Everything but Your Wits

“And I followed her to the station / with a suitcase in my hand”

 

“LOVE IN VAIN,” ROBERT JOHNSON, 1938

STATION

The pump brays as someone works the enameled handle, a grip heavy and cool, marked with duller places from the oils of many palms. Then water stutters from the iron spout, and travelers step forward, canteens in hand. Children squeal as the cold water splashes them. Water puddles on the concrete.

Imagine a place filled with waiting people. They stitch patches to frayed pant legs, swap stories, smear lard on cracked sandals. Every now and then, a latecomer steps onstage and attaches to a group. Over there is someone stretched full length on the sand (or bench, or low-pile patterned carpet), catching a few winks. Gather your strength while you can.

So: the singing pump, the low hum of conversation, light snoring, dripping water. And a clicking, as from shuffling a stiff deck of cards, emanating from a large ebony Departures sign. It hangs in a conspicuous place, and the travelers glance up at it before turning back to their different tasks. Occasionally, after such a glance, a group jumps to its feet, collecting its knapsacks and bedrolls, and rushes off to some platform or trailhead. The purring click of the sign fires the travelers’ blood. Bikers bound for the mountains pass around a tire pump, a roll of red grip tape. The travelers jig with excitement. Then a whistle blows, and they hurry to their respective gates.

GATE/PLATFORM 1: MATAMOROS, MEXICO

I dropped my quarter in the slot, and the turnstile gears clicked. A man launched himself toward me, saying what is it you want, I help you. I kept my eyes down. Under a warped ramada, a man played an upright bass with dark strings worn down, in places, to nylon white as a finger bone. Behind a plate glass window, meat roasted over glowing charcoal, the animal splayed on a rod, legs spread wide, muscles dry and purple red, revealing the twin ditches of its rib cage.

Then she appeared, a natural on high heels, pulled through the crowd by her father. It was her quinceañera, and the hem of her lavender gown flounced around her nylon-covered ankles. Dark curls, shiny with pomade, clung stiffly to her smooth temples. If that ’s what it was to be queen for a day, it wasn’t anything she hadn’t practiced, nothing she was scared of. So what if she was late for the party? They couldn’t start without her.

Border-town girl, fifteen that long-ago day in July, I remember your poise, the flame your eyes held. Let men hurry; time is not your master. You vanished around the corner, past the taxi stand, but when I close my eyes I see you.

GATE/PLATFORM 2: TUCSON

The car seemed to come out of nowhere, a black Nova, glass packs so loud we suddenly had to shout. Once it roared past, four things in quick succession: I felt a sudden, sharp pain; the boys in the Nova shouted something out the window; an egg, stone hard, bounced off my side; it smashed on the sidewalk. Then the Nova was gone, blasting off into the night, taillights streaming red. Yolk smeared the concrete yellow. I thought: at least it wasn’t a rock, at least it wasn’t a bullet. The purple bruise below my rib cage faded to green, then yellow, and after ten days was gone.

GATE/PLATFORM 3: MURRELL’S INLET, SOUTH CAROLINA

She might have been thirteen, the girl on the bicycle, pedaling up and down Schooner Court all day long. Heavy, her hair in a lank ponytail, she kept her head down over the handlebars, and her blue shorts were dark with sweat. In mid-July, a mile from the beach—where those looking to economize stay—there’s not much of a breeze. The early morning air is like a damp towel, and by noon, people who aren’t used to the heat have a hard time catching their breath. In the evening the mosquitoes whine, the air smells like gunpowder from the fireworks, and little frogs make regular, taut calls, like car alarms. All that long day, the tires of her red bike hissed on the asphalt. No breeze rattled the palmetto fronds; the marsh air was thick enough to spoon, like custard. What did she think about, the girl on the bicycle? Once I think she saw me, sitting on the porch with a sweating drink in my hand, watching her. She just kept going, and as the sky got dark and the streetlights flickered on, I caught a snatch of the song she whistled: “Embraceable You.”

GATE/PLATFORM 4: SIRACUSA, SICILY

Their aim was very bad; the slanting rain got in their way, and the chain-link fence. But they were determined and resourceful, focused as children can be. One found a stone; the others slung mud. The women, tending braziers of coals that smoked in the rain, ignored them. I had passed their camp on my way to a fountain in Siracusa where, according to legend, you can drop a flower and later it’ll surface in Greece. But when I found the fountain I’d forgotten to buy a flower; my heart wasn’t in it. I leaned over the pool’s edge and looked at the rain-dimpled water. Everything was gray, the stones lining the well, the streets, the old palazzi turned into storefronts selling gloves and copper cookware. I took a different way back to the train station; someone in the street showed me how. I’m sure those children—adults by now—forgot me by the time the sun set. What did I look like to them, a dripping girl with a backpack and a broken umbrella? They hated me; their eyes burned with it.

GATE/PLATFORM 5: MAIN STREET

Savor the melancholy that comes from driving through a strange town after dark. It doesn’t even have to be late; once the stores have shut down for the day, their display windows burn like stage sets under fluorescent lights. Notice the hardware store with cans of paint in its window, an assortment of beveled mirrors, canning jars. Signs read We Sharpen Everything But Your Wits: Carbide Blades, Skates. Glass Cut. Custom Framing Available. Pause there until the traffic light changes, then touch the gas. You don’t belong here. By the time the workday starts again, you’ll be long gone.

GATE/PLATFORM 6: TERLINGUA, TEXAS

No shade nor scrap of green as far as the eye could see, and the sun bore down like a hammerhead. Rusty barbed wire edged the old graveyard. I walked slowly down the rows, sweating and reading the faded names, thinking of the well-watered city cemetery where I worked once, its green grounds studded with granite monuments polished to glass and gracefully lettered. Nothing like that here. The mourners’ own hands had painted the names on the wooden monuments, piled stones at head and foot, smeared mortar between bricks. They filled the altars they had built with silk flowers, bottles of beer, and votives, spent now, tufts of blackened wicks at their bottoms. They must have dug the very graves, and what would that take in country like this? A whole day of swinging a pickaxe, stony chips flying, denting ground hard enough to twist metal. They did it themselves, those mourners; they paid no one, laying their lost ones away instead watered with their own labors’ sweat, heralded with their own bodies’ hurt. That work had hallowed the red dust under my feet. A wooden tablet ringed with stones (violet, chalk blue, paprika) read, “In the arms of my beloved desert, know I am at rest.”

GATE/PLATFORM 7: PUMPVILLE

Seemed like the wind always blew in west Texas, rubbing paint from the boarded-up storefronts, making the faded signs creak and bang. In a plate glass window, a menu yellowed, and an empty trailer hulked by the dry riverbed. I turned the car radio to “scan,” and it riffed through empty air, picking up static. I listened for hours. There was no shade; there were no churches, and the only shadows were those cast by cinder-block buildings built by men who had left long ago. An old sign read “Hang Your Hat in Sanderson.”When I drove through the next year, the sign was gone.

GATE/PLATFORM 8: EASLEY, SOUTH CAROLINA

The passenger train used to run through Easley at 10:42 every night. I worked at the movie theater then, and by that point in the evening I’d be sweeping up outside, emptying the urn of cigarette butts, beating dust from doormats. From the theaters came the muffled sounds of scripted mayhem—tanker explosions, percussive laughter. I brushed grit off the sidewalk under the humming sodium floodlight. It was a pensive time. And then the Klaxon of the passenger train. I leaned on my broom and watched the train approach, its headlight burning brighter as it rounded the curve. The train’s wheels clicked, one-two, one-two, and across Highway 123 I saw passenger car windows, some lit, flash by. I wondered about the people on the train, where they were going, if they felt the excitement I did, whether any of them looked out their windows at the town, my town, that must have looked nondescript, to them. They would not know the story of the boarded-up textile mill, would not have gone to a funeral at the cemetery by the tracks (pale headstones sliding by in the dark), would not have stopped at the ice cream parlor for supper every Sunday after evening service, would not have tilted high above the tired crowd in the rickety Ferris wheel, set up by the tracks every Fourth of July, looking toward the dark place in the west where invisible mountains bunched.

GATE/PLATFORM 9: IOWA

On the Fourth of July, I dreamed a soldier. Walking a highway shoulder, his back to me, he wore a green uniform and carried a duffel. The material of his jacket stretched taut between his shoulder blades. This was corn country, and I saw waves of green plants, tall on the ridges, stunted and yellow in the low places where rainwater had stood. Knee high by the Fourth, we used to say. Every now and then, he bent to pick up a stone. He’d carry it a little while, then drop it, pick up another. One at a time. He looked solid, corporeal, his dark shadow moving over the gravel, but he was dead, I knew. He walked inexorably towards home.