chance to see it.â
âWe were just talking. Thereâs nothing there.â
âYouâre wrong,â I said. âThere is.â
I put my hat on my head and lifted the suitcase in my hand.
âBy God,â said the salesman, âI think youâre really going to do it.â
My heart beat quickly. My face was flushed.
The train whistled. The train rushed down the track. The town was near!
âWish me luck,â I said.
âLuck!â he cried.
I ran for the porter, yelling.
There was an ancient flake-painted chair tilted back against the station platform wall. In this chair, completely relaxed so he sank into his clothes, was a man of some seventy years whose timbers looked as if heâd been nailed there since the station was built. The sun had burned his face dark and tracked his cheek with lizard folds and stitches that held his eyes in a perpetual squint. His hair smoked ash-white in the summer wind. His blue shirt, open at the neck to show white clocksprings, was bleached like the staring late afternoon sky. His shoes were blistered as if he had held them, uncaring, in the mouth of a stove, motionless, for ever. His shadow under him was stencilled a permanent black.
As I stepped down, the old manâs eyes flicked every door on the train and stopped, surprised, at me.
I thought he might wave.
But there was only a sudden colouring of his secret eyes; a chemical change that was recognition. Yet he had not twitched so much as his mouth, an eyelid, a finger. An invisible bulk had shifted inside him.
The moving train gave me an excuse to follow it with my eyes. There was no one else on the platform. No autos waited by the cobwebbed, nail-shut office. I alone had departed the iron thunder to set foot on the choppy waves of platform timber.
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.
âAfternoon,â a voice said, faintly.
I knew he did not look at me but only at that great cloudless spread of shimmering sky.
âAfternoon,â I said.
I started up the dirt road towards 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 oâclock 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 drug-store silence. Five oâclock, boys and pebbles plunged in the town river. Five-fifteen, ants paraded in the slanting light under some elm-trees.
And yet â I turned in a slow circle â 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 drug store he was out front spitting tobacco that rolled itself into tumble-bugs 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 eight time through the quiet streets when I heard footsteps beside me.
I looked over and
Jennifer Snow
Selena Kitt
Allison Winn Scotch
Erica Storm
Joanna Rakoff
Nina Croft
E.J. Swenson
P.G. Wodehouse
E. C. Sheedy
Vi Voxley