An Angel On Her Shoulder

by Dan Alatorre

  I sat in my car and watched the long train roll by, each set of steel wheels making a clack-clack as it went over the crossing. That’s a noise I knew well. The rhythm lulled me into a kind of daydream, bringing back memories of Millersburg.

  When I was a kid, a classmate’s mom had died over the summer in a terrible accident. When people first heard about it, we were all really surprised. My parents were absolutely shocked. But I was young. Kids didn’t process things the way we later would as adults.

  Jenny Billen’s mom had been hit by a train, along with their little baby. We knew the Billens because Jenny was in the same grade as me. Our families went to the same church, and my older brother was on the basketball team with Jenny’s older brother. Our families were kind of close. When my dad felt inclined to buy an antique car, the Billens stored it at their ranch for us in an unused barn stall. I visited there once in a while. One time, Mrs. Billen gave me a peanut butter sandwich with a glass of milk that came right from their cows. I almost didn’t want to drink it. Milk came from a bottle in the refrigerator, not from a bucket under a cow. I was certain it had missed some very important decontamination process that was supposed to occur before you could drink it.

  When I first heard about her accident, I assumed that Mrs. Billen had probably been driving in their station wagon, and when the crossing lights began to flash, she tried to beat the striped guard pole as it came down over the road. Somehow the train must have caught her as she drove across the tracks. As kids we had heard stories like that before. On the way to soccer practice, if some teenager drove around the crossing gates to beat the oncoming train, Mom would point it out. Look how insane that person is! That’s very dangerous. You should never do that!

  This was different.

  Mrs. Billen wasn’t driving anywhere; she was walking. Somehow, she had managed to be walking alongside the train tracks with her little baby and gotten hit by the train.

  In our small Indiana town, train tracks were everywhere. They fed the big industries that helped our town grow and thrive for decades: Richmond Chemicals, Metcalf Machinery and Mining, Atlas Engineering, among others. Most of them are gone now, but once upon a time, big thundering trains rolled through our city with the sound of progress and prosperity. When a kid got old enough to ride a bike, train tracks became a real pain in the butt. A tire might go sidelong into the two-inch dugout on each side of the steel rails at a crossing, and it would send him flying. Driving a car, a long train would ruin your mad dash to school or work.

  Teenagers can’t budget for traffic or train delays. It’s not in their DNA until sometime after age thirty or so.

  As kids, we tried to flatten coins by placing them on the train tracks. Jimmy tried it a few times down near the park. You had to put a penny on the big steel rail, and when the train went by it would smash the penny flat—as thin as paper and as wide as a half dollar. Or so we had heard, anyway. We only knew about flattening coins the same way all kids learn things like that—from some other kid whose older brother had done it.

  The train conductors knew kids liked to do that stuff, too, and they must have hated it. One wrong move by some dumb kid, and splat, the kid would get flattened along with the coins. The train’s engineers were always on the lookout as they passed through towns.

  Smashing coins was more difficult than you’d think. The oncoming train vibrated the tracks with such great intensity the coins moved around and fell off the rail. That meant you had to jump up at the last minute and replace your coins or they wouldn’t get flattened.

  Time it wrong, and you’d get flattened.

  Even the rush of wind from the passing train was strong and violent. It was scary the first time I felt it, because I wasn’t expecting it. From our hiding spot in the trees twenty feet away, the wind from the train was still massive and powerful. The vibrations came through the ground and into your Keds, and the suction created by the enormous train engine could pull you under its huge steel wheels.

  Adventurous kids would sometimes hop aboard slow moving trains as they came to the crossings or needed to switch tracks. That often met in disaster, too, like the kids who insisted on swimming in the Indiana rock quarries every summer. You could read about some kid drowning from the shifting sands in the quarry every year, and you could find a story about some kid getting his leg cut off—or worse—trying to jump onto a moving train. They were like annual stories in the paper, only with different names each time. But I guess the draw of the cool water or the thrill of a free train ride was enough to make dumb kids take unknowing risks. Kids don’t read newspapers.

  As I sat in my car watching the train roll by, I thought about the game my dad would play when we were stuck by a train. He would try to get us kids to wait out the delay by counting the boxcars and coal cars rolling down the tracks. It was an old trick, and it usually met with mediocre success. It gets boring counting train cars unless there are a lot of them, and then that gets boring because there are too many.

  This time, I was first in line, a front row seat. The only thing between me and the rolling thunder of the giant train was a small striped pole from the roadside train guard.

  From there, even in the car, I could feel the vibrations of the massive locomotive. It made me think.

  How the heck did my classmate’s mom not hear that thing coming?

  The trains were so big and so noisy, it seemed inconceivable that somebody couldn’t hear them coming. Mrs. Billen hadn’t been placing pennies on the rail to flatten them, either.

  An awful, queasy feeling shot through me. Maybe she did hear the train.

  A cold sweat broke out on my forehead as I envisioned what happened. She heard it coming. You can’t not hear a train coming. And you can’t be taking a walk by the tracks and not notice it from a long way off.

  Gripping the steering wheel, I tried to not see, to not know. The images came at me fast, blinding me to all but the horror they displayed.

  I swallowed hard, shaking my head, fighting it, but it overwhelmed me. I had to look. I couldn’t not look.

  The very thought of not seeing made my insides churn. I thought I’d throw up in my car. I was gasping, sweating, hot and stuffy—but unable to stop seeing it.

  She would know the train schedules just like everybody else in town. There were the morning ones that made me late for class in high school, and the afternoon ones that made me late for my job after school. I can’t tell you now what times they ran, but I could have told you then.

  The scene played out inside my car like a movie projector was showing it on my windshield and all around me. Like I was there.

  She put away the breakfast dishes the way she did every morning, and walked over to the high chair. Glassy eyed, she picked the baby up. I felt him squirming in my arms when she did. He was getting heavier now that he was a few months old.

  The day before, she had seen her older kids off to summer camp. It was a much quieter house without them. This morning, she kissed her husband goodbye as he went off to work the cattle auction. For one week a month, he would spend the morning in town and the afternoon at the stockyards getting everything counted and ready.

  She had the big ranch house to herself, just her and the baby.

  She opened the window over the sink while she washed the dishes, gazing absently over the green pasture. Afterward, she dried her hands on a dish towel and slid the station wagon keys off the hook on the wall.

  She drove past the small grocery stores that were closer to the farm, going all the way down to Robertson’s. She found a spot in the middle of the lot and lifted the gear shift on the steering column until it clicked into park. She got the baby and walked toward the front door, but instead of going inside the store, she walked on down the covered sidewalk to the side of the building and went around the corner.

  Here, the train tracks were closest to the store. There was the asphalt driveway that the delivery trucks used, then a short span of woods, and then the train tracks—a distance of
maybe seventy-five feet, in all.

  Waiting near the store, she heard the distant howl of the train horn as it passed the crossing two miles away at Sunset Street. The noise carried in the wind. That was her cue.

  I squeezed my eyes shut, my breath coming in short gasps as I watched her step onto the asphalt driveway.

  A delivery truck slammed on its brakes to avoid her. The driver honked. Mrs. Billen should have been startled, but she wasn’t. Holding her baby in her arms, she looked up at the driver, paused, and then moved on.

  The truck driver shook his hands in the air.

  When she reached the wooded area, she paused again. The closest tree that would hide her was very close to the clearing for the drainage ditch. She wrapped her body around her sleeping child as best she could, to prevent the branches from scratching him as she pushed her way through the underbrush. Then she waited.

  She could not yet hear the train but she could hear its next horn blast as it passed through each intersection, a friendly honk to drivers as the huge locomotive made its way through town.

  Her breathing calm and slow, she gazed at the tracks. Simply down a small hill and up a small hill. Her pulse quickened. My heart pounded with adrenaline as a bead of sweat rolled down my cheek.

  Another blast from the train horn as it crossed the intersection at Morris Road. It was getting closer. I groaned, my stomach clenched in fear as I watched.

  She observed the distance to the tracks with the next horn blast. She turned to look. In the distance, the massive engine pushed its way out of the morning mist: a small white headlight surrounded by the painted yellow cat of the Chessie system train.

  Right on time, she thought. Her heart was pounding now. My feet were pressed to the floor slamming invisible brakes.

  The train’s speed was deceptive. Objects that big don’t appear to be going fast. Slowing down to pass through town, the train still moved at a brisk fifty miles per hour. As the giant steel engine rounded a small curve a mile away, Mrs. Billen stared at the tracks close by. A short run down the hill and a short run up the other side to the tracks.

  Now she could start to feel the rumble of the big train. It started as a methodic clacking with a low hum underneath. The closer it came, the louder the clacking grew. The thunderous engine vibrated the ground. Its trademark yellow cat image became clear in the sunlight.

  Another blast from its loud horn as it crossed Hanna Avenue a few hundred yards away. That one woke the baby. He began to cry.

  I couldn’t breathe. I clenched my teeth and squeezed my eyes shut, unable to stop the images all around me from continuing.

  The rumbling grew louder. Her feet began to shake. Mrs. Billen put a hand on the tree to steady herself. Her baby crying, she took a deep breath.

  She pushed off from the tree and sprinted down the short hill. Running with her child in her arms, each stride landed hard on the ground. She rushed across the flat span to the short hill, being careful not to fall.

  The train engineer saw something move out from the trees on the left. Maybe a deer, he thought, and moved over to the left window to check.

  Mrs. Billen looked up at the coming train, less than a hundred feet from where she stood. Its terrible noise deafened her and drowned out the cries of her infant son. She paused, only for a moment, as a hand frantically waved at her from the engine window.

  The blaring horn was overwhelmed by the piercing screech of the metal brakes. She stepped up the short hill to the tracks, clutching her son.

  She looked down at the gravel dancing under her feet from the rumbling of the massive locomotive. Then the ground was covered in a huge shadow.

  She lifted her head to see the large painted cat as it leaped at her.

  Closing her eyes, she braced to receive it.

  I sat in my car, shaking as I cried, my shirt drenched in sweat. The churning in my stomach caused me to gag and spit. I slapped at the armrest buttons to put down a window, gulping the fresh air.

  It took the train over a mile to come to a complete stop. By then, there was not much left to identify Mrs. Billen or her son. Hours later, the police finally figured out the car in the Robertson’s parking lot belonged to the bodies on the tracks. The car keys at the accident site fit the station wagon door. Mrs. Billen’s purse rested under the front seat.

  Then a phone call was made to the stockyards, to locate her husband and give him the terrible news.

  I wiped my eyes. Whatever her personal pain, her world of depression, Mrs. Billen heard the train call to her—and she went to answer it.

  That’s what I knew now. I knew it. I saw it.

  She crossed over into the realm of the dark angels, the ones that push us to do the unthinkable.

  She did it on purpose and took her baby with her. It was as simple as that. And as evil as that, to take the life of an innocent baby.

  What other possible explanation could there be?

  One, perhaps. The one they made up and gave to us kids. I remembered that.

  A lie told to young classmates by their parents to protect them from the horrors of the world for a little while longer.

  A lie told to the Billen kids to ease their pain and keep the good memories of their mother intact.

  A method to prevent a well-meaning friend who came over to see the new calf, from asking innocent questions that would keep the torture alive.

  A gift of love, really. Everyone would look the other way. What benefit was there to dwell on the truth of such a tragedy?

  And what is the truth, anyway? They said she didn’t hear it coming. That it was an accident. Who was I to argue? Still . . . With my bloodshot eyes and wet shirt, I now knew there were other explanations.

  Darker ones. Ugly ones.

  In all the years since, I never spoke about what happened to Mrs. Billen. Not to my wife, not to anyone. I never mentioned it to a living soul since the summer it happened, and I couldn’t believe I thought of it now.

  Father Frank was working on me.

  The driver behind me laid on his car horn, yanking me out of my fog. The train had passed.

  Sitting up, I put my car into drive and headed for home. My queasiness had vanished.

  But I think I understood what Father Frank was getting at—or starting to. I think I may have started to grasp it. The aberrations, these dark angels or whatever they are. Maybe they do exist. I may have met one.

  Once upon a time, she gave me a peanut butter sandwich with a glass of milk that came right from her cow.

  My queasiness came rushing back as I realized something much worse. I may have been best friends with one.

  Chapter 15

  “What?” The cars were whizzing by my green Schwinn as Jimmy and I rode our bikes to Woolco. I couldn’t hear his question over the noise. There were too many cars, driving way too close to us.

  As adults we tend to forget these things, but being a ten-year-old kid on a bike, riding down a busy road with cars going by barely two feet away—it can feel pretty ominous.

  Construction in several places along Washburn Boulevard, our chosen route to Woolco to procure more model boats, created the hazard that forced us into the street. Apartments were being built, so whole sections along the busy road didn't have sidewalks. That wasn’t a big deal on our own street—the only cars that drove down Reigert Drive belonged to people who lived there. But going out to the bigger, busier roads was a different story.

  A scrawny little kid on a bike feels it when a car goes past at forty miles an hour. You wouldn’t think forty miles per hour was very fast riding in a car as a passenger, but a car that goes by you at that speed when you’re a kid on a bike, it’s a whole different ball game. Squeezed onto the side of a bustling main road with car after car whizzing by, it’s amazingly fast. And loud. The hum of the tires make a lot of noise, especially if the cars already have snow tires on them. Trucks make the most noise. When one of the big concrete trucks rolled by, it was like a jet liner was getting ready to land on your h
ead. The freaking ground shook. But the biggest part was the wind.

  Even when the smallest sedan goes by you on your bike, the wind in its wake tugs at you and pulls you toward the road. It would grab at you and knock you off balance. A big car going by felt like it could throw you to the ground. Asphalt roads do horrible things to hands when you fall off your bike. Not only did it sting like hell, you had to sit there and pick the little rocks out of your wounded knees and palms. Then you had to climb back on your bike, bleeding, and keep riding. It didn’t matter whether you gave up and went home, or whether you toughed it out and rode on to the store, a bike was usually a kid’s fastest way to get to someplace. And riding with a skinned knee or buckshot hands was the worst.

  Usually, we encouraged each other to keep going and get to the store. The thinking was, as long as you already went through all that trouble, you might as well get your model boat. I bet Woolco saw more than one bleeding kid pull up on his bike on any given summer day.

  So our little excursion to acquire additional warships to destroy down in the creek was made a little more adventurous—and a lot longer—by the lack of sidewalks. At least it seemed longer to us.

  Amidst this chaos, Jimmy had said something to me, but I missed it. He shouted it again.

  “Would you kill Hitler?”

  “What, here? Now?”

  Another car roared by, its driver voicing disapproval by laying on the horn as it passed.

  “You wanna play now?”

  He was crazy. This road was too busy to talk back and forth to another kid on a bike behind me. I hated this part of the ride. We needed to get to the section of the road up ahead that had the sidewalk, where we could ride safely. That’s what was on my mind.

  Not Jimmy. “C’mon! Would you kill Hitler?”

  “Get off the road!” A motorist shouted as they sped by. We had to go on and off the street when there wasn’t a sidewalk, but we obviously weren’t doing it very well. This particular spot was a short section that was lasting forever.

  “Come on!” Jimmy shouted. “Let’s play!”