All the Earth, Thrown to the Sky

by Joe R. Lansdale

  He saw us and yelled something.

  Floyd hollered out, “Run like hell!”

  We took off running for the train. It was slowing, but I didn’t think it was slowing enough. The sacks we were carrying were heavy and weighed us down.

  I looked back, and the man with the nightstick was gaining on us. As we got near the train, Floyd yelled, “Grab on and climb in!”

  Easier said than done, but it did seem as if the train was slowing even more. We picked out an open boxcar and went for it. Jane slung her sack in the open door, and she jumped first. She was nimble as a deer. She hit the floor of the open boxcar with her palms and she was up and in. I had to keep running. Finally I was close enough to throw my bag inside and grab and swing myself up. Jane got hold of me and helped pull me in.

  When we looked back, Floyd had Tony on his shoulders and was running alongside the car as if Tony weighed no more than his hat.

  Floyd flung his hat into the open boxcar, snatched Tony off his shoulders while he was running, and sort of stuck him at the car. Me and Jane grabbed him and pulled him on board. Tony had lost his sack of goods.

  We could hear Floyd breathing loudly as he ran. In the next moment, he was grabbing at it and climbing on board and we were helping him.

  The bull hadn’t given up. He was winded too, and he sounded like a busted accordion when he ran, but he was closing in.

  Floyd was almost inside when the bull hit his leg with the nightstick. Floyd let out a groan and turned so that he was facing out of the car. As the bull came closer again, huffing and puffing and having lost his hat, Floyd kicked out and caught him in the face and the bull tumbled backwards and did a flip.

  “Eat them apples!” Floyd yelled.

  The train began to pick up speed. It had been slowing all the while this was going on, but now it was starting to go faster and faster, and there wasn’t any way that bull could catch up, even if he’d been on a bicycle, or a horse. We was hauling now; the wind blowing by like we was in a little tornado.

  We looked back and the bull was getting up and yelling at us and shaking his nightstick.

  “That don’t get nothing done,” Floyd yelled at him. “We’re already gone.”

  The bull turned into a little dot.

  Tony said, “Look there.”

  We turned to look at the back end of the boxcar. An old man was lying inside with his back up against the corner. He was looking at us, but he didn’t look as if he thought we were really there. He looked completely tuckered out. His cheeks was dirty and had fell into themselves like sinkholes. His hair was thin, and the pieces of it that was left looked like they had been drawn on his head with a pencil.

  I went over to him and the others followed. I said, “Are you okay?”

  He opened his watery eyes and looked up at me. “I’m just about gone. That’s what I am.” When he spoke, his tongue came out of his mouth, it was so thick and dry. When it did it touched the few bottom teeth he had left and wiggled them around like loose fence posts in a high wind.

  Floyd was there now. He bent down and said, “What’s wrong with you, pops?”

  “I done got old. Worn out.”

  “What you look like to me is hungry,” Floyd said. “When did you eat last?”

  “I don’t know,” the old man said. “I can’t remember.”

  “If you can’t remember when you ate last,” Floyd said, “then that’s too long. Jack, you mind giving him something from your sack?”

  I nodded and started digging in it. I came up with my can opener and a couple of cans. One was soup and the other was meat. I opened them and gave them to him with a spoon.

  The old man started to eat.

  Floyd grabbed his hand, said, “You eat, but you got to slow it down, or you’ll just puke it all up. Take a bite, chew a long time. Drink the soup slow.”

  “I ain’t got nothing much left to chew with,” the old man said.

  Jane had come up with a couple more cans, but Floyd shook his head and she put them back in her bag.

  The man ate slowly like he was told. He closed his eyes sometimes while he chewed. He ate like it was the first time he had ever tasted food. I was glad I had given him soup, and that the meat was some kind of ham that was easy to chew.

  We just stayed where we were and listened to the train chug and clank along and watched the old man eat. He ate the meat and drank the soup like it was water.

  After a while, he paused and looked up at us.

  “I feel a little better,” he said.

  “See there,” Floyd said. “You ain’t done for. You’re just hungry.”

  The old man smiled at us. “Oh, I’m done, all right. But at least I won’t go away hungry.”

  “You’ll be all right,” Floyd said. “You just take it easy. Here, stretch out.”

  Floyd got the old man under the shoulders and helped him stretch out. Then Floyd crushed his nice hat up and put it under the old man’s head and covered him with his suit coat.

  The old man went straight to sleep.

  “I miss my old man,” Floyd said. “He reminds me some of him.”

  “That was an awfully nice thing to do,” Jane said.

  “It wasn’t nothing,” Floyd said. “It ain’t nothing at all. Something like that,” he said, straightening his coat over the old man so that it covered him better, “is like the little boy who stuck his finger in a hole in the dike. It don’t really work, and it don’t hold back nothing for long. It’s just another moment he’s got.”

  “Well,” Jane said. “It’s another moment, then.”

  “Yeah,” Floyd said. “It’s that, all right. But it ain’t nothing else.”

  28

  “Thing to do when you get to Fort Worth,” Floyd said, “is get off. This train is going to slow, but it ain’t going to stop. I’ve ridden it before. You got to jump off before you get into the station, and then you got to walk up close to the station and get another train that goes to Tyler, and then you got to get off there, ’cause its next stop is Lindale, which is a little burg outside of Tyler. You understand?”

  We said that we did.

  “I can’t help you after we get off,” he said. “I got business to take care of. I can’t be messing with you kids.”

  “You’ve treated us fine,” I said.

  “You have,” Jane said, and the way she looked at him made me a little jealous.

  “I’m glad I could help,” he said. “But after Fort Worth you’re on your own.”

  “We understand,” I said.

  “I’d rather you stay with us,” Jane said.

  “Can’t,” Floyd said.

  Floyd looked back at the old man.

  “What about him?” I said.

  “Time’s got him by the leg,” Floyd said, “and it’s holding on tight, and it’s tugging him away, and I’m pretty sure it ain’t going to give him back.”

  After a while we pulled some cans of food out of our bags and shared them with Floyd, and then we all found a place to sit down with our backs against the car, and with the train rocking on the tracks and the excitement we’d had, we all drifted off to sleep.

  We rode like that a long ways, and when we did wake up, none of us had much to say. We went back to sleep. That was how it worked until the train rolled us in a few miles outside of the Fort Worth trainyards. We could see them in the distance.

  Floyd said, “All right, now. Coming up is the jump-off spot. We all jump off there. I point you to your train, and then I’m gone.”

  The old man was awake now, and he had sat up with his back against the boxcar. He straightened out Floyd’s hat and his coat and laid them over his knees.

  “You’re going to be needing these, son,” the old man said.

  “Yes, sir,” Floyd said. “I suppose I will.”

  As Floyd went over and got his hat and coat, the old man looked up, said, “You’re him, ain’t you?”

  “Him who?”

  “Pretty Boy Floyd.”
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  “I don’t like being called that.”

  “But you’re him just the same, ain’t you?”

  “Charles is my first name,” Floyd said. “I don’t like none of that Pretty Boy business.”

  “I don’t care what they say,” the old man said. “You ain’t bad in my book. You could run over a child on a tricycle and shoot the eye out of a one-legged librarian lady, and I’d still be on your side.”

  Floyd laughed. “You don’t have to worry about me doing nothing like that. And don’t believe everything you read in the papers. I done all that stuff they say I did, robbed all them banks they claim I’d robbed, there’d have to be four of me, and a couple more to rest up for later.”

  Floyd put his coat and hat on, said, “You need some help getting out of the boxcar, pops?”

  “I ain’t never getting off,” the old man said. “This is my home. I stay here, and I die here. Ain’t no one going to miss me.”

  “Someone will,” said Floyd.

  “No,” the old man said. “They won’t.”

  “I’ll think about you, then,” Floyd said.

  “Do that, boy. Do that for me.”

  “I will,” Floyd said, tipping his hat. “But I don’t want my last thought of you to be that I left you on a train and you couldn’t get off. I bet we could help you off. These folks are riding to Tyler. You could ride with them.”

  “I’ll give it a shot,” the old man said, “but I don’t know how much I got left in me.”

  “Why don’t we find out? What’s your name, pops?”

  “Daggart.”

  “All right, then, Daggart. You ready?”

  “No,” said Daggart, “but the way I see it, if I can’t jump out of this train, I can darn sure fall out of it.”

  “That’s the spirit,” Floyd said.

  29

  I got an arm around one side of Daggart, and Floyd got the other side. Me and him jumped with the old man, hit the ground, and tumbled some. It was grassy there and kind of wooded, so we had a soft landing and were partly hid behind the trees. The old man took the fall well enough. We helped him up and he seemed okay. Worst I got was a mouthful of dirt and grass. After all the sand I’d seen, that bit of grass was pretty nice. Back in Oklahoma, green was as rare as a solid meal.

  Behind us, Jane and Tony jumped and landed safely. When it was all said and done, we managed to get off without breaking a leg or twisting an ankle.

  “Now,” Floyd said. “You see the tracks on the other side of the trees? I’ve caught that line before. It goes to Tyler. It don’t stop once it gets rolling, so that’s the one you want. It’ll take you all the way in. There’s enough of a slant on the other side of them trees, you get to moving downhill pretty quick, you can make the boxcar easy. It’s kind of like a porch that leads down to it. It’s high up and slanted about right, though you got to get off to a good run.”

  “I can’t run,” Daggart said. “Maybe I can just roll down and onto it.”

  “You’d roll down and under it,” Jane said.

  “Hell, I know that,” Daggart said. “I was kidding. Didn’t you know I was kidding?”

  “Good,” Jane said. “You’re up to joking. That’s an improvement.”

  “All I’m saying,” Daggart said, “is I’ve caught it here before. I just don’t know I can do it today. I don’t know I want to go to Tyler.”

  “You’re just being contrary,” Jane said.

  “A little, I reckon,” he said. “Maybe it’s because I feel like death warmed over with a match, and the heat’s fading.”

  “We’ll stay with you,” I said. “At least until we can get you settled somewhere.”

  “Ain’t no place to settle me,” he said.

  “We’ll do what we can,” I said.

  He sat down with his back against a little pine and looked down the tracks. A few seconds later, he said, “Guess going with you folks is a mite better than just sitting here in these trees and dying.”

  “You got to think more positive,” Jane said. “You got to see what’s down the road a bit.”

  “I done seen what’s down there. There’s just more road.”

  In the cover of the trees, we squatted and waited, the old man still sitting with his back against the pine.

  Up a ways ahead of us, I saw there was at least a half-dozen hoboes in the trees and brush, waiting on that train. They looked back at us in a manner that made me a little nervous. We wouldn’t be the only ones riding, and there might be some trouble if we weren’t careful.

  “Try and get the same boxcar, if you can,” Floyd said. “That way you can watch out for one another if there’s someone else in the car that might take a mind to bother you. But let me tell you, they got a gun, a knife, it’s best to give them what they want or jump.”

  “That won’t be much,” Jane said. “Our bag of goods and a few dollars is all we got.”

  “It ain’t worth dying over,” Floyd said.

  “You didn’t give them sandwiches away the other night,” Tony said.

  “No,” Floyd said. “But I was meaner than them, and I had a gun. I ain’t proud of that gun. It ain’t brought me much good, except that time the other night. A gun just seems to make things go bad. You start to depend on it and give it too much respect. I wish I hadn’t never seen one.”

  “Is that the train?” Daggart said.

  We looked down the track. A train was moving out of the station.

  “That’s the one heading southeast,” Floyd said. “The one you want.”

  “Could the line have changed since you rode it last?” Jane said.

  “Sure it could have,” Floyd said. “But you don’t want to think about that, do you? But you miss it, there’s tomorrow, about this same time. It leaves out when the Fort Worth train comes in. I know that much from having been here and known people who’ve ridden it.”

  “I guess it’s in for a penny, in for a pound,” Jane said. “Bend down.”

  Floyd studied her for a moment; then he bent closer to her face and she kissed him on the cheek.

  “Thanks for being so kind,” she said.

  “Pass it along,” Floyd said. “I ain’t passed near enough of it along before, so you do it for me. Say you will.”

  “We’ll do that,” I said.

  Floyd shook my and Tony’s hands. He bent down and shook Daggart’s hand. The old man was still resting against that pine tree. Floyd touched his shoulder.

  “Goodbye and good luck,” Floyd said, and with that he moved across the track well in front of the oncoming train, turned, and waved at us, and then the train’s engine passed in front of him, followed by the train, and then we couldn’t see him anymore.

  30

  As the train began to move closer, we watched for an open boxcar. A number of closed ones passed. Finally we saw an open one, but those hoboes charged down from the trees and dove right into it.

  I could see there was a line of open boxcars behind that one. I turned and got hold of Daggart’s arm to help him up, but he was deadweight.

  I bent down and looked at him. “He’s gone, Jane,” I said.

  In just those few moments, he’d given it up. What was left of Daggart had flown out of him and gone the way of last year. His eyes were still open, and so was his mouth. A fly had already landed on his bottom lip. I waved it away.

  “Least he didn’t suffer none,” Jane said. “And he was with folks he liked.”

  “He didn’t even know us,” I said.

  “I figure he knew us enough. His last memories are of people being nice to him.”

  “There ain’t no sense to nothing,” Tony said. “I don’t want to ride no train.”

  “Yes you do,” Jane said, grabbing him and pushing him in the direction of the tracks.

  “We ought to do something,” I said. “We ought not just leave him.”

  “We can’t wait,” Jane said. “He’s gone and there isn’t a thing we can do. And that train’s going to be gone to
o. I don’t want to hide somewhere and wait until tomorrow. He’s dead and that’s it. We done what we could.”

  I closed Daggart’s eyes with my fingers. It wasn’t a perfect job, but his lids mostly covered them over.

  “Come on,” Jane said, and grabbed my arm. “You got to come on now.”

  Then she let go of me, and she and Tony were darting down the hill toward the train.

  I looked one more time at Daggart. “Sorry,” I said. “Burying folks don’t seem to be our stong suit.”

  I ran down the hill after them then. I could see they had already reached a boxcar and were struggling on board. The train was starting to move fast. I ran as hard as I could.

  “Come on, Jack!” Jane shouted. “Now ain’t the time to get lazy.”

  I ran so hard I thought my heart would burst. I finally got up alongside the open boxcar and got hold of it, but my hand slipped and I nearly stumbled onto the rails and beneath the train.

  For a moment there, I thought about quitting. I thought about letting the train go and just going back up into the trees and leaning up against a pine next to poor old Daggart. But then I thought about my daddy, how he had quit when things got bad, and decided I wasn’t going to be a quitter in any kind of way. I ran even harder. The sweat flew off me as I ran. Or at least I thought it was sweat at first. Then I realized that some of it was, but not all. Some of it was tears.

  A moment later and the train would have picked up too much speed for me to make it, but I got a ladder down from the open boxcar and pulled myself up on that and rested a minute. Jane stuck her head out of the car and grinned at me.

  I grinned back.

  After a few minutes, I climbed up on the hitch, found the ladder that led to the top of the boxcar, and went up there. Then I swung down from the top and stuck my legs inside. Tony and Jane grabbed me and helped pull me in.

  We sat up against the side of the car. There wasn’t anyone in it but us.