Drifting South. Charles Davis

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      I shook my head.

      “Well, good thing,’ cause the radio don’t work.” He laughed a little and turned toward me all bent-up looking. His grin faded and he turned back around. “Wished it did, though. Sometimes wished it did.”

      The train started hitting its whistle every five or ten seconds. Listening to it brought me closer to home, recalling the late-night sounds Norfolk and Southern trains made on the other side of the Big Walker across from Shady Hollow.

      “How long were you in?”

      I was suddenly back in that van, not sharing a bed with my brothers listening to a faraway coal train across a river.

      “What?”

      “I say how long were you in for?”

      I liked him better before he got so windy with so many things working in me at that moment. He turned with a sack full of green apples and offered me one. I shook my head.

      He pulled out a lock-blade knife careful and looked at me in his mirror quick before he grabbed one and started peeling it.

      “A long time,” I said.

      “Big day for you then,” he said, looking at me and smiling again like we were big buddies. “How long is that, if you don’t mind me asking.”

      “I’ve been locked up in one place or another since I was a boy.”

      I figured he’d pulled out that knife and was asking questions about how much time I’d pulled to figure out how bad a person he was sitting there with in the dark, stuck at a train crossing way out in the countryside. Peeling an apple was just an excuse to have some kind of weapon out if he needed one. Never know what something wild just let out of pen was apt to do, I figured was what he was thinking. I’d probably do the same thing if I was half-crippled and driving the van and was hauling somebody who looked like me. You’d ask the time first, not the crime. You’d maybe ask that later if the conversation got off on the right foot.

      “Where you heading?” he asked, after a few moments and a dozen more train cars passed by.

      “Home.”

      “By your accent I’d guess that’s down South somewhere.”

      I nodded, looking all around us again to see if we had any bad company. I wouldn’t feel safe until I was a long way from that prison. At least I knew the driver wasn’t a threat. He had the knife but not the eyes to use it.

      “So where you heading?”

      “Why?”

      “What you say?”

      “What’s it to you where I’m heading?” I said.

      “Just talking…”

      “You talk too much.”

      He didn’t say anything for a long moment and then said, “Always had a friendly nature, I guess. No harm meant.”

      I leaned back in my seat, remembering how I used to have the same easy friendly nature and used to enjoy conversation. I didn’t just enjoy it, I was good at it. Ma used to tell me that talking was my one true gift of many. I was the only person she’d ever known who could “outtalk a mockingbird,” she’d say on many an occasion with an ending to that always of “Let’s hush now, child.”

      Anyway, after a while I finally said to the driver, “Gonna stay with my ma for a while. She lives in Virginia.”

      His head was still and then he nodded and nodded like we’d made up and he peeped at me again in his mirror. “I used to take my family to Virginia Beach until the kids got older and my wife passed. She passed last year. Emphysema took her last breath. That’s when I started eating all the time and got fat. I smoked more than she did and she made me swear off of them before she died. Almost killed me quitting them. Probably eating will kill me now. Get rid of one bad thing, you just pick up another. You quit bad things but the hole the bad thing was filling never goes away is what it amounts to. Just end up filling it with something else no good.”

      I blew out a deep breath, wore-out with his stories already, and I looked as far down the tracks as I could. That had to be the longest train I’d ever seen.

      “Heard the place is all built-up now.”

      “What is?”

      “Virginia Beach. Probably wouldn’t even know it if I saw it.”

      I didn’t say anything, but just hoped he’d still himself or I was gonna have to tell him to. I’d never seen a beach and I didn’t care to comment about it or his wife passing. I didn’t want to get ugly with him being as mangled up as he was and he seemed like an all right feller, so I figured me not saying nothing back would work to let him know finally that I wasn’t definitely in the mood for talk. But it didn’t.

      “What you gonna do with yourself once you get settled in back home? Got you a girl to go see?”

      “Had one a long time ago. How far’s the bus station from here?”

      “Few miles. I say, what you gonna do once you get back home and settled in? Gonna go see that girl?”

      I wasn’t going to talk about the only girl I’d ever had that I would ever call “my girl.” I wished I hadn’t brought the thought of her into that van. She wasn’t the kind of girl to be spoken of in such ways in such conversations in such places. But I knew he didn’t mean no harm even though it bothered me in a dark way and I said, “Have quite a few things to do,” louder and faster than was necessary.

      “Like what?”

      By that point, I figured he was one of those folks who couldn’t help himself to shut up even if he really tried. If he wanted to know what I was gonna do after I got home, I’d tell him a few things for him to ponder on, because I’d been pondering on them a long time.

      “First thing I’m gonna do once I get settled home is find out why a man tried to kill me when I was seventeen years old for no reason I can figure.”

      The driver’s voice dropped. “I see. You gonna go looking for him?”

      “He’s dead. I got some other people I need to find and have some serious business about it. Gonna go see a preacher, too.”

      The driver set his sack of apples to the side careful. “The preacher help you through your trials and tribulations?” His voice had gotten shakier.

      “Not quite like that. He helped get me into my trials and tribulations. I’m pretty sure I’m gonna kill him over it. Been leaning that way heavy for a long time. Gonna go see a sheriff after that. I owe him a visit, too, just like that preacher. He might survive my coming. I haven’t made my mind up about him.”

      The driver dropped his knife on the floor and reached down to get it back in a hurry, just before he turned around to where he could barely get a wide eyeball on me. Then he turned around quick and we both sat in the stillness for a good five more minutes until the train passed. After ten more minutes, he dropped me off at the bus station, pulling right up front.

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