The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [229]
But it was fun to ride the train! Beside us to our left the Hudson River rushed and sparkled against the Palisades as we shuffled and hooted away from New York City. We passed the train station of Hastings-on-Hudson, where I had once chosen to board the southbound train instead of the northbound train, and thus met Leon and had all the rest of that adventure. That was more than a year earlier. I liked the crisp dark blue suits that the ticket collectors wore, and I liked their shiny brass buttons and the flat plastic visors on their caps. Leon and I sat in a booth in the dining car, playing the games we had brought: chess (a game at which I am not skilled) and checkers (at which I am) and, as always, my most beloved game, the one that a certain bean-boiling one-legged bagpiper first taught me many years ago, backgammon. The train shuddered and hooted and rolled onward, and the chessmen, checkers, and dice clicked, clattered, and tumbled on the table between us. We talked to the people who came and went from the dining car; we watched the landscape slowly scrolling by, gradually changing from urban to rural and back to urban again. Everyone is so friendly on a train, so curious and talkative and eager to make friends with strangers. Perhaps this is because the people on a passenger train are acutely conscious of the anachronism of it, pushing the experience into the realm of novelty, of the fun and interesting and unusual, which prompts people to want to talk. Or perhaps this friendliness arises because those who choose to travel by train tend to be the people who, like Leon, long for an earlier world, a chaotic and inconvenient world where things took a lot of time and people enjoyed talking to each other. A world before the world became a world where every place looks the same and nowhere is home.
So Leon and I intermittently conversed together and conversed with the other passengers and played our games and read our books and watched the land roll past the windows and dozed slumped over in our seats off and on from New York City to Albany to Buffalo to Cleveland to Toledo to Gary to Chicago.
My heart leapt inside me when I saw those familiar buildings rising in the distance, those very buildings that had once bewitched and seduced me when I was only a mind-silent animal. I myself was practically leaping up and down in my seat by the window with irrepressible glee as we rattled across the Union Station switchyard with the early morning sunlight flashing on the rails of the tracks.
Oh! Chicago! (My heart exclaimed within me in rapture.) I have been away from you for more than a year! Oh!—Chicago, are you happy to see me? It’s me, Bruno—your son and lover! I have been unfaithful to you, I admit. I come back to you from an affair with your big sister—your bigger, older, meaner, and more complicated sister who lives eight hundred miles beyond you to the east! But Chicago, inland Chicago, redbrick and brown Chicago, freshwater Chicago, almost-uninhabitably-cold-for-the-better-part-of-the-year Chicago, I’ve come back to you!—for you are the only city that I can truly love.
The train docked in a tunnel and hissed in repose, and then fell silent. Everyone disembarked, for it was the end of the line. Leon and I breakfasted together on bagels, bacon, eggs, and coffee at the Union Station food court before I saw him off at the gates of his connection, which would take him far away, across the great American interior—past I know not how many mountains and plains and desert cacti and shaggy-maned buffalo—to the sun-dappled land of California, where asylum had been promised him. Leon and I embraced as we said good-bye, with tears shed on the behalves of both parties. I stood at the gate, waving, as I watched him fastidiously guide his mass down the ramp that led to the train platform, and my heart burned as much with my gladness to be back in my homeland as with my reluctance to see him go.
He was wearing a rumpled brown corduroy suit, and he laboriously struggled to drag along a fatly stuffed rolling