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National Geographic
, maggots are a good source of organic protein.
The train began slowing, and Luke retreated to his hiding place. There were more thumps
and bumps as his car went over points and crossings. At last it came to a stop.
It was an early hour, but this was a busy place, even so. Luke heard trucks. He heard men
laughing and talking. A boombox or truck radio was playing Kanye, bass like a heartbeat first
swelling, then fading. An engine went by on some other track, leaving behind a stink of diesel.
There were several tremendous jerks as cars were coupled or uncoupled from Luke’s train. Men
shouted in Spanish, and Luke picked out some of the profanities:
puta mierda, hijo de puta,
chupapollas
.
More time went by. It felt like an hour, but might only have been fifteen minutes. At last
another truck backed up to the Southway Express box. A guy in overalls rolled the door all the
way open. Luke peered out from between a rototiller and a lawn tractor. The guy jumped into
the boxcar, and another steel ramp was laid between the truck and the box. This time there were
four men in the crew, two black, two white, all big and tatted out. They were laughing and
talking in deep southern accents, which made them sound to Luke like the country singers on
BUZ’N 102 back home in Minneapolis.
One of the white guys said he’d gone dancing last night with the wife of one of the black
guys. The black guy pretended to hit him, and the white guy pretended to stagger backward,
sitting down on the pile of outboard motor cartons Luke had recently re-stacked.
“Come on, come on,” said the other white guy. “I want my breffus.”
So do I, Luke thought. Oh man, so do I.
When they began loading the Kohler crates into the truck, Luke thought it was like a movie
of the last stop, only run in reverse. That made him think of the movies Avery said the kids had
to watch in Back Half, and that made the dots start to come back again—big juicy ones. The
boxcar door jerked on its track, as if it meant to shut itself.
“Whoa!” the second black guy said. “Who’s out there?” He looked. “Huh. Nobody.”
“Boogeyman,” said the black guy who had pretended to smack the white guy. “Come on,
come on, let’s get it done. Stationmaster say this bitch is runnin late.”
Still
not the end of the line, Luke thought. I won’t be in here until I starve to death, there’s
that, but only because I’ll die of thirst first. He knew from his reading that a person could go for
at least three days without water before lapsing into the unconsciousness that preceded death,
but it didn’t seem that way to him now.
The four-man crew loaded all but two of the big crates into their truck. Luke waited for
them to start on the small engine stuff, which was when they would discover him, but instead
of doing that, they ran their ramp back into the truck and yanked its pull-down door shut.
“You guys go on,” one of the white guys said. He was the one who’d joked about going
dancing with the black guy’s wife. “I gotta visit the caboose shithouse. See a man about a dog.”
“Come on, Mattie, squeeze it a little.”
“Can’t,” the white guy said. “This one’s so big I’m gonna have to climb down off’n it.”
The truck started up and drove away. There were a few moments of quiet, and then the
white guy, Mattie, climbed back into the boxcar, biceps flexing in his sleeveless tee. Luke’s once-
upon-a-time best friend Rolf Destin would have said
the guns are fully loaded
.
“Okay, outlaw. I seen you when I sat down on those boxes. You can come out now.”
23
For a moment Luke stayed where he was, thinking that if he remained perfectly still and
perfectly silent, the man would decide he’d been mistaken and go away. But that was childish
thinking, and he was no longer a child. Not even close. So he crept out and tried to stand, but
his legs were stiff and his head was light. He would have fallen over if the white guy hadn’t
grabbed him.
“Holy shit, kid, who tore your ear off?”
Luke tried to speak. At first nothing came out but a croak. He cleared his throat and tried
again. “I had some trouble. Sir, do you have anything to eat? Or drink? I’m awfully hungry and
thirsty.”
Still not taking his eyes from Luke’s mutilated ear, the white guy—Mattie—reached into his
pocket and brought out half a roll of Life Savers. Luke grabbed it, tore away the paper, and
tossed four into his mouth. He would have said all his saliva was gone, re-absorbed by his thirsty
body, but more squirted, as if from invisible jets, and the sugar hit his head like a bomb. The
dots flared briefly into existence, racing across the white guy’s face. Mattie looked around, as if
he had sensed someone coming up behind him, then redirected his attention to Luke.
“When’s the last time you ate?”
“Don’t know,” Luke said. “Can’t exactly remember.”
“How long you been on the train?”
“About a day.” That had to be right, but it seemed much longer.
“All the way from Yankeeland, right?”
“Yes.” Maine was about as Yankeeland as you could get, Luke thought.
Mattie pointed at Luke’s ear. “Who done that? Was it your dad? Stepdad?”
Luke stared at him, alarmed. “Who . . . how did you get that idea?” But even in his current
state, the answer was obvious. “Someone’s looking for me. It was the same at the last place the
train stopped. How many are there? What did they say? That I ran away from home?”
“That’s it. Your uncle. He brought a couple of friends, and one’s a cop from Wrightsville
Beach. They didn’t say why, but yeah, they said you ran away from up in Massachusetts. And if
someone done that, I get it.”
That one of the waiting men was a cop scared Luke badly. “I got on in Maine, not
Massachusetts, and my dad is dead. My mom, too. Everything they say is a lie.”
The white guy considered this. “So who done that to your ear, outlaw? Some foster home
asshole?”
That was not so far from the truth, Luke thought. Yes, he had been in a kind of foster home,
and yes, it had been run by assholes. “It’s complicated. Just . . . sir . . . if those men see me, they’ll
take me away. Maybe they couldn’t do that if they didn’t have a cop with them, but they do.
They’ll take me back to where this happened.” He pointed to his ear. “Please don’t tell. Please
just let me stay on the train.”
Mattie scratched his head. “I don’t know about that. You’re a kid, and you’re a mess.”
“I’ll look a whole lot worse if those men take me.”
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