Rock Island Line

by David Rhodes

  “He was a killer,” his father explained. “In his life he killed more than a hundred men. You shouldn’t get the wrong image of him: he was nothing to admire. He was an outlaw, and so the least of all kinds of persons to admire, but it’s interesting how even in such a low, low person—how his life can be kind of an inspiration—but only in idea—only in idea. Killing is the ugliest thing in the world. But if you don’t think about that—if you just think of the strength—the unyielding cunning to stay alive at all costs, against all odds. He was in prison once where he went a week without water, and when they took him out and let him walk along the wall—this was in New York—he saw ten thousand people, all of them come to see him die. They gave him some water and led him back to the cell (he wasn’t going to be hanged until that afternoon) and he got away. He got away! It’s unbelievable! Maybe it’s because we all have a private fantasy of doing something unbelievable—at just the moment when everyone else has given us up, when the odds are ten thousand to one, to snap out and unbelievably get away. How sweet life must seem after that! And a legend like Kingfisher is only an attempt to capture that sweetness. Oh, they had him there, right there in the prison—can’t you imagine it?—this fellow who’s nearly sixty—who’s never been caught before—and he gets away!”

  John got up and went over to the cash register. The tired waitress squashed out the last quarter-inch of her cigarette and came over. Behind the counter, she lit another. He put a fifty-cent piece on the rubber mat. Thirty-five cents came up at the top of the register.

  “Say, mister,” she said, blowing smoke through her words, “that was some story, about that Kingfisher.” She handed him back fifteen cents in yellow fingers. “Come again.”

  The cook turned. “Stop flirting,” she said, and swatted her on the rump. They looked at each other and laughed and looked at John.

  “Thank you,” he said, blushed and quickly left.

  SIX

  The Funeral—1953

  July was sitting on the porch looking through the screen, and then at it, wondering how he was able to see the square wire holes so clearly and at the same time see through to the lawn as though there were nothing there. The memory of the last four days was a blur. The square holes. The lawn. He was becoming afraid again. He rocked the swing harder, and made himself do two things: look at the wire holes and review what he had done that morning, from the moment he’d gotten out of bed for the last time. I went over to the window. No, first I put on a shirt—the red one—no, it was green, corduroy—my favorite—can hide in trees with it and no one can see me. Dad always said . . . Dad always said—I went over to the window and looked out. Swallows and flies. I went back and sat on the bed. Put on my socks. Red. Saw the drawer and took out my junk box. I looked at the beebees, chrome buttons, keys, padlock . . . padlock . . . padlock . . . yellow dog chain, broken knife, beer opener. He felt the fear subside and allowed his vision to wander from the screen, outside, inside, around the porch. Red. The shirt was red. The green one was in a lump on the floor. I’d forgotten that, he thought. I’d forgotten that because—Then he was afraid again and went back to the screen. I went over to the window. Swallows and flies. I breathed against the window and drew a circle with my finger. I put a dot in the middle. I sat down on my bed. My socks are red. My shirt is red, the green one on the floor. Hiding in trees. Then I put on the other sock and the drawer was open. I took out my junk box—

  “Here, July,” spoke his Aunt Becky, her fleshy arms big all the way to the shoulders, “you must have something to eat. A person can’t go without food. You must eat something.” She carried out a tray and set it next to him on the swing, after stopping its motion with the side of her hip. July stared at the sandwiches and Jell-O and looked back to the screen. “Now, I want some of that eaten by the time I get back,” she continued, kindly, but as though she would take no monkey business either. Then she stayed for a silent moment longer and went back inside, leaving the door open. He was glad when she was gone. She made him feel small. Until four days ago he’d never seen her—or didn’t remember. It wasn’t that he didn’t like her, or that he was incapable of recognizing the kindness . . . only that he felt he was being watched naked. In fact, he’d liked her from the first moment, but it was irrelevant: his understanding went deeper.

  Four days ago. He got off the schoolbus. There was a car in the driveway. He didn’t know who it belonged to. Inside were Mr. and Mrs. Binford, whom he’d never seen outside Sunday mornings at the church. They stood up when he came in and looked as though they’d been interrupted while stealing silverware. He thought they must owe his father money and were waiting for his mother to come out of the bathroom. He took the square-folded lunch sack out of his back pocket and put it on the kitchen table. He wondered if the Binfords would be like his friends at school—would think it was the mark of poverty to have to save your sack and not squash it up in a ball with the waxpaper and half a sandwich inside and throw it in the trash. (Actually, no one had ever said it, but he knew what they thought. He’d told it to his mother and she had said, “Foolishness,” and that had been the end of it.) Usually he would try to fold it up when no one was looking, but out of pride would not do this if it took much effort. The Binfords were talking nervously together and they came into the kitchen. He had the feeling that his mother wasn’t in the bathroom. Like suspected thieves, they talked to him about school. He opened the refrigerator and looked for last night’s dessert—black-bottom pie. But even the plate was gone. So were the potato chips from under the counter. July was beside himself with how to be rid of the Binfords. Finally, he could stand it no longer and in the living room called “Mom” at the top of his lungs, both as a statement that it wasn’t his responsibility to entertain them, and in the hope that she was upstairs somewhere and would come down. But she didn’t, and they came rushing back into the living room. “ Your mother isn’t here,” said Mr. Binford, and seated himself nervously, absurdly, on the couch. “She won’t be coming back,” said Mrs. Binford. “She’s dead,” they said together. “They’re both dead,” said Mr. Binford alone. Then Mrs. Binford sat down beside her husband and they folded their hands and looked as they did in church. The telephone rang, and they both jumped. July sat looking out the window, and heard the receiver taken up—then murmured talking from Della’s old bedroom—as far away as the cord would reach. The first time anyone tried to kill him he was ten years old. Then the receiver was put back.

  Whenever he turned and looked at them, they were sitting in church, hands folded. Four hours passed. It became dark outside. Mrs. Binford turned on a light, on low beam, and went back to looking without direction. Finally, a car came into the driveway. The lights were shut off. Walking sounds. A knock on the door. The Binfords opened it together. Mumbled talking. Then his Aunt Becky burst into the room wearing a light green dress, her voice loud. “All right,” she said. “Are you July?”

  He nodded his head.

  “Good. I’m pleased to meet you. I’m Becky, your Aunt Becky. I came as quickly as I heard. God, it’s like a dungeon in here.” She ran around snapping on lights. The Binfords were watching her from next to the opened door. “Go on now,” she said to them. “July and I will manage just fine. Get on out of here.” They inched their way out and Aunt Becky gently slammed the door as soon as they were in the yard. “Now!” She sat down fatly on the sofa. “We must get things straight. First, as I guess you know, your parents have both been killed—in an automobile accident. Second, it was nobody’s fault, but that doesn’t matter. He was my brother. My name’s Becky Frunt. My husband Perry will be here for the funeral. At that time we’ll decide whether or not to live here. But don’t think about that now. You’ll live with us whatever, and get along fine. We have one girl, but she’s ten years older than you and will be going away to college in the fall. You’ll stay home from school until after the funeral, then you’ll be going back. Until then there are many things to be done. First, where’s your room? . . . No, later
. Have you eaten?” July shook his head. “Then we’ll have to make dinner, won’t we?” He nodded, and they went into the kitchen.

  After dinner, though July didn’t eat because he couldn’t swallow, they went up to his room with a white ball of string. Together they strung the string from the corner of his bed, across the hall into the guest room, up to the ceiling and to a small brass bell above the guest bed. “There,” said Aunt Becky when they were finished. July had looked several times at her enormous rear end. “Now, if you need anything you can just pull the string. OK. Fine. Do you have any games?” They went downstairs and July got out a Clue set and they played until far after midnight. She won nearly every game.

  He was eternally grateful for her, and during those four days as he came out of shock and into the horror of understanding, she was always there with this and this and this that had to be done. “Now we must clean the living room.” “Now we must do the dishes.” “Now we must go to the store, bring the bottles.” “Now we must go for a walk.” “Now we must play Canasta.” “Now we must write letters—you too.”

  But today she seemed tired. July picked up one of the sandwiches and opened it. Chicken salad. He put it back together and took a bite, but couldn’t swallow. Then the longer it stayed, half chewed, in his mouth, the more the nausea grew. He looked behind him for fear Aunt Becky was watching. She wasn’t. With his fingers he took out the mutilated piece and threw it to the other side of the porch. Then he began ripping the sandwich and putting it into his pants pocket. Even doing this, he was watchful for her. Later she came back out and took the tray inside, looking at it with suspicion. He could tell she was worried today. But he didn’t care. She was irrelevant.

  A blue car pulled up front. Three people got out. The man and the woman he recognized. They were his Aunt and Uncle Montgomery. The other man he’d never seen before. He wore a straw hat with a band around the bottom of the crown, and chewed an unlit cigar. His Uncle Sid talked intently to Aunt Franny as they came up the walk. The stranger lagged behind, looking at the house and lawn as though someone were trying to sell it to him and he didn’t want to look either impressed or completely disenchanted . . . skeptical. All three showed signs of having ridden a long way.

  Uncle Sid and Aunt Franny introduced themselves with great solemnity and deliberation. Once again he felt the nagging question: How are you making it?—searching his face for signs of how he wasn’t making it at all, of how the horror had ruined him. The first time anyone tried to kill him . . . Everyone, it seemed, wanted to be able to be looking right at him just when he exploded. Then the stranger was introduced. Uncle Perry, Becky’s husband. He tipped his hat and took the unlit cigar out of his mouth for an instant as a gesture of his good will. Then went quickly back to surveying the house for structural flaws and other indications of its retail value. July said nothing to any of them. He was learning, among many other things, that he had an excuse to ignore people—an excuse that they accepted as well as he needed.

  They went into the house and left him alone. From inside he could hear his Aunt Becky’s voice raised to an insidious, loud whisper. “You miserable wretch. The least you could have done would be to put on a coat. Get rid of that cigar....” He let the words pass through his hearing like the sounds of nature—meaningless and irrelevant. They had no more importance to him than the stupid birds on the birdbath: he cared nothing for them—nothing. He began rocking again, and pretended that a place in the screen where several strands of wire had been torn was a gunsight, and every time he came forward and the sight lined up in his vision with the bird-bath he would squeeze a soft, terrible trigger inside his stomach and blow them apart with tumbling lead slugs. By moving his head a little to one side, just at the time when the sight was lined up, he could get them all. Feathers and blood all over the yard. Then they flew away and the fear returned. I got out of bed. I put on my shirt. My red shirt. I went over to the window. I drew a hole with a dot in it. The hole disappeared first. Then the dot. I went over to my bed and sat down. I did not pull the string. I could hear . . .

  An hour before the funeral Aunt Becky came and told him to get dressed. He went upstairs and found his suit laid out on the bed, clean socks, a white shirt, clean underwear, and even his shoes polished. The floor had been dusted with a dry mop. His box of junk was neatly put back in the drawer. He went over to his window and looked out. Footsteps in the hall. Someone came into his room and stood there. He did not turn around. At first he felt the presence staring at the back of his head, pushing his face against the window. Then he decided that there wouldn’t be anyone there—that as far as he was concerned he would be alone in his room—he would not only refuse to answer, he would not even hear the question. He felt a pleasant, restful sensation of this solitude filling him. He stood inside his bone sanctuary until he’d completely forgotten about no one else being in the room, and when he turned there was no one. As he put on his clothes he thought for an instant: Now, wait a minute—someone was in here, but he stopped. They were irrelevant. They had no importance. Then for the first time (though for only a fleeting second) he thought of his parents in such a way that he wasn’t frightened. He thought of them as being still alive somewhere, like just in the next room reading or talking inaudibly, thinking about him. But soon came the image of them riding in the car on some white road slick with frogs, black oil blood in the steaming radiator wreckage . . . and he wished he were dead. The first time anyone tried to kill him he was ten years old.

  They all went together in one car to the funeral. No one talked. His new Uncle Perry had been drinking. It was hot. July made himself become part of the moving landscape.

  The parking lot of the church was filled. Cars were stopped on the road and people in dark clothes walked along the ditch. Two long black cars with gray curtains on steel rails pointed outward, opened in the rear, less than a heavy stone’s throw from the iron railing of the front step. The naked sun nailed July’s eyes.

  The lush smell of bought, manicured flowers filled the church. He was squeezed in between his two aunts, the third row back from the altar. Beyond the first row were two caskets, lids down. The room (though he had been in it every Sunday since he could remember) seemed twice or three times as large, the people larger, the stained-glass windows as big as a house, the altar like a mausoleum. An undertaker unclipped the little chain at the end of their pew, let himself in and refastened it, causing the small plaque suspended in the middle to swing. reserved for family. He inched over to Uncle Sid. They talked in short, breathless whispers. Once his uncle gestured to the caskets. The undertaker held his hand down several feet from the floor, as though indicating water level. His uncle smiled. They shook hands and the undertaker went outside the aisle, walked around the front, surveying the crowd like a large, unruly family, then went back toward the entrance hallway, where he met another undertaker and disappeared. Finally, as the silence became deafening, the minister came out and, with a white fleshy hand gesture, brought the group to a standing position. The organist hit a sinking chord and hymn number 107 tonelessly filled the air. July could feel Aunt Becky singing, her great sides heaving, but he could not find her voice in the sound. He felt very small. Then the minister let them down with his hands.

  July began to reason. He realized that ever since he’d come home from school four days ago he hadn’t had a reasonable thought about anything. Now he was beginning to put things together. It was the tone of the minister’s voice that first presented a clue. It was deep and sincere, emotional and slow—but many of the phrases jolted July. He’d heard them before—sitting with his parents, he’d heard them before—shutting his eyes and leaning his head against his father’s hard arm, he’d heard them before. The realization was like a slap in the face. He listened to the voice more closely: it was the same voice, a little slower maybe, and more deliberate, but that was pretense . . . the voice was the same! He quickly looked to his Aunt Becky. Her eyes were lowered to the floor as though wrapped in pr
ehistoric thought. But he could see—he could tell that the full importance of the caskets and who was in them had not even bruised her and never would. Snapped thoughts yammered through him. He stole a quick, furtive look behind him and sat for long afterward with the vivid impression of the faces. Sad faces. But he could see . . . he could tell. There was only one person there who thought something was wrong, and that was him. One lady next to the organist stood up and began a song, then had to sit back down when her voice choked her. But no one besides himself felt there was anything wrong—terribly unfortunate, but not wrong. The old world was still clicking away. Waves of understanding passed through him.

  I was deceived, he thought. Somehow, though the blame is mostly mine, I was deceived into believing nothing terrible would ever happen to me. Everyone else knew . . . that all it takes is one bit of bad luck—the tiniest quirk of fate, and zip, bring in two caskets, if the little fool was running, we’d hear ’im. He believed he understood why everyone seemed to be staring at him—it wasn’t that they wanted him to explode before their eyes—it was just a casual interest in if he was a fool or if he wasn’t. Just curiosity. Look in his eyes and see if he’s one of the fools, the halfwits, who believe nothing bad is ever going to happen to them—who believe their parents will live forever.

  Then the minister called for a moment of silence, broken shortly by the sinking sounds of the organ. The feet began shuffling. The church filed out with low, murmured talking.