can you imagine? Jesus rode a bicycle… can you imagine seeing the old guy a forth time? He’d have to be a ghost, wouldn’t he?
“Well, we’re moving at a good speed, not as fast as before but we’re zipping along… and I can still see him. He’s getting farther away all the time but he’s still there, standing by the tracks, and do you know what happens? Can you guess? He waves at me. The son-of-a-bitch waves, as if to say, ‘Yeah George! It’s me! You see me and I see you, now what are you going to do about it?’ Well I don’t mind telling you that I got scared. Right then and there––for the first time in years, I got scared. His eyes were glistening and his hand was swinging back and forth and he had a smile that looked more like a scream than anything else, like he was wearing the goddamn thing wrong, somehow. So why wouldn’t I be afraid? Huh? I don’t mind saying, I damn near dropped a bucket of shit in my pants.”
The two officers didn’t speak, nor did they exchange a glance. They just listened, nodding their heads like good cops do. There would be time for talking later, plenty of time.
George let a few seconds roll by, waiting for a response that didn’t come. Then he said, “The train stops again. This time a dozen people got aboard. I’m not looking at any of them. Oh no, I’m looking out the window. The train starts moving. It went under a bridge and along two or three subdivisions and sure enough, I see him again. Four times, now––four! Only this time we’re not racing along the track at a hundred miles an hour, we’re going slow, like… twenty miles an hour, slow. And he’s looking at me. And his eyes are sparkling, like he has little flames inside his eyelids. His eyes are huge and gray and sparkling and I know they’re focused on me! I know it. And the man’s not alone. Oh no. Not this time. This time he has a little boy with him. The boy is five or six. The old man has a hand wrapped around the kid’s wrist and he’s holding him up so his feet aren’t quite touching the ground. The kid’s arm is extended in a way that looks terrible, it has to be hurting him, and, and…”
George squeezed his eyes together and pulled the smoke from behind his ear. He lifted the matches, lit the cigarette and inhaled the nicotine. It helped. Didn’t fix anything but it helped.
Detective Martin said, “What about the boy?”
“I don’t remember what he was wearing, if that’s what you’re asking me, but I remember the pain in his face. He was hurting, all right. He was in a lot of pain. The old man had a hunting knife in his free hand. It was long, like a machete. He had the boy in one hand and the knife in the other. The boy was screaming. His eyes looked like they were trying to jump out of his head and he was screaming like a baby. Now, at this point I’m thinking: What the hell am I going to do? I want to get off the train and help the kid out somehow, but every time I see the old man he’s halfway between stations. I’m not even sure which way I should go, ‘cause I know I’m going to see him again, and I know I just passed him.
“The train stops and I think about jumping off, but I don’t do it. I don’t know why. More people climb aboard, the car is getting full now… now that we’re close to Toronto. We start moving and five minutes later I see the old man a fifth time. The boy is there, lying at the old man’s feet with his throat slashed open. There’s a huge pool of blood around him, like every ounce of fluid has been drained from his body. And the old man is laughing. He loves it, I can tell. He’s laughing and smiling and he loves it. And that’s not the worst part. The worst of it is, the old man has another kid with him. This time it’s a little girl, and she’s screaming, just like the boy. He’s holding her up by her pigtail; her feet must be three inches from the ground. I don’t know how he did it. The girl