No Destination No Journey

Jon Henry was a multimodal man.

Two, to be precise.

The e-scooters and communal bikes had vanished a few years back -- that is, kept vanishing until the city tired of scouring alleys and vacant lots and culverts and shrubs and decided to stick to bulkier if pale greener macro-mobility. But “bimodal” is one or six modes short of optimal commercial curb appeal, and thus Millington Multimodal Hub contented itself with shuffling commuters and students and shopper/tourists and senior charters and drafting new and exotic bus routes and building a franchised, express-service food court that would recall the past glory of the Sbarro-anchored East Millington Mall galleria and enable travelers to fuel up for the ride without resort to the nine Campustown eateries located inconveniently within a block of the Hub’s street entrance.

At 125,000 souls and fluctuating, largely baffled or frustrated by most national retail advertising (Millingtonian Lobster Lovers now shuttled to Peoria or Champaign or hoped to catch Bisque Day at the Beltway Panera), Jon Henry would remain a bimodal man. As vertical integration seemed impossible, the Hub’s executive director dreamed in landscape.

And as he settled in the last car with the new SI and a vente Americano from the new Hub Starbucks, Jon Henry again dreamed of the day when he could be fired like a sleek millennial bullet into the heart of the Loop or the Gateway Center instead of communing for the length of a Star Wars sequel with the unbathed, their constantly evolving contagions and stowaway bedbugs, the hillbilly and hip-hop static leaking from Walgreen earbuds, and their supersized munchies raining Taki dandruff, Cheetos fallout on the Red Bull/BO-saturated upholstery.

With the federal woodchipper randomly grinding agencies and services and other non-essentials to mulch, Jon Henry tingled at the prospect that, this time, the ax might hit the mark. The old guard Boomers, the grunts, the God-save-us citizen groups rallied valiantly to keep Amtrak on life support, but now that proof of concept and privatization were the New World Order, the magic bullet – high-speed – appeared locked and loaded. After all, all modes ran through him, and A2B Human Logistics and the rolling stock/infrastructure folks could and already had indicated they would enthusiastically pay the toll.

Jon Henry surreptitiously scanned the coach – he shared the rear compartment with a hipster beeping and booping on his 16 Pro, and a behemoth in a “Wutang” (?) hoodie dropping deadpan f-bombs on his own device in service of anything from lost love to a hopeful hookup on Dearborn to a glowing or glowering review of last night’s Taco Bell. Loop parking and rideshare chicken were a nightmare, but short of his creating a scene or tomorrow’s local headline, nobody was stowing electronic devices on takeoff.

The fourth passenger was far more disconcerting. Redneck redheaded Buddha in a filthy parka a month out of season, corduroy slacks fringed with dried mud in the middle of the driest May on record, incongruously spotless hiking boots. A doughy right hand was submerged, immobile, in a brown paper bag. He was anywhere between 35 and 85.

But what whispered at Jon Henry’s nape was the man’s molecular-level stillness. Eyes trained ahead, looking at or for or away from nothing. If the man were even breathing, Jon certainly couldn’t tell and absolutely wasn’t about to check. The awesome thing about high-speed, he reflected, was that the projected fares would price this freakshow democracy out of existence.   

“GOOD AFTERNOON, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN.” The pleasantly perfunctory drone jarred Jon Henry from his misanthropic meditations. Hipster screwed buds into his ears. F-Bomber glanced irritably at the popping speaker before returning to his latest fucking assessment.  

“This is the final boarding call for the Lincoln Service Express 317 to Chicago Union Station, with stops in Pontiac, Dwight, and Joliet. Please make sure all personal belongings are securely stowed, and take your seats as we prepare for departure. We thank you for choosing Amtrak, and behalf of our crew, please have a safe and pleasant journey.”

Jon Henry shook his head as he toed his footrest into place and took up his Sports Illustrated. The swimsuit issue -- the one benefit of rail traffic was, nobody monitored your literary choices.

**

Hear the mighty rush of the engine

Hear that lonesome hobo squall

You're travlin' through the jungles

On the Wabash Cannonball!

Jon Henry awoke with a jolt. What remained of the Americano bounced off its tiny tray to roll nearly halfway to the head of the car before lodging under an engaged and now abandoned footrest.

“Hey, hey.” The voice was low, rumbling, and, he noted with annoyance, amused. The coach attendant had planted a beefy palm on the headrest and leaned in with a broad smile and an essence of orange TicTac and pot-bottom cafe car java. “Just Roy Acuff, Chief. Not my taste, more an O’Jays kinda guy, or just maybe a little Little Eva, you catch me?” His espresso-rich, nearly pupiless eyes darted toward the splayed magazine, connecting with Alix Earle’s preternaturally blue orbs and working southward.

The flushed rider flopped the cover closed with a single finger and produced his onscreen e-ticket. Amtrak still hadn’t coughed up dedicated scanners, and “Raymond” held his well-traveled iPhone an inch from Jon’s until it blipped in what under the circumstances felt like a digitally intimate act.

“Jon Henry,” the attendant proclaimed. “His Papa cried out this lonesome farewell: Son you’re gonna be a steel driving man lord, lord, Son you’re gonna be a steel driving man.”

“What?”

“C’mon, Chief. John Henry. You ain’t ever heard that? If I die a railroad man, go bury me under the sand, with my pick and shovel at my head and feet and a nine-pound hammer in my hand. You a steel-drivin’ man, Jon Henry?”

Jon stared incredulously at the husky thirtysomething with the radio clipped to his baggy short-sleeve button-down, his regulation Amtrak cap riding high on his forehead, too-short navy tie minutely askew. Johnny Cash launched into the interlude.

“Well, I'm going down to Florida/And get some sand in my shoes/Or maybe Californy/And get some sand in my shoes. I'll ride that Orange Blossom Special and lose these New York blues…”

And then he got it.

“So, I’m guessing you know who I am, huh?” Jon challenged quietly. “I could’ve guessed it would’ve started making the rounds. Look, you got a bitch, take it up with the General Assembly or IDOT. And you can cut the ‘Chief’ bullshit, too, by the way.”

Raymond showed his palms and stepped off with a grin. “Whatever you say, Jon Henry.” The attendant chuckled as he turned back up the aisle, crooning soft and low as the coach door whooshed open. “The man that invented the stream drill thought he was mighty fine, but John Henry made fifteen feet; the steam drill only made nine…”

Jon Henry’s eyes narrowed, and he scanned the car for witnesses, for an expression of sympathy or mockery. But Wutang and the hipster had vanished. He didn’t picture either one debarking at the Pontiac station. Especially not Wutang, unless he had a playdate at the Pontiac Correctional. Jon Henry immediately admonished himself for the shot, and then pondered. Maybe the encounter between the surly millennial suit and the genial low-wage brother already was being uploaded to the universe over Mountain Dew and sour-cream/onion chips three cars up. The Multimodal Commission and the A2B folks would love that.

“He kept dreamin', ooh, that someday he'd be a star,” Gladys Knight commiserated. “But he sure found out the hard way that dreams don't always come true…”

Jon sunk back and stared disconsolately out at the Central Illinois landscape unrolling out the coach windows. To Jon, it had always been the destination, never the journey. A chain of container and hopper, tank and box cars sat idle, waiting, on a weedy siding, some cryptically tagged, some detailed, some a virtual moving mural crafted in the South Chicago train yards. Jon marveled at the misguided ingenuity and resourcefulness of the outlaw “artists,” the banger/vandals. He’d seen these urban spray jockeys leave their vibrant mark in razor-wired auto yards, at the summit of port terminals and seemingly unscalable high-rise warehouses on the Pilsen riverfront, on busy underpasses and congested tunnels. The world their canvas.

Their small, confined, stifling, claustrophobic world, Jon Henry reflected surprising himself. Sending their art into the world, a traveling exhibit from coast to coast, border to Gulf, this new, unbidden voice mused. As if hoping to silence the mental chatter, he studied a black CSX boxcar tagged end to end with jagged ragged text and in flagrant trademark infringement, a beaming and inebriated Homer Simpson draining a can of something labeled Natty Daddy and seemingly dancing across the Chicago skyline, trouser leg snagged on the Sears Tower. Jon Henry squinted at the passing text in day-glo green and juicy-ripe royal purple. 

NO JOURNEY NO DESTINATION

Jon blinked.

Homer winked back, a jaundiced pinky waggling toodle-loo.

With a sharp intake of stale bio-forward air, Jon wrenched away from the window.

“Ooh, he's leavin' (leavin'), on a midnight train to Georgia (leavin' on a midnight train),” Gladys and a trio of Pips taunted.

“Yup.”

Jon Henry whipped toward the voice, Stephen Hawking black hole hollow. He’d been so…still…he hadn’t even registered in Jon’s earlier coach car head count. The Still Man continued to stare mutely into, well, whatever Jon truly didn’t want to know.

The Multimodal Man’s eyes clamped tightly, painfully shut, terrified by the prospect The Still Man might check his own side mirrors. Jon Henry sat in rolling blackness through the Dead and the Doobies and Elvis and pre-Fatwa Cat and a selection of more obscure wait-for-it train tracks and, somewhere around Raymond’s favorite songstress, a crispy, escalating rustling of paper…    

**

“There's a long black train comin' down the line/Feedin' off the souls that are lost and cryin'/Rails of sin only evil remains/Watch out brother for that long black train…”

The Country Countdown had begun anew, and Josh Turner crackled through car after empty car. Dwight should easily have been an hour ago, and as he moved unsteadily down the aisle, Jon Henry grew certain he wasn’t going to make the Happy Hour spread at McCormick Place.

“There's an engineer on that long black train/Makin' you wonder if the ride is worth the pain/He's just a waitin' on your heart to say/Let me ride on that long black train…”

Jon stumbled as a freight train roared past, whistle sounding in a key that even to his Millington High Band-dropout ears was in a key unknown to Union-Pacific or BNSF. He risked a glance out the window, and seized a headrest as what could only be described, poorly, as a high-velocity, technicolor, abstractly surreal flipbook animation played out. The stories that unreeled in sheets of magenta and nuclear greens and Type A reds and supernoval oranges and bilious dizzying yellows and midnight blacks and hues Jon’s rods and cones seemingly couldn’t process were vivid, desolate, jubilant, devastating by turn. A parade of particolored faces and contorted bodies, young, old, black and brown and white and every Sherwin-Williams chip between and beyond, mourning, rejoicing, reconciling, ministering, consoling, dying.

“That train is a beauty makin' everybody stare/But its only destination is the middle of nowhere…”

Like mismatched closed captioning, the 3-D text underneath unspooled. NO JOURNEY NO DESTINATION NO JOURNEY NO DESTINATION NO JOURNEY.

The “film” jumped the sprockets as the last car cleared and faded to a smudged gray which resembled no part of the Land of Lincoln Jon had ever seen. Half-formed fields and farmhouses and Main Streets and diners and highways and through a sienna haze, a skyline that told Jon he wouldn’t find Union Station at the end of this line…

** 

Raymond’s eyes wrinkled as he glanced over his steaming foam cup.

“Jon Henry. Didn’t think you’d grace us.”

Jon peered about the café car.

“Well, us,” the attendant shrugged. “Like a cup? Ain’t caramel macchiato half-caffed oatmilk latte…”

Jon nodded numbly. “Hey, about that shit earlier…”

Raymond shrugged and gestured him toward the small booth. As he squeezed onto the Amtrak Heritage Blue bench, Jon Henry discovered the steaming cup before him. Johnny Cash rolled out of the station with a trademark “boom-chicka-boom” riff as countermelody to the wheels clacking on steel under their feet. “Cream? Sugar?”

“Two creams.” Raymond smiled, arm crooked over the back of the booth, and after a beat, Jon looked down and, as he somehow knew, the rippling institutional brew had gone a muddy mocha.

“I bet there's rich folks eating in a fancy dining car,” the attendant accompanied The Man in Black. “They're probably drinkin' coffee and smoking big cigars…” Raymond chuckled. “At what point was a cup of black coffee the gold standard for decadent affluence? Least, back in Johnny’s day? I mean, wasn’t that about all cowboys lived on? Black coffee and beans? Took the Texas Eagle to L.A. to see my daughter few years back, and I shoulda asked some of those Lone Star boys what the story was. Hot enough for you?”

“Mm,” Jon Henry nodded hastily.

“See, Jon Henry, I know you’re a steel-drivin’ man, in a manner. But thing is, this ain’t the Texas Eagle. This line, we got all amber waves, no purple mountains majesty to speak of. We’re all destination, no journey. I mean, without the destination, there’s no journey, and without the journey, well, there’s no destination. You feel me?

“That young man, Wu-Tang with a hyphen, FYI? His destination’s a shitty little closet at Rush Medical where his grandma’s about to have a complete mechanical breakdown and he has to get her in a coffin and into the ground ‘cause he’s pretty much it even though it’s gonna lose him his gig at the Subway and probably his diploma. That kid, the one, what’d you call it, beeping and booping? – he got a ride at the University of Chicago to make video games, you believe that shit? You gotta cousin in the Cook County system or a sister doing a Rape Kit up at NorthShore? Gotta last-chance interview with the big macks at Mickey D’s or the CTA or the Squarespace? Gotta lump in your skull the size of a kalamata olive only one guy up on Taylor can scoop out, gotta talk the ICE boys into not FedExing your ass back to Haiti or Venezuela or New Delhi? We’ll get you there – least to the station.”

Jon Henry took a lubricating sip of bracing, comfortingly acrid brew, nodded back toward the tail car. “And, uh, him? What’s his destination?”

“The Still Man? Gotta way with labels, dontcha? Ed’s a frequent flyer, got like a lifetime pass. Had a son the other end of the line, booted him outta the house he was 15. Boy scraped up enough for the 9:16 run and got someplace with a cooler, more, ah, well, accepting climate. Ed haunted the old depot back of the Hub every couple months for awhile, but had to get a formal invite from the CPD before he finally popped the $17 for the 7:06 Lincoln.” Jon’s head jerked up, and Raymond nodded thoughtfully. “Yeah. He was in no hurry, figured he had nothing to come back to. Been back there, shit, I dunno – still ain’t finished that Garrett’s, you know, the Chicago Mix, cheese and caramel? Never so much as glances out at all that glorious corn and beans and cows and corn and beans. Guess he’ll just keep on the journey ‘til he finds some destination suits him.”

Jon Henry took another bracing sip of the scalding Farmer Bros. brew that somehow glided down like mother’s milk. “What is this, anyway? Who are, who are you—?”

“Just work here, Chief – feeding the beast, as it were.” Raymond then laughed, and his espresso eyes caught a glint from a seemingly impossible angle. “Oh, you’re thinking this is one of those hell-bound trains, like outta Mr. Serling or Stephen King.” The attendant materialized a tarnished silver flask like Penn or Teller and tipped an amber rivulet into his cup. “No long black train here –just Platinum Mist and Heritage Blue and Amtrak Red and Black. Guess you fellas never figured how to trademark no color. I’d do my best to explain this shit, but it’s kinda even outta my pay grade. My advice, settle back, relax with your Ms. Earle and your Cubs and your coffee -- bottomless refills, by the way – and just savor the ride.”

And thank you for choosing Amtrak, Jon mused, scooting out of the booth with his foam cup.

You snooze, we choose. He turned abruptly at Raymond’s “voice,” but the man was gazing out the window opposite, softly harmonizing.

“Well, every Monday morning, when the bluebirds begin to sing/You can hear John Henry a mile or more/You can hear John Henry's hammer ring/Lord, Lord, you can hear John Henry's hammer ring…”

**

It seemed an odyssey itself making his way back to the rear coach, eyes ahead, coffee ebbing and flowing but never losing steam as the chained cars rode the steel in rhythm with the O’Jays.

“People all over the world, join hands/Start a love train, love train…”

Ed remained immobile as Jon Henry passed, paw still submerged in crispy caramel/buttery/cheddar goodness, eyes fixed. Jon paused as he spotted the spray of orange now dusting The Still Man’s parka front, then moved on to the last row where SI and the girls were waiting.

A low, protracted gurgle erupted, and Jon’s ass hovered above the seat as he realized it had originated neither in belly nor bowel. Then, as Arlo Guthrie kicked in, he nestled back for the journey.

After all. Jon Henry was a multimodal man.