A King Alone

He was on a low road next to the French Broad, which divided the town in half. He thought about how with small cities, like this one, that were split in two by a river, you added the word “West” or the word “East” to the half that was less desirable, the half that was not the commercial center.

He had been on this road before, twenty years earlier. The damp and teeming feel was familiar and unchanged. There was almost no development here, just tall trees and railroad tracks. His windows were down and the river felt close, as if its green water were breathing on his skin.

He arrived at the railroad crossing—he remembered this crossing—as the gates were descending. He waited. The sound of a train horn blasted into the car. As the train appeared and rumbled past—industrial, Norfolk Southern, tankers of chemicals connected one to the next like hot-dog links—a man hobbled up to the driver’s-side window.

Where had he come from? Who knew. People seemed to pop up on a roadside from out of nowhere.

The man’s mouth moved as though his lips were dancers.

George heard nothing at all. The train was moving past, tanker by tanker, and the sound of it drowned out every other.

The man kept talking.

His chin was stubbled in gray, his gut sloping forward like a stretched water balloon. He was on crutches, missing the bottom half of one leg.

He held the crutches and also a full bottle of beer, as if this were no challenge.

The man and George were possibly the same age. People aged differently. George was sixty but felt undeterred in his habits and pursuits. He had both his legs, for starters.

George pointed to his ears and shook his head to indicate that he couldn’t hear the man’s words, and the man nodded and stopped moving his lips.

The two of them, George in his car, the man resting his armpits on the supports of his crutches, watched the train slide past like they were watching a movie.

When the caboose appeared, orangey-red—some things, not that many, do not change—the man spoke again.

“Can you take me to the other side of the river? Just up to River Bar—it’s close.”

George said that was fine. He had always picked people up. It was like they knew. They understood that they could just walk up to his car window at a stoplight. Crutch up to the window.

The man was impressively nimble getting in the car with the crutches and the missing half leg and his beer bottle, as though he’d been managing this way for some time.

The gates went up. As they set off, the man raised his bottle in a toast, the turbulence of the uneven train tracks sloshing beer onto the car seat. George did not care, had never cared about anything material and certainly not this Ford Crown Victoria, which looked like an undercover cop car.

“Did you know most people are dehydrated?” the man said. “Ninety per cent of Americans, is what I read. All these thirsty people. Not me.” He drained the beer bottle.

George did not ask the man what had happened to his leg. He sensed that he would hear about it without prompting.

A very long train was stopped on the tracks one afternoon, the man told George. He was walking. He had always walked to River Bar before the accident. He waited and waited for the train to move so he could cross. There was no engineer, no one in sight, and happy hour at River Bar was almost over—you get a shot and a beer for three dollars, he said. He had six bucks, and he could get a little credit from smitty, the bartender who was working that night.

He figured he’d step over the linkage between train cars, do it quickly. Why stand there getting eaten alive by tiger mosquitoes when he could be inside, under a fan, drinking with his buddies? He’d got one of his legs up over the linkage when the train lurched forward and started rolling. It picked up speed, with him trapped under it.

He detailed to George what had happened next. There was a tourniquet fashioned from a shirt. A nephew of Smitty’s who worked in the emergency room. A sum he was awarded, eventually, thanks to a lawyer from Charlotte. An ex-wife who bled him of the money as if he had a hollow leg. And look, he said, I don’t have any leg. He had told this story—the bar, the train, the shirt, the lawyer, the ex-wife, the hollow leg—probably eight hundred times.

River Bar was a shack painted sky blue, with a dark, open doorway. It looked like the kind of outbuilding where you’d expect to find old gas cans and a lawnmower. There were voices audible from inside. People relaxing and drinking in this tiny shed. The man thanked George for the ride and got out of the car and started crutching. At the entrance, he shouted, “Honey, I’m home!”

Honey, I’m home. It was like in that movie with Jack Nicholson, pretending he’s a cheerful nineteen-fifties-style husband when really he’s a monster and a murderer. But maybe that was a nineteen-fifties husband, George considered. That movie, “The Shining,” only pretended to be horror. It was really the horror of your typical family. Men yelling and blaming, and women on their eggshells, padding around.

He’d heard this line just a week earlier; it was as if there were a regional conspiracy of men yelling, “Honey, I’m home!” It had happened at a liquor store near the bass lake in north Florida where George had gone to fish. He was buying bait. At the counter was a display of Fireball, on military discount. The clerks were from India, and they were behind bulletproof glass, because the place had been held up repeatedly. This was on the Georgia border, near a huge state mental hospital. Some character walked in and grabbed a bottle of Fireball and yelled, “Honey, I’m home!” The two clerks did not look up at him.

Honey, I’m home, but what’s the use.

Honey, I’m home, but I can’t stay long.

George had been in a dry spell, lyrics-wise. He turned that one over, hoping something might come from it, as he meandered north.

A giant insect flew into the car and got trapped in an air vent on his dashboard. He pulled over to direct the insect out, but mangled it by accident while trying to remove it from the vent with the edge of his insurance card. It left a mess suited for one of those cleanup companies, the ones that come in after a flood or a suicide or a chemical spill. Not that he’d ever called one.