answered the disembodied voice.
Pause.
“He did what? Oh hah hah hah hah haaaaaaah. Man, he dropped a hammer on it? That was really stupid, hah, hahhhhh. I bet, yah, he’ll be limping for a while after that. Hah, hah! Bye!”
And you’ll be limping for a while if you don’t stop that horse laugh.
Pause.
Dah-Dah-Dah-Daaaaaaaah.
That tears it!
I leaned over the top of the seat in front of me and faced two upside-down teenagers dressed in blue jeans and Tshirts. Both of their eyes bulged, as if an angry cobra was hanging over the seat.
“Alright, if I hear that goddamned ring tone again, I’m gonna throw the phone, and the idiot it’s attached to, off of this fuckin’ train,” I hissed.
The two kids froze for a second, then quickly collected their laptops, iPods, cell phones and other toys and hurriedly left the car, looking back with terrified glances.
Children shouldn’t be allowed in the same car as adults.
As I was starting to doze again, I felt an unwelcome presence sit down next to me. Out of squinted eyes I saw six gold stripes on a green sleeve.
“Hey fella, it seems like you’re having some sort of trouble.” The soldier wore a black beret and had a chest full of ribbons. He sounded like one of the people talking about Cairo earlier on the trip.
“I’m okay,” I said.
“I don’t think you are. You look like you’re being eaten up from the inside out. Let me ask you…are you happy with your life?”
“No.”
“People? Do you like people?”
“No.”
“Do you like anything?”
“No.” All I wanted to do was sleep.
“Listen fella, I was where you are now, about six months ago in Iraq. They told me that I had what is called ‘a thousand yard stare.’ Just before I planned to kill myself, someone gave me this.”
The soldier reached into his inside pocket, pulled out a mechanical pencil, placed it on the windowsill for a few seconds, and then held it up to my face. I slid my glasses over my brow and looked at the thing with my myopic eyes and saw clouds swirling around a maroon sunset inside the pencil—as if that simple writing instrument had absorbed a chunk of the sky while sitting on the windowsill.
“Sometimes writing things down helps,” said the soldier dryly.
“I’ve got plenty of pencils.” I didn’t want to touch the damned thing. I ignored the soldier, turned toward the window, and fell asleep again.
I was awakened by the train running over a switch. That’s when I saw the sign out the window—or thought I saw the sign…or maybe I imagined seeing the sign in the field stubble. Whatever the case, it burned itself onto my retinas like the after-image of a flashbulb. The sign was spectacularly ugly, a monstrosity supported by massive pillars hewn out of bituminous coal and painted in rude swaths of maroon and silver. Chunks of fool’s gold, glittering unnaturally in the dark, formed the words WELCOME TO SOUTHERN ILLINOIS! And below that, barely legible from the train window, was scrawled in maroon magic marker: IT’S GONNA BE ONE HELL OF A TRIP.
Chapter 3
I awoke to a dark, empty train car with the photo of a young Catherine in my lap, and placed it carefully into my shirt pocket. Through a dripping window I saw maroon-tinted, luminescent clouds descending over the roofs of old brick and wooden buildings burnished by light drizzle and stained orange by streetlights. The buildings were vaguely familiar, but distorted by an imperfect memory made decades ago. I had walked past these buildings many times during the two years I had attended SIU in the early 1970s. But the trees were different; many had entire limbs missing, and there were stumps here and there along the street. I had read about this. An inland hurricane had blasted through the region in May and left such incredible damage that it was still being cleaned up months later.
When I stood up, the blood drained from my head, leaving a thick sludge that weighted my head so that I was looking down at my feet. The sludge shifted ponderously around as I reeled to the exit door, slipped on the wet train steps, and landed in a heap on the ground.
Welcome to Carbondale!
With the help of a lamppost, I pulled myself to my feet and stood swaying like a bottom-heavy blow-up clown, then stumbled out onto the sidewalk and started a shambling walk down Illinois Avenue—the main drag—until I reached a coffee shop. The ache in my shoulder reminded me of last year’s brawl at Demonic Grounds, and I didn’t need a visit from the gremlins, so I chose to stay outside and behave myself. Yet I hung around the shop’s entrance, curious to see what modern SIU students looked like.
At first glance, they didn’t look much different than my generation did in the early ‘70s. Except: A kid walked in the door with a tastefully camouflaged backpack fitted with compartments for his laptop, cell phone, iPod, and one of those blessed water bottle-things we never had in the ‘70s. In the Vietnam era, students wore Army surplus backpacks with something like a peace symbol sewn raggedly on the flap.
The door to the shop edged open and a coed (Do they call them that anymore?) left the shop while awkwardly balancing three cups of coffee in her hands in an effort to avoid spilling them on her Versace jeans. When I attended SIU, I walked around in beat-to-hell combat boots, and our “designer” jeans were stiff-as-a-board bellbottoms that took a month of washings to soften up. Fashion-conscious students tie-dyed the jeans in the bathtub, then wore them until they fell apart—and no one gave a damn what was spilled on them.
Inside the shop, a petite girl sitting with a swimming pool-sized cup of coffee was sporting a short, razor-cut hairstyle, dyed the SIU colors—maroon with white streaks—and the guy sitting across from her had the same hairstyle, but in brown. In the ‘70s, our hair wasn’t “styled.” We either cut it ourselves or went to an old-fashioned barber and hoped he didn’t cut off too much. We wore our hair stacked on our heads like leaves of lettuce piled in a salad bowl or splayed out in all directions like frazzled steel wool pads. And no one thought of dyeing his or her hair maroon, pink, or any other color, because we wanted it to look “natural.” Besides, SIU students of the early ‘70s didn’t have that much school spirit, and except for an occasional school sweatshirt, we didn’t wear maroon and white.
I noticed a youth sitting on a paisley cushion and playing a guitar, who looked like he had been teleported there from 1971. The kid affected a scraggily beard and wore a torn T-shirt, dirty jeans, and scuffed combat boots. But the outfit looked too perfect, as if he had seen an old photo of a genuine hippie on the Internet and had practiced dressing like him. I suspected that behind the façade lurked a squeaky-clean college student, circa 2009.
But I did notice a hint of genuine rebellion in this coffee shop crowd, because students wore glasses with larger lenses than what most people wore in 2009, probably because small lenses were “in” for everyone else, which meant they were “out” for college students. But, aside from this mild ophthalmological revolt, the rebellious look of the ‘70s was no longer rebellious—it had been studied and refined until it was the standard for the 21st-century student.
