Bradbury, Ray - SSC 07 (39 page)

 
          
 
Crossing the continental United States by
night, by day, on the train, you flash past town after wilderness town where
nobody ever gets off. Or rather, no person who doesn't belong, no person who
hasn't roots in these country graveyards ever bothers to visit their lonely
stations or attend their lonely views.

 
          
 
I spoke of this to a fellow passenger, another
salesman like myself, on the Chicago-Los Angeles train as we crossed Iowa.

 
          
 
"True," he said. "People get
off in Chicago; everyone gets off there. People get off in New York, get off in
Boston,
get
off in L.A. People who don't live there go
there to see and come back to tell. But what tourist ever just got off at Fox
Hill, Nebraska, to look at it?
You?
Me? No! I don't know
anyone, got no business there, it's no health resort, so why bother?"

 
          
 
"Wouldn't it be a fascinating
change," I said, "some year to plan a really different vacation? Pick
some village lost on the plains where you don't know a soul and go there for the
hell of it?"

 
          
 
"You'd be bored stiff."

           
 
"I'm not bored thinking of it!" I
peered out the window. "What's the next town coming up on this line?"

 
          
 
"Rampart Junction."

 
          
 
I smiled. "Sounds good. I might get off
there."

 
          
 
"You're a liar and a fool. What you want?
Adventure? Romance? Go ahead, jump off the train. Ten seconds later you'll call
yourself an idiot, grab a taxi, and race us to the next town."

 
          
 
"Maybe."

 
          
 
I watched telephone poles flick by, flick by,
flick by. Far ahead I could see the first faint outlines of a town.

 
          
 
"But I don't think so," I heard
myself say.

 
          
 
The salesman across from me looked faintly
surprised.

 
          
 
For slowly, very slowly, I was rising to
stand. I reached for my hat. I saw my hand fumble for my one suitcase. I was
surprised myself.

 
          
 
"Hold on!" said the salesman.
"What're you doing?"

 
          
 
The train rounded a curve suddenly. I swayed.
Far ahead I saw one church spire, a deep forest, a field of summer wheat.

 
          
 
"It looks like I'm getting off the
train," I said.

 
          
 
"Sit down," he said.

 
          
 
"No," I said. "There's
something about that town up ahead. I've got to go see. I've got the time. I
don't have to be in L.A., really, until next Monday. If I don't get off the
train now, I'll always wonder what I missed, what I let slip by when I had the
chance to see it."

 
          
 
"We were just talking. There's nothing
there."

 
          
 
"You're wrong," I said. "There
is."

 
          
 
I put my hat on my head and lifted the
suitcase in my hand.

 
          
 
"By God," said the salesman, "I
think you're really going to do it."

 
          
 
My heart beat quickly. My face was flushed.

 
          
 
The train whistled. The train rushed down the
track. The town was near!

 
          
 
"Wish me luck," I said.

 
          
 
"Luck!" 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 he'd 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 clock springs,
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, forever.
His shadow under him was stenciled a permanent black.

 
          
 
As I stepped down the old man's eyes flicked
every door on the train and stopped, surprised, at me.

 
          
 
I thought he might wave.

 
          
 
But there was only a sudden coloring 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, nailed-shut office. I alone had departed the iron thunder to set
foot on the choppy waves of platform lumber.

 
          
 
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.