Couch

by Benjamin Parzybok

  “We’re going to cross the great water,” Tree said.

  “Most likely that’s a metaphor,” Thom said.

  Sheilene shrugged.

  She helped outfit them. She had a wealth of camping equipment in various states of disrepair in her basement. She fitted them with matches, pocketknives, tarps, a map of Northwest Oregon, eating utensils, a first-aid kit, and spices. To Thom she loaned a sleeping bag, a camp stove and some pots and pans. She gave Tree a hand knit hat and Erik a compass. She gave them jars of jam and dried fruit, bread and cans of beans, soup mixes and water.

  Tree in return sculpted from a single long wire three men—big, medium, and small—carrying a couch. “So you’ll remember us,” he said.

  She looked at Thom. “I don’t think that’ll be too hard.”

  Highway 30 was loud and unwelcoming, with cars blazing past, all exhaust and noise. Looking down from the Sauvie Island Bridge, they saw railroad tracks that followed alongside the road. The tracks seemed far more peaceful than the highway for couch-carrying, and a movement was made to do the trek on those. The couch felt light and easy, and Thom almost convinced himself that the weight issues of the previous day were imagined.

  They pushed the couch down the weedy slope to the railroad tracks, and the three studied them, trying to determine how often trains passed. Erik laid his ear on the rail and declared, “Not a train in a hundred miles!”

  The tracks were rusted, but a streak of polished metal gleamed through, tracing a silvery line into the distance.

  Thom and Erik carried the couch, stumbling over the ties. Their ankles twisted and blisters that had started the day before began to bloom. Tree walked trying to balance on the rail or guide the couch. They spoke little, issuing only grunts and couch directions. Thom was lost in thought over the Sauvie Island house. Unresolved issues bubbled up in a stew of emotions.

  After only an hour or two of walking on the uneven surface they were exhausted. They stopped to apply moleskin to their feet and to take lunch, setting the couch crosswise on the tracks and pulling out various items from their gear, spreading everything out in a disorganized radius.

  “Well, this is fun,” Erik said after the eating had slowed. Tree crammed more bread and jam into his mouth. All of them had been sweating through their winter clothes, and now the cold set in. The cloud cover was thick, with dark welts threatening at the edges. They rubbed their hands together to keep warm. Thom fought off sleep, comfortable on the couch. Ahead was a blackberry-bush corridor, a hallway of thorns with the rails down the center. It was an inviting green passageway, just large enough for a couch and those who might carry it, but an restricted one, the thorns dense and bristling on either side. Erik pulled out a cigarette and smoked slowly.

  “Where’d you get that?” Thom said.

  “Emergency gear.” Erik held it at arm’s length and studied it. “Gives you the impression you’re warm even if you’re not.”

  “You know, I think I’d like one.”

  Erik pulled a cigarette out, lit it from his own, and gave it to Thom.

  “Yes sir,” Thom exhaled. “Three boys lost in the Arctic.”

  “I wonder how many days it will take to get to Astoria,” Tree said. He’d found a second small jar of blackberry jam and was spreading it thickly across a hunk of bread.

  “Not more than another month or two,” Thom tested to determine his roommates’ knowledge of distance and endurance.

  “Wow,” Erik said, confirming Thom’s suspicions.

  “I’m joking. It probably won’t be more than a week. It’ll be hellish, though, if we walk on these damn tracks the whole way. We should build some kind of wheeled gizmo for the bottom of the couch.”

  “Yeah,” Tree said, “let’s do.”

  “This vacation is cheaper than I thought it was going to be.” Erik pulled a wad of bills from his back pocket. “I’ve still got, like, fourteen dollars left.”

  “You’re loaded,” said Thom.

  “I didn’t have any dreams last night. It’s the first night in a long time that I haven’t had dreams.”

  “That’s because a winter day at Sheilene’s place is very much like a dream.” Thom blew smoke. “I could go to sleep right now.”

  “How’d that go for you? I’ve been meaning to ask. I mean, first of all, why’d you leave her? She’s, you know, she’s a catch and all. Muscular.” Erik raised his eyebrows suggestively.

  “It was nice there,” Tree said. “I wish we could have stayed longer.”

  “First of all, I didn’t leave her. She kicked me out.”

  “She doesn’t seem like that kind of person at all,” Tree said.

  Erik nodded. “What’d you do? Must have been something bad.”

  “Well, she didn’t kick me out. More like she suggested I leave. I don’t know, we just weren’t getting along. We had different interests. I went in to work at a job I hated all day, didn’t really have any interests other than computer stuff, and she . . . I don’t know. She wants a groovier guy, you know? She wants someone a little less of a nerd, someone less logical that can, I don’t know, fill up the house more. She admires what I do and all, it’s just that, I don’t . . . I’m half machine.”

  “Six Million Dollar Man,” said Erik.

  “Except not that much.”

  “The Thirty-Four Dollar and Ninety-Five Cents Man.”

  “Listen!” Tree yelled.

  “To what?” Erik heard a bird chirp, the distant din of the highway.

  “Shhh!”

  “I don’t . . . Train!” Thom tried to yell, but his voice went suddenly hoarse. He leapt off the couch, stumbled to his knees on the uneven tracks, and lurched back to his feet. His giant body became a blur of motion. He started throwing everything they had left on the tracks to the side: bags and shoes and first aid kits and packs and tarps and food. Erik and Tree lifted the couch and each tried to push it the other way. Tree slipped and fell under the couch and then the train rounded the bend behind them.

  “Get away!” Thom yelled. “Get away!” his voice came back.

  The train let out a whistle that made his molars ache.

  Tree stood up, disoriented, and Erik gave the couch a mighty shove that knocked Tree off his feet again and into the blackberry bushes and set the couch on the tracks at an angle. Thom realized there was no way to save the couch short of throwing it up onto the bank. Erik and Thom lay in the ditch. Thom looked up briefly to see the impact with the couch, and then it was gone. A blur of orange, a wooden concussion.

  The train passed for what felt like hours. The wheels were just feet from their heads, flinging small rocks violently off into the ditch. When it passed, a ringing silence followed, a sound that was the absence of sound. The couch was nowhere in sight.

  Thom and Erik stood up. It looked like their belongings had been air-dropped from five hundred feet. They helped Tree extract himself from the blackberry bushes.

  “It’s gone,” Tree said.

  “Well, that’s that,” Erik said, dusting his hands.

  “There’s got to be traces of it. It can’t have just disappeared,” Thom said. His body trembled from fear and vibration.

  “It definitely disappeared.” Erik gestured to where the couch wasn’t. “There ain’t nothing left. Think if one of us had been hit. We’d have been exploded into a million bits.”

  Thom brushed gravel from his face. “I don’t think it was atomized. Either it was thrown into the blackberries or it’s stuck to the front of the train.”

  They paused and considered the image of the couch snagged on the front of the train, fastened haphazardly by an armrest, one end dragging on the ground, being torn to shreds as it sped away from them.

  “Nahhh,” Tree said, clearly shaken. “Couldn’t be.”

  “It could. It’s highly possible. Else where is it?”

  “Spread out!” Tree yelled. He took four or five steps up the slope into the blackberry bushes to try to get a better vantage point
and became immediately ensnared.

  Thom watched Tree jerk one way and then the next, as if he were a marionette whose master had discovered a spider in his ear. Then he slipped on the mud and disappeared into the blackberries with a cry.

  “Help?” A thrashing came from where Tree had disappeared into the bushes. “Help!”

  Thom could feel himself on the verge of giggles. Did he want this? Mothering these two miscreants? He missed the cleanliness, the anonymity, the dullness of computer work, multitasking, keeping his own projects hidden behind the work windows, solid puzzles to chew on, keeping the mind occupied, distracted, insulated from life by function calls, arrays, variables, SQL statements, SELECT * FROM the_brain WHERE memory LIKE “%Tree falling in blackberry bushes%.”

  Erik ran back from where he’d been searching, and they scrambled after Tree, pushing blackberry branches to the ground with each step. Tree was lying on his side, long blackberry thorns piercing his clothes. With each move, he became further enmeshed. They removed him thorn by thorn and finally managed to pull him to a standing position. He was bleeding from four or five small punctures on his face. Thom picked him up like a child and carried him back to the tracks.

  “Lucky you’re wearing a lot of clothes. Now all you need is a crown of those, you silly fool.” Thom set him down. “That thing could bleed you to death.” He gestured loosely toward everything around them.

  There were only two ways out: back the way they’d come or onward.

  “We lost the couch.” Tree wiped a dot of blood from his forehead.

  “It’ll turn up,” Thom said, doubting it would. They were only an hour from Shei’s house, he thought.

  “It’s around here,” Erik said. “It’s got to be. If not, I think we should go find another.”

  “Another couch?” Thom said in disbelief.

  “Another couch. We’ll need another couch.” Erik thought of radio journalists, fame. He was having fun.

  “You’ve really become committed.”

  “We’ve got to see this through!”

  “What is it exactly we’re seeing through again?” Thom said.

  “This! Carrying the couch!”

  Thom looked at Tree, and Tree shrugged. “I don’t think another couch would be the same,” said Tree.

  They trudged on down the tracks. Tree’s despair wavered. He was unsure of what was lost with the disappearance of the couch. They walked for a half hour, doubly burdened with their gear. Another sound came from the direction they’d come.

  “Train!” yelled Tree, and then Thom heard it too.

  They ran to the ditches and lay facedown. The train was coming very slowly. And something was wrong with the engine. It was high-pitched and slow. Then around the corner from behind them came the smallest train Thom had ever seen. It wasn’t a train, it was a small platform with wheels. On top of the platform was a great white dog, its head up and its hair blowing back. It looked like the arrival of a king, stoic and regal upon his litter. Thom stood up in disbelief and saw that two men were sitting in low chairs at the back of the platform. One of them killed the motor, and the platform coasted slowly past the three roommates and on up another twenty feet or so.

  “Well, what have we got here?” the smaller man said. He was dressed in a bathrobe, wore a hunting cap, had giant glasses on, and several weeks’ worth of beard. In one hand was a bottle of beer that he used to gesture. “What have we got here, Edward?” He looked around at the roommates’ scattered possessions and stepped off the platform. “Camping?” the man said incredulously.

  “Hi,” Erik said. “We thought you were a train.”

  “That we are, that we are,” the man said. “We’re a train of thought. Peace train. Training wheels. The Train 2000. Has anyone got a cigarette?”

  “Yeah.” Erik fished one out of his pocket and handed it to him.

  “Light?”

  Erik took out his lighter and lit the man’s cigarette.

  “Okay, then, what are we all doing here?”

  “We lost our couch,” Tree said, and Erik and Thom gave him disapproving looks.

  “I see.” The man took a deep draw off the cigarette. He tipped his head and blew the smoke straight up. “Lost your couch then.”

  “It was hit by the train”—Tree motioned to the tracks—“and we don’t know where it went.”

  “Trains do that. They hit things, especially if you leave them on the tracks. It’s the darnedest thing. Did you leave it on the tracks?”

  Tree nodded.

  “Well, that’s your problem right there.” The man coughed harshly and finished it off with a few sneezes. “They left their couch on the tracks, Edward,” the man hollered over his shoulder. There was no reaction from the cart.

  “We think it might have gotten knocked into the bushes.”

  “Uh-huh. I doubt it, I doubt it.” He looked back at the cart, “Want to have a look?”

  The large man on the cart stood up, a towering figure. He shaded his eyes and turned in a circle, looking into the blackberries, shook his head, and sat down.

  “Uh-huh.” The smaller man took a long drink off his beer, a drag on his cigarette, and then exhaled toward the sky again. “Well, hop on then. You’re hours from anywhere on foot.” The man turned and wove a half circle back toward his platform. None of the roommates moved. “Let’s go! Move it!” The man yelled and clapped his hands, and the roommates jumped to action, getting their packs together and scrambling onto the cart.

  “Introductions,” the man said and waited for them to begin.

  Erik pointed first at himself. “I’m Erik.” Then the others. “Thom and Tree.”

  “All right. You’re a big man, Thom. I’ll need you at the opposite end from Randall.” He patted the larger man on the shoulder. “Randall is the fabricator of this great vessel.” Thom nodded at Randall, thinking that the man had called him Edward several moments ago. He noticed that Randall was at least as large as he was, a behemoth of a human, with giant features and a great bald head partially covered with a ski cap. Randall returned Thom’s nod.

  “I’m Theo, Theo the navigator. Theo is short for a longer name that also begins with Theo but which is not necessarily important for you to know, and that’s Edward.” Theo pointed toward the white dog at the front of the cart. The white dog looked briefly back in apparent distaste. Thom, Erik, and Tree sat cross-legged on the cart and tried to make themselves as small as possible.

  It was cramped. Five men, a dog, backpacks, and an electric motor with two car batteries to power it on a piece of wood the size of a king-size bed. Theo started up the motor. It whined and complained, and the cart didn’t move. He hopped nimbly off, swayed, and with one hand guarding his beer bottle pushed with the other. When they had a little momentum, he did a dance over the railroad ties until he’d managed to dance himself back onboard. The cart picked up speed until they were moving along at about twenty-five precarious miles per hour.

  Thom smiled inwardly and with some embarrassment at the novelty of it, rolling along on this wooden stage as they were. Unsure still if they’d fallen in with bad company—but to be off his feet felt worth it for the moment.

  Theo had a case of beer at his foot. He replaced his empty beer, pulled out another, knocked the top off with a swift tap on the side of the cart, and took a long swig. He reached back and grabbed what looked like a tiller, though there was obviously no steering mechanism. They raced round a bend, and everyone leaned to the left to keep the cart from tipping over.

  “Now this is moving,” said Erik. “This is the way to do it!” Erik felt someone staring at him and looked over to see Edward sizing him up, grimly inspecting, disapproving. “Hey boy, good dog.” He held out his hand. Edward stared at the hand and then turned his head back to the front, peering into the distance like a figurehead. Erik hugged his knees.

  “Never drive drunk,” Theo hollered and toasted everyone with his beer. “Welcome to the Railmobile 1-4-7! So what’s all this abou
t a couch?”

  Thom realized he didn’t have the faintest idea what to say. He looked at Erik, who seemed nervously preoccupied with the dog.

  “We’re on a quest,” Tree said. “We’re carrying the couch across America.”

  “America is that way.” Theo jerked the thumb of his tiller hand over his shoulder, mimicking Sheilene’s gesture. “And you’ve got no couch, I feel it my duty to point out. Cigarette.”

  Erik pulled another cigarette out and handed it and his lighter to Theo.

  “Why is it the 1-4-7?” Erik said.

  “Isn’t that a great number? God, I just love that number.” He lit his cigarette. “So what does one go carrying couches across America for?”

  Thom managed not to say “We’re with the Society of Useless Acts.”

  “Actually,” Tree said, “the couch wanted to go this way. Or at least, it was too heavy to carry the other way.” Thom put his head in his hands.

  Theo nodded thoughtfully. “So whose quest does that make it, yours or the couch’s?”

  “Ours,” said Tree. “And maybe the couch’s too. I’m not sure yet.” The corridor of blackberries opened up, and the tracks ran parallel to the highway. Cars full of passengers gawked at the odd half-dozen people on the tiny platform. Theo waved his beer at them, half hello, half go to hell.

  Thom realized that he’d found himself among more of the unchosen. But they were of another sect, the superchosen, perhaps, brain adding the new category, people who didn’t understand that there are chosen and unchosen people and wouldn’t give a damn if they did.

  They came to a mild incline that twisted away from the traffic, and Thom could feel the motor lagging. They were a lot of weight for a small electric motor going uphill. He leaned forward, urging the motor on. I think I can, I think I can, his brain volunteered.

  “Jettison!” Theo hollered and stood up on the edge of the platform, unzipped his fly, and commenced pissing over the side, weaving precariously back and forth. On one deep sway half a dozen hands went up to steady him. A magnificent view of the Columbia River with a freighter in its middle came into view, then disappeared.