CAP’N
His real name is Philip Blakeney, but everyone calls him Cap’n, or Cap for short. He’s about 45 or 50 years old, and is known by everyone in town, whether you’ve lived here for years or weeks. Cap is mildly retarded; a little on the slow side, but once he has learned something, he retains it for life. He knows more about the railroads, forestry, firefighting, and Indians than most people will ever forget. And he will freely distribute his knowledge to everyone.
He can read, but writing comes a little hard to him. He can do it, but sometimes he gets a little confused as to whether the tail on a “g” goes to the left or right. (Or is that a “q”?) But he loves to read. Books are an endless fascination to him, and he reads everything (nonfiction, of course; he could never understand the appeal of “fake stuff”). Still, he has an amazing amount of determination, a trait picked up from his mother. Cap’s father had died when he was seven, leaving Cap’s mother to raise him and a baby sister. She worked two jobs, but they made it through.
Cap drives a 1967 Ford pickup truck that Rick Murchison at the Texaco gave him for Christmas one year. Rick told him it was payment for all the work Cap had done throughout the year. Rick always has an odd job or two for Cap when he stops by, and whenever a new load of tires comes in, he’s there to help unload them and roll them to the storage shed off the left of the tire shop. Sometimes, he lets Cap ride along and help if they have to go out and help change a tire for a stranded motorist.
No matter what the weather is like, unless he’s laid up in bed with a near-fatal illness or a broken leg, he has a set schedule that he follows every day. Every morning at 8:00, he brings coffee and donuts to the men at the Volunteer Fire Department. He hangs around for about an hour, chatting with the firemen and listening to their tales of the fires and catastrophes they’ve dealt with, be it in the past twenty-four hours or twenty-four years. He might have heard some of the stories dozens of times, but he never tires of them. He’s such a permanent fixture that they made him an honorary captain, hence his nickname.
From there, he drives out to the railroad depot in Koval (about ten miles away) and greets the engineers as they come into the station. While the train is being unloaded and prepped for the next leg of its journey, he sits, enraptured by the tales the engineers have to tell. Some of the engineers have been “on the line” working for one railroad or another for over fifty years, so they have plenty of them. Tales of traveling all night through three states to make sure a carful of fertilizer was delivered to Amarillo. Having to stop the train for hours to get a heifer off the tracks near Fort Wayne, Alabama. A few horrifying tales of near-collisions with stalled cars and trucks. Sometimes Cap would sing for them: one of his favorite songs was “Rock Island Line”, and they all got a good laugh at the “pig iron” part.
When the trains are ready to go, he walks along with the engineer as he boards the engine and starts it up. Cap stands on the platform with his hands in his pockets, whistling “Rock Island Line”. Eventually, the whistle blows, and the train makes its way down the line. The engineer will usually lean out and wave as he leaves. Cap waves back, then stands there silently watching until the train is just a dot on the horizon.
About this time, he goes home and has lunch with his mother. His mother is in her late 60s, and is beginning to have trouble getting around, but she keeps up with him well enough. Occasionally, when she can convince him, they’ll go out of town and go to old historic houses and antique shows; sometimes a flea market or two, but that takes a lot of convincing. Cap is pretty adamant about following his schedule, so she usually has to couch her plans for these trips with an appeal to visit to his sister’s house in Lewiston.
After lunch, Cap visits the library, where he returns his mother’s books and talks with Mike Baldridge, the librarian and town historian. Cap loves to hear the little anecdotes about the characters in the town’s past, and never gets tired of looking through the manuscript for the town history that Mike has been working on for a couple of years (and may never finish, because he keeps remembering things he left out, or keeps discovering new things that he wants to add).
After checking out some new books for his mother (and few for himself), he’ll say goodbye to Mike and make his way over to Rick Murchison’s Texaco to see if there’s any tire shipments coming in. Even if there are no tires to unload, Rick usually has some kind of job to be done, whether it’s just moving an old carburetor to the storage shed, or sweeping out one of the empty bays. Cap will tackle the job in a hurry, and Rick will usually give him a soda from the vending machine while they stand around and shoot the breeze. Cap usually gives him a rundown on what he’s done and heard about that day, and Rick will add in a comment or two. Sometimes, Gene Young will join in if things are slow and he’s not repairing a car. Sometimes, he’ll join in even if he is repairing a car, although Rick doesn’t like that too much. The way he looks at it, someone is waiting for any car being repaired, and time spent talking just adds to their time waiting. Rick’s a fair man, so he tries to mentally keep track of how much time is wasted on stuff like that and deducts it from the customer’s bill.
After he leaves Murchison’s Texaco, Cap calls his mother to see if she needs anything, then heads home for dinner. After that, unless there’s a game going on at the high school, he and his mother watch television for a little while. Cap attends every home game of every sport played at Newtonberg High School. He even attends some of the out-of-town games; a few times, the coach has even let him ride with the team on the bus.
This schedule is second nature to him by now. He’s followed it for years; and if the library is closed or Rick Murchison is on vacation, it throws him off-balance a little. He’ll try to fill in the time – he might go see Matt Cooper at the Forestry Service office over in Garrison’s Mill or stop in to see Reverend Stanley at the church – but it never feels the same. And if the truth is to be told, a day without Cap around makes everyone else feel a little off-balance too.