clenched. He leaned towards me as I leaned towards him. There was a terrible silent moment of immense strain as before an explosion.
He forced himself to speak at last. It was the voice of a man crushed by a monstrous burden.
«How do I know you got a gun under your arm?»
«You don't know.» My voice was blurred. «You can't be sure.»
He waited. I thought he was going to faint.
«That's how it is?» he said.
«That's how it is,» I said.
He shut his eyes tight. He shut his mouth tight.
After another five seconds, very slowly, heavily, he managed to take his hand away from my own immensely heavy arm. He looked down at his right hand then, and took it, empty, out of his pocket.
Slowly, with great weight, we turned away from each other and started walking blind, completely blind, in the dark.
The midnight PASSENGER TO BE PICKED UP flare sputtered on the tracks. Only when the train was pulling out of the station did I lean from the open Pullman door and look back.
The old man was seated there with his chair tilted against the station wall, with his faded blue pants and shirt and his sunbaked face and his sunbleached eyes. He did not glance at me as the train slid past. He was gazing east along the empty rails where tomorrow or the next day or the day after the day after that, a train, some train, any train, might fly by here, might slow, might stop. His face was fixed, his eyes were blindly frozen, towards the east. He looked a hundred years old.
The train wailed.
Suddenly old myself, I leaned out, squinting.
Now the darkness that had brought us together stood between. The old man, the station, the town, the forest, were lost in the night.
For an hour I stood in the roaring blast staring back at all that darkness.
