by Billy Coffey
(Those cries)
she remembers her own hand shooting out from the dark, taking hold of the boy. She remembers pulling the boy inside even as the deepest parts of herself screamed their protests, and remembers pulling Dumb Willie in as well, shattering everything, unbalancing some never-touched part of her own universe, and why? Why these two, when neither is no different from all those others who crossed her path?
And it is here the girl alights upon an answer, perhaps not the correct one but one that feels close enough to truth: it was because they were no different at all. Because that made them everyone.
“I’m not running away,” the boy says again. “I’m out to save my momma. I’m to bring my daddy home. I’ll get a reward.”
“What about him there?” she asks, nodding toward the hulking form beside him.
“Dumb Willie had to come. I have to keep him safe. That’s what friends do. Don’t you know that?”
She doesn’t. The candle flickers and the train rolls and she doesn’t know what friends means. She wonders if that, too, had a hand in this thing she’s done.
“We have to get to Fairhope,” the boy says. “It’s important.”
“Fairhope? Carolina? Long way to go if you don’t know where you’re going. That where your daddy is?”
“Yes. My name’s Abel.”
The girl nods. “Old name. Bible name.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“Well, Abel, I’m gonna snuff this candle. Burnin’ low, and I ain’t got another one. That suit?”
Abel dips his chin and raises it. He reaches for Dumb Willie’s hand. “You ain’t gone hurt us, are you? Because I don’t think you will. I think you’re kind.”
She laughs, too shaken to do anything else. “Kind? Ain’t nobody ever called me kind. But no, Abel. I ain’t gonna hurt you. You don’t have evil in your heart, do you? Or that man with you? One of you gonna sneak over here in the night and put me on the Westbound?”
“Never,” he says. “I won’t never do that to you.”
“Good, then.”
She holds out the candle. There is a whoof that plunges the car to darkness. Only moonlight remains, dim and shadowy through the open door.
“Never minded the dark,” she says. “Some people’s scared in it. Not me. There’s things you see in the night ain’t no place else. Brings a comfort, don’t you think? Makes you face things.”
She hears only the wind at the other side of the car and senses no movement.
“You keep over there, Abel. Won’t do you no good to fall to sleep and roll right out this car.”
“I don’t think I’ll sleep tonight,” comes the reply. “If it’s all the same.”
The girl nearly smiles to herself. Nearly. The rest of her is too occupied with what she’s gotten into and what she must do next. She thinks, No, boy, I don’t guess you’ll sleep much at all, and lowers the brim of her hat, settling her head against the wall. The car rocks them, the thump thump of the wheels beneath. The train carries them ever on, safe and sound like a momma’s womb.
Too late to make things right now, she thinks. Though sooner or later, she’ll have to get this boy home.
It’s meant.
-3-
Though Abel is aware he has been proven wrong of much in the last days, he finds a strange comfort when he proves himself right in this: sleep will not come. He shuts his eyes to the darkness and the strange girl who saved them—a girl, he reminds himself, who would not even offer her name. It is a mystery what sort of person would go to all the trouble of saving someone’s life (not only his own, Abel recalls, but Dumb Willie’s as well; leaving Dumb Willie behind surely would have amounted to a death sentence) and still be so wary as to not even volunteer the most basic part of herself. Maybe that’s another part of the code. Abel has never met a hobo, but what he has read of them leads him to believe they are a strange breed, and prone to peculiarities.
He rolls to his side—always the position in which he has slept, curled into a ball so nothing can hurt him—and uses Dumb Willie’s chest as both mattress and pillow, careful to avoid Chris’s blood. The faint outline of the girl remains by the door. Abel thinks she’s still looking at him. Far from unnerving, her vigil gives him a sense of safety and almost peace. She isn’t scary, not anymore. Abel has spent so much of his life in fear that to discern what is truly frightening and what only pretends to be is a simple enough matter, and the girl is not scary. She is odd and beautiful, but not dangerous.
He is in possession of no facts to support this theory, yet the past day has taught him that sometimes facts alone are irrelevant. Sometimes it’s the feeling of a thing that matters more, and what Abel feels is that the girl is no different from himself in the ways that matter. They are both wandering now, both unsure of the road they take. That makes them kin in a way. His lips spread at that word—kin—and Abel smiles at the notion that one so wonderful as she could share a bond with someone so ruined as him. Yet as his head rises and lowers ever so slightly in time with Dumb Willie’s breaths, Abel decides it’s true, or at least could be so. He has long seen Dumb Willie as a kind of kin. The strongest of bonds very often have nothing to do with flesh. Sometimes it’s longing that yokes people together, and in ways that are not understood but still endure all things.
His mind refuses rest for fear of the nightmares that may follow. Images of his momma and of Chris; of the monster alive inside Dumb Willie and of himself being thrown toward the rails; the girl watching him, who somehow both eases and dismays. Abel’s only comfort is the sound of the wheels beneath him, turning on toward someplace other. What portion of him that knows that running may do no good now is silenced by the greater part that says running is all that remains. For himself, but for Dumb Willie more.
However long and dark the road ahead and no matter the joy found at its end, there will be only one happy ending now. Abel can still return home with his daddy, but not Dumb Willie. More even than the restlessness, this thought is what keeps Abel awake this night. Not the long road afore, not Reverend Johnny’s promises of Abel’s healing, his daddy, his reward. Nobody will ever believe Dumb Willie was only trying to save Abel. Not once they find Chris dead and see how mangled he looks. Not when they all get a good fill of that expression that died on Chris’s face. It’ll be up to Abel to figure out a way to keep Dumb Willie safe. Right now, that means getting as far from Mattingly as they can.
He shuts his eyes and listens to those turning wheels that inch him farther and farther from the field and a trouble he cannot fathom. He will not sleep, refuses it. Sleep, in fact, is the only thing from which Abel cowers this night. He is afraid if he drifts, the train will somehow stop moving. That it will even somehow turn and go backward, returning him to all that lies behind.
*
He rolls over again to find only the worn wooden floor and morning light reaching into the deepest parts of the boxcar. Dumb Willie stands at the edge of the open door, looking out to a world that has moved on from meadows and ridges to endless thick forest. The girl stands with him. Their backs are turned. Her hand rubs Dumb Willie’s back in small circles as she speaks in low, soothing tones. It is an act that speaks to Abel of comfort, even intimacy, and flares a jealousy in him before his mind can form a single thought.
“Hey, what y’all doin’?”
Dumb Willie shudders like he’s been splashed with water. The girl turns and adjusts the brim of that hat she wears, which remains still even in the breeze.
“Abel,” she says. “Mornin’ to you. We’re just talking on things is all. Filling each other in.”
Abel stands. He wobbles less than he did last night, in much the same way he supposes a sailor gets his sea legs. Or maybe that sudden spurt of agility is owed to a fear of what Dumb Willie may have confessed.
“Fillin’ each other in on what?” he asks.
“On what’s got to happen. To you and him, and to me.”
“Dumb Willie, you okay?”
The big man moves a hand to his head and turns, facing Abel with eyes gone wet and red. He wipes his nose and mixes the snot on his fingers with the dried blood on his overalls. In a broken voice Dumb Willie says, “Love. You A. Bull.”
“That’s weird,” Abel says. “Don’t say stuff like that.” And then to the girl, “What’d you tell him? You done got him all blubbery.”
She holds out her hands, palms up, as though feigning ignorance.
“A. Bull you got go. Home.”
It is not so much what Dumb Willie says as the way he says it, almost as though there’s no choice left to them now—it is the way Chris Jones had talked just before leaving Principal Rexrode’s office, when he’d promised murder. Dumb Willie looks a pitiful thing, standing there by the door. So big and strong he shouldn’t be scared of anyone, now crying like a little baby.
Yet something in Abel can see in these tears and in this broken, pleading face Dumb Willie’s truest self. It isn’t the muscles that make him what he is, nor is it Dumb Willie’s dumbness that first drew Abel to him that day on the playground. It is rather that Dumb Willie is good, he is kind, and the world has not enough of those things. He does not look a murderer, a breaker of children. Just after they were pulled to the train, Abel feared his friend for what Dumb Willie had done. Now he can only look upon him with a mixture of adoration and respect. Dumb Willie saved him. It doesn’t matter if anyone else will ever believe that, Abel will. And as such, Abel vows here and now in this dusty old boxcar that he will save Dumb Willie right back. That’s what he knows his momma would do. Lisa Shifflett doesn’t believe in God, but she does believe in sin. After last night, Abel counts himself a believer in wickedness as well—in Chris, in Dumb Willie. Even in himself.
“We ain’t goin’ home, Dumb Willie. We know that. Where are we?”
“A good ways from where you came,” the girl says, “which is how trains do. Not so far as you’d like, though. It’s a slow ride on this track. Mountains tend to be tall.” She looks from the door. “We’re deep in the woods here. Double track ahead. There’s another train coming, and it’s a cannonball.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Means it’s a fast load. That cannonball’s gotta get to where it’s goin’ quick. It’s got the right of way. Happens all the time on this rail.”
Dumb Willie still stares. Love is not upon his lips but is spread wide on his face, love and sadness plenty. Abel tries to keep his eyes away.
The girl won’t look at him. She’s looking outside and saying, “Train’s got to switch tracks up ahead to let that cannonball pass. It’ll stop altogether and wait. That cannonball’ll go by nice and easy before going on its way. Back to where I got you. We need to be on that other train, Abel. I got to get you home.”
“Me and Dumb Willie are goin’ to Fairhope.”
“For your reward?”
“A Bull ain’t no bass . . . terd,” Dumb Willie says.
The girl wrinkles her forehead. “What’s that mean?”
“Means we can’t go back,” Abel says. “We can’t go home. Not yet.”
“You got no means. No provisions. Shoot, you don’t look like you ever been no place. How you gonna get to Fairhope?”
“The train’ll take us.”
“We’re going west, Abel. Fairhope’s southway. You jumped the wrong train.”
She’s still looking from the door and Dumb Willie’s still mourning when Abel realizes what’s happened. The girl has seen him. Last night it was too dark for that. There was nothing but her candle to go by, and what faint moonlight forced its way into the first half of the boxcar. She heard his voice, maybe got a glimpse of his face, but nothing more. Here in the full light of day, though, there are no shadows in which Abel can hide. Everything of him, every bit of his broken parts and misshapen body, is laid bare. And while sunlight serves the girl well (Abel cannot believe that someone he saw as so pretty in the night could be made even more so in the daylight, but it’s true), it only makes himself uglier. That’s why she won’t look at him. Sending them back isn’t part of some code. It’s more a rejection.
“Then we’ll get on another train,” he says. “One going south. You can take us.”
The words are out of his mouth before Abel can snatch them back, leaving the girl in silence. He had wanted to broach the subject of her going along as early as last night, though in a far more elegant manner. Now Abel decides he will force it. If she is sending them back to Mattingly simply because they’re too unfit to travel on with her—with a hobo, albeit a beautiful one—he will make her say it.
For the first time this morning, Dumb Willie finds his grin. It looks a horrid thing, jagged and devoid of all sense. Abel prefers it to the blubbering.
“I can’t do that,” she says. “You think I got no sense? Go all the way to Fairhope with a couple Angelinas like you?” She shakes her head in a way that seems to Abel more for herself than him. Like she’s fighting something. “I can’t do it, Abel. I have to get you home. It’s meant.”
“It ain’t meant,” he says, unsure what meant means. “A man sent me. He gave me a word and told me to go and so I did, me and Dumb Willie, and he was a holy man. He did magic. Like you did when you saved us.”
Dumb Willie lays his hand against the girl’s arm. He leans in, nodding as though to clarify things. “A Bull know the. Magic.”
“What?” she asks. “You think I’m magic?”
It sounds ridiculous, that’s true, at least some of it does, but the parts Abel still struggles to believe about Reverend Johnny and what he said are the parts that matter little right now. And though it sounds ridiculous, the girl isn’t laughing.
“I’m saying something happened that I don’t know, and then you happened. And I think you’re supposed to come.”
“No, Abel. That’s what you don’t understand. I never should have brought y’all this far. We have to turn—”
“We can’t,” he says. “You don’t understand that. We cain’t go back.”
“Why? There something you need to tell me?”
Abel can only stand there as the train begins to slow, wondering where this part of his plan had gone so wrong. It should have been good enough, having Dumb Willie along. Four days to Fairhope, five at the most. Most of that sitting in the same old boxcar hooked to the same old train, having their adventure. He’d figured getting on the train would be the most dangerous part of their trip. Now it’s become the easiest. He should have thought things out more, but everything happened too fast. Abel had gotten into trouble at school and had gotten hauled off to revival, had met Reverend Johnny and hurt his own momma, found his daddy’s letters—
His daddy’s letters.
“I need to show you something.”
He reaches into his back pocket and draws them out, folded and wrinkled. The girl’s eyes settle there. Abel walks the length of the car with them outstretched in his hand. The one with the cast stretched around it. Abel wants her to think long and hard before sending a cripple and a dummy back to where they came from.
“You asked me last night for rent. Something I got of worth. These are it. I’m sorry I lied.”
She takes them in one dirty hand and turns the pages over. Her eyes pass over them quick. Abel wonders if the girl can even read.
“I found them yesterday. They’re from my daddy. He’s in Fairhope, like I said. I have to find him. Me and my momma ain’t getting by. She says we are, but we ain’t because there’s no joy, there’s just trying and trying. That’s why I’m gonna go find him. I’m gone bring my daddy back home with me and we’re all gone be together. He can work so Momma won’t have to so much. But we can’t go back right now until I figure things out. Something’s happened”—Abel looks at Dumb Willie, who stands at the door looking not at Abel but at the girl as he says this—“and it’s something bad. For Dumb Willie especially, but me too.”
The train nears a crawl and lurches hard to the right, accompanied by a scraping sound so lou
d it could mean the whole world’s been torn in half. Abel sees two sets of rails from where he stands. One leads on, the other back. He pauses to think what that makes this place, here in the middle of all these trees. He settles on a word: crossroads. For him and Dumb Willie, for the girl as well.
She says, “You don’t know what you’re asking.”
And now something, not an idea but more an impulse, gives Abel these words: “I thought he was dead. My daddy. Momma always told me he was and I don’t know why. I couldn’t ask her because I ain’t supposed to go in the wreck room by myself, but I did since I was trying to say I was sorry for what I did. I did something bad. Maybe two things.” He thinks that over. “One and a half things. It don’t matter. What matters is I been sent. That’s all I can say. I got a promise that something good’s gone happen if I go. It’s like a second chance. Ain’t nobody hardly ever gets something like that, but now I got one and I got to go. And you got to come too. Please?”
The girl stares at the letters. From this close Abel can smell her. She stinks of dirt and sweat and all things good. Far off, a cannonball whistles.
She whispers, “I’m supposed to take you home.”
“Not yet,” Abel says. “Please, just not yet.”
-4-
The massive brakes squeal and smoke, shuddering the floor beneath Abel’s feet. With no word either way, the girl hands the letters back and peeks around the edge of the door. The train’s engines idle to a low groan.
“Can’t see it,” she says. “Y’all back off anyhow. Dumb Willie? That cannonball comes, I don’t want that other driver to see you.”
They oblige, Dumb Willie and Abel crowding to one side of the door and the girl to the other, the three of them watching and waiting.
“We might have a bit,” she says. “Could be half an hour, could be more. You can tell what’ll happen with a train most times, but sometimes you can’t. That driver up there, he might be kicking back for a bit until that cannonball comes past. Might be he’ll take a little walk, check the connections and the cars.”
