Truants (9 page)

Holz was covered in muck now, and his bandages looked like a small sports cap. Every once in a while when he would open his mouth to bellow, some bit of mirish debris would be tossed up from the front wheel to lodge in his tonsils. This slowed him a bit, but I could see that he would catch Louisa in a few minutes.

What broke up this high-wire motorcycle team forever, and spared Louisa the crackling emotions of a family reunion, was a surprise even to the daredevils amongst us. Ring Holz ran through the ditch at a new velocity as he neared her car. He was only mud and smoke now. The motorcycle would have been aflame had it not been for the wet swamp he rode through. He flew up along the track, settled, reached with his waving hand, and touched the iron rung on the side of the coal car. It was an action he’d witnessed in western movies.

But as he did it, he disappeared.

I looked again:
gone!
As my car rocked past the spot, I understood.

He had not seen the coming crossroad and the one-way tunnel of its culvert, in which he now rode his little race solo. I fully expected to see him come out the other side, but as I glided by atop thirty tons of coal, that great resource, I saw
nothing
. Not even smoke. Ring Holz, that unflappable daredevil, that king of motorcycle high-wire lunatics, vanished from my view forever. He hadn’t been much of a father.

I glanced uptrain at Louisa whose wondrous profile was eclipsing the whitegold circle of the rising sun. This is quite the auspicious day, I thought: My first getaway. My first real train ride in the real world with real objects: real trees, real sky, real wind in my mouth. I wondered if the fact that I now had bitten this off also implied that it, like so many other things in my life, would be more than I could chew. Regardless, it would be quite the day.

15

*************

Railroad travel

In flashes I felt the great need to hold on. I felt alternately absurd and brave. Finally, when the train slowed to pass through the one-story suburb of Surprise, Arizona, I crawled across four cars of the shining, angular ebony coal, sooting myself fully, to where Louisa perched. A one-armed employee of the railroad encouraged me by yelling, “Get the hell off there before I kill you!” But soon, even he and his blue overalls were in the distance, and the train continued, northwest.

When we stopped somewhere near Sun City I told Louisa to sit tight, and I dropped down and ran across the siding, up an alley, and in the backdoor of Taco-World, where I purchased a sackful of counterfeit burritos.

But when I returned to the tracks, she was not in sight. I called her name over several coal cars. No answer. She had absconded again. She had left me. I stood in the future, holding a bag of rapidly cooling pseudo-Mexican food staring at a train, empty in my eyes. I am not prepared for this, I thought. I am not fully aware of what to do next.

“Louisa!” I called.

“Ssssssssssttt!” came the reply. “Collin! Up here!”

I couldn’t see her. I ran up the roadbed, stumbling only twice. She leaned out of the passenger window of a maroon Pontiac Firebird, parked economically along with eleven others on a racked rail car. The interior featured a bit more leg room and crushed velvet than had our hot seats in the coal.

“I saw two men coming up from the caboose; the fuckers won’t find us here. What’d you get?”

The train jarred to a start while we were still eating the burritos and washing them down with some iced cola. I looked out of the window like any privileged passenger, and then back at this girl chewing her ice beside me, and I thought: yes, everything seems to be changing, and good, because I seem to be on the change committee.

She talked with her mouth full. She told me I looked like I was fourteen. She told me that she had seen me watching her at the fair and was hoping I was the governor’s son or something. She told me that I certainly was a horny bastard.

She answered my obvious questions with: “Does the bear shit in the woods?” I didn’t know that much about bears, as I have said. I did come to know that everytime she opened her mouth, full or not, out flew spirals, stars, and exclamation points. Obviously she had learned to curse at the paternal knee.

The train dragged. We had the windows rolled down and there was only the thinnest breeze. Twenty-eight miles an hour, tops. The engineer evidently had read
The History of Casey Jones
, and had been utterly cautioned by it. I lay back against the seat and studied Louisa’s hair when she wasn’t looking. It was auburn, and the red elements shone.

Then twilight: the sluggish ride through the desert, the colors, green and lavender rising as the light failed, the car interior with its new plastic smell, the prints on the dashboard where Louisa rested her lounging feet. Later, as we rolled along, rocked to a drowse by the regular triple rippling of the railroad tracks and the evening capsized and sank, she told me about her father.

“He’s all right. He’s always all right. He’s crashed in twenty or twenty-one states. I think it’s a goddamned record. Did you see those stupid stickers on the trailer window? Those are the states he’s crashed in. He’s broken a shitload of bones and a lot twice. His collarbone three times on one side.”

“Maybe that’s what made him mean!”

“Heredity, you simple shit—do you know what that is?—made him mean; he didn’t
learn
it anywhere. He was mean and he passed it on. Watchout.” She laughed.

“What did your grandfather do?”

“Nothing. Lived in Germany. Threw kids out of the house. My father thinks that’s how to raise kids. It was the only lesson he learned. I never met my grandfather, I did talk to my grandmother once. In Germany.” She stopped, leaned back, changed directions.

“It was lucky my dad got kicked out. It was the only thing that saved him from being a fucking Nazi.”

I waited.

“Seriously. He was just a kid, nowhere to go. He joined the traveling carnivals, and went to Canada when the war started. Oh, don’t kid yourself; he’d have led the motorcycle troops, if they’d had such a thing.”

“What about your mother?”

“Canadian.”

“Oh.”

Louisa’s mother had ridden the trapeze before her. When Barbara, that was her name, met the young daredevil in Sudbury, she joined the act first as a lark, and then in courtship. She must have been a cheap date. Three children later, Louisa came along, riding the unicycle in two shows a day, looking upward at her mom and dad riding the wire. It was a childhood like any other.

When Barbara ran away with “a fat-assed fry cook!” from a carnival in Montreal, Louisa started riding the bar. The morning after Louisa’s mother left, Ring Holz went after her. Louisa stayed with Mr. C. B. Borkanida. Ring came back three weeks later, empty-handed, to find his eight-year-old daughter speaking a certain version of Japanese. She had that whipped out of her and began riding the trapeze. Her father never volunteered any news about the chase, whether he had found them, killed them, offered them money, or wished them well. And Louisa never asked.

At night, the German-Canadian Ring Holz would get drunk with his Japanese lighting man, Mr. C. B. Borkanida, and they would complain to each other in two and sometimes three languages about life in general, and about the treachery of women, and about the way the spotlight ought to be a bit higher to cover the complete headstand every night. Neither understood a word the other spoke. Finally, they would lapse into singing, a racket Louisa heard a hundred times and took to be an international lullaby.

“He was good to me when I was little,” she said. “But after mom left and I started riding the trapeze, it got bad. This is the fifth or sixth time I’ve split. And if he finds out where this drag-ass train is headed, he’ll be waiting for me at the other end. Count on it.”

In the darkness, I felt a little safer from the immediate injury offered by railroad personnel, but this was sprinkled with a dark anxiety about just what I was doing. I tried to imagine my father in the make-up trailer on the location of his latest film, asking the girl if there had been any calls from his son. I tried to dream up a plan.

Louisa meanwhile resorted to a short game called: belching on a train. They were full-size belches, the kind that you could hear on the other side of a house.

I told her about the Noble Canyon Home for Wayward Girls, my mother, my father, Rawlins and Steele, and the nightlife. She said
wow
, and then said that it all sounded like a lot of fun. When she said that I got sick. I could take all the other silliness, truckloads of oath, invective, mispronunciations, and belching. I could stand being called a simple shit and being asked about bears etcetera, because I was on a train, excited; the horizon was everywhere. But her screwy analysis of my recent life as being
a lot of fun
, reached my stomach.

So, like a fool, I tried to tell her more. I recounted one of Steele’s initiations.

The way Raymond Steele kept the populace of Noble Canyon under his thumb was by composing lasting first impressions. His concept of winning friends and influencing people was simply to hurt them first. New kids fell fast. He’d hear about a new admission and his mind would sink a gear from
prank
to
crime
, and he’d be in motion.

Last week there had been a new girl in the girls’ facilities, and by midnight of the first day, she was in his room. Silli, not knowing better, not knowing anything, brought her over for a “party.” When Silli left, the girl, Denice, went along with everything for a while, measuring Steele drink for drink for almost an hour. Then Steele had introduced his lower-school accomplices (because I’d refused), and escorted Denice to his room where the fun began.

First, they drew cards for clothing, a laughing matter until the grabbing begins. At that point, it becomes a screaming matter, which is useless, since our guard, Jerome, practiced Quaaludes, and he and his ears were scudding the bottom of the Gulf of California.

I was in my room, pretending to read, actually counting my books, listening to the girl cry out, until I couldn’t take it—or Steele—any longer. When I pushed in to Steele’s room, he had one of the sophomores on top of the naked girl, and he was giving inspired instructions to the kid and to Denice, who didn’t seem exactly fit for any advice. She was a pale, fleshy white, except where red handprints tracked along her arms and legs. Her screaming had subsided into a moaning lyric: “Nooo! Noooo!”

“Let her go, Steele.”

“Go on, Collin. She’s okay. Go on.”

The girl was crying in a subdued but insistent way. The sophomore looked at Steele to see if he should press on.

“Get out of here,” Steele said to me. “We know what we’re doing.” It seemed the strangest thing he could have said. But I wasn’t getting out. I grabbed the sophomore by the shoulder and pulled him off.

“Get off,” I said. “She doesn’t really care for you.” I was trying to kid Steele out of it. The girl, released for a moment, lay there spread naked, half off the bed. Steele took my arm, leaving his right hand free, in case he wanted—or had—to hit me. “Get out!” he growled. “It’s an initiation. You don’t have to worry, Collin; she wasn’t a virgin.”

I pushed him off and we would have had it all right there, instead of later, if the girl hadn’t thrown up on herself and started choking. I turned her over, and then she really let loose and puked all over Steele’s room.

The two other kids pulled up their pants and left. I got Denice a wet towel and threw her Steele’s red robe to wear back to her dorm.

I waited until she limped out, and then turned to Steele to see if we would be required to batter each other. He looked at me as the sour fumes rose around us.

“I can’t stand a girl who throws up,” was what he said, grabbing the half-empty bottle of Scotch and leading me down to the recreation room. There we enjoyed the shoddy pretense of comaraderie, drink by drink, like men after a hunting trip, until his eyes closed and I wobbled off to bed.

The day after, utterly poisoned, I shoveled for my cows. Every time I bent over, my eyes blurred so I thought someone was throwing birds at me. If it had been only cerebral hemorrhage city, I could have stood it, but, no, it was my
life
, and it was stalled, mired helplessly. I had shoveled and shoveled that summer, but not without the growing awareness that something, sometime had to hit the fan.

When I finished talking, I had the impression Louisa was listening. She looked at me, with what I mistook as understanding, and then she quietly said, “Don’t take anything I say personally or seriously, but you sure make being a simple shit seem complicated. You and your words.” She said the entire sentence out of the side of her mouth, a technique I attributed to her life in show business.

Sometime after midnight the train shuddered to a stop. We are not in California, I thought: it is too soon. Louisa sat up and rubbed her eyes. I couldn’t see anything outside except our neighboring trains in this yard, and then men, men coming, walking down the track. So that is what working on the railroad means; I’d always wondered. The men walk down the tracks at night and catch runaways all the livelong day. It was time for us to get out.

“Roll down your window,” I whispered.

“Huh?”

“We’re getting out. Roll down your window and crawl out.” I pointed at the men coming up my side of the train. This stimulated her exit, and I followed feet first. We dropped to the ground and began a modified sneak-walk back along the train in the darkest shadows.

After about a dozen cars she asked, “How long is this goddamned train?”

It was long. The railroad yard was a regular city of railroad cars looking lonely in the flat flare-lights of the towers. If you want to feel like a kid, walk around trains at night; they’re bigger than you think.

The sign on the wooden station read:
Wickenburg
. Not even Kingman. We skipped across the street from the rails and were again pedestrians, now looking for a place to spend the night. I could see Louisa was worried. Her eyes scanned the empty streets. Then she turned to me, as if this portion of the world were my fault, and asked, “
What now?
”