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In which the boys find an alternate means of travel, but eventually miss their mark. |
4. In which the boys find an alternate means of travel but eventually miss their mark. It was closing on mid-afternoon and as the heat that we’d gone through earlier in the day was nothing compared to the heat that was now coming off the highway in the afternoon. The tar in the highway looked like it was oozing and the heat coming off the pavement made everything in the distance kind of shimmer, sort of like it was all melting like butter in a cooking pan. I felt like I was melting, too, and I looked over at Toadstool and he was in a bad way. Despite the fact that he'd left his shirt opened it was still soaked with sweat, and the water showered off his forehead in buckets. I couldn't be mean anymore, and when he stopped to sit a moment, which was still every few yards, I only let out a little sigh to let him know I was in a hurry, but I didn't say anything. It was a Saturday afternoon in small-town Illinois on a rural highway, so there wasn't a lot of traffic coming through, maybe a farmer every once in a while in some old beat-up truck or some kid out joy riding, nobody who'd really lend themselves to giving us a ride. Every so often I'd see somebody pass by who looked like they might be friendly and I'd stick out my thumb, but they'd just hit the gas and move on by us quick, like a skinny kid and his fat friend were the worst criminals on earth. You'd think that we'd at least be helped out by the breeze coming from the cars passing by us, but as hot as it was it just felt like all that air was coming out of a blast furnace. We'd made it about a mile out of Guardian and we were closing in on the bottom road where Gerd had left us when I suddenly got one of those inspirations that usually meant nothing but trouble for me and whoever I was with. There was a railroad that ran from Carbondale to St. Louis and went right past Guardian and Garen, it used to be a really popular passenger route during World War II but by the '70's it was nothing more than a cargo route and nowadays it's been abandoned for over twenty years. Anyway, at the point where'd we'd been walking the tracks took a really sharp turn along a hill and right into the woods. They'd been working on the tracks that day, and just by coincidence it happened that the train had to stop right at that point. As I walked by, the sweat from my forehead running into my eyes and stinging them badly, something in the back of my head noticed that you couldn't see the train's engine or its last car because of the way it was sitting on the bend, and there was four or five of those box cars with their doors wide open, the way they leave them sometimes, God knows why, and no one in sight around them. The tracks were maybe a couple of hundred yards off the road and from where I was standing they looked better than Becky McGlothlin in her Easter dress. Then I knew what we'd have to do. "Hey, Toadstool, look," I said, grabbing his disgustingly damp sleeve and pointing towards the train. Toadstool took a minute, then slowly turned his head towards the train and, in a dead voice, said, "So?" "That's our way out of this." "You are a moron," he said, but there wasn’t much resistance behind his voice. "You've got a better idea, butt-face? That train'll go straight past Garen, and it has to slow down there. We can jump out the second we hit town." "We'll get thrown off the second we try to get on. It's just too stupid. . ." "You see anybody around?" "No, but that doesn't mean they're not there." "Then they throw us off and we come back here. At least we have a chance to get home faster than walking." "It'll probably start moving before we get there. . ." "And if it don't? God, for a smart kid you sure are stupid. You can stay here and sweat if you want, I'm heading for the train." With that, I started heading off the highway and made my way through the foxtails and brush that stood between us and the train. I could tell that Toadstool still didn't like the idea, but after a couple of seconds he started waddling after me like he always did, mainly because he wasn't sure if I'd leave him or not. For my part I kind of wanted to leave him because he was the closest thing a living human being could be to dead weight, but if he'd have stayed I think I would've too. Like I said, though, we'd played this game before and he always wound up giving in. We didn't get to the train as fast as I thought we were going to because all that brush and weeds hid some dips and curves in the ground that kept tripping me up, and if they tripped me up they were sure making life bad for Toadstool. At one point I thought that Toadstool had fallen behind me, but if he did he got up quick enough and, surprise of surprises, we made it to the train before it started moving. I moved up the gravel in front of the tracks as fast as I could and pulled myself into one of the open boxcars, arms first and then scrambling my legs into the car. Then I braced myself because I knew that Toadstool would have problems, so when he got up to the car I grabbed one of his sleeves and tried as best as my scrawny frame could to help get his pudge up into the boxcar. It must've taken him ten minutes to pull one of those hamhocks he called legs into the boxcar, and if the train had taken off then he'd have been dead. Lucky for him it didn't, though, and he finally got in, laying there on the floor of the boxcar and panting like a dog. I got up and moved to a corner away from the sun. It was like a sauna inside that boxcar and I still felt water flowing off of me like it was coming out of a faucet, but at least we were out of that sun. I was parched, but being that we had nothing to drink all we could do was sit back in that boxcar and be glad we were heading home soon. "Told you we'd be all right," I said after a few minutes, just saying something to keep my mind off my throat. "We haven't started moving yet." "So what? God, you are stupid. Whatever, we'll be home soon." "Yeah, I guess. Man, mom's got to have called out the National Guard by now." "Y'think she'll be happy to see you when you get home?" "I think she'll slap my face off so far I'll have to go to St. Louis to find it." I laughed at that, but Toadstool hadn't necessarily said it with humor. His mom was small but she was intimidating. And tough. She had to be, being the breadwinner in the family, which wasn't so usual in small-town Illinois back then as it might be nowadays. Toadstool's dad had been disabled, had been since before Toadstool was born, and there was no way his disability check brought in enough money to pay for the mortgage on their backwoods house and put food on the table. So Toadstool's mom worked, and she worked a lot. She didn't like her life, with all that working and not enough rewards, and she was the kind who felt that her troubles meant that she didn't need to take crap from anyone. She didn’t take any from her lazy, do-nothing husband, and she especially didn’t take any from her only-born son who, from day one, she had a lot of expectations for. A bad mark on a homework assignment meant he'd be catching trouble for a week. Being several hours late without calling meant that he was probably no better than a dead man. I don't know how long we sat there, but finally the train jerked forward and we could see the trees and electric poles around us moving. The breeze that blew into the shade of the boxcar was the first relief we'd gotten since leaving Sam 'n Ella's, and both me and Toadstool scooted over to the back end of the boxcar to get the full benefit of it. "See, no one's throwing us off," I said. "Just keep your eyes open and we'll be home before long." "Lucky." "Hey, luck works." "Yeah, well, your mom won't tear your head off." No, my mom would be at home crying and worrying. She'd already lost my dad, and with my brother gone in the army, she didn't need her second son running out and giving her grief. I didn't want to think about that just then. "I think I'm going to sleep for a week when I get home," I finally said, just to say something. "If I'm lucky, mom'll be at work and I can at least get a nap before I get killed." "Well, you can get killed all you want. I've got a date tonight that I've got to get ready for." "Who are you going out with tonight?" "Meg Callahan." "Meg Callahan? Shut up, Dreamer." "Don't believe me, I don't care. I'm seeing Meg Callahan tonight." "You wouldn't know what to do with Meg Callahan if you had her." Meg Callahan was a year older than me, but she had a certain reputation, if you know what I mean, and she's the type who didn't really mind what the age of the guy she was with was as long as she considered him cute, and she was known for being particularly accommodating to the incoming freshmen. At least, that's what I heard. The truth was I had never really spoken to her, other than the occasional "excuse me" in the hall, and I certainly didn't have a date with her. "From what I've heard, she'll show me all the ropes," I finally said back to Toadstool. "Besides, I've seen how it's done before." "How've you seen how it's done before?" "Stag films." "And how did you get your hands on stag films?" "My brother. He brought some home when he was on leave when he was stationed out in California." That seemed to perk up Toadstool's interest, mainly because it seemed plausible. "What kind of stag films?" "What kind of stag films do you think? There's only one kind of stag film that I know of. Anyway, one day when my mom was out to work, he took me downstairs in the basement and showed me some of them." "So, you saw women in them." "No, it was a gay stag film. Of course, there were women, doing all sorts of stuff I never knew women could do." "Like. . .?" "Well, acrobatic stuff. You know, stuff that doesn't look very comfortable, to tell you the truth. All that while doing the deed." I pretty much had Toadstool hooked in, which was sad because my viewing of porn films was as much fiction as my date with Meg Callahan. My brother had told me that he and his buddies had gone to see an adult movie when he was on leave in San Francisco, but he didn't really go into any detail about it, other than to say that the gals in the movie weren't really that good looking and that, after the excitement of the first few minutes wore off, the movie was actually kind of repetitive and boring, plus you never knew what the people sitting around you were doing. Anyway, I was pulling most of this stuff out of my head, but it kept Toadstool's mind off of things for awhile and stopped him from whining about what his mom was going to do when she got home. After awhile we stopped talking and just started watching for Garen to show up outside of the boxcar doors. At least once I reminded Toadstool that he had to be ready to jump the second the train started slowing down, but I'm pretty sure he'd figured that out already, so we really didn't have a lot to talk about any more. The truth is, after all that walking and the heat and all, combined with the fact that we'd stayed up really late the night before at Davy Matheson's house, I was tired to the bone. Where I was sitting in the shade the breeze was blowing really gently about my face, and despite the fact that I was still parched, it was the best that I'd felt since Gerd had left us behind. The boxcar kept a steady rhythm along the tracks, and I didn't think closing my eyes and relaxing for a bit would be a bad thing, if only for a little while. . . It's funny where your brain will take you when you're really tired. I don't really remember my dad as I was seven when he died, but suddenly him and me were riding down the highway in the old Bel-Aire he used to own, Hank Williams playing on the radio and him singing to it badly. I remember he looked away from the road for a minute and smiled down at me, then told me some sort of joke that I can't remember but I know made me laugh, then I looked back at him but he wasn't there anymore, though that car was still moving. I'm not sure if we hit a bump or what happened, but the world came back to me suddenly. Even so, it took me a few seconds to recognize that I was still in that boxcar, and a little while longer to realize that we had to get out of that boxcar. I looked over and saw that Toadstool had been dozing away too, rolled up into a lump on the other side of the car. Rubbing my face, I looked out the door and realized the predicament we were in. "Crap," I yelled loud enough to wake Toadstool up. "What?" "We've got to get out of here." "What. . .why. . .?" "We missed Garen!" "What do you mean we missed Garen?" "What I just said, you butt-wipe. We missed Garen!" I didn't know how long we'd been asleep in that boxcar, but I knew that the landscape I saw outside of it was like nothing I'd seen before. Now, my family had moved to Garen just after my dad died and since then I had been all over the area surrounding the town, so I would've known it if we were somewhere in the area. The fact was that we weren't, and the realization came up on me like a wave that we were all of a sudden in a lot more trouble than we'd been when we were stuck in Guardian. I admit it, I panicked. My only thought was that we had to get off the train, and in the same breath that I yelled out, "We've got to jump," I threw my body out of that open boxcar door. Lucky for me I was light and for whatever reason the train wasn't moving as fast as it could've, because I was able to land on my feet and do a few quick rolls and I was up with nothing more than a few scrapes and bruises. I watched the train go down the tracks and for a minute I thought I'd lost Toadstool, but just as I'd given up on him I saw his body awkwardly drop from the train and thud to the ground. The land around the tracks at this point was much worse that the land had been around the area we'd gotten on the train and even though I was, for the most part, not injured, the deep ruts in the ground kept me from getting to Toadstool as fast as I would've liked. When I'd finally moved within fifty yards of him I realized he hadn't gotten off as easily as I had. He was laying there in kind of a lump and the only way you could tell he was even living was that he was breathing heavy. One hand was clutching on his right leg, which must've been scraped pretty badly when he landed because his jeans had a rip in them below the knee and his leg was all cut up and bloody. When I got close I could hear him making little whining sounds when he was breathing, and I couldn't tell if he was crying or not. "Are you okay?" I said, asking the most stupid question in the history of the universe. "No. . . no, I'm not," he answered in a way that I could barely hear him, kind of muffled and low, and the fact that he didn't insult me told me he was really hurt. "What happened?" "I fell wrong. . . on my leg." "Well . . .can you move it?" "I don't know," he said, and he kind of made grunting sounds when he talked, like it was taking an effort just to communicate with me. "Well, try." "It hurts, faggot." "Do you think it's broken?" "I don't know." To be sure, Toadstool's leg was a bloody mess, but there wasn't any swelling so I was pretty sure it wasn't broken, and I knew broken bones because I had my arm broken twice when I was a little kid. I wanted to kind of be sympathetic towards Toadstool, but on the other hand in the back of my mind I knew we were in a lot of trouble and that we couldn't just sit there if we could at all help it. "You're going to have to try to move it sometime," I finally said to him. "What if it is broken. . .?" "I don't know," I said, and I really didn't. We were stuck in the middle of nowhere and if Toadstool couldn't move then I didn't know if I should leave him and look for help or wait for someone to come along the track or a train to come through, and God only knows when that would be. Finally, making a lot more noise than I thought he was capable of, he started to move his leg forward and back, then left and right. He was wincing and grunting, but it looked to me like he still had a serviceable leg. "See if you can walk on it." "Give me a minute, butt-munch." "We've got to get going. . ." "Who's stupid idea was it to jump out of the train when we could just wait until we got to the next town? I thought you were stupid before, now I know. . ." "I'm not the one who thought getting a ride from Gerd Mueller was such a good idea. He’s back in Garen right now, probably drinking a beer or passed out or something. If it wasn't for him, and for you, we wouldn't be here right now." Having just rattled off our recent history of stupidity, we both sat there for a moment, him still breathing heavy, both of us blaming the other for our predicament. Finally, he started grimacing real hard and with what seemed like a pretty tremendous effort he raised himself off the ground. When he was halfway up I put my scrawny arm underneath one of his fat ones and tried my best to help him. Finally he was up, though he was definitely favoring one leg and he was now breathing like he was giving birth. "Can you walk?" "Geez, I don't know. . ." "Well, try." It was while we were standing there that I looked around at where we were for the first time. It was definitely late afternoon and the sun was hanging pretty low but there was still no clouds and no breeze and it still seemed just as hot as it was before. The slope that came down from the tracks was pretty steep and Toadstool might've had problems getting down it even before he hurt his leg. At the bottom there was a stretch of trees and beyond that there was some farmland and out in the distance I could see some farmer out in his combine stirring up some dust. I knew that was the only hope we had at the moment. "C'mon," I said, "we're gonna have to see if we can ask that guy for help." "How're we going to get down there?" "Well, we've got to try to climb down. Do you think you can make it, or do you need me to leave you. . ." "No. No, I'll try to make it down." With that, we started to work our way down the steep dirt hill that led down to the trees below. It was slow and hot and the only lucky we had was that there was hardly any weeds around the track, so there were no surprises. Toadstool labored fairly badly, and every once in a while I had to hold up and support him down a particularly steep part, but in time we finally made it down to the trees. We got lucky there, because sometimes trees around a train track can hide a creek or some kind of deep ravine, but in this case it was only a flat patch, kind of a boundary line between the railroad and the farm. Being in the shade again felt good, and I held up for a minute longer to let Toadstool catch his breath, but I wanted to catch up to that farmer before he got too far away, so I started after him a lot sooner than I really wanted to. We came out in a middle of what seemed to be a thirty-acre hay field, half cleared, and the bailer and hay wagon was stirring up dust causing a gray fog that go thicker the closer we got to it. That farmer was a good quarter-mile away from us when we came out of the woods and he was moving away from us, which made me worry that we'd never catch them, but they must've caught sight of us and been curious as to why two vagrant boys were tromping all over their farmland, because all of a sudden they stopped and waited for us. As I got closer, I could start to make out that there were four of them bailing hay, an old farmer sitting in the bailer and a teenage kid a few years older than us on the John Deere that was pulling the hay wagon, with what looked to be one of the kid's friends on the hay wagon catching and another one on the ground throwing, all of them looking at us like we were the funniest sight they'd seen in a long time. "What're you kids doing out here," the old farmer asked in kind of a harsh tone. He was this skinny, sun-withered old man with this wild head of gray hair and kind of looked like Porter Waggoner in overalls with bad teeth. The old man's demeanor threw me off and made me nervous, but I had no choice but to ask for help. "I-I'm sorry, but we're kind of lost and we need some help." "Lost?" the old man asked, spitting out some chewing tobacco juice, with a little bit of a humorless laugh in his voice. "How'd you get lost and what are you doing out here on my farm?" "We just got off the train up there." "Off the train, huh? Didn't know the train made stops beside the farm," he now had a weird smile on his face, and the boys had the same kind of smile on their faces. I stood there for a moment, not really knowing what to make of these farmers. Finally, trying to think of something that might get some sympathy out of these guys, I said, "Well, we were attacked." "Attacked? Who attacked you?" "Some black kids. I don't know who they were. They took our money and threw us on the train." Okay, I know it's stupid, but one thing you'd probably never see away from the city back in those days was a person of color, and of course everyone in the backwoods thought that anyone who wasn't white was a bunch of cutthroats and thieves. So if you say you got in a fight with a white guy, somebody'd figure you just got yourself in a some sort of idiotic fight, but if you said you were jumped by a couple of blacks, then you were obviously a victim, because, of course, white people never attack anyone unprovoked. Anyway, the old farmer hiccuped and took a long time answering me, but finally said, "Where're you boys from?" "Garen." "Garen? Where on earth's Garen? Hey, Tommy, d'you know where Garen is?" "Sort of," said the boy on the tractor. He was black-haired, shirtless and sun-burnt, not an ugly kid but with the same dental problems that the old man had. "I think it's down south a ways." "We just need a phone call, sir," I said. "If we could borrow a phone to call my mom. . ." "And how far is Garen from here?" "I don't know, sir." "A ways, like the boy said. Long distance charges, and you boys already said you have no money." "My mom'll pay when she comes to get me. . ." "Yeah? How do I know that?" I stood there for a moment, and, for once, I literally had no answer for someone. "Is the fat boy over there okay?" the old man finally asked. I looked back and Toadstool was standing behind me breathing heavy, the lower part of his one leg all red from the blood. At this point, I might've come up with a story about how he needed immediate medical attention and how he might die at any minute, but Toadstool cut me off by saying, "I'm okay." "Well, I'll tell you what," the old man said, slowly taking a pinch out of his container of chew, "the nearest phone is at the house and I've got to get this field clear today, so I'm afraid I can't help you now." "Well, is there somebody there who we can. . ." "You ain't going to the house without me, you can forget about that right now. Tell you what, you think you can pitch some hay?" "What?" "You're small, buy I could use an extra person, even if they can't do much. The fat kid looks pretty useless to me, but if you can pitch at least a few bails of hay and help us out a little here, maybe we can go back to the house after we're done and you can use the phone." We had no choice. I didn't know where the nearest farmhouse might be and it was getting late, plus the old guy was more than a little intimidating, so all I could say was, "Okay." "All right, but you better keep up. Paul back there will show you what to do, Porky over there can sit up front there with Tommy as long as he doesn't cause any problems, meaning I don't want to hear from him. Okay?" I nodded and looked back at Toadstool, who slowly and unsurely made his way past me and into the cab of the truck. I couldn't hear anything, but at least Tommy was kind enough to notice how bad off Toadstool was, because I could look up and see Toadstool drinking out of something, which was better than I got. Paul was a tall kid, also shirtless and sunburnt but with shaggy blonde hair and at least two days' worth of beard on his face. He had the world's creepiest smile, and it stayed on his face all the time, even while he explained to me how I was supposed to follow alongside the hay wagon and throw the bails up for the other boy, Merle, to catch and stack. I tried, but I was small and frail and it was hot and I wasn't used to that kind of work and for every three bails Paul would throw up I'd maybe get one, and sometimes I'd miss which would cause the old farmer to cuss and yell at me. It was the worst misery I think I'd ever known and it lasted for hours. As I worked I watched the sun sink slowly over that farmer’s land and I was miserable, out there with complete strangers in the heat and catching all sorts of verbal abuse. Even so, I couldn't get my mind off what my mom might be thinking right then or if I might ever see her again.
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