Drybridge

1 Claude says he, too, was given the tracks and not the train, the way — and not the way out, not the beyond beyond that bend, or the next. The place they call Drybridge — for the waterless bed of rails — where on the banks, you grow up learning more news from hoboes than from the mailman. But you know nothing of the train as it passes behind the backs of grander houses, gutted warehouses, chained dogs, as it grazes an alien grid of fences — of stone, metal, and chain-link. Or that when it passes beneath the underside of a bridge, a boy your own age waves the way you do, and that there is a horse doesn’t lift its head, and one that does, only to lower it again. 2 You are a grown man when the train comes to a scalding stop, and a lantern swings down the road. A man has been killed, they call out from behind the light’s aura, and would you come see what you can tell of him by what’s left. You do know his hat, and that burn scar on the back of his hand. What you know of his wife you do not say and will not even the next night when you sit up with the body in the house he wanted that much shut of, her voice rigid as its walls while the train you hear out there in the darkness passes by the way it always does, as though the same, the very same, and, again, on the time it will this night be able to keep.