SCARY COOL SAD GOODBYE 35

"So I rolled and I rambled, like a leaf in the wind, found my fast ladies and some hard livin' men."

I had pictured a cross-country train ride like something from “The Gambler” — guys playing Texas Hold’em by moonlight, trading solemn pulls from some mystery bottle and so on. But I’d ridden to New Orleans, back through Memphis, and up to Chicago again, and had found none of that; the Brits and the Boy Scouts played card games, but that wasn’t the same. Resigning myself to the idea that the Amtrak, much like everything else, had lost its edge, I took a window seat, armed with a baggie of fat green grapes and a few appropriate novels on the subject of ‘the West’ as told by alcoholic boomers, and settled in to ride the California Zephyr in its 51 and a 1⁄2 hour westbound entirety, with a stop in the Colorado Rockies in between.

Then came my neighbor, who flashed me his seat assignment ticket ruefully as if to apologize for the next 26 hours of predestined companionship; I’d get off in Glenwood Springs, and he at the next stop, Grand Junction. Beyond that, he didn’t say much. He was older: hard face, white beard, trucker hat, strange pants. We left Union Station towards the void of western Illinois, then Iowa, somehow even duller, and he minded his business, as I did mine. Still, you couldn’t not notice the half-pint of Fireball slipping from his backpack every 15 minutes; you could set your watch to it. I said to myself, “Now we’re talking.” As for the slowly impending reality of this man being my bedfellow — I kicked that can down the road.

[A note on Amtrak’s sleeping arrangements: in coach, as I am, you sleep in your seat, which can be generously reclined. Minus a seatmate, you’re golden. With one, you’re in for a long, weird night of essentially spooning a stranger.]

After an hour, the man was ready to talk. He’d been living in Downers Grove for some time, but his ticket to Grand Junction was one way. Years ago, he said, he’d owned a house in San Diego. “They took it,” he told me, “when they got my brother. Feds got him on charges of terrorism and tyranny. Well, then they found two bodies in the house. Brother died in federal prison. Funny thing — he went to Harvard.”

“Well, so did Ted Kaczynski,” I offered. The man excused himself to the snack car, returning with two Stella cans plus a small bottle of white wine, which he handed to me. “I don’t know if this is what you like,” he said shyly. “I guessed.”

“I don’t mean to interrupt,” said a voice across the aisle — a long-limbed man of maybe 40 in a gray sweatsuit and cheap black shoes. By his feet, a flimsy mesh bag revealed a small stack of books and papers and what looked like a set of dentures. “I wasn’t trying to eavesdrop,” he went on. “But I just got out of federal prison, actually.” He’d left FCI Yazoo City in Mississippi yesterday, boarded the Amtrak overnight to Chicago, waited, changed trains, and was headed now to a halfway house in Omaha, where he’d never spent a day. He had moved between prisons many times before, but this was his first day of something like freedom in 14 years. (Manufacturing meth had been the ticket.) “That’s why I’m dressed like this,” he explained. “I was afraid people would think I was homeless.”

“Well, I am homeless!” my seatmate crowed. “So you’re all good here!” And he burst into a coughing laughter, which we joined. “So you don’t think I’m some asshole looking for sympathy,” said the man in gray, presenting his prison ID card. My seatmate countered with his own, a shelter-issue homeless ID. I knew their names now: Chad and Don.

“Can I get you a beer?” Don asked. “I wish,” said Chad. “Halfway house.” At the smoke stop in Mt. Pleasant, Iowa, the three of us stood in the last of the daylight — Don and I smoking, Chad shivering, lost in thought. Back inside, I watched as Don quietly slipped Chad a twenty.

I bought Don a beer in return, he bought me one back, and so forth. I felt some guilt accepting $7.50 Stellas from a man I now knew to be homeless, but to deny his largesse would surely be worse, and by sunset, we were drunk. “I like to smoke a little weed — good weed, though. Like to do a little coke,” Don said. “Don’t smoke crack anymore. Probably won’t again.” He’d walked from Moab to Chicago “a couple of times,” he told me, but that was off the table. “Banned from two states. Utah and Texas I’m not allowed, so if we’re going on holiday, we’re not going there.”

Don hated being homeless in Downers Grove; you were always having to pay off silly young guys for ‘protection.’ (“Protection from what — wetting the bed?” he coughed.) Grand Junction, he hoped, would have better vibes. He liked to make wire jewelry, though someone had stolen his supplies, and maybe Colorado would appreciate that more. Maybe he’d even rent a room when he got there. “Finally got my documents together for my inheritance. My dad set up a trust before he died,” he said. “Took me a few years. Now I get ten thousand dollars every two weeks.”

“You get what?!”

“Yep.”

“You should definitely rent a room!!”

Don laughed softly. “Just not used to it, I guess.” An almost-empty bottle of Jameson thrust itself from the row behind us, along with a decree: “Kill this.” I gave the same instruction to Chad, passing the bag of grapes.

It was dark now, and Don was fading. His stories began to repeat. “I guess I’ve been a bad boy most my life,” he muttered, only half to me. “I’m 65, but I probably won’t be here much longer. How much more can you take?” He promised politely not to kill me in my sleep; then he was snoring. I must have followed not long behind.

I woke to a gray sunrise over the flat part of Colorado. Chad was gone. Carefully I climbed over Don, still snoring, and from the observation car watched the plains pass in a blur of straw and snow and incense-red, here and there a burnt tree or lonely billboard: “God Bless Donald Trump. GOD BLESS THE AMERICAN FLAG.” The fields became pines and firs, dusted and then blanketed with snow. We were in the mountains.

Beside me, a young professional opened his laptop to a spreadsheet, which I gathered had to do with being an actuary, whatever that could be. “I might get cut off at any minute — on the Amtrak in the mountains! Beats driving!” he chirped by phone. “But I should make the company event on time. I’d hate to miss the horseback riding.”

We wound up the Rockies through valleys of cold fog, hell-black tunnels, and along the snaking brown Colorado River, which roared with newly melted snow. The sun broke through. Fishermen waved from their canoes, two cowboys splashed across the gleaming river on horseback, herds of gentle elk grazed along the highway and Don slept on to Grand Junction.