Westbound

I had this incident once when I got on the train going out of New York City. This very intense young man sat next to me for about fifty miles, but got off somewhere in Westchester or beyond. I was going up to Albany and then all the way out to Colorado so I was about to settle in for a nap. But the guy was quite intense.

I had a newspaper in my hand and he pointed out that the killer referenced on the front page had just been in Manhattan. "As were we all," he said, looking around at the people on the train. It seemed like a pretty normal train-car full of people, all ages, both genders, even some families. But this young guy could have been a killer, and I realized that, even as he was insinuating, it seemed, that maybe I was.

He left me alone until his stop, at which point he got off rather quickly, and then I realized that he'd left his phone on the seat. The phone was dead. There was no way I could reach him anyway, even if it were charged. He was there, the phone was here. I wondered if perhaps my charger, which I always carry with me, would work on it.

The train was an Amtrak and it had a club car, and believe it or not way up there I found a plug and was able to plug it in. I thought of handing it to the authorities right away, namely, the conductor on the train. After all, it was really between him and the train; there was no reason I should even be involved, not to mention using my own charger to charge his phone.

There was a card game near where the plug was and some guy with a white Panama hat noticed me messing with my charger, which didn't fit his phone, and came over and offered his own charger which he was pretty sure would work. It did. But now I felt obligated to go sit near the card game since I was using this guy's charger to find out about what was on this phone. Deep down, I thought this guy was the killer. You couldn't tell from the picture in the newspaper; that was a police artist's sketch and it was like a horoscope, it could fit just about anyone. You could look at that police artist's version of a young guy with a handsome face, and a winter hat, and intense eyes, and if you were in the mood half the people on the train would fit that profile. So I figured I had to get into that phone to learn more about the guy who had been sitting next to me.

The card game broke into a raucous fight as two guys accused the guy with the Panama hat of cheating. Apparently, they said that while he got up to get me the charger he'd looked at this other guy's cards. There were two guys pummeling him and trying to take this wad of bills that he'd cleared from the table in winning. "You cheated! they yelled, "Give us the money!" I felt like I had to do something, though I really didn't want to get involved, so I started pulling on the back of the largest guy, a big red-headed guy who turned out to be George.

The fourth card-player was a woman. She was quite beautiful, and did nothing but put the chips in order and watch.

Two men burst into the club car and came up to us with guns drawn; one had an Amtrak uniform. They told us all to line up near the wall; this was near the outlet so I took the phone and charger and just tucked it away. They had the woman against the wall too; there was me, the two big guys, the guy with the Panama hat, and the woman. They patted down the fanny pack of the guy with the Panama hat and found a gun. "What's this?" they said. The fanny pack was clearly in the spot where he'd been sitting.

"It's not mine! That woman put it in there while I was helping this guy with the charger!" He looked at me like he wanted me to say something in his defense. He was pretty sure nobody else would.

But he was wrong. George said, "That's right! She put it in there!"

"That's your gun, George," said the woman.

"Everybody off the train!" they said. The train was stopping; we were in Albany. My plan had been to get out here anyway, to look up an old college friend; he knew vaguely that I was coming. We lined up in front of them to get off the train. The other guy, the guy with the red bandana, whined about some stuff he didn't want to be separated from. He was pretty sure that, off the train, the train would go on without us, and his stuff would still be under his seat. They assured him that he'd be back on the train in time. I wasn't so sure, but I didn't care; I didn't have stuff.

The minute we got off the train George set off and disappeared in the crowd. They couldn't shoot at him because he was running behind random people who were getting off the train. He was a big guy, but really they just appeared to be Amtrak security and didn't really want to shoot anyone anyway. The money we were talking about was just a fistful of bills, mostly ones, that George and the man with the hat had been scuffling over; the guy with the uniform had those. He had the gun, too.

We stood outside the train while people finished getting off and others started getting on. It was a warm spring day, a little cool out, but the sun was shining. "This fight was about this money, right?" the guy in the uniform said. "But this fellow ran off," he said, referring to George, "so I guess the money's yours, huh?" and he gave the money to the guy with the hat. "But I'm keeping the gun. You can't have a gun on these trains. Now get back on there and behave!" He and the other guy turned on their heels and left, leaving us, me, the man with the hat, the woman, and the guy with the bandana, to board again. The guy with the bandana was relieved and went straight to his stuff.

I had a split-second decision to make: whether to change my ticket for a ticket tomorrow, and go visit my college buddy, as I'd originally planned, or to just get back on the train with these two, the guy with the hat and the woman, spurned and abandoned by George. I decided to stick with them and get back on the train. My college buddy could wait; I'd be coming back through in a couple weeks. But the main reason was I didn't want to deal with anyone from Amtrak, ticket master, anyone. I didn't want to give them the phone. I think they handled the incident well enough, I just didn't want any more to do with them.

Back in the club car the man with the hat bought us coffees with the money in his fist that he'd won nefariously; he admitted that he might have looked at George's cards. There wasn't all that much of it anyway and it didn't go that far since coffee was like a fortune on an Amtrak. I settled into the booth and tried to figure out what the relation of George and the woman was; clearly they'd known each other. I asked her if he was her husband or what, and did she expect to see him again? I kept my eye out for the guy with the bandana but didn't see him.

She said they were actors going to play a show in Cleveland and she was aware that he had a rough side; she knew about the gun; but she'd agreed to go with him on the train to Cleveland as it was better than traveling alone. She didn't know what motivated him to bolt in Albany or what he would do on the streets of Albany. Amtrak had his gun. Maybe he'd try to get it back.

The man with the hat claimed he was going to Cleveland too; he was the actor, though, I figure, and was interested in the woman. I was too, but not enough to interfere or to get off the train in Cleveland. We played cards most of the night with an old deck of cards with presidents on them, but only after they agreed to my demand that no money be involved. I remember raking in some chips over an old Garfield card that was like king of clubs or something, but my pleasure was short-lived because the woman was really the best at cards. It turned out, though, that the phone was the phone of the killer. I gave the charger back and we looked at it together; it opened right up without a passcode or anything, and there were plenty of signs that the owner had used it for bad purposes. After a point I agreed to take it straight to the police in Chicago, which I did, and I just told them I couldn't hand it in to Amtrak for my own reasons. It wasn't that I was mad at them or anything; I got right back on that Amtrak later in the day anyway for the long ride out to Colorado. You never know who you're going to meet on those trains.

The Bog

In the middle of the night, maybe four in the morning, I woke up from a bad dream and couldn't get back to sleep. Normally I get back to sleep right away, but the puppy sleeping beside me was having a bad dream too, and in the process of comforting him, so that he could get back to sleep, I started worrying about all the things in life that generally keep you up at night. In my case, there are plenty. Giving up, I went downstairs and sat in my chair.

What I often do in situations like this is play online boggle, or the bog, which is an intense little online world where, in the process of trying to find words in a cube of letters, in this situation sixteen of them, I get my mind off whatever is bugging me and into a more mundane, relaxing but competitive sport. Some programmer set it up so that it runs by itself, with a new game every few minutes, and in the daytime up to thirty or forty people will compete, all with different names, but in the middle of the night, maybe only five or six.

On this particular night, there were twelve, and two of them were the Fosters, a man and a woman. The woman was slightly better than the man; she'd place maybe third while he placed fifth. Back when they were a team, Team Foster, they'd win every game the whole time they played. The game allows you to be a team, but then the rest of us only see your collective score under Team Foster, and don't get to see the individual players. But occasionally one would quit before the other, or start before the other, or perhaps one would get up to get coffee, and we'd see only the one player: Team Foster: Carl or Team Foster: Izbla. I assumed that that last one was Izabella, or something like that, and that they were married and probably lived together. But over the years we saw a spat, and then we saw them break up, and then they were never Team Foster anymore. So I had made a couple of assumptions, which I was aware were based on flimsy evidence, that Izabella was no longer a Foster. For years they said nasty things to each other through the names they used for themselves on each boggle game. That's because you can change your name each game you play, eliminating the team if you want, or adding it, or just speaking to someone. One night I clearly remember, in about third place: TeamF got new bff and in fifth place Teamf gotohellIzzy. In their names, they were not using the "Team" function, not playing as a team, but speaking to each other using "Teamf" and carrying on their marital dispute. At least they were enjoying games of boggle though.

In boggle, you make as many words as you can from a cube of four letters across, four down, sixteen altogether, or you can play the five by five board, which is twenty-five altogether. In that little window of time you spell out as many words as you can, and believe me, some people can get an incredible number of words, fast, from those boards. You'd be surprised how many words there actually are, and after a while, if you study the ones you've missed, you get more of them, you get better at it, you become quite a fast typer. This had clearly happened to Izzy and Carl, perhaps even before they'd married, but I often pictured them, even during their marriage, both typing away at perhaps a kitchen table, maybe shouting out the words they got or found. It's a pleasurable way to pass the time. One very rarely wins, because so many people on there are so good at it. Some, I suspect, have found a way to cheat; perhaps they got a computer to list out all the possible words and they just type them in? I'm not sure, but people get incredibly high scores. I almost never win, and it's all I can do to keep from coming in last, especially in the late nights when the hard-core players are all out there, and almost everyone gets way more points than I do.

So on this night they were both there, and they were both talking to each other, and it was about three in the morning. But suddenly I got very disturbed by the names they were giving themselves. Izzy was in trouble. In the higher position I'd see teamf help carl to which he'd reply, the next game, teamf whatsupizzy. She, as her name, used teamf imtrappedneedurhelp and his name was teamf wtf. She used teamf needoutofhere and he used teamf thoughthewasbff. She used teamf hesamonster and he used teamf getonfbnwelltalk. She used teamf cantheswatching and then she disappeared. He played a number of other games, asking her questions, but they went unanswered; she was gone.

In the middle of the night, I'm trying to calm my mind, thinking of words given a number of combinations. Game after game relaxes my mind, and keeps it off of my own problems, which are sometimes overbearing. But now I was in the middle of Izzy and Carl's problem. She fell in with the wrong guy. Carl was her only way to get help, get her out of it. Carl undoubtedly at least knew where she lived. Carl could at least do something about it. I had no idea even what city they were in, or where. I thought I remembered, from some earlier thing one of them said, Virginia somewhere. Virginia is for lovers, I thought. But it's also for a whole range of other things, too, I'm sure. Some lurid drama was playing out there in Virginia that night, I imagined. If I were Carl, I'd head over to her house, even if she were an ex.

But then, I had no idea how bad their breakup was. I figured it was a good sign that they could still get on the online boggle and play a few games together at night, even if they weren't a team any longer. But really I had no idea if Carl could stomach getting involved with some controlling new boyfriend that Izzy had. Would he come to her rescue?

I guess I'd have to stay on the bog to find out.