The Spot: Stories

The Blade

Amid the men around the fire — tramps with other tramps — there was a young kid who reminded Ronnie of himself from way back, the same limberness combined with sorrow, the same combo of despair and liveliness holding out against the odds. A kid copping amid the others as if it didn’t matter that a sense had already formed that at some point soon he’d be cast off, thrown from a train car or simply left behind on the road when he was too far gone to move along. He stared the kid down and waited for him to answer somehow.

Ignore that dead weight, the man named Vanboss said, offering a bottle. There were among the men two bottles of Old Crow and one of a nameless cough remedy, emerald green, syrupy and sweet. They were in a scrubby little camp not far from an oil refinery, just outside of Toledo, and near enough to the Maumee to hear the water flowing. A turpentine smell filled the air, along with the pitch of creosote coming from the track ties and something else, an ozone aftermath of a giant electric spark. They had a little taper of a fire going, nothing much, and they were easeful and calm with the past as far behind them as it would go, and for a long time not much was said besides an occasional curse, some forswearing of the past in the form of a grunt, nothing else until eventually — because it had to at some point — a banter began between the man named Vanboss and the man named Stark, the kind of talk that came after a long quiet. The man named Vanboss told a story about a car crash. Two cars, each doing about a hundred on a two-lane outside Tulsa, struck each other head-on, mashing up into a one-foot-by-one-foot block of metal, out of which there crawled an unscratched child. That led to an argument about the likelihood — or the possibility — of such an event, which in turn led to a story about a guy who had been decapitated in a farming accident, his head boxed neatly in a bale of hay, which in turn veered into some easy, casual chatter about arrest records, which in turn led to stories of knife use, of the best way to stab a man if the need came around. (Ease into the handle and let the edge do the work if the knife is sharp, the man named Vanboss said. If dull, stab fucking hard — for the startling shock of it — and then twist even harder to make up for the dullness.) At that point, the junkie kid entered off topic, telling a tale about an old Indian man on a Zuni reservation who claimed his baby daughter had been carried away in the claws of a hawk, which led to a short, tight argument about the possibility of such an event, which somehow led back to knives and a brief silence in which they considered the way blades came in and out of their travels — a blue chrome glint in the darkness of a reefer car. A fat butcher knife — wider than it was long — whirling, blade, handle, blade handle, over the top of a loaded coal hopper. And in this silence, Ronnie held his own blade story close to the vest and resisted the urge to join in, because to tell it properly he’d have to explain how he’d spent a couple of years with an old geezer named Hambone. (But he’d never confess the deep extent of that sharing. He’d hold off on the intimacies. He’d refrain from all that.) He’d have to give the requisite road detail, charting their travails like pins on a map, from Spokane (bad facilities, not enough places to squat) to Lincoln (kind people willing to go out of their way to buy you a drink), giving just enough detail to authenticate the story, so the others would have a chance to chime in, saying, I know that town, that shit-hole, or, I stay clear of that dump, with the bulls running wild in the yards, or, I know a cop in that one, a nice guy who’ll cut you a break if you need it. Then he’d have to go into how the old man had gone on a drinking binge in Flagstaff, and how he had waited out the jail stint and helped him out, and then how the old man did the same in kind a few months later, when Ronnie had evened things out with his own binge in Kansas City. The men would nod with an understanding of the delicate nature of a balanced road kinship. Finally he’d get (he speculated) to that one night at the camp in Michigan and what Hambone had said about his mother.

But at that point, in order to give the complete story (he thought), he’d be forced to backtrack. In order to give sense to his blade story he’d have to expose the old man — now gone, now just so much ashes and dust — to the judgment and ridicule of these men around the fire. Then his voice would thicken and he’d say, Here’s where the knife fits in, boys. You wake up in the cold night with a blade to your throat. You wake up to a halfcrazed old fuck drawing a knife against your gullet while you struggle out of a dream to a vague understanding of the threat at hand. You wake to hear an old man saying, You believe what I said about my lovely mother or I’ll kill you dead right here. At that point, the story would demand more. Without more, it would simply be another blade story in a world of a million. One more old geezer/youth kinship/betrayal tale of the road. Give me your word that you believe me or I’ll kill you dead right here, he thought while the men waited, their faces tentative and masklike in the firelight, each one — even the junkie kid — holding firm with the sense that he had something to say. Beyond the weeds, the Maumee slugged casually toward Lake Erie. Another blade-to-the-throat story stood at the ready, the men sensed. They caught a vibe in the static holding pattern the banter had taken, in the way that Ronnie held off on his turn to speak. They were sure he had a blade story! In turn, he sensed their expectation, the desire they had to hear everything, right down to how he had extricated himself from the blade. Because the old geezer named Hambone was now long gone.

Just a little unloved runt packed off like a parcel. Nothing much more than a sack of flesh in cloth, passed from one relative to another, riding the line from his uncle Garmady in Detroit all the way to Chicago, where he was passed to his uncle Lester, who in turn passed him over to a Division Street neighbor lady named Urma (last name lost), who later passed him back to his mother, who reluctantly — as if holding a bottle of strychnine — took him for a week or so before saying, Good riddance, get out of my sight, and shipped him off to New York. The memories of that ride combined with the others into a panorama: small towns staring back along dark verges, lit windows buried amid hills, warm and safe but unobtainable: glowing Pugh cars loaded with pig iron, radiating heat along a siding somewhere in Pennsylvania; the long straightaway tracing the rim of Lake Erie; the rattle of the wheel trucks over the tapered tongues of switches somewhere — maybe entering Manhattan on the Hudson River line, or along the complex arrays of Gary where, years later, he’d work lighting smudge pots and greasing gearboxes. O holy vestige of memories, all those trips as a kid reduced to the sensation of being next to nothing, of being little more than a sack, curled against the seat while some bored Negro porter came to attend, his voice hangdog and low, saying, You need anything, boy? While out the window the train dug east or west through the tired back ends of yards, ran along the deep culverts and over the tops of viaducts until — in memory, at least — it came to a sudden standstill along a siding in upstate New York, where out the window a field of weeds was swaying behind some old coot, some vagabond soul lost to the road, his pants hitched up with a rope, staring up with that dull perplexity — eyes oily and stale — and then giving, in response to the boy’s wave, a feeble lift of the hand, just enough to put a curse on the boy’s soul and to let him know that at some point an even exchange would be made and places would be traded and the boy would take his spot on the siding and look up at the warm windows of passing train cars, the faces silhouetted behind glass. He would look up to see the shades pulled down on the sleeper cars and imagine a Cary Grant type in there watching an Eva Marie Saint type undress, her dress pooling around her feet while in her panties she rises up onto her toes to tighten her beautiful calves. He would look up and imagine that kind of scene and feel bitterness at the fact that somewhere down the line — he’d never know exactly where — he became the man on the siding looking up and stopped being the little boy looking down, Hambone thought, staring across the campfire at the kid named Ronnie, who met his gaze, waited a few beats, and then said, What are you thinking on, Hambone? (The kid — eighteen, maybe nineteen — was already starting to take on a hardness, because somewhere down the line he’d been rolled. It was there in the pale green luster of the kid’s eyes, a violation. He had confessed to the fact, speaking in a roundabout manner, saying: Some men took me and tied me up and offered me a choice between two things. One of those things was death, and the other was worse than death.) You’re thinking on something, the kid said again.

Hambone waited a few beats and then said, Well, Ronnie, I was thinking on a trip I took as a kid on the New York Central line — what they used to call the Water Level Route — to New York. It was grand and lovely. Nothing but plush seats and a smoking car and a dining car with full service — white tablecloths and fine china — and a sleeper car, too, with a porter who came to turn down the sheets while my mother dabbed my face clean with a washcloth and read me bedtime stories, he said, and the kid waited another few beats, and then said, I’ve never heard about that side of your mother. Never once heard you speak of her so kindly, and then he sat back, waiting, looking through the roil of flames at the old man, who in turn looked back with his eyes tight, pressed into the wrinkled flesh, waited a beat, then a few more, before saying, You can believe what I say or not. That’s up to you. My mother was a wonderful woman. She’d do anything for me, and she did. She suffered a great deal and went through the fires of hell for my sake so many times I can’t count them. I have only fond memories of my mother. I’d put her at the top of any list, he said. Then he began to cough again, lurching to the side and hacking into the darkness. When the coughing subsided, he turned back and watched the kid stir the beans one last time and then tweeze the can out of the fire, working carefully with two sticks, putting it down in the dirt to cool. Then the kid leaned back and gazed up at the sky, abject and sullen, throwing itself over the campfire. It was the kind of sky — hazy with only a few stars visible — that formed itself over a dishonest old tramp. Deep in the darkness, past the sound of crickets, the railroad tracks ticked, giving off heat, or maybe — unlikely but maybe — releasing the tension of a train traveling along the fishplate joints, an unscheduled manifest out of Chicago, or farther west in the hinterlands, somewhere past the Mississippi where, months ago, Hambone had confessed the truth about his mother: A nasty cunt is what my old lady was. A real piece of work without a kind or decent bone in her body. You’ll have to take my word on this, Ronnie, because it’s all I can offer. If I could I’d bring her here for you and prop her up just so you could bear witness to one of the nastiest pieces of work, I would, just to prove it, but I can’t because she’s dead as a doornail. Thank Christ. I’m free of that burden, at least. No matter what I can say about my time in this world right now, I can at least rejoice that she’s gone, he said. Then he’d launched himself into a four-day whiskey binge in Flagstaff, one of those rant-and-rave runs that landed him in jail. (Ronnie stuck around, waiting out the jail stint, sleeping beneath a local overpass, checking in on occasion with a desk sergeant named Franklin. Who is that man to you? Franklin had asked. My father, Ronnie said, evoking a steady, doleful stare from the police officer. Your father? Yes, sir. My old man.)

There are things you can and cannot say about your old lady on the road, Hambone’s Flagstaff binge had stated. There are secret limits to the evocation of anger and hatred when it comes to speaking of she who bore you out of her loins. You can say what you want about the one who brought you forth into the world, but don’t go so far as to call her a cunt. The basic physics went as follows: You made a confession to your fellow tramps, usually in the form of a campfire rant, words pounded out of a pent-up grief, and then you used that confession as an excuse to tear into a drinking binge that would, in turn, serve to reveal an inner torment so deep and wild that it could manifest itself only in the form of a dismal creature, a man alone, crawling along the roadside, ignored by passing cars, his knees bloody, with no love in the world.

You’re a stupid fool for holding out around here for me to come out, Hambone had said, walking bowlegged out of the Flagstaff jail. The fact that you did so simply shows your foolhardy youth.

Didn’t you check some gear when they took you in? Ronnie asked, holding him up and feeling the frail, chicken-bone thinness of his shoulders.

Nothing I ever want back. Some old duds, and a canteen of whiskey they poured out for my own sake.

Long days of windblown dust and cold nights beneath starlight and yet somehow they stayed together, watching over each other, taking turns, trying to maintain a balance. For his part, at a campfire near Kansas City, Ronnie confessed to having abandoned a bride back in Ohio, a girl named Rose who had been with child — knocked up, pregnant, take your pick. As beautiful as a fucking voodoo doll, he added. He went on with his confession until his voice gave way and he slipped away from the fire and stumbled off into Kansas City — all cowpoke delusion and gunslinging hee-haw! — where he found himself, in the end, after a long binge, bloodied with a broken jaw (wired shut) and a ten-day jail stint. During which time Hambone, using the incarceration as an excuse (ten days in a K.C. pen is equal to a month in a Chicago clinker), hooked up with a hayseed named Stills and went on a ten-day burglary spree. (The old lady I burgled ain’t gonna miss what I took, he explained, escorting Ronnie out of jail. She was demented and hardly knew what was what. In any case we kept things even and didn’t go too far and left her a pearl brooch, a pair of earrings — silver plate — and her reading glasses. We burgled the old lady and then Stills robbed me and now I have just enough to buy a few bottles and to hold a little cash on the side to give someone else out there something to rob from us if they come along and feel so compelled.)

From K.C. they wandered east again, skirting town centers while between them a tension formed. If the price were high enough, one man would rob the other if he could, if enough funds entered into the formula, Ronnie began to admit to himself. A structure had formed around this possibility of betrayal. A tightness entered the way they spoke to each other, wedged apart by the fact that even after the drinking binges, Ronnie was still youthful and the old man was still old. To go off alone would be to stretch the you-did-this-and-then-I-did-that fights they sometimes had, mostly in Indiana, a state too prim and proper and boring around the edges to exploit. In any case, the old man’s health was going downhill fast. At a free clinic in Indianapolis a doctor pressed the cold cone of his stethoscope to the caved rib bones and said, Breathe deep, deeper. Is that what you call breathing deep? When he slapped the X-ray film onto the light board in his office, it showed not shadow but rather ghostly white furls of tumor, billowing like smoke. In contrast, Ronnie remained limber and quick, fast on his toes, with lean skinny arms — only a few track marks and one hookshaped scar from a knife fight in Akron — and a brightness in his eyes that stayed on the edge of being hopeful. A spark still burned when he spoke about ideas he had on how to make a buck, heists he might pull if he could get his old buddies back together: a forlorn gas station, not far from the Ohio Turnpike, with a single attendant behind the counter, just begging to be stuck up, just asking for it when the time was right; a blueberry farm in Michigan that would yield up a month’s worth of sweet eating if you felt like heading up that way.

You got something to say on blades, the man named Vanboss said that night, outside Toledo. The silence had continued to open around the men, stretching down to the shore of the river and past that to the refinery, wagging its burn-off plume into the sky. It was a wide silence that spread out in concentric circles with Ronnie at the epicenter and the men just one ring out. It was the kind of silence that formed around a given, and the given was that Ronnie had a good blade story to tell, most likely a blade/fight story, and — this was pure speculation, but they sensed it was possible — even a terminal act of violence on Ronnie’s part, because he seemed the type: gaunt, tight-lipped about his past. He had uttered the name Hambone once or twice before going on to some other subject, as if testing to see who might’ve known the man.

Don’t have nothing to say on the matter of blades, Ronnie said, studying the flames, feeling his story tighten into something sharp. One last bit of trust the old man had handed over, in the form of how he had died and at whose hand that night. It was something he’d hold as long as he could, years hence, until he forgot most of the details and was moving through a vague sense of what had been. But for now he recalled the blade pushing harder against his throat, unwilling to budge no matter what he said up into the darkness. (Christ, I believe you. Your mother was one of a kind. She was wonderful.) Beneath the blade the hollow of his windpipe waited; an airy emptiness ready to form. A gape through which the rest of his life would pass. An obscene hole. The blade had not lightened up. It remained persistent and tight, sliding ever so slightly under the old man’s grip, nicking and digging until, in a single, quick movement, he lashed up, acting as fast as he could to save himself. Then the blade went in and out, moving before thoughts could form. It plunged between the brittle ribs and penetrated the cloudy center while the old man gave a loud, bellowing wheeze, tumbling back a few steps into the fire and, falling into a bloom of sparks, unleashing the scream that would spin around in Ronnie’s eardrums forever. It was a scream that would never leave the world, he thought, looking at the men who had stopped waiting for him to speak and were readying themselves — their faces taking on a bored slackness — to move on to some other subject.