It was the kind of rev-up for a storm that made your chest pound with dread and anticipation, and though many of the families had left in their cars, all those that stayed had gathered side by side at the railing of the bridge to look at the water and study the sky. There were women in halter tops and kimonos and bikini bottoms standing like teapots with their hands on their hips, and men in bluejeans, not wearing any shirts, hunched around their fishing poles half-awake from fear and weariness. A couple little kids stood beneath the arms and legs of their parents, swinging from their mama’s hips or rotating about their daddy’s knees, but the parents didn’t pay them much mind. Once in a while they’d reach back a hand and stroke the little kid’s face or hair, but otherwise they kept their eyes keen on the sky and water, as if the storm might break the instant they looked away, as if they might miss at the one moment least worthy of looking away the one moment most worth waiting for.
In the distance I could hear a train in the railway yards beyond the port. Sure enough, a white pillar of smoke moved like a huge bird across the dark sky, and beneath it I could see the chain of heavy swaying cars as the train pulled slowly through the city. When at first I saw the smoke I imagined it was from Bohannon’s house, but I knew the smoke from the fire had been black, and only white smoke like that from a train would show itself moving in a storm-eaten sky. Black swallowed black in the case of a storm, in the case of smoke or fire in a bad-weather sky.
“After the storm,” my brother said, “whenever it comes, you’ll see morning full. It wasn’t dark like this thirty minutes ago. Oh, it was dark all right, it was night even, but it wasn’t dark like this. After the storm breaks it’ll rain hard and fast, then, when the worst is done, it’ll drizzle for an hour or two. It’ll be drizzling in full daylight, and you won’t remember none of this.”
We were almost off the bridge and beyond all the people, and there wasn’t any sign of a cop anywhere. Quickly, then, as if he scented something, my brother stopped and turned and walked to the railing of the old bay bridge. I went up beside him, and we looked out across the bay. I watched where his finger was pointing.
Over the water, no more than a halfmile out, the air hung gray-speckled from a quick summer squall, and beyond that, about two miles off in the east, a long whitish-charcoal thing, shaped like an upside-down cornucopia, hovered above the waterline.
“Funnel cloud,” I whispered.
My brother nodded.
“Waterspouts,” he said.
He pointed again to the vicinity of where I was looking, then his hand began to scan farther to the east.
“You see that?” he asked me.
“The funnel cloud?” I said.
He brought his hand down. “Uh-huh,” he answered. “All three of ’em.”
I looked harder, right where his hand had pointed, and saw them. Floating, cone-shaped, like suspension ladders extended from earth to heaven, the other two stood there, hovering in the background of the first and largest waterspout. Altogether they looked like panty hose hung up on a shower rod, or skinny barracuda on a fishmarket scale, and they meant that we might have tornadoes inland, that the fishermen and their families camped out on the old bay bridge might get hit by three brewing cyclones.
“Do you think they see them?” I asked my brother.
He turned to look at the people, then we were walking again.
“Hunh,” he said. “It’s all they can see. Those folks is hypnotized, look at them. They can’t take their eyes off of it. Sometimes you’ve got to have strength to look away.”
We passed the barge where the little girls were playing. I noticed then that one of them was not so little, that, in fact, she wasn’t even a girl. She was a woman, old enough to be pregnant, and she rested her head against the same chain pile, holding her swollen stomach and laughing at the sky. I could tell she was having a good time. I didn’t have to ask her.
Spray from the dead barge blew across us over the water as we passed through the last of the deserted port. As I walked away from the pitching barge I could hear the laughter of the pregnant girl growing. I’d never heard a woman’s voice—or anyone’s for that matter—get gradually louder as you moved away from it. It was as if the wind were blowing it up with air, placing it like toy balloons beneath our tired feet; every step I took seemed to make the girl’s voice break all the louder. Just when I thought we were out of her range I’d hear one last uncontrolled pop, and soon it’d be followed by another. After it had died out completely I realized it was a sound I wasn’t likely to forget. Like a carnival calliope or a buzzer in a house of horror or the laughter of a fatman in a circus freakshow, her voice had a unique music to it, a stamp all its own, and when we’d passed completely through the old bay shipyards I could still hear her music calling after me, playing around in my head like a radio song you can’t shake off.
We turned down a dirt road that cars took to get to the bridge, and it led us to a white pebble hill where you could see the railroad switchyards. The deserted switching house was made of tumbledown wood, and the windows had been broken into. A boy and a girl, about my brother’s age, sat holding each other on a busted bench. When they saw us they squinted their eyes and fell back into what they were doing, all wrapped in one another like lovebirds in a pet store cage.
We stumbled down the white pebble hill and took to the maze of the railroad tracks. I went immediately to the track that was still in use and put my hand against the steel railing to feel how warm it was. I called to my brother. He came over, slowly.
“Put your hand there.”
“On the track?”
I said yes.
He did it, and when he felt how warm it was he laid himself out completely on the track, his whole body across it.
“This is where I wanna come,” he said. “This is where I wanna come lay when I die.”
I spread myself out on the track opposite his.
“You wait here and you’ll get your wish. Trains come on time every twenty-five minutes.”
He stretched his arms out behind his head and picked up a handful of pebbles. He threw them up into the air, and some of them landed on his face and body. He laughed.
“Then I better not stick around here,” he said. “No, sir. I’d better goddamn not.”
He sat up and turned and looked in the direction from where the next train would come.
“You see it?”
“No.”
“I do,” he said. “It’s got a black face and white hollow eyes. It says its all right for me to be on the track, but you better get the hell off.”
He looked at me.
“You know why?” he asked.
“No.”
He didn’t look at me no more.
“You know why.”
I got up and started to walk. This time, he followed me.
We walked down the railroad tracks for less than a quarter-mile balancing like gymnasts on the balls of our feet. I ducked into the bushes to take a piss, and when I walked back up the white pebble hill I found him stretched out between the rails of the railroad tracks. His eyes were wide open, like an invisible hand was prying the lids, and the whole while he talked he wouldn’t take his eyes off me.
“It’s got a black face and white hollow eyes. It comes in the night when you’re lying awake and says, ‘Ohh. Ohh. Ohhhhhh!’ Do you know what it is? I bet you do. Do you know what it is?”
I told him it was death.
“Ohh,” he said, sort of speculative. “Ohh,” in the same tone, but kind of amused. Then he wrapped his hands around his stomach and let out a ferocious bellow, almost as if there were something inside of him, something he had to push on to force out. “Ohhhhhh! Ohhhhhh!” Only when his eyes fell back into themselves and his legs straightened out did I realize he’d been laughing, that the answer I’d given his riddle amounted to one of the funniest things he had ever heard.
“Oh. Oh. Oh!” he shouted. “Death? Death? Is that what you said to me? I told you on
ce, ain’t you got any ears? I sat up on the tracks and said I seen it coming. Death? Goddamn it. That ain’t the answer! It’s a train, you idiot. What I meant was a train!”
I looked down the railroad track sort of southward and saw it, that thing with the black face and white hollow eyes, moving toward us at a comfortable crawl. It may have been death, I didn’t know. But it looked like a train; it most certainly did. And it made the noise my brother’d described: “Ohh. Ohh. Ohhhhhh!”
“See?” he said. “See?” He had his back turned to me and was choking with laughter. His eyes were wild in the far-off lights of the train, and he had one hand on the knob of my shoulder trying to pull me down onto the tracks with him. “Do like me!” he hollered. “Do like me!”
“What do you mean, do like you?”
The train was still a good distance off, but it was getting closer by the minute; I could see the light.
“Do like me! Come on and do like me!”
I shoved his hand off of my shoulder.
“No, I ain’t gonna do like you. Least not until I know what it is you want done.”
“Listen,” he said. He drew his breath. “It’s easy. I seen it in the movies. It’s how you beat the trains. It’s how you beat that big old monster. Look.” He stopped grabbing at my shoulder and stretched out between the tracks as flat as a cedar two-by-four. “See? You lay low and it passes you over, like you ain’t even there to be flattened, like you ain’t even there to be seen. See?” He sat up quickly and lay flat again, to demonstrate. “You could lie next to me. The track’s wide enough for two. It’ll be a lot of fun. It’ll show that you can beat it.”
“Beat what?”
“The train! What do you think?”
He was grabbing at my shoulder again, trying to get me to lie down.
“You better hurry up,” he told me. “This isn’t any Saturday serial. This isn’t any godforsaken to-be-continued deal. You’ve gotta make up your mind. I ain’t gonna do it for you, and you haven’t got a whole helluva lotta time to think.”
Already my body was white from its glow. The cars weren’t approaching at a breakneck pace, they were approaching sort of slow and thorough and self-assured, but I knew it wouldn’t be long before they’d be upon us.
“Come on!” my brother said. “Stretch or be stretched. This isn’t any goddamn grocery cart. This isn’t the Sunday funnies and it isn’t Truth or Dare. Stretch or be stretched.”
I asked him if it’d be hot beneath the belly of the train.
“Ten times as hot as hell and twice as many devils shooting sparks up our asses.”
I did not lie beside him, because I did not want to risk losing an arm, but I did place my feet sole to sole
with his. I crossed my hands up over my face and took a huge gulp of stormbrewed air, as if I were preparing to spend a long time underwater. Then I heard my brother give a cowboy shout and the world became heat and steel and solid noise and I’d never hollered so loud or so long and nothing ever seemed so good or so true and I couldn’t remember a time or a place when anything had felt so real, so satisfying.
________________________________
Walk fast to your own end. I’ll be there to see you. Go.
I rose with that flavor of my heart in my mouth and went to him. He was the color of clean bed linen and his body twitched like some darklived thing left to manage in the light. I dipped my hand in a railroad puddle and sprinkled his face with water.
“Over! What?” His eyes were not open. “It’s almost what? It’s almost over.”
I sat beside him, waiting for his head to fall back together. I splashed his mouth with water while he babbled.
“What? Oh! I’m gonna live beneath the belly of a rolling bed of cottonmouthed firecrackers! I’m gonna stretch up these arms of steel and rattle the bars of the clattering cage ! I’ve got a steam whistle ! I’ve got a gravedigger! I’m wide awake for the boneyard express!”
“Quiet.”
I could see the train disappearing around the bend. It made less noise now that it was not above us.
“White eyes! What? What? White eyes of God the bluecrab!”
His arms were flung backward, fingers hooked around the ties as if the world, in complete disregard of the upside down and the undelivered, had suddenly decided to right itself.
I said it to him.
“What?”
I said it to him again.
“No. Oh, no.” His eyes bobbed back pale and empty, showing veins. “Please. I can’t. I already beat it once. You said it yourself. I don’t have to beat it no more.”
“That’s right,” I told him. “You already beat it once.”
We could hear the train now.
“Ohh,” it said. “Ohh. Ohhhhhh!”
I looked at him. He was coming to.
“I didn’t make you. Remember that.”
I wasn’t sure if he could hear me.
“I didn’t tell you that you had to do it.”
He rolled over on his side curled up like a beebee pellet. His body looked like somebody was pulling on it, pulling from his feet.
“I want to go back,” he said.
“We can’t now.”
I put the burlap sack beneath me and lay his down for him to sit on. The yellow plastic of the slide is warm from the nearness of the sun, and we can see the grounds of the school below us. There are kids behind us in line waiting to go down, and he just stands there, hands wadded into fists, not saying a word nor moving, not even looking as scared as he is.
“I had a dream about this once’t,” he says. “I climbed to the top of a carnival slide, and just as I was about ready to go down, it started to come apart beneath me. I didn’t die though. There was just that awful feeling of falling, and I knew it was a dream, but the falling wasn’t any less horrible. I almost wished it weren’t a dream so I could hit the earth and get myself killed and get all the falling over with.”
He sets himself down on the burlap sack and we join hands as we fall. At the bottom of the slide he is all smiles and laughter and ready to pay another two quarters. I say, “I told you we couldn’t climb down the steps we clumb up. Once you’re at the top of a slide, you ain’t got no option but to slide backdown.”
“Come on.”
I helped him to his feet and we headed in the direction of the switchyard house. There was a half-blinking station light and behind it I could see those two mooneyed kids still feeling each other up like the world was coming to an end. I went to them and showed them the knife. They didn’t run or anything, like I’d suspected, they just stopped what they were doing and sat there staring, almost as if they were closed in behind protective glass. They were both so young-looking I wouldn’t have needed a knife to have hurt them. I wouldn’t have needed nothing save my hands.
“Do you want us to git?” the girl said.
I nodded and sort of twisted the knife.
“That’s right,” I said. “That’s what I want.”
Her boyfriend sat there like a bump on a log, not even looking at me really, but taking me in sort of indirectly, as if my head were off center.
“We heard tell about the West Port strangler,” said the boy. “You ain’t him, are ya?”
I told him I wasn’t and the girl started laughing.
“Oh, you!” she howled, slapping him. “Don’t you know nothing about nothing? A strangler wouldn’t have no knife in his hands, he’d have a pair of panty hose! Ain’t you ever seen any strangler movies? Gawd!”
They were breaking up all over each other then, and when I went to bring the boyfriends’ arm behind his back, I saw how gone the both of them were. The girl’s eyes were red and spotty in the dim morning light, and the boy’s body reeked of the stuff.
“Christ!” the boy hollered. “Don’t yank my fucking arm off! We’ll git, we’ll git!”
The girl flashed a wounded look at the boy, as if he were the one who was forcing them to go, not me.
“I liked it here,�
�� she pouted, as they stood to leave. “There weren’t any mosquiters, nor people, nor policemen. There weren’t nothing here but us, and I liked it like that. Now we’re gonna get caught in all this worthless rain.”
I watched them as they weaved across the railroad tracks. When they had disappeared, I sat on the bench and rested.
“Your father is sleeping.”
She sits at the kitchen table staring at the tablecloth. It is past twelve midnight, and her look is not one of weariness nor worry but the duty-ridden look of a woman who has been forced to stay up past her preference.
“Where have you been?”
“Out.”
She runs her hand across the length of the tablecloth.
“Where you been out at?”
“Merreau Island.”
“With who?”
“Nobody.”
She gets upfrom the table and goes to the refrigerator and takes a swig of water from the waterjug. She looks at me and turns on the stovelight.
“What’s her name?”
“Who?”
“Nobody. What’s this Nobody-girl’s name?”
“I don’t know, ” I tell her. “Listen. What does it matter? I want to go to bed. ”
“All right, ” she says. She turns from the light. As I’m walking away she looks again and sees me scratching.
“Wait.”
“What.”
My hand is beneath my arm, and I am digging at it, underneath my armpit.
“Why’re you scratching there?”
I sigh at her.
“ ’Cause I got mosquito bit. Why else?”
“Don’t be brief with me, ” she says. She holds my eyes in hers until I bow and look away. “You wait right here. And take off your shirt. I’m gonna get some calamine.”
Life in the Land of the Living Page 16
