Arlo

Some scholars and hard men alike just might say there ain’t nothing quite as joyous as a Saturday afternoon with your curious and wild eyed and loving offspring. And never so much joyous a moment as if it be in the autumnal susurrus of fall. Be that as it may, men like me have never known it, will never know it. Haunt us it does some, comfort us maybe, but crossing the thoughts always, he said.

The father nodded to the man who sat with one leg in boot and the other, nub in peg. The train came and the father was ready for it. He nodded again to the man before squatting, gathering and lifting his young daughter to sit in the crook of his arm. He boarded the train and the man watched the headlamp of it until there was only darkness once more. He farted and jostled his balls and smoked his piped tobacco that had been cheap and drew harshly.

He knocked the ash from the chamber and replaced it in the inside breast pocket of his weathered woolen coat and stood with much of the weight of his large and over-ripened body going through his left hand into his walking cane. He stepped from the platform and walked through the muck and the mire of the rain softened middle of town and into the saloon, which was little more than a casino and opium den the new owner had started calling The First Chance. Out front, the Women's Temperance Movement held their signs and chittered and bitched at those entering and leaving and the man farted on them as he passed.

Inside the young whores smiled at each other and nearly every man. The old whores smiled at nothing. He tried speaking to one of them with a scar around the jowl that she had tried to cover up with cosmetics and then at another who had no scars but was fit more for washing clothes at the Chinese laundry than honest whoring, but they knew in their hard earned instinct that he had no money nor did he have hygienic decency and they hung around the edge of the bar and waited for the men who left the poker tables with a jig in their step or for the men paying for their drinks with dollars.

The man knew he would not find charity here or unattended beer and he walked out the way he came, this time the lady teetotalers recoiled away from him like rain that swam around knotted wood and ran down the straight grain. He growled and lunged at one who screamed like he had clamped onto her with his brown fangs. He laughed and it sounded like it hurt and it did.

A big one of them stepped between the woman in hysterics and the man. She stood a head above him and she had eaten better meals and his smile faded. Didn’t mean no offense, he said. He backed away leaving two of the same side foot prints and a straight line that harrowed a trench in front. The big one stepped back into the women who were victory clucking and serving him right.

He stood like a buzzard on the open floor of a house that was being constructed in the daytime but sat in the night like the rib cage of a dead coach-sized buffalo. The music and the arguing and the fucking was but a faint noise on the other end of the town. Usually he would be with the legless Confederates and the undesired, passing cheap drink and sharing a fire but there were none left in this town. They had been taken by disease, vice, or violence, so he stood alone.

He did not sleep in the dead buffalo at the risk of being kicked to death in the morning and wandered back to the platform. He stopped a few hundred yards short and rested on a cut tree that did not get the opportunity to see many things in its short life.

He smoked and when he was done smoking used the stem of the pipe to itch his amputation between the stump and apparatus and the catgut chords. He remembered for some reason his granny breaking the necks of chickens. Taking life as if it was nothing more than snapping fallen branches into kindling and it was the last thing he remembered as he labored to lay in front of the last train into town. He guessed it was like this.