by Grant Farley
I led my brothers and sisters out of our pew. I was getting a little old for this, but no one noticed ’cause I hadn’t gotten taller. We reached the manger and everyone stood around staring at the Baby Jesus in the for real hay. It wasn’t too late for me to back out. Then a little girl stepped up and laid a present in the manger and kissed the Baby Jesus. That broke the mood and there was like a pushing, squirming mess of kids trying to get at that manger.
Soon the other kids wandered back to their seats. But I stood, my hands stuffed in my pockets, eyeballing Baby Jesus. Which box? The wannabe Madonna had this scared look on her face like she thought I was about to do something weird. Then my right hand twitched. Okay, it wasn’t much of a sign. But it was all I had. I lifted the present out of my right pocket. The ribbon was messed up, so I straightened it. I held out my offering. The paper was stained with sweat, but that couldn’t be helped. I lay the present in His arms and stared at Baby Jesus’s face, like He’d nod at my choice or something. But He just stared back with a blank doll’s grin.
I turned and walked back, ignoring the stares, and plopped into our pew as the children’s choir slid into “Silent Night.” My mom’s glare cut through me. I felt the song sliding up me like sickening sweet incense, but I gagged it back down. You see, I had sung in the choir for years, but a few months before that Christmas I quit, after she praised my confirmation solo. She’d said I had my dad’s same sweet voice.
Well, Christmas Eve was the one time when my mom made all the sibs stay with their fathers’ families. They didn’t always stay with the fathers, but my mom always dug up some member of the prospect’s family. I didn’t have any other family, so she was stuck with me.
Christmas mornings I woke before my mom. Every year there’d be a couple things in my stocking and maybe one wrapped present. But the main gift was always the same. I’d wake to see the Lionel train on the figure-eight track that took up the whole floor in front of the tree. My dad had died right after my third Christmas, but he had already bought the old train on layaway at Mrs. Elliot’s, and she had delivered it just like he’d ordered.
All the years of that train run in me like trips around that figure-eight track. The hum of the transformer as the red light flickers on. The electric tingle as my tongue licks the track. The rising hum as I turn the lever and the train edges forward, clicking faster, faster, gliding along the track: first the black engine with its pipes and stacks and the smell of fresh oil and metal, its wheels spun by the metal rods . . . then the fat black coal car, lionel on the side . . . then the orange boxcar that said baby ruth candy but in my head carried teddy bears and wild tigers and friendly hobos and a runaway boy . . . then the flatcar, where I put real stuff like a special rock or a toy car or my mom’s shiny present . . . then the red caboose with the little second story where a kid could just kick back, watching the whole scary world glide by without it ever hurting him.
At some point I always stopped the train and pressed the reverse button, the train edging slowly back. Then faster, flying backward around the figure eight. Faster and faster . . . But you can’t ever take things back to before because that lame train always spun clear off the tracks. Then I put the edges of each wheel of each car back on the track, hooked the cars together, replaced my mom’s shiny present back on the flatcar, and started the train forward again.
As I sat and watched my mom’s present glide round and round, I never heard her come into the room. Finally, I stopped the train and gave her the present. She unwrapped the shell necklace and put it around her neck, but it slid under all those shiny beads and disappeared.
Nothing was ever said about where that train first came from. Every January sixth, the Epiphany, the train would be stored away someplace where I’d forget about it until the next Christmas. But that Christmas was the last time I saw the train. Now it stays forever stored somewhere inside both our heads.
“Goodbye, Mr. Leguin.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
Absolution
I’m sitting in the beach chair on Mr. Sanders’s slab, the blue light bathing me. It’s the deepest black of night, but too many questions swirl around in me to sleep. My Rod Carew bat lies across the arms of the chair, and I run my hands on the wood just for comfort.
Waiting. Biding my time. Looking out under cante bury to where we’d played maybe our last over-the-line, only a couple weeks ago. Theresa had come out, the first girl to ever play. And they even picked her over one of the guys. The guy was me. Not one of my best hours. Glad for her, but damn . . . She never went back and played again. When I asked why, she said, “All boys are creeps.” Since I’d had to sit on the curb the whole game, I wasn’t sure whether she included me as a creep, but she probably did since I’m a boy.
A light flicks on in a nearby trailer. It’s the single-wide Buns shares with his mom. His shadow darkens the curtains. He hasn’t been home for weeks, staying up with the Blackjacks in the hills. Well, now he’s returned, and I got a hunch why. So I sit here waiting. The hard wood of that bat takes on a whole new comfort.
My mind goes back to that night in the old Miller place, and I see Buns’s face going purple after I told him he’s got bigger tits than Roxanne . . . and then I’m remembering the road to the Corpus Christi, when Buns had said, You’re a part of our initiation. He had said “a part,” and I had let that slide. But now it hits me. The other so-called part must have been Roxanne. I had been half of the initiation, and Roxanne had been the other half. I almost admire the Ace for such a perfect, twisted plan. So Buns has been the connection between Roxanne and the Blackjacks all along. I stand up and step off the slab.
I don’t need any light to walk along the gravel path to his trailer. Mr. Sanders’s voice whispers behind me, Violence is not the answer. I try and block it out as I take some warm-up swings. Violence is not the answer.
Buns steps out of the trailer carrying a large duffel bag. He sees me coming and he sees the bat, but he just shrugs and opens the door of the sweet El Camino his father gave him after the divorce. He tosses the duffel on the seat and slides in after it. I know the truck is a metallic blue, but in the darkness it looks black. He slams the door. I stand with the bat over my shoulder, staring at him through the window. He rolls it down like he’s afraid I’ll smash it.
“Going somewhere?”
“RJ, just let it go.”
“Let it go?” I lift the bat.
“Listen. She wanted to go up there.”
I swing the bat hard against the front fender, a sting jolting my arms. But it just makes a soft thunk and a small dent.
“RJ, some girls get a kick out of danger, you know?”
I lift the bat and swing again, the sting shooting higher and deeper into me. Still, he just stares back.
“I let her out of purgatory,” he says.
“You let her out? You mean she got away?”
He stares straight ahead like at a road only he can see.
“Well, did she get away?”
Silence.
“Tell me, or I go for the headlights. Then you won’t be seeing anything.”
“You don’t get it, RJ. I don’t know.”
“Don’t give me that crap. How could you not know?”
“She just stayed there under that tree. Arms out. Doing that sort of dance of hers.”
“Dance?”
“Yeah, like when we were at the Miller place. I tried to snap her out of it. Took her arm. Shook her. Pulled her away. Shit, I was afraid her singing would wake the others. But she wouldn’t go. Hell, maybe she was already gone in her mind. Maybe. I guess I could have picked her up or something, carried her. She ain’t that big. Finally, she was quiet. But she still wouldn’t go. If the Ace found out it was me . . . Jesus. So I left her there.”
“Then what?”
“Then in the morning, she was gone.”
“So she got away.”<
br />
“Some of the Jokers, they were acting really creepy. I mean, they’d been crazy for a long time. But this was weird . . . kind of paranoid, you know? And the Ace, he was like in this skull-grinning good mood. Not even caring to find out who let her out. Do you think if she had escaped, he’d be like that? The hell we’d pay. I think she did something to herself up there. Maybe hanged herself. And that one of the older guys, maybe the Ace, found her. And they buried her somewhere.”
“But you think. You don’t know for sure.”
“There were whispered stories, mostly among the younger guys. At first, the stories were about what I just said. She hung herself from that tree. Maybe even the ghost of Coyote Jack made her do it. And that the Jokers, they found her and took her off and buried her. And that if any of us tell, we’ll end up with her. That her ghost was with Coyote Jack and that ours will be there, too. That’s when some of the younger ones really stopped coming.”
“The Ace could have made up that rumor,” I say. “Because if the others knew she’d gotten away, then he’d lose a lot of his power.”
“You think too much, RJ. Anyway, then the tale began to change. Some younger kid was supposed to have been watching that night. No one knows who it was, though. And he was supposed to have seen her with a guy under the tree. And then the guy left her. And she did some weird shit. Then she wandered down the hill like some ghost. And she got away.”
“That could have been you, the guy under the tree. And the weird shit is her dancing.”
“Could’ve been. I was scared shitless, afraid that some kid was going to finger me. But that never happened, so I’m thinking it might have just been a story.”
“But you don’t know for real.”
“No. I don’t. But . . . I mean, come on, RJ.”
“Buns, you gotta go to the sheriff.”
“What good would that do?”
I lift the bat, fighting a coldness that might numb the anger.
“Think about it, RJ. They will never find her body. If there is a body. They will never get the proof. And no one will ever testify. She’ll always be just a runaway.”
He’s right. God, I know he’s right. Then I see something in his eyes. He feels like he deserves to have his truck smashed. He’s almost welcoming it. Each smash would be like the click of a bead in a twisted rosary. The last thing I want is for him to feel absolution.
I drop the bat.
He turns on the ignition and the pipes growl.
His mother stares at us through the curtained light, like some ghost spying on us from a safer world.
“Where are you going?”
“LA to live with my dad.” He glances at the trailer window.
“What about MJB?”
“He already got away. His dad sent him to some private school in Carmel.”
“And Ed the Head?”
“He didn’t make it. He thinks he’s found a way to escape, strung out all the time.”
The truck rumbles toward the gate and I follow until he drives under the sign and turns onto the street. I head back to my chair.
I got one last tale to tell.
Even if there is no one to hear it.
The Tale of Foxy Roxy and a Bad Place
There was a girl. War killed her father when she was little. She had no sibs to share her loneliness. Just a mom who treated her bad. And her mom’s boyfriends, who treated her even worse. She had half a brother, but she was jealous of him, and so she was mean to him. She thought that was how you treated someone you loved. The boy didn’t know no better, either, so he treated her the same way back.
A lot of bad things were done to her. So many that they became a part of who she was, and so she started doing the bad stuff to herself because she didn’t know another way.
She tried to get better. She even went to God thinking He would help. But she didn’t find anything there. She thought that was her last chance. So if God wouldn’t help, she would go to the opposite. She went to a very, very bad place. And very bad things happened to her. Those things nearly killed her.
A boy helped her out of this purgatory. But it wasn’t over. There was still evil pulling at her. Whispers that she belonged there. That she was so bad, she couldn’t ever be good. It was a terrible battle between her and that bad thing.
But she won that battle.
In the wee hours before dawn, she turned away from that evil and made her way down the gorge. She sneaked back home and got her clothes and stuff and packed them in a bag. Then she sneaked out and found a truck driver who drove her down to Santa Maria.
Once she was out of that valley, she began to feel cleaner. That evil was back there, no longer inside her.
She got a job as a waitress. She didn’t do no more bad stuff. Well, she did some. But nothing as bad as before. And the more she stayed there, the less bad stuff she did.
She met a good guy. He was a little older. But he had a good job. A schoolteacher, maybe. They got married. They had a kid. She named him Richard. Ricky for short. They lived as happily ever after as most people.
And this is the for real truth.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Suicide City
I wake up with Charley shaking my shoulder. Daylight streams through the screens. He drags me outside as I pull on my jeans.
Amazing Grace lies on the dirt. Her neck is all chewed up. The Old Tumbler sits on the roof of the coop, cooing.
Peabody done this.
There’s only one thing left to do.
I wrap Amazing Grace in the rag I use to polish the Banzai Flyer and load the Old Tumbler in the portable. I head for Mr. Anderson’s tomato field by way of Eighth Street instead of the Banzai. There’s only one Banzai Run left in me, and I got to save that.
I bury her in the middle of the field, deep enough so she won’t get dug up. Then I let the Old Tumbler go. He heads straight for the sky, but I turn away without watching his fall through that heat. I leave the portable lying in the field and start for home. The Old Tumbler won’t have trouble finding his way. But a part of me hopes he takes off to find a better place.
I get home, slip into the trailer, and pull the backpack out from under the sofa bed, the silverware thunking as I lift it onto my back. It’s time to make my final delivery to the Blackjacks.
And so I make my way up Dead Man’s Gorge. There are no Deuces. What’s left of the campsite is a mess.
The Ace is sitting under his tree like I remembered, one leg of those old jeans over the arm of the rattan chair with his cracked boot just dangling and his elbow on the other arm, with his chin resting on his fist and his face a shadow under that Raiders cap. I stare at the black limb above his head and think of Roxanne. I can’t let the hate and sad fill me now or I won’t ever get through this.
“You’re late,” he says.
“What do you mean, late?”
He nods and two guys stand right behind me. “I was expecting you days ago.”
I pull the pack off my back without answering. The silver makes rich, mellow clunks.
The Deuces are gone, run away back to their homes. Like Buns said. Now only some of the older guys are left. This makes them even more dangerous.
“My delivery from the old man.” I work to keep my voice flat.
“Let me see what you got.” The Ace takes off his cap and wipes the sweat from his stubs.
I kneel and spread out the silver.
“Bring me one.”
The gray-haired guy picks up one of the knives and brings it to him.
The Ace hefts it. “This is good stuff. The real deal.”
He waves to his two sidekicks to take Mr. Leguin’s silver away.
“Why did you risk bringing it up here, RJ?”
“I got a proposal for you. A deal.”
“Now, why would we want to ma
ke any deals? What do you got that we couldn’t just take?”
“Me.”
“You? We already got you.”
“Me and the Banzai Run.”
“Go on.”
“I do the Banzai Run. If I make it, you leave me . . . and the old man . . . alone.”
“It don’t make sense. What do I get by you running the Banzai that would be worth losing what I’m already getting from the old man?”
“Well . . . it will . . . make you famous.”
“Famous?”
“Yeah. Everyone remembers the last run of Cesar Aguilar. It’s a legend.”
“Yeah, I remember that run myself. It was my first year as a Blackjack.” He looks around, and I can see he’s thinking this might be a way to get back some of the mojo. Then he frowns. “It got more fame for Cesar than for the Blackjacks. You got to do better than that, RJ.”
“Well, for another thing, you can make some big bucks off this.”
“How?”
“Make bets.”
“You gotta be kidding. It takes two sides to make a bet. Who would be stupid enough, even with odds, to bet you’d make it? The only way we could make money off a bet like that would be for us to bet you will make it. We’d get a whole lot of takers against that bet. Then we’d fix it so you really would make it. Yeah, we’d clean up on that. But that would spoil all the fun and miss the main point.”
“Okay, then, you could charge.”
“Charge?”
“Yeah, charge a fee for watching.”
“On public streets? Why, this is a free country.” He laughs like that’s the best joke he’s ever made.
