Bucephalus, Missouri: Prologue: The Last Hobo (2024)

Well, I got my health/ My John B Stetson / Got me a bottle full of baby's bluebird wine / And I left my stash / Somewhere down in Preston / Along with thirteen silver dollars and my mind -- Colter Wall

The whole family was convinced it was what Ted needed. He hadn’t been quite right. Not since Grandma had died, and it was hard to keep after him. He was ornery and didn’t want to take his medicine, or stop driving, or stop smoking. At his sixtieth high school class reunion, he was momentarily detained by the police for engaging in a fistfight with a classmate he claimed still owed him a dollar from seventy years before. “He’s totally out of control,” his eldest son, Rick, aged fifty-five, told the sales representative from SFI. “I’m getting older myself, and after I moved to Florida it’s been getting harder and harder to act like a parent to my own father.”

Ted was from Bucephalus, Missouri, just Southeast of where Jesse James was born and where the West was first Wild. He had tried to break into the movies after he got back from being stationed with the Army in Germany, but it went nowhere. He used the semester of GI Bill technical education he received to get a job as a cameraman at a local television station, where he worked in some capacity from 1961 to 2015. He and his wife, Margaret, had three children: Rick, Steve, and Cassandra. Cassandra lived in France now working in a Peugeot plant as an external auditor for Chrysler, so he did not see her much.

The decade after he retired was mostly quiet, except for the turbulent few months after the death of his wife, and the turbulent few months shortly after that, where he mounted a lengthy legal defense of his right to drive when he plowed directly into a tree planted as a memorial for a cyclist slain in 1997. He grew more irritable, cantankerous, and eccentric as time went by, secluding himself for days at a time in his house, watching nothing but the films of Hollywood’s golden age. His children and grandchildren came to visit, but were eventually put off from doing so after he harangued them each visit for interrupting that day’s movie, in the case of Cassandra’s most recent visit, Lowell Sherman’s 1936 comedy “She Done Him Wrong.”

It was only when the family capitulated to Ted’s specific itinerary for the day, which he kept the same every day, family in town or not, that he opened himself to the friendliness and joviality for which he was known in younger days. When his grandkids visited, he would always find the best of Hollywood’s old screwball comedies to put on and watch with them, enraptured, as if he himself was a kid watching them for the first time. The second the movie finished, he closed back up and kept on shambling across his house aimlessly doing chores until his eleven o’clock bedtime. Holidays became impossible, as did birthdays, or spur-of-the-moment pop-ins. A neighbor observed that Ted only left his house once every week to get groceries. The growing eccentricity of Ted’s behavior prompted his children to begin searching for facilities that could take in their father in case this eccentricity happened to be of a medical kind.

To his family, SFI had been billed as the Nursing Home of The Future, able to provide in near-perpetuity, a quality of life to him in his nineties that was comparable to that of a fifty-year-old just a few years earlier.

“With the power of AI and machine learning…” the near-monotone text-to-speech voice in the sales webinar said, “… we have created the most optimal of all possible environments for elder care. With SFI LifeGuardian Implants, we're revolutionizing senior care, offering a seamless blend of advanced technology and compassionate support for your loved one’s well-being. At SFI, we understand the importance of staying connected and informed about your loved one's health, even when you can't be there in person. LifeGuardian discreetly monitors their activity and health status, providing you with real-time updates and peace of mind, no matter where you are. But it's not just about technology – it's about the dedicated team behind it. Our staff at SFI is committed to providing personalized care and attention to every resident, treating them like family every step of the way.”

The pitch video was watermarked with the SFI logo: a stork carrying an aged man like a baby, its Latin motto scrolled underneath it, “Senex Iuvenis Iterum Factus Est.”

The video shows cheery old men playing checkers with cheery old women in spick and span mock-modern surroundings, drinking tea. An old man curls a five-pound dumbbell in a state-of-the-art gymnasium, and a group of seniors swing dance in the home’s cafeteria.

“And even when family is thousands of miles away -” the video cut to an image of the same old man who was curling the dumbbell now donning a large virtual reality headset “- they are still close by.” The image cut again to one of the old men playing checkers, now in the form of a much sprier-looking virtual avatar, enjoying a game of catch with his virtual grandson.

When his family broke the news about a week after his ninety-third birthday, Ted had resisted what he called “being institutionalized” by his Sons.

“I can still drive,” he told them angrily over a group call they staged to break the news to him. “I can still sh*t by myself, I can get my own groceries.”

“You’ll be happier, pops. It’s for the better,” his tragically-named twenty-one-year-old grandson Job told him.

“No, I won't! You hit one tree and all of a sudden, you’re an invalid!”

“No, that’s not what we’re saying at all, Dad. You know that. It’s just. We’ve all moved so far away now and there’s no one close to home that can help you out if you really need to.” said his second son - Job’s father - Steven, a balding 53-year-old insurance agent, and born-again Christian, now in Omaha.

“I can take care of myself.”

“We know, but they can take care of you so much better.”

It took about an hour of the same conversation going back and forth before Ted finally relented. He agreed to move into the SFI Home under the specific condition that his house not be sold, his belongings not be removed from the house if one of his family members were to move in, his DVD collection travel with him, and that he could exit SFI when he and his sons reach a mutual agreement on his living there, or with them. The SFI home was about two hours North of Ted’s old house, in a different town, and on the border of a different state. His kids thought the physical distance away from his usual surroundings would do him good as well. He could only leave with the written permission of his sons, granted power of attorney over their father as part of the agreement signed with SFI.

II.

It had been two years since Ted had moved into his local facility.. He mostly got used to everyday life in an elder care facility. He knew all the nurses by name, participated in all the group events, he even became the pseudo-dictator of their movie nights, vetoing any suggestion other than his own. He once subjected, in vain, the entire nursing home to a marathon showing of “The Thin Man” (1934) followed by “After The Thin Man” (1936), and so on. The group got about halfway into “Another Thin Man” when it was medicine time and the crowd dispersed.

He made a few friends here and there in the home, then a few of them died, and he stopped trying to make friends with anyone under forty. That meant that most of his daily socializing was done with janitors, nurses, administrators, or his grandson.

He tried his best to keep up with his youngest grandson’s activities. He was in film school now, somewhere in California. He was going to make movies like Ted wanted to at his age. Assisted living facilities throughout the country were supplied virtual and augmented reality headsets through a public-private partnership established between a failing Silicon Valley startup and the federal government, established in an omnibus bill in 2024. SFI was the first of the major care providers in the country to receive their headset rebates, and replaced what was once a second staff break room with a “communication room” where residents could use the “PersonalView”. Every Friday at exactly six thirty P.M. Central Time, around the end of his grandson’s last afternoon class in Pacific Time, Ted went into the Communication Room to talk to his grandson about what he learned in class that day.

Upon logging in, owners of the PersonalView augmented reality headset are presented with a third-person view of their avatar, set for customization. Ted dyed his visual hair back to amber brown the second he was able to set a PersonalView appointment to call his son about a week after moving in. He mockingly donned a prison jumpsuit in the Virtual World to signify his continued, but softened, displeasure with his living arrangements.

In its May 16, 2026 update, PersonalView implemented a video-sharing platform, allowing you to chat with your friends and family while watching video content together, supplied by partnered streaming services. Ted and Job used this new feature as a way to do what they always did during Job’s childhood, sit down on the couch and watch movies. The flexibility of their now-virtual platform allowed them for a slight change in venue. Now, instead of his wife’s extremely well-decorated living room, they were in an ornate movie palace of the era that Ted cherished most. Today’s movie came out the year Ted was born, “Wild Boys of The Road”. Not because either of them particularly wanted to watch this movie, but because it was in TFI’s free catalog of movies which rotated stock every month.

The digital projectionist started the movie from behind them. They see logos of long-conglomerated movie studios and long-dead movie stars flash before them. The film is a piece of social gospel: the ills of Wandering Youth, the trials and tribulations of a country in the throes of a Depression that no one can see ending any time soon. Three teenagers, bereft of opportunity in their small town, USA life, ride the rails across the country looking for the future and gainful employment.

Around when a Chicago policeman, looming over the kids like a giant, was about to snatch one of them, the unreliable streaming connection froze up, leaving Ted and his Grandson in the movie theater as a giant animated circle went around its axis trying to load the movie.

“I saw in a book one time, they made this movie to scare kids away from riding the rails. Fantastic piece of work for President Roosevelt’s agenda to get us out of the depression,” Ted said.

“Oh, really? So, like government-funded type thing?” his grandson said.

“No, not really. More of trying to prove movies’ social worth. This was before the code and all that. Anyway. The movie did the opposite! A bunch of kids went and saw the movie and went out on the railroad to become bums! This was before my time, though. I was still real little by the time the war started.”

The movie started again. Ted shushed both himself and Job. A kid hits his head and in his confusion has his leg smashed by an oncoming train. They both cover their virtual eyes with their virtual hands.

“Oh, man! That was gruesome,” Ted said through a chuckle.

The rest of the movie flashes before them: the lost boys tend for their ailing friend, they find a simple country doctor: he has to amputate. The boys run into the next town in search of a peg leg for their now-legless friend and are again assailed by the police. They run and keep running until they reach New York City by way of Cleveland. They get caught by the cops again. The boys are sternly warned by a paternal judge about the dangers of vagrancy, who tells them they ought to return home. A New Deal is coming for the American people, and their folks will soon be back to work.

The credits roll. The virtual theater fades away into the two talking heads sitting side by side in a featureless void. The two discuss the qualities and faults of the movie for about thirty minutes before saying their goodbyes.

“Alright, pops,” Job said, “I need to go to a Christian Student Union meeting. Be safe. You’re in our prayers.”

“Okay, kid. Have a good time,” Ted told his grandson.

Ted took the visor off and exited the Communication Room. It was directly attached to the communal dining hall, so he could still smell dinner from earlier that afternoon, microwaved Salisbury steak and pudding. He couldn’t bear the smell of microwaved Salisbury steak and pudding. They had it at least three days a week. During his first week there, he got into an altercation with one of the nurses because his anger at being served “leftovers and trash” caused his heart rate to jump so high that his “vital sensor” sent a notification to her phone.

He told her that he, unlike “these people”, still had all of his teeth, and didn’t need to eat “glorified baby food.”

The nurse opted him in for the home’s vegetarian menu, which consisted of steamed vegetables, microwaved like the rest, but more palatable to Ted in the meantime.

The dining room was chromatically arranged in descending shades of beige. The walls were the lightest shade of beige, nearing white, with small blue accents around the baseboards. The chairs were an ever-so-slightly more yellowed shade of beige, bordering on a light brown if they weren’t in direct LED light twenty-four hours a day. The chairs were a shade down from the tables, and the floor a shade down from the chairs.

Ted walked around the beige-brown chairs and down the beige-blue hallway to his room, shared with a former high school football coach who was one of the home’s many coma cases.

“Hey, Bill,” Ted said, walking over to his side of the room and sitting down in the armchair usually meant for visitors. He had no idea how a comatose man could remain so fat for so long.

He was almost always the last person on his floor to go to bed every night. Tonight, though, he felt the inertia of his life in the SFI home come down on him all at once. He felt tired, old, and worthless. He remembered when he could go out, even if he didn’t actually do it, and do whatever he wanted, with his own life. The entirety of that life felt like it had shifted inwards. Being under direct care his every waking hour forced him, whether he wanted it or not, into a life where contemplation or distraction were the only two activities he could engage in of his own accord.

After a while, he got comfortable with distraction, but distraction was not working tonight. He rolled around in bed for four hours. He thought about the movie he had watched with Job a few hours earlier. He remembered when he was a child, adults told him stories about how it was common in the thirties to hear a knock on your back door, only to find a humble, friendly bum there, asking for a sandwich and directions to the next train depot. They would give him the sandwich and he would thank them and go on. He thought about the kids in the movie, and about the stern judge veering over them, lecturing them about the dangers of the life they had decided to live. He saw himself in those kids. He was one of them, their spiritual brother, or realistically, considering their probable off-screen age at the time the movie was filmed, they were his spiritual predecessors. He wanted out just as much as they did. Would he get hit by a train and sent to a kangaroo court and sent back to his sons?

Ted sat up in bed and faced Bill, the comatose football coach. “It couldn’t be that bad, right?” he asked, without really waiting for a response from Bill. “It’s better than doing what we’re doing right now. Especially you. No offense intended, buddy.”

Bill’s heart rate monitor beeped its responses at him.

“You really think so?” Ted asked for the heart rate monitor. “Me too!”

It beeped on.

“Yes! Exactly! I should be able to get out of here whenever I want!”

One of the night nurses, Jeanine, came in. Jeanine was Ted’s oldest friend on the staff of the TFI home. She helped him get moved into his room, repositioned the TV, and put all the DVDs in the correct order on his first day. She said, “Ted, what did I tell you about late-night phone calls? Come on, now.”

“I’m just talking to Bill,” Ted said, pointing at Bill.

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. He thinks I should move back in to my house and live my life!”

“Come on. You’ve been saying that at least once a month since you got here. You can’t be putting words in Bill’s mouth like that, just because you’re unhappy,” Jeanine said, checking the levels on Bill’s IV.

“For all I know, Bill’s already out of here! He could be having one long dream replaying the state championship game in seventy-eight, over and over again! Or he could be an outlaw in the old west in his head right now. I don’t know!”

“Actually, coma patients rarely report having dreams when they’re down like he is. It’s like when you have surgery.”

“I’ve never had surgery.”

“Oh. Well, you just kind of wake back up.”

“Oh. He’s always scrunching his face like he’s dreaming.”

“He does not! I see Bill about as much as you do, and I’ve never seen him even twitch.”

“Alright. You win this one. The medical professional and all. Doesn’t change the agreement I and Bill came to, though.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Let’s say you’re doing your rounds in about an hour. I ask to go get a midnight snack from the dining area. You come back in the next time you swing by here, and poof! I’m gone. ‘Where’s Ted at?’ You ask Bill, but Bill just beeps at you because he’s in a coma!”

“How about I get that snack for you, Ted?” Jeanine asked with a worried look in her eyes.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s what I get for making friends with the guards. They don’t even give you a file or a pail and shovel to help you bust out.”

Jeanine laughed and said, “I’ve got to go. Beeper just went off. The computer picked up strange vital signs on the other side of the building. Gonna go check on Cheryl.”

“Alright, then. Have a good night Jeannie.”

“Jeanine,” Jeanine laughed.

“Okay.” Ted laughed. They repeated this routine with her name every night.

Ted decided to try and think things through rationally, the way Jeanine always tried to advise him to. He could just ask Rick or Steven to come pick him up, and take him back to the house, and give him back control of his bank accounts and car. Too much work. The kids would say no. For all he knew, his sons could have liberally exercised their Power of Attorney, and Ted’s house could be rented out to some stranger already, leaving him none the wiser.

That was the end of the trail of rational thinking. He turned from facing the door, to facing old comatose Bill again. “They’re all rushing to that mean old bag in 3C! The hallway might be empty, Bill! It’s time to go!”

Ted lurched to the door, taking cover against the wall like a G.I. in an old World War Two movie.

“Coast is clear,” he whispered to Bill. Ted grabbed all of the personal effects he could muster into a spare Wal-Mart sack that he had left in his room for trash and hoped for the best as he shut the door to his former room behind him.

He gently tiptoed down the hallway, peaking his head into each room he saw, to make sure some nurse wouldn’t jump out and surprise him and take him back to his room.

“So far so good.”

He took a left at the dining room, went around the ping pong tables in the rec room, went through the employee break room, and out into the employee smoking area. The room was outdoors but didn’t have a clear exit out to the parking lot. He tried rustling with the grated windows for a few seconds, but it didn’t work. He looked down at his watch. “Twelve forty-five,” he said under his breath. He figured, at the quarter and three-fourths mark of every hour, at least one of the nurses would have to be on break. That means, they would be coming his way. He went out back to the ping pong tables as fast as he could. He heard footsteps in the otherwise silent hallway. “Ah, man. Back to jail, I go,” he thought. “Sheriff’s coming with a posse.”

He heard the two nurses in the hallway’s conversation, one saying “I told him the first time, if he did it again, I would take away his X-Box and he wouldn’t get it back until his twentieth birthday. And do you know what that boy did?”

A male nurse responded, “He snuck out again?”

“Yup, that’s exactly what he did.”

“Dang. Tough. I hated getting grounded as a kid. I can’t really relate much to doing the grounding.”

“You will, soon enough.”

“Let me check on Suzie.”

“Alright, I’ll wait for you. Need to borrow your lighter.”

Ted knew he would have maybe two minutes before the two nurses would come through and ruin his plans. He had to find somewhere to hide. He ducked under one of the ping-pong tables and tried to slow his breathing as much as he could. The two passed, continuing to talk about the intransigent kid. He was always terrible at matching faces with voices, but he guessed that it was Charise and David. Charise, he remembered, had, he thought, four kids. David’s wife had just given birth to a son about three months prior. Distracting the nurses from their jobs with conversation was one of Ted’s own favorite distractions. He got to know most of them pretty well, but he only really liked Jeanine, who reminded him of his daughter.

From underneath the table, he heard the door to the smoke deck creak open. He was in the clear. He took the reverse route back through the dining room and tried the main entrance. No one was at the front dispatch desk, meaning that it was probably Charise who left her post. He heard the other nurses complain about her doing that every time she worked the night shift. Ted looked left, and right, and behind the counter, and it seemed like he was good.

Ted stepped out of the front door, and a symphony of screeching alarms responded. They kept going as Ted kept walking further and further down the parking lot. Ted stopped by some bushes to catch his breath, and hide down low to see if anyone had gone outside to see what the commotion was.

Huddled in the bushes, Ted calculated his escape route. He had spent quite a bit of time in this town for work at the TV station, covering local politics and human interest stories. He knew that just before the right turn onto Jefferson Street, there was a Greyhound bus station. Whether that Greyhound Bus Station was still operational was questionable, and the question of payment was also still to be resolved. He knew that he won three dollars under the table from David, the nurse when he beat him at chess a couple of weeks back. The two haggled about the specific dollar amount of the bet before they played, because he, rightly, pointed out that being in an elder care home where all foodstuffs are added to your Power of Attorney’s monthly bill, he had no need for actual cash. Ted negotiated him to a fair three dollars.

He hadn't been on a Greyhound since the late 1950s, so whether that three dollars was enough for a fare out of town, he did not know. It was worth checking, anyway.

Right as Ted began his descent down the hilled parking lot of the SFI Home to the road below, three police cruisers pulled in, shading the entire area red and blue. Ted sunk deeper below the bushes, almost prone, completely shrouded by leaves.

He saw through the brush a nurse come out, visibly exasperated. The first cop stepped out, big and bald, and talked to her for a second. He took notes down on a tablet’s notes app and signaled to the other guys in their squad cars that they could go. They all pulled out, lights still on, and hit sixty miles an hour before they even left the parking lot. The cop and nurse talked for a little longer, and the cop took more notes on his tablet. They both eventually shrugged their shoulders, the nurse shook the cop’s hand and took his card, and he left, just as fast as the other two did.

Ted waited for ten minutes before he made his next move. He rushed from bush to bush down the driveway until he reached a sign that said

TFI - Where Home Is Healthy

What the hell does that mean, he asked himself, and looked down at the intersection. It was a Friday night, so the leftover bar traffic was still making their way home after last call. Every few seconds an Uber comfortably glided by, or a clearly drunk driver sped by in an S pattern up and down the left and right lanes. He stood in the crosswalk for about forty-five seconds as he waited for the light to change. The second DONT WALK dimmed and a walking stick man lit up, Ted hurried across the street, then waited again as drunks from the other side of town went on their way home. He crossed again and kept on walking for about three blocks until he reached Cleveland Boulevard.

Cleveland was once a hub of commerce in the small city where he lived, but now all that remained was an Applebee’s, an Office Depot, and a Red Lobster. The rest were shuttered office buildings for about half a mile before Cleveland split off to Jefferson Ave on the right, and Illinois Street on the left. Towards the end, at least as far as he could see, was what he imagined to be the Greyhound station, the only building on Cleveland that would have any business being fully lit at one thirty in the morning. Ted walked down the side of the road, Cleveland didn’t have any sidewalks, youthfully jumping over potholes and moving onto the grass whenever he saw headlights coming. It took him about fifteen minutes to reach where he thought the bus station was.

It still was a bus station, at least in architecture, the large garage doors for the terminals were still there, and the brick facade of the building hadn’t changed since he last drove by there several years before. The sign was different, though. Instead of the familiar purebred dog, he expected to see lit up blue shining out against streetlights, he saw THE STATION 24 HOUR GYM - FREE PERSONAL TRAINING - FREE TANNING. A lime green vinyl banner was strung over one of the garage doors that said in blue-outlined white letters “ONLY EIGHT DOLLARS A MONTH!” The lights coming from the spare windows of the garage doors and the main entrance were oppressive, shining out for at least 15 feet from the front of the gym. Inside, playful people lifted weights, and walked on treadmills, but mostly sat and talked. There was a young woman at the front desk, scrolling on her phone. She wore a bright green polo shirt with a big coffee stain running down the center of it nearly in the shape of Hawaii. She did not look up as a young man entered as Ted stared and took in the scenery. The back of the gym was littered with ten televisions minimum, the first five set to CNN, the last five set to FOX News. The young man scanned his card at the desk and went in to the men’s locker room. Ted walked in after him.

Behind the girl at the front desk was an array of self-tanning solutions, shampoos, sports drinks, protein shakes, and, for a reason that Ted did not quite understand, devotional books and Bibles. He walked up to the girl at the desk and said, “Excuse me, miss. I… what happened to the bus station?”

“I don’t know. I’ve worked here for two weeks. I think the bus station moved over by where the Toys R Us used to be.”

“Oh, okay, and where would that be.”

“I don’t know. The Toys R Us closed when I was a little kid.”

“Oh, thanks. I think I might know where it is. Thank you very much. Do you have the time?”

The girl squinted at her computer. She was already wearing glasses, but she put her face about three inches away from the screen to read the time. “It’s one-thirty,” she said.

“Oh, okay. Thank you, miss,” Ted said. He operated on the assumption that a day pass to a gym that charged members only seven dollars a month to join, would only charge maybe a dollar for a day pass to use the gym’s facilities, and that those facilities would have somewhere out of sight where Ted could catch a couple of hours of sleep and avoid walking across town at two in the morning. That would leave him two dollars he could at least eat something with when he woke up. He saw, about three yards to the left of the sign showing members the way to the locker rooms, the tanning booths, each set with their own locking doors. That was it! Take a nap in the tanning bed, provided of course, that it was off, sneak out around six or seven in the morning, and begin the trek home. It seemed simple.

Before he could turn around and walk back up to the desk, a guy who he assumed was the girl’s boyfriend was already perched in front of her. He could tell that the conversation was intense, and going to last, he hoped, about thirty or so minutes: did you see so and so the other day with whats his name, and so on. Might as well use this as a chance to save a dollar and make sure he can pay his Greyhound fare. He waited for a couple of seconds at the door for a real gym member to enter and trailed closely behind him as he walked onto the gym floor without scanning in.

The music in the gym was overbearing, threatening the promise of sleep under dimmed UV lights in the tanning bed. The couple at the front desk did not notice him come in after the actual gym-goer. So, armed with that confidence, he walked around a chest press machine and over to the first unoccupied tanning booth. Ted walked in, and shut the door behind him, making sure it locked when he did. Tired from the excitement of his escape, he stretched his arms out, and slowly let himself down into the tanning bed. Surprisingly, it did not take Ted long to drift into a peaceful sleep.

He woke up to the sound of someone knocking on the door. “Excuse me, is anyone in there? I need to clean this tanning booth,” the voice said. This voice was masculine, implying that there had been an overnight shift change.

Ted was groggy, but pieced together the sentence “Yeah, sure one second. Just getting my clothes on.”

“Okay, thank you, sir.”

Ted opened the door and saw a boy about his grandson’s age with a mop and bucket. “Have a good one, buddy,” he said.

Ted stepped out of the gym and onto Cleveland Street. Traffic was three times as heavy now as it was when he came in the previous night. How he would cross the streets, even at crosswalks, was questionable. The Red Lobster’s parking lot was full of cars, so he assumed that it was sometime between noon and six at night. Had he really slept unnoticed in a tanning bed for twelve hours? Couldn’t be. He squinted and he saw that the Red Lobster was closed, and the cars were actually there for a store called BIN MART, directly behind it, which he assumed sold some kind of overstock or Amazon returns.

Ted set out on his journey, weaving through cars and into a pattern of residential, business, residential, residential, then business, then two more residential neighborhoods. He got to the supposed site of the new Greyhound Station, which was another empty lot. Might have misremembered the details in the map of the town he drew in his head. He was now on the far outskirts of town and he had been walking for at least three hours. He was beat tired and already feeling like he needed to go back to sleep. All that was on the street “where the Toys R Us used to be” was a gas station, and a freight junction. A train was stopped at the freight junction and (he assumed) the one person working there was inspecting the cars at the far end of the train.

Worth a shot. Ted walked over to the freight yard and had a look around. Two other trains were parked there, both with overlapping layers of graffiti, the oldest of which had to have been sprayed on there thirty years beforehand. The third car was clearly still running, and about twenty minutes away from departure, from his estimates based on having sat at railroad crossings in his car.

“Now isn’t that something,” he said. “A real hobo!” He started laughing hysterically.

Wouldn’t be that bad of an idea, to him, at least. Bill back at the home agreed with him, too. At least that’s what he thought Bill believed. Wide open country, cans of beans, the sunset over the hills of the West as he crests along a coastal railroad. Ducking brakemen at railroad junctions. It sounded better than watching reruns of Bonanza with people who can’t remember what they had for breakfast that morning, or being babysat day in and day out by one of his sons. So be it.

Ted walked over to the third car and jumped in one of many open doors.

III.

The boxcar was dark, damp, and smelled halfway between canned corn and dog sh*t. It seemed like it took forever for the train to start moving. When it did, it didn’t go very fast at all for another forty-five minutes. Ted sat there, looking out at the late afternoon sky, covered in clouds. It was about to rain. Better to be in a box car than out on the streets. He leaned back his head to take a little nap, and the train started to go faster.

It was a short nap, only about an hour. The sound of a railroad crossing sign in town woke him up. He didn’t think, at least, that he was still in his hometown: the surroundings were entirely foreign to him. The railroad crossing was exactly at what he assumed was the busiest point of whatever town he was in. To his right, just ahead of him, there was a Wal-Mart, the parking lot packed with cars coming in and out, and the road leading to it congested by the train’s stopping. To his left, there was a Taco Bell, and a law firm sharing the same commercial lot. The traffic in the other direction was just as congested. He assumed, based on what he saw, that it was probably around six thirty at night: most people are either getting off of work late or going to eat dinner with their families if they got off of work at five o’clock. They peaked through just a little bit through the clouds, orange-yellow mixing with the gray. What struck Ted was that every car at the intersection seemed to be about twenty years old, not a new car in sight. The car closest to the train was sputtering its death rattle as it came to a halt, the engine noticeably shaking underneath the hood. It was a Buick, he guessed from about the late 1980s or maybe 1990.

Taking in the sights of his new environment distracted Ted from one of the most important tasks of hoboing – concealing one’s self while he’s in a rail car, so as to not attract any undue attention, that would lead him to being thrown off of the train by a conductor or brakeman. Ted was leaning out of the boxcar door with half of his torso exposed, and everyone in line at the railroad crossing saw the strange old man in what looked like hospital clothes hiding in the train. A little kid in the exploding Buick stuck his head out of the window and excitedly waved at him.

“Mommy, look! He’s riding on the train! Hi!!”

Ted silently waved back at him and ducked out of sight for the rest of the train’s stop. The train started to chug and go again, about the same sound the Buick was making, the two almost harmonized. First going five miles an hour, then up to fifteen, then coasting along the next two hours at a solid forty. When Ted peeked out of the boxcar door, all he really saw were corn fields, trees, and cars driving down the highway that ran parallel to the railroad track for about thirty miles. He sat back in the corner of the car and went back to sleep.

This sleep went undisturbed, unlike the last attempt at a nap. By the time he woke up, it was already night or early morning, he couldn’t tell yet. His alarm came in the form of a knocking sound on the metal walls of the box cars.

“Hey! Who the f*ck are you!?” a gravely voice yelled at him in the darkness.

“Just trying to make my way home! Hey there buddy!”

“Don’t ‘Hey there buddy!’ me, man. This is private property. You’re trespassing.”

“Trespassing on whose private property. I don’t see any names on it but,” Ted leaned out of the door on the other side of the Box Car and read the graffiti “Twixxy.”

“Sir. You don’t have to get wise with me. Just step out of the car,”

A white unmarked SUV was parked next to the train tracks. The man yelling at Ted was a bulbous creature in a white polo shirt and khaki short pants, and socks going up near his knees. He had a massive pistol poorly holstered on his right hip and a badge that looked like it came out of a toy store.
Another man walked up, this one much younger, and significantly dirtier than the one currently threatening Ted.

“I can take over from here, Tom. I’ll handle this one. I saw some kids trying to tag the car over on lane three. Can you take a look?”

“Uh, sure,” the bulbous red creature said, and hopped in his white Jeep and went down the track a little.

“You gonna beat me up?” Ted asked him.

“No, I’m gonna give you a ride. You’ve got some balls man, and I could use the help. I’ll let you ride as long as you help me out at the stops.”

“Oh, okay. Why? I didn’t see any ‘now hiring’ signs on the train when I hopped on?”

“We aren’t. It’s usually just me taking care of the whole train, though. I could use some help.”

“Oh, okay. So what you’re saying is I help you clear brush or cows off of the train track, and you don’t let some bloated bastard in a big truck beat my ass ragged?”

“Correct. I’m Ayoub, nice to meet you,” Ayoubthe railroad man reached out his hand to shake Ted’s. Ted guessed that he was around twenty-eight, his skin was ash-blackened by the combination of sweat and dirt around him.

“You mind taking me with you?”

“As long as you give me that hand you promised.”

IV.

The control station in the front car only had one seat, which rocked uncontrollably as the train went down the track. Ted had asked his benefactor why the crew was so sparse, and by sparse, why it was just him. Ayoub said that it’d been that way the entire time he had worked for the railroad, and he’d worked there for basically his entire adult life. They exchanged pleasantries, Ayoub telling Ted an abbreviated version of his autobiography. Ayoub married early and had a wife and a son who died in a car accident while he was three states away working on a train. He said that before his son was born, his plan was to go to college and study music or art or movies, something artistic. He kept a sketchbook with him on the train and he tried his best to draw, counterbalancing himself against the rocking train and being constantly interrupted by his job duties. Ted commended him for ‘keeping it up” and told him that his grandson Job was studying movies right now, but he worried that he would never make any good movies because his dad was a religious nut case.

“That’s my name too!” Ayoub told Ted.

“What do you mean?”

“Ayoub, that’s Job! My parents were Jesus Freaks too when I was born, but they mellowed out pretty soon after. Ayoub is the Arabic translation of Job!”

“Huh. Meaner than hell to name a kid after the worst-off bastard in the whole Bible other than the Big Guy,” Ted said.

Ayoub had vacated the seat to Ted out of reverence for the elderly, opting to stand at the controls and intervene when necessary. Their route was going to take them out across the state line for a few miles, and across over again the other direction. The way so far kept apace with Ted’s initial expectations for the hobo life deep in the heart of the American plains. Trees, grass, cars, corn, soybeans, deer, dirt roads, trucks. No grand sights or sounds, snow-capped mountains, or bald eagles. Just roads, and cars. The next town they’d see would mark about two hours away from Ted’s house by car, but he did not know how long by train, or what exact direction this specific train was going. The hour they had been going so far, the two didn’t really talk much after their initial exchange: Ayoub was fixated on making sure his job was being done to standard, and Ted, looking out the window and observing his surroundings.

Ayoub interrupted the silence, “So, why did you jump my train?”

“I’m running away from the nuthouse.”

“No sh*t?” Ayoub said, adjusting some unlabeled knob to Ted’s left.

“Not really. My kids put me in a home, and I busted out.”

“Damn. Man, you’re like an outlaw out here.”

“Not really. It’s within my rights. I think, at least,” Ted told him.

After they passed a town in Southeast Kansas whose name Ted forgot by the time they were out of it, the train chugged out of the prairies and through the rough Ozark backcountry, where decades before, men used dynamite to blast open mountainous hills to make way for civilization, and railroads. The limestone and sandstone peered out at them from either side of the road, for twenty or thirty-minute stretches, then back down into prairie, then back up into the craggy, blasted hills. The train managed to kick up so much dust that the windshield of the control cabin was nearly caked with sandstone residue and bugs.

“We’re headed down to Bucephalus, right?” Ted asked his new companion.

“No, actually. Straight shot North up to Kansas City after a while, only really headed that direction for the first maybe hour of the trip,” he said.

“Well, sh*t. What’s the nearest town we’re gonna be stopping at?” he asked again.

“Looks like there’s a railroad crossing over by Hampton that’s usually busy. You might have to get off there if Bucephalus is where you’re headed. About thirty more minutes of the trip until we get there.”

“Damn it all. I guess I could hitch a ride from Hampton. That’s nothing but thirty minutes from where I need to be.”

“Nobody hitchikes anymore, too many crazy crackheads asking for rides and too many serial killers giving them out,” Ayoub warned him.

Ted shrugged and said “Worth a try. I’ve made it this far riding the rails, and they haven’t done that since I was a little kid.”

Ayoub shrugged too.

V.

Hampton, Kansas was a desolate town in a region dotted with desolate towns. Its main claim to fame was the possibility that an old, broken-down tow truck, green and pockmarked with red rust, was the inspiration behind the sentient tow truck in the movie “Cars”. After this was featured in the press, the tow truck was pulled out of a Pentecostal minister’s front yard, and placed in a spot of prominence beside a renovated Conoco station built for the Route 66 tourist crowd. The rest of the town existed for that purpose as well. Boutiques lined the main street, made again for those American Dream Nostalgic Tourists, where they sold clothes and tchotchkes none of the actual residents of the town could afford. In days past, Ted went there occasionally for work, most notably in 1997 when the town’s outskirts were hit by a record-shatteringly large tornado. When he and the star reporter the station sent out arrived, all they found were knocked-over trees, an overturned trailer, and a missing dog. When they tried to interview the survivors of the ordeal, they received outright refusal or interviews so laden with profanity the station couldn’t use them. The next time he was in Hampton was in the middle 2010s, when a German couple bought and refurbished the Wild West bordello on the West side of the town, complete with a stained glass mural of a nude woman in repose, causing community-shattering controversy among the few aged remaining Hamptonites and a goldmine for local news features.

When the train buzzed by, Ted saw that same trailer, not rusted red like the tow truck in the town square, and felt a tinge of nostalgia for when he was “useful.” What adventures he had been on, he thought. What adventures he could still be going on if he hadn’t been in a nursing home, either imposed or of his own creation, for the last ten years of his life.

The train approached the center of town, and Ted remarked on the significance of the old tow truck as the train screeched to a halt at the railroad crossing. “I need to check a few things in the back. Feel free to hop off when I do,” Ayoub told him.

“Might as well. Thank you, a lot, Kid. Hope things go well for you. Try to make a movie,” Ted said as he reached out his hand to shake his new friend’s.

“You too, man. I hope your escape is successful,” Ayoub laughed and stepped down off the platform onto the road.

Ted stepped down after him and went on down Main Street. He walked up to the gas station, the one that was fully operational and not meant for photo ops, and sat down on a bench out front. He sat and tapped his foot to the rhythm of old songs playing in his head for what he thought was twenty minutes until a young couple approached him coming out of the store. The woman was holding a baby in her left arm and a bottle of Diet Pepsi in her right hand. The man was holding a black pack of Marlboros in his right and a regular Pepsi in his left hand.

“You look lost,” the woman told him. “Don’t he look lost?”

“Don’t bother him, babe. He’s just resting.”

“Well, you could say I’m lost in a way,” Ted told them.

“Where are you trying to go?” the husband or boyfriend asked him.

“Oh, just Bucephalus. Y’all headed that way?” Ted asked back.

“Yeah, we are, actually. Going to go to Ross and buy some clothes for the baby,” the woman said.

“Well, if you’re heading that way, anyway, I could use a ride if you got the room,”

“Old man like you shouldn’t be driving anyway,” she said to him.

The man gestured at him and said “How do you know he’s not some kind of old creeper. You saw that video I showed you last night, they ain’t caught the Zodiac Killer yet. That could be him.”

She retorted, “Sir, do you promise you’re not the Zodiac Killer.”

“Boy Scouts pledge,” Ted told them and mockingly crossed his chest.

“That’s good enough for me,” she sniped at her husband. “We’re over there, the green car at pump three.”

“Alright. Thank you very much.”

The car at pump three wasn’t green as much as it was a veritable rainbow of assorted door panels and rust. The car was a Buick LeSabre of nineteen ninety-eight model, which Ted could recognize only because he had driven its much-prettier counterpart for the last twenty years he had a driver’s license. He opened the door with a creak and sat down in the red mock velvet seats comfortably. They don’t make them like they used to in the days when they didn’t make them like they used to, he thought. He remembered that when he bought this type of car new, he thought the craftsmanship of the American automobile was a lost art, the interiors tacky and the exteriors worse. But now, the same car was a bonafide antique, and he felt comforted by it. In a few minutes, the four of them, husband, wife, baby, and geriatric hitchhiker, were off down Route 66 going East to Bucephalus, the town of Ted’s birth.

“So, you got any family in Bucephalus?” the woman asked Ted.

“Yeah, but they’re all dead, or they’ve all moved out of state. My grandson’s in California now,” Ted said.

“What’s he doing in California?”

“Reading the Bible and watching movies,” Ted said.

“‘Bout the same thing he’d be doing in Bucephalus. Why move all that way?”

“It was his granddad’s idea. Made his dad real pissed off,” Ted laughed.

The husband asked him, “You got anywhere specifically in Bucephalus you have to go?”

“Yeah. 2105 South Chester Arthur Street. That’s where I used to live, and hopefully, after all, I still live there.”

“Oh yeah? Your old lady kick you out at Hampton or something after a road trip?” the young man asked him.

Ted laughed hysterically. “No, but I’ve got a story about that,” he said.

The rest of the thirty-minute trip back home was spent by Ted dispensing whatever wisdom he could to the young couple. The woman’s name was Cassie, and was twenty-two and studying to get her CNA. The man’s name was Charlie, and he was a journeyman welder currently looking for work somewhere outside of the “Four States” to take advantage of the higher wages. Their daughter, Neveah, was six months old. Ted’s advice constituted a moralized retelling of his own story. He repeated the phrase “Only do what you actually want to do,” at least six times during their conversation. “Same goes for you,” he said to the baby, who responded in a way not dissimilar to his old friend at the SFI home.

The rainbow car took a left off the main through-road in Bucephalus and down Twenty-first Street and took another left down Chester Arthur Street. And there it was. Ted’s old house was a yellow house of midcentury construction, looking a lot worse for wear than it did when he bought it almost a lifetime ago. “Go ahead and stop here,” Ted said. “Thank y’all, again. I really mean it. Teach that kid to be a human being,” he told them.

The two waved him off and the baby smiled at him as he walked up the front stairs of his old home. When he moved into SFI, he secretly kept a key to the old house and provided his sons hadn’t changed the locks behind his back in the case of a jailbreak like this one, he would be scott free to go back to his old life. He inserted the key, only to find that the door was already unlocked.

“Huh.”

Ted walked into the house, in pristine condition. Everything was exactly as he left it. Except one minor detail was off. The chair in the living room, usually occupied by Ted, was occupied by his son, Steven, and the chair occupied usually, in better times, by his wife, was occupied by his grandson Job.

“What the hell,” Ted said.

“We knew you’d come here,” Steven said, rage boiling his face beet red.

“How!? How’d you even know I got out?”

“Remember that shot that they gave you at SFI, that we had to tell you was a flu shot?” Steven said, holding up his phone to Ted’s face, with a street map marked by a red circle containing Ted’s face, hovering over the house. “They knew you were going South the second they figured out you were the one missing around five thirty in the morning on Thursday.”

“What day is it now?” Ted asked.

“Saturday morning.”

“Do you know how much trouble you could have got yourself into!?” his son nearly screeched, holding his finger out at Ted’s face.

“Only a little,” Ted said.

“And us! Think about us for once in your life. We were worried sick! Your grandson skipped class and flew all the way down here just to make sure you were okay.”

“I’m a big kid,” Ted told him under his breath, walking over to the kitchen to get something to drink.

“You can’t just casually go about your day after pulling a stunt like this, Pops! You’re going back to SFI with us.”

“What if I say no?”

“Well, we’ll make you.”

“How are you gonna do that?”

“How are you going to do anything by yourself out here? Me and Brother still have power over all your bank accounts.”

“I’ll get a new job and open new bank accounts?”

“Not that easy, anymore.”

Job piped in, “I can transfer my credits to MSSU and help take care of Pops as long as he behaves. We can make it work!”

“There is absolutely no way, no way in hell, that you are doing that, son!” Steven chided his son for speaking up.

“Well, why not? It’s my own life. I can do as I please. The same way that Pops can do as he pleases if I’m here to help out.”

Father and son descended into a quarrel in front of the grandfather. Think about your future, one said to the other. Think about the missed opportunities, he said. The plan was set in stone in Job’s mind. Ted would have freedom, and so would Job. They would watch movies together as they always had. Yes, he would miss out on film school, but he could study something more practical, like his dad did, like business.

Ted stepped in again. “Ah, f*ck it,” he said. “Just send me back there. I’ve had enough of this bickering already. With one of you in the house with me, this’ll be every day.”

Ted arrived back at the SFI home Saturday afternoon. He greeted Bill in his room and turned on a movie. He called Job the next day, to make sure his flight to California went smoothly, and to make sure he didn’t suffer academically from his two-day excursion to the Ozarks.

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