There were only two endings to the tall tales traded before their beleaguered campfires: men fell to their death, or they lived on gallantly against odds that were as wide as the sky and as twisted as Joshua trees. Well fuck all that, he said, cursing his slip, the closeness to which he’d come to being eaten by the wheels. Fuck all this. It was time to let go or be let go of, one way or another. It was time that the long snaking oblivion of the night — the ceaseless clank and rattle of the couplings below, the scene of desert at night — of juniper and dust and dew combined — had its will.
But he did not let go with an attempted jump, and the reason was simple and left him until the late fifties when he was on his deathbed in Toledo, Ohio, with his son Carter by his side, holding his hand, and he remembered it again. Down at the camp by the water tower, right before falling into the deepest sleep of his life, he vowed to himself not to forget it, and he told Roy to remember what he was going to say, and to repeat it to him when he woke. Don’t let me forget that, he said, for Jesus’ sake when I get up and I’m myself again tell the whole story to remind me. He’d staggered a few yards up the track where the switchman told him to go. He’d never forget the kindly switchman who saw him stumble out from between cars and fall to his knees. Dressed in railroad overalls, an oil can in one hand, the switchman came over and helped him to his feet and asked him if he was all right. Here’s a nickel because you didn’t ask for one, he said, passing it over, shaking his head in a bemused but respectful manner when he saw where the kid had held on — the small handle, the bit of metal sticking out below — clear across the desert.
Right above the lip of the car, in that open starlit space that was only a slight variation of darkness — only a tiny bit lighter than the train itself — he saw her small, pure face, like some kind of ripe fruit; in it he saw his own eyes, marbled brown with flecks of mica, and the shape of his own mouth, thin and tight around the teeth. So sure was he that this wasn’t an aberration, that this was in no way a mirage, that he called out her name several times. Mom. Mom. Mom. She reached down to him, her arms long and thin and frail-looking in the darkness; she reached down to him and put her fingers around his fingers and held them tightly there — grip holding forearm; grip holding forearm — until twilight began to merge with the dark and spread above the train.
My own mother’s fingers appeared, he told Roy, who looked away with skeptical shame over his companion’s confession; it was a sad sight to see his buddy sink to this point without him being drunk out of his mind on Ripple. Promise me you’ll tell me. I forget everything in my sleep, he said. Ah shit, I’ll tell you, Roy muttered, spitting once into the weeds.
For all it matters to the world he might as well have been eaten by the wheels, another dead body kicked free of his grip by bad luck, weakness, ill timing, or a sadistic railroad bull. There were plenty of dead in that time of wandering. He shared the story with his son shortly before he passed away in Toledo’s Flower Memorial Hospital, where his son was a resident radiologist. He had seen his mother’s face up there, real and pure, as hard as carved stone. And he’d lived to speak of it to his son, who wept to see his father’s x-rays reveal the cloudy result of seventy years of Lucky Strikes. Your grandmother’s fingers were surprisingly strong, he said. They wrapped around mine and together we worked our way out of the night and into the next morning when, like a song of mercy, the clacks slowed and the train came off the long grade and stopped to take on water.
Then he told his son about Roy, and how he’d made him promise to repeat the tale to him when he awoke, and how after making that request he fell face down into the brambles and slipped into the deepest sleep of his life.
WHAT I HOPE FOR
I DON’T want anyone to die in my stories anymore. From here on out it has to be a glorious life. The light in the late evening from the ferry to the island will glimmer and pop off the horizon, the last of the sun going down; they’ll lean on the rail, shoulder to shoulder, feeling the soft heave of the boat, knowing that once they arrive at the bed and breakfast — the little sachet of potpourri dangling from the closet rack, and a mint on the pillow — they’ll undress to behold each other in naked splendor. The next day they’ll rent bikes and ride into the headwinds until their thighs (they never ride at home, in the city) are tight; they’ll picnic far out, on the end of the island, in a cove protected from the wind. Only an occasional gust will grit their potato salad. There they’ll kiss slowly and he’ll lick the salt from her lips and marvel at the warmth of her mouth in contrast to the hard cold outside, over the cove, where the surf roars in. On the way back, with the wind behind them, they’ll feel the exhilaration of a jet going with the jetstream; they’ll spread their arms outward, spinnakers to capture the wind. Parking their bikes under the porch, locking the chains, they’ll wobble up to the lobby on weak legs. Oh so tired, they’ll be, so wonderfully weak-kneed, as if navigating on land for the first time in years; and in this anguish of exhaustion they’ll make love again upstairs, half dressed, and then fall asleep through the dinner hour, only to rise in the darkness with the shudder of the storm outside, and with that barely perceptible awareness that something had been missed, something of the utmost importance. In the hall, the door is creaking and the man across the way, who they presume is a loner, is wending his way to the bathroom (which they share), and they both listen, holding their breath to hear the sound of his pee in the water, which no longer makes them laugh the way it did the first time they heard it, in the morning, but now sounds like something that has to be done, cold firm water against water in a porcelain bowl. If no one dies in the story, this is how it will be: the two of them a day later getting back on the boat and returning to the mainland, watching the landscape slip behind the boat, the gulls dashing above the wake, and the wake itself smoothing out from the v, fading off into the eternal uproar of the North Atlantic.
THE INTERRUPTION
THEY STAYED together on the coldest night of the year, wondering when the security guys might find it in themselves to come out, to send them on their way — and there were ways to be taken even on a winter night, paths that might be taken depending on which guy stumbled first in which direction. Arno had his arm up around the back of Roy’s shoulder as he hunched close to the old man and tried to hear what he was saying — a prattle partly drowned out by the knit cap over his own ears, and partly by a vibration from beneath their frozen boots, coming from the air circulation systems of the Hilton, a low drab noise that was part of the attraction of the spot, like the lowest note on a cathedral organ; Arno listened, half concerned for what Roy was plotting and half concerned for the split in his lip which had opened up and seemed to carry within a chasm of pain too wide for such a small crack in his flesh.