Blood on the Tracks Read Online Free PDF

I wanted to ask him if his ghosts sat at his kitchen table or followed him around at work. But I didn’t want him thinking I was certifiable. I drank my whiskey and kept my mouth shut. Nik went on to say that the anger and the memory problems and the nightmares would eventually stop, and that it was best not to talk about them because that gave them weight. “Weight with a capital W ,” he’d told me. “The hardest pounds you’ll ever work to shed.” Nik had been a grunt in ’Nam; he knew what he was talking about. So I listened and learned, did my best to be as stoic as he was. When I told him I wanted to be a railroad cop, one of the first women to do so, he’d clapped my back, and we’d switched from Johnnie Walker to Macallan.
    In the Ford, I lifted my head. In a few short minutes, Nik would have Weight again.
    A sudden gust rocked the truck like a reminder that I couldn’t wait forever. Clyde gave a delicate, inquiring bark. I opened my eyes and scratched behind his ears.
    “Right, boy. No time like the present.”
    Nik was waiting for us at the door. He’d been smiling as we came up the walk, but when I didn’t smile back, his expression went flat.
    “This can’t be good,” he said.
    I looked down. Someone had scratched a line through the word Welcome in the doormat, slicing right through the plastic. Nearby were the remnants of a swastika someone had spray-painted on the concrete.
    “What the hell?” I asked.
    “Punks. Hit a bunch of the houses here.”
    I looked up and caught his eyes. “Nik, it’s—”
    But he shook his head. “Let’s do this right, whatever it is. Come inside, Sydney Rose.”
    He led Clyde and me to the kitchen and poured coffee without my asking. He put nondairy creamer on the old pine table next to the sugar bowl, then sat across from me and shook a couple of antacid tablets out of a bottle. He’d obviously just begun his day: the coffee was fresh and his hair was wet from the shower. He had a piece of tissue stuck on his cheek where he’d cut himself shaving. Nik still used a straight razor, or so his wife had told me. “The man shaves like he’s making penance,” Ellen Ann had said. “I offered to buy him a horsehair shirt, but he said he’d make do with the razor.”
    I nodded at the tissue, tried to make my voice light. “You still haven’t gotten the hang of that?”
    “Hands aren’t as steady as they used to be.”
    More Weight.
    Clyde tolerated Nik petting him for a minute, then took up a post at the back door. Nik’s Doberman barked once through the door, Clyde growled, and they were done with the territory thing.
    “How’s school going?” Nik asked.
    I accepted the delay. “We’re still on winter break. Just picked up my books for this semester.”
    “Good. That’s good. Don’t quit, Sydney Rose.”
    “No.” I stirred sugar into my coffee. “I needed this. Thanks.”
    “You’re welcome.”
    He didn’t meet my gaze, so I gave him some time. I looked around the tidy little kitchen with its rooster-themed wallpaper and blue countertops. I’d sat in this kitchen, at this table, hundreds of times. Doing homework, eating Ellen Ann’s Appalachian stew, filling out the paperwork for my Marine enlistment. Often other people were here, too, railroad employees come around to ask Nik’s advice or sample Ellen Ann’s cooking or just shoot the breeze. Sometimes Grams came with me to chop vegetables or knead bread dough so that she and Ellen Ann could talk.
    The wooden pendulum clock on the wall filled the silence with its thick, syrupy voice. Tick . . . tock . . . tick . . . tock.
    I’d traded words with Elise now and again at this table. But there was a gap of almost seven years between us, and we had little interest in each other. She was still just a big-eyed, scrape-kneed kid in a training bra when I left for Iraq.
    I glanced out the window over the sink, into the dead yard with its scattershot rim of dormant poplars. Overhead, the