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I had stopped walking. It was dark. The moon would not be up for an hour.
“Would you?” I said.
“Yes,” he said. I saw the motion of his head looking at the stars. “Well, I’ve talked enough.” He sidled close and touched my elbow. His hand was feverish, as if he had held it to a stove before touching me. His other hand, his right hand, was hidden, tight and bunched, in his pocket. “I’ve talked enough.”
Something screamed.
I jerked my head.
Above, a fast flying night express razored along the unseen tracks, flourished light on hill, forest, farm, town dwellings, field, ditch, meadow, plowed earth and water, then, raving high, cut off away, shrieking, gone. The rails trembled for a little while after that. Then, silence.
The old man and I stood looking at each other in the dark. His left hand was still holding my elbow. His other hand was still hidden.
“May I say something?” I said at last.
The old man nodded.
“About myself,” I said. I had to stop. I could hardly breathe. I forced myself to go on. “It’s funny. I’ve often thought the same way as you. Sure, just today, going cross-country, I thought, How perfect, how perfect, how really perfect it could be. Business has been bad for me, lately. Wife sick. Good friend died last week. War in the world. Full of boils, myself. It would do me a world of good—”
“What?” the old man said, his hand on my arm.
“To get off this train in a small town,” I said, “where nobody knows me, with this gun under my arm, and find someone and kill them and bury them and go back down to the station and get on and go home and nobody the wiser and nobody ever to know who did it, ever. Perfect, I thought, a perfect crime. And I got off the train.”
We stood there in the dark for another minute, staring at each other. Perhaps we were listening to each other’s hearts beating very fast, very fast indeed.
The world turned under me. I clenched my fists. I wanted to fall. I wanted to scream like the train.
For suddenly I saw that all the things I had just said were not lies put forth to save my life.
All the things I had just said to this man were true.
And now I knew why I had stepped from the train and walked up through this town. I knew what I had been looking for.
I heard the old man breathing hard and fast. His hand was tight on my arm as if he might fall. His teeth were clenched. He leaned toward me as I leaned toward him. There was a terrible silent moment of immense strain as before an explosion.
He forced himself to speak at last. It was the voice of a man crushed by a monstrous burden.
“How do I know you got a gun under your arm?”
“You don’t know.” My voice was blurred. “You can’t be sure.”
He waited. I thought he was going to faint.
“That’s how it is?” he said.
“That’s how it is,” I said.
He shut his eyes tight. He shut his mouth tight.
After another five seconds, very slowly, heavily, he managed to take his hand away from my own immensely heavy arm. He looked down at his right hand then, and took it, empty, out of his pocket.
Slowly, with great weight, we turned away from each other and started walking blind, completely blind, in the dark.
The midnight Passenger-to-be-picked-up flare sputtered on the tracks. Only when the train was pulling out of the station did I lean from the open Pullman door and look back.
The old man was seated there with his chair tilted against the station wall, with his faded blue pants and shirt and his sun-baked face and his sun-bleached eyes. He did not glance at me as the train slid past. He was gazing east along the empty rails where tomorrow or the next day or the day after the day after that, a train, some train, any train, might fly by here, might slow, might stop. His face was fixed, his eyes were blindly frozen, toward the east. He looked a hundred years old.
The train wailed.
