by David Rowell
“Hey, my mom liked him,” Walt said, “but my dad said Bobby Kennedy had everything handed to him his whole life.”
“Why did he do it, anyway?” Daniel said. “Why did he kill him?”
“They don’t know,” Ty said. “Not really.” Michael was looking down at the ground, following an ant. The others looked at him, and then at one another. Walt shrugged.
“Michael, what did your dad think about Kennedy?” Ty said. Walt and Daniel looked at Ty in vague disbelief, and then turned to Michael. Michael shook his head without looking up.
“I don’t know,” he said. “We never talked about that kind of stuff. He wasn’t shot yet when I was with him.”
“Hey, so what did you guys do together all that time?” Walt said. “What were you doing in Michigan, anyway?”
Michael lifted his head and considered Walt’s red face. “My dad rented a cabin there, by a lake,” he said. “This little log cabin. It was small, but it was made of these giant logs.”
“Cool,” Ty said.
“We fished a lot,” Michael said. “And he showed me how to prepare the fish, how to cut their heads off and take off the scales with a paring knife. And a couple of times he let me shoot his pistol at some tin cans. Have you guys ever shot a real gun before?”
The boys said they hadn’t. “Not a real one,” Daniel said.
“He’s not talking about squirt guns, doofus,” Ty said.
Daniel said, “Duuuh.”
“They’re loud,” Michael said, “and it knocks your arm way back when you fire.” He then demonstrated, his arm soaring over his head.
The three boys tried to imagine.
“Did you know everyone thought you were dead at first?” Daniel said.
“Shut up,” Ty said.
Michael watched one of the magpies fly to a lower branch. “No.”
“Hey, only in the beginning,” Walt said. “Then your mom figured it out, I guess.”
Ty looked at Walt and rolled his eyes.
“We knew you’d come back,” Daniel said.
New York
So you’re a college boy, then,” Big Brass said.
Lionel said he was.
Big Brass nodded, though this was not an indication of his approval. He poured himself a half-cup of Coke and took a glance out the window, where he caught sight of factory workers leaning out the windows of a building the color of gums.
They were standing behind one of the vents, the air cool and pleasing on the back of their necks, and when it suddenly cut off, both men turned around, as if the vent would explain.
“That ain’t good,” Big Brass said, and within a minute they could feel the car warming up.
Lionel was getting used to the rumble under his feet, the sudden thrust that threatened his balance at any moment. Big Brass had been watching him, and after Lionel reached for the soft-paneled wall to steady himself, he told him, “Always be connected to something. If I’m not pouring a drink, my hand is holding on to this little surface right here.” He indicated that Lionel should look at his hand. “If I’m pouring a drink and I need to steady the cup, I’m moving my feet a little wider apart. If you keep them together too close, it’s easier to fall. Your weight’s not distributed. The wide stance is your friend on this train, always.”
Lionel had been taking the subway his whole life, but he showed the older man how he would do it from now on, his feet apart in a way that felt unnatural. Big Brass took his time before responding. “That’ll work,” he said.
A man with a press badge leaned over to order a hot dog, and Lionel watched Big Brass lift one of the wieners, pinch it into a bun, and then close it into a small convection oven underneath. He then wrapped it in tinfoil and dropped it into a cardboard box. “That’s hot, sir, so do be careful,” Big Brass said, and the man put his coins on the counter, grinning and unwrapping it to apply ketchup.
Big Brass began to tell Lionel a few things he should know about the temperamental convection oven when another train soared past—a distance in between that felt like mere inches. The force of the other train’s speed sent a little quake through the snack car, and Lionel gripped the edge of the counter.
“Huh. I’m surprised they’re not holding trains until we pass,” Big Brass said. “Seems like that’s what they ought to do.” It took him a moment to remember what instruction he was giving when their train ground to a dramatic slowdown, so much so that the tip jar traveled the length of the counter.
Lionel looked to the older man for an explanation, but Big Brass wasn’t ready to speculate. He crouched down and looked outside, as several of the passengers had thought to do as well. But what he saw offered no clues.
“Something’s going on,” he said. “Where was that we just passed through? Was that the Elizabeth station?”
Lionel hadn’t noticed.
“Yeah, that was Elizabeth,” Big Brass said. “But something’s wrong to slow the train down like this. We were cooking at sixty miles an hour, thereabouts.” He waited, taking a calculation as only a man who had ridden trains his whole life could. “This, this is twenty-two miles an hour right now. Something is most definitely afoot.”
Maryland
Miriam had wandered out to the backyard, feigning interest in Jamie’s shooting. Roy was standing a few feet away from Jamie as he aimed his bow, and she could hear Jamie talking in a low voice. He was most likely talking about his technique—his release and follow-through. She watched Roy as he wrote in his notebook, and stepped closer to them. When Jamie released another arrow—this one hitting just to the right of the yellow circle, she called out, “How’s the interview with Robin Hood going?”
Roy turned, already smiling politely. She was older-looking than he was prepared for—for some reason he had clung to the image of the girl in pigtails and braces from the picture in the hallway. Miriam was wearing tight-fitting jeans and a loose madras top that revealed her narrow shoulders. Her hair was clipped by a yellow barrette, and she had a mischievous smile that Roy didn’t see in Jamie or her mother. She could have easily passed for a sorority girl, he thought—a Maryland Tri-Delta, or Alpha Delta Pi. When Roy realized that Jamie wasn’t going to make the introductions, he told her his name and stepped over to shake her hand, which made her giggle.
“So are you raking him over the coals yet?” she said.
Roy laughed uneasily. “Oh, I don’t know about that. Your brother’s pretty tough.”
“I guess,” she said, walking over to the back of Jamie’s chair. “But there are ways of making him talk.” She ran her hand through his hair once. She never liked how the high-and-tight had looked on him, but she was sorry now not to feel the prickly sensation of it. “So am I in the way of official business?”
“Ask Edward R. Murrow here,” Jamie said.
“He’s just showing me his shooting,” Roy said, “which, of course, is highly impressive. Do you shoot, too?”
“I shoot my mouth off,” she said. “But I don’t shoot arrows. So you went to Burton. You would have been a senior when I was a freshman, but I don’t remember seeing you. Do you remember me?”
“I don’t know that we ever met,” Roy said.
“Murphy was a close friend of Claire’s,” Jamie said, aiming his bow once more.
“Oh wow, Claire the Fair. So you and Jamie were friends, then?”
“We didn’t actually hang out together too much,” Roy said quickly.
Jamie made a sound in his throat, but Roy pretended not to notice.
“Huh,” Miriam said. She could see that Jamie was in a mood—irritated, remote. She figured it to be an awkward situation for Roy, and she was surprised to feel more softhearted to him than to her brother. She could see that Roy was someone Jamie wouldn’t like—mannerly, physically unimposing, perhaps a little too brainy.
“So are you going to ask me some questions? I’ll be a good interview. I’m a serious blabber, though, so just be warned.”
Jamie put down his bow and
glared at her, but she was having too much fun now. She thought of what she had said at the breakfast table that morning, trying to be Jamie’s protector, and now she was surprised by how much distance she had from that feeling. Since he had come back home, they had spent plenty of time in each other’s company, but mostly Jamie was content to be silent. Miriam and her mother had assured each other that this was to be expected, given Jamie’s injury, the trauma of war. But Ellie had also come to wonder if for Jamie, home had become Vietnam.
“Here,” Miriam said, and she walked over to remove some arrows from the targets, whose color was conveyed only in fragments now. When she had tugged the last arrow out, she said, “You should move the targets back. This has gotten too easy for you.”
When she put the arrows back in Jamie’s hands, she said to Roy, “So, what, you’re interning at the paper?”
“That’s right,” Roy said. “I’m at Maryland.”
“I might go there,” she said. “Or Penn State. How do you like it there?”
“I like it,” Roy said. “Good classes, good journalism program. The campus isn’t much to look at, if that kind of thing is important to you, but it’s a fun place. You’d like it there, I’d bet.”
“And that’s not where Claire goes, right? She went to—where did she go? Virginia?” She looked down at Jamie, who had no intention of answering.
“Right, Charlottesville,” Roy said. “I was telling Jamie I don’t really hear from her. She hasn’t come back here during the summers. The last I heard she was studying psychology. But who knows?”
“Claire’s going to be a shrink?” she said. “Gosh, I always figured Claire as more of a poetry teacher, or teaching English literature at some girls’ school. She had that air about her, you know. That way.”
“You talk like you two were pals,” Jamie said.
“Well, you dated a long time. She was always at the house. I don’t know, I felt like I knew Claire pretty well, actually. I don’t know her now, obviously. I’m just saying—”
“Now you see my sister wasn’t being modest when she talked about her ability to blab.”
“Touchy about the old flame, are we?” Miriam said.
“I’m just saying, whether she’s a psychology major or an English Lit major or whatever the hell she is, it doesn’t have a lot to do with me, does it? You and Mom with your ‘Oh, Claire.’ Do you think her parents don’t know about what’s happened to me? In a town like this? Have I gotten a phone call from her or a letter? Anything that says she could give a damn? So all this mooning over Claire is, you know, is . . . I don’t really need it.”
Roy had been looking down during this time, too embarrassed to look at Miriam, too nervous to look at Jamie. Finally Miriam turned and walked back toward the back door.
“So what else do you want to know?” Jamie said.
Pennsylvania
Delores and Rebecca sat sipping their Cherry Cokes. They were at Stribe’s Drive-In, and on the tray attached to Delores’s door was an empty carton of crinkle-cut French fries and the balled-up wrapper of a cheeseburger. Rebecca held half of her cheeseburger in its wax paper and sometimes tried to smile, which she saw put her mother at a little more ease. On and off for an hour Delores had managed to hold ice to Rebecca’s face, but still, from a few inches above Rebecca’s eye to just above her jawline, her skin resembled the sky at twilight. She had managed to walk a little outside the grocery store without noticeable difficulty, and the way she gripped her doll and the fact that her crying had dwindled to sniffling made Delores believe she had suffered no serious injuries; they didn’t need a doctor after all.
When the boys got badly scraped or bruised, they were engaged in activities Arch entirely approved of—football or climbing a tree or wrestling. He was particularly cautious with Rebecca, though, calling her his “little plum,” and he could quickly fall into a rage if either of the boys was being rough with her. He was just as protective of Delores. He didn’t like her getting on ladders or handling hammers or carving the meat with sharp knives. In the early years of their marriage, Delores had found this attitude rather endearing, and she was amused when he gently removed such things from her hands and sometimes kissed her on the cheek as he sent her off so that he could handle the task in question. But with three children that habit had became at first impractical, then irksome. For much of their young lives the boys had needed two pieces of wood nailed together or sawed in half, or airplanes made of balsa wood rescued from tree branches, and since no one ever turned any lights off except Delores, bulbs constantly needed replacing. These little jobs had become the heart of Delores’s days, and Arch’s ideas about what Delores should and shouldn’t do had lost all significance.
Delores peered inside Stribe’s—at an older man and woman tucked into a booth, the man’s head hung low toward his cardboard plate, the woman trying to make conversation with him despite his wish that she stop. Delores reached over and gripped Rebecca’s knobby knee like a gearshift. “Maybe today we’ll have two lunches,” she said. “What do you think about that?” When Rebecca didn’t answer, Delores pressed the button on the speaker box and waited for someone to respond.
New York
The laggard speed of the train allowed the faces of the mourners to come through distinctly, and many of them waved when they saw anyone from the cars looking out.
“Sure are a lot of people out there,” Big Brass said. “And all of them hot. ’Course, we’re in a train that’s already lost its air condition.”
Buster Hayes made his way through the crowded car, and even before he could reach his crew members his expression had indicated grim news.
“Let me tell you what I know,” he said when he got to Big Brass, and he spoke into the man’s ear. Lionel could see that he should focus on the bar. A few passengers had taken notice of Buster Hayes when he came through, and the room grew quieter.
“We don’t want to excite anyone,” Hayes said. “But that train that just blew by, the Admiral, ran straight over some folks back in Elizabeth. The crowd didn’t know other trains were running—I didn’t know that, either—so they were all over the tracks. Conductor’s just trying to get a sense of how bad it is.”
“Good God Almighty,” Big Brass said. Buster Hayes agreed, then said, “Two of them just got pulled right under, they say. And listen to this: one of them was a woman holding a little girl at the time. But the report I got said the girl got thrown into the air and landed in the crowd, if you can believe it.”
Big Brass was not yet ready to.
“So we’re slowed indefinitely until they can work this mess out,” Buster Hayes said, and he became aware that half of the car’s passengers had trained their eyes on the two men. “Kennedy family about to have a fit.”
“With good reason,” Big Brass said. “Lord, Lord.”
“Anyway, I need to check in with the others, and I’ll let you know more when I get an update. They’re radioing back and forth like crazy, trying to make sure all the other trains get held as we pass.”
“Well, that’s the first thing I thought when that train just went by us. I knew that wasn’t right.”
“No, it wasn’t,” Buster Hayes said. “It’s a major fuckup is what it is. Conductor was pulling the emergency brake, apparently, but it didn’t slow him down enough.”
“No,” Big Brass said. “Mercy.”
Buster Hayes pulled away from Big Brass then and clapped Lionel on the shoulder. “You all right, young buck?”
“Yes, sir,” Lionel said. He had heard everything, but he tried to hold himself as if he was surprised that Buster Hayes was still in the car.
“Mr. Trent will fill you in on what’s happening. But let him do the talking with passengers. This is a situation, right here. And we want everyone to be as calm as can be, considering.”
“Yes, sir,” Lionel said. Buster Hayes moved carefully through to the next car, and after the passengers watched him go, they turned to Lionel and Big Brass.
“This is something else,” Big Brass whispered.
New Jersey
The train was nearly forty-five minutes late, and Ty put his ear to the railroad track.
“Hear anything?” Daniel asked.
Ty shook his head and checked his watch again. “Not yet.”
Michael balanced himself along the rail as Walt piled some stones on top of a wooden plank. Daniel stretched out lengthwise over the tracks, his hands together under the small of his back. “I’m tied up,” he said.
The boys studied him and were pleased with the new idea. Ty walked over. “Well, I warned you and your gang,” he said. “I told you there’d be trouble if you didn’t leave town. Now it’s curtains for you.”
Then: “No one will save you this time,” Walt added.
Ty lay down on the tracks, putting his ankles together and his wrists over his head. “Michael, try it,” he said.
In the distance, Michael could see a man and a woman walking hand in hand. “Here comes someone.”
Ty and Daniel craned their heads from the tracks. Walt shielded his eyes from the sun.
“I didn’t think we’d be the only ones here,” Ty said. “I’ll bet you they don’t climb any trees, though. Michael, get tied up.”
Michael brushed away some pebbles before easing his back onto the tracks. He lifted his head off the rail several times before he could find a suitable angle.
“You’ve rounded up the whole gang,” Ty said to Walt.
“That’s right,” Walt said. “All of you varmints are going to pay now.” He wanted to say more, but he felt out of his element as a ruthless sheriff. “That’s right,” he finally added. He caught sight of a few more people approaching the tracks. “Hey, where do you guess they’re all coming from? You think they parked over by Webber Street and walked along the stream?”
Ty lifted his head again. “I was thinking most people would just go downtown to watch. Train’s passing right over Dunlop Road. Doesn’t matter much to me, though.”
