The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [104]
against the wall and stepping over bodies to where I had seen Stoney lie down. A bad nightthe rain rattling hard first on one side and then on the other like someone nailing down a case, or a coop of birds, and my feelings were big, sad, comfortless, of a thinking animal, my heart acting like an orb filled too big for my chest, not from revulsion, which I have to say I didn't feel, but over-all general misery. And I lay down by Stoney, who roused a little, recognized me, and fell asleep. Only it was cold; toward morning, deathly cold; and now and then we'd find we were pressed close, rubbing faces and bristles, and we would separate. Until-it was too freezing to take account of being strangerswe were trembling too hardand had to clasp close. I took off my coat and spread it over the both of us to keep in the warmth a little, and even so we lay shivering. There was a rooster some brakeman's family nearby owned, and he had the instinct or the temerariousness to crow in the wet and ashes of the backyard. This morning signal was good enough for us, and we got out of the car. Was it really day? The sky was dripping, and cloud was running as light as smoke; there was pink in it, but whether that was the reflection of the sun or of railroad fire how could you tell? We entered the station where there was a stove of which the bottom skirt was hot to transparency, and we steamed ourselves by it. The heat pushed into your face. "Stand me a cup of coffee," said Stoney. It took five such days of travel to get back to Chicago, for I got a tram to Detroit by error. A brakeman told us there was a train for Toledo coming soon, and I went to catch it. Stoney came along. Our luck seemed good. Because of the hour this freight was practically empty. We had a car to ourselves. Furniture must have been hauled in it the last trip, for there was clean excelsior on the floor, and we made beds in this paper fleece and lay there sleeping. I woke when the angle of the sun was very narrow in the door and guessed it must be noon. If it was that late we must already have gone through Toledo and be crossing Indiana. But these oak woods and the deep-lying farms and scarce cattle were not what I had seen in Indiana crossing it with Joe German. We were going very fast, flying, the locomotive and the empty cars. Then I saw a Michigan license on a truck at a crossing. "We must be bound for Detroit; we missed Toledo," I said. As the sun went south it was back of us and not on the left hand; we were going north. There was no getting off either. I sat down, legs hanging at the open door, back-broken and dry, hungry furthermore, and my eyes followed the spin of the fields newly laid out for sowing, the oak woods with hard bronze survivor leaves, and a world of great size beyond, or fair clouds and then of abstraction, a tremendous Canada of light. The short afternoon soon darkened; between the trees and stumps it turned blue. The towns became industrial, factories riding up and tank cars and reefers sitting on the spurs. Queer that I didn't worry more about being taken these hundreds of miles out of my way when there were only a few quarters and some thinner stuff in my pocket, about a buck in all. Riding in this dusk and semiwinter, it was the way paltry and immense were so mixed, perhaps, the jointed spine of train racing and swerving, the steels, rusts, bloodlike paints extended space after space in the sky, and then other existence, space after space. Factory smoke was standing away with the wind, and we were in an industrial sub-town--battlefield, cemetery, garbage crater, violet welding scald, mountains of tires sagging, and ashes spuming like crests in front of a steamer, Hooverville crate camps, plague and war fires like the boiling pinnacle of all sackings and Napoleonic Moscow burnings. The freight stopped with a banging and concussion, and we jumped out and were getting over the tracks when someone got us by the shoulders from behind and gave us each a boot in the ass. It was a road dick. He wore a Stetson and a pistol hung on the front of his vest; his