Free The Train of Small Mercies by David Rowell Page A

didn’t acknowledge him.
    Out by the street Ty said, “Does she know we’re going to see the train?”
    â€œYeah, a dead body,” Daniel said.
    â€œHe’s in a coffin, dimwit. It’s not like you’re going to see his flesh rotting off or anything.”
    â€œNo,” Michael said.
    â€œHey, my mom’s been crying ever since he got shot,” Walt said. “She goes for hours and keeps saying, ‘What is this country coming to?’ ”
    â€œTell her to ask Michael the professor,” Ty said, not with resentment, but pride. “Michael always knows the answer, don’t you? Mr. Honor Roll Hotshot.”
    Michael could only smile. He was so grateful to be back among his friends that nothing else mattered.

Maryland
    R oy Murphy was looking at his three ties, trying to decide which might look best with his pale-striped seersucker suit. He had worn the yellow tie the previous day, but no one from the office would see him, except the weekend editor, and Roy hadn’t seen him yesterday, so he chose the yellow one.
    As he tied it, he studied himself in the mirror. He studied the way his cheekbones failed to rise, the way his ears jutted out too low on his head, the handsome green of his large eyes, his brown, wiry hair cut short. He wondered what Jamie West would make of his face now and whether Jamie would think that Roy looked more like a man than when they saw each other last.
    They weren’t friends in high school, but Roy was a close confidant of Jamie’s high school girlfriend, Claire Payton. In this arrangement, since Roy and Claire were such close friends, Roy knew a great deal about Jamie, and Jamie knew little about Roy. Claire understood early into their courtship that Jamie didn’t like to hear much about Roy—or any other boy, for that matter. She also understood that Jamie seemed to dislike Roy, perhaps only because he was another boy who knew Claire well, but also, Claire believed, because Roy and she had much more in common. They both liked to write—poetry and also editorials for the school paper. They both loved J. D. Salinger and Robert Frost and had a fondness for music, for string quartets and Benny Goodman’s small combos, and preferred the Kinks over any of the other British bands. They liked looking for constellations up in the night sky, and they compared notes on the various birds—mostly yellow warblers and red-winged blackbirds and orioles—they saw in any given week.
    Roy appeared scrawny next to Jamie because he was. And Jamie didn’t trust Roy’s intentions with Claire. How could a guy spend that much time with Claire and not want to kiss her?
    Claire was at the University of Virginia, and Roy had heard that she had since become pinned to a student there from Richmond. He wondered if Jamie knew, or cared. He wondered how much they would talk about Claire, if at all. Roy was no longer in touch with her.
    As a reporter, Roy was already becoming confident. His first week, when one of the sheriff’s deputies tried to dismiss him by saying there was nothing the paper needed to report about an arrest made that night on a local arson case, Roy replied, “With all due respect, Mr. Tillman, we’d like to be the judge of what there is to report.” Roy reenacted the encounter for his parents that night at dinner, and he replayed it in his mind for the better part of that week, when he was back to covering a Boy Scout Jamboree and a property dispute story between two dairy farmers.
    The drive to the Wests’ took just a few minutes, and he parked his car—his mother’s sedan—in front of the neighbor’s house. He was running early, as he always was, but it helped him relax and let him review in his mind how he wanted to start. How long would he talk to Jamie before bringing up the matter of being on the record? Would he ask that he and Jamie have some privacy, in case the parents