Running Down the Track
A life summed up in one ride.
His ears overflowing with clacking and creaking, Al Zullo had fallen asleep in his coach car seat as the train rushed headlong into twilight on its way from Denver to Chicago. Five cars ahead of him, the train’s horn quietly screamed at every crossing, a comforting, beckoning wail. He may have dreamed, although he couldn’t say. He seldom remembered his dreams, and when he did they had no clarity, rather like his life. “Always running,” his mother had once said. “From what? You don’t remember. To what? You don’t know, or maybe even care.”
Mother had always been right, for all the good it did her. Or him, for that matter. She was gone, and he was still running.
In the wee hours under a darkened sky, the train lurched and threw Al against the window. He woke with a start, those words echoing in his brain: you don’t even care. They slapped his face and boxed his ears and washed his mouth out with soap. He sputtered, then wiped his lips with his sleeve. Eyes wide with alarm, he looked left where, beyond the window, night still reigned; then right where a young woman, a redhead, slept on in spite of the jostling, her seat reclined full back, her footrest up, her unshod feet delicately perched on its edge, a navy blue coat draped over her body. Al knew the woman’s name, or had the previous day. She introduced…
