Rej Bredberi - The Town Where No One Got Off

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 fascianting 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 of 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 a 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 Ms 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 clocksprings, 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, for ever. His shadow under him was stencilled 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 colouring 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, nail-shut office. I alone had departed the iron thunder to set foot on the choppy waves of platform timber.

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 towards 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. Pour-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 drug store he was out front spitting tobacco that rolled itself into tumble-bugs 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 river-bank towards 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 nothin' 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.