“I…” My throat clicked. “I don’t know what to say, Nick.”
He shook his head again. “You don’t have to say anything, Ian. But you really do need to do something.” He opened his desk drawer and pulled out a sheet of his personal stationary. Unscrewing his fountain pen, he wrote on the paper and blotted it. “Here’s the address of a folk music center in North Carolina. My cousin runs it, and I’ve spoken to him about you. See if you can turn up a thesis idea there, okay?” He handed it to me and I folded it carefully and put it in my wallet. “You can do this, Ian. I know you can.”
We both stood, and he reached for my hand; I took it numbly, but with gratitude. I didn’t question his sincerity at all; we’d known each other too long. I also didn’t doubt he was right about what I had to do; but I wasn’t at all sure he was right about the rest.
* * * *
Now, looking out the doors of the boxcar in the late August afternoon, I was too bewildered to be sure about anything. I wasn’t even sure where we were, except that we were still north of Richmond. Hell, I was from Van Nuys, what did I know about Virginia? I saw houses from time to time, and once in a while we’d go through some small town with its feedlots and convenience stores, but they could have been anywhere. Where this old geezer had us going was anybody’s guess.
He was awake now, too, staring up at the ceiling with his hands crossed behind his head. I looked him over again, more carefully this time. He was older than dirt, true, but his eyes were a lot clearer than I’d first thought, for all that they were out of kilter. That doesn’t mean much—John Wayne Gacy had clear eyes—but it was an indication that at least he wasn’t a crazed Sterno-bum. He was clean, if shabby, and he had an undeniable dignity.
Dignity. That was just one of the many things that I didn’t have. I can’t say that I missed it as much as I missed my girl, frankly. I was both desperate and desperately tired. All I had was a knapsack and a badly overdrawn emotional bank account.
I wanted to compose music, to write songs, to play them for people and make them sit up and take notice. I couldn’t, and had never been able to. Do you know what it’s like to burn with music and not have a voice to sing it with? Like the Who said: “Schizophrenic, hell. I’m quadraphenic!”
I’d been trying hard not to think about those things back on the bus. “’Birthday present’, huh?” I said, trying to get my mind off my life. “When exactly was our birthday?”
“Long time ago. Back in the scaly-o-zoic era, I figure.”
“Before humans, right?”
“Don’t be stupider than you have to be, son,” he said scornfully. “Aliens ain’t gonna give no presents to no lizards, no matter how big they are.”
“But, I thought…”
“No, you didn’t or you’d of not shot off your mouth concernin’ stuff you don’t know about.”
“Okay, then,” I said, a little piqued, “Define your terms. When exactly was the ‘scaly-o-zoic’?”
“It was when we first made up songs. Or was it the first time we ate fish?” He shrugged. “It don’t matter. Both happened about the same time.”
I was confused and getting more so. “We invented music and seafood at the same time?” I asked.
“Yep,” he said. “3:17 A.M.” He sighed. “Boy, those were the days.”
It made as much sense as anything else he’d said, not that that was saying a lot. The old guy was obviously crazy as a shit-house rat, but he was at least an interesting rat.
The other passengers on the bus had either studiously ignored us or stared blatantly. I leaned closer and lowered my voice.
“Given all that, how old are we?”
“Oh, we ain’t had our first birthday party yet. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not talking about anniversaries here. They give that other Frog Level to us the day we was born. Still,” he continued with a shrug, “it’s been longer than I can remember, and I was a old fart before you was hatched.”
“The Earth is four and a half billion years old, or so the scientists say.”
He shrugged again. “Drop in the bucket, boy. I’m wearin’ socks older’n that. Anyways, birthdays ain’t always reckoned in years.”
“But what’s your interest in all this? And why are you talking to me about it?” I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer, but there was no way I wasn’t going to ask.
“Because somebody’s got to send ’em a thank-you note.”
“’Thank-you note?’ Are you out of…?” But of course. “How? How do you write a thank-you note to aliens? Crop circles?”
He looked at me in horror. “You don’t believe in that booshwah, do you? If so, we might as well end this conversation right here and now.”
I should have done it. I should have said, “Yes. I do believe in crop circles, and the Loch Ness Monster, and Bigfoot.” But I didn’t. Years of knee-jerk skepticism made me say, “No, of course not.”
“Well, then, fine. I got a job to do, and I can’t do it by myself. If I could, I’d’ve done it long since. I need your help.”
I frowned. This could get sticky. “Help. Help how?”
“That,” he said firmly, “remains to be saw.” And he stood up and signaled to the driver to stop.
Why? Why on the face of this good, green Earth did I follow this crazy old man off that bus? I know I’ve asked myself that question every day since I did, and I have no more answer now than I did the day I got up and went after him.
Or, perhaps I do; he was the straw at which I was grasping.
If my problem was that I didn’t have a focus in my life, it certainly wasn’t the old man’s. Hell, he was focused to a point so fine that you could barely see it. Call it an obsession (I know damned well I would), call it whatever, he knew what the problem was, and he knew the solution, and he was determined to apply the latter to the former if it killed him. Or us.
He had a “voice,” a presence, cracked as it was. I didn’t, and how could anybody hear me…why would anybody listen to me if I didn’t have my own voice? I could feel the lack of it, deep inside, an aching wound that had been scooped out of me like a melon ball so many years ago I couldn’t remember not hurting.
Maybe, just maybe, I had something to learn from him. And maybe it would be a lark, a story to dine out on. That would come in handy when the money gave out. It might help stave off dumpster-diving for a few weeks. In any case, anything was better than the bleak landscape inside my own head.
“Look,” I said, “I don’t even know who you are. You don’t know who I am. Hell, I could be anybody. We’re on a bus, for Chrissakes! How do you know you can trust me?”
“I don’t. I trust myself. I’m the only one knows me well enough. And who I am doesn’t matter. Let’s just say I’m ‘of no fixed abode.’”
There was a time when I actually chose to go cross-country on buses. I thought it was romantic. I thought it would give me the edge that Kerouac and Cassidy had, the world-weary experience and gritty sense of realism that I thought was integral to the Beats. At the time, I was dismayed by how wrong I was: it was noisy, filthy, smelly, it made my ass hurt; and let’s not even go near the bathroom facilities, either figuratively or literally. If that was what made the Beats what they were, they were welcome to it.
This time it wasn’t by choice, I simply didn’t have any other way to get where I needed to go.
I hate buses. The only thing I care less for is woods. I know that’s unhip, but I don’t apologize for it. They look great on greeting cards, and they’re perfect for writing songs about, but they’re dirty, musty, and they tear your clothes. So guess what was right in front of us when we got off that bus?
We must have hiked four miles through those damned woods. Can you imagine anything that would make you nostalgic for a Greyhound in August? Well, I can, and we were traipsing through them at a pace that kept me breathless. And it started raining the minute we stepped off the bus, a hot, clammy drizzle that ran down my neck and managed to soak my shirt through fro
m the inside out.
“My…my name is…Ian. I’m a…music teacher,” I said between pants. “Can we slow down some?”
“Nearly there, music teacher. Can’t you hear it yet?”
I stopped. There was something, off in the distance. A train whistle, almost below the threshold of hearing.
“You don’t mean…!” I said, horror dawning.
“First thing you’ve got right, boy. We gonna hop us a freight and catch us some real miles. Where we’re going, you can’t get there from here.”
“But…I’ve never done anything like that in my life!”
“First time for everything. Well, almost everything. There’s never a first time for a tuna-melt on dry-wall in aspic.” He shuddered. “Boy, I’ll never do that again.”
“But isn’t, uh, ‘hopping a freight’ against the law?”
“Depends on the law. If you go by the law of supply and demand, etiquette demands we send a thank you note, and we gotta supply it. If you go by the law of averages, well, I figure there’s one of us that don’t cover.”
“What about the law of conservation of energy?” I muttered.
“That’s a good ’un. Hang onto it, you’ll need it later.”
“Wait a minute,” I said, trying to catch my breath. “If…we’re going to be hobos, don’t we need one of those bags on a stick?”
He snorted. “Nawp, and if you see any see-gars with toothpicks in ’em on the ground, just leave ’em lay.”
As we went along, the old man would pull up a weed or pick leaves off some bush, and he carefully placed them in the center of a rag he took out of his back pocket. I didn’t want to know what they were for.
I heard a loud hissing noise ahead of us, and the old man began to walk even faster.
“Hurry up, boy, or we’ll miss our ride!”
We ran around a bend in the creek and, sure enough, there was a long freight moving slowly across a trestle. The old man stopped and scanned the train carefully.
“Gotta keep away from the bulls,” he muttered. “They wouldn’t understand, nawsir. Gotta find us a nice side-door Pullman, most of these are grainers. There! That’s the one!” He took off running, and it was all I could do to keep up.
The car we were headed for was a dilapidated old boxcar that looked like it had been built some time around the Napoleonic wars and had seen heavy use since. It had those cryptic numbers on it that you always see on freight trains, but nothing like C&O or N&W or any of the freight line company names I remembered. It looked drafty and dirty and dusty, all the things I didn’t want to be right then.
The train moved slowly enough that the old man was able to grab the open door with one hand and the floor with the other and pull himself inside. I tried to do the same and almost slipped. He grabbed my arm and just hauled me in like I was a sack of potatoes. I rolled over and sat up in the doorway, and he slapped me across the back of the head.
“Never, and I mean never, sit in the doorway of a freight car, boy! If that door comes loose and slams shut, what do you figure to walk out of here on?”
I nodded; it made sense. I pulled in my legs and settled down.
* * * *
Which is how we ended up in a beat-to-shit freight car that rattled like an angry snake somewhere in the wilds of Virginia in the middle of the Dog Days.
Actually, I guess it was pretty cozy, looking back on it. It was dry, the wind was broken enough by the boards that by the time it got to us it was a breeze that stirred the dust in eddies. It had last been used (as near as I could tell) to haul apples. That sharp, sweet tang was a welcome memory from my childhood; I’d grown up on a farm that had orchards.
“Okay,” I said. “You got me here. What’s next?”
“We got a ways to go, so settle down and get some rest. You done pretty good so far. For a stiff, anyway.”
I was more pleased by this than I let on. I wasn’t sure why, but it felt fine. Was I really a hobo now? Just from riding a train without paying? If so, it sure felt better than being a spectacularly unsuccessful grad student.
There was some old excelsior padding bunched up in a corner, and I nestled into it. The space between the boards was enough for me see out, and I watched the countryside go by in the early dusk. This was a lot more cool than taking the bus, for all the dust and roughness. Hell, you had to pay to get on a bus; this was free. Maybe this was why hobos were hobos.
“Aaahhhhhh…” The old guy stood silhouetted in the doorway, taking a leak onto the tracks. “Ain’t nothing in the world like pissing out a train car to tell the bastards you’re here, boy. Nothing in this world nor any of the others.”
He finished, straightened his clothes, and then lay down on a big piece of cardboard with his hands behind his head. I looked him over, trying to picture him as a younger man. I failed miserably.
“You know,” I said, “this ‘hobo’ thing could work out pretty good. You get to travel, you don’t have to work, no responsibilities…yeah, I could get used to this.” I smiled at the thought.
He snorted hard in the dimness of the car. “KEE-rist, boy, you don’t know shit from Sherlock, do you? Let me explain something to you.
“I been a hobo, man and boy, since I was fourteen years old. I run away at a time when they wasn’t no jobs to be had. Back then you worked or you didn’t eat. Hell, even in the jungles you was expected to pony up something for the pot.
“And I’ve had just about every job they was to be had, short of workin’ in a office somewhere. I followed the harvest for years, I washed dishes, I laid rails, I built some houses and I tore some down. When I couldn’t get work like that I beat rugs or chopped firewood for a hand-out, or a sit-down if I was lucky.
“What you’re talking about,” he went on, “is bein’ a tramp, and I don’t have no truck with tramps. Tramps are dirty. They beg. They get drunk. They lie and they cheat and they steal. The hardest work they’ll do is grifting some honest stiff, and then they’ll blow it all on cheap wine and dice games.”
He sat up and looked at me, his face light in the gathering gloom. “They got no pride, son, and they’re proud of it. You can feel just as sorry for yourself as you care to, but you ain’t a tramp or I’d of known it and you wouldn’t be here right now.”
“But, I thought…”
He waved it away. “So you keep saying, but I haven’t seen no evidence of it yet,” he said ruefully and lay back down.
The rails sang under us. I didn’t like what the old man said, but I couldn’t argue with it.
“All right, you know so much about me, but I still don’t know about you,” I asked. “Who are you, and why is this so important to you?”
“It’s important to me because gifts should be acknowledged. It’s the proper thing to do. It’s important because I was brought up better than to let a gift go by unthanked.” He looked wry. “It don’t even matter if it ain’t terrible much of a gift, it was still give to us. We all get gifts, some more than others, but ain’t too many of them ever get used. Just like a fondue pot. And it don’t matter to anybody here who I am, long as they know. Now, get some sleep. We got miles to make.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, shaking my head, “but I’m just too wired to sleep.”
He sighed. “S’pose you wanna talk.” I nodded in the dark. “Okay, we’ll talk some, but we both need to sleep or we’re never gonna get there.”
“Look,” I began. “I know you’re crazy. That’s okay. I’m sane, and it hasn’t done me a bit of good.”
“Go on.” If he resented my remark it didn’t show.
“Well, I’m not good at much of anything. I do okay teaching music, but that’s not anything special. I just don’t think I’m who you need to…to do whatever it is you want us to do.”
“And who might you be to make that judgment, boy?” The words sounded harsh, but his voice didn’t; he spoke low and kindly. “If you’re such a screw-up, why trust yourself to trust yourself?”
“But why me? Ther
e were plenty of other people on that bus. Why did you single me out?”
He was quiet for a long while. Somewhere off in the far distance, another train whistled low and lonely. “I might claim that you looked me in the eye when you got on the bus. Not many care to. Could be that I saw something in you that you needed to know about. Might be that you know better than you think, and think better than you know.” He stood up in the swaying car, keeping his knees slightly bent in a way that told me he’d done this countless times before, and stretched. “Gettin’ old, son. Not as spry as I used to be.” He turned and faced me, although I couldn’t see him in the gloom except as a dim shape in the doorway.
“I’m gonna tell you something that you probably won’t understand, and that’s okay. I looked at you, and I seen a man who long ago took hisself to a dark and lonesome place and then left hisself there. You been trying to find your way back ever since, and that’s a damn shame, but you forgot that it was you that lost you in the first place.”
He hunkered down on his haunches beside me, hands between his splayed knees.
“Don’t matter if you believe me. What is, is, and what isn’t, is not. You’re not half what you could be, and you’re twice the lowly bastard you’re afraid you are, but you ain’t been sewed up in a shroud yet. There’s time to strike a light and bring yourself home. Mayhap you’ll find your match when we get where we’re goin’.” After a minute he stood and turned back to the door, looking out into the night.
I noticed then that my face was wet. My throat ached and there was a burning in my chest, and something deep inside me felt broken.
He spoke again without turning. “That dangly thing in front of you is the end of your rope, boy. You can either hang yourself with it or haul yourself up by it. Your choice.”
I sat there without speaking, thinking about what he’d said. I didn’t like it. I never liked it when somebody else was right about me, and for all his shabbiness and lack of a handle on consensual reality, he was dead-on right.
The Ninth Science Fiction Megapack Page 23