Some Small Magic

by Billy Coffey

  “What if he finds us?” Abel asks. “Nobody can know we’re here.”

  “Be all right,” says the girl. And now she looks from the edge of the door and over her shoulder to where Abel stands. Grinning at him in a way that lets him feel it’s true, they really will be all right. “A good hobo is a sneaky thing, and a good driver knows it. We leave them alone, they’ll do the same. It ain’t like things used to be. Drivers and ’bos get along all right so long as we keep quiet. We’re ghosts, you see. That’s how we got to act. So long as we do, won’t nobody get found.”

  She sits cross-legged on the boxcar’s floor, those two tanned knees sticking out from the holes in her jeans. Dumb Willie’s looking at them. Abel wants to say quit that.

  “This train’s going to Greenville,” she says.

  Abel wants to look that up in his atlas. He gets so far as to look back toward the recesses of the car for his backpack before remembering he doesn’t have it anymore. That got crushed back home along the tracks, right after Chris got crushed too.

  “West Virginia,” the girl says. “We crossed over before dawn.”

  “West Virginia? That’s the whole wrong way.”

  “Said you hopped the wrong train. Not every set of tracks moves south, Abel. We’ll have to stop in Greenville. Part of this load is feed going to the mill there. We’ll sneak off then, find us something going south.”

  Abel grins at the word—we’ll.

  “You. Comin’?” Dumb Willie asks.

  “Got to, don’t I? Abel says he ain’t going home, and the only reason y’all here is because of me. Means I got to see you through. Ain’t that right, Dumb Willie?”

  Though he has no proof, Abel cannot chase the suspicion that much is passed in the long and unbroken look the girl and Dumb Willie share. He would question them both were there time, but now comes in the far distance the call of a whistle. The cannonball is near, which is of some consequence. And the sun is getting high. That is the bigger consequence and all Abel can think of at the moment, that high sun and what time it must be getting. Most everyone will be up now. Dumb Willie’s folks and Chris’s. Abel’s momma.

  He gets up and moves into the soft shadows deeper inside the car. Waddling more than walking, massaging his hips and his broken arm more from habit than any inkling of pain. Which is strange, he decides. Abel can sleep in his bed and then get up with joints that feel like an old man’s, but he rolls around on the wooden floor of a boxcar all night and he feels fine. Great, even.

  He turns to see the girl staring at him, blue eyes piercing.

  “You okay?” she asks.

  Dumb Willie answers, “A. Bull’s a . . . clipple.”

  “Stop that, Dumb Willie,” he says. And to the girl, “Don’t stare. I don’t like it when people stare at me.”

  “What’s the matter?” she says again.

  “Clipple,” Dumb Willie answers. He holds his palms out and shakes his head as though adding, How many time I got to say it?

  It isn’t mean, the way the girl has asked it. In fact, Abel has taken her words as something of genuine concern rather than mere curiosity. Not that it makes him feel much better.

  “It doesn’t matter what’s wrong with me,” he says.

  The girl shakes her head, making her brown hair shimmer in the sun. “It matters if we’re all going on together.” That hair is better than Miss Ellie’s. “We can’t be loping all over creation if you want to get to where you want to be. It’ll be a hard go. You ready for me to take you home?”

  “No.”

  That sun. It has to be near nine o’clock now.

  “What’s your name?” Abel asks.

  “Never needed one.”

  “Sure you do. Everybody’s got a name. Ain’t that right, Dumb Willie?”

  “I’m Dumb. Willie,” he says.

  Abel decides to sit again, though keeping to the shadows. That way she won’t dwell on what he is, only what he says.

  “What are you doing out here all by yourself?” he asks. “Which reason is it?”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” she says.

  “You told me there’s only two reasons people hop a train, for what they think they’ll find when they get to where they’re going or to run from where they are. Which are you?”

  She smiles. It is the first time Abel has seen her do that, and it is as pretty and pure as he’d imagined. For the most part, anyway. Her lips spread in a way that makes dimples on her cheeks and her teeth show, though only the top row, which is as brown as his own but not so jagged. The corners of her mouth nearly touch what parts of her hair aren’t covered by that black hat. The girl’s eyes, though, remain still. There is no greater spark in them from that smile than there is without one, as if the amusement his question has triggered reaches deep but not far.

  “Neither,” she says. “I just ride. Always have, I guess. Ever since I can remember. I go from place to place and make my way best I can.”

  “Where’s your folks?”

  “Don’t have any.”

  “But you got to have a name,” he says. “What do people even call you?”

  “Whatever they want.”

  “What do we call you?”

  She shrugs. The cannonball calls again, much closer now.

  It would give a body shivers, Abel thinks, looking long into those eyes. The day has come hot, baking the inside of the boxcar. Haze clings to the trees outside. Already the front of Dumb Willie’s overalls is soaked. Yet the girl remains calm and still, her own clothes untouched by sweat, as though she’s seen drier days than this.

  “Dorothy,” Abel says.

  “What?”

  “That’s what we’ll call you. It’s from one of my favorite magicians. Dorothy Dietrich? She’s the only woman to ever do the catching bullet trick. That’s when you catch a bullet in your mouth. It’s like the hardest trick ever.”

  Dumb Willie leans forward, putting his face in the sun. He says to the girl, “A. Bull can do the. Magic.”

  “That true?” she asks.

  Even though his face remains in the shadows and even if she can’t see, Abel still blushes.

  “I’ll show you sometime,” he says, “Dorothy.” He smiles at the word. It is a powerful thing, naming someone. “Dumb Willie, this here’s Dorothy. You say hi.”

  Dumb Willie grins. “Hi Do. Tee.”

  And Dorothy smiles herself, everywhere but in her eyes. “The pleasure is mine, Dumb Willie. And Abel. Abel the Great.”

  Abel’s cheeks feel so hot he swears they’re about to burst into flame. The whistle calls again, this time so close that the walls of the boxcar tremble.

  “Come on over here,” Dorothy says. “You can watch with me.”

  She opens her left arm, inviting him. Abel leaves his spot in the shadows and joins her, keeping his head down and trying not to waddle, not wanting to see her seeing him. He squats next to her and shudders as her arm goes around him, then looks to see an expression of longing on Dumb Willie’s face.

  Only one engine leads the cannonball, meaning the cars behind will be few. It slows with a final call and comes alongside at barely a creep—four tankers, a dozen flats, and two boxcars on the end, their doors wide. Abel watches them all. How easy it would be, jumping one of those boxcars and heading home. Running back into his momma’s arms and saying he’s sorry, he was only trying to help things. Go inside his own house and walk through his own yard, travel up and down his own little dead-end road. For the first time, he believes he may have done as Dorothy asked if only there was a little more time to consider things. He would have taken Dumb Willie and gone on home, choosing the familiar over the wide uncharted lands before him—just as he’d always done. His daddy would not matter in the end, nor even the healing Reverend Johnny promised. They were things too distant, and the world was far too big for a broken little boy. What waits back in Mattingly would be an awful thing, but Abel thinks he could convince everyone Dumb Willie only meant to protect. And at
least that thing is known. That is what matters now, even as Dorothy’s arm grows stronger around him.

  What lies behind is known, while everything ahead is not.

  -5-

  It is by Abel’s judgment little more than an hour after their westbound train started moving again when the deep woods and ridges yield to a smattering of homes and paved roads and then, finally, the streets and buildings that make up the town of Greenville, West Virginia. The three of them keep well away from the doors now, Dorothy saying there’s no sense in risking them being seen. She gathers up her leather bag as the train switches tracks once more and then eases beneath a graffitied bridge, aiming itself toward a hulking mass of steel in the distance.

  The feed mill, she says. She now moves to the opposite end of the boxcar and flips the heavy latch on the other door. Abel and Dumb Willie stand with her. She slides the door open as the train shudders to a stop, the gap only wide enough for the three of them to fit through. Dorothy jumps out first, followed by Dumb Willie. They both help Abel. He settles his tiny feet on the big rocks and ties and realizes the last ground he touched was a whole other state away.

  “Come on,” she says. “And remember, we’re just ghosts.”

  Bordering the tracks on this side is a thick copse of trees. Dorothy leads them there. Abel sees no one about, hears nothing but the whining of the mill’s machinery and the distant sound of traffic. Dorothy stands guard at the tree line while guiding them in—Dumb Willie first, Abel following. She has slung her bag crossways, the strap dividing her two breasts. Abel wishes he was that strap. He doesn’t know what’s happening to himself.

  Inside that tangle of trees every way looks the same. Dorothy takes a spot in front of Dumb Willie and leads them on, deeper, until not even the noise from the mill can be heard.

  “You sure you know where you’re goin’?” Abel asks. “There ain’t no path here.”

  Dorothy looks over her shoulder and flashes most of a smile. “’Course I know. We’re being taken care of here, Abel. And you know who’s doing the caring? The ones come before. Ain’t a lick of land between one ocean and the next a hobo ain’t stepped through, ’specially if it’s near a rail.”

  Dumb Willie shakes his head as though he’s found a flaw in that reasoning. “Ain’t no . . . trayne. Here.”

  “That’s so.” She stops and points toward one of the dozens of trees ahead of them. “But there’s other rails, if you know what to watch.”

  Dumb Willie scampers ahead to inspect. He circles the tree and stops along its side, hands on his knees. Grinning, though Abel knows that expression may mean little. It’s just as like to be a bug sitting there, or a bit of moss. Could be anything other than something.

  “A. Bull look.”

  Abel moves forward past Dorothy, skimming the side of her arm with his and mostly on purpose. He has no need of bending in order to see. The mark looks an old one, carved into the trunk at his chest level. A circle with a diagonal slash running from its top left to the bottom right. Beneath there is an X with two small circles to either side. A wavy line has been made across the top.

  “Good road to follow,” Dorothy says. “That’s what the first means. Second means fresh water and a safe camp. Just what we’re looking for.”

  Abel runs a finger over the shapes. “How’d you know this was here?”

  “Part of the code. Them marks are most places. All we got to do is heed. They’ll keep us safe.”

  “Sape,” Dumb Willie echoes. “Sape’s good.”

  “Safe’s very good,” Dorothy answers. “Shoot, couple Angelinas like y’all out here alone? I’d give it a day before you both caught the Westbound.”

  Abel looks up to her. “What’s that mean?”

  Whatever part of Dorothy’s grin that could be called genuine fades. “Means dyin’, Abel.”

  Dumb Willie rubs his chin, eyebrows drawn. Abel pictures Chris Jones on the tail of a long black train, pounding his fists against a darkened window. Wailing for help, screaming as he rides off down the rails.

  “Some are plain,” Dorothy says, speaking of the signs. “Most is hid. Lots, really. Things go on all around folk they can’t see or fathom. Some can, but they’re few.” She looks at Dumb Willie. “Special. But y’all come on now. Place we need’s right up here, if I ain’t mistaken.”

  She moves off once more, leading them. Dumb Willie places Abel’s legs around his neck like they’re going flying, only this time they’re not. This time Abel thinks Dumb Willie just wants to make sure his friend doesn’t get lost in this tangle of trees and shrubs. The traffic noise sounds louder now, like a road is just up ahead, though Abel can’t see anything even from this height because of the woods. Dorothy moves among the trees with a grace akin to her slender body, disturbing not a branch. Dumb Willie tramples all in his path.

  “A Bull,” he says, “this our. Venchure?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  Dorothy dips left and walks ahead some twenty paces, then stops. She turns and smiles, says, “This’ll do.”

  The trees open here to a small stream that feeds into a pond. Willows and cattails surround the water, offering them welcome shade and privacy from the cars and trucks that travel an unseen road that cuts through a hill beyond. It’s as though this place of calm has been set aside in the midst of all the noise and thrum, protected by the fact it has been forgotten.

  “We’ll keep here,” Dorothy says. “We got water plenty, and there’s food to be had. You hungry, Dumb Willie?”

  Abel moves Dumb Willie’s head up and down with his hands, careful not to bump it with his cast. Dumb Willie, he’s always hungry.

  “Next train won’t come before tomorrow noon. We’ll have to sleep here.”

  “Tomorrow?” Abel asks. “We got to get to my daddy.”

  “Ain’t no telling trains what to do,” Dorothy says. “Don’t you worry none, Abel. It’ll be nice here. Dumb Willie, we can sleep under the moon. Ain’t no better sleeping than that.”

  “We ain’t going to town?”

  “Think we best keep from there,” she says. “We’ll be fine here. Dumb Willie, why don’t you go on and boil yourself up in that water. It’ll feel good.”

  Dumb Willie lowers Abel to the ground and clamors off back into the trees, leaving Abel and Dorothy along the bank of the pond. Dorothy shrugs off her bag and sets it on the ground, offering him a seat. He takes it. They look out over the water and the birds that skim from the trees. Fish pop at the surface, eager for a meal of bugs.

  “Thank you,” Abel says. “For coming with us. And for saving us. I told you last night, but I wanted to tell you again. I know maybe you didn’t want to do either.”

  Dorothy bends her legs and hugs them. “That’s no offense to you. I’m used to being on my own. What I did, I didn’t even think about. Or maybe I have thought about it for a long time until I didn’t have to think about it anymore. Either way, it can’t be undone now. We’ll get you to your daddy, Abel. Then I got to take you home.”

  “Because of the code?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Well, thank you anyway. It would’ve been an awful thing if you hadn’t pulled me on that train.”

  “Why’s that?”

  He lifts the shoulder that isn’t stuck upward, making them both form a shrug. Thinking of Chris again, because Abel supposes he always will now.

  “It just would’ve been bad. Momma’d be alone. That would be an awful thing. And Dumb Willie would have been left alone too, which I guess is a thing even more awful. And I’d’ve never gotten to see my daddy.”

  “You think that’s true?” Dorothy asks.

  “I know it.”

  She falls silent.

  “You didn’t see anything, did you? Before you pulled us up.”

  “Why? There something you need to tell me?”

  Yes, Abel thinks. But I can’t tell that, not ever and not even to you. He waves a hand over the water, wanting to change the subje
ct. “There’s places like this back home. Lots of’m. Me and Dumb Willie have been to them all. We fish and swim. Well,” he says, correcting himself while holding up his cast, “not so much swimming lately. It’s bad news to get a cast wet.”

  She points to the bright yellow thing on his arm. “How’d that happen?”

  “I snuck out one night to look at the train. That’s what I do. Momma said my daddy used to drive a train. I guess that’s true, I don’t know. She lied about him being dead, so now I’m wondering if there was other stuff she didn’t tell me the truth on. But I tripped over a rock.”

  “Must’ve been a pretty nasty fall.”

  “Not really,” he says.

  He looks at Dorothy, sees her looking back. It’s that same way she looked at him on the train. That concern. Abel doesn’t want to say more—he never wants to say it just like he never wants to say it about what happened to Chris—but she’s looking at him and their arms are touching and some of her brown hair is tickling the side of Abel’s head and he finds he can’t help but talk, can’t keep himself from cracking open his heart just to show her a little, because even that little might keep her here beside him.

  “I’m sick,” he says. “I have a condition. I’m special.” Tears gather in his eyes. “My bones are soft. That’s how I was born—broke. They don’t work right. They’re weak and they break all the time. That’s why I’m so small and why I limp, because my back’s not straight. That’s why my eyes look different and my teeth are bad. That’s why I’m not strong like all the other kids, because of my stupid bones.”

  The tears rush now. Abel shakes such that he looks to be freezing in the summer around them. Dorothy’s body goes slack next to him. Her posture slumps, head tilted to the side. Abel slumps into her shoulder and feels Dorothy’s right arm move around him, now her left, pressing him deeper into herself. It feels something like heaven, her holding him, though Abel recognizes her arms are tense and her body has gone rigid again. Her head is positioned wrong so that her hat goes tumbling off into the grass behind them. It’s like Dorothy doesn’t know how to give a hug, like she’s never done that before.