One day, Ishmael came upon three telephone poles.
They stood along the railroad tracks in line with countless others that ran away into the distance as far as the eye could see.
Ishmael had taken little notice of them as he had traveled on. They had been part of the landscape, rising like crucified trees, bent and splintered, some leaning crazily to one side or the other, black with tar, oil, and smoke, scarred by the wind, sun. rain, and ice, some strung with useless rusting wire, some not, some with cross beams, some without. They rose in the midst of the winterdead weeds that stabbed into the air like spears.
He sat on a hard rail in a cold winter mist and gazed up at the dead things. The mist fell like quiet woe and covered everything. Covered the tracks, covered the bare woods, covered the slick red clay of the embankment, covered Ishmael. It sucked the heat from his thin body like a leech latched onto a turtle sucks blood.
He pulled his head down into the scratching collar of his coat and watched as his breath floated before him like a ghost.
As he gazed up at the poles, examining them, he wondered that he had not really noticed the thousands of others he must have passed for mile after mile and day after day.
Perhaps it was because the others had not been festooned with corpses.
One each.
Three in all.
Side by side by side.
He looked up and down the track and saw that they were alone, the four of them together, and he wondered how the three had come to their predicament. The cold steel of the rail pressed uncomfortably into his flesh, but he was too tired to rise and he had no desire to lie down on the oil blackened rock of the railway bed, so he sat in his uncomfortable position and pondered as he tried to light a cigarette in the damp of the falling mist. When the end finally glowed and the ghost of his breath came as smoke, he heard a voice.
"Give me a drag, man."
Ishmael continued to ponder as he gazed up at one of the far poles. Then he slowly pushed himself to his feet and headed towards the voice, thinking "It's the least I can do, considering the man's situation."
He stopped at the base of the pole and looked up at what he had taken to be a corpse.
"Can you reach it?" Ishmael asked as he lit another off the butt. Then he realized that the man could not because his feet were nailed to the tar covered pole and each hand was hammered to a cross beam with a railroad spike.
"Put it on a stick." the man said.
The ground around was bare and winter hard, red clay slick with wet, graveled and sharded with bits of glass and rock. But here and there were the dead stalks of daylilies of the previous year and the bare branches of stunted redbuds. Ishmael broke one off, split the end, and slipped the cigarette onto the notch. Raising it high he pressed the unfiltered and unlit end to the man's lips and then threw the stick into the weeds.
"Keep it." Ishmael said.
"You'd never get it back, anyway." said another voice. "He's a thief."
Ishmael stepped back and looked at this new speaker who hung on the far pole.
"And you?"
"Me, too."
Ishmael and the man gazed at each other for a moment.
"Want one?"
"Thanks, man."
Ishmael retrieved the discarded stick and lit another cigarette off his own. He walked past the still silent figure in the middle and raised the smoke to this second man's lips.
"How about this one?" Ishmael asked as he nodded towards the man who hung at the center of it all.
"He's dead." said one.
"No he's not." said the other.
"He died at Three." said the first.
"How do you know the time?" asked Ishmael. "You can't see your watch."
"Train came by. Always comes by at Three."
"How do you know that's when he died?"
"He raised his eyes to heaven, gave a little speech, and died. I could hear it."
"What did he say?"
"Couldn't make out all the words. Train was too loud. But I heard enough."
Ishmael took a drag and blew the smoke into the damp air. He turned to the other.
"Is that what happened?"
"Nope. No death, no train."
"Then what the hell was that roar?" asked the first, suddenly angry.
"That was his soul, going to prepare me a place."
"Damn! You are one dumb fuck!"
"I thought you said he wasn't dead." commented Ishmael, ignoring the angry outburst of the first who was even angrier now that he had dropped his cigarette while cursing the other.
"The box might be empty, but what came in it lives on."
Walking past the silent figure that separated the two men, Ishmael retrieved the dropped butt. He gave it a pull to reglow the end and reached it back to the hanging man.
"Look at him." said the first, angry no longer. "The guy's as dead as Julius Caesar."
Ishmael stepped to the base of the center pole and looked up.
He had little experience with corpses. Just his Grandmother, his Father, and one or two he had encountered on his travels. But this one sure looked dead. The face was already set in death, the body stiff. Blood had ceased to flow from the hands and feet, the cuts across the back, the gaping wound in the side, and the lacerations on the scalp caused when someone had forced a crown of barbed wire onto the man's head. The mouth gaped open and through the slit of the barely opened eyes there shone no sign of life.
"He's dead." said Ishmael.
"Told you." said the first.
"Just the box." said the other.
"Who killed him?"
"The locals." said the first. "They're damn mean around here."
"No worse than elsewhere." said the other. "But watch yourself. They don't like strangers."
Ishmael stepped back and looked up at the two who framed the
not-dead dead man.
"You want me to get you down?"
"No." said the other with a nod towards the silent one. "He promised to come back for me."
"Don't bother "said the first. "We're goners anyway. But thanks for the smoke."
"How about once you're dead? I could bury you."
"Nah. The guy in the middle had some friends who said they'd take him down once it's over. I expect they'll do the same for us."
Ishmael left them there, hanging on their poles. He felt bad about it, but one was looking forward to the keeping of the promise made him while the first saw no point in the short lived salvation Ishmael offered.
Hours later, he set up camp on the embankment that framed the tracks. He built a fire near one of the poles so he could lean his back against it while he stared at the flames.
The falling of the mist had stopped and the sky had cleared. The rusting wire that ran from pole to pole cut the face of the moon.