A nurse from the local hospital who was waiting at the bus stop across the street gave me a curious look, and I drew my head down into my collar. I felt suddenly that I looked genuinely eccentric in the filthy old ski jacket, my hair pulled back formally as it had been for the burial service that morning and the smeared remains of lipstick around my mouth. What I remembered most clearly about the burial was the dismal reddish color of the broken soil, and the unpleasantly smooth motion of the mechanical device that lowered the coffin into the earth; the two images seemed to have nothing to do with anything.
Talking aloud to myself, however, had suddenly recalled my father to me: he was always talking—preaching, or conferring with parties of solemn-faced men—and when he had no one else to talk to, he talked to himself, pacing in the dining room through many sleepless nights. Once when I was very small, I had crept down the back stairs and peered at him from the kitchen doorway. Wearing pajamas, he had been walking up and down, talking in a low, expressive voice and pausing occasionally to write in the notebook he kept for sermons, his face as alert and interested as if someone were walking there beside him. Remembering that, I remembered that after his funeral I had dreamed about him. In the dream he had fallen overboard from a whaling ship—like the one in Two Years before the Mast—and had come up from the ocean still alive but encased in a piece of iceberg. Through the ice I could see his big hands gesturing in a friendly, instructive manner while he looked straight at me and said something inaudible. It was the same word or syllable I had wanted to say in answer to Stuart Penn, and I couldn’t figure out what it was.
8
When I took the train back up to Boston, a weird-looking kid got on at the North Philadelphia station and sat down next to me. He was fourteen or fifteen and had stringy shoulder-length hair that was a rich, almost metallic gold color, like the hair of a Madonna in a particularly garish religious picture. He had a whitish, pimply, pushed-in face and black eyes that looked almost East Asian; on his skinny body he was wearing a pair of faded orange bell-bottoms and a tight, cheap-looking leather coat, with the big cuffs and wide lapels that had just gone out of fashion. He pushed a very small knapsack with a Boy Scout emblem on it under the seat in front of him, and then he turned to me with such a bright, nutty gaze that I wondered what drug he was on. “Do you like riddles?” he asked me, without any preliminary, and my heart sank.
I was feeling numb and lightheaded, unable yet to comprehend what had happened to my life in the last week and a half. My mother had driven me to the station, and we had kissed goodbye like a couple of zombies, looking at each other with the oblique gaze of two people for whom pain had temporarily cut off communication.
“Listen, I really don’t feel like talking,” I said to the kid next to me, and he responded brightly, “That’s OK—I’ll just give the riddle, and if you don’t know the answer, I’ll say that, too.”
He told me an elephant joke, one of the oldest in the world, and after he told it, he gave a grating high-pitched giggle. “That’s a really good joke,” he said. “A guy gave me a ride in this incredible customized van and told me that one. Hey—I’m on my way to Vegas. Where’re you going?”
“What are you doing on the train to Boston if you’re going to Las Vegas?” I asked unwillingly.
“I’ve got a connection in New York,” he said, emphasizing “connection” in a spacy, mysterious way that suggested to me that he meant nothing at all by it. “Hey, listen, how old are you?”
“Twenty.”
“Crazy. I’m fifteen. I got suspended from school when me and this other guy were in shop and we put a bullet in a vise and turned it until the bullet went off. It was wild, the teacher went nuts. After that I got sick of sitting around the house getting high and watching Secret Storm with Uncle Roman. He’s my father’s brother, Macedonian, just off the boat, doesn’t speak a word of English—just ‘yes,’ ‘no,’ and ‘TV.’ Christ, what a dirtball. So I took off to go to Vegas and be a dealer or a bodyguard. Both those jobs make a lot of money. You name it, anything would be better than living in Linvilla, PA—Linvilla, armpit of Scranton, asshole of the world. Where are you going?”
“Back to school in Boston.”
He went on talking in a chattering rush that convinced me that he was on speed, then suddenly, in mid-sentence, grabbed his knapsack and hopped off the train in Newark, leaving me to wonder why he had said
