l i f e
the giving end
contributions
christopher@30seconds.org
The cars are all empty, their doors slid back in a dangerous sigh, an expulsion of stale air reeking of wet cardboard and frightful silence, air I can't breathe without taking the weight of the train itself deep into my lungs where it wheezes and rattles and joins with the cigarette smoke from the Camel in my left hand. In its silence the train blocks, daring me, it walls off, creating a new horizon of uneven hinges, ladders, and lines that don't suggest, but rather demand, through their random placement, some kind of conformity, some kind of solidarity, a tyranny of fashioned metal that never gives way to wind and weather, but which shapes it. In this silent horizon the smell of diesel fuel and oil turns to taste with one breath, lining the mouth with spit like petroleum and a flavor somewhere between copper pennies and blood.
The train turns the breeze into my face, chilling me through my worn denim jacket. Pushing the bottom two buttons through their holes, I spit on the rail, drop my cigarette, and climbing on the third to last car, change my horizon back to trees and leaves. Down the line the engines release air like steam from a broken pipe, a thousand tea kettles scream they are ready. The couplings clap again, slower this time, with the steadiness of machines driving wooden piles into moist earth. The wheels become a metronome, counting not time, but distance. Yards turn into miles, marked by bridges, old water towers, fenced in forests of cut timber, rivers, warehouses, and occasional parallel roads.
I lay back on my knapsack, link my hands behind my head, and watch the clouds drift by with increasing speed in the opposite direction. A few cigarettes later and the small southern town that had held me in its grip of lost-loves, failed ambitions, and dreams; the town that made my life into so much filigree, had disappeared behind changing horizons.
Hours pass slowly at first and then by the end of the second day I've begun to live with the solitude and the click-clack of the tracks which are both my heartbeat and time piece. Then the visits start. Dark boxcar smelly hay shadowy visits when I think I am most alone. The kind of alone one feels just before sleep and dream when the slightest bumps are all your misgivings and the plaster walls turn to gray-blue sackcloth. The time when one begins to ponder rational and madness, combining the two like an ashen philosopher burning a beeswax candle at both ends and calling it truth.
The truth.
There isn't much truth in the visits at first except they happen and I blame them on the darkness, lack of food, constant movement, and all those bumps in the night. But being alone with the truth is sometimes the loneliest place to be, and the shining white teeth and huge milky eyes of the Negro only alienate me more.
I try to divert my attention to the train itself. This train is hauling freight, scrap-metal, grain, gas. It is moving through the country-side with the agility of a snake, grabbing at anything getting to close. Inside its belly lay the visions. Behind the scales that are bolts live the imprinted memories of the others, all grabbed, stripped, and digested in the name of parallel rails that for some lead to nirvana and for others a negated bloated mess amounting to compost and Queen-Ann's lace.
It's been four days now and the old Negro visits with increasing regularity. He doesn't always say anything. Sometimes all I get is a tattered shirt or a sole less shoe. The bottle of wine in my knapsack was half empty this morning and I had yet to touch it at all.
So now I'm waiting. The boxcars aren't safe. I find my way to the last car, and above the red signal light I make my perch. It is mid-afternoon. When the sky changes and I imagine the noise of cicadas we cross the Haw river. It is low and some fishermen wave from the rocks. For a second I forget the train and waving at them frees me, but they have companionship and the slow current of the Haw to soothe them. For them humanity continues with an arpeggio of catfish and pickup trucks, but this release isn't mine.
The train moves on out of sight leaving only warm rails and echo. Within minutes there is no sign of its ever passing, and if not for the smell of mud and rotten roots along the banks of the Haw the world might have disappeared completely.
He comes again. His molded breath in my ear whispers cottonmouth and thirst. He stands in full silhouette, wearing a starched black coat-and-tales, white gloves, and top hat. His leathered hands stick too far out of the sleeves of his jacket making him appear abnormally tall. In his left hand he holds my bottle of wine by the neck in a grip so hard it raises the veins around his knuckles. His right hand makes quick random movements, swinging a conductor's baton, and despite the hollow bass of the wind and the click-clack of the wheels I can hear him singing his song not far above a whisper. His gums have grown over his teeth, filled with puss and drool, they shine dull in the starlight. His teeth are flat and altogether too smooth at the cap, and I can see him in my head, bent over a grinding stone, pumping the wheel. I smell the sparks and dust rising in a cloud around his head. A bassoon and tin drum play heavy in my stomach etching a pattern like a knife on ivory. And he sings. . .
"My eyes have seen the glory o' the comin' o' the Lord I don't amount to nothin' in the picture he has stored I drank his casks of wine and I broke the bastards sword And I'll n'er be marching home"
He moves forward, takes off his hat and gets down on one knee. The music stops and he holds the baton like a ruler poised to slap a student. His eyes turn chartreuse with cracked white lines of marble, his face spits out a full beard of curly white and piss yellow, and then sucks it back up again.
"Shake a stick at me boy, I don't flinch, don't move no muscle to ya! Ha ha ha, ooh, Lordy, Lordy, the boy is poorly, and a might seemin' troubled too. What's ailin' ya, son, now that I's chased you on the roof? Best be hopin' it don't rain."
And with that he raises his baton to the sound of thunder so loud I lose my balance and go over the railing. I hang there upside down, one cold hand clutching a steel ladder the other flailing wildly. One boot is still tucked under the metal bars halfway down the car, the only thing keeping my head a scant three feet from the ballast. I hear the blue-gummer's laughter above me, but when I look up he is silent, waving his hand like a clown saying bye-bye to some children and he begins untying my bootlace.
"No, no second thoughts, don'tcha go a tellin' me I don't care. No sir, don't rightly give a damn at all!"
I never hit the ground. I feel myself falling sure as hell is real, but I never hit the ground. Instead I'm exactly as before, except it is raining.
"Who the hell are you?"
The Negro leans in real close, "I'm's yo worse feelin'. I'm's that tight stomach you be a grabbin' at. And this here be," he holds out the bottle of wine in a gloved hand, "yo one an only salvation."
Big band music kicks in somewhere about three cars back. The Negro swallows deep from the bottle and says, "You's can call me Vargas, but don't gets attached."
I watch, words stick in my throat like sawdust. Vargus sways back and forth, his coat and tails change to a lose suit, the Jersey Bounce plays on into Sing, Sing, Sing, the drums augmenting the clack of the wheels, boxcar doors slamming closed with the peak of every crescendo, and then he begins to dance. He dances and balance doesn't matter, one foot, arms waving, he moves like a drunk Irishman at a wake. Toy soldiers appear and he kicks the wooden figures out of his way, toppling them over the side to be crushed under the wheels of the train. He finishes off the bottle of wine and throws it happ-hazard over his shoulder, spinning off like an out of control satellite to disappear into the darkness. A small spiral staircase appears in front of him upon which leans a cane and tophat. He picks up the cane, taps the hat on his head, and dances up five steps, then back down two; pausing to smile with the little crooked sharp teeth of a demon. He ignores me for a minute or two, carrying on like a drunk on some polished teak deck far out at sea: and then the tunnel makes it all go black.
A whisper in my ear. . .
"Betcha' don't feel much like dancin' now does ya boy."
He hangs on boy, letting the word drift like smoke.
"I'd bet my black cat bone that town o ya's sounds a might damn good right bouts now. Don't it boy, oh yeah just don't it. I's got God's own piss pourin' out you boy, and it smells worse Ôen any damned alley cat ever could or did. And you, you aints got the slightest idea why. You just don't forgest my name or yo town. Vargas, and yo town."
I wake up with a headache and the sun shining hard through the open door of a boxcar right into my eyes. My boots are torn right below the tongue, two large gashes, right down to the steel. My right arm hurts below the elbow, and an ugly bruise wraps itself around my thumb and forefinger like a snake. I sit up and rub the circulation back into my legs. They sting with pinpricks and I imagine they are fairly beat up too.
My town.
Vargas had said, my town. I had never much thought of any place I lived as my town. I occupy space. I occupied the one room apartment off Elm street down by the lamp shop. I cling to people and architecture, storing threads like the silk worm, all the combinations of sight, sound, smell. Maybe cling is too strong a word, I react with people. But more than people, the cities and towns have more effect. Making one feel small like the diminished impact of a sunset viewed through a parking deck. I don't make events happen, they happen to me. I make choices, but rarely do I feel I have a choice. I think a lot of people go through life feeling like me. I think most are okay with the complacency, the standardized way of living to occupy space. I am. It's what you do with the space you occupy that matters. Like all those Steppenwolfesque people out there who think that life is nothing; cog in the machine type stuff. And that's where the train comes in. Its the one part of the twentieth century that can move me away from where I am.
So I got on it. No regrets. But now I sit bruised and battered, pursued by a crazy Negro in coat and tails. Makes no sense. No sense at all. What is it about my town I can't escape? Why won't it let me go? Why should it even care?
Then I remember her...
I recall as I lay there in the open door of the boxcar what she said. But who was she but a crazy woman on Tate St. who read cards? And that was years ago.
Still...
goodnight 3.14.98
