Part 1 of 1
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Tonight, we present a letter, as written by the hand of Sgt. Smith, telling of one strange evening, and a stranger encounter.
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071 - Sgt. Smith and The Last Stop, Part 1 of 1
[music] Welcome to FlashPulp episode 71. Tonight we present Sergeant Smith and the last stop, Part 1 of 1. This week's episodes are brought to you by the ranting of Captain Pighart. Thrilled to the dangerous incompetence of his crew, Swoon and his romance with anything that will have him, cackled gleefully at the results of both. By the tales, as told by the captain himself, at cdbaby.com or point your browser at httpbit.ly/b7hb68. [music] FlashPulp is an experiment in broadcasting fresh pulp stories in modern age. Three to ten minutes of fiction brought to you Monday, Wednesday and Friday evenings. Tonight, we present a letter as written by the hand of Sergeant Smith, telling of one strange evening and a stranger encounter. Sergeant Smith and the last stop, Part 1 of 1, written by J.R.D. Skinner, Art and Narration Biocoponax, an audio produced by Jessica Meck. [music] Mulligan. It was 1944, and there was a war on. But as you know, I was forced to abstain from the service of my country, as I was short my tongue. Still, there are things a man can do to help his nation, and I was willing to do them. I probably wouldn't have been so eager if I'd known your ma at the time, but in those days, the life of a mute wasn't always the easiest. And, being 16, I was slightly stupid with my need to make a place in the world. That's how I found myself riding the rails. The age of the hobo was coming to an end. Some would say it already had, I guess, but you could still find old-timers hopping trains and coasting from C to C, if you looked hard enough at the shadows. I was supposed to be watching the cargo cars for Japanese saboteurs, of which there never were any as far as I can tell. But every now and again, I'd stumble across some grey-whiskered fellow in patchwork pants, usually with a bottle under his arm. The night I met Jancy and Polk was a cold one. I'd spent some of it chatting away in the caboose, keeping close to the heater, but I was young and hardy, and my duties weighed heavy, even if I'd done the rounds a hundred times previous, without turning up so much as a kimono, or plate of sushi. Jancy and Polk weren't nip and knees, obviously. I doubt they'd ever had a home address beyond America in general. They'd crammed themselves between a double stack of crates, and when I first came across them, I thought they were doing something mighty inappropriate. "Hey, what are you doing in there?" I thought, pinning them with the flashlight the railroad had handed me. He was years later that I realized just how lucky I was that no one pitched me from the train during those dark hours. Polk was lying across Jancy's lap, and over the rattle of the tracks, I could hear one of them crying, and one of them dying, and slow rasps. Jancy probably couldn't make out my face over the glare of the light. With the look on his own, I figured he must have thought he'd been caught up by a hardliner railroad deck. "Mr. Mr. Please, my friend, he ain't gonna make it much longer. Just let us ride." Well, I had a whistle, and I had my flashlight, but those were about the only options the company had given me. I couldn't speak to tell him I'd give him a pass, and blowing the whistle would have brought old Mike up from the caboose with his clobbering stick of the ready. I pulled out my notepad and scratched a quick message, but Jancy only looked at the paper and despair. You don't find yourself having to hop freight because of a great education. I didn't have much else to offer them, but I felt bad. The poke was obviously in rough shape. His face was a mess of brews and hard life, and I didn't want to just flip off the light and leave them to the dark. I dug out the last thing I had in my pockets. A Kit-Kat chocolate bar I'd been saving a supper. I snapped off two of the ridges and handed them the Yancy. The next few hours were a life's worth of learning. I mined my silent disposition the Yancy, who introduced himself in his companion, and had no problem accepting it. To fill the time, he started talking, and I'd long finished my half of the meager meal before I realized the hour. He told me of his travels with poke about the cities they'd seen built and fall apart, the moonshine they'd drunk together, even about the small town cop who'd beaten poke to an inch of his life, ending their journeys. Maybe it was the kindness I'd shown him that made him tell me. Maybe it was the fact that he himself was not long behind poke for the Lord's judgment. Either way, he let slip where they were headed, and that he needed to watch out for the great gnarled Douglas fir, with only the eastern portion of its limbs, that it would soon be after the downslope of McClechy's hill. It's hard to say how, but before I knew it, the three of us were at the open door, and as the engine began to grind, run the sloping grade that marked the bottom of the incline, as we spotted that huge and awful tree, the three of us jumped. I don't know how antsy had planned on carrying poke along the path through the end of brush. If it hadn't been for my flashlight and youthful exuberance, I'm not sure either of us could have managed it. As it was, after an hour of pushing aside the thick green, we came across a hillock in a clearing, on top of which sat a low fire with a lone man huddled close. I hadn't fully believed what the hobo had been telling me back in the railcar, but seeing that beacons hit my body trembling. The patchwork man tending the flame didn't bother to look up as we passed, and antsy wasn't willing to stop after getting so close. It wasn't a free place to rest my light that didn't touch on bleached white bones, or rotting flesh. I hadn't smelled anything on the approach. The antsy had told me the wind always blows westward over what he called the hobo graveyard. Some of the dead had signs on their chest. Names, or dates, or scratched final messages, some had died sitting, some had taken the time to lay themselves down with arms crossed. After a while of strolling through that open air subculture, I flipped off my light. Some things are best left, little scene. I don't know where we were going, but Yancey led on. After a time he sat himself down, the emotion for me to rest poke, who'd been limping along on my shoulder muttering deliriously about his mother, beside him. Yancey shook my hand, and I turned to leave him to it, trying hard to focus on the firelight as I picked my way back. I grabbed a ladder onto the next train to slow for the grade, and once I got to the yard, I spun a tail to old Mike that had fallen overboard after a lurch. I've never seen a newspaper report mentioning the horde of bones and bodies, and I've often wondered whatever happened to that self-made cemetery. Did the last man pick up a shovel and lay them all under? At 82, I'm unlikely to sneak onto an iron horse to find out, and I have a terrible feeling I'd just find a subdivision with no history anyhow. Still, sometimes when the wind blows to the west, I find myself wandering, and my legs longing to ramble. Dad. [Music] FlashPulp is presented by http colon slash slash Skinner dot FM. The audio and text formats of FlashPulp are released under the Canadian Creative Commons attribution non-commercial 2.5 license. [Music] [Music] (upbeat music)