From A Game to Play on the Tracks
The river still works. Regardless of commerce's digital hocus-pocus, logs
must be towed, fish netted, barges and railcars loaded. From his open kitchen
window, the day falls into the dirty water, and Roy watches the towboaters
and their tides, onboard DVDs and the crass canned laughter, their on-line
chess matches and short-wave tough talk to American navy ships. Some evenings,
barbecued steak wafts over from their decks, a smell—cooking animals—his stomach
can't abide. Fish, maybe; no longer the ruminants. The river is all mud and
turbulence, but it locomotes. The narrow banks thrive with slick-furred otters
and muskrat. Three long blurts of the whistle: the swing span of the railway
bridge. The dusk-driven murder of off-shift crows passes over en route to their
secret hideaway.
On hot nights
like this, he does not wear a shirt, only loose and long and frayed denim shorts,
Tom Sawyer shorts with deep pockets for beetles and dead cats and granite. He
is so clean. His chest and face are smooth, his arms smooth and muscled. At this
point in the year, his blond hair is close-cropped, a ten-year-old's hair. Almost
white, almost transparent against his lovely skull. He repeatedly runs his hands
over it and waits for the kettle. Bare feet on varnished wood floors. The Louvin
Brothers—their skyscraper harmonies and bittersweet major chords, the mandolin's
needling, his mother's album—soar over the river and all pertinent tributaries.
If I could
only win your love.
These walls
were whitewashed but are not the texture and fabric of brick again, history recovered
and splashed with modernity. This huge room—his home—was a section of roundhouse
for the railyard on this river. The building is not round. It is only a section
of circle, a chunk of curve, circa 1920. Close out Roy's back door, the original
turntable now spans a Japanese water garden, the concrete well is loaded with
lily pads and bog plants and shaded by cutleaf maples; its trestle, once the
lubed swinging arc of the circle's curve, is now fixed as a footbridge across
the pond, painted railroad black. He stands in the middle of the bridge, both
hands around his mug of black tea, and looks down into the water, past the blanket
of chickenwire, to the huge fluorescent koi. From there, that elevation, he looks
back at his home and imagines himself—his chest and wide shoulders, the bright
blue and ancient eyes—framed in the curve of its golden storm-lantern light:
he's here, he's there.
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