Hope Never Dies

by Andrew Shaffer

  “Listen, Grant, you knew Finn better than me. Ever get a sense that he was…depressed?”

  Grant narrowed his hawklike eyes. “You think it was suicide.”

  “I’m sorry if I misspoke.” I don’t know why I’d asked the question. I didn’t need to be digging around in other people’s business. It’s just that I’d made that promise to Grace.

  Grant said, “It’s the first question people ask when somebody steps in front of a train. You know why?”

  I shook my head.

  “Because the answer is almost always yes,” he said. “There are plenty of other ways to kill yourself, but nothing’s more final than stepping in front of a train. Take some pills, there’s a chance you wake up. Hang yourself, someone could cut you down. But the Acela Express doing one-fifty?”

  I waited for him to continue. After a few moments, he said, “Finn’s wife was sick—real sick. He never said a word to anyone. Not a word. I imagine that takes a lot out of a man. Was he depressed? How could he not be?”

  Losing family was enough to wreck you. If it didn’t, there was a chance you’d already been wrecked.

  “But he never would have killed himself,” Grant said. “Not like that.”

  “How can you be so sure? You just said—”

  “I said the man was depressed. Not in the right state of mind, or however you want to say it. That doesn’t mean he would hurt a fellow railroad man. People who step in front of trains because it’s the easy way out…they’re not thinking about how their actions affect the engineer who’s driving. It’s not even on their radar. But Finn would have known. He wasn’t going to burden anyone with his death. Not one of his own brothers or sisters at Amtrak.”

  “I killed him,” a voice from behind us said.

  Alvin had left the van. He was staring through me with dark eyes.

  Those eyes scared me. I quickly glanced away.

  “I was the one who killed him,” he said. There was no inflection in his voice. “He was lying on the tracks. I should have seen him sooner. I should have—”

  “No, Al, we’ve been over this,” Grant said.

  Alvin was shaking now. “I keep replaying it, over and over, trying to remember if I saw him twitch…Did he move, or was that just the rumbling of the tracks shaking his body? Was it—”

  “Stop,” Grant said. He braced Alvin by the shoulders. “There was nothing you could have done. Nothing. We don’t know why he was on the tracks. We’ll probably never know. You braked as hard as you could. If you’d braked any faster, the train could have derailed. Think about how many lives you saved.”

  Alvin closed his eyes and tilted his head toward the sky.

  Grant pulled me aside. “This was a bad idea. I should get him home. He’s had a rough couple of days.”

  “I can imagine,” I said, though of course I couldn’t. Nobody could.

  “You need a ride?” Grant asked.

  I started to say no, but I sensed there was more Grant wanted to tell me. Or maybe that was just wishful thinking.

  “Where you headed?”

  “Dropping Al off, then I’m heading on down to the station to finish out my shift,” Grant said. “I can drop you at your place or—”

  “The station’s fine.”

  “Catching a train somewhere?”

  I climbed into the backseat. “Something like that.”

  He eyed me in the rearview mirror. Getting dropped off at the station wasn’t going to get me any closer to home, but it might just net me another puzzle piece or two. I had more questions about Finn, questions that I thought Grant might be able to answer. On the drive to Alvin’s, however, neither of us said another word on account of the shattered man sitting in the passenger seat. Alvin’s quiet sobs filled the dead air. I kept waiting for Grant to turn the radio on, to drown out the haunted noises. He never did.

  8

  After we dropped off Alvin, Grant pulled over to the side of the road a mile or so from Wilmington Station and killed the engine. We were in the heart of a long-abandoned industrial district, parked in the shadow of the interstate running overhead. The area was so forgotten, it didn’t even have a nickname. Razor wire lined the tops of the fences protecting the warehouses and parking lots, though there were holes in the chain-link everywhere I looked. Empty eyes watched us through broken windows. Come nightfall, the squatters would come out of hiding, dealing on the street corners and servicing johns in the alleys.

  Grant didn’t say a word. He didn’t have to. I knew why we’d stopped. Behind the abandoned peanut-butter factory with the busted-out windows was the site of the accident. Finn had taken his final breaths just a hundred yards away from where we were sitting.

  I stepped out of the van, but Grant didn’t budge.

  “You’re not coming?”

  He shook his head. “I’ll wait here, if you don’t mind. There’s a cross and a bunch of flowers marking the spot, unless someone’s taken them.”

  “Why would someone steal a cross?”

  Grant shrugged. “Why does anyone steal anything?”

  I don’t think he’d been planning on driving to the scene of the crime, but maybe he was tired of me pestering him with questions. He knew a lot about the accident, including the drugs found on Finn. He didn’t mention the map, and neither did I.

  I crossed the deserted street. Wilmington was a uniquely situated shipping port, sitting as it did between two rivers that flowed into the Atlantic. The boom times were over long before my family moved to town, however. Thanks to Delaware’s corporate-friendly tax code, Wilmington had successfully transformed itself into a white-collar town. Nevertheless, a permanent underclass persisted. The poor lived in slums on the other side of the interstate; the poorest of the poor lived right here, underneath the interstate. The police did regular sweeps, knocking down tents and arresting users for possession or prostitution, but they were fighting a losing war. The people who called this place home had already lost their self-respect. They had nothing else to lose.

  There was an empty field between the street and the tracks. It was unkempt and overgrown. The weeds came up to my knees. I treaded carefully, because only God knew what I might accidentally step on. A used needle, a broken bottle. A baggie of heroin, fallen from the pocket of an Amtrak conductor.

  There were two pairs of train tracks, side by side on the other side of a chain-link fence. The ones farthest from me were the tracks headed southwest to DC. For several decades, whenever Congress was in session, I passed through here nearly every day. When the train rounded the bend and sped up on the straightaway, my head was usually buried deep in the day’s paper. If only I’d looked out the window, what human misery would I have seen? And would I have been able to do anything about it?

  I found a hole in the fence and ducked through. It wasn’t without difficulty. I felt a twinge in my back as I bent over. I hated to admit it, but I was getting older. And getting older sucked eggs. While I publicly debated the merits of running for office again, the thought of crisscrossing Iowa in a tour bus for the third time made me question my very sanity. I knew what Jill thought; I knew what my kids thought. Opinions are like elbows: everybody has one. Most have more than one. Could I do it again, though? And could I do it without Barack by my side?

  Imagine what he’d say if he saw you here now. An old man with nothing better to do on a Friday afternoon than creep around some post-industrial wasteland. Are you doing this for Finn…or for yourself?

  It was a good question. I didn’t know exactly why I felt so compelled to see the crime scene in person. By now, the police and the transportation investigators had already picked it clean like shoppers ransacking a Walmart on Black Friday. Whatever the investigators hadn’t picked up, the vultures did.

  The only thing marking the spot was a crudely erected wooden cross, jutting out of the rocks a couple of paces fr
om the tracks. The flowers Grant had mentioned were missing. The cross looked lonely, like a bare tree in the middle of a field in the dead of winter. There wasn’t any yellow tape to preserve the scene of the accident, no chalk outline to mark the location of the body. Of course, they’d recovered the body from many different locations. Grim, but true.

  I tried to imagine Finn coming to this particular spot. He’d squeezed through this hole in the fence, or another one nearby. Even if Finn hadn’t been high on dope when the train hit him—even if he’d died of natural causes—he still had been down here for some unknown reason. He was a third-generation railroad man. He knew the dangers of the tracks. So why had he climbed through the fence?

  The cross began to vibrate. It was almost imperceptible, but it was there. I turned to see the DC-bound Acela hurtling toward me. It was two hundred yards away but closing in fast. I hadn’t heard it round the bend. Compared to diesel engines, the electric trains were eerily silent. If Finn had been passed out on the tracks, he wouldn’t have stood a chance. By the time he felt the vibrating rails and heard the train, it would have been too late.

  I crouched low and ducked back through the hole in the fence, bracing for the back strain again. Instead, there was a sharp pop in my left knee. My leg buckled out from under me and I went down hard, landing on my side. The train zipped past with a high-pitched whine. The ground rumbled for two seconds, jostling every molecule of my body right down to the silver fillings in my molars. And then all was still again.

  I rolled onto my back and clutched my knee. In high school, I’d been a standout football player. I didn’t have the arm strength to be quarterback or the long fingers to be a wide receiver, but I had the getaway sticks. I could tuck the ball and run. Senior year, I was the leading scorer. Senior year, I’d also banged up my left knee. Since then, it had been known to act up on occasion. I’d always been able to grit my teeth and bear it. This was the first time it had completely given up on me. If you can’t trust your own body, what can you trust?

  I didn’t know what I was doing out here, crawling around a crime scene. As head of the executive branch, Barack held the top law-enforcement position in the country. I’d been his right-hand man. That didn’t amount to a hill of beans when it came to actual police work. It was like asking Santa Claus to make you a toy train. That was a job best suited for his elves. The fat man in the red suit didn’t know the first thing about sanding down wooden toys for good little girls and boys. I had no business here.

  What would Barack say if he saw me out here, rolling around like a turtle on my back? We hadn’t talked since his visit two nights ago. As far as I was concerned, nothing between us had changed. Yes, he’d kept his word and put the scare into the police department. The lurid details, as they were, hadn’t hit the papers. For that I was grateful. But there was too much still unspoken between us. I wasn’t about to send another errant text through the airwaves and see if I’d get a response. I was through being made to be the fool.

  Eventually, I sat up and stretched out my leg. My black suit was covered with a thin layer of dust. There was a shiny grass stain on my elbow. I could stand on my knee, but I was walking with a limp as I returned to the van. If Grant noticed, he didn’t say anything.

  9

  Wilmington Station’s official name is the Joseph R. Biden Jr. Railroad Station, though nobody uses it. Everyone still calls it Wilmington Station, which just shows they shouldn’t name places after people until they’re dead.

  Thing is, it isn’t the only place in town bearing my name: the city also renamed a public pool after me—the Joseph R. Biden Jr. Aquatic Center, down at the corner of East 23rd and North Locust. It’s a pretty poor neighborhood. I’d worked as a lifeguard at the pool while putting myself through college. The other lifeguards would ask me questions about race relations, because I was the only white guy many of them knew. We learned a lot from one another. One black lifeguard asked if I had a gasoline can he could borrow. He wanted to see his grandmom in North Carolina. “We can’t stop at most gas stations down there,” he’d said. The pool was where my commitment to civil rights began. I hadn’t fully understood what black folks were up against until then. I would have felt better if they’d renamed the pool after Martin Luther King Jr. or a local black politician, but the neighborhood appreciated that I’d never turned my back on them. I’d never turned my back on anyone. It just wasn’t something a Biden did.

  And it wasn’t something I could do to Finn.

  The station was full of commuters. Rush hour was just beginning. I slipped through the crowd with my shades on, unnoticed, headed for the newsstand to grab a bottled water. Spending the afternoon outdoors in a black wool suit had left me thirstier than a dry road.

  When it came to Finn’s death, Grant said he was just as stumped as me. He had never seen signs that Finn did any drugs. Was it possible to hide addiction that well? Perhaps we were just too close to Finn to see the truth. Dan Capriotti had seen all the evidence firsthand and was convinced this was nothing more than an overdose. Could it really be that simple?

  Maybe the truth was staring me right in the face.

  Grant had said one interesting thing: he’d turned over the security tapes from the station to the Wilmington PD, but didn’t think they would shed any light on the situation.

  “Why’s that?” I’d asked.

  “We’ve got four cameras set up here, all of which record direct to VHS tapes that are older than some of the sneakers in my closet. The most they’d be able to see is Finn getting on and off that train for work the day before. Those tapes have been taped over so many times, it’d be a miracle if they could even make out any details through the grain.”

  Another victim of government belt-tightening. What else was new?

  I believed Grant was right about the tapes. Even if there was crystal-clear digital footage of Finn the day before the accident, it wouldn’t amount to a hill of beans. Grant knew that Finn was on time for work that day, and that he’d worked a full shift. There was nothing out of the ordinary, at least from his recollection.

  There were still the next sixteen-odd hours to account for, which I was able to reconstruct from articles in the paper, what Dan told me, and Grant’s story.

  Finn had gone home, or maybe to visit his wife at Baptist Manor. Grace had been away at school. She had a place near campus with a couple of roommates. There wouldn’t be any cell phone records to trace Finn’s movements, because Finn didn’t carry a cell phone. He was one of the last holdouts of our generation, I suspected. Hated the damn things with a passion. I hated them, too, but you couldn’t deny how much they’d changed our lives. How much they’d changed the world. And yet I knew that even if he had been carrying a phone—even if we could trace his movements through the cell towers it pinged (a trick I’d seen on Law and Order more than once)—it would only beg more questions.

  I limped past the shoeshine stand. The elevated chair was empty, but there was a dark-skinned man sitting hunched on a bench, counting cash inside a zippered money bag. A newsboy cap covered his eyes, but this was no newsboy. This was Greg McGovern, aka “the Mayor of Wilmington Station.” He knew everyone who passed through the station with any regularity. If anything went on in his station, he knew about it.

  I took a seat in his chair. The pain in my knee momentarily went away.

  The Mayor didn’t look up. “Be with you in a moment,” he said, his voice crackling like an old record. The Mayor was my senior by at least a decade. It had been about that long since I’d seen him, too. The last couple of times, there’d been a young man shining shoes in his place. I’d sort of figured the Mayor had retired.

  I’d figured wrong.

  “Take your time,” I replied.

  He froze, and slowly met my eyes. His face was webbed with creases. “Amtrak Joe. Didn’t expect to see you ‘round here. How’s the missus?”

  “She’s good
. Still teaching.”

  The Mayor zippered his money pouch and hid it in a drawer. He didn’t have any family. All he had were the commuters who passed the time with him in this worn-out chair. The cracked leather seat was badly in need of replacing, just as it had been on my first visit in the seventies. Back then, the Mayor had been a young man, just like me. The years had chewed us up and spit us out like tobacco.

  He took one of my shoes in his hand. It was covered in dirt from the field. He didn’t say anything as he got to work on it. He’d seen much worse in his day.

  “Just came from Finn’s service,” I said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You following the news?”

  “I hear things,” he said.

  “Good things, or bad things?”

  He shook his head. “Just things.”

  “The police say it was an accident. That Finn got high and stumbled onto the tracks.”

  “High on what? Life?”

  “Heroin.”

  The Mayor paused, then resumed his work. “I never seen ‘im take a drink,” he said. “We played cards together, Saturday nights. Me, him, Alvin, Grant. Knew him as well as you can know anybody, I suppose.”

  “You hear anything interesting about him?”

  “Interesting?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m trying to figure out what happened. How he ended up out there on the tracks. Where the drugs came from.”

  He glanced from side to side without looking up at me, like he was scanning the crowd for somebody to rush in if he gave the wrong answer. He didn’t trust me.

  “If the police say he was on drugs, then it must be true,” he said. He gave my shoes one last pat with his rag. “Sure was nice to see you again, Mr. Vice President.”

  “It’s just Mr. Biden, now.”