The Midnight Ghost

An ImaRead production · text & illustration by the production line

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A small lone man with a rucksack stands in an open freight gondola riding a curving track along dark mountains at night, a far smear of orange city light behind him. — The lone freight south, city behind

Inside a dark swaying freight car, a sturdy younger man and a frail old stubbled hobo sit on the floor sharing bread and a wine jug; the old man reads from a small worn paper while night rushes past the open door. — He read the prayer; I was in church

A sturdy man sits alone against the open door of a moving freight car at night, a wine jug in hand and a small book in his jacket, gazing out at a star-blue sky framed like a cathedral window. — Silence, the jug, the open-door sky

The night I climbed out of Los Angeles, the city was nothing but a smear of sick orange lights behind me, and the air on the ridge was already turning cold. I had caught the southbound zipper freight that the railroad men call the Midnight Ghost, and I was riding hard and easy in an empty gondola with nothing in the world but a rucksack, a half-loaf of bread, a slab of cheese, and a jug of cheap red wine. The train groaned and rocked like some old ship putting out to sea, the wheels singing their long iron hymn beneath me, and I felt that strange holy joy rising in my chest, the joy of owing nothing, of belonging nowhere, of being a speck in the great dark belly of the continent and not minding one bit. Los Angeles fell away behind us like a bad dream you wake up from, and the only thing ahead was the dark coast road and the dark mountains and the long whistling curve of track that would take me, by morning, to Santa Barbara and whatever ragged blessing was waiting there. I had no plan, no ticket, no appointment with anybody, and that was the whole beauty of it, the diamond-empty perfection of having no destination at all.

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Pretty soon another fellow came scrambling up into my car, an old, thin, beat-up little bum, all bones and shivering and soft gray stubble, the kind of gentle old roamer you meet a hundred times on the rails and somehow never forget. He had the look of a man who had been everywhere and was afraid of nothing, and in his hand he clutched a small worn slip of paper, the prayer to Saint Teresa, all crumpled and thumb-smooth from years of carrying, and he asked if he might read it to me. I said yes, of course, and I broke the bread and poured the wine, and he read the prayer in a cracked little voice that went right through me like a nail of soft light. There on the swaying floor of that dark freight car, with the night rushing past outside and the wheels clacking their endless sutra, I felt I was in church, a better church than any I had ever been christened in. We sat there passing the jug between us, two ragged apostles of the open road, and the prayer was so plain and so beautiful that I knew, right then, the diamond-clear truth the Diamond Sutra had been trying to teach me all along: that everything is empty, and everything is shining, and that to compare one moment to another is to miss the whole blazing show. I listened with my whole body, and when he was done I just sat there grinning like a fool, because the old man's prayer was ten thousand times more real to me than any sermon I had ever slept through.

I am a self-made religious wanderer, you see, with no temple and no master, only a copy of the Diamond Sutra stuffed in my jacket and a head full of my own wild, half-baked, blissful notions about holiness. I had picked up somewhere, maybe from a book, maybe from a conversation in a flophouse, the saying that comparison is odious, and I had taken that phrase like a stone in my mouth and rolled it around until it became the very marrow of my bones. From that night on, I never wanted anything other than what was already in my hands, never wanted to be anywhere other than exactly where I was. There is no better life than this one, I told myself, with the bread crumbs on my coat and the old man's prayer still ringing in my ears. No better night than this night, no better bread than the bread I was sharing, no better church than this rolling boxcar cathedral with its stained-glass sky. The old man finished the prayer and folded his slip of paper away and we drank another swallow of wine in silence, and I felt, in that plain and perfect way, that I had been handed a sign, a little warm lantern hung out in the dark to tell me I was on the right track, going south, going somewhere, going nowhere, going home.