There's a Whisper down the line

[bote]

Part 1


Whisper had signed on with the United States military, or maybe he’d been drafted by selective services, I can’t remember. An apt candidate, he’d been trained extensively and sent to Vietnam as a Ranger, position of exciting albeit horrifying consequence.
He weathered missions and murder in the 60’s with the mild humour and even temper for which he’d been recruited; when the war ended, he returned to civil society with mild detachment.
He got married and had kids, he enjoyed company and kept in touch- but he was a marginal. He didn’t live a sedentary, working life for long. First he left his family, then kept on leaving cities and towns behind, passing out of one after another, quiet but steadfast. There was nothing outwardly compelling him, one day he’d simply get on a freight train and go.
Watching the trains, he figured the layouts and functioning of the shipping yards: how once he’d learned to synthesize topographical maps and military intelligence, he learned to identify what manifest was heading where, and how to pass unseen and out of trouble.
When he started riding trains, he watched the countryside roll by, read all the signposts and mile markers. Over time he became more and more cautious, by the mid 80’s, he wasn’t taking a single unnecessary peek. He’d board, roll out his sleeping bag, and stay down till past experience and the sounds of the train told him it was time to get off.
He told me, I never bought a ticket so I never expected a window seat.

Whisper liked this immediate, arduous life, living in the small details: like how tightly coiled the springs sat over the wheels, or the particular sound of a rock thrown against an empty gondola.
The landscape was vast, but eventually finite, the seasons repeated themselves, the skylines and names changed slowly if at all.
The railroad was finite too, but the hobo jungle stretched away down any track in both directions, and it shifted with the comings and goings of the men and women who elected to live there. It was space, the insignificant boundaries separating significant lives.
But there was so much of this space!
and somehow more real for its arbitrariness.
The people in the jungle entertained themselves telling stories and thoughts, Whisper sat listening at the camps. He might tell a story of his own in a quiet moment, but never raised his voice in order to be heard. In the lulls, he talked, and it was of the life he was living: in the jungle, there was no safe distance from which to embellish memories.
Speaking or listening, he was aware of the bodies around him, how they moved tense or at ease. Voices could betray coming adversity in the shifting dark of a campfire, and he was ready.

 

[Ravie]

I'm hooked so far... looking forward to part two.

 

[bote]

Part 2


I met Whisper two months shy of his sixtieth birthday, under the Pepper Ave. bridge.
He was the oldest, but booze and missing teeth had left the other six hobos in camp looking haggard and aged by comparison. Wearing a clean white t-shirt, jeans and boots, grey hair swept back, he sat unobtrusively on a stump, a worn but well-kept pack at his side. He was listening to the conversation, but kept his gaze averted.
I found this regal.
We were fifty miles out of Los Angeles, in a pine grove bordering the Union Pacific train yard in the city of Colton. No one was in a hurry, the warm breeze conducive to staying days or weeks in the shade; you could spend all summer watching the trains move by day and the stars by night.
The conversation was stalled on alcohol when I left.
I walked up the tracks around a bend, and into a canyon. I clambered up the steep bank to a shelf roofed by a skinny train bridge and sat back in the shadows, the sun was bright on everything outside my hiding place, on the gravel mountain
with its giant flag too heavy for the breeze, on the asphalt somewhere nearby. After fifteen minutes one of the tramps appeared and passed below me without looking up.
The other six followed after, in ones and twos, packs on their backs or a shoulder. I wondered if I´d reminded them they could leave, I wondered if they´d been rousted by the cops, or if they were broke or out of booze. I climbed down and followed them.
Whisper was under the next bridge, leaning forward into on a chain link fence and after awhile, he said he was tired.
His daughter in Oregon wanted him to visit, he could buy a small house near her farm and see his grandkids, he could spend some pension money on a Honda Goldwing and travel like that from now on.
Whisper said, all the old tramps start talking like that some day and I never believed any of them.


I was passing through Colton two years ago when I heard he´d died.
Workers in a train yard in San Antonio found him, dead of a heart attack. They said there was a dim light shining in the same place three nights in a row and they finally checked it out.
He was sitting cross legged in his tent with a book open in his lap, head slumped forward on his chest. His headlamp was still on.

 

[veggieguy12]

Nice writing, dude!

 

[boston joe]

good writing, great story,sad ending. keep up the good work i look foward to another story
boston joe

 

[bote]

stp gathering special commemorative edition

Part the third


The Professor Mike Bright suggested ¨Okrie Springs¨ after the nearby Okra fields; in the summer months when the heat was worse, ¨Satan´s rim¨ seemed more appropriate for this sulphurous, steaming pool, bubbling darkly up from the cracked desert floor. When I thought of it now, it was in logistical terms: 3 miles from the crew change, a half-hour walk from the train line, out of direct line of sight from all but one of the camps I was better off avoiding. The dogs over at Larry and Sherry´s knew about me, but they were used to nighttime visitors with stranger smells and habits than mine, and they wouldn´t leave their perimeter except to do battle with the coyotes.

It was so dark I couldn´t see the water under my nose, my body submerged , back against the hot muddy bank, only my head and hands stuck up in the night breeze. I was eating a peanut butter sandwich and considering washing it down with some of the lapping springs water. It wasn´t the thought of micro organisms that made me hesitate: the water was boiling fifteen feet down in the middle of the pool, and still hot enough at the edges to cook a parasite. The macro was another story, and blind as I was, I didn´t fancy a mouth full of brush or reading glasses, or worse. More than one body had given out in the heat and steam, and floated around on its face for awhile before being fished out like a plump raisin. Getting a mouthful of water with some soft flesh and a fingernail in there…

I felt around the old tire till I found my clothes, like a pile of greasy rags.

The heat from the water stayed with me as I walked back along the old asphalt road, and the moon shone dimly. I knew the place well enough to imagine the low shapes of dunes out on the plain, I wondered if the caveman still lived in one of them, or the Appleseeds, with their broken windmill and anachronistic but very real illiteracy. I remembered all three of them around front of the trailer listening to their little girl, five pink clouds floating in the sky, she´d recited, and it was hard to get her to say even that, she had learned to never give anything for free.
The wind stretched the high tension lines somewhere overhead and they sent out their laser-like pings.

I turned right up the tracks, walked a mile, and picked an angle on a sandy slope that put a jumble of railroad ties between me and anything following my path. I sat there till a train blew by, then nothing. I sat there and rubbed my legs to keep warm, then finally got out my old sleeping bag. It was too late to warm up, even cocooned in the thin fabric, all I could do was wait for the sun and think about sex.
I was lying on my side, my body had relaxed; I opened my eyes. The fire was burning slow and low, Whisper was watching it. He was watching me.

 

[Rash L]

mmm hot springs

 

[bote]

part 4

I blinked, and there was a skinny shirtless guy lying on a beanbag, looking up at me and speaking Spanish. "Pone Buena rock national, no este mierde, musica de mierde que nadie quiere escuchar," he said. There was a long pause as he stared on expectantly, then a voice I recognized as Penny's came from where my mouth would have been, "Finiste de hablar? Si? Bien." My eyes swept away and over to some girls sitting on a couch, and Penny's voice asked, "Now, what were you saying?" The girls started laughing and I saw the skinny guy move in the periphery.

I blinked again.

The dunes were back, clearer because the fire had disappeared along with the light it cast. I could see the pile of railway ties as a dark silhouette a-ways behind where Whisper had been a moment before. The heat was gone too, but I was still warm; a train was rolling, tiptoeing by.

I pushed up out of the sleeping bag and pulled on my boots, mechanically taking the knife out first and putting it in my pocket. I felt like I was losing something as I grabbed up my pack and water, but where I'd lain there were only lines in the sand.

I couldn't think about what had just happened in eyespace, the train was moving right along. The action was keeping dread at bay, a fear akin to the anxiety caused by sleep deprivation or too much coffee: the dread of not knowing what it is you are trying to ignore.

It was a quad stack, a long line of flatcars with shipping containers piled four-high on each. I saw a blue one a few cars back that looked like it had the right angles and numbers, and I started running.

The container moved past as I jogged alongside, then I kept even with the short deck at the rear. My 4 liters of emergency went up in a short arc, over the low sidewall and dropped into the well, then I tossed my bunched up sleeping bag after. Running hard, I grabbed the short ladder with one hand and swung up, seeing then feeling the middle of my foot square on the bottom metal rung, sensing a bunch of thoughts like a strand or a speck (my friend April welding years ago, the joints of any weld that were visible on an x-ray, high school shop class, corrosion and eventual failure over time, failure over time).

The ground racing by was the same colour as the early morning light; my pack straps were loose, and it hung off my shoulders like an anchor riding over water. But I pulled myself up and looked down into the well.

I had guessed wrong and there was no floor, my water jug had gone straight under the train and only the crisscrossed suicide bars were momentarily keeping my sleeping bag from following after.

Something is wrong with my head, I joked, that's for why the rookie mistake.

The odds against eyespace self-activating or activating on natural sounds are billions or trillions to one, and when it breaks down, it shuts down. I could feel the key, safe in the pocket glued into the crotch of my pants, like a hidden cyanide capsule, a means to escape reality. Something happened nothing happened, I said and couldn't hear the words for the train and the wind.

 

[bote]

part 5

The train stopped a couple minutes and I managed to wrestle some half-rotted plywood from under a pile of railroad ties, and throw it down in the bottom of my suicide before we took off again.

I rolled my bag out, stayed down, and listened to the sounds of the train. A dark smudge far overhead marked where the containers ended and the stars began.

I got the eyespace hardware the same year I got my vasectomy, connecting in the present a sort of compensation for cutting the physiological line to the future. It was an impulse buy, back when I lived with my parents and my materialism wasn´t quite my own.
My motivations were pedestrian: showing off full sails on a windy bay or whatever exotic vistas I could come up with, pubescent fantasies of watching myself through someone else´s eyes while I busted a sterile nut in them, et cetera.

I´d imagined it would be like a forum or a social networking site, slivers of contact and inspiration gleaned from a slowly dripping barrage of bars, boxes and threads. But eyespace was not like that at all- it was quiet.

There was no periphery, just the transmission.

Accounts could be modified from a computer, but the only changes affected directly were audio/visual limiting via the plastic pitchkey. The signals added to a given account became channels that could be selected, giving the user a live feed of whatever was being seen or heard by the person they´d added. You could look and you could listen.