Train Tracks Read Online Free PDF

delight of the startled boy. When it came to the menfolk,
though, the invaders had different thoughts.
    They entered the little house, demanding the women
reveal the whereabouts of the men and boys, who they hoped to conscript into the
Polish army. As Uncle Philip, then fourteen or fifteen, hid in the root cellar,
which was entered through some floorboards hidden beneath a piece of furniture,
the soldiers pounded their rifle butts on the floor, one smashing my
grandmother’s foot as he left in disgust.
    So, as a young kid, I’d be down in the basement of
the market cleaning bronzes with cyanide solution, lost in my boyhood thoughts.
Every once in a while I’d see Charlie waltz by with some beat-up woman, and she
would say in the dark, “Well, where are the dresses?” And he’d say, “Oh, they’re
in here.” As he always had hundreds of rag dresses, he’d lead them into his
cold, damp basement and say, “Go over and pick out what you want.” They took a
few rag dresses and Charlie took them.
    Anyway, once I was down there cleaning, and Charlie
came out from giving rags to this woman, and he was wiping off his pants with a
handkerchief. At the time I didn’t know what had gone on in there. So my father
walked by, and he looked at Charlie, and Charlie looked at him, and he said to
Charlie, “Whatsa matter, Charlie, you spit on yourself?” And Charlie, he just
laughed, wiping off his pants.
    I mean this was the kind of subterfuge that was
going on underneath the floorboards of the market. So I knew Charlie from those
days, when he was at the height of his womanizing, when he was chasing the dead
wye over the rags in the basement, right up to when he was dying of cancer,
fifteen, twenty years later, in those hot summer days, while he still held
out.
    The market was right next to Neiberg’s Funeral
Home; that was where I saw my first corpse. It was a hot summer, and I learned
from the undertakers who used to hang around in my father’s market that there
were seasons for death, that when people had terminal illnesses they would
rarely die in the spring, and hardly ever in the summer. People with terminal
illnesses would wait out the summer and die in the fall. My father eventually
died in the fall; he knew the folklore. He was expected to die at any time, and
he chose October.
    But I remember Charlie as a dying man. It was his
last season at bat. There he’d be, in his little gray suit. He always dressed
neatly because, after all, he was a woman’s man, even if it was those poor,
beat-up women. In his mind, he was still a woman’s man. And he always used to
talk to me about women, from the time when I was a little kid. He always used to
say, “Hey Mickey, look at her fartsa . Oh Mickey,
look at her fartsa .” This went on for years. Anyway,
this was his last season in the dugout. He was sitting back in his booth with
his wife and her cheeks made up, big red lipstick, a real dummy. So he was
sitting there, Charlie, in his last season, with a little gray suit and a tie,
sitting there on a chair. He had terminal cancer and he was moaning, low, but I
could hear it even as he spoke to me. The pain must have been frightening. There
he is with his eyes closed and all of a sudden, he’s looking through the slits
to stare at a young Puerto Rican woman prancing through the market. “Oh,
Mickey,” he said. I followed, “What, Charlie?” He said, “I’d like to schtup her once more.” So, you know, I fell for it. I
said, “Oh, you mean you made it with her before, huh, Charlie?” And he said,
“No, once more I’d like to schtup HER.”
    As we move down the line, we come to Monk. Monk was
a bohemian whose old lady was Frances; she was the woman that I really fixated
on through my early years. Frances, she was the beatnik. They were the two old
beatniks.
    I mean, they were commie beatnik bastards. Monk
wore a