The Blade
Amid the men around the fire — tramps with other tramps — there was a young kid who reminded Ronnie of himself from way back, the same limberness combined with sorrow, the same combo of despair and liveliness holding out against the odds. A kid copping amid the others as if it didn’t matter that a sense had already formed that at some point soon he’d be cast off, thrown from a train car or simply left behind on the road when he was too far gone to move along. He stared the kid down and waited for him to answer somehow.
Ignore that dead weight, the man named Vanboss said, offering a bottle. There were among the men two bottles of Old Crow and one of a nameless cough remedy, emerald green, syrupy and sweet. They were in a scrubby little camp not far from an oil refinery, just outside of Toledo, and near enough to the Maumee to hear the water flowing. A turpentine smell filled the air, along with the pitch of creosote coming from the track ties and something else, an ozone aftermath of a giant electric spark. They had a little taper of a fire going, nothing much, and they were easeful and calm with the past as far behind them as it would go, and for a long time not much was said besides an occasional curse, some forswearing of the past in the form of a grunt, nothing else until eventually — because it had to at some point — a banter began between the man named Vanboss and the man named Stark, the kind of talk that came after a long quiet. The man named Vanboss told a story about a car crash. Two cars, each doing about a hundred on a two-lane outside Tulsa, struck each other head-on, mashing up into a one-foot-by-one-foot block of metal, out of which there crawled an unscratched child. That led to an argument about the likelihood — or the possibility — of such an event, which in turn led to a story about a guy who had been decapitated in a farming accident, his head boxed neatly in a bale of hay, which in turn veered into some easy, casual chatter about arrest records, which in turn led to stories of knife use, of the best way to stab a man if the need came around. (Ease into the handle and let the edge do the work if the knife is sharp, the man named Vanboss said. If dull, stab fucking hard — for the startling shock of it — and then twist even harder to make up for the dullness.) At that point, the junkie kid entered off topic, telling a tale about an old Indian man on a Zuni reservation who claimed his baby daughter had been carried away in the claws of a hawk, which led to a short, tight argument about the possibility of such an event, which somehow led back to knives and a brief silence in which they considered the way blades came in and out of their travels — a blue chrome glint in the darkness of a reefer car. A fat butcher knife — wider than it was long — whirling, blade, handle, blade handle, over the top of a loaded coal hopper. And in this silence, Ronnie held his own blade story close to the vest and resisted the urge to join in, because to tell it properly he’d have to explain how he’d spent a couple of years with an old geezer named Hambone. (But he’d never confess the deep extent of that sharing. He’d hold off on the intimacies. He’d refrain from all that.) He’d have to give the requisite road detail, charting their travails like pins on a map, from Spokane (bad facilities, not enough places to squat) to Lincoln (kind people willing to go out of their way to buy you a drink), giving just enough detail to authenticate the story, so the others would have a chance to chime in, saying, I know that town, that shit-hole, or, I stay clear of that dump, with the bulls running wild in the yards, or, I know a cop in that one, a nice guy who’ll cut you a break if you need it. Then he’d have to go into how the old man had gone on a drinking binge in Flagstaff, and how he had waited out the jail stint and helped him out, and then how the old man did the same in kind a few months later, when Ronnie had evened things out with his own binge in Kansas City. The men would nod with an understanding of the delicate nature of a balanced road kinship. Finally he’d get (he speculated) to that one night at the camp in Michigan and what Hambone had said about his mother.
But at that point, in order to give the complete story (he thought), he’d be forced to backtrack. In order to give sense to his blade story he’d have to expose the old man — now gone, now just so much ashes and dust — to the judgment and ridicule of these men around the fire. Then his voice would thicken and he’d say, Here’s where the knife fits in, boys. You wake up in the cold night with a blade to your throat. You wake up to a halfcrazed old fuck drawing a knife against your gullet while you struggle out of a dream to a vague understanding of the threat at hand. You wake to hear an old man saying, You believe what I said about my lovely mother or I’ll kill you dead right here. At that point, the story would demand more. Without more, it would simply be another blade story in a world of a million. One more old geezer/youth kinship/betrayal tale of the road. Give me your word that you believe me or I’ll kill you dead right here, he thought while the men waited, their faces tentative and masklike in the firelight, each one — even the junkie kid — holding firm with the sense that he had something to say. Beyond the weeds, the Maumee slugged casually toward Lake Erie. Another blade-to-the-throat story stood at the ready, the men sensed. They caught a vibe in the static holding pattern the banter had taken, in the way that Ronnie held off on his turn to speak. They were sure he had a blade story! In turn, he sensed their expectation, the desire they had to hear everything, right down to how he had extricated himself from the blade. Because the old geezer named Hambone was now long gone.