Amtrak, you devil you

I boarded the 66 from Washington DC to Boston’s South Station at 10 pm last Friday, book and Ipod in hand. Everywhere the announcements roared that this train was full. “Full!” they shouted, “so get thee to a stranger and make thee a friend!”

This I did, ascertaining speedily that a young black boy with some sort of fancy movie-watching gadget had no companion to call his own. To the left of him sat two old black women of nosy dispositions. The dispositions of these two (and my inclusion of their races)* will come to bear soon enough.

Vijay called me within seconds of my settling. His friend Tim – or Mr. Scales, as he is known to the Pongians among us – was on the very same train as I, and wouldn’t it be nice if we could meet? I agreed, took down the number and called Scales straight off. He suggested we rendezvous in the restaurant car once the conductor had punched both our tickets.

In the meantime, all around me was chaos. Unable to find seats, grown men and women were positioning themselves in the restaurant car’s booths for the night. An Indian woman asked the black boy placed sideways beside her with his legs spread if he couldn’t find it in himself to “sit like her.” “No,” he told her loudly and with no hint of self-doubt. “I’ll sit how I want.” This led her on a fruitless journey down the aisle and into connected cars in search of a seat with no legs embracing it. The black ladies beside me arched their necks to follow her progress, murmuring that this was going to be a long trip.

My ticket was soon punched and placed above my seat, and I called Scales. In no time, we were standing at the bar drinking beers, there being no empty seats in the restaurant.

We talked with abandon, comparing the Dark Knight to Obama, and briefly discussing Massachusetts’ incest law.

My spirits rejuvenated, I bid Scales a fond adieu and made my way down the darkened path to my seat. When I hit a new car, I knew I had gone too far. I retraced my steps. How could my seat have disappeared? A mystery, it seemed.

By about the third retracing, I had cracked it. There in my place was another little black boy with another fancy movie-watching device.

He jumped like a disgraced state’s attorney from his moral high ground. Guiltily, I mean, and with more than a hint of embarrassment.

“This your seat?” he asked, closing up the gadget on which Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl was playing.

Before I could say a word, the two nosy women said way more.

“Oh no, nuh uh, you left your seat, it’s gone.”

I turned to them.

“That’s right. You was gone for nearly an hour. We already stopped somebody else from taking your seat, now it’s gone. That’s it.”

They looked at me with an expression I’d seen them do before, a You think you deserve special treatment? sort of thing.   Last time it had been aimed at the Indian woman afeard of legs.

I felt like I was in the Wild West.

“But I went to the restaurant car,” I said. “My ticket’s up here. That means this is still my seat.”

“I don’t know,” one of them said disapprovingly. “You ask me, your seat is gone.”

It didn’t seem that they had any connection to the two boys other than being of the same race. And yet, as I stood in that rumbling Amtrak car, in that moving space between state lines, I knew that was connection enough. These here parts knew no rules ‘cept those of blood.

I cut a deal with the kid, that if he could find a seat elsewhere I’d take it. I made the offer seem generous. Persuasion, after all, was my only weapon.

Minutes later he returned. “There’s a seat in the next car, Ma’am,” he told me with orphan-style big eyes. I removed myself and plodded down the car, aware that the chances he would lie in this brave new world were high, the outlook for my accommodations not so hot.

But integrity prevailed. There, in the last row of the next car, was a seat next to a man with a kerchief round his face. There, good readers, did I watch our journey into Boston’s yellow morning light. There, beside my neighbor, and several pairs of his dirty socks.

*For Jack, who I find perhaps a tad too sensitive, but a great man for reading my blog, nonetheless.