by Billy Coffey
“No,” he screams. “Dumb Willie, don’t,” as the bottom ledge of the boxcar inches closer a final time. Abel feels himself being hefted higher and tilted back in the same motion.
Here time does slow, if only for Abel’s final breath. The train itself is made silent, the rails and wind. All thought and feeling are gone as Abel takes flight. His arms are outstretched and grasping, eyes wide as he realizes Dumb Willie hasn’t thrown him far enough. Abel will not land inside the car, nor will his fingers even scrape the ledge. All things fall away as every memory and sense returns, the sum of his days reduced to a pinpoint in his mind. What fills Abel are not the letters he carries folded in his back pocket or the hungry steel beneath him and around, not Dumb Willie or Chris Jones or Reverend Johnny Mills. It is instead the picture of his momma, how tired she has always looked and how Abel was so wrong in leaving her alone.
His body begins to drop toward the wheels as Abel yields to what is meant. Somewhere far away, Dumb Willie cries out in a noise too full of knowing to have been made by an idiot.
There comes a moment of utter pain and nothingness, a great letting go that ends when two small hands emerge from the darkness of the boxcar. They take hold of Abel’s shoulders, lifting him.
The last thing Abel feels is himself flying once more. The last he hears is Dumb Willie, screaming his name.
PART IV
THE TRAIN
-1-
He tumbles end over end into the middle of the boxcar and lands hard on his bad arm. There is no pounding of a broken bone bumped, no searing agony. Only panic grips Abel as he goes sliding. He shoots his left hand over the boards, searching for a gap or knothole, anything to stop his movement. None can be found in this darkness. The pitch and sway of the train drags him deeper into the car, the rectangle of dim light at the door shrinking. And outside, the anguished voice of Dumb Willie, wailing Abel’s name.
His foot strikes the back of the boxcar; Abel struggles to his knees only to be thrown off-balance. He sinks to his stomach as a shadow appears at the door’s edge. Fear silences what warning he may shout for Dumb Willie to run, to watch out. The shadow reaches down and out in a single motion that ends with Dumb Willie’s bulging form pulled inside. He is thrown inside with an odd sort of grace, a perfect somersault that places him in the precise spot where Abel landed, legs straight and arms stretching to the sides, looking the way Jesus hung on the cross inside all the books Dumb Willie’s momma has.
“A. Bull.”
Wailing the broken word not as a plea for help but as the sound a heart makes when it has been rent and stripped bare. Dumb Willie is crying. Abel has never heard him cry.
The shadow is gone, the wide door empty but for ashen moonlight. Noise floods Abel’s senses, wind and iron and the train’s squeal as it gathers itself away from the field. Beyond, the night flies, near meadows and distant ridges and all the world Abel has ever known, his momma and their little house. And Abel here in this box of steel and wood, alone but for the company of a killer and the shadow of some something. His perception shrinks to just what he can smell—a rank combination of diesel and what can only be urine.
“A. Bull.”
“I’m here,” Abel says, and that is all he says, because he is here and Dumb Willie and that something else as well, and Abel doesn’t know just now which frightens him more.
Dumb Willie’s form sits up and scampers toward the sound of Abel’s voice. “A Bull you. Fawled.”
Abel feels Dumb Willie’s fingers groping for him. He stabs at them in the darkness with his cast, then feels the stroke against his arm.
“Don’t touch me,” he says, so loud that Abel knows Dumb Willie has heard him. He knows that shadow, that whatever-it-is, has heard him as well.
Dumb Willie jerks his hand away as though it’s been burned. Which, Abel supposes, it has been, only by the heat of his words rather than his skin. He regrets saying it as soon as he does. Not only because it has called attention to themselves, but because Abel knows Dumb Willie’s feelings are hurt. But he cannot bear that touch for the moment, those same hands upon him that just shook Chris Jones until his neck snapped and all the life in him drained out. It doesn’t matter that Dumb Willie’s memory of that act has likely been shaken out as well, him being special in that way just as Abel is special in another. It doesn’t matter, because Abel will never be rid of Chris’s final moments. That look of rage and hate as he rained down his fists and swore death swirling to the one of shock and puzzlement that became Chris’s dying expression. That memory will haunt the remainder of Abel’s days.
“I didn’t fall,” he says. “I’m okay, Dumb Willie.”
Around and beneath him, the train ratchets upward into the hill country. Abel climbs to his knees, gathering balance. Now to his feet. He searches the darkness.
In his ear, Dumb Willie says, “Sumthun got. Me.”
“I know.” And softer, “Me too.”
Motion at the opposite end of the car, there and now not. The train is gathering speed. Outside, the world is a mass of hard shadows broken by occasional house lights in the distance, shooting stars that blink away too fast to wish upon. They could make it to the door. Jump if they must. Even if for Abel jumping would mean—
From the darkness comes a voice that echoes over the wheels and rails: “Who are you?”
Dumb Willie shrieks.
“You can’t be here,” the voice says. “Nobody’s supposed to be here.”
Abel spins his head to where the words have come from, far in the opposite corner, just as Dumb Willie answers, “A Bull. Fawled.”
“No, I didn’t,” Abel whispers.
“What’s that?” the voice asks. “Who are you?”
No longer in the corner. A spot near the door? Abel thinks he sees a shadow there.
He gropes for Dumb Willie’s hand and finds it. Squeezes. The meaning is clear: Don’t say a word.
“I’m Dumb. Willie.”
“Got to be dumb,” the voice answers, “thinking you can flip a cannonball like that. What you make me do that for?”
A girl’s voice. One tired like Abel’s momma’s and just as kind, with a sweetness like Miss Ellie’s. There’s a girl on the train. This frightens Abel even more than seeing Chris dead and knowing the man who killed him is currently holding his hand, scares him more than even his tumble toward the rails.
A light blooms, hardening the shadow near the door to a tall, slender body. Her back is to Abel, the flame hidden. When she turns, the light takes hold and gathers atop a thick white candle in the girl’s left hand to reveal the far side of the car and a battered leather bag against the wall there. She is young, older than one of the high school kids but not by much. Her hair is long and auburn, half of which has been tied into a ponytail that hangs over her left shoulder. The rest tumbles down the right side of her face, curling inward just below a narrow chin so that it frames two blue eyes that sparkle.
Most of her hair is hidden beneath a black hat like the ones Abel has seen in the old movies, something a gangster would wear, or an old farmer. Its brim is beaten and its crown holed. The ribbon has gone missing. Her blue jeans are worn through at the knees; her tennis shoes may have once been white but are now as filthy as those on Abel’s feet. The shirt she wears matches the hat’s color, a black streaked with the gray dust of the boxcar. A row of white buttons begins midway to her stomach. Only half of these are fastened, revealing smooth, tanned skin and the beginnings of two mounds that threaten to loosen Abel’s bladder. He pinches it shut before there is an accident.
“It’sa. Girl,” Dumb Willie says, his voice awed and low, like he’s witnessing a miracle.
“You hush,” the girl says. There is venom in her voice, and rising rage.
“You keep away,” Abel says.
“Or what?”
“He’ll kill you.”
Spoken in the gravest possible tone and without the slightest tremble, because Abel knows these words to be true. As an adde
d warning, he glances at Dumb Willie beside him. Most of the big man remains hidden by the night, though the candle reveals a splattered streak of blood—Chris’s, it can be no one else’s—staining the front of his overalls. Yet where there should be building rage (or at least bubbling fear) upon Dumb Willie’s face, Abel sees something else. Dumb Willie isn’t looking at the girl at all. He’s looking at Abel instead, slack-mouthed, his cheeks flushed and his eyes wide and watering.
Abel looks back to the girl. “You better be scared.”
She chuckles, the candle bobbing in her hand. “That a fact? I don’t see nothing much to fear. What are you two doing in my house?”
Dumb Willie glances down at his hands, flexing them. He looks up to Abel and says, “Chris. Stunk,” before Abel plunges him into woeful silence with a single look. However much Abel longs to see that slumbering monster inside his friend bare its teeth to the stranger across the way, no trace of it appears. Instead, Dumb Willie shifts his look of dreamlike wonder, unchanged and whole, from Abel to the figure by the door. It’s as though he’s never seen a girl before. Or at least not one this beautiful.
“That your name?” she asks. “Chris?”
“I’m Dumb”—grinning now—“Willie.”
The candle flickers. The girl shields the flame by cupping it in her hand, forcing the light to cone around her face. Abel reminds himself to breathe.
“We didn’t know anyone’d be here,” he says. “We’re sorry.”
“Sorry?” The car fills with a chuckle that sounds more like sadness, like the breaking of a sacred thing. “Sorry don’t mean a thing now.”
“You can’t throw us out.”
“Why? You’ll kill me if I try?”
Abel doesn’t like the question. Nor does he much approve of the manner in which it was asked, with the raising of one brown eyebrow and a smirk that conveys some secret knowing. He wonders if the girl was watching at the curve. If she saw.
“We won’t bother you. Ain’t that right, Dumb Willie?”
Dumb Willie says, “It’sa girl. Over there.”
“Can’t throw you out,” she says. “But if you stay, I’ll need rent. You got anything I need?”
Abel thinks of his backpack, now lost miles behind. And given that Dumb Willie’s next reply only serves to remind them yet again that Chris stunk, Abel is left to believe what provisions his friend brought have been left behind as well, either back along the curve or in the field, tossed away with as little forethought as Dumb Willie tossed Chris. In a night filled by all manner of horrible things, this is the one that collapses Abel’s spirit. They have neither rent to pay nor supplies to see them to Fairhope. Worse, it won’t be long before Chris is found. Come morning, Royce Jones will rise to find his boy gone. The Farmers will discover Dumb Willie missing, and Lisa will sneak into Abel’s room to wake him and find his bed empty. Sheriff Barnett, the whole town. How long before someone gets the idea to search the tracks behind Medford Hoskins’s old rental house? How long before they find Chris and find Abel’s pack, find Dumb Willie’s?
How long until they know?
“We don’t have anything. We lost it all getting on the train.”
“Sure now?” she asks. “Bet you carrying something of worth.”
Her eyes narrow in a way that is less doubt than searching, the candle held high. Abel thinks of the letters in his pocket.
“I’m sure.”
She adjusts her hat and neither nods nor speaks, only sits, using the leather bag as her chair.
Abel sits as well. He leans against the corner of the car and pulls on Dumb Willie’s arm, making him settle.
“It’sa. Girl.”
“I know. You just sit here with me, Dumb Willie. Sit here and don’t you move.”
They ride for what feels a long while, long enough for the train to crest the mountains and the car to shift such that Abel’s end is the one higher. Dumb Willie’s chin drops. He raises it with a grunt, flutters his eyes. No amount of elbowing and pleading on Abel’s part can keep him present. Dumb Willie sleeps as only the ignorant can, deep and peaceful.
The girl continues her vigil by the door. There is something of her that Abel feels is terrible in a way terrible doesn’t mean, much like the flame in her hand can comfort so long as you don’t draw too near. Abel stares down at his cast, which has been left dented but whole. He stares and will not look away, because even now he can feel the girl’s eyes upon him, those pretty blue ones set inside that pretty face. He feels that look as one that speaks not of friendship, but of options weighed and regrets counted.
-2-
Only now does the world slow enough for the girl to regain her thoughts, consider things, and what she considers is not the boy across the way or his slumbering friend Dumb Willie or even how the two of them came to be in this car. What the girl considers is how this should not be.
The boy moves his gaze away toward something and anything else, finally settling on the filthy yellow cast that covers an arm so small the girl doubts it would even reach past her own wrist. Beside him sleeps the one called Dumb Willie, his snore silent over the grinding rails. That snore is far more comforting than the look Dumb Willie first gave her, one so full of wonder and knowing that she could only answer in anger.
Yes, she thinks. Anger is what she felt. At them, at herself. And it is anger she still feels, though now tempered with the fear of being placed in such a position as this.
It was a mistake, bringing them here. Dumb Willie, but the boy most of all.
Yet as the boy draws his legs inward to make a wall of knobby knees and grass-stained denim between them, the girl believes she has committed no violation. Would anyone be seated where she is now, they would believe the same.
They, too, would have taken pity.
The boy is a frail thing, pale and waiflike, with strange alien eyes and a body that looks pieced together of spare parts—one short leg matched with one longer, a chest too full for his waist, an odd hip alongside an even one.
No harm has yet been done that cannot be repaired.
He glances up, meeting her eyes for only an instant. Now looking away again, to Dumb Willie rather than the cast. His hand slips behind his back in a slow motion designed to go unnoticed but which only calls attention to itself. What does he have back there?
“Thank you,” the boy says.
“For what?”
“Saving us. You didn’t have to.”
“Shouldn’t have,” the girl says. “It’s not meant. Understand?”
“No,” says the boy. “Are you a hobo, a tramp, or a bum?”
“What?”
“I read about them. How they sneak on trains. I know all about trains.”
“You don’t know enough to not try to get on one that’s moving. You think something like that can end more than one way?”
“We had to.”
The boy grows quiet. Good, she thinks. Let him be still awhile, give me time to think. Should have thought before, she wouldn’t be in this mess now. Should have left what was meant to take its course as she stood in the darkness of this car, looking out on that field. Should have stayed apart even as that strange scene unfolded before her eyes, this boy being beaten by another and Dumb Willie running.
Should have let it be.
But no, she couldn’t. Not one more time.
“Hobo,” she says.
The boy raises his head. “What?”
“To answer you. Hobo, tramp, bum. Hobo.”
“That’s good.”
She lets the candle flicker, the flame struggle to keep hold. “Why do you say that?”
“Hobos are trustable,” the boy says. “Tramps don’t work ’less they got to, bums won’t work at all. But a hobo works all the time. He travels and he works. Or she.”
“You’re a smart fella.”
“I read it,” the boy says.
The girl lets silence sink in again, or what passes for it here. Just the wind and the wheels, the sin
ging rails. She says, “You know all about hobos, guess you know the code.”
“Code?”
“Hobo code. Everybody got to have a code, ’bo ain’t no different. Like how you got to cause no trouble and how you got to move like a ghost. Not be seen. Like how you ain’t supposed to help no runaways.”
“I ain’t no runaway.”
“Well, why you here then?” She points to Dumb Willie, still snoring in spite of all the hollering around him. “Why’s he here? Only two reasons anybody’s got to hop a train to anyplace. Either it’s for what they think they’ll find when they get there, or to run from the place they are.”
“We’re on a mission,” says the boy.
“For what?”
He won’t answer.
“You in trouble?”
He won’t answer that either.
You are, she thinks. The both of you. Now I am too. And you have no idea how much.
She settles her back against the car, taking in the two boys across the way. Neither is so different from the ones who’ve come before, who whether by their own choosing or not reach the end of one thing and have nothing to do but go in search of another. Dumb Willie wears a bloodstain on the front of his overalls. There are no cuts on his body or the boy’s. The other boy’s, then—the one Dumb Willie killed. Flung him like a bale of hay, left him a sack of lifeless bones. The girl had watched, silent and hidden, as Dumb Willie snatched up his friend and went running for this boxcar. Him screaming and the boy screaming. What she should have done was nothing. Abel went tumbling to the rails, and what the girl was supposed to do was trust what’s meant.
But there had been none of that this time. No standing guard, no trust. No code. Because after that fall and in the midst of those cries
