excerpt
suspect something, or someone, I’d sure like to hear about it”
“No, Mr. Hall, I don’t suspect anyone. Thanks. You’ll see that I
get a copy of your report, please.”
Spanger walked with Hall back to the group of watchers and
chatted with them for a moment. As he was turning to leave,
Poodie waved goodbye, hand raised, fingers curling and uncurling,
his smile in full bloom. Dust billowed as the crane dropped the
twisted tank car undercarriage onto a flatcar.
Under the improvised lean-to, Poodie lounged with Engine Fred’s
bedroll as a backrest. Sipping coffee from a tin cup, Fred was on a
captain’s chair missing an arm and all but one of its back slats. On
his knee was Poodie’s notebook with a question: “Where have you
been?”
Fred looked at his friend. After a long silence, he said, “Oh, here
and there.”
Poodie shook his head. He retrieved the notebook, wrote
quickly and handed it back to the hobo.
“Not here.”
Engine Fred smiled. “Mostly there,” he said.
With the question in his eyes, Poodie examined the big man’s
face and waited. A tendril of smoke rose from the apple wood fire
near the lean-to’s open side. Fred listened as the section gang’s
clatter and clang drifted up the tracks into the jungle. Except that
his hair was gray and his steel rimmed glasses had given way to
rimless ones, Fred seemed to Poodie as he was in the 1930s, a tall
solid man who was able to look around inside you. Amusement
flickered on the corners of his mouth. He wore the same sagging
gray suit, plaid shirt and lace-up boots, the same relic of a fedora.
Engine Fred studied the red, blue, green and white ceiling mosaic
of rusting cans mashed flat—Folgers, Maxwell House, Hills Bros.,
MJB, Beech-Nut—and looked back at Poodie.
“Seattle,” he said at last. “My family took me back. Kids are
grown up and gone now. My wife knows I need to get on the road…
Libros Libertad 