The Shoebox Trainwreck

by John Mantooth

  And even though I haven’t touched a drop of alcohol since the day of the wreck, I can believe it too.

  Inside Phillip’s box I have laid smooth strips of hardwood, oiled and polished to a shine. Over these, I’ve painted lines and erected miniature hoops. Phillip would be a senior now, if he had lived. He would have been a varsity basketball player, a good one, according to his coaches. The article the newspaper ran after the accident quoted the varsity coach as saying that Phillip was one of the middle school players he had already pegged for a college scholarship.

  When I stare into his shoebox, I can almost hear the crowd behind him, rooting him on, insisting he live.

  And sometimes I can lose my hold on this world, like roots slipping through the soil. When this happens I see him move. I see him play. And for a time, he does live again.

  The thing that pleases me the most about my dioramas is they represent an ordered place where violence cannot intervene. Here, I keep the children safe through diligence and attention to detail. They are invulnerable here, impervious to the awful winds of fate. Here, trains do not run, nor buses stall. Here, towns are not consumed by grief.

  I’ve slept a dreamless sleep when my eyes open and look at the blinking clock beside my bed. The room is dark, and it must still be hours before morning. Heaving myself out of bed, I go to the window and see that the yard is a wasteland of trash and tree branches. Earlier in the night, a great elm in my front yard cracked in two, and one side has fallen against a power line causing random electrical sparks. They look like silver eels, whipcracking in a black sea.

  I hear a knock at my front door. A moment later I’m peering through the peephole at James, my brakeman at the time of the accident.

  Like me, James had been drunk the day of the accident, and like me, he’d been able to act sober enough at the scene of the wreck, when everybody was shouting questions at us. In fact, he’d been the first one to come to my defence during the inquiry. “Wasn’t anything Arch could do. Everybody knows that the county commission should have put a crossing arm at Buck’s Creek a long time ago. In my opinion, no engineer could have avoided that accident.”

  James and I fell out of touch after the wreck, mostly due to my own guilt and anger. Also because there seemed to exist between us a kind of physical knowledge, an unspoken bludgeon. Whenever we were together, it hurt. I stopped answering the phone when he called. Once, I met him on the street on the way home from the library. We both pretended not to see the other. It was an unwritten pact, and we understood the parameters: suffer alone.

  Now, he’s outside my door, having braved a thunderstorm in the middle of the night.

  I’d heard he was sick with cancer, but even that doesn’t prepare me for the way he looks. His body is smaller, his collarbone protruding out and around his neck like some obscene bone scarf. His hands are crossed in front of him, clasped together like clusters of hooks that have become accidentally entangled. His arms droop like fishing line, so skeletal and long, I wonder how he moves them, as the muscles are so deteriorated, they appear to have vanished. When he speaks, his teeth—what’s left of them—smile of their own accord, a crooked pumpkin grin.

  “Arch,” he says. “Can I come in?”

  I step aside and he shuffles past into my living room.

  I sit down, gesturing to the couch for him.

  Outside, a rush of rain begins again, so loud against my tin roof, I wonder how I slept through it the first time.

  “I got some things to tell you, Arch.”

  Lightning flashes, making the room go white and then black as my power goes off for good. It’s so dark James is nothing more than a shadow across the room.

  “What we did, getting drunk on the train. . . . You feel like a murderer. But that’s over. For the longest time I wanted to go back to the day I lied and take it back. I wanted to go to jail. Die there. But I couldn’t. You understand?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “I understand.”

  “Those kids down at the tracks. I talked to them. They want me to tell you something.”

  “Don’t do this, James.”

  “They want you to understand. They’re not still here because they want to be.” He speaks calmly, oblivious to my rising anger.

  “It’s because I put them there, right, James? You were only the brakeman, ultimately not responsible for any of this. Isn’t that the deal?” I’m across the room, reaching for him before I know what I am doing. Grasping his shirt in my fist, I try to pull him to his feet. But he’s heavy, way too heavy for a man his size. A flash of lightning lets me glimpse his dark eyes; they’re inexpressive, calm.

  “Let them go, Arch.”

  He seems about to say more when a barrage of lightning lashes the house, illuminating the room in a series of repeating flashes as if a million cameras are being snapped in an instant. When the room goes dark again, James is gone; I can’t see him at all. His shirt is still balled in my fist. In desperation I pull hard on it, trying to find him, trying to pull myself back to him, but it’s no use. His shirt rips. My fist holds something, but I can’t see what. My head aches. Thunder pounds around me. The room spins, and I lose my grip on consciousness.

  The next morning, sun streams in my window so brightly I can barely keep my eyes open.

  The clock next to me blinks 12:00 AM. I shade my eyes and peer out into the yard where the elm is split open. The power company is there, already working on the broken line.

  I feel wasted, tired beyond all reason, as if I did not sleep at all. James’s visit is still etched in my memory. What had he wanted to tell me?

  A dream, I decide. Then I realize something is clenched inside my fist. Opening my hand, I find a solitary button.

  I confirm James’s death with a quick phone call. According to his wife, Beth, he died last night in the midst of the storm.

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” I say.

  “James told me the truth, Arch. He told me about being drunk.”

  “Beth . . .”

  “I hated him. I wanted him to go to jail. Then the next day I wanted him to be with me forever. Back and forth like that. It was a long time before I forgave him. Even longer before he forgave his self.”

  “It wasn’t his fault, Beth. It was mine.”

  “Nobody can carry that by themselves.”

  “Ever wonder who decides?” I ask her.

  “Decides?”

  “Decides which kids are due to die? Which bus will stall on the tracks? Before the accident, I’d been drunk dozens of times on that train. None of those mattered.”

  “Arch . . .”

  “And how many children’s deaths had I heard about before the wreck? Hundreds at least. All you have to do is turn on the nightly news and you’ll get your fill. But you know what? I shrugged them off. Paid them no mind. It was like they didn’t matter. But it changes. It all changes when you’re driving the train that hits the bus. They’re not just children anymore. They’re your children.”

  I begin James’s box the next day. I construct James out of a clothespin and spindly bits of wire. His head is the button I managed to keep from my dream-like encounter with him.

  Painstakingly, I build a little train and popsicle stick tracks. Placing James inside without me feels strange, but I do it anyway. I create a grayscale sky and dot the landscape with trees made from of old bottlebrushes. Finally, I fashion the school bus from an old Cheerios box and place it on the tracks, just ahead of the train.

  The day of the accident, in a shoebox. I feel like God, except powerless to stop the past.

  A few days later I hear a whistle blow. I step outside on my back deck and study the trees behind my house, as if they are somehow responsible for the noise. I know somewhere behind those trees are the tracks where the accident occurred, though miles away, too far for me to hear a train.

  Yet, I can’t deny the sound. I go back inside into my sanctuary and sit in front of my dioramas, waiting for the calm feeling to come over me, the fee
ling that lets me believe I am in control and the children in these boxes are not dead.

  Still I can hear the whistle. If anything, it’s louder, more insistent, blaring, demanding that I do something.

  Closing my eyes, I try to go back to the night I dreamed of James.

  What did he want? What had been so important?

  Let them go, Arch.

  “They won’t let me go,” I say.

  Then another voice. A voice from my dream. A child’s voice. The dead do not haunt the living.

  “Yes, they do,” I say. “They haunt me.”

  The train whistle is louder.

  I remember the day of the wreck, watching the trees as they scraped the sky. They looked like claws; the earth trying to peel back heaven.

  That’s what I was looking at when the 100-car payload I was pulling began to wrap itself snakelike around the blind curve, and I saw the school bus stalled out on the tracks. One minute I had been drunk, perfectly content with the world, and the next I was cold sober and stricken with such bone-numbing panic I felt helpless, stuck inside my own skin.

  If I even considered blowing the whistle, I don’t remember it. What I do remember is thinking I had to stop the train. This thought was followed closely by the cold realization that I couldn’t stop it, not in time to avoid a collision.

  I never thought about bailing. Though it’s nothing to be proud of, I did stay with the train.

  By the time I engaged the brakes, the train was on top of the bus.

  There was a ground-shaking smack followed by the rending of metal on metal, the sickening scrape of steel, and then a single scream, which died almost as soon as it rang out, extinguished like a snuffed match. The train kept going, barely shuddering as it bisected the bus, sloughing off the front and back like great rocks tumbling from a precipice.

  When it was over, one thing stood out. I never blew the whistle.

  But someone is blowing it now.

  Later that evening, I take my pick-up truck out to the tracks, to Buck’s Creek where the accident occurred. In back I have a bag of flour.

  When I arrive, another car, a convertible, full of teenagers, is already there. They’ve parked on the tracks, powdered the bumper with copious amounts of flour, and now they wait, throwing back beers and laughing, pretending to hear noises behind them. They ignore me.

  I wait too. An hour passes and the evening drops a veil over the sky, creating a hazy glow as silver as it is black. The stars are above me in draft, barely bright enough to be seen. Off in the woods an owl hoots, marking time, until the moment comes when the last inches of daylight are shooed away by shadows, and I see them gleaming in the almost darkness, six shapes, rising out of the earth. So slowly it’s as if they’ve choreographed their movements with the setting sun.

  By full dark, I can recognize them all; they line up in the order I have set for them in my room: Michael, Adriana, Phillip, Adam, Samantha, and Suzy. Suzy is not smiling. Phillip does not look pleased or full of athletic potential as he does inside my shoebox. Michael, Adrianna, Adam, and Samantha all look tired.

  The children reach out for the car in front of them, their fingers barely grazing the bumper. They don’t push as much as touch and the car, already in neutral I suppose, rolls off the tracks. The teenagers inside laugh out loud. Somebody snorts and spews beer all over the others. A girl says, “Oh, hell no. That did not just happen.” A big kid with long straight hair and a beer in his hand jumps out and runs around to the back. “Holy shit, guys! Holeeee shit! Come look.” They file out to look at the flour and the fingerprints of the children I killed. Yet, they cannot see the children who stand on the tracks as if they are unsure what to do with themselves now.

  One of them, Suzy, turns around and seems to see me. Her face is distraught, shining silver like the face of the moon on a clear night. Her eyes meet mine, and I hear the voice again. Her voice: The dead do not haunt the living.

  Slowly, they reform their line in the centre of the tracks. They stand, resolutely facing east, waiting for the train that will kill them all over again. Within seconds I spot smoke, snaking in thin columns over the tree line. The acrid smell of diesel fills my lungs. The earth beneath my feet begins to thrum.

  The train appears, heaving forward like some hound unleashed from hell. The children are erased, obliterated, sent back to the soil from which they rose, sentenced to re-form and live again, however briefly the next night and the night after that and on and on until . . .

  I let them go.

  Driving away, into the shadowed dusk, I finally understand. The dead really don’t haunt the living. The living haunt the dead.

  I’ll build a fire. Let the flames lick the bottom of the pines and watch the smoke curl heavenward. Then one at a time, I will bring them out, toss them into the fire, turn away as they burn.

  Last, I’ll come to James’s box. Keeping his button in my hand, I’ll burn the rest. The fire will give off the sweet smell of death and no more lingering, a final scent, like the odour of chrysanthemums after a long rain.

  Breathing in the air, I’ll take a moment to think how the world never gives you what you expect. Like ghosts. Me keeping them around. I’ll laugh at this thought and try to take some lesson from my anguish and the way it results in more anguish, an endless cycle, forever rolling over on itself until there is no proper way to tell where the cycle begins or, much less, where it will end.

  After I’ve stood for a long while, I’ll open my hands, palms up and stare down at the button. I’ll consider keeping it, one last token, one more way to hold on. I’ll want a drink. Ignoring that desire, I’ll close my eyes, and in the tilting darkness, cast the button into the fire. When I open them again, all of this will seem half-remembered, a fever-dream of little worlds. I’ll turn back to my house, and when I go inside, I’ll begin the real battle of living with myself and what I’ve done.

  The Best Part

  Danny and Truck are tossing horseshoes outside Mom’s trailer when Truck says he’s got a moneymaker. “Surefire,” he says and underhands the horseshoe in a practiced arc toward the rusty pole.

  “Surefire, huh?” Danny says.

  “Sure fucking fire.”

  Danny doesn’t believe in surefire, though his lack of belief is less a matter of principal than it is experience. He wants very badly to believe in surefire. Surefire would be so much simpler than the chaos the world usually offers. Still, he’s willing to listen. Moving in with his mother last month has made him willing to listen to a good number of things.

  “Last time you told me something was surefire, I ended up in the state pen for twenty months.”

  “I was stupid then. That was insane. This is smart. A clean job.”

  Smart and Truck are not two words that ever belong in the same sentence, but Danny finds himself curious, despite his better judgment. “What are we talking about?”

  “Savannah Ridge, baby.”

  Danny nods. “That’s where Darrin lives, right?”

  “That’s the one. They’re building a new section just behind Darrin’s house. He’s already got some new neighbours behind him.”

  Danny knows about the new construction because a few days earlier, he borrowed his mom’s Intrepid and drove out to the site to ask about a job. The foreman all but laughed at him, said there were grown ass men he’d had to lay off, why would he want to hire a skinny kid?

  Danny hasn’t mentioned this or any of his other efforts to find honest work to Truck. As far as he knows, Truck hasn’t tried to find a job—a real job—since they got fired from the landscaping crew last fall. That had been a good gig. Hard work, but the money was cash and the boss paid every Friday. Truck hadn’t liked working with the Mexicans, but Danny suspects that Truck wouldn’t like working with anyone.

  “So, here’s the plan, Danny-boy,” Truck says, picking up another horseshoe and swinging it a couple of times, as if to test its weight. “Darrin says these new neighbours are some rich pricks. Says they work
all the time, up in Birmingham at some uptown ad agency. The husband drives a Beamer. The wife—Darrin says she’s fucking fine—drives one of those gas guzzling SUVs. Wears big jewellery, like she’s a fucking hip-hop star or something. Bling bling and shit. Darrin says there’s no alarm system, no dog, nothing except a dead bolt lock on the front door.”

  Darrin is Truck’s drug friend. He’s a few years older than Truck and Danny, which means he dropped out of high school around ’03 while Truck and Danny both quit in ’06. He married the first girl he got pregnant whose grandfather died a month after they got married and left her sixty-three acres of land on the southside of Wilton. They sold to the highest bidder, and then she died in a drunk driving accident. The kid—a boy Darrin named Shaun—laid in the ICU for four weeks before he died. After a whirlwind five months, Darrin wound up with no wife and no kid, but about eight hundred thousand dollars for the land sale, and that wasn’t all. He also got a ninety thousand dollar insurance check for his dead wife. All this explains how Darrin not only affords Savannah Ridge but also why he sits around the house in his boxers all day downloading porn and getting baked.

  “If it’s so surefire, why doesn’t Darrin just do it? Why involve us at all?”

  Truck tosses the horseshoe. It’s a good one, clanging against the metal pole before catching and sliding to the ground. He smirks and leans his head back on his neck, exposing a huge Adam’s apple that makes Danny think about a turkey he saw his father kill once. His dad had big hands and when he laid hold of something, those hands were going to do what they meant to do, and that turkey didn’t stand a chance. Danny remembered being surprised that the bird didn’t call out in pain, but now realizes it had died too fast to even scream. This realization fills Danny with a sudden and fierce sadness that he can’t explain.

  “Any dumbass knows you don’t steal from your neighbour.”

  “Well, what’s the difference? He’s helping us do it.”