kaolin fire presents :: writing :: fiction

"ThreeBumsWaitingForTheTrain.1"

words

I trudged up the stairs, checking my phone for the time.

A man's voice drifted down and past me. "No, honey, that's not our train. Our train's going to be on this other track."

"But shouldn't our train be here by now?"

The train starts to leave as I pass the man and his daughter. He calls out to someone else on the platform, "Did that train just leave for Sacramento?" I don't hear an answer, but his response tells me more then I really cared to know. "But I just came from Sacramento and we arrived on this track. How--" and I can tell he's been cut off, but I'm not sure if the someone else is talking over him or if it's his daughter that has his attention. "You mean I just missed my train?" Then I finally hear the reply, and it's in the same sort of bemused tone I would have given. "I suppose so."

He and his daughter walk down the stairs I just came up, I presume in search of a payphone, or maybe to try to convince the ticketing machine to give him the time of the next train bound for Sacramento. Me, I'm going to Los Angeles. There's only two trains a day that do so, one in the morning and one in the evening. I find a bench away from people and settle in.

It had been cold for a week, but the day was quickly making up for that and then some. The flowers I'd bought during lunch were rapidly wilting in the sun that was just barely comfortable plowing down on my arms. I paced before the bench, trying to clear thoughts of work from my head. Between three hours of sleep, getting to work late, and leaving early, the day had been a boulder of stress that I needed to let roll off of me. The weekend was straight ahead: train booked, hotel booked, two days to just lounge around with my fiancee. All I had to do was relax.

Falling asleep would be nice--I might try to sleep on the train--but I couldn't let myself go quite that far until I was actually on it. So I just walked up and down. I'd aimed to be at the station an hour early just in case of mistakes and delays and had made it there spot on. I had an hour to wait while keeping myself awake.

I looked at my clipboard and pad of paper, but there wasn't really anything I wanted to think through. After a few more paces, I sat down and pulled out a book from my college days. I'd recently started getting interested in the sorts of things I'd learned and lost, was curious how different they would seem to me now, curious to see whether they'd take me anywhere new.

So far I was only a chapter and a bit in, and it was as if I'd never read it. Chances were I hadn't, really--skimmed the required reading, jumping back and forth to answer questions in the back. Now I was reading it straight through, and critically, forcing myself to go back and re-read when I'd notice myself skimming, noticing when something didn't immediately follow and stopping to think it through. Sometimes I'd have to read something five or six times again. It felt good to think through it, though; I felt like I was actually comprehending the material, understanding where it came from and where it was going. I wondered, flipping to where I'd left off, how much of that was having seen it before, regardless of how unattainable the knowledge was and how poor of an understanding of it I had had even then, and how much was simply that my mind and approach had each considerably matured.

"Hey, excuse me."

I looked up and set my book down. I knew the gist of what the man was about to say just from his stance and attire.

"Hey, I just got out of prison and I'm tryin' to get a train ticket. Anything at all--". He gave the briefest of pauses to see how I'd react but even with forewarning I wasn't sure how I wanted to respond. I let him ramble on, "--yeah, just got out, I've got half of what I need so anything'll help."

I stood and started searching through my pockets. I was pretty sure I didn't have any change and the show would get him off my back more quickly than just saying no. Any change I did find he was welcome to.

There was no change with my cellphone in my left pocket, no change with my keys in my back left pocket. There wasn't any change with the glasses and tissue in my breast pocket and no change with the receipt and digital camera in my front pocket. I shrugged and looked at my backpack where I had two bananas left over from lunch. I was planning on having them for dinner on the train, but figured I could spare one. "I don't have any change. You want a banana?"

He ignored the banana. "Seriously, man, any pennies even."

I sighed and pulled out my wallet. To his credit, sort of, he took a few steps back while I flipped through my bills. I had a ten and two twenties and wasn't feeling anywhere near that generous. I shook my head and shrugged. "Sorry, just got the banana."

"Hey, that's all right man." He nodded, almost tipping the hat he wasn't wearing, turned and walked away.

I settled back onto the bench and checked my phone. Only fifteen minutes had passed. I gazed up and down the tracks, noticing downed signs, new construction, old advertising, and many eras of graffiti.

Another man caught my eye twenty awkward steps away, but the glimpse I had of him as I moved between watching the human scenery in the parking lot across the tracks and going back to read my book pegged him as more respectable than someone who would come up asking for money. It must have been a trick of the light and perhaps my tired mind that gave him a pressed suit, clean-shaven face and an uncomplicated complexion. I had just determined where I'd left off my studies when he placed himself in an implied conversational range.

I looked up.

He was not unfriendly but living had done far more damage to him than my original glimpse belied. There was no suit, no fancy shoes; he shook back and forth, ill at east with his existence, not well fitting the spot he stood in. His face was dirty and pock-marked, his voice half-filled with gravel.

"I don't like to do this," he said, "but I just got out of the hospital." He paused and raised his shirt for effect--his ribs stuck out the bared left side of his upper torso, his skin was pasty, his billy distended around new stitching and old scars.

I shook my head slowly. "I don't have anything."

"Any change at all?"

"Sorry." And I was, despite everything. A sliver of guilt made me wish I had change in my pockets. I offered him my banana.

He shrugged and turned, then turned back. "You got anything to drink?" he asked, mimicking a bottle or can up to his lips.

"Sorry," I repeated. "Just the banana."

He walked away with generic conciliatory remarks to the wind.

I found my place in the book once again and delved back into a tight explanation of information theory as it applied to machine learning.

My arms tingled in the sun and I realized that time was passing and that the sun was large and unobstructed; photons were digging into my skin excitedly, passing energy to the dead cells comprising my outermost epidermal layer and digging deeper, glutting living cells with a warmth they could not properly digest.

Time was passing and my skin was burning, unaccustomed to hours outside. I looked at my phone--it was five forty. I had thirty minutes until my train arrived and left. I stood up and stretched and yawned, thinking back on how silly I'd been to approach today of all days with so little sleep. There was shade ten feet towards the stairs, past the next set of benches; a structure to slow the wind and sun, transparent plastic sheeting dangling by thick rods from a roof supported by two thin brick walls. It hadn't been built with earthquakes in mind, but in a way it was simpler than that. I walked one way around it, reveling in the dry shade, and then back.

Looking over my shoulder, a third man attempted my attention. He launched straight in, harried and a bit breathless. "Our car ran out of gas," he said. "Anything you can sare at all--".

He actually was well-kempt, sporting a sweater despite the heat over a neatly pressed button-up shirt, nice slacks, new sneakers if not shoes. His skin had a healthy glow to it, accentuated a bit by perspiration, and there was a distinct softness about him--easy living, a broken down car was the whole of his worries right now. Still, I had nothing to spare. "You're the third person to ask me while I've been waiting here," I said, "and I don't have anything but a banana. You're welcome to the banana."

He peered around me to my bag and flowers. "Those yours?" he asked.

I nodded my head. "Yeah."

He looked around, seeming to have exhausted the denizens of the platform. "Alright. Okay, thanks." His mind was back to his overwhelming problem before he'd finished the customary pleasantries of conversation.

I sat down with my things and pulled out the note pad and pencil to doodle with. The pencil traced curlicues that entirely ignored the rules of the page. The lazy lines mimicked thoughts in my head about giving and taking, having and not.

Why was it that I felt the most urge to help the person who seemed to have had the least adversity in his life?

The fellow who had just gotten out of jail simply made me uneasy. It's always an unspoken question, an unspoken aggression, what was he there for? Doesn't he have anyone who cares anymore? Or maybe he's tired of taking from them. Maybe it's easier to ask a complete strange, just once, than your own family, your posse, that one more time.

And the guy who'd just gotten out of the hospital--he'd been pretty sketchy, too, largely for the same reasons. Despite the recent sutures and whatnot, you had to wonder if he hadn't just gotten out of prison himself. His body language, in fact, had been more in-your-face and less pleasant than the out-and-out jailbird. The fact that he had to flash me his belly, like he was used to people not believing him, added a bit of warning as well. But a warning of what? That my money wouldn't do any good? Or was it simply a feeling of being taken advantage of? But how exactly would he be taking advantage of me? Worse, was it some subconscious class distinction? Was I so horrible that I'd only give to those as well-to-do as I?

But then--that third case. If he was as well-off as he seemed, what did he need anything I could spare? Out of gas, I'm sure he had a credit card he could use. Either that or it was all a ruse. Who knows, maybe these folks were all working together to fleece the unwary for their every last drop. Stranger scenarios had been contrived, I was sure. My mind spun through possibilities.

A cold wind woke me from my reveries. The platform was empty. I looked at my phone. It was six forty. My train had been due at six ten. I looked at the time again; my brain could not begin to force the digital oracle into any other belief.

I don't know when it came or where it went, but my train and come and gone.