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Fiction Contest

No. 6 Spring 2004


Joe Bonomo
Student Killed By Freight Train


I think somehow that I can fill space, once bereaved, with living space, with space that warms. I stand from a log on the gravel lot behind the Lincoln Inn Restaurant and walk the five or so feet back to the train tracks where a long Union Pacific freight train has just finished rumbling past, ties groaning beneath it, shedding sparks and cries. As it disappears out of town to the east, I step closer, my ears humming in the new calm, lean down to place my palm on the rail. The steel is cold. Strange. Out of the corner of my eye I notice a man twenty or so feet down the track. He's standing from having touched the rail with his hand, too.

"Weird," I call out to him. I'm befuddled. "I thought it'd be hot. Nothing."

"Yeah," he calls back with a half-grin. "Not a thing."

He shrugs his shoulders and walks back to his car. I stare back down at the rail, confused, expectant. The sun is high and bright, odd for mid-November. Were I to later bring a tuning fork to the rail and strike, I might hear in the resonance a single, held note pealed from the beauty and the trouble of locomotion.

***

3:45 a.m. The young man looks with dark eyes into a lobby grimly lit by the fluorescence of civic hospitality, a Welcome mat eked out in chains across the Midwest. Not a soul for hours. He had told his friends. And he had told her. In the garish lighting of the Best Western Inn and Suites on West Lincoln Highway he sat behind the paneled front desk, leaning his tired head out over his body, the tingling of sadness having long vanished. He couldn't tell what had replaced it. He had told his friends. He called the last friend a little over an hour ago. I wonder what. How they'll deal. It's a short walk from the lobby, through the front glass doors, past the east wing of rooms, past the warm, homey scent of the laundry room, past the twin dumpsters, past the few parked cars and semis, toward the edge of the parking lot, into the grass now dark and discreet with sleep, over the crunchy thistle and gravel, over the chain link fence, just ten or so feet now up a small embankment to the tracks. The night is still and, actually, the night is impossibly gorgeous. It's probably four in the morning. Wonder what. The track is not as cold as he thought. The ties are uncomfortable, much wider apart than he would've thought. He feels the rumble a minute or so before the whistle funny, like Radar M*A*S*H his dog Jasmine the faded linoleum remember when you held the neighbor's puppy on your stomach in the middle of the kitchen floor and you knew that you made such a cute picture that you'd wait until someone came in but no one came in and looked so you felt stupid and you pretended to be asleep in the middle of the kitchen floor? the rumble is so loud now he feels it in his sinuses and down the canal of his spine God this hurts a long thin space filling with sound and vibration and he feels that the dark and spacious sky is pulsing in a minor key now it feels like he'll be pushed off the track by the speed and shaking wonder how the whistle is piercingly loud God how do people live here? how do people? the terrible screech of brakes a loud manly or unearthly scream but no it can't be the conductor's and no it can't be his and he had told people the dark.

***

It's one of my favorite sounds: the long cry of a train whistle. A Baltimore & Ohio track ran the length of my grandparents' yard in Coldwater, Ohio, and as a kid I loved running out to the tracks after I'd heard the faint whistle come from over the corn fields and neighboring farms -- my body hearing first, an animal to an inaudible cry. The train might as well have been coming across an infinity of land, from the wavy mirage that was Indiana. The sinewy, impossible grace of those tracks, their masculine arch over the country, the solitude and sadness of the moments after the train had roared by, the dream over, the transcendence settling, myself made visible again . . . all of this conspired with a long-ago image of brown, sad buffalo chewing up long, pale-green grass that had grown between the ties in an abandoned rail yard. Where did I see that picture? In a school book, or an afternoon movie? Wherever I happen to live I look for trains, listen for trains, stay up in bed during wakeful nights lamenting that I wasn't raised near them, prizing the lives of those boys who grew up along them, who knew the thunder, felt it fill in the heavy spaces in their bodies. As a boy in suburban environs, I envied those boys as I envied those who grew up along rivers, those winding, dark pretenders to the nobility and mystery of the trains.

***

I listened hard to the air the day after a twenty-four-year-old man killed himself by lying down across the Union Pacific tracks a few blocks west of my house. There were fewer whistles, it seemed. I wondered if that wasn't my own projection, draping a kind of false mourning over northern Illinois. When I did hear a whistle cry, the thin peal sounded bewildered, breathless. The harmonies sung in each cry sounded to me like anxious conversation, lament. The trains appeared dazed, respectful; they moved slower on the tracks that afternoon. Their lights came on well before dusk, as if sweeping for bodies, the awful littering.

I wondered grimly on the details. The student was despondent over a romance -- what a cliché. He had warned his friends, who had promptly called the local police, but they were too late. The man simply left his early-morning post as night manager at the local hotel, walked to the tracks and threw himself in front of a passing freight train. The train was slowing from 70 mph to the posted 50 mph when it struck him, but it is, as it turns out, nearly impossible for such a train to stop within a half mile. This had been the second time in a week that someone had committed suicide by throwing himself in front of a Union Pacific train. Only days before, a man in California had done the same thing.

***

I wonder if the ghosts of those killed by trains gather at the scenes and lament in an eerie threnody. Perhaps they celebrate. A train roaring through town is nearly an otherworldly specter, and maybe those who die by train expect deliverance, a blessing, a spiriting away from this world on a vehicle magnificent, heartbreaking, yet companionable in its loneliness, its flight through the unseen dark. A ghost of a man carried in pieces toward the fabled sun idly scratches behind the ear of an animal's ghost, any animal's ghost whose dreadful instinct lifted him into the bright and black..

While I sat on the log behind the Lincoln Inn Restaurant waiting for a train to come, I stared for nearly half an hour at a shimmering light a mile or so down the track. I rubbed my eyes but the light persisted, divine in its acuteness, a glow of faith. This light might have been what I wished it to be, a phantasm. Perhaps it was a flicker of the tumultuous past, a dire mistake made whole and bright again.

***

When I was an undergraduate, one of my favorite afternoon escapes from campus was to drive into Washington, D.C., park somewhere off of upper Connecticut Avenue among the stately homes in Cleveland Park, and walk the broad street toward downtown. My favorite place, a few miles north of Dupont Circle at Calvert Street overlooking Rock Creek Park, was the Taft Bridge, an impressive span bookended by two weathered, regal sculpted lions. From a spot halfway across the bridge I could look west toward Georgetown or back east toward Adams Morgan, and beneath me the traffic along Rock Creek Parkway skimmed silent along the floor of the city. The bridge -- the highest in the city, and one of the oldest -- soared above plentiful, dark trees and the expansive Rock Creek riding stables, and I took solace in standing there.

One afternoon, emboldened by something recklessly romantic, I climbed up onto the guardrail and swung my legs over -- essentially floating above the park. If I looked just past the ends of my feet I could imagine that I was hovering, dream-like, pure mood thrilling in the step from the known to the gusty.

Within moments a passerby ran toward me.

"Don't! Don't do it. I promise you it's not worth it."

He reached me.

"Let's talk about it," he said quietly, offering a hand.

Oh, man, this guy thinks I'm going to jump. Annoyed and embarrassed, I quickly scrambled back over the rail to convince him that I had no intention of jumping. We had a brief pantomime of gestures and exclamations until he was sure that I wouldn't jump. I walked back over the bridge, a giant mural of Marilyn Monroe painted on the side of a pharmacy staring down at me, amused. I was self-conscious and peevish that this man could so melodramatically mistake my intention. How I must have looked to him! A young guy on a bridge, throwing it all away, for what? A girl? Poor grades? Parents who didn't love him? Looking back, I see now that I was being reckless at a particularly reckless time. In the mid-eighties the Taft Bridge and its neighbor, the Duke Ellington Bridge, were popular with suicide leapers, their fates luridly covered in the papers and made the stuff of urban legends. In 1986 the city erected "suicide girders" along the Ellington bridge, much to the ire of citizens who ultimately took the local government to court on aesthetic grounds. But the girders remain there to this day, and in fact are the model for other cities wishing to forestall the indignity, and the mess, of death by leaping. As I straddled the Taft Bridge that afternoon, the local controversy didn't really involve me, and I failed to appreciate the dramatic dimensions of the suicides, anyway. I couldn't see the stencil for human tragedy that I had become to that thoughtful man on the bridge, the pain of self-annihilation as foreign and distant to me as the ground below.

***

An urban legend says that the machines that dominate our lives -- our personal computers, cash registers, data banks, etc. -- give off an imperceptible white noise that is tuned, providentially, to a minor key. All around us, the metal-and-plastic boxes that promise so much are humming conspiratorially in a minor-key litany. Is this why I leave Wal-Mart so blue? Is this what I see in the dour looks of my students at the end of a long class beneath fluorescent lights, a kind of choral ennui that drains their faces and imagination of spirit? My own computer now hums as I write this, as I try to navigate through the stubbornness of words a sense of what my imagination knows but cannot tell, of the sadness of train tracks before, and after, the trains.

I wonder if before the invention of movies we heard sentimental orchestral strings in our minds when we read sad passages in novels, or a wave of triumphant music when, say, little Sylvia perched atop the fir tree first spotted the prized heron's nest. In 1793 while a dying man gazed far ahead or far back in his imagination, did the edges of his perception grow poignantly fuzzy in a cinematic dreamscape? The men and women who scored the first films in Hollywood did not create the soundtrack of our lives, they merely listened with well-tuned ears to the desperation of silent hours, when sadness and joy alike offer their strings to the world's bow. The symphonic swell that we are accustomed to hearing in film -- accompanying two lovers' final embrace, or the unbearable stay at a young child's death bed -- is sadly Platonic, a thin copy of a veiled orchestra that had finished tuning long before the world cooled, the baton first lifted millions of years ago when grief was not yet a word. I hear what can only be described as a low cello moan, sometimes barely audible, sometimes thrumming loudly in my throat. I hear in the vibrations a kind of music lost forever in the transparent day, scored and waiting for the lost to bow their heads and turn the sheet.

***

A couple of weeks after the suicide in my town I contacted John Bromley, the Director of Public Affairs for Union Pacific Railroad. I was interested in how often such events occur, how train operators deal with the incidents. How do they cope with being unwitting accomplices to a suicide? Are they trained for such grief?

Bromley answered me in an email:
      Nationally on all U.S. railroads about 500 pedestrians trespassing on
      railroad property are killed by trains, slightly more than the 450 or so       killed each year in train-auto collisions. Many of the pedestrian deaths       spare suicides, but we don't have a data base to identify them, as the
      final determinations of suicide are made by local authorities. At Union
      Pacific we have a peer-support group that train crews are referred to
      after fatal accidents. Train crews usually are relieved and replaced with
      another crew immediately after an accident, rather than completing their       run.

Perhaps those haunted trains I imagined the day after the suicide were merely vessels for the sorrow inside of them, the grief of train operators whose concentration, buffed by daydreams of mortgages and spouses and box scores, was rudely interrupted by the severing of a human body. Bromley's answer was appropriately curt and officious, I thought. Why dwell on tragedy? And the tracks behind my house are hazy, gloomy now, and bereft.

The act of killing oneself intentionally: the dictionary definition is typically brusque -- there are tens of thousands of other words to make room for, after all. A teacher once claimed that the hardest sentence to write is one that begins with your name, and continues with the phrase, "...died today." And yet as I write the generic definition of suicide here, I find it also difficult, as if it is personal. I didn't know this student killed by a freight train, but his gesture enacts itself every day on the tracks behind my house, a hallucination at dusk on those early December afternoons when winter is up on its knees somewhere in the Arctic, filling its immense lungs.

"I, too, was suicidal once." That sentence is not difficult for me to write. Because now that fact and the events surrounding that fact seem relatively trivial, remarkably shortsighted. I had, however, morphed (if tentatively) into a version of that guy on the bridge about to throw it all over. My egocentric moods at the time involved an overwrought relationship with a girl whom I had met the summer before college, and my inability to see beyond my own nose. (Ironically, she eventually moved into an apartment a few blocks north of the Taft Bridge). I lived many months in a kind of ponderous hysteria. Once, I walked in a humid July night the three miles from my parents' house to Holy Cross Hospital, where I was born. Kneeling in the small, cool chapel for hours I prayed feverishly that my depression would lift. I prayed often that year, in Saint Andrew's the Apostle Church, where I had begun attending mass again fitfully, between classes at the small white chapel at the leafy end of my college campus, and many more times in Holy Cross, where I took comfort in the nurses' squeaking shoes barely audible behind the chapel doors, their soft succor, and in the single, unwavering nun who seemed to be there around the clock, bobbing in her private dark and quiet.

Pushing my fists together until they whitened, I was desperate to shed my stubborn ego. I listened hopefully for answers. I remember once nodding my head uncertainly to my counselor at college who tried to explain my sadness away as an existential response to President Reagan's emotionally vapid "Morning in America" election campaign. My counselor was a doctoral student in psychology, and I believe I was one of his field requirements. He was charmingly enthusiastic about his pet theory, which betrayed his liberal leanings and through which he hoped to filter every personal difficulty that I broached. My stomach bubbling with my standard midday meal -- No-Doz and Dr. Pepper -- I smiled and tried to agree with him, while inside a small voice brayed, an urgent but nameless tide of solipsism and dejection.

At the worst point I sat in the break room at the undergraduate library at the University of Maryland, slouched so willfully low that I felt I could have drained fluidly to the floor, breathlessly unhappy. I had been unable to thaw the scary freeze in my chest for weeks. A ghost of a man carried in pieces toward the fabled sun. I thought, one way.

***

Luckily, my fifteen minute break ended. Years later I see myself unhappy on that hard plastic orange chair on the cracked linoleum floor under the harsh and ugly insistence of fluorescent lights in the basement of that library, and I think of the student in my town who sat in a back office at Best Western and imagined with clinical precision -- buoyed on a swell of music only he heard, music so dramatic and compelling as to feel like measured truth and counsel -- the steps that he would take to the train tracks and his own willful conclusion.

Copyright 2004, Joe Bonomo

nidus is an online publication supported by the Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh's English Department.


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