Assorted Fire Events: Stories

THE GRIP

BENEATH HIM the metal gave and sang accompanied by the tedious clack of rail gaps; it was the couplings whacking each other, or something. Jim didn’t know the parts the way some did, the ones who had worked on the lines; he was just hanging on, and had been since the yards in Albuquerque, where he’d clambered up between cars and then, before he could jump back down, found himself stuck as the train opened up full throttle and darkness fell, which it did along this stretch of the Rio fast and quick, the sun sliding off the emptiness, leaving him with only his grip and a foothold that wasn’t sure. It was very cold. The heat rose up through the translucent sky, was gone, and he was left in his cotton shirt — moth-holed and tattered. (He’d left Ohio in this same damn shirt, the very same one.) He’d heard stories of men in the same circumstances, men betrayed by bad leaps onto sluggishly moving freights; he’d heard the tall tales of men who held on in poor positions all night, into the next day, and through another weary night until their tendons locked and their muscles broke and they were saved at the last second when the destination was reached or the train pulled to a siding to let an express pass. Then with their arms out like zombies they’d stumble off between the couplings and lay in the grass, scream into the sky. The other side, too, he’d heard. Those who held on for a night and then tried to find some way to climb up to the walk only to fall to a depraved death. The grip he had was a solid one, and there was a toehold below, on a shank of metal coming out of the car, a piece of broken hardware that had no apparent use. The foothold wasn’t much, and to keep it he had to rest his weight on the side of his boot, his arch; when that got sore, he moved back to his toes. About fifty minutes into the ride, he slipped off his toes and had to rely on his grip to keep himself from falling. That was when he decided it would be best to keep his arch over the nub. His buddy Roy was farther down, probably on top of a car, and maybe he’d work his way along and, looking down, see him there and somehow conspire to find a way to help him up, maybe making a loop with his belt (did he have a belt?), because Roy had been riding for months and knew the tricks of the trade. Roy had a tight-lipped, know-it-all look. He chewed over his knowledge, his tales of the road, long and hard before talking them out.

This was a long dull stretch of empty land, desert hard and straight, allowing the engineer to open it up so that the train, despite its enormous length, might sizzle through the landscape and make the yards in Fe by dawn; he reckoned his grip would hold until dawn, to say the least, and maybe through the next day if he had to do it, because he knew what had to be done to stay alive in this life. He’d been called an animal by his adopted aunt, and he found himself — as he wandered around — drawing strength and life from the comparison. One day after another it had been basically by living the life of an animal that he survived (he’d confessed all this to Roy in an apostolic rant by the campfire one night over a couple of bottles of sour mash); he figured his grip was tough enough, fingers thick and hard from the last job he’d had hauling ice in Ohio, wrists good and thick as the rest of his torso, at least down to his legs, which were long and thin and rather elegant; he figured all this would conspire to hold him onto the car at least to Fe.

Night settled on the train. The trails of light in the sky, which flickered above him, little feathers of high cirrus with orange and magenta hues, were swallowed up by the purest and finest dark he’d ever known. The dark seemed to be a thick oil pouring from under the train and up and over him until — this was an hour or two later — he wasn’t sure how long he’d been there and how long he was going to have to wait for dawn. He wasn’t sure of much except of the pain in his arch above the nub, and that he’d had to loosen his grip, flex his fingers, putting even more weight on that nub before he made the contortion — almost slipping off in the process — to get his weight transferred to the other foot.

Above him the sparkling display of the cosmos framed by the lip of the hopper gave testimony to the train’s movement, to space and time passing, but he didn’t see it. He didn’t see the passing of stars; the spiraled celestial movement. He held on and held on tight and time slipped away. Time didn’t pass. Or it did pass. He was remembering the time he’d been at the house, in Galva, in the backyard, playing beneath large double sheets on the line as they bloomed and folded with wind like spinnakers, starched by the sun while his mother — making that soft little hum sound she made when she was occupied by herself — put more pins into more cloth, or just stood there with her back to him scrutinizing the horizon, as if in the view his father would appear as an aberration of light; for his father was one of those long-lost salesmen who took to the road selling and rarely came back: a scuff of his hard soles on the kitchen floor, the bootblack smell, his thick ungainly arms were the sole fragments left of the man. That one single moment in the yard reclining against the grass watching his mother, or just listening to her make sound out of air against her teeth and lips; and then, along with that, a memory of her arms giving him one of her great, big bear hugs. That moment seized up and fell away when the great strain of the grip — the flaring pain of it — superseded all memory and he held on for dear life. The fear burned the memory away, like a projector bulb melting a hole in jammed film. What did it matter? It was the last memory of her anyhow, all he had left of it. She died before she could fully reveal herself to him. After her death the rest of his childhood was short-lived and brutal, a series of bleak portraits, fuzzy daguerreotypes of his aunts — he was passed from home to home until his body hardened to adulthood and the Depression set in and he began to drift.

The night took on vast, grand proportions; the night was liquid and runny, stretched taut until it was no more than a thin strand of hot white burning his foot and palm.

With great laborious heaves the train slowed and began to lug up the grade into the foothills — but not slow enough to allow him to jump from his strange position, twisted partway around so he wasn’t able to find the leverage for a leap that would clear him from the wheels and the girth of the car; in any case the energy he’d need for such a stunt was gone — or so he thought, calculating and making odds. It was the slow deceleration of the train, the decreasing clicks of rail links, that broke him from his odd reverie about his mother (which as far as he knew was the last real thing he’d thought of aside from his grip, the nub that was burning hellfire into his foot; maybe a stray thought of how good a slug of Roy’s Ripple would taste at that very moment). He had no large philosophical map of the world upon which to consider his situation. His intention, his sole intention, was to live through the night, to hold on. Far in the dark the train gave a low whistle, probably to scare off a coyote from the tracks. No God-fearing soul would find himself this far in the desert, even with water towers spaced periodically. Again he considered the stories of men who had ventured out into the desert only to watch the sardonic waves of brakeman and fellow hobos from the open mouths of passing boxcars; he considered again the fantastic tall tales of men such as himself, holding on for dear life in stupefying positions for days on end. Those tales had always sounded preposterous and stupid and impossible to anyone who’d gone through the experience of riding between cars for more than an hour. But those were the best stories, the ones that held the campfire crowd longest, the bullshits and yeah rights just adding to the fun of telling them.

One of two things was going to give: the grip or the toehold. If the grip went — already he’d lost it a bit that one time he was changing feet — he would count on the foothold. If the foothold went he’d hope for the strength to cling with his fingers long enough to regain his footing. The car had a slight rhythmical sway to it. The tracks were set in clean, white ballast, but they weren’t perfect. In the time he’d been holding on — an hour, maybe four, most likely not more than that because there wasn’t even the slightest trace of dawn-light in the sky — he’d learned the dance she made; his cheek rested against the metal side; he tasted it with his lips, metal and old paint and creosote and ashblack. The dance was the waltz, a three-count thing. Now it was slowing, and he did a shift, putting all the weight on the nub as he switched to his cold, dew-damp left hand and then spun slightly — in congruence with the sway of the car, it seemed — to the other foot.

Again far up in the future there was the thin squeal of the whistle.

The train seemed to be slowing even more, although if there was one thing that he had learned from Roy it was that there was no speed better than a dead stop for departing a train; and any hobo worth shit knew that there was nothing harder than gauging the speed of a train once you were under her spell; men were betrayed by all kinds of things, and one thing that could do you in was thinking the clacks were slowing, that there was a long space between them, when all you’d done is stopped hearing them; stopped listening; or the rails were longer, or it just didn’t matter anymore and you were ready to pack it in.

His relationship with oblivion was a tight one. He’d looked out into the long blank stare of the Great Plains for hours on end. He’d lain atop a load of coal clear across the plains of Nebraska and let his eyes swallow the cosmos from one end to the other.

Roy had one of those strange, twisted voices, half yokel but with a hint of some kind of feigned dignity that came from attending a good college out East before Wall Street fell out from under his life. Some said he had a house and two kids and even a little cocker spaniel behind him like so much refuge, trash tossed along the roadway. Others said he’d once been a strong businessman, a compatriot of Rockefeller. In a hobo shack someplace outside of Cleveland a man had whispered into the darkness — secreting his words in soft, husky grunts — that Roy had once played croquet with Lindbergh. Who knew? It was as possible as anything else in the world. So when Roy’s voice appeared up over the top edge of the car it seemed both angelic and harsh at the same time; he barked commands over the roar of the train. The commands were grand and oratorical: To jump clear of the tracks, Jim, all you have to do, he said, is find the resolve, the spunk, the go-get-it attitude. It was the voice of a man addressing the Rotary Club about civic pride and boosterism on one hand, and on the other it had undertones of fatherly advice.

Outlined with starlight and what perhaps was the first fine hints of twilight, he could see Roy’s hand up there reaching down to him with a furtive little waving motion. Give me your hand, the voice said firmly. It would be simple. Roy would haul him up and over the side of the car and then they’d have a celebratory smoke, flicking the ash and spark off into the slipstream, not saying a whole hell of a lot but letting the silence itself spread around the fantastic way in which he’d survived the ordeal. He’d wait out asking Roy if he had any sense at all of how long he’d been hanging on with his grip; he’d savor the response that was about to come: two fucking hours, or three, or longer. Then with this information imparted they’d chuckle at the odd ways of the universe and shimmy their way along the top of two cars until they found a hopper in which to dig out rounded spots of coal upon which to catch a bit of shut-eye.

Jim had to persuade himself of the truth, to go about it systematically. The voice he was hearing was nothing more than the constant stream of passing air being twisted by his pain; and the waving hand above coaxing him to let go was nothing but his tired eyes giving way to hope. He’d seen mirages before, fantastically real, opening up over the fields of Iowa and Utah; he’d seen a great lake of pure fresh water amid which there was a raft and girls being towed on skis behind a boat; he’d seen large Indian faces, passive with judgment and wisdom, staring down out of the sage and bramble. To believe in them was one thing, because it was just as possible to believe in a mirage as it was to believe in anything else; but to expect out of a mirage what you’d expect out of something real and tangible was nothing but foolhardiness; many a good hobo had gone that route, put faith in the visions — gone the way of large open lakes with speedboats towing skiers; and died for it. He’d learned that the best visions were the ones you sat back and took in without trusting one bit; on the other side of the coin he’d seen real sights that were as good as mirages because they were so far removed from his trust, his fingers. Once, on the East Coast, on a New York stopover selling pears on the street, he’d taken a train out to the edge of the Bronx, and then a street car farther out until he found himself on the verge of some avenue of great wealth on which the houses, stately and large, were draped by sweeping crowns of maple and oak. It seemed to him to be vestiges of a land so grand and fantastic that he sat down on the sidewalk right there, crossed his legs, and wept with his face cupped in his palms. Then a man came along, a colored gentleman in a wide white shirt and dark blue dungarees, his face as dark as pitch, swollen with years of hard work. He asked if things were right. Then he offered a glass of water, taking him back along a side path to the kitchen door of one place, making him wait there until he came back out with a tall, dark green glass, actual cubes of ice clinking inside it, and made him take a long drink before telling him to get on his way because the likes of him weren’t appreciated around those parts. Back on the sidewalk, facing the house again, he’d been uncertain as to the validity of the event. Had he gone with the Negro to the back door to have his thirst quenched? Or was he just working into the scene his own form of indulgence, spurred on by the thirst he was feeling? Sitting on that sidewalk his throat was as parched as it had been on any of his travels across the desert, not even a small trace of spittle available to relieve the clench of his esophagus or the dry paper of his tongue; and now on the train with his grip failing he was just as thirsty. But he was awake. That much was sure. He was as awake as he’d ever be. He made a little shift of his root — now so numbed he was hardly able to call it his own — and tried to flex his fingers without letting go, and instead he did let go and the full brunt of his body was on the nub for a second and then his foot slipped completely off and just in time — in conjunction with another heartfelt wail of the horn far up — he regained his handhold.

There were only two endings to the tall tales traded before their beleaguered campfires: men fell to their death, or they lived on gallantly against odds that were as wide as the sky and as twisted as Joshua trees. Well fuck all that, he said, cursing his slip, the closeness to which he’d come to being eaten by the wheels. Fuck all this. It was time to let go or be let go of, one way or another. It was time that the long snaking oblivion of the night — the ceaseless clank and rattle of the couplings below, the scene of desert at night — of juniper and dust and dew combined — had its will.

But he did not let go with an attempted jump, and the reason was simple and left him until the late fifties when he was on his deathbed in Toledo, Ohio, with his son Carter by his side, holding his hand, and he remembered it again. Down at the camp by the water tower, right before falling into the deepest sleep of his life, he vowed to himself not to forget it, and he told Roy to remember what he was going to say, and to repeat it to him when he woke. Don’t let me forget that, he said, for Jesus’ sake when I get up and I’m myself again tell the whole story to remind me. He’d staggered a few yards up the track where the switchman told him to go. He’d never forget the kindly switchman who saw him stumble out from between cars and fall to his knees. Dressed in railroad overalls, an oil can in one hand, the switchman came over and helped him to his feet and asked him if he was all right. Here’s a nickel because you didn’t ask for one, he said, passing it over, shaking his head in a bemused but respectful manner when he saw where the kid had held on — the small handle, the bit of metal sticking out below — clear across the desert.

Right above the lip of the car, in that open starlit space that was only a slight variation of darkness — only a tiny bit lighter than the train itself — he saw her small, pure face, like some kind of ripe fruit; in it he saw his own eyes, marbled brown with flecks of mica, and the shape of his own mouth, thin and tight around the teeth. So sure was he that this wasn’t an aberration, that this was in no way a mirage, that he called out her name several times. Mom. Mom. Mom. She reached down to him, her arms long and thin and frail-looking in the darkness; she reached down to him and put her fingers around his fingers and held them tightly there — grip holding forearm; grip holding forearm — until twilight began to merge with the dark and spread above the train.

My own mother’s fingers appeared, he told Roy, who looked away with skeptical shame over his companion’s confession; it was a sad sight to see his buddy sink to this point without him being drunk out of his mind on Ripple. Promise me you’ll tell me. I forget everything in my sleep, he said. Ah shit, I’ll tell you, Roy muttered, spitting once into the weeds.

For all it matters to the world he might as well have been eaten by the wheels, another dead body kicked free of his grip by bad luck, weakness, ill timing, or a sadistic railroad bull. There were plenty of dead in that time of wandering. He shared the story with his son shortly before he passed away in Toledo’s Flower Memorial Hospital, where his son was a resident radiologist. He had seen his mother’s face up there, real and pure, as hard as carved stone. And he’d lived to speak of it to his son, who wept to see his father’s x-rays reveal the cloudy result of seventy years of Lucky Strikes. Your grandmother’s fingers were surprisingly strong, he said. They wrapped around mine and together we worked our way out of the night and into the next morning when, like a song of mercy, the clacks slowed and the train came off the long grade and stopped to take on water.

Then he told his son about Roy, and how he’d made him promise to repeat the tale to him when he awoke, and how after making that request he fell face down into the brambles and slipped into the deepest sleep of his life.