The Volunteer
8
WHITEFISH, MONTANA. G2 was headed eastward and was through the mountains. G2 had not found Nirvana. He was merely blanking out another portion of his life. If he could do that with all his life, then what? Then would he never want a glass of wine again? Would he achieve oneness with the universe? Would he be happy? Satisfied? Content? Nothing? The last seemed the most likely. G2 did not feel satisfied or content. Neither was he unhappy or depressed. He didn’t feel anything. People might have said he was empty inside, but G2 wasn’t empty. He wasn’t a wine bottle. A wine bottle was worthless when it was empty. But it didn’t have to be full to be worthwhile, either. A few drops was sometimes enough. No, G2 was not a wine bottle. Maybe he was a rock. There was a song about that when he was a kid, but G2 couldn’t remember anything past the words I am a rock. But it couldn’t be a rock like the one Mr. Barnes showed in science.
In sixth grade, Mr. Barnes taught everyone about geodes. Gerald had been fascinated during the part when Mr. Barnes taught about erosion. Everyone brought a stone in from their yards or driveways, and for one entire class period they sanded their rock. At the end of class, the rocks were put on display with labels that showed the differences in erosion for different kinds of rock. Gerald scrubbed at his rock with vigor through the entire class, but couldn’t see any change in the size of his rock. It was just a little smoother on the one side on which he had worked. Paul’s rock was almost gone he’d sanded so much off of it. And Sandra’s had crumbled with hardly any sanding at all. Mr. Barnes said it was really a dirt clod and not a rock at all. Mr. Barnes knew everything there was to know about rocks. The day he brought a geode to class was one of the most amazing in Gerald’s six years of school.
“Now what kind of rock is this?” Mr. Barnes asked the class. All the words they had learned to describe rocks bubbled out of the kids mouths. Igneous, sedimentary, marble, conglomerate, fossil. But Mr. Barnes said that this was a very special rock called a geode. He handed out plastic goggles to all the kids and they giggled at each other and how silly they looked or poked at each other’s eyes with their fingers. But when Mr. Barnes put on safety goggles, nobody laughed. Then he pulled on heavy leather work gloves, and finally picked up a large hammer he called a mallet and a steel chisel. He marked out an area around where he worked and told everyone they had to stay behind the chalk line. Then he set the rock on the floor and placed the chisel on it and struck it with the mallet. It took only two blows of the hammer before the geode split open and revealed the crystalline formations inside. The class jumped from the flying shards of stone, but then everyone crowded in to see the remarkable inside of this unusual rock. For weeks after that demonstration, kids from class would collect large rocks and work diligently at trying to break them open with a hammer. Gerald never found a crystal geode. All his rocks were solid and if they split at all it was into thousands of tiny pieces, crushed by the hammer blow.
G2 wasn’t a geode. He had no inside, so he felt nothing inside. He wasn’t empty. He wasn’t full. If the huge wrecking ball hit him directly, he would just crumble into sand and loose bricks and it would be no different.
The license plate said “READP21.” G2 stared at it for a long time. Then it dawned on him. Read page 21. Of what? he wondered. It was obviously important. He shuffled up the street until he saw a newspaper discarded on a sidewalk table. He picked it up and quickly turned through the pages. There were only 18 pages. No page 21. It took G2 a few minutes before he could get his bearings and identify where the library was, but when he had decided he walked there with determination. He would check page 21 and find out what was so important for him to read. At the door, however, G2 hesitated. He recognized some of the men gathered outside the library. Some were local and one or two were transient. One of the transient men waved G2 over. Reluctantly, G2 approached the men. The guy who called him over was tapping a cigarette on his thumbnail to tamp it down more firmly. “You gotta light, G2? I gotta coffin nail needs a hammer.” Sam something, G2 thought. He didn’t know the man well. But it did happen that G2 had a match. He was saving it to light a campfire tonight, but he could spare one. As long as the wind didn’t blow it out.
The matchbook read “Wabash College” on the front. On the inside it said “A Liberal Arts College for Men—Crawfordsville, IN.” G2 wasn’t exactly sure where Crawfordsville was. He didn’t recall going through it, but maybe it wasn’t far. There were only three matches in the cover. He pulled one out and offered to light the cigarette for Sam, but the man snatched the cover and pulled out a second match, lit it and puffed the cigarette to life. He offered the light to a second man with a cigarette, but the wind blew it out. He dropped the dead match and tore the last match out of the cover, lit it and managed to get the second cigarette lit before the match went out.
“College man are you, G2? Goin’ to the library to work on your Master of Liberal Arts degree?” The men laughed. G2 grinned and nodded. The library. That’s where he was going. Sam tossed the empty matchbook on the ground and G2 picked it up. There was something about it that he needed, though he didn’t know what it was. It was important. He would find out on page 21, he was sure of that. “You go get educated and when you make a million bucks, come get us and make us foremen, you hear?” Sam said. The men turned away from G2 and passed the two cigarettes around their little circle. No one offered a puff to G2. That didn’t matter, really, because G2 never smoked, but it would have been nice to have been asked. Cigarettes were bad for you. That Surgeon General made sure everyone knew it years ago. He published big pictures of people’s diseased lungs and made the tobacco growers put danger labels on their packages. There was no skull and crossbones on a bottle of wine; that was for sure. It was cigarettes that killed.
G2 was still staring at the open matchbook cover when he entered the library. What book was the message in?
When Gerald was a sophomore in college, his Early American History professor and his English Composition and Creative Writing professor assigned a joint research project that would last the entire semester, culminating in a 20-page term paper that would count as one-third of the grade in each class. The professors would grade the papers separately, so it was possible to receive different grades in each class. The paper was to describe the Revolutionary War as a common person might have experienced it. The professors had a grab-bag of names and a one paragraph biography of each person. The subjects came from different parts of the colonies and England. None were historical personages, but were identifiable in genealogies, letters, or historical references. The objective was not to research that person, but to research what the experience of that person could have been, based on the available data about the events of the war, the location of the person, their status, and family. Historical data had to be factual, but the paper had to be written from the point of view of the subject.
It was a daunting task. His personage was Sibel Betts, wife of Selah Betts of Pawlett, Vermont. Gerald went to the library with a general plan of research, starting with the Betts surname and extending to the town of Pawlett, thence to the state of Vermont and battles of the revolution that were fought within the region. He would track troupe movements and see if he could find the records of surviving soldiers from that region. He knew that one resource would be the Daughters of the American Revolution. The DAR had played a role in Gerald’s high school life, even though no one in his family was a member. Each year the DAR sponsored an essay contest for seniors, awarding a thousand dollar scholarship to the winner. Gerald’s essay had been chosen as a finalist in the competition. The five finalists presented their papers at a meeting of the DAR. The members then voted on the readings and awarded the prize. Gerald’s paper was filled with buzz words that he knew the ultra-patriotic organization would love. That was how he had been chosen as a finalist (the only boy among four girls). His presentation went well, his mellow voice filling the living room of Mrs. Hanes’ house. His persuasiveness made the words, “In God we trust,” and “conceived in liberty,” ring true and moved more than one of the members to tears. He sat, confident that he would be awarded the prize. Then his classmate, Debbie, rose to give her presentation. They’d never got along that well, but her smoothness in including him in her condescending gaze as she began her presentation made him feel very small. “Madame President, Ladies of the DAR, and fellow competitors and guests. Thank you for this opportunity to present my paper titled ‘The Role of Wives in the American Revolution.’” Gerald knew that he had lost the competition before she began reading. He had stood, said the title of his paper, and read. He did not salute the ladies or thank them. As he looked at the warm smiles around the room, he realized that he was a token. He was not a girl. He was not a Daughter (or Son) of the American Revolution. He had not followed proper etiquette. And he did not win. Debbie was voted the winner in a formality that even had the other female competitors grumbling.
Gerald went to the card catalog in the library just after the library opened and began researching. He compiled a list of specific books that mentioned his subjects, but after he had a page of possible references, he moved to the first section of the library in which he had found a book reference. The library was organized according to the Dewey Decimal system. He began in category 917 with a specific book, but the book next to it also looked interesting. He leafed through the pages, starting with the table of contents and then scanning the index. He looked for references to the names he had found, but discovered a reference to a Vermont Company under the charge of General Wolcott. This led Gerald to biography. Next to Wolcott’s biography was Wallace. When the library announced that it would close in fifteen minutes, Gerald looked up realizing that he had been pulling books off the shelves and looking in their indexes for ten hours and had not stopped to eat. His notebook was filled with references and his back hurt from sitting on the floor between the shelves poring over the books. He had forgotten the subject of his paper.
G2 entered the library with determination. Wabash. W. Page 21. World Book Encyclopedia. W was in volume 21. Page 21, Volume 21. Read page 21. He pulled the reference book from the shelf and sat on the floor in the aisle to open the book in his lap.
The World Book Encyclopedia was a familiar reference. Gerald’s father had bought the set from a traveling salesman and the books were delivered six weeks later in a big box. Also included in the box were a World Book Cyclo Teacher and the fifteen-volume set of Childcraft. The next year, they began receiving World Book Yearbooks. Gerald’s family had an entire bookshelf dedicated to World Book. Gerald sat for hours leafing through the volumes, feeling like he had all the knowledge in the world at his fingertips. Learning games on the Cyclo Teacher taught Gerald about constellations and he could still sleep outside at night and name all the major constellations in the northern skies. There had been only 20 volumes in the family World Book Encyclopedia, but the set in the library had 21 volumes with WXYZ all in the last book.
WAAF, Women’s Auxiliary Air Force in Britain in World War II.
Waag, a river in Slovakia.
Waalhaven, The Netherlands, a Dutch military air field in World War II.
G2 turned over several pages. WABAC, the machine that Mr. Peabody used on the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. G2 giggled over the memory of the cartoon. He had spent hours watching the clowning squirrel and moose. He loved Boris and Natasha.
Wabakimi Provincial Park in Ontario.
Waban, Massachusetts. G2 was sure he was close. He turned to page 21. Wabar Craters in Saudi Arabia. Wabash, Indiana. Census information, geography, historical sites. Nothing stuck out to G2. It must be here. Why was he supposed to read page 21. Wabash, St. Louis & Pacific Railroad Company vs. Illinois 1886, also known as the Wabash Case. The courts had to decide whether the states had the right to regulate railroad rates for interstate shipments. This was important, G2 thought. If every state could regulate who could travel or how much it cost on a railroad, then he might not be able to go through some states. G2 couldn’t think of a state that had prevented him from riding the boxcars. There were conductors who locked cars, chased away bums, and occasionally did a sweep to be sure no unauthorized people were riding the rails. But not the states. The commerce clause does not permit states to enact direct burdens on interstate commerce. There you had it. He could ride the rails. Wabash led to the creation of the modern regulatory agency and signaled the movement of the national government to assume responsibility for economic affairs. Yes, the United States government was responsible. The courts had decided. When was that? In 1886. The courts had decided that Illinois couldn’t regulate the railroads. Maybe he should sue the state. There were hardly any boxcars left on the rails. States were making the trains carry containers, two long and two up. When those cars ran empty, they were open and exposed to the air. Cold. Enclosed boxes were much better. Best thing you could get now was the well beneath a hopper car. You wanted to be on the trailing end of the car, or the wind would whip you to shreds. G2 opened his notebook and carefully wrote beneath the license “READP21” the word “Wabash.” This was important. He carefully reshelved the encyclopedia and walked out of the library with determination. The states were changing the railroads and Wabash said they couldn’t do that. G2 had an obligation to defend the railroad. That was what his journey was about.
G2 fished in his pocket to see what kind of money he had and then went into a 7-Eleven store. He bought a bottle of wine and filled his water bottle in the restroom. He bought a loaf of bread, though it pained him to pay so much. He had just enough left for a jar of peanut butter. With his supplies in hand, he headed for the tracks. Eastbound. He stopped beside a car and watched the brakeman as he came up the tracks checking the couplings. When he got to where G2 was standing, G2 recognized the man.
“G2. How’s my man? Headed South?” the brakeman asked. G2 shook his head and pointed East. “East, huh. Jump over two lines to the Capitol. She’ll pull out around ten tonight. Get ya east as far as ya want ta go.” G2 bobbed his head and said “God bless,” and then ducked under the car to cross two tracks and walk the length of the train before he found an empty well-car. He climbed aboard and waited for the train to move.
There was a time when train conductors were the enemy. They jealously guarded their empty freights and would physically abuse hobos who jumped their trains if they caught them. Some had been rumored to have murdered bums, though no evidence had ever come to light. But times changed. Some of the short lines had managed to eliminate conductors and the cabooses they lived in altogether. Now, if there were two people on the train, it was the engineer and the assistant engineer. It was unusual for a freight to even have an extra brakeman these days. The engineers had too much to take care of to worry about a guy hitching a ride on an empty car. If someone jumped off the train or fell between the tracks, chances are it wouldn’t be known until the next train came by. Could be later in the day or later in the week. Now dropping between the cars onto the tracks when the train was going 80 miles per hour would be a messy way to die, G2 thought. And it would hurt. Jumping from a train, though—say a train that was traveling over Crooked River Gorge Bridge in Oregon, 300 feet over the river—would be like flying right until the moment you died. It would be instant.
Flying would be fun. G2 had never been in an airplane, but that wouldn’t really be flying anyway. Now standing on top of a boxcar at 80 miles an hour with your arms outstretched to the wind was like flying. If your clothes were too bulky, you could really be flying. Sometimes when he was out in the middle of nowhere—especially at night—G2 crept up the ladder to the top of his car and imagined he was flying. There was nothing but the wind and the darkness. And risk. G2 had once narrowly missed having his head taken off as they went through an underpass. It was a change in the sound of the rails that alerted G2 to pull his head down. That was the thing about riding the rails. Old timers said the steel talks to you. You could feel the difference when you crossed a state line. You could feel the change of speed. The steel would tell you when you were coming into town, what the weather was, and who was on the train. You could really feel the steel.
G2 thought about flying sometimes. Dropping off that bridge and living his last moments flying through the air. But he couldn’t see the point in suicide. He wasn’t unhappy. He just thought too much and the thoughts filled his head till it overflowed and there wasn’t any way to escape from them. There had been a time when he’d thought about suicide because he was never going to be any of the things he assumed he’d be, but if any of those things wanted him, they’d find a way to have him.
That’s what it was like with Sharon. It was fall of Sophomore Year in college. Before school started Gerald and Brian and half a dozen other men and women in their class had decided to go camping over Labor Day before they had to buckle down and study. The group had done everything together over the past year. They met as part of a team selected to decorate the homecoming float for the Freshman Class. They ate meals together in the dorm kitchen with a different member of the group cooking once each month. They had nicknames for each other drawn from Winnie-the-Pooh. Who were Pooh, and Piglet, and Eeyore? Gerald was Owl. Gerald had never actually read Winnie-the-Pooh. The friends went to ball games together and became a team for the annual bicycle relay race. They were on the rope together for the freshman/sophomore tug of war. Most of them studied the same things through their freshman year. Some of them had already paired off. Those who had were sharing a tent with each other, but most were sleeping head to head near the fire. Gerald was head to head with Sharon. She was quiet and studious. A nursing student, so she didn’t share as many classes with the rest of the group. Rachel had brought her along to the float building and she had become one of the Pooh Corners group by virtue of her presence. Most things happened that way, Gerald decided. You just went along and people accepted you in or excluded you. That was how you knew where you belonged. It had happened to him often enough. Brian had led him into the business program and Gerald figured that was as good a major to study as he could think of. He didn’t know exactly how it began, but lying head to head, whispering in the dying firelight, Gerald found himself kissing Sharon. Kissing had led to petting while those around them slept, many having drunk themselves into a stupor. Kissing and petting was much better than drinking, Gerald thought. And they became more and more urgent in their explorations. Sharon was panting into his mouth when she whispered that she was coming up. Gerald realized that from her perspective, he was up and barely got his sleeping bag open enough for her to slip into it with him.
It was an old army surplus sleeping bag. It wasn’t that Gerald couldn’t have afforded a better or more modern sleeping bag, but he’d had this one for years and never thought about replacing it. Where other campers were cocooned in arctic bags, Gerald’s was large and flat, really made for lying on a cot instead of on the ground in a campground by the river. As a result, though, Sharon was able to slide into his bag with ease, and Gerald noticed as she did that she had already shed her jeans in her own bag. Lying in the sleeping bag with their bodies pressed against each other, the kissing became more passionate. Piece by piece, they stripped away the rest of their clothing and Gerald realized that he was about to have sex for the first time in his life. “I don’t want to get you pregnant,” he whispered as Sharon stroked him. “I’m on the pill for medical reasons,” Sharon said. “I’ve never done this, but I want to.” The thought of pregnancy had entered Gerald’s mind and consumed him so much he scarcely heard her say she was on the pill. His erection suffered. Sharon was diligent, however. She had decided that this was the time and Gerald was the boy. But every time they made contact and Gerald tried to enter her he began to wilt. He was embarrassed by his inability, and that made things even more difficult. At last, frustrated that she could not force Gerald into her far enough to let go of him, and limited in what they could do by the dimensions of the bag and effort to stay quiet so they wouldn’t wake anyone else, Sharon simply rubbed his cock in her slit until, gasping in their kiss, she came. It seemed impossible to Gerald that his first time actually ready to make love to a woman, he was unable to perform. Sharon kissed him again and then slipped out of his sleeping bag and back into her own. Gerald appreciated the sight of her naked body in the moonlight as she turned to wiggle into her bag. They giggled slightly as Gerald dove repeatedly into his sleeping bag to retrieve articles of clothing, sorting out which was hers and which was his. In the course of this relaxed play, Gerald became hard—really hard. “Sharon, I think I’m ready now,” he said. “Shhhh,” she said. “Go to sleep.” She tucked herself into her sleeping bag and was asleep—or seemed to be—before Gerald could say anything else. She had been in his sleeping bag. They had been naked together. His cock had been at the entrance of her womb. She had rubbed him in her own juices. He touched himself once and came.
He never got together with Sharon again. He had asked her out once that fall, but she said she was really having to study harder this year and wasn’t going out. Sharon was the first of the group to slip away and find other friends. Robin and Dave were in a world of their own and seldom did anything with the group of friends that year. Phillip quit school halfway through the term and joined the army. Carol announced that she was marrying a guy she met in Chem Lab at Christmas and was hardly seen by any of the group, though they all went to the wedding. At last there were just Gerald and Brian, studying together, signing up for the same classes, double-dating when they could. Gerald met the transfer student, Lori, during spring term and they had seldom been apart the rest of their time in school. She had taught him how to be a good and patient lover and not to be concerned about his performance. He had never had a problem answering her call, no matter what he was doing or how he felt. It was just a natural fit, though Gerald couldn’t remember having ever really decided to be sexually active with Lori. She decided when and where. That was the way it was supposed to be.
There were too many thoughts in G2’s head. He didn’t think he missed Lori. He could hardly remember her—just that she had been important. He stood at the edge of the well car leaning out into the night, feeling like he was flying, and let himself go.
G2 hit the cold steel bed of the well car with a clang that nearly knocked him unconscious. “That was so cool!” Mad Mary said, putting down her video camera. Mad Max held the back of G2’s jacket as he dragged him away from the open bottom of the car. “It was like you were flying and were just a lifting off like an angel. I want to try it.” It wasn’t likely that Mad Mary would succeed in lifting off anything. She outweighed G2 by several pounds and was a lot more compact. “I knew you wouldn’t want to go without your bag, though man,” Mad Max said, shoving G2’s canvas bag toward him. “It would have made great video, though.”
Mad Max and Mad Mary weren’t really homeless. Not that they had a house in the suburbs or anything, but they were self-styled documentarians who traveled the rails video-taping the transient homeless as they moved from one place to another, and then uploading the videos from their laptop computer to someplace where people could see the pictures. G2 was lost as soon as they opened their computer, but they showed him the video of his near flight into the unknown.
“You might think we’re strange, just traveling around the country like we do,” Mad Max had said. “But it beats having a mortgage and 2.5 kids to take care of. We were just going to travel for six months after we graduated, but that’s been almost two years ago now. We’re big sellers on YouTube. When we’re ready to quit this life and settle down, we’ve got job offers from two television news stations. They’ve been running a weekly spot on us for nine months that we let them air before we put up on YouTube. This is definitely going to be on the news next week in Albuquerque.”
“We’ve always hoped to catch up with you, G2. You’re a hobo legend.” Mad Mary pointed to the scrawl on the inside of the well done with a broad-tip marker. “G2.” G2 remembered the day he marked his first boxcar with chalk. That would be long gone by now, of course. Chalk washed off in the rain or with a hose if the workers happened to flush out a car. Some itinerant homeless marked the cars with spray paint and you could see tags of all kinds on any train you boarded. G2 only ever seemed to have a pencil, but he marked cars with his pencil. Younger hobos often went over his mark with a marker to make it permanent. Once, G2 had ridden the rails in a car that was splashed with asphalt. He discovered that he could use the tip of his pencil to lift the tar and use it to create a raised impression on the wall of the car. His mark was much simpler than some of the transients—just the letter and number. The inside of this car had a dozen tags scrawled or painted on its low wall. “Rail Rider,” “Steelman,” “Zodiak,” “Laze,” and most recently the sprayed red heart onto which Mad Max had penned “MMax+MMary.” During the relatively quiet period while their train had been pulled to a siding to allow a northbound to pass, Max and Mary filmed their two minute special.
“This week, we’ve caught up with legendary hobo, G2,” Mad Max said, looking into the camera that Mad Mary held steadily on him. “G2 has been riding the rails for about thirty years, but you won’t get a lot of information about his adventures from him. So far as we know, the only words anyone has ever heard him say are ‘God bless.’ Where are you heading right now, G2?” Mary moved the camera over to point at G2. Confused for a moment, G2 simply pointed the direction the train was headed. “South,” Mad Max continued as the camera pointed back at him. There are a lot of cities south of here and sometime along the line you might see G2 standing at a freeway entrance with this sign.” Mad Max held G2’s corrugated sign up. It said, “Anything helps. God bless. G2.” “G2’s needs are simple,” Mad Max continued. “Just enough money to buy a sandwich and a bottle of wine that will last him two or three days. G2 isn’t a drunk; he isn’t mentally unstable; and he isn’t a danger to society. He is merely one of the hundreds, maybe thousands of unhomed people in this country that you see every day and simply don’t notice. G2,” Mad Mary turned the camera back on him. “Do you ever want to settle down, move into a home in a nice climate and quit wandering?” G2 was puzzled by the question, and it showed on his face. “Home” didn’t really mean anything to him anymore.
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