Boxcar

BOXCAR

    I was born in a boxcar, an Illinois Central 40-footer, number 32576, as it rolled down the IC’s mainline somewhere between Memphis, Tennessee and Greenville, Mississippi on the fourth day of August in the year 1963. My momma told me all about that trip and was very specific about the car number explaining to me, “I wrote it down because a person needs to know the place of his beginning and that number was as close as I could get to it.” My daddy was with her but not for long. He jumped out of the car when the train stopped at a freight yard in Natchez to get supplies, he said, but never did get back on. “Your daddy was a drinkin’ man,” momma said, “just like mine, and he probably found a liquor store and didn’t want to leave it.” I never did meet him. We rolled on into Baton Rouge where a railroad cop heard me crying’ and threw us off the train. Never did get to New Orleans as momma planned. 

     Stuff happened as it does to all of us. Settled in Red Stick for a number of years. Momma had two more kids with a policeman or policemen, not sure, boy and a girl, Randy and Rachelle. Rachelle did good. Learned to do hair. Married a dentist. Three kids. Nice house. Randy and me, not so good. Neither of us never did like school. School was mostly talking inside of a close room and we liked doing things outdoors. Throwing rocks, hitting a ball, fishing, climbing up trees and on things and listening to the trains running the mainline or switching cars in the yards. The main thing we did though was stick together. Always struck me a strange thing that two boys born of the same woman, raised under the same roof, eat at the same table, sleep in the same bed could end up in so many different ways. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. One born crooked as a snake ending up in a jail while the other give Jesus a run for His money. Or they just holler and fight between themselves until they get up and travel to nowhere particular but just to get away the one from the other. Never talk again or see each other until it’s time to die – maybe not even then. But it was not like that with Randy and me and for the longest time I never did understand why. We didn’t look alike, of course, he tall and thin and me stocky. We didn’t like the same foods, he eating his vegetables and me liking leans cuts. Trying to be objective as I can be, he was intelligent, boy and man. Me, not so much. Still, we were inseparable – for a time.

    What is it about time passing that drives people apart? Not everyone, not always, but for most, often. Eventually, Randy could not help but be a responsible, honest, hardworking man, lovable and loving. Me, I had to be always moving, mostly in the belly of a freight train. I needed to see more and do less than most. Some talk about the romance of the rails, the call of the engine’s whistle in the night, the lure of faraway places. Never felt any of that myself. I just liked the idea of a train. A thing you can’t control moving along a predetermined path stopping and starting up at unpredictable times and heading to a place of no importance except that it is not the place you started from. And if it is a freight train, there’s usually nobody but yourself to bother about. Randy and I hung around the IC’s freight yards when we were schoolboys, but he lost interest when the smell of the girls got to him. So, I went alone and climbed aboard a hopper car the first time when I was fifteen years old. Sat there a long time just feeling the power of the cold steel coming up into my pants thinking about the possibility of freedom from a policeman’s household. Trains shake you hard when they start to move and I banged my head good and almost fell off when this one did. But I was seen and the train stopped after a few hundred feet and the railroad cop pointed a club at me. My mother shook her head. The policeman took a strap to me. Randy laughed so hard he had to run to the toilet. And I think it was then that the idea of killing him crawled into my head.

    Much as we might want it to be otherwise, this old earth keeps chugging around and around the sun pulling all of us along with it much like a train, now I think about it. Before you’re smart enough to welcome it, you’re not young anymore and climbing up rusted steel ladders and sitting on dirty steel grates or rotting wood floors is not easy or much fun. I was a hobo. Not a bum, you understand, because I worked when I wanted to or had to. I never asked anything of anyone and, so, never got much of anything from anyone. In the coldest of times, I stopped by a mission for soup, maybe a warm, worn coat and listened to the sermon. I say “listened” because I felt I ought to do that out of gratitude but, honestly, I heard more than listened most of the time because the heat in my stomach and soft cushion of the chair tempted me to sleep. But once there was a woman preacher who really did seem to have met with and spoken to and been schooled by God. At least she convinced me of it. Powerful, high-pitched voice, she had, and described God’s clothes, His smell and manner of speaking with authority. God told her that whatever you wanted could be yours, but you had to do one thing and only that thing and nothing else. Then she paused and everyone got real quiet, no snoring, no mumblings now, all of us waiting to know what that one thing was. She pointed to the ceiling, got red in the face, and swayed, first a bit to the right, then left, and, then she fell hard, flat on her face, dead as dirt. As I said, she convinced me.

    After a good while, momma died too. I assumed she was dead or close to it because I stopped getting short notes and small checks from her at my PO box in Little Rock. Although I hadn’t seen or heard from Randy in many years, I knew where he was because momma sent me his address in Nevada. I went there though it wasn’t easy for me to do. I had to ride a bus. Well, he glowed like a gas lamp when he saw me. His hug almost broke my ribs. “You’re a prodigal prodigy,” he told me. I knew then we wouldn’t understand each other as once we did. Should have expected as much. Lived in a small, nicely groomed house in Henderson, and, after bricklaying, landscaping, and house painting jobs, sold insurance. He was married to a stumpish woman whose face was still pretty but who had run to fat as they tend to do. No living children, one died in the womb, another under a drunk’s car. I told him he looked healthy and wealthy and wise and he told me, “Well, a dog don’t piss on a man’s shoes all the time.” I remembered the old man who mumbled that to no one in particular when we passed him on our way to school one day. We both laughed almost to pissing ourselves and my love for this man, this brother, watered my dry old heart as it never had been soaked before.

    Well, after a while the talk to turned to me. Randy wanted to know what I had done with my time and wouldn’t settle for me telling him “Nothin’ much.” I couldn’t very well tell him I was taking a break from a career in neurosurgery or the Lutheran ministry so I lied in subtler ways. “I live free and carefree,” I told him, “doing what I please when I please and loving every minute of it.” He said, “You were always making up stories. Nobody lives like that. How do you suffer? How do you cope with it all?” That got me to thinking, which I try to avoid, but that’s impossible when you spend so much time alone. “I suffer from thinking I’m going somewhere, not knowing where, but suspecting there is nowhere to go” is what I wanted to say, but I said, “From not believing what I have heard about the difference between doing right and wrong and, so, I don’t do much of anything at all except ride the rails here and there.” I could tell he liked hearing that because he nodded, smiled and said he always wanted to try that just once. We made a plan. Uncle Pete, that is what we call the Union Pacific Railroad Company, has a freight yard in Las Vegas just off Jones Road and I figured we could catch a local out of there, run a few miles and taxi back in a few hours. Randy was hot for it.

   Much as I travel on the railroad, I don’t know everything about its workings and, as it turned out, I didn’t know anything that was true about Uncle Pete’s doings in Vegas. There were plenty of trains, of course, but none were what we call locals, just delivering a car here and there and returning to the place they started after a day’s shift. As it turned out, these trains were mainline long-distance jobs that ran hundreds of miles until they stopped to change crews. Another thing. The yard was well fenced and patrolled by bulls, the railroad police, who, in my experience, had gotten meaner over the years. None of this bothered me much, but I thought it might place second thoughts in Randy’s head especially when I told him we would have to try it at night. It did and I think the combined pull of the woman, the house, the predictable tide of money in and out, and the blunt fact that he would be committing a federal felony took the shine off the apple. Risk is a funny thing. Can’t help but take some and we all do. But take too much and you die one way and take too little and you die another. So, to me, it didn’t make much of a difference, but a lot of people don’t see it that way and Randy was one of them. Parked along the yard fence, on a night nearly moonless, freight cars banging, locomotives hissing and snorting as they seem to do, Randy told me he couldn’t do it and I told him, my mind decided and closed, that he should and that he would.

    I said to him, “Brother, this is likely your last chance to do what you want to do, to see a glimpse of what is just over the edge of the rut you’re in, to know me for what I am.” I think it was that last bit that pushed him through the hole in the fence that always seem to be there when you need it to be. A boxcar with an open door is getting to be a rare find as the world has mostly moved to the closed and locked up container for its needs, but I found one. Didn’t catch the road name or number in the shadow the yard lights left, but it had that one feature you want when you’re looking for a comfortable ride: it was empty. We climbed up and into its warm darkness, me like I was mounting General Lee’s horse and Randy like he was climbing out of a WW I trench looking to be shredded by machine guns. “First thing we do,” I told him, “is to make sure we’re alone. You don’t know who you’re going to find in these places, fruits or nuts. Next, put a rail spike in the door track. If that door closes and locks, you won’t get out until you’re dragged out, frozen, starved, or broiled.” Then we waited for movement. It came suddenly, unexpectedly, violently, as it always does, almost knocking us to the floor as the slack in the train ran out. I welcomed the high-pitched squeal of the turning wheels as the brake shoes rubbed against them, hesitant to start another trip of endless spinning, because the journey I needed to take was finally underway. 

    It wasn’t long before we had rolled into the dark of the desert and our talk dried up. Finally, Randy said “You know I always liked trains but this one scares me.” “It scares me too,” I told him. “It always does because you never know what will happen, who you might meet, whether the train will run fast to a place you want to go or get sidetracked and end up siting in the middle of nowhere for days. But it’s the scaredness that gets you to the feeling of being alive.” He shook his head, “I don’t see it. You just refuse to do what you ought to do. You prefer the wrong over the right for reasons I could never understand. Always were that way.” That preaching woman’s voice came into my head. She said that God meant for all of us what he told Cain: ‘If you do not do well, will not sin crouch at the door? Its desire is for you, but you must master it.’ Bothered me to hear it then and troubled me to remember it now. But I helped Randy to his feet as the boxcar swayed and led him to the open door. The train was moving so fast the heat of the desert felt positively cold. “Look up at the stars,” I shouted over the noise. And he did, always thinking to please anyone who asked anything of him. “That’s where you belong,” I thought. And then he was gone.

    When I woke up, I was flat on my back looking up at the rusted ceiling of the boxcar and wondering what had happened. The train was moving faster than I had ever known. The floor seemed to undulate under me and the walls had a faint glow and figures, looking similar to, but not the same as, real people and animals, walked slowly along them, from one end to the other and then back. I thought I heard voices but could not understand what they were trying to say. I did hear some faint laughing and crying. Well, it was obvious what had happened. We were moving real fast and hit a patch of rough track, the boxcar shuddered and threw me to the floor and Randy out into the night. This thought just died in my mind when a voice plainly said, “No.” I asked, “Who’s there?” Nothing. Not that I thought there would be. Must have had a concussion from that hard hit of my head on the floor. That’s what I argued. The most curious part of it all was that, despite my spiking it open, the boxcar door was almost, but not quite, closed. No matter what I did I could not get it to open or close anymore. It let just about a foot of the outside world in. Just enough for me to see the sky, the ground, the flashing past of an occasional tree or rock or sign. Not enough for me to slip through.

    All of that brought me to this: from one boxcar to another. I keep count of the days from the sunlight coming through the slot in the door and track of the seasons by the heat and the cold. By my count, I have been here three years, two months and eighteen days. The train keeps rolling on, moving fast, never stopping. I never hunger or thirst, or do what people need to do after they eat and drink, and I don’t sleep. What I do is think and argue with the voices. Mostly, the argument is about what happened. I tell the story. A voice says, “No.” But lately, the thought made its way into my mind that the story was different than I told it. That my hand was there, on his back. I told this new version to the voices. First, nothing, then, “Begin.”