Free Friends by Stephen Dixon

problem?”
    â€œOh sorry, I wasn’t thinking.” I put the overnight bag on the ground and the briefcase on top of it.
    â€œHow far you going?”
    â€œNew York.”
    â€œSame here. I always wanted to catch the evening Mon-trealer. I like the club car idea. I don’t like buying a split of wine and then sitting with it in my seat. I like the tables and chairs and, you know, to spread out a bag of peanuts or cards, even.”
    â€œIt’s much better,” I say, “though there’s usually too much smoke in there for me.”
    â€œSure, I can see it if you don’t smoke. You go up often?”
    â€œEvery now and then.”
    â€œI go twice a week. That’s back and forth, back and forth two times. It gets boring but it’s my work, and I wouldn’t live there. Only way to liven the trip up is by taking the plane occasionally or getting different kinds of trains. The evening Montrealer is one I never got. The one in the morning from New York I’ve done a couple-dozen times, but it rarely carries the club car, don’t ask me why, but if it does it’s usually locked and they’re only hauling it to Washington for this or some overnight Southern run. Besides, who wants wine at nine or ten in the morning—even eleven.”
    â€œYou could have coffee. Or English muffins.”
    â€œYou ever eat their English muffins, though the coffee’s not bad.”
    â€œNo, it isn’t.”
    â€œIt’s not freeze-dried or instant at least. They make it in the pot.”
    Yes, I’ve seen.”
    â€œYou work here but also have business in New York?” Tve a friend there, so occasionally I go for a long weekend.”
    â€œI’m out in Towson.”
    â€œThat so?”
    â€œWork there but live in Lutherville. Electronics. An Engineer, but now mostly supervision of sales. The Murke-MirabliaCompany.”
    â€œI don’t know of it.”
    â€œOne of Baltimore’s largest employers. You’ll see one of our warehouses on the way out.”
    The stationmaster announces our train. That means it’ll be here in seven or eight minutes. “Excuse me,” I say, and I get up, stretch, walk around the platform keeping my eyes on my briefcase and bag. People are coming downstairs, fanning out along the platform, a few heading with heavier luggage to the front where the sleeping cars will stop.
    My feet hurt and I almost feel too tired to stand. So much preparing for classes this week, papers to read and grade, talking, talking in class and an inordinate amount of photocopying to do and departmental paperwork. And student readings. Two this week, and one visiting poet I had to meet at the airport, take to dinner, give the introduction for at her reading, go out for beers with after with some of the students, see her back to her hotel. And the old woman in my building. Three days in a row attending to this for her, that. Her lights blew because she overloaded one outlet. Next day she walked into my apartment two flights above hers. “Where am I?” she said. “I think I’m lost.” That night she screamed up the stairs for help. I went down to her with the second-floor tenant, saw she was sick and called an ambulance and she said “One of you come with me to the hospital. They’ll kill me if you don’t,” and I went with her, filled out her forms and helped take her to her room. Then called the landlord and said “Don’t you know if she has somebody?” and he said “You don’t think I want her out also, but so long as she doesn’t want to she doesn’t have to go to a home,” and next day calling the twenty people with her last name in the phonebook.
    I go back to the bench. “Almost here,” the man says. “You can see the locomotive’s light on the rails. Another reason Iprefer The Montrealer is it’s much roomier inside. And window curtains.