, checking the tracks, signaling the engineer, and hanging there for a few seconds while the train lurched away from the station. Not quite flying, but as close as I’d ever get.
Smelling the tracks.
Wet, hot, cold, they had a smell that let me know they would carry me this way at least one more day.
So on that Thursday I climbed down off the platform—using the steps, of course; I can get around, but I can’t jump around—and started walking along the bed, checking the rails, kicking the gravel, eyeing the spots where rust might be a problem.
Habits never die, never break—you can only forget them, except in your dreams.
That’s when I saw Brownie.
I was half a mile, maybe more, from the depot when he stepped out of the woods that lined the route in both directions. He wore a white shirt with thin blue stripes, suspenders that held up a baggy pair of corduroy trousers, and thick-soled shoes. A thin green cardigan, the buttons undone. A chewed pencil behind one ear. A dead cigar in his left hand. One thing about Brownie, he didn’t have a lick of hair on his scalp; when he went gray, only his eyebrows changed.
He didn’t see me at first, but he must’ve heard me. He turned suddenly, shaded his eyes, and hurried back into the trees before I could call out.
Now, I’m not an agile man anymore, but I can move when I have to, and I moved. By the time I reached the spot where he ducked into the woods, I was puffing, sweating, and my face was probably red and shiny.
But I didn’t see him.
I called a few times, and maybe I should have gone into the woods after him.
But the other thing about Brownie is, he’s been dead nine years.
“So what are you saying, Rich?” Putter asked me later, in the bar. “You saw a ghost or what?” His face was ready to smile.
“I don’t know. I guess.”
He shook his head thoughtfully, staring into his beer. He was shorter than me, a lot heavier, his name from golfing and from just puttering around. It was the way he passed what was left of his time, and it made him happy, I guess. It would have driven me nuts.
“No such thing as ghosts,” he finally said.
“I know that.”
“So what did you see?”
“Beats the hell out of me.”
In the other chair of the three-chair table, Vera Hallow knitted her umpteenth sweater of the season. That’s all she did. Putter putted, Vera knitted. She lived at home with her daughter, hated the woman, and spent as much time in the Brass Rail as she could. Her daughter scolded her, yelled at her, demanding her mother consider her reputation. Vera, at just a spit over seventy, reminded her that a woman her age would kill for a reputation.
Her daughter didn’t think that was very funny.
“Angel,” Vera said.
I looked at her. No purple hair for her, or shapeless print dresses, or clunky shoes. She went to the beauty parlor every two weeks, always wore a skirt suit and low heels. Age had tap-danced on my skinny face; age waltzed across hers, barely leaving a mark.
She nodded without looking up, needles clicking. “Brownie was a good man. He’s probably an angel.”
Putter snorted. “No wings, Vera. Hell, he wore what he had on when he died, for God’s sake.”
“So? Who says angels have to have wings and white robes? You ever see one?”
He snorted again. “I’m not crazy.”
“Thanks,” I muttered.
He grinned. “Rich, for God’s sake, it wasn’t an angel, it wasn’t a ghost. It’s warm, you were walking too much, you were thinking about them dumping you off the railroad.” He spread his hands. “Easy.”
Maybe it was. Maybe he was right.
But it bothered me, seeing Brownie, and it made me wonder if there was something going on that I ought to know. I’ve heard lots of folks my age talking about “knowing when it’s time,” but I never believed it. The way I figured it, when the end came, you were probably going to be damn surprised.
Surprised it took so long.
Surprised it came so soon.
The thing is, Brownie and I weren’t exactly best friends. We nodded to each other on the street, once in a great while had a beer together, but we never spent any private time in each other’s company. When I was kid, he was a Negro; now he’s a black man. Didn’t make any difference to me one way or the other, we just didn’t hit it off well enough to be friends. And I hadn’t thought about him in years. If this was a sign, or an angel, or an omen, it would have made more sense to show up as my wife. Or my son.
“Stop thinking about it,” Vera scolded. “You’ll have nightmares.”
I had another beer and went home, taking my time, taking the long way, just in case.
Nothing happened except I got a cramp in my leg.
I didn’t have a nightmare, but I didn’t sleep very well either. Or the next night. Or the night after that.
After a week, I grumbled over to see Doc Wolton. Putter didn’t like her, said a woman had no business messing around with his privates and asking him foolish questions. I liked her. She was young enough to make me remember, and old enough that I figured she knew what she was talking about.
“Go away,” she said when the exam was done. “I can’t make any money off healthy people like you.”
Direct, too.
I laughed, and didn’t argue when she gave me a prescription for something to help me sleep.
“It happens,” she said, walking me to the door. “You’ve got a bee, Rich, and you’re going to have to get rid of it.”
I had told her about Brownie. She listened, nodding in all the right places, and suggested I was having one of my periodic bouts of guilt about my family. They came on me every so often, altho
ugh never like this.
It’s hard when a man outlives those he loves.
He can’t help thinking the wrong one was taken.
He can’t help thinking there had been a horrid mistake.
I saw Brownie again a few days later. I was on the platform, he was on the tracks a hundred yards or so away. He watched me, then waved slowly. I waved back, and looked away. I didn’t check to see how long it took before he left; I stayed a little while and went home, took a beer from the refrigerator and drank it standing up.
A few days after that, he was back. No closer. He waved, I waved, and that was that.
By the end of the month, I was getting used to it.
“So,” Putter said, “how’s Brownie today?” He laughed, drank, ordered another.
“Leave him alone,” Vera snapped. Knitting another sweater. “He’s got things on his mind.”
Putter belched. “Sure. Ghosts and angels.”
Something was wrong. Putter was still Putter, maybe a little heavy on the booze, but Vera was nearly breaking speed records with that knitting of hers. She barely said a word except to defend me or swear at the Democrats, and when I couldn’t stand to see the blur in her hands anymore, I reached over and did the unthinkable—I grabbed the needles.
She gaped.
“What?” I asked.
She pulled away angrily. “Nothing. Now you’ve made me lose count.”
“An earthquake couldn’t make you lose count,” I said.
Putter had his glass in front of his face, but I could see his eyes, and they were scared.
I looked from one to the other, trying to figure it out, but didn’t have the chance. Vera crammed her knitting into her bag, threw a bill onto the table, and left without saying good-bye. I watched in astonishment, too stunned to go after her.
Then Putter tapped my arm, made me turn around. “She saw him, Rich.”
I must have looked stupid, because he said it again: “She saw him. Brownie, I mean.” He stared into his beer; his left hand was trembling. “Last night. He was in her yard. She said it was like he was just passing through.”
I stared at the door, half tempted to go after her, but I didn’t.
“Me, too,” he added, not quite choking. He shoved himself to his feet, the glass tottering until I grabbed it. Then he leaned over and said, very quietly, full of rage, “What the hell are you doing to us, Rich? What the hell are you doing?”
He left, making it clear by the rod up his spine that he didn’t want me to follow.
I sat for a while, turning his glass around in my hands, ignoring the others, feeling like somehow I had been dropped into a ball of cotton. Everything was muffled, my breathing came hard, and when I finally moved to go home, I felt pressure around my ribs and lead in my arms and legs.
I had done something to my closest friends, and I hadn’t the vaguest idea what it was.
That scared me.
I’ve seen a lot all these years, been shot at, been near dying more than once what with this and that falling part, but I was never really scared.
Now I was.
The lights stayed on, and I stayed away from the windows, didn’t get much sleep thanks to some godawful heartburn and some just as godawful crap I had to drink to drive it away, and the next morning I cleaned up, ate something for breakfast, I don’t remember what, and walked across town to Vera’s place. A small house, a Cape Cod with a hedge and flowers and always something hanging on the front door, depending on the season.
She wouldn’t answer.
I rang the bell, I knocked front and back, but she wouldn’t answer.
Putter wasn’t home either, or he wasn’t answering the door.
By this time, I was getting angry. But I didn’t know where the anger should go. At them, for being so old and foolish as to listen to an old idiot like me; or at me, for being a big mouth and telling them about Brownie.
I wandered a little, I sat, I wandered, I think I ate, I’m not sure, and finally ended up back at the depot, sitting on the platform’s edge, swinging my legs, waiting for that son of a bitch to show himself again.
He did.
Just about dusk.
He came out of the woods across the way, hands in his pockets, that damn cigar in his mouth. He stayed far enough away that I couldn’t see him very clearly, the speckled dark almost blending him into the trees behind.
“What the hell do you want?” I finally said, feeling like a jerk. Talking to a dead man; I must have been out of my mind.
Brownie shrugged one shoulder.
“You’re scaring us half to death, you know,” I complained. “We don’t need it.” I spat onto the tracks. “Vera’s got that goddamn daughter of hers, Putter’s got nothing, and I got …” I looked up.
Who did I have?
I had a wife who had left me thirty-two years ago, and the memory of a son who hadn’t talked to me for twenty. They died within a year of each other five years ago; I only found out when Putter told me. I found out, and I got drunk, and didn’t sober up for months, punching walls, throwing chairs, playing the if I had only game, the one that assumes you can foretell the future and rearrange the past.
Vera and Putter saved me.
But even now, on the TV when a man hugs his children, I have to look away.
“I don’t get it,” I said, almost whispering.
Brownie took the cigar from his mouth and examined the unlit tip.
A quartet of leaves bounced across the tracks toward me.
I watched them tumble and scratch until the base of the platform stopped them, just below my feet.
When I looked up, Brownie was gone.
No surprise.
What did surprise me was the kid who came scooting around the station house on his bike. Scared the hell out of me. Scared him, too, by the look on his face when he spotted me. He damn near fell off, and when I raised a slow hand to show him I wasn’t going to hurt him, he wheeled around abruptly and was gone, like a ghost.
I laughed a bit then.
It showed I still had it—the power, maybe even the Look. I had used it often, that Look, to keep my trains in order. No rowdies on my routes, that’s for sure; no troublemakers, no drunks, no arguments, no fights. I was tall enough to loom a little, and there was, I’ve been told, something in my face that somehow stopped folks from causing trouble.
My wife had told me that more than once, as a matter of fact. I never had to spank my son, or even raise my voice. It was the Look, and the loom, that kept him in line. Until she took him away. After that, I don’t know. All I had left was the train.
So I went back home, ate a little, slept a little, and decided the next morning that Putter and Vera would come around, sooner or later. I wouldn’t tell them about Brownie again; and if they asked, I would lie.
Meanwhile, the weather staying as nice as it was, I set about cleaning the house, opening the windows to let the winter out, dusting, vacuuming, all the things that take up time when time was all you had. I did it deliberately slowly, making sure I didn’t miss a speck of dust, a wrinkle in the carpets, a burned-out bulb in the hall closet. Then I plunked myself down on my favorite porch chair to read the paper, thinking that maybe I’d head for the Brass Rail that night to see how my friends were doing.
The photograph on the front page almost passed me by.
It was the kid on the bike. He had been hit by a pickup on his way back from wherever, and had died in the King Street Hospital only the day before. Internal injuries. The driver of the pickup claimed the kid had swerved in front of him, not giving him a chance to do anything but close his eyes.
That, I thought, was a hell of a thing. A whole life gone before the life began.
It didn’t occur to me for another hour that the accident was my fault. I had scared the kid, and he’d run off, pedaling as fast as he could, not paying attention to anything but getting away.
Another hour of just sitting there, wondering if I should say something, wondering
if I was just making something out of nothing.
When daylight left me, I got up and went inside, went to the phone and called Putter, who, when he heard my voice, hung up.
I started for the Rail anyway, to have a beer or two, changed my mind and walked very slowly over to the park. The gates were still open, and I followed the tarmac path for a while, then veered to the right and followed a dirt path until I reached the bandstand.
Vera was on the steps, knitting beneath the lights that circled the bandstand’s conical roof. The season’s first concert was to start at nine; some folks were already setting up their chairs and blankets.
“Hey,” I said, coming up alongside her.
She turned away quickly, not missing a stitch or whatever they’re called.
“Damnit, Vera, what’s the matter?”
She didn’t answer for a long time. Then, her voice trembling a little: “They took Putter away this morning,”
“What?” I moved to get in front of her, but her spine went rigid, and I stopped. “What the hell you talking about, Vera? Who took him away? Why?”
“That last day he saw you,” she answered, needles flying, nearly making sparks, “he went home, never came out. They found him sitting in the kitchen, filthy, starving, staring at the phone, mumbling to himself.” Her shoulders sagged a bit, her head bowed, the needles flew. “Didn’t even know his own name, Richard. He didn’t even know his own name.”
A bunch of little kids raced and whooped across the grass, arms and legs at odds with each other. Three men with worn instrument cases climbed the bandstand steps, excusing themselves to Vera, ignoring me completely.
When they began tuning their horns, Vera put her knitting away. Precisely. Each movement painfully, tearfully, slow.
“Go away, Rich,” she said as she stood, her back still toward me. “Go away.”
She walked off without looking back once.
I walked off myself and looked back a hundred times, until I couldn’t see her anymore, until I couldn’t see anyone.