Read Online Friends by Stephen Dixon - Free Book Online Page B

and sinks but the other three remain. No real problem. Nobody would know, if he found those pages, where they came from and probably not what they mean. Wouldn’t really matter to me if anyone did. Wouldn’t matter at all, in fact, not at all, and I mean that. I go home and sit down to start another novel, but with a new character for me. I’ll make him older, of a different nationality, and with a wife. I’ll put him in the country, since I’ve never written anything but about city life. I’ll call him Bill or Phil or Ed, three names I’ve never used before, “p. 1” I write on the top left-hand corner of the page. Maybe that’s as far as I’ll get. I don’t know, but I do care. “Bill walked into his house.” So, there’s more. I sit for hours and try to think of something to follow that sentence, but nothing comes that makes any sense. I get up and tell myself to come back to it later today.

Training to Magna
    It’s been a long tough week of work and other things and for the train ride to New York I just want to be alone and rest. I walk the half mile from my apartment to the Baltimore station, buy my ticket and in the waiting room see every seat but one is filled. If I sit in it I’m almost sure someone on either side will start talking to me—it usually happens—so maybe I should just stand. But the train from Washington’s been delayed by twenty minutes, the stationmaster says over the p.a. system, so I take the seat, put my overnight bag between my feet, my briefcase on my lap, close my eyes and think Just rest.
    â€œWhen they say twenty minutes, do they mean thirty or even forty minutes?” the woman on my right side says.
    â€œTalking to me, ma’am?”
    â€œYes, sorry, did I wake you? This is my first train trip, other than for that little subway under the Capitol in Washington, so I don’t know if that announcement was only some delaying tactic for not telling us the train’s going to be an hour late, possibly two.”
    â€œWhen they say twenty it usually means twenty and sometimes it means fifteen.”
    â€œYou’ve ridden the trains from here a lot?”
    â€œEvery Thursday around this time,” I say, “or really about three out of four weeks.”
    â€œYou work in Baltimore and both travel that much?”
    â€œI travel for personal reasons—to see a friend in NewYork—but teach here.”
    â€œCommunity College?” the man on the other side of me says. “That’s where my wife went nights.”
    â€œUniversity of Maryland Baltimore County my school’s called.”
    â€œBaltimore?” he says. “Oh yeah, I know the one. Way out in the sticks.”
    â€œSort of, that’s right.”
    â€œWhat do you think?” she says to him. “Our train from Washington will be an hour late, or only twenty minutes as the announcer and this man says?”
    â€œGot me. I’m just stopping here. Seemed a good place to come in out of the rain.”
    â€œIt’s stopped,” I say.
    â€œHas? Well it had to one day, but I’ll just sit a while more. For now I’ve no real place to go.”
    â€œWhen does the train reach Trenton?” she asks me.
    â€œI’m not sure.”
    â€œBecause you said you rode it so much, I thought—”
    â€œThis is The Montrealer. It’s a slower train than I usually take.”
    â€œWhich one’s that?”
    â€œThe 5:l5—I don’t know the name. Excuse me. I just remembered something.”
    I go downstairs to the platform. There are two benches there. A man’s sitting on the one nearest the stairs, so I go to the other. It’s empty and I sit. I close my eyes.
    â€œMind if I sit here?” a man says.
    â€œNo no, of course.” I look at my watch. I was asleep for two minutes.
    â€œYour bags. I don’t mean to, but if it’s no