Friends With Steinbeck - "I jumped off the —— Express"
I started this in writingcirclejerk as "Ex-agented author starts a new book," a way of venting losing my agent of 16 years, with 42 submissions to our credit, through starting a new throwaway work (provisional title "Friends with Steinbeck.") Oddly it turned into something more than a throwaway exercise. Though the posts have been allowed to stand, in contravention of writingcirclejerk's number one rule ("A parody of writing communities. Don't post your writing here.") this good run cannot last forever. This forum may be more appropriate.
ONE
I jumped off the —— Express about a half mile from where the lights became apparent through the fog, the Southern Pacific sheeting through the silence with a screeching hiss. My metal framed canvas rucksack tight against back, I walked down the tracks toward the soft glow of lights that merged with wave crash, ripples of an oasis of humanity in this long country of nothing.
Three days ago, on impulse, feeling indescribably angry at my mom and in depths of despair at the death of my reckless father, I had hopped on the Union-Pacific in Tuberville. It was a dismal city of 34,000 set in a notch between two dismal mountains, with mining and smelting covering the baroque creations that had accompanied initial boom years in layers of gritty cast. Sky-effacing brick smelter stacks, yellow smoke blanketing everything.
My father’s death had not come as a surprise exactly—my earliest memory was how he used to throw me up and catch me with a broad smile. One day he had thrown me up and failed to extend his arms to catch me. The pain had gone beyond a bump on the head, my entire reality shattered, trust never recaptured, though in many ways we were best friends.
Apparently, in his early middle age, my father had done a similar thing with someone who wasn’t a defenseless toddler. His body found slumped across the side entrance of city hall by a janitor, the early morning outflow of patrons and hustlers from pool rooms and dance halls giving way to a knot of men in hats and peaked caps, a sprinkling of women, then the ambulance squad and the hearse. When I arrived, they were finishing up with the forensics. One policeman on the scene needed a shave, another had buttons off his uniform, cigar in corner of mouth. Both had a slight reek of alcohol, when they realized who I was both were more concerned than they led on. Justice would never be served—or had that been the closest approximation of justice that existed Tuberville?
My mother, though separated from dad for four years, turned into a wraith, her hands trembling in the night air when I came home from my after-school job stocking sundries at the Elkin Pharmacy on Laurel Streeet. This went on for a month and I came to dread that long walk home to a parlor that embodied her memory-laded version of hell.
On the day I left she looked me over, hat to shoes, and simply said “which way you going?” With a resigned face, as if she already knew. As I walked to the train crossing, five dollars pinned under grey flannel, gaudy boys exited from a late night of debauchery. The flat leaden sky said everything—the men heading to smelters and mines grasped hard lunch boxes in soot embedded hands—I wanted nothing to do with the town ever again.
Now after three days of furtive freedom, riding the boxcar, I had taken it as far as felt needed or necessary. I was starting to long for some form of civilization again, through all those blurred stars and rising and falling telegraph wires. Yet San Francisco, the terminal stop, felt too big, too anonymous. The clickity clack embedded in my step as I got used to not being in constant motion, felt my cadence slow to something that felt right.
—Anson Bridges