Richard Ford - The Sportswriter

Within the yellow-lit coaches, pale dreamy faces stare out into the Easter night. Where are we now , they seem to ask. Who lives here? Is this a safe place? Or what? Their features are glassy and smooth with drowse.

I stroll to the platform and up under the awning, hands in pockets, stepping lively on my toes as if I’m expecting — a loved one, a girlfriend, a best friend from college long out of touch. The two trainmen give me the mackerel eye and begin some exclusive talk they’ve been putting off. But I don’t feel the least excluded, since I enjoy this closeness to trains and the great moment they exude, their implacable hissing noise and purpose. I read somewhere it is psychologically beneficial to stand near things greater and more powerful than you yourself, so as to dwarf yourself (and your piddlyass bothers) by comparison. To do so, the writer said, released the spirit from its everyday moorings, and accounted for why Montanans and Sherpas, who live near daunting mountains, aren’t much at complaining or nettlesome introspection. He was writing about better “uses” to be made of skyscrapers, and if you ask me the guy was right on the money. All alone now beside the humming train cars, I actually do feel my moorings slacken, and I will say it again, perhaps for the last time: there is mystery everywhere, even in a vulgar, urine-scented, suburban depot such as this. You have only to let yourself in for it. You can never know what’s coming next. Always there is the chance it will be — miraculous to say — something you want.

Off the train steps a buxom young nun, in the blackest, most orthodox habit, carrying a slick attaché case and a storky umbrella. She is bright-eyed, round-faced, smiling, and passes a teasing “thanks, goodbye” to the trainmen, who touch their hats and smile, but also give her a swarthy look the instant her back is turned. She is met by no one, and trudges past me cheerfully, heading, I’m sure, up to the seminary on some ecclesiastical business with the Presbyterians. As she passes me by I give her a smile, for she will encounter no dangers on our streets, I can assure her. No would-be rapists or scroungy types. Though she seems like someone to look danger in the eye and call its bluff.

Next, two business types with loose ties, single-suiters and expensive briefcases — lawyers, without doubt, up from Philadelphia or the nation’s capital, come to do business with one or another of the world headquarters that dot the local landscape. Both are Jews, and both look dog-tired, ready for a martini, a bath, a set of clean sheets and a made-for-TV movie. They crawl into the taxi. I hear one say “The August,” and in no time they go murmuring up the hill, the taxi’s taillights red as smudged roses.

Two blond women scurry out, give each other big phony hugs, then jump in the two waiting cars — each driven by a man — and disappear. For an instant, I thought one of them was familiar, someone I might’ve met at a cocktail party in the old days. A spiky married Laura or Suzannah with boyish hips, red silk pants and leathery skin: someone of my own rough age, whom I more than likely bored the nose off of but was too bored back by to stop. Possibly a friend of X’s, who knows the truth about me. One blonde indeed did give me a lashing, feral half-glance before stepping into her waiting Grand Prix and delivering Mr. Inside a big well-rehearsed kiss, but she seemed not to recognize me. A big problem of being divorced in a town this size is that all the women immediately become your wife’s friends whether they know her or not. And that’s not just paranoia. Being a man gets harder all the time.

The trainmen part company and sidle back toward their vestibules. The wig-wag headlight careers over the open rails. The inside passengers have all gone back to sleep. It is time, almost, to turn to home. And do what?

Out of the far silver car comes a last departer. A small fawn-haired woman of the frail but vaguely pretty category, not of this town. That much is clear the moment her shoes — the kind with heels lower than the toes — touch ground. She is wearing a tent dress, though she is wire-thin, with a pleasant, scrubbed look on her wren’s features, and a self-orienting way of looking round about, which makes her turn her nose up testingly to the air. In one hand she is carrying some kind of deep Brazilian wicker basket as luggage, on top of which she’s strapped a bulky knitted sweater. And in the other there’s a fat copy of what I can make out as The Life of Teddy Roosevelt , with plenty of paper bookmarks sprouting from the pages.

She sniffs the air as if she’s just detrained in the Punjab, and turning her head with a scent, moves to say a word to the older of the two trainmen, who points her in the direction the nun has taken, up the hill into town and directly by me, leaned against a girder beside the phalanx of newspaper boxes, growing sleepy in the springtime evening.

The word “taxi” is spoken, and both of them look toward the empty parking spaces and shake heads. My Malibu sits alone across the street, angled into the murky Rose of Sharon hedge behind the regional playhouse — a dark and barely detectable blob. I see the two of them look toward me again, and I sense a connection being made. “Maybe that gentleman right there will give you a lift into town,” one of them is saying. “This is a town of gentle folk. Not one in ten thousand will murder you.”

I am unexpectedly visible!

The woman turns with her orienteering wren’s look. She and I are the same vintage. We have learned to trust strange people in the sixties, and it hasn’t yet dawned on us that it might’ve been a mistake (though one clue should’ve been our own perfidies).

Hands thrust in back pockets, though, I am ready to be used; to lend a hand, prove myself guileless as old Huck. There might, in fact, be a late-night cocktail invitation in the works as a “thankee,” an intime in the dark taproom of the August, alongside the bushed lawyers. After that, who knows? More? Less?

Deep in my pocket my fingers touch an inconclusive paper. Walter’s poor letter, folded in thirds and tucked behind my wallet, forgotten to this moment. And a sudden cheerless warmth rises out under my chin and stings my ears and scalp.

This is Walter’s sister, this woman! Wicker basket. Healthy shoes. Roosevelt bio. She has already arrived for her doleful duties, and with enough dry, grief-dispelling practicality to send a drowning man clambering for the bottom. She is some miserable Montessori teacher from Coshocton. A woman with a reading list and an agenda, friends in the Peace Corps, an NPR program log deep in her Brazil bag. A tidy, chestless Pat or Fran from Oberlin or Reed, with high board scores. My heart pounds a tomtom for the now disappeared blondie, whirling away in her Grand Prix to some out-of-the-way Italian snuggery with the nerve to stay open Easters. I ache to be along. Dinner could be on me. Drinks. The tip. Don’t leave me to sensible grief and a night of plain-talk. (Of course I’m not sure it’s her, but neither am I sure it isn’t.) This woman has the look to me of trouble’s sister, and I’d rather put my trust in my heart and my money where my mouth isn’t.

“Excuse me, please,” scratchy Fran/Pat says in her bony, businesslike voice as she comes toward me. She has an iron handshake, I’m sure, and knows death to be just one of life’s slow curves you have to stand in on, brother or no brother. I would hate to see what else she has in that basket. “I wonder if you’d mind terribly….” She speaks in a phony boarding school accent, nose up, seeing me — if at all — out the bottom third of her eyes.

The train discharges a loud hiss. A bell rings a last shrilling peel. “Boooard,” the trainman shouts from his dark vestibule. The train lurches, and in that sudden instant I am aboard, hurt knee and all, unexpectedly a passenger, and away. “I’m sorry,” I say, as my face slides past, “I’ve got to catch a train.”