Time Between Trains - Anthony Bukoski

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the smooth gliding of the track inspector on his way to Chub Lake.

      Early one year, he decided he’d become too committed to the railroad. Through his heavy boots, his legs, even up into his heart, he sensed the slightest problems with tracks. Nothing was too fine to escape the inspector’s attention. He took good care of the truck; he worked late; he reported problems before they occurred. He wanted so much to be Employee of the Month again, that week after long week he thought of nothing else.

      After work on Fridays he would stop in a place where he could be less vigilant of the railroad for an hour. Seeing Joe Rubin, someone would yell to Ogy, the bartender, as he rang up a cash register sale, “Play that Jewish piano, Ogy. Make the Jewish piano sing.” The track inspector laughed as was expected of him, for he wanted to get along. But what some wiseguy yelled to the bartender coupled with “the Wandering Jew” nickname and other small slights made him feel that he might just as well go back out to inspect the tracks again. Listening to the sound of rails wasn’t so bad, he told himself. He might as well spend the weekend in his truck on a siding, maybe at Milepost 8 or M.P. 12.

      At M.P. 15.9 lived a woman who wished she were less solitary. Alone most evenings, this Sofia had done well in life, at least for Superior. She was a teacher in an elementary school outside town, eight miles east of her home. “Mrs. Stepan,” the children called her, though she was a widow, and her married name now had a hollow ring to her ears.

      She lived at the four corners where South Irondale Road crosses County Trunk Highway C, then winds through thick woods down into a river valley.

      Sofia’s house was the only building at the corners. Across the highway and the BN-SF tracks was the wooden M.P. 15.9 sign and the gray railroad masts that told east- and westbound trains to hold or proceed. In midsummer when everything greens up, the area is unremarkable, unnoticeable. In other corners of the intersection were ditches dug out of the clay, a few scraggly alder and hawthorn bushes, and miles of fields that ended in the woods where, forty years ago, her father hunted rabbits. Twenty times a day trains passed—every five minutes a truck or automobile on the paved highway came close to the house, but nothing slowed, nothing stopped except once in awhile a train on Number 1 track being held until the eastbound line was clear. Otherwise nothing, no reason to stop, though sometimes a truck driver speeding by might wave if he spotted Sofia staring out her bedroom window on the highway side of the house. At least there was something to see that way. Her other windows looked out on empty fields.

      Five days a week during the school year she was at school—and then there was summer school in June and July. Sofia loved her third-graders; but after teaching them and reading to them, correcting arithmetic and penmanship, escorting them to the playground, coordinating milk breaks, meeting parents, taking care of the small and large responsibilities of a teacher’s day, she found the job growing more tedious every year. For twenty-five years she’d done the work. During the January that Joe Rubin fully realized the extent of his commitment to his job, concentrating on railroad tracks to the exclusion of everything else, Sofia stared from her bedroom window and wondered where the years had flown. Her husband, Jerry Stepan, had been dead ten years, she had two women-teacher friends she saw socially once a month, and she lived alone in her house with shiplap siding at a boring crossroads in a flat country above a river valley. With a class of eight-year-olds clamoring for her attention, Sofia had less time than the track inspector for introspection. Still, as much of her time as they took and as much as she delighted in the children, she knew her life was passing.

      As she daydreamed out at the fields, sometimes her life seemed so empty, but then she would snap herself out of her reverie and return to her pupils’ work or listen to records as she reheated coffee in a pan on the stove. Maybe everyone feels this way in winter, she thought. Sofia had a few moments in the evenings to think like this, or on weekends after finishing the dishes and preparing her school clothes, but the track inspector, during every long season, had plenty of time to worry over where his life was going.

      Though neither knew it, they traveled parallel tracks. The highway runs beside the tracks (except for the ditch between) until “Shortcut Road,” where Sofia turned down a dirt road to pick up South State Highway 35 to school. Four or five times a year as he was heading to Chub Lake and she was on the way to or from Nemadji Elementary, they rode close to each other, the proximity occurring more often when he had time between trains—for the tracks at M.P. 15.9 are only a few steps farther from the house than from the highway. To Joe Rubin what did it matter that sometimes there was a woman driving parallel to him at the same speed he was going? Since the old neighborhood of Jews on Connors’ Point had vanished, he thought there was no one worth noticing. His people had intermarried or moved away—everyone but the track inspector, who’d put off marriage to care for his parents. When his father died, the synagogue closed; the remaining old people went to Adas Israel in Duluth. Right before his mother died, the boarded-up Hebrew Brotherhood Synagogue in Superior (where his parents once had to reserve seats during High Holidays because of the large turnout of people) was set on fire. Over and over in the last weeks of her life, his mother said to Joe, “This isn’t how it should end.” As if to support her claim, her burial left the Hebrew Cemetery filled to capacity.

      Busy as he was, Joe Rubin didn’t often go to visit his parents’ graves, and there was nothing left to see of the synagogue.

      He concerned himself with a different kind of particulars now. He’d become a detective of sorts. At work he carried with him a small book. In some dreary northern place, when he got out of the truck to stretch, he compared pictures of animal tracks in the book to tracks he saw in ditches and fields, or sometimes running along or between the railroad tracks. Sometimes these mammal tracks made exquisite designs. Magnified, the smallest of them—shrew tracks—looked like hands with long, crooked fingers growing sharp and thin at the end. He learned that “long-tailed shrews frequently leave a tail mark on their trail, which is barely over one-inch wide.” During the course of his investigation, he read in Mammals of the Superior National Forest that “red fox prints appear as a line of prints as if the animal were walking along a string. A fox track is roughly circular and 1.5–2 inches in diameter. In soft snow where detail cannot be seen, their tracks appear as a line of round depressions.”

      Sometimes he confused mammal tracks with the tracks made by birds’ claws. The way they went out over the fields, on out into the distance, all these (if you pretended) could be the tracks of people like the wandering inspector. The variety of mice living in the area presented problems in track identification, too. Above the snow and tunneling beneath it, they left an artistic network Joe Rubin got on his knees to observe. What was so unusual about his kneeling in snow? Joe wondered. Old-time railroad workers broke out a pint of brandy or a couple of miniatures of whiskey or vodka to keep them company. At least what Joe Rubin did endangered no one. Kneeling in his brown jacket and insulated pants, he looked as if he were praying as he searched for the animal tracks, which, to him, seemed to represent the Diaspora of the Jews.

      As he was doing this searching that resembled praying one afternoon when the schools celebrated Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday and when he himself waited for a taconite train to pass, a voice startled him. The trackbed, the tracks, the gray signal masts looked especially forlorn. All morning a biting wind ducked low over the fields. Now this voice—“You grow to be like the company you keep.”

      Turning, he saw a woman in the middle of Number 2 track.

      She said it again in what he thought must be Polish, “You become like the company you keep . . . Z kim przestajesz takim się stajesz.”

      She walked down the slight pitch in the road, crossed the highway, and went into her house, wondering, the teacher, why she hadn’t walked toward the river on her day off. She sat a half-hour in her coat and gloves pondering it.

      Now that he had seen her, she wouldn’t catch

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