Augite

        I board the light rail and head to the back row. Only the newer trains have a back row like this; it's really the best spot to sit. You're surrounded by windows, and you feel like you're perched up high, with the entire car stretching before you. The trouble, is there are usually people sprawled across the five seats, often sleeping with their belongings strewn about. Today there is one man back there, and amazingly he's only taking up a single spot. He has a gray beard and watery blue eyes and a skateboard.            I have a long ride ahead of me, so I take out my book and start writing. Almost immediately the man says, "I don't mean to be rude, but is that English you're writing?" There are three seats between us and my handwriting is atrocious, so unless his eyesight is very sharp, I don't know how he could possibly tell what language I'm writing, but I tell him yes.
        "So you write stories?" he asks.
        "Not really," I say.
        Just then another man, who has been staring intensely at me the whole time, comes and sits near me and asks, "Are you a lawyer?" I say no and he shows me a Fred Meyer rewards points card and asks where he can cash it in. Before I can explain that it's not a cash card, he shows me a small black rock and says, "This is worth 327 million dollars." He turns it over and over in his fingers, which are filthy.
        "What's that you got there?" the first man asks him. The other man ignores him. "Don't worry, I'm not gonna take it from you. No one should take anyone else's freedom away. I'm just kind of a rock hound. Spent my whole life finding rocks. I don't look for them, they come looking for me." He chuckles. "You know what augite is? They say it's not worth a lot, but everything you take out of the ground is worth a lot. It may have some use we don't know about yet. Maybe affects people like a magnet.  Could be worth a fortune. I find it everywhere, shining in the sun. You can't see it at night, it's so black. I know as much about it as anyone. I even have a website, augite mine dot com."
        The second man starts scratching the rock with a key. Shiny green specks start to appear in the black. The rock hound notices and says, "Could be emerald. Could be sapphire." He asks me where I'm from. Not this again, I think. I tell him Philadelphia, and he says, "Oh, like the Philadelphia Providence." I tell him I don't know what that is. "It was before the Louisiana Purchase. The entire Eastern Seaboard was bought first and they called it the Philadelphia Providence. Just like this area was the Oregon Providence." He speaks calmly and gently, and doesn't seem to mind when I don't respond. "They want to make that Jefferson Providence south of here. I don't know why not. They're good people. Keep to themselves. Don't do anyone any harm." This is far from what I've heard of the racist goons itching to secede and form the State of Jefferson, but I don't argue with him.
        He genially asks the second man where he's from. The man doesn't answer at first, then mumbles, "The South."
        "Where in the South?"
        "Arizona."
        "Arizona! Beautiful down there. Just like Eastern Oregon. Dry. Rocks lying around everywhere, just waiting for you to find them." The man from Arizona stares sullenly out the window.
        "Did you say 237 million, or billion?" asks the rock hound.
        "Billion," the other man growls.
        The rock hound nods. "That's great. That's really great. You know a black rock is worth whatever you want it to be. It's worth whatever you want it to be worth. You hold on to that thing."
We pass through Saturday Market, which is packed with tourists wandering between the booths.
        "I know what those people about," the rock hound says. "Maybe I should get off this train."
        "What do you know about this train?" the man from Arizona barks.
        "It's okay, there's nothing wrong with this train," the rock hound says soothingly. "It's a good train."
        At the next stop, the man from Arizona suddenly leaps up and dashes out through the open doors. The rock hound smiles. "A little scary. I know what his kind's looking for. Like when I sniffed that black rock. Seen it all the time. Won't do him any good."
        We sit in silence for a while, then he says, "How it started was, there was one perfect rock, and there came along an even more perfect rock, and the two rocks got together and that's how evil was born."
        We sit in the sunlight streaming in through the train windows, I scrawl my little chicken scratch musings.
        "Like a magnet," the man says quietly. "It's all just like a magnet."