The train whistled over the hill.
Fool! I thought. My fellow passenger had been right. I would panic at the boredom I already sensed in this place. All right, I thought, fool, yes, but run, no!
I walked my suitcase down the platform, not looking at the old man. As I passed, I heard his thin bulk shift again, this time so I could hear it. His feet were coming down to touch and tap the mushy boards.
I kept walking.
“Afternoon,” a voice said faintly.
I knew he did not look at me but only at that great cloudless spread of shimmering sky.
“Afternoon,” I said.
I started up the dirt road toward the town. One hundred yards away, I glanced back.
The old man, still seated there, stared at the sun, as if posing a question.
I hurried on.
I moved through the dreaming late afternoon town, utterly anonymous and alone, a trout going upstream, not touching the banks of a clear-running river of life that drifted all about me.
My suspicions were confirmed: it was a town where nothing happened, where occurred only the following events:
At four o’clock sharp, the Honneger Hardware door slammed as a dog came out to dust himself in the road. Four-thirty, a straw sucked emptily at the bottom of a soda glass, making a sound like a great cataract in the drugstore silence. Five o’clock, boys and pebbles plunged in the town river. Five-fifteen, ants paraded in the slanting light under some elm trees.
And yet—I turned in a slow circle—somewhere in this town there must be something worth seeing. I knew it was there. I knew I had to keep walking and looking. I knew I would find it.
I walked. I looked.
All through the afternoon there was only one constant and unchanging factor: the old man in the bleached blue pants and shirt was never far away. When I sat in the drugstore he was out front spitting tobacco that rolled itself into tumblebugs in the dust. When I stood by the river he was crouched downstream making a great thing of washing his hands.
Along about seven-thirty in the evening, I was walking for the seventh or eighth time through the quiet streets when I heard footsteps beside me.
I looked over, and the old man was pacing me, looking straight ahead, a piece of dried grass in his stained teeth.
“It’s been a long time,” he said quietly.
We walked along in the twilight.
“A long time,” he said, “waitin’ on that station platform.”
“You?” I said.
“Me.” He nodded in the tree shadows.
“Were you waiting for someone at the station?”
“Yes,” he said. “You.”
“Me?” The surprise must have shown in my voice. “But why …? You never saw me before in your life.”
“Did I say I did? I just said I was waitin’.”
We were on the edge of town now. He had turned and I had turned with him along the darkening riverbank toward the trestle where the night trains ran over going east, going west, but stopping rare few times.
“You want to know anything about me?” I asked, suddenly. “You the sheriff?”
“No, not the sheriff. And no, I don’t want to know nothing about you.” He put his hands in his pockets. The sun was set now. The air was suddenly cool. “I’m just surprised you’re here at last, is all.”
“Surprised?”
“Surprised,” he said, “and … pleased.”
I stopped abruptly and looked straight at him.
“How long have you been sitting on that station platform?”
“Twenty years, give or take a few.”
I knew he was telling the truth; his voice was as easy and quiet as the river.
“Waiting for me?” I said.
“Or someone like you,” he said.
We walked on in the growing dark.
“How you like our town?”
“Nice, quiet,” I said.
“Nice, quiet.” He nodded. “Like the people?”
“People look nice and quiet.”
“They are,” he said. “Nice, quiet.”
I was ready to turn back but the old man kept talking and in order to listen and be polite I had to walk with him in the vaster darkness, the tides of field and meadow beyond town.
“Yes,” said the old man, “the day I retired, twenty years ago, I sat down on that station platform and there I been, sittin’, doin’ nothin’, waitin’ for something to happen, I didn’t know what, I didn’t know, I couldn’t say. But when it finally happened, I’d know it, I’d look at it and say, yes, sir, that’s what I was waitin’ for. Train wreck? No. Old woman friend come back to town after fifty years? No. No. It’s hard to say. Someone. Something. And it seems to have something to do with you. I wish I could say—”
“Why don’t you try?” I said.
The stars were coming out. We walked on.
“Well,” he said slowly, “you know much about your own insides?”
“You mean my stomach or you mean psychologically?”
“That’s the word. I mean your head, your brain, you know much about that?”
The grass whispered under my feet. “A little.”
“You hate many people in your time?”
“Some.”
“We all do. It’s normal enough to hate, ain’t it, and not only hate but, while we don’t talk about it, don’t we sometimes want to hit people who hurt us, even kill them?”
“Hardly a week passes we don’t get that feeling,” I said, “and put it away.”
“We put away all our lives,” he said. “The town says thus and so, Mom and Dad say this and that, the law says such and such. So you put away one killing and another and two more after that. By the time you’re my age, you got lots of that kind of stuff between your ears. And unless you went to war, nothin’ ever happened to get rid of it.”
“Some men trapshoot or hunt ducks,” I said. “Some men box or wrestle.”
“And some don’t. I’m talkin’ about them that don’t. Me. All my life I’ve been saltin’ down those bodies, puttin’ ’em away on ice in my head. Sometimes you get mad at a town and the people in it for makin’ you put things aside like that. You like the old cave men who just gave a hell of a yell and whanged someone on the head with a club.”
“Which all leads up to …?”
“Which all leads up to: everybody’d like to do one killin’ in his life, to sort of work off that big load of stuff, all those killin’s in his mind he never did have the guts to do. And once in a while a man has a chance. Someone runs in front of his car and he forgets the brakes and keeps goin’. Nobody can prove nothin’ with that sort of thing. The man don’t even tell himself he did it. He just didn’t get his foot on the brake in time. But you know and I know what really happened, don’t we?”
“Yes,” I said.
The town was far away now. We moved over a small stream on a wooden bridge, just near the railway embankment.
“Now,” said the old man, looking at the water, “the only kind of killin’ worth doin’ is the one where nobody can guess who did it or why they did it or who they did it to, right? Well, I got this idea maybe twenty years ago. I don’t think about it every day or every week. Sometimes months go by, but the idea’s this: only one train stops here each day, sometimes not even that. Now, if you wanted to kill someone you’d have to wait, wouldn’t you, for years and years, until a complete and actual stranger came to your town, a stranger who got off the train for no reason, a man nobody knows and who don’t know nobody in the town. Then, and only then, I thought, sittin’ there on the station chair, you could just go up and when nobody’s around, kill him and throw him in the river. He’d be found miles downstream. Maybe he’d never be found. Nobody would ever think to come to Rampart Junction to find him. He wasn’t goin’ there. He was on his way someplace else. There, that’s my whole idea. And I’d know that man the minute he got off the train. Know him, just as clear …”
I had stopped walking. It was dark. The moon would not be up for an hour.
“Would you?” I said.