High Horse

By Michael FitzMichael

One night in some dank and dismal underground, I was waiting for a train. There was a bum down there, trodding the platform theatrically, and there was a gang of teenagers with skateboards.

The teens were talking amongst themselves, jeering the bum, tittering and tee-hee-ing, looking in the bum’s direction, pointing and laughing.

The bum was using this quiet time between trains to teach the youths, instructing them on the virtues of a life well led, admonishing them for being slovenly and unpresentable, and preaching salvation through the Army.

“You should join the Army,” the old fellow advised them. “It’d do you a world of good. The Army’s the best thing in the world for you. Everyone should join the Army.”

The bum had a good voice for declaiming, deep and assured, persuasive. The skate-punks laughed and pointed.

“Go ahead, laugh,” the bum replied, not nonplussed. He seemed almost to be speaking rhetorically, ambling along the yellow warning line at the platform edge, lecturing over his shoulder to them professorially.

“Laugh, go ahead, laugh all you want, I like it. It’s good to laugh, good to hear people laughing, good for the soul…The Army’s good for you too…they dress you, feed you…place to stay, something to do. There’s always something to do in the Army, plenty to do in the Army…shine shoes, peel potatoes… you always have something to do in the Army…course it’s dangerous too, oh yeah, no question about it. You can die in the Army, die in a second in the Army…but they take care of you right up until the end…fly your body home, pay for the burial…oh, the Army takes care of you…”

During the bum’s oration, one of the teens, astride his skateboard, rode to the bum’s side and stopped. He was an unshaven ragamuffin dressed in oversized mop-bottom shorts sagging to his shins, a shredded shirt, mismatched socks and unlaced clodhoppers. A defiant adolescent, wispy growths of hair on his chin stuck out in provocation as he glared at the bum rambling on about the Army. The kid began treadling the skateboard, beating the nose of it repeatedly on the pavement. The pounding repeated against the echoing concrete, riotously ringing around the hollow tunnel walls.

The bum was unfazed. “You wanna make noise? Go ahead, make noise…doesn’t bother me, noise doesn’t bother me. I was in the Army…bombs going off all around me, I slept alright…machine guns shooting right next to my ear, I didn’t mind…I like noise, a little noise doesn’t bother me…”

Then the tracks trembled and the tunnel rumbled and the train roared in and drowned out the oratorical bum.

Michael FitzMichael’s writing has appeared in Cornice Magazine and Sweety Cat Press. He lives on a lonesome western ranch with ponies, dogs, and chickens.