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‘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 wait-in’ 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 tell –’
‘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 in-sides?’
‘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 trap-shoot, 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 cavemen who just gave a hell of a yell and whanged someone on the head with a club.’
‘Which all leads up to …?’
