Rock Island Line

by David Rhodes

  Each time July went over the middle he would look toward the house. It held his attention. He saw someone come out of it carrying a loaded basket, set it down and begin hanging laundry from an invisible wire. Shirts and pants, towels, underwear and socks dangled like pleasant memories against the green background. This sight was soothing and each time one of his round sweeps of the field would reach the several-acre mound in the middle, he would be straining his eyes to see it lift into view in the distance, and each time more laundry would be drying. Finally, two long lines of it hung there, and the picture it gave him was like having a friend. He lived in it when he couldn’t see it and talked to the woman about clothespins, drying time and the little drama of her life.

  Then the woman went back into the house and there was only the laundry; and abandoned to him, the pleasant memories turned sour and hung like the truth. He became more and more depressed. Another tractor came out to take away the full wagon and leave him an empty one. He stopped when he could see the house, and Bonesy and Jack climbed down to pull the pin. It was wedged tight and they called to him to back up a little to take the pressure off.

  But at that time someone else came out of the little house and stood against the white side, holding something, then walked forward to the clothesline and sat in the grass. All July could see was her long brown hair.

  “Hey, back up, July,” said Jack. But he paid them no attention, as if in a trance. They looked at each other and wondered what to do. Bonesy began to climb up on the back of the tractor, but all of a sudden July slammed it into gear and lurched forward, throwing Bonesy off and nearly running over him with the hay baler. “Hey!” they both yelled accusingly. July shifted into a higher gear and pulled the throttle open all the way, heading for the small white house in the distance. Jack and Bonesy ran behind him for a way, bales bouncing off the wagon and the baler banging and clanking in the ruts. He was going too fast to catch. But they continued running, thinking that they’d repossess the tractor when he stopped at the fence. But the fence didn’t stop him. He went through it as if it were made of crepe paper and began tearing through the standing corn, ripping out a strip as wide as the wagon. The next fence didn’t stop him either and he broke off the wooden posts like popsicle sticks. Then there was a small creek, and he went over that as well, leaving the wagon in it, the tongue dangling behind him. A wheel fell off the baler and he half pulled and half dragged it through the last remaining field before the house.

  Betsy Hammond, three years old, sat in the yard holding her doll and saw the tractor coming. She remained sitting as it came closer, right up to the yard and halfway into it. Then she stood up and backed toward the house. The young man climbed from the smoking machine and stood next to the far clothesline pole, staring at her. He didn’t talk, smile or make a gesture of any kind, just continued to stare at her. Then came closer.

  Her mother came out of the house and ran over to her, taking her by the shoulders and putting her protectively behind her leg, silently squaring off against the man from the tractor.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought for a moment”—pause—“that she was someone else.”

  “Go away,” the woman said. He turned back to the tractor, then to the hanging clothes. The mother hesitated. “Say, you’re July Montgomery,” she said, and immediately her face became compassionate and she even took a step closer to him. But he backed away.

  “I only look like him,” he mumbled.

  Lyle Hogue’s car roared into the driveway and Lyle and two others jumped out and ran over to him. At the same time Jack and Bonesy came running through the great swipe in the bean-field. Jack climbed up on the tractor and drove it back out of the yard. Lyle took July by the arm and gently but cautiously led him to the car. The others went to see about the wagon and the baler’s wheel.

  They drove the whole way back to July’s car without talking; when they had stopped and it was time for July to climb out and leave, Lyle began: “Look, July, take some time off. Go somewhere and just take it easy for a while. Get yourself straightened around.” July opened the door and stepped out onto the gravel. Lyle got out of the other side. July started to talk, but Lyle cut him off. “Forget about it. Accidents happen. Nobody was hurt. Forget it. Just try to get yourself together. . . . And, July, I don’t know if this will sound right, and maybe it won’t, but for what it’s worth, I’m sure glad that it wasn’t me what happened to you.” July looked at him with completely vacant eyes, climbed in his car and drove away.

  He went back home, parked in the mud and looked in the mailbox. There was a flyer from a hardware store in Iowa City with a recurring little cartoon man who pointed, smiling, to the red-hot specials and buy-the-second-for-only-one-penny deals. He put it back inside and closed the flap door. As an afterthought, he put up the flag, then wondered who he would ever send a letter to. He went to the porch, got a hammer that was lying there on the floor, went back to the road and tore off the flag and threw it into the ditch. Then he took off the box and jumped on it until it was flat. He went inside and read for a second time the note to himself on the refrigerator and fell into a chair at the table, putting his head in his hands.

  July slept on the sofa, afraid to go upstairs with her things in the bedroom and bathroom, her shoes in front of the bed. In the morning his neighbor drove by, slowly, he thought, wishing to see in. He closed all the curtains and turned on the lights.

  Around noon his Aunt Becky came into the drive and got out of her car. He had hidden from her before. He wanted nothing to do with her now. He despised her. The sight of her walking into his yard, dressed in her clean, fresh-smelling clothes, her hair arranged just so on top of her head, her brown gloves, and that look of anxious concern on her face as she looked around, hoping to see him and offer him comfort, drove him nearly mad with fear, resentment and rage. He carefully reclosed the curtain and went down into the basement to crouch in the moist darkness with his back to the cement foundation. He heard her knock kindly on the front door, wait, knock again and walk back and forth on the porch, then down the steps and a minute later he could hear her knocking at the back door.

  This time she let herself in. Holmes’ feet danced in the kitchen as she met her like an old friend. It made July’s fists draw together the way she talked to the animals, kindly, softly, putting food down for them in case he might have forgotten. The door slammed and he thought she was going. He looked through the basement window. She went to her car, but returned with a box, went back to the kitchen and July could hear her putting things in the refrigerator. Then she went into the living room and parked herself like a century.

  A half-hour later a van pulled into the drive and a man got out. His aunt let him in. They talked in murmurs. He returned to the van, brought back a black telephone and was gone again within ten minutes. His aunt waited another two hours, then finally he heard her walk out of the house and watched her get in her car and leave. Then he went upstairs. On the small table before the sofa was a telephone. Next to it was a note: I’ve put this in, July, so that you might call me. Please do. Becky. He read it without touching it, and turned down the dial on the bottom so that he would not be able to hear the ring if someone called him, thereby nullifying in his own mind all that she had tried to do.

  He sat on the porch looking out toward the road in front for a long time, noticing that his outlook was becoming increasingly morbid and grim. His terror of living was exceeded only by his terror of death, which kept him trapped forever between despair and misery. He felt the demon of catatonia tighten its grip on his will. His physical sense of himself was weak, pale and impotent. He sat nearly all the rest of the day without moving, got up, went into the house and wandered through the rooms, finally coming to a rest in the bathroom, where he sat looking at the three inches of cold water he’d run into the tub two days before. Its clearness attracted him.

  Mal . . . Mal ... Mal.

  The following day brought him another visitor, this one from the police
department. It was the young lieutenant. As before, July hid in the basement. The policeman knocked twice, briskly, then came in and went into all the rooms downstairs, checking the closets as well, and then went upstairs. After five minutes he came down, and from the basement window July watched him go into the barn and return to the house after lifting the hoods of the cars to see if the motors were warm. Twice he called out July’s name, opened the basement door, turned on the light, came halfway down the stairs for a quick check and went back up.

  July heard him dialing the phone.

  “Billy, this is Lester. Get me Snider, will you?”

  Pause.

  “Snider? Right. I’m over at the house now.”

  Pause.

  “There’s a phone here now. Somebody put it in for him. There’s a note here.”

  Pause.

  “No. Can’t find him anywhere.”

  Pause.

  “There’re three cars out front. . . . Listen, what have you got from—” Pause. “Oh, never mind, then. I don’t know what to do. Wait, I guess. Get a hold of Muscatine.”

  Pause.

  “I’m sure he’ll turn up.”

  Pause.

  “No I haven’t. What did you say? ‘66? Mercury?”

  Pause.

  “All three? What makes you think—”

  Pause.

  “Maybe so. I’ll be back in tomorrow morning. Talk to you then. I’ll be here another hour or so. Call if you need me. The number’s three eight six nine eight seven three.”

  He hung up, but remained sitting on the sofa. He stayed in the house for another half-hour, then went outside and July saw him picking around in the driveway and road, inspecting the flattened mailbox and discarded flag. He came back to the house for a moment and left.

  The note on the door said. Dear July, stopped by to see how you were. If you have the time, why don’t you come in and we’ll have lunch together. Call me 383-6464. Lieutenant Lester Helm. July opened the door and it fell onto the porch floor, where he left it.

  But something was working away at him, and he tried to go over the telephone conversation—that much of it that he had heard. He tried to think, but it was almost as if he couldn’t. His grief had stunted him and hollow shouting was all he could manage before coming to rest once again at the foundation of madness, where hatred was his only rationality.

  The following morning the back door of the house banged closed, announcing July’s entrance into the yard. He wore no coat and held his arms close to him with his hands in his pockets. Long, thin puffs of frozen breath, flared at the ends, came from his nostrils. He walked to the white fence and stood beside it for a long time, letting his hand slide gently over the tops of the wooden pickets. Then with no warning he yanked off one, wrenching the nails from the upper and lower rails, threw it out beyond the drive and kicked through several more. Then he walked around the house several times, beginning to shiver. Before he started to wander toward the barn, he recovered the picket, pounded it back in place with a chunk of brick, fitted the others together where they were broken, and backed away from the fence to see how far away one had to be not to notice.

  He entered the barn and stood shivering in the doorway, his hands back in his pockets. His clothes looked a size too large for him. His face was thin and pale. Dark gray shadows hung beneath his red eyes. He went all the way in and closed the double doors. Immediately the inside of the barn darkened. Then he began pacing back and forth in front of the mangers, looking at the dirt floor under his feet.

  He stopped to listen as a car went by in front, hearing it slow down, but continue on—thinking at first that it might be his aunt again. Then he opened the larger set of doors and drove the Chrysler in and reclosed the barn, in this way hiding it so that if she were to stop by she would think he wasn’t home and not wait around so long, or even get out of her car. For a long time he sat in the driver’s seat of the car looking at the dashboard, then started it and shut it off; then started it again, almost turned it off, but then, with his hand on the ignition key, slammed the foot pedal to the floor and ran it for several minutes wide open, the motor screaming. Then shut it off, got out, went up into the loft and lay in the hay looking at the cracks between the boards, which grew darker as the afternoon wore on. The hard core of light gone, he fell into the deepest despair and his thoughts became the color of old black rubber. In the middle of the night, shivering like a leaf, he stumbled slowly out of the haymow and went to the house and sat with his animals.

  The next day, after having fought its way through layers and layers of cold sorrow and hatred, an idea came to him. He went out of the house and walked down the road, searched along in the ditch and found the comic book he had thrown there. As he had noticed before, on the back was stamped Property of Riverview Courts.

  He drove to Iowa City and went to the library. There, in the Muscatine telephone directory was the name of a trailer court: Riverview Courts. It seemed quite a coincidence. Of course, there might be a thousand Riverview Courts across the country, but it did seem strange that there would be one in the only town he had overheard the lieutenant mention. Now, if there was in that trailer court another coincidence, a 1966 Mercury, it would be truly an odd set of circumstances.

  July took the pocket knife Mal had given him for Christmas, sharpened to a razor’s edge, and left for Muscatine, driving at a steady forty miles an hour, having hardly the presence of mind to refill the gasoline tank or stop for stop signs. He shoved a ten-dollar bill out of the window to pay for four dollars and sixty -three cents worth of gas and then drove off without waiting for the change, not because he was in such a hurry, but because he’d forgotten, picturing all the number of ways he might take his vengeance with such clarity and resolve that without the automatic habit of driving the car would’ve meandered off the road and into the ditch.

  “Tell me where the trailer court is,” he demanded of the first person he saw on the streets, and received directions. At exactly three a.m. he drove in among the long trailers, parked the car and walked along in the dark looking for a Mercury. He knew it was there. He found it hidden in a metal garage, and in the trailer beside it there was a light on. Also the sound of a radio and loud talking.

  He slipped between two other trailers and came around in back. Two cinder blocks carefully piled upon each other brought him up to the level of the window in the bedroom, where he could look through the opened door along the whole length of the trailer.

  Two young men were sitting at the small kitchen table. The other, a boy, sat on the sofa next to the radio. The two at the table were drinking beer out of bottles.

  “What’re we going to do, Wally?”

  “Don’t ask me that again. Don’t ever ask me that again. I’m sick of it, fucker. Use your own head for a while.”

  “Murder. That’s the worst of all things. They could hang us for that.”

  “Shut up. You think I don’t know that?”

  “Maybe somebody seen us in the parkin’ lot ‘n’ wrote down the license plate. They’ll be the FBI, Wally.”

  “Shut up, you stupid jackass.”

  July could hear the sucking noises of the younger boy, and could see him crying. The older boy stood up and shouted at him to be quiet, then hit him in the face. Blood ran down from around his eye and the gasping noise grew louder.

  “Shut up, fucker!”

  “Don’t hit him again,” yelled the other boy, getting up from the table, knocking over the empty and half-filled bottles.

  “You want to try me, mother?”

  “Just don’t hit ’im again.”

  “It’s his fault, you dumb bastard! You said to bring him along and now we’re here ‘n’ wondering if we won’t be hung.”

  “He didn’t mean to. He just got scared.”

  “They don’t want me for nothin’. I could leave you sons of bitches right now—you know that, don’t you? They ain’t getting anythin’ on me.”

  “It was your idea to go
out there, ‘n’ you was the one who started pushin’ ‘er.”

  “Nobody’d believe I had nothin’ to do with it. I ain’t never been in trouble before. It’d be your word against mine.”

  “He just got scared.”

  “Scared of a girl.” The sucking noises grew louder. “Shut up!” And he raised his fist as though to hit the boy again.

  “Don’t, Wally. No more hittin’.”

  “Then make ’im shut up. It’s like being in the room with a sick horse or somethin’.”

  “What’re we goin’ ta do?”

  “I told you never to ask that again, fucker. Next time you get it. We got to think. There’s plenty a smart ways a gettin’ outa a thing like this. Shit, they don’t catch but one hundreth of murders. We just got ta have a good story up, in case we was asked by somebody.”

  “We could say we just never left the parkin’ lot.”

  “Then they’d say real fast, ‘What was you boys doin’ in the parking lot?’ Go ahead, you try to answer, like you would if you was being asked by a detective.”

  “I can’t think, Wally. God, I’m scared.”

  “I know you are, punk. That’s why we got all three of us to stay here until you guys get your cool back. Course they got nothin’ on me—you remember that.”

  “Don’t leave, Wally, please.”

  “Just remember that, ‘n’ get him to shut up. God damn, why don’t they have no TV shows when you need ’em? Get me a beer.”