Max the Mighty

by Rod Philbrick

  Everything keeps moving. It never settles into one thing, it keeps moving and turning into something new. You don’t need to change the channel, because it keeps changing itself and never stays the same.

  After a while I feel like I’m getting hypnotized. Like I’m wide-awake but dreaming. Like the train is standing still and the world is turning under us.

  Worm, she gets tired of watching the world go by and takes out a new book. This one is called The Sword in the Stone. I know about it because Kevin read it and told me the story back before I could read on my own.

  It’s about this kid who everyone thinks is a real loser until one day he accidentally pulls this sword out of a stone. And that proves he’s going to grow up to be King Arthur, this excellent dude who had a posse of knights in shining armor, slaying dragons and rescuing damsels, which are what they called women in the old days.

  “You know what’s so cool about King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table?” Worm says to me. “It’s all about fighting for honor and protecting the innocent and never giving up even if the whole world is against you.”

  I go, “Yeah, that’s pretty cool.”

  “The coolest thing is, they called it chivalry,” Worm says, sounding excited. “And that’s where we’re going. Chivalry, Montana.”

  She acts like it’s this big coincidence, but I’m pretty sure she knew about knights and chivalry, and that’s why she picked the book in the first place, so it would remind her of where we’re headed.

  “You sure your dad is there?” I ask her.

  For some reason that makes her mad. “You don’t believe me, is that it? You want me to swear on my grave? Okay, I swear on my grave: My father is in Chivalry, Montana!”

  I go, “Okay, okay. Take it easy.”

  Joe hears her and butts in. “Chivalry? That where you two are headed?”

  Worm glares at me and then nods. “Yes,” she says. “Most definitely.”

  “Then you come to the right place,” Joe says. “This train don’t go there, exactly, but I know one that does.”

  “And you’ll show us?”

  “ ’Course I will,” he says. “But it ain’t exactly right around the corner. We got a good long while before we get there, so if you guys don’t mind, I’m gonna catch up on my beauty sleep.”

  Joe fluffs up his canvas bag like it’s a pillow and stretches out his skinny legs and closes his eyes. Pretty soon you can hear him snoring and it blends into the sound of the train.

  Worm taps me on the shoulder. “Sorry I got mad,” she says.

  I go, “That’s okay.”

  “It’s just I miss my mom,” Worm says.

  “Sure,” I say. “That’s only natural.”

  The Worm looks fierce. “I miss her but I hate her guts.”

  I go, “Huh?”

  “It’s her fault,” Worm says. “She didn’t have to marry that creepoid. Or let him hurt me. Or lie to the cops.”

  “She’s scared of him,” I say. “People do stupid things when they’re scared.”

  “But she’s my mom. Moms are supposed to take care of you.”

  I don’t know what to say. Moms aren’t supposed to die, either, but sometimes they do.

  “Everything will be okay if I can just talk to my dad,” Worm says. “My real dad. He’ll understand.”

  “Don’t worry,” I say. “We’ll find him.”

  Then everything is quiet except for the clickety sound of the train and the wind humming by. It’s so quiet I can hear my own heart beating and it seems to go rackety-roo, rackety-roo just like the train.

  After a while Worm tugs at my arm and says, “You hear that? It sounds like giants talking under the earth.”

  At first I think it’s just another weird thing she got out of a book, but then I start to hear it, too. A low rumble that seems to come off the mountains and roll over the plains. You can’t quite make out the words. You can’t tell if they’re just talking or fighting or maybe the giants are singing and it sounds like earthquakes and avalanches from far, far away.

  “It’s like they’re calling us,” Worm says in a whispery soft voice. “Trying to tell us something.”

  I’m listening so hard my ears are hot, and finally I figure it out. The rumble noise from the train is echoing off the mountains. That’s what makes it sound so hollow and deep. It’s not giants talking under the earth, it’s only the lonesome sound the train makes as it goes through the world.

  But I don’t say anything and Worm keeps listening, and she’s smiling to herself, like she knows what the giants are saying, and that makes everything okay.

  I can’t hear the giants anymore, but there’s a song coming from inside the train. Rackety-roo, rackety-roo. Keep us safe from You Know Who.

  Joe wakes up fresh as a daisy, he says. He leans out the door of the boxcar and takes a sniff and goes, “Wyoming! I can smell Wyoming just around the bend! Better than perfume! Smells like dry dirt and tumbleweeds!”

  He says he’s been through this way before but he never gets tired of it. “I love this wide open country,” he says. “I bet you can see a hundred miles at least. See that mountain over there, against the dark patch of sky? Seems so close you could hit it with a rock, don’t it? Just you try! You could walk all day for a week and still you wouldn’t be close. What it is about the West, the real West, the scale is different. The sky is higher up and wider open and that makes everything bigger. Makes a man look to himself because there’s nobody else can see him! Yessir!”

  So we roll on into Wyoming and Joe says the train is probably making sixty miles an hour. Just humming along, running straight into the horizon, and nothing around but a few scrubby pine trees and these far-off mountains that look like somebody painted them against the sky.

  Every now and then the train stops, and Joe always knows where we are and why we stopped, and if we should change boxcars. “They got to fuel up those diesel engines,” he’ll say. Or, “They’re pickin’ up a ten-car hitch out of Casper.”

  Pretty much every time we stop, Joe disappears for a little while and then comes back with some kind of food. He never says exactly where he finds it, but when you’re hungry and riding the rails you don’t ask too many questions.

  He’ll heave up this big sack of oranges and go, “Nobody’ll miss these little beauties. Got to get our vitamins!”

  Maybe he’ll bring back a box of stale crackers and a big restaurant tin of honey and give it over to Worm and say, “Nothin’ wrong with these crackers a little honey won’t fix!”

  Thanks to our skinny friend, we never get so hungry we can’t stand it. Not that the Worm eats much, but Joe bets I could win one of those flapjack-eating contests where a bunch of lumberjacks eat until they bust. “It ain’t just a hollow leg with you,” he says, “it’s a hollow everything. Which means you’re still growing! Pardon me, son, but if you get any bigger you’re gonna need your own time zone!”

  For some reason I don’t mind it when Joe kids me about being big. Maybe because he’s so small and scrawny. Maybe because he doesn’t have much of anything, but he always shares it without making you feel like he’s doing you a favor. And he never asks what me and Worm are doing on our own, or tries to give us a bunch of advice about what we should do and why.

  Most important, any time Worm looks a little sad or unhappy, Joe is right there working to cheer her up. “Look over there,” he says, getting her attention. “No, farther out. You see that thing moving up and down? Looks like a big tipped-over swing set? That’s an oil pump. That’s right, they’re raising oil out of a deep well. They’ll put a pump like that wherever they find oil. Once I seen one right in a churchyard! Talk about an answer to your prayers!”

  Worm stares out at the horizon. “They look like giant birds pecking at the dirt,” she says.

  When Joe hears that, he doesn’t make fun of her, he just nods to himself and goes, “I never thought of it that way. Giant birds, huh?”

  We’re heading out throug
h the wide-open spaces for hours and hours. Pretty soon we’ll cross over into Montana, Joe says, where the last of the cowboys live, and the mountains reach all the way to the moon, and that’s where we change trains to Chivalry.

  Joe says we’re on the right track, yessir, and it feels good.

  The way night happens out West, the sun kind of disappears all at once and suddenly the stars are shining and the air feels thin and cool. Worm has got herself real comfortable on this pile of hay Joe fluffed up, reading with her miner’s light, and before long her chin starts to droop and then she’s fast asleep. I shut off the light to save the battery and Joe brings out this old wool blanket and covers her.

  Me and Joe are both shivering a little, but it feels good watching Worm sleep so calm and peaceful under that warm blanket.

  “I guess you know she’s pretty special,” Joe says.

  I don’t say anything because I hate gooey talk like that, but it makes me think about how sometimes you meet someone who really messes up your life but you’d rather have a messed-up life than not know them.

  Anyhow, everything will be okay if we can just find her father. And because we got lucky and bumped into Joe, now we’re headed in the right direction.

  I never do fall asleep. There’s something wide-awake inside my head that makes me think of Grim and Gram and how much I miss them, and how rotten it was for me to run off without telling them why, or even saying good-bye. I keep thinking how much they’ve done for me and how I never did anything much for them, except a couple of lame presents at Christmas or whatever.

  When the sun finally comes up, I’m still thinking about home, and how there’s no place I’d rather be but hanging out in the down under and reading my comic books for the umpteenth time.

  So I’m already feeling pretty low down and sorry for myself when Joe tells me the bad news.

  “We’re almost there,” he says, out of the blue.

  I go, “Huh?”

  “You kids want to get to Chivalry, right? Well, I got you on the right train. All you gotta do is ride it to the end and you’ll be there.”

  “But what about you?” I ask. “You’re coming, too, right?”

  Joe shakes his head. “I got business elsewhere,” he says. “I got to keep moving, I can’t stay still.”

  Which shows you what a doughnut brain I can be, because I’d been thinking somehow we’d stay on the train forever and just keep riding through the wide-open spaces, and Joe would always be there to tell us where we were, and what was going to happen next.

  The train starts slowing down, and gets so slow you could walk beside it.

  “There’s apples and that tin of American cheese,” Joe says, getting ready to go. “I left a big can of beans, too.”

  “What about your blanket?” I say, looking at where Worm is still curled up and sound asleep.

  “Better keep it,” he says. Before he hops down from the boxcar he says, “Here’s the deal. In about a hundred miles this train dead-ends in Chivalry. Hope you find what you’re looking for.”

  Then he slips over the side and he’s gone. The last thing I hear is his voice sounding far away already.

  “Yessir!” he calls out. “Don’t forget them beans! They got vitamins!”

  We’re alone again when Worm finally wakes up.

  “I dreamed I was home in my own bed,” she says. Then she stops herself, like there are parts of the dream she doesn’t want to talk about.

  I explain about Joe leaving, and how the last stop is supposed to be Chivalry. When I say how everything will be okay once she finds her real father, Worm stares down at her hands and won’t say anything. Which really blows my mind, because she’s supposed to be happy and excited, right?

  Worm has never been a big talker, but the closer we get to where we’re going, the less she says. Like she’s got this big secret and not talking is the only way to keep it all to herself.

  Meanwhile the train takes a long time rolling up toward the end of the line. Moving along in fits and starts. Every time we stop I lean out real careful and take a look around and sometimes I spot these railroad guys waving their arms and shouting out orders. If they suspect anybody is sneaking a ride on their train, it’s like they don’t care, or they don’t want to know.

  The mountains are right up close around here. You can see where they start and how they jut up so fast and steep it makes you dizzy looking all the way to the top. The mountains seem like they’re made of yellow dirt and yellow rock and a few scrawny-looking bushes here and there, like nothing can grow on a place that steep without falling off.

  One time the train stops inside a tunnel and it’s so dark it might as well be midnight. Worm switches on her light, but she isn’t reading, she’s using it to look at me. “I had this weird idea that we all disappear when the lights go out,” she says. “Not just you, but me, too.”

  I go, “That’s weird all right.”

  “Like they say, maybe there’s no such thing as a noise if there’s no one to hear it.”

  “Who says that?” I ask.

  “Just ‘they,’” she says. “I don’t know who.”

  “Well, ‘they’ sound pretty stupid to me,” I say. Which ends the conversation right there. Worm switches off the light and I figure she’s hoping I really have disappeared.

  I’m thinking: What am I going to do with a girl who doesn’t know what’s real and what’s just in her head? I’m thinking: Here we are in the dark, stuck inside a mountain in a place I’ve never been and we’re about a million miles from home and we don’t have the Dippy Hippie to help us, or Hobo Joe, or anybody at all, and I haven’t got a clue about what to do.

  That’s when my brain says, I told you so, you moron, and my brain is right, because it’s been telling me all along that running away was a big mistake.

  After a while, Worm’s voice comes out of the dark. “Are you still there?”

  I go, “Yeah.”

  “Good,” she says, and then she shuts up again.

  Suddenly the train goes bump-bump and starts moving again, and we slowly come out from under the mountain and back into daytime.

  At first the light makes me squint so hard I can’t really see anything. But pretty soon I can make out these shiny roofs and a bunch of chimneys and stuff.

  We’re looking down on this town full of junky old wooden buildings stuck right up against the bottom of the mountains. There’s only one road and it’s just plain dirt, no paving. The roofs are shiny because they’re made of tin, but when you look closer you can see streaks of rust and dark spots that must be holes. There’s a couple of old trucks, but the hoods are up and they look broke down forever.

  I keep expecting to see people going in and out of the buildings, or maybe kicking the tires on those old trucks, but the only thing moving is a broken door slapping in the breeze. It looks like everybody just walked away from Chivalry and never came back.

  I always wondered what a ghost town was. Now I know.

  Now that Chivalry turns out to be this falling-down old place where nobody normal would ever live, I’m starting to think maybe Worm’s father is going to turn out to be even weirder than she is. He’s probably some old hermit with a long white beard, or one of those guys who walk around in camouflage gear talking to themselves about what happened in the war.

  Okay, so maybe finding Worm’s real dad won’t solve everything. But at least I won’t be the only one looking out for her. And even if my brain doesn’t think so, I’m hoping he can help clear it up with the police, and make it so everybody doesn’t think I’m a kidnapper, or worse.

  “You sure this is the right place?” I ask as the train rolls through the little town.

  Worm nods. She hasn’t said a word since we came out of the tunnel, and she’s not reading her book, either. Her eyes have this look that’s either scared or excited, maybe both.

  The old train station is built right up against the side of the mountain. It’s all boarded up with plywood coverin
g the doors and windows. Which doesn’t do much good because part of the roof has caved in.

  Near the train station I notice a faded sign that says,

  CHIVALRY MINING CORPORATION

  “We’re Digging for the Future!”

  I doubt this is the future they had in mind, with everybody gone and the whole town falling down. From the look of everything, they must have run out of stuff to mine, and that’s why nobody is around.

  All of a sudden the train motors stop and you can feel the way everything goes dead quiet.

  “We better get out of here,” I say. Because sooner or later those railroad guys are going to check the boxcars and never mind what my stupid brain says, I’m not ready to get caught yet.

  Worm helps me load up with apples and cheese and the other food Joe left behind.

  “You know where your father lives?” I ask.

  Worm shakes her head no.

  “But you’re sure he’s here?” I ask.

  “I’m sure,” she says, but her voice sounds so small it’s like she swallowed something the wrong way.

  We slip away from the boxcar without being seen and skid down this gravel embankment until we’re out of sight of the train. Worm stays close to me while I check out the old buildings, looking for a good place to hide until we can find her real father, or until he finds us.

  I’m kind of spooked, because it feels like something is watching us from inside the ratty old buildings, like the empty windows are really eyes. The sound of a broken door slamming in the wind is driving me nuts.

  “Come on,” I say, and we head straight for the banging door. It’s on the back side of this boarded-up building that has gray clapboards peeling off and a saggy old front porch that faces the dirt street.

  The first step through that busted door almost breaks my leg.

  Wham! My foot goes through the floorboards and I fall sideways. The air gets whumped out of me so bad I can’t say anything, I just have to lie there and wheeze for a while.