Just a little unloved runt packed off like a parcel. Nothing much more than a sack of flesh in cloth, passed from one relative to another, riding the line from his uncle Garmady in Detroit all the way to Chicago, where he was passed to his uncle Lester, who in turn passed him over to a Division Street neighbor lady named Urma (last name lost), who later passed him back to his mother, who reluctantly — as if holding a bottle of strychnine — took him for a week or so before saying, Good riddance, get out of my sight, and shipped him off to New York. The memories of that ride combined with the others into a panorama: small towns staring back along dark verges, lit windows buried amid hills, warm and safe but unobtainable: glowing Pugh cars loaded with pig iron, radiating heat along a siding somewhere in Pennsylvania; the long straightaway tracing the rim of Lake Erie; the rattle of the wheel trucks over the tapered tongues of switches somewhere — maybe entering Manhattan on the Hudson River line, or along the complex arrays of Gary where, years later, he’d work lighting smudge pots and greasing gearboxes. O holy vestige of memories, all those trips as a kid reduced to the sensation of being next to nothing, of being little more than a sack, curled against the seat while some bored Negro porter came to attend, his voice hangdog and low, saying, You need anything, boy? While out the window the train dug east or west through the tired back ends of yards, ran along the deep culverts and over the tops of viaducts until — in memory, at least — it came to a sudden standstill along a siding in upstate New York, where out the window a field of weeds was swaying behind some old coot, some vagabond soul lost to the road, his pants hitched up with a rope, staring up with that dull perplexity — eyes oily and stale — and then giving, in response to the boy’s wave, a feeble lift of the hand, just enough to put a curse on the boy’s soul and to let him know that at some point an even exchange would be made and places would be traded and the boy would take his spot on the siding and look up at the warm windows of passing train cars, the faces silhouetted behind glass. He would look up to see the shades pulled down on the sleeper cars and imagine a Cary Grant type in there watching an Eva Marie Saint type undress, her dress pooling around her feet while in her panties she rises up onto her toes to tighten her beautiful calves. He would look up and imagine that kind of scene and feel bitterness at the fact that somewhere down the line — he’d never know exactly where — he became the man on the siding looking up and stopped being the little boy looking down, Hambone thought, staring across the campfire at the kid named Ronnie, who met his gaze, waited a few beats, and then said, What are you thinking on, Hambone? (The kid — eighteen, maybe nineteen — was already starting to take on a hardness, because somewhere down the line he’d been rolled. It was there in the pale green luster of the kid’s eyes, a violation. He had confessed to the fact, speaking in a roundabout manner, saying: Some men took me and tied me up and offered me a choice between two things. One of those things was death, and the other was worse than death.) You’re thinking on something, the kid said again.
Hambone waited a few beats and then said, Well, Ronnie, I was thinking on a trip I took as a kid on the New York Central line — what they used to call the Water Level Route — to New York. It was grand and lovely. Nothing but plush seats and a smoking car and a dining car with full service — white tablecloths and fine china — and a sleeper car, too, with a porter who came to turn down the sheets while my mother dabbed my face clean with a washcloth and read me bedtime stories, he said, and the kid waited another few beats, and then said, I’ve never heard about that side of your mother. Never once heard you speak of her so kindly, and then he sat back, waiting, looking through the roil of flames at the old man, who in turn looked back with his eyes tight, pressed into the wrinkled flesh, waited a beat, then a few more, before saying, You can believe what I say or not. That’s up to you. My mother was a wonderful woman. She’d do anything for me, and she did. She suffered a great deal and went through the fires of hell for my sake so many times I can’t count them. I have only fond memories of my mother. I’d put her at the top of any list, he said. Then he began to cough again, lurching to the side and hacking into the darkness. When the coughing subsided, he turned back and watched the kid stir the beans one last time and then tweeze the can out of the fire, working carefully with two sticks, putting it down in the dirt to cool. Then the kid leaned back and gazed up at the sky, abject and sullen, throwing itself over the campfire. It was the kind of sky — hazy with only a few stars visible — that formed itself over a dishonest old tramp. Deep in the darkness, past the sound of crickets, the railroad tracks ticked, giving off heat, or maybe — unlikely but maybe — releasing the tension of a train traveling along the fishplate joints, an unscheduled manifest out of Chicago, or farther west in the hinterlands, somewhere past the Mississippi where, months ago, Hambone had confessed the truth about his mother: A nasty cunt is what my old lady was. A real piece of work without a kind or decent bone in her body. You’ll have to take my word on this, Ronnie, because it’s all I can offer. If I could I’d bring her here for you and prop her up just so you could bear witness to one of the nastiest pieces of work, I would, just to prove it, but I can’t because she’s dead as a doornail. Thank Christ. I’m free of that burden, at least. No matter what I can say about my time in this world right now, I can at least rejoice that she’s gone, he said. Then he’d launched himself into a four-day whiskey binge in Flagstaff, one of those rant-and-rave runs that landed him in jail. (Ronnie stuck around, waiting out the jail stint, sleeping beneath a local overpass, checking in on occasion with a desk sergeant named Franklin. Who is that man to you? Franklin had asked. My father, Ronnie said, evoking a steady, doleful stare from the police officer. Your father? Yes, sir. My old man.)
There are things you can and cannot say about your old lady on the road, Hambone’s Flagstaff binge had stated. There are secret limits to the evocation of anger and hatred when it comes to speaking of she who bore you out of her loins. You can say what you want about the one who brought you forth into the world, but don’t go so far as to call her a cunt. The basic physics went as follows: You made a confession to your fellow tramps, usually in the form of a campfire rant, words pounded out of a pent-up grief, and then you used that confession as an excuse to tear into a drinking binge that would, in turn, serve to reveal an inner torment so deep and wild that it could manifest itself only in the form of a dismal creature, a man alone, crawling along the roadside, ignored by passing cars, his knees bloody, with no love in the world.
You’re a stupid fool for holding out around here for me to come out, Hambone had said, walking bowlegged out of the Flagstaff jail. The fact that you did so simply shows your foolhardy youth.
Didn’t you check some gear when they took you in? Ronnie asked, holding him up and feeling the frail, chicken-bone thinness of his shoulders.
Nothing I ever want back. Some old duds, and a canteen of whiskey they poured out for my own sake.