16
He thought of Andy’s visit the previous year and how he had grown comfortable with his cousin’s quiet unobtrusive manner, the ease with which he had adapted to life in the high timber. Mitchell feared it actually, for the pain it would bring. He could have stayed away from this, but they had been writing since Andy’s seventh grade, letters that scratched an itch Andy had for occurrences outside the city. Reading his correspondence through the years Mitchell had appreciated the growth of Andy’s youthful surety, his ideas and his eagerness to experience them in practical realms. Mitchell felt an obligation to offer his resources. He had extended an open invitation.
"My charge from the old timers I suppose," he said and there was a sadness in his thoughts for the elders he had known. There had been a hint of it in their eyes too, but he had never pondered the loneliness of those farewells. Until last summer when he had felt it.
The train’s horn reaffirmed all this, returned it as an obnoxious portent ahead of the train itself. Mitchell reached for the sides of the bucket seat and raised his weight off the seat to relieve the pressure on his buttocks. His ass was on fire, it was unusual for him to sit so long without a seat cushion. He had told himself he should rig one but he hadn’t. He didn’t spend much time waiting for trains.
The ground trembled and the truck shook and he lowered himself into the seat as the commotion sped past, a blurred wall of screeching silver steel, the green-lit almost empty passenger cars shattering the silence.
Andy stepped out of the train two cars back from the truck and climbed down into the pale light with his thumbs in the shoulder straps of his green canvas knapsack. His sleeping bag and a bright orange stunt kite were rolled on top. A pair of worn hiking boots that Mitchell recognized were strung by their laces around his neck. Yawning, Andy walked to the side of the truck and Mitchell handed him a jug of spring water through the open window then watched him drink.
"How was the trip?"
Andy set the jug on the running board. With his hands on his lower back he arched backward, inhaling deeply then reaching his arms wide to stretch. "Long," he exhaled.
The tempo for their conversations had begun.
Don’t hurry him, Mitchell thought, there’s another long ride ahead. And it impressed Mitchell, that Andy had written and planned and then made these trips happen. Alone. On a train.
Andy stepped up on the running board and lowered his gear over the rails into the truck’s body. He walked around the cab and climbed in and Mitchell started the engine to let it warm while Andy adjusted his fatigue to the seat’s hardness.
"You ready?"
"Uh-huh."
Mitchell drove northwest through long silent miles climbing mountainsides above eastern vistas of endless green forest. The morning sky was empty but after eighty miles the sun had risen into a yellow-gold conflagration igniting the horizon. He took an exit and shifted the automatic transmission into low then rode the hand-control brake downhill for miles to a back-country road. The mufflers were loud as the truck rumbled north alongside a wide shallow river. Radiant with morning’s clear sparkle and strewn with boulders, some of them giant, the water swirled mysteriously in the shadows of hardwoods. Rotting moss-covered tree trunks slept in the river as it twisted down from hard-scrabble pastures near occasional farmhouses and barns along the road. They were small dairy farms, some with a few head of cattle, or sheep, or horses grazing the steep slopes.