This story, guest-starring Shawn Kemp and Gary Payton, continues the Blake Griffin saga somewhere in the not so distant future but well after “The end of something”:
Blake stood up, but he knew something was wrong with his toe. Up the track, lights disappeared in a darkening twilight. There was water and wood on either side of where he stood. The metal rail and timber felt both more familiar and dangerous to him than the peripheral wilds.
His hands were cut up from the fall. He limped down the slant of sand and cinder toward the sound of running water. He washed himself as best he could in water the temperature of Michigan despair.
He cursed the brakeman. He called him the brakeman because he didn’t have a name to pair with the body. If he had, he would have cursed the name Jerry West, one of the most famous brakemen of all, ranking either a notch above or below Ernest Borgnine’s character in Emperor of the North.
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“Come here, Blake,” the man named West that Blake didn’t know was called West had said. When Blake had approached the man, he failed to see the billy club raise and fall, but he felt its brute violence on the back of his skull and discovered some hidden law of Newtonian power.
When he fell, he fell as if from the sky. And now his heart burned with a dim furnace heat.
Wayward and low, Blake wobbled up the track. The blow to the head echoed through him; a brutal sea pulsing in his veins. He trembled as he followed the rails. He had climbed aboard the freight train at Walton Junction, named for Californian Bill Walton. He had ridden from Los Angeles to Detroit and many other cities after that. But, now, he was miles from anywhere and not sure where to go next. He might as well walk he figured. He might as well walk.
He walked with his head down mostly. The years leaned in and he leaned with them. The gray shadows in the sky rolled into blackness. He saw a fire up ahead and smelled the smoke and needles. That warm autumn scent bordering on decay.
He decided to approach the orange flames licking the darkness. To do so, he had to leave the rails behind and wander through a forest of scrub pine and beech wood. Or something like that. After all, it was dark and he didn’t know much about trees. He tried to make a joke out of it, but concluded he was barking up the wrong tree. He recalled his one night stand at the comedy club. He had killed it, but they didn’t invite him back. On his exit, he told them: “I hear you refuse Gandhi too.” They told him, you’re not him. He said, “What about Ali?” They pointed to the door. Such is the fate of presidents and physicists alike, he thought.
The fire he could see burned well and good as he approached it. A man sat alone beside it. Blake called, “What’s up?” in the vernacular, and when the man did not respond, he crossed that border between darkness and light. He must have looked like some long lost caveman lawyer, for the man jumped at the sight of him.
“Don’t ever sneak up on a man like that!”
“I called out.”
“So maybe you did,” said the man squinting at Blake through the smoke and the flame. “Yo, you look all sorts of busted up.”
“Brakeman.”
“I see.”
“If I ever see him again—”
“I doubt you will. The trains never run the same way twice.”
Blake stared dumbly.
“For a man like you, that train ain’t running back.” The man sat his cup down by the fire. “I saw him.”
“Who?”
“The man who busted you.”
“I’ll get mine.”
“Sounds about right,” said the man, resting his elbows on his knees and leaning forward. “You even get a look at him?”
“I’ll know him.”
“No one ever been bad as you, huh?”
“Not when it mattered.”
“That’s what we all say.” The man paused to breathe. “Have to,” he exhaled.
When the older man smiled, Blake noticed how one side of the man’s mouth opened wider than the other, portraying a meat cleaver of teeth and gum. The flames flickered across the misshapen face, its swollen depths and lumped skin. In the night time, it was a canvas of vanishing purples.
“You don’t think much of me, do you?” The man cradled the cup between his shinbones.
“I wouldn’t say.”
“I was the baddest there ever was. How far you ever get? Bet I went farther.”
Blake let out a nervous laugh. “I’m sure you did.”
“You do it long enough you’ll lose it.”
“Is that what happened to you?”
“You saying I lost it?”
“I ain’t saying nothing.”
“That’s right you’re not.” He sipped from the cup. Spat out its contents and tossed it aside. Sparks flew up into the canopy of drifting smoke.
The man held out his hand. “You see that?”
“Steady,” commented Blake.
“Yeah, but I dunked with this hand.” The man held up an empty sleeve.
“Seriously?”
The man laughed. “I’m just playing.” A fist bloomed in the sleeve’s mouth, opening slowly into four fingers and a thumb. The man slapped his knee, cracking up as he were a child.
Another man stepped into the lit circle. “That’s Shawn’s go to these days.”
“It’s a good one.”
“No, it’s an awful joke. What’s your name?”
“Blake.”
“He’s Shawn. I’m Gary.”
“When are we eating?” asked the man named Shawn.
“Haven’t you had enough today already?”
“I ain’t ever had enough, and neither has my new friend here. We gotta feed him—it’s only polite.”
The man named Gary started preparing a meal in a skillet. He cracked eggs into it and cut slices of meat. He tilted the skillet from one side to the other over the flame. He gave directions to the other man, who then turned to Blake and asked to borrow a knife.
Blake started to roll up his pant leg.
“You don’t want to do that,” said Gary.
Blake hesitated.
“Last man who lent Shawn a knife was Vin Baker. Ever heard of him?”
Blake shook his head.
“Yeah, you should keep your knife.”
Gary handed Shawn a plate, and Shawn accepted it without word or expression. Then Gary handed Blake a plate. Blake reached for it, but Shawn’s arm fell like a tree branch and the plate’s contents scattered in the dirt.
“K . . . I . . . A . . . killed in action,” said the man with the misshapen face out the side of his jaw.
“Sorry, Blake,” said Gary, a slight laugh shining in his voice, “even I didn’t see that one coming. Some nights he’s still got it. That old quickness.”
Shawn chuckled through mouthfuls of food. Grease ran from the corner of his mouth.
Blake asked, “Why’d you do it?”
The man stared at his own plate and kept chewing.
As Blake stood up, Gary placed a hand on his shoulder. Gary shook his head. Blake ignored him.
“That wasn’t very polite.”
The man kept chewing.
“You gonna offer me a new plate?”
Shawn swabbed the grease from his plate with a piece of bread. When he was done, he handed the empty plate to Blake.
“What am I supposed to do with this?”
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Gary looked up at him, “What does anyone do with anything? They use it until it can’t be used no more. Shit, that’s the everything.”
Blake took a step backward, toward the edge of the circle’s wavering circumference. He dropped the plate. As he walked up the slope toward the tracks, he could hear the two men jawing back and forth, cackling like witches in the wood, one blaming the other, the other blaming the one, a song of bitter love and sweet hate. Blake looked over his shoulder. The orange dot flickered in the void. He blinked once, and he couldn’t find it again if he tried.