A Night Ride with Horvath

Wait, put out your cigarette, I remember now.  It was so-wise that I finally lost my air brakes, it was this time my whistle broke into a scream.  You remember it but have not trotted it out– first because you were protecting me, then because you may have needed it, a sap in the hip pocket– then because it did not scan in that stout-fueled conversation.  

But I remember now, really I do because of a stray cloud of fragrance, the merest chance of a gesture of a hint– and this edition is much more stripped-down, much more raw almost pornographic, more like the original M.S. whose lines I could barely complete before the next crisis– certainly a far cry from the revisionist, lilac-scented late editions.  

For now, you see, I have gone on the dole completely and am forced to perform at the 4/4 time of my patrons– and I must find a quicker step.  I must hear a tune more lively– but all in terms of the old standards– a new transposition if you will.  

The question is:  how long can I pretend to have special knowledge?  Let us tour, then, the galleries of the city, its concourses of stained concrete, its graffiti-scrawled tile passages, its howling ramparts of scoured mortar and chipped green paint–

Let us love through our routes, through our signatures of fading hiss of fabric, crackle of soles, cloud of breath, anything but that queasy moment before the mirror with its doubled chin, its buried youth, its bloodshot revelation–

You think I have shot my bolt.  You are mistaken.  I have merely laid the weapon by.

I was there with Horvath the day he went to earth.  Horvath is not dead, you say, you who know him.  No, he is not dead, but I was there the day he went to earth.  

We were painting his cellar; our arms were like lead and our boots had become glistening red clods.  We were neck deep in a giant’s grave bristling with hairy roots, teeth of broken saucers, nails of cut steel gone to rust...  Our tampico brushes were also clods, clods of tar cooling in the winter night and we slapped them on the crumbling concrete like fighters swinging wide in a trance.  In a dim blue miracle we spied the wedge of gray, the last remaining unpainted corner and Horvath covered it with a fatigue-drunken flourish.  “I am all in,” he announced and picked up his water bottle.  He had to fumble with the bail and the porcelain cap to open it.  Suddenly we were cold and lonely for a good stiff drink.  “There is one last thing, my boy,” he said and picked up an old steel cash box.  He tapped the lid.  “I say when I go to earth.”  Then he tapped his chest with all four fingers.  “I say.”  He dropped the box in the ditch and covered it with earth.  “That’s for you, when I’m really gone you can say that is where Horvath has gone to earth and he did it on this New Year’s Eve.”  

“But what’s in the box?” I said.  

“You mind what I said,” Horvath said, pointing at me, as if I hadn’t asked.  “You mind and when I’m really gone if you need to know you can dig it up and see.”  We climbed out and slapped our hands on our pants and put the tools away in the cellar.  Then we had our drink by his wood stove and Horvath went to his desk and opened the locked drawer.  He opened an old leather wallet and peeled out his cash.  “That’s a good job, my lad and I thank you.”  He handed me the bills but I didn’t take them.  “I want to go with you this time and I won’t take the money,” I said.  He frowned into the bills in his hand and shrugged.  Then he put them back in his wallet.  “I knew you would ask me some day,” he said.  “I thought it might be sooner.” He refilled my glass and as he refilled it he said, “You can go but it is a small thing.”  I drank the whole glass and said “The train leaves the yard, Horvath.”  Horvath looked at me.  “When did it leave the yard?”  

“Last night,” I said.  “I saw it leave.”  

“When?” Horvath said, and as he said it his body heaved a bit, like he was having trouble pushing my craziness.  “About eight,” I said.  “I was on a tramp and the train left the yard and I watched it disappear, into the dark at the foot of the hills.”  

“It was never that train,” Horvath said.  “Will takes me around the yard and we have a drink and go home; and Will locks the gate.  You could not have seen it.”  

“Yet it left and I can show you tonight.”  Horvath took another drink.  “Very well, but we will finish this bottle.  I have been saving it for the completion of this dreadful cellar painting and we must finish it.”  I toasted his good health and we drank.  

Sometime later I looked at Horvath’s face in the glow of the grating and the lamp by the door and I saw myself all full of unfounded hope and absurd expectation and I exclaimed “You and I, Horvath, we have to take that train, we have to take it tonight.”  I slapped my knee as I said the word ‘tonight’ and a puff of orange dust drifted up.  Horvath shrugged.  “It will be as you say,” Horvath said, “but not what you expect.”  He stared into the grating.  “Do you know what to expect Horvath?” I said.  He continued to stare.  The flames glittered in his eyes.  He shook his head.  

We found a second bottle, God knows where and made our way down to the yards.  Will was about to leave and Horvath gave him a drink and introduced me.  He shrugged when Horvath asked if we could take a ride together and said, “Sure.  Hop on.”  We watched the blue and white arc lamps hissing and the utility poles like the spars of ships in drydock and the night behind open and dark and hunched into our greatcoats.  The bottle we held in reserve for later.  

We followed Will out the gate and watched him lock it, then shouted our goodbyes and strolled down the block to the powerhouse and waited a good long while while we supposed Will was walking back to his old clapboard.  Horvath pulled out his watch and nodded.  We walked back to the yard and Horvath simply swung the lock open.  “Will, he never locks it,” he said.  The train waited like a building on its side, its doors open like hungry mouths.  We climbed into one and sat in the dark and waited.  For a while Horvath sat quietly.  Then he said “Hm.  It seems you are pulling my leg.”  

“No, no, Horvath,” I said.  “This train left–”  Then Horvath put his hand on my arm.  He pointed over my right shoulder.  “Look,” he said.  The lamps and shacks and cars in the sidings were gliding by silently.  Horvath sat back.  I saw him dimly, the triangle of his arms down to his hands and his hands on his knees.  From the apex of the triangle came his voice, quiet, unperturbed as always.  “A fine night,” he said.  “It’s high time we took a holiday.”  We had a couple more drinks and slept in our coats.  

The first time we woke Horvath said “It is like Columbus Indiana, where I laid my first brick after my apprenticeship.  You can smell the leaves burning in the streets.  And look– the houses are unpainted.”  

“They’re weathered,” I said.  Horvath sat back.  “No,” he said.  “They are unpainted.  You see?  No spots.  No chips.  There is no money for paint.  There are no street lights.  When the sun goes down the workers trip on the broken sidewalks– or the sycamore roots.  They do what they must and leave the rest to God.”  We watched the arc lamps try to push back the night but they could only show us the sidings and the few one-room houses by the yard.  “This is the world as it is, this is our lot for now,” Horvath said, and the bottle gurgled.  I nodded and took a drink.  We watched the houses go by, a world, a galaxy, a universe of houses with the night full of hollow booms and the smoke of burning leaves and the stink of paper and somewhere underneath the rotten sweetness of the stockyards.  We fell asleep hearing the clank of cars and somewhere far away a truck upshifting.  

Horvath shook me.  “Look,” he said.  “We’ve come to another town.”  I looked out the car and saw a parkway with great trees painted yellow by the street lamps.  The houses were newer, white with black shutters, with old-fashioned lamp standards on long, curving driveways.  The cars were newer, and there was no smell of smoke or burning leaves.  There was only a cold smell, like snow on pavement.  Horvath said “Look at the lamps.  They show us all the driveways, the dead ends.  The streets lead to more houses and the houses are shut.  You see all the porches are hidden by camelias and roses.  These people do not want to see their neighbors.  They only want to see the thresholds of their houses and their garage doors.  This is their world as it is.  I have seen it, I have even lived in it.”  I picked up the bottle but it was empty.  “We have no need of it now,” Horvath said.  I let it roll deeply across the deck.  “I thought you had never been here,” I said.  Horvath watched the cars glistening in their driveways.  “I have never been here,” he said, “But I have seen such places.”  

The train climbed and climbed through the night, out of the plain and into a region of rocks and whispering grasses and shivering oaks.  We watched the morning open its lamp on the crags and watched our breath come out in clouds.  After what seemed a very long time the train left its valley and below us was spread a vast plain fading to purple in the distance.  We could smell a memory of heat and a much closer threat of snow.  The train descended again and we saw a shack by the rails with a crazy smoke stack made of coffee cans.  After a time these shacks appeared more often and graduated to block buildings with signs and roads that carried trucks and cars.  At a busy siding the train finally stopped and Horvath put his hand on my shoulder.  “It seems we must walk,” he said.  By now it was almost night again and we walked past the siding and into a jungle of weathered block buildings, shacks and unpainted houses.  The houses stood in dirt yards but were planted with gardens of cactus and yucca and the wind clattered mobiles made of old cans and bottles.  The sun slanted through them and painted the face of a man whose skin was like a nut, brown and tough.  He put up his hand silently.  We passed more of these houses, their porches open, some decorated with masks, some strung with faded garlands.  We came to what looked like a public square, where a crowd of men and women, some brown and some made brown with shocks of blond hair or brown carefully plastered a chicken-wire man with advertising circulars, posters and newspapers.  Others gathered firewood and piled it under the figure.  One man waved and put out his hand.  Horvath took it and the man said “We burn lies here.  This man is made of lies and we burn them.  Sometimes our people come back from the desert and bring the clothes of those who’ve died trying to cross it and we burn those too, because that’s a kind of lie that the smugglers and coyotes tell them.  We wait for the border patrol to break us up but no one seems to care.  And the fact is, the man made of lies screams.  He screams because lies are a kind of hate and hate doesn’t die quietly.  So he screams and the bigger the lies he’s made of the louder he screams.  The people round about hear it and see us drinking pulque and say “That is where they drink pulque by the light of untruth. “   We have forgotten the truth in all the lies but we burn the lies and drink pulque by the light of them and that is a start.  As we remember the truth we paint it on the cars but the cars never seem to leave the sidings.  And if they do by the time they cross the desert the writing looks like gibberish.”     Horvath and I drank pulque with them by the light of untruth and they gave us some blankets.  

When we woke Horvath hurried me back to the train.  My head pounded and I was sick out the door.  “Go with God,” he shouted as the train pulled away.  “I will see you again, don’t worry my lad.”  I shouted at him but he didn’t hear me.  I slept heavily and woke by the power station.  Someone had propped me against a weathered milestone with my blanket under my head.  I followed the smell of burning leaves home.   

Aaron Hobbs   

New Year’s Eve 2011