1
Nor does that interval return to me intact, and seldom
in the right sequence. After smoke, sometimes, if things
stay clear long enough-or a few drinks—I am driving
through a part of the country I have never seen before-
level farmland, western Illinois-on my way to a town
I know nothing about. I pull over and pick up a hitchhiker
who is cold and shivering, who says he’s out of work,
he’s been sick for a while, now he’s going back to Templin
where he has people who still remember him, who will take him in,
and where he hopes to find his father, and talk with him,
even though his father has been dead for fifteen years,
this said as though he had noticed a sign at the road’s edge.
We drive along for a few miles. He wants to know if he can smoke.
He carries nothing with him, only the pack rolled in his sleeve.
He smokes, and looks out, and after a while goes on talking.
“My father is not really dead,” he explains, “sometimes
he comes and stands where we can see him, across the river,
or maybe outside a restaurant. We look through the glass
and see him watching us.” I glance across the flat land
we are driving through. “Do you speak to him?” I ask.
It is spring, the earth is dark and scored with furrows.
“It doesn’t do any good,” he replies. “He won’t answer.
And if we try to get close, he goes away. Disappears.”
He lights another cigarette and continues to talk,
reminiscing about earlier encounters. He remembers
being taken to the funeral when he was a little boy,
seeing them lower the coffin with his father’s body inside-
but when he looked across the cemetery he saw his father
standing near the gate, watching it all. “Why would he want
to do something like that?” I ask. “For the insurance money?
Why won’t he see you now? Why has he done such a thing?”
“I don’t know,” the hitchhiker says, “that’s why I’m going back
I want to find him again. See if he will come any closer.”
We are driving through Templin now. It is like everywhere else
I have never been before—the same used-car dealers, same churches
and hamburger stands, same laundromat on the courthouse square.
2
Years later in the place where I live-a burnt-out street
in a large inner city, with empty lots and frame houses covered
with aluminum siding and added-on porches made of glass blocks
one of the young people who has grown up here explains to me
that the old ones have never left, that they refused to go to
nursing homes when it was time, that they have not died,
that they stayed here and found places for themselves
in the abandoned houses—buildings with boarded-up windows
and holes in the roof, stink trees growing in the yard.
“They come back, they find shelter-maybe it was this house
they had lived in for most of their life, raised a family,
been somebody, paid taxes, once or twice had their names
in the paper, and now it’s all over for them, everybody thinks
they are dead or in a home somewhere, but there is no money
for that, so they go on living in the shadow of their old life,
they only come out after dark. No one looks at them.”
I ask “How do you know this?” but he turns away from me.
He has seen them; it is too painful for him to go on.
3
Now it is nighttime and you are the one who is driving alone
through darkened streets. Your car breaks down, rolls to a stop.
You get out. Somewhere up ahead there is a building on fire.
A man stumbles along the sidewalk-people may be chasing him,
you can hear their voices-sirens flare in the distance,
amber lights flicker-you cannot tell if he struggles to reach
your car or to escape from something else, but he is hurt,
he staggers toward you through the shadows—spotlights
pick him out now-he is so close you can look in his eyes.
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