By Angus Stump
When I was a kid.
I know it’s a completely exhausted trope. But I’m not done with it.
Because dang it, things have changed.
When I was a kid, which was an awful long time ago, we were all raised by wolves and snakes and vagrants. The things that we did were, to my thinking now, unsanctionably dangerous and criminally negligent and beyond comprehension in the scope of bad ideaness. “Unsupervised” just doesn’t quite say it.
It was so cool.
I would take off on my bike at about 8:30 in the morning, and my mother would have not the foggiest notion where I was until that night, when the street lights came on. Which is when we were all supposed to be home. But you know what? We didn’t even get in trouble then.
It was Lord of the Flies.
So let’s just understate it by saying mistakes were made. And we all survived.
There was a ride up at Astro City that was just there to break arms. It was a ritual. Every summer, kids would line up to go up and stick their arms out of the Astro City whirly thing and break their arms, and then school would resume, and half the class would arrive with their arms in casts.
It really seemed to bust up right arms so much worse than left arms. I don’t know why. Maybe all whirly rides are that way when they turn savage.
But we were kids. We didn’t know better. And, apparently, neither did our babysitters.
I was riding with my babysitter and her other captive, John David, when she whipped around a corner, and John David’s door flew open. He rolled out.
He rolled out of the goddamn car right onto the pavement. We weren’t going especially fast, but this was a moving car by any description. And it was the early 1960s, so this was an awful lot of car.
So anyway, John David fell out, and the babysitter kept going.
I hoped she’d noticed that John David fell out, but apparently not. So I said to her, “John David fell out.”
She just kept driving.
I cleared my throat, and I said, “John David fell out.”
I repeated that phrase a couple of times without offering a lot more detail. Try it yourself. Say it out loud a few times, and you’ll see it’s a phrase that poses more questions than answers. Especially on repeat.
I get it. I’m sure she needed clarity. But John David fell out. Let’s deal with that instead.
And so we went back, and we picked up John David. He was none the worse for the wear. Face it, we were durable.
Durable enough, apparently, to go unattended for long-distance travel. I recall being sent to visit relatives in various regional friend and family homes, some within three or four hours and some a day away. And I remember being dropped off at the Greyhound station, one parent or the other walking me to my seat. I’d wave through the window, and I’d ride the bus to wherever I was being sent.
You know, it was a different world. But weren’t human beings still human beings? And weren’t bad ideas still bad ideas?
The Greyhound bus, I will say, made me realize that being a grown-up isn’t so terribly difficult. Apparently, everybody’s just winging it. Apparently, everybody’s just kind of doing what they want. At least, that was what it looked like from my seat on the bus. My whole view of what being a grown-up was was shaped, in part, by Pepsi cans rolling down the aisle of a Greyhound bus and someone playing a transistor radio between stations a few rows back.
I remember it being cacophony. And I remember it being crowded. And intimate in the worst way. And I remember it being absolutely terrible, but it was a marvelous kind of terrible. There was something magical about the freedom to live as an equal in this world of creatively unwashed weirdos.
And that smell. The special perfume of the Greyhound bus. That weird smell of something that was 70 percent diesel and 30 percent human being.
It hit me as I walked across the lobby floor of the Amtrak station in Newton, Kansas. The smell, the vibe, the lighting, the weird viscosity of the air. It was all there. But the Newton Amtrak station is so much nicer, brighter, friendlier, happier, cleaner, more hygienic and substantially less murdery than the Greyhound stations of my youth.
That kid waved from the bus window and didn’t know where anything was going. I only know a little more than that now.
The Southwest Chief runs through Newton at about midnight, westbound, and it is not waiting around about it.
I was carrying fifteen books. Sci-fi time travel romance heist buddy flick, no genre slot, can’t get Amazon to put it anywhere that makes sense. So the best approach is not to sell it. My strategy is to find the right people and hand it over. Inside the front cover of every copy: Hi! I’m [name]. Different name, every book. There’s a QR code — the recipient scans it, and the book’s location registers on a living map. Basically, the same as writing a return address on a dollar bill and letting it go.
That’s the whole plan. I get how it sounds. I’m doing it anyway.
It was 2:36 in the morning when I wrote that down. I was in the lounge car and there were three of us, one at each end of the car and one in the middle, equidistant. Nobody was talking.
Only I was facing the window. Outside, ink-black Kansas whipped past at 78 miles an hour. I watched it anyway.
By morning, I was in the downstairs cabin. The lower level, eye-level with the ground, the zone nobody requested on this leg. Eastern Colorado was coming up. The train runs through terrain where you can see a farmhouse from miles off. You can watch it the whole way in, close enough to count the windows, and then it’s behind you and gone.
Each lighted window in the distance is full of an entire complicated life. Somebody’s big day, somebody’s argument lingering from last week. Somebody’s dog by the door. Countless whole worlds, each spinning in its own complete universe. It fills me with awe and makes me a little dizzy.
That feeling is called sonder. I looked it up.
JJ texted: Did you get any sleep?
No.
The lounge car had, by morning, acquired a Very Talkative Self-Interested Man. He announced and explained the altitude. He spoke of his father’s health and how often he visits. He discussed his iron stomach at some length and unpacked exactly how he had stopped drinking tequila but could still drink all the tequila he wanted. He rescued a stranger from drinking from the Amtrak water supply, proffering his spare bottle of water in the most public way the lounge car allowed, which was quite public. He wasn’t wrong about the water. It came out of the dispenser genuinely opaque. The stranger held his cup up, and we wondered if it was just air bubbles. We watched it gradually clear and did not reach a conclusion. The stranger demonstrated sufficient gratitude, and the VTSIM seemed self-satisfied with that.
It was her shoes that caught my eye. Colorful and loud. Then the backpack: small, critter-faced, floppy-eared. The kind that says its owner is not quite done being young yet. At a glance, I thought her to be in her late teens. About four minutes in, she mentioned her ex-husband and her kids, and I revised my estimate considerably. I know nothing, Jon Snow.
Her fake name is Leigh, and she’s been riding this stretch of track her whole life. About every three months. She knows where the bathrooms are and understands the drinking water situation without a mansplainer.
I made my pitch: “It’s a science fiction time travel romance heist buddy flick with a thing for breakfast. I never know who to give it to. But you’ve already thought of someone, haven’t you?” Indeed, she had. “You can give it to me,” she said, “and I’ll give it to my grandmother.” No hesitation. Her grandmother has always been her role model and her travel buddy, and she reads everything regardless of genre.
Then Leigh established the order of operations: “I’m going to read this before I let anyone else.”
The book is named Wallace. Says so right inside the cover: Hi! I’m Wallace. He introduced himself, and she smiled broadly. “I love the train so much,” she said, apropos of … well, this in particular, I guess.
Her grandmother was going to hear about all of this the minute she got back home. She was also going to read it first, obviously. She’d told me that, and I grinned, which she seemed to like.
I told her this book had gotten on a train and come looking for her.
She said, “That’s exactly right,” as she flipped to the Prologue and started reading.
Las Vegas, New Mexico. Quick stop, boarding only. Three iron clawfoot bathtubs sitting in the dirt outside a 1899 Spanish Mission station. Not sure why.
Doc Holliday came through here. Jesse James. Billy the Kid. Wyatt Earp. The town was originally named Señora de los Dolores de las Vegas — Our Lady of Sorrows of the Meadows.
Three bathtubs in the dirt in front of a building that predates statehood.
It’s an odd way for a train station to announce itself.
But apparently, there are no rules about that. Apparently, there aren’t many rules about much of this. This oddball book tour is making up its own half-baked rulebook as we go along. I’m just winging it, just like all those grown-ups on the Greyhound.
And now we’re moving again.
