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“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.
The stars were coming out. We walked on.
“Well,” he said slowly, “you know much about your own insides?”
“You mean my stomach or you mean psychologically?”
“That’s the word. I mean your head, your brain, you know much about that?”
The grass whispered under my feet. “A little.”
“You hate many people in your time?”
“Some.”
“We all do. It’s normal enough to hate, ain’t it, and not only hate but, while we don’t talk about it, don’t we sometimes want to hit people who hurt us, even kill them?”
“Hardly a week passes we don’t get that feeling,” I said, “and put it away.”
“We put away all our lives,” he said. “The town says thus and so, Mom and Dad say this and that, the law says such and such. So you put away one killing and another and two more after that. By the time you’re my age, you got lots of that kind of stuff between your ears. And unless you went to war, nothin’ ever happened to get rid of it.”
“Some men trapshoot or hunt ducks,” I said. “Some men box or wrestle.”
“And some don’t. I’m talkin’ about them that don’t. Me. All my life I’ve been saltin’ down those bodies, puttin’ ’em away on ice in my head. Sometimes you get mad at a town and the people in it for makin’ you put things aside like that. You like the old cave men who just gave a hell of a yell and whanged someone on the head with a club.”
“Which all leads up to …?”
“Which all leads up to: everybody’d like to do one killin’ in his life, to sort of work off that big load of stuff, all those killin’s in his mind he never did have the guts to do. And once in a while a man has a chance. Someone runs in front of his car and he forgets the brakes and keeps goin’. Nobody can prove nothin’ with that sort of thing. The man don’t even tell himself he did it. He just didn’t get his foot on the brake in time. But you know and I know what really happened, don’t we?”
“Yes,” I said.
The town was far away now. We moved over a small stream on a wooden bridge, just near the railway embankment.
“Now,” said the old man, looking at the water, “the only kind of killin’ worth doin’ is the one where nobody can guess who did it or why they did it or who they did it to, right? Well, I got this idea maybe twenty years ago. I don’t think about it every day or every week. Sometimes months go by, but the idea’s this: only one train stops here each day, sometimes not even that. Now, if you wanted to kill someone you’d have to wait, wouldn’t you, for years and years, until a complete and actual stranger came to your town, a stranger who got off the train for no reason, a man nobody knows and who don’t know nobody in the town. Then, and only then, I thought, sittin’ there on the station chair, you could just go up and when nobody’s around, kill him and throw him in the river. He’d be found miles downstream. Maybe he’d never be found. Nobody would ever think to come to Rampart Junction to find him. He wasn’t goin’ there. He was on his way someplace else. There, that’s my whole idea. And I’d know that man the minute he got off the train. Know him, just as clear …”
