Sunset and Sawdust

3

The cyclone that tore up Sunset’s house swirled on through the trees, carrying away her roof and goods, headed east, and was still kicking by early nightfall, tossing fish, frogs, and debris. It even threw a calf against a house and killed it.

The westbound train into Tyler caught the tail end of the storm, and the wind tossed fish against it and shook the boxcars and made them rattle like a toy train shaken by a mean child.

For a moment, it seemed as if the train might be sucked off the track, but shaking was the worst of it. The locomotive and its little boxes chugged on and so did the storm, which finally played out near the Louisiana border. The last of it was just a cool, damp wind for some hot people night-fishing on the banks of the Sabine River.

In one of the boxcars, Hillbilly sat with his guitar and his little tote bag and eyed the two fellas squatting across from him. They had climbed on when the train slowed in Tyler, and now as it clunked through the countryside and the storm was over, they began to eye him.

They pretended to ignore him at first, but he caught them sneaking glances. He hadn’t liked them from the start. He had greeted them as they climbed into the car, and they hadn’t said so much as eat shit or howdy.

They kicked a couple of sun perch out of the open doorway, shook the rain off themselves dog style, hunkered down like gargoyles opposite the open sliding door, and said nothing, just sneaked peeks.

Although Hillbilly looked younger than his thirty years, he had lived a full thirty. He had been around and seen much. He had played his guitar and sung in every dive in East Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana. He had ridden trains all over the place, supped in hobo camps, boxed and wrestled for money at county fairs, where his wiry thinness and soft good looks had fooled many a local tough into thinking he was a pushover.

From experience, Hillbilly knew these fellas were studying him a little too intently. Like hungry dogs looking at a pork chop. One of them was short and stout and wore a wool cap. The other was taller, leaner, and hatless, with a thick growth of beard.

“You got the makings?” Hillbilly asked, even though he didn’t smoke as a matter of course. But sometimes, you broke the ice, it could save you trouble. A cigarette could do that, break the ice.

The man with the cap shook his head, said, “You’re a young’n, ain’t you?”

“Not that young,” Hillbilly said.

“You look young.”

“Have any food?” Hillbilly asked.

“Just them fish in the doorway,” said the bearded man. “You want that, have at it.”

“I don’t think so,” Hillbilly said. “Ever seen that kind of thing before? Raining fish? I read about it. It was that cyclone. It sucked out a pond somewhere, throwed them fish all along here.”

The men had no interest in the cyclone or the fish. The bearded man grinned at Hillbilly. Hillbilly had seen friendlier grins on alligators.

“You been on the road a while?” said the bearded man.

“A while.”

“Gets lonely, don’t it?” said the man with the cap.

“I’m not that lonely, really.”

“We get lonely,” said the bearded man. “Me and him just being together. We get all kinds of lonely. Man don’t need to be lonely. Don’t have to be.”

“I’m not lonely at all,” Hillbilly said.

The man with the cap said, “We can show you that you been lonely and didn’t even know it.”

“I’m fine. Really.”

The man with the cap laughed. “It ain’t really you we’re worried about. It’s us that are lonely.”

“You got each other,” Hillbilly said.

“Having each other all the time gets old,” the bearded man said. “We want someone else to not be lonely with.”

“God don’t like that kind of talk. You boys ever hear about Sodom and Gomorrah?”

The bearded man hooted. “Who gives a damn about some Bible story? We get you bent over, you’ll be happier than you think.”

“Fellas, leave me alone.”

That’s when the one with the cap came up from his squatting position and sprang.

Hillbilly brought his guitar around hard, breaking it soundly over the capped man’s head, knocking him back. Then the bearded one was on him. Hillbilly pushed him back with the palm of his hand, stuck the other hand in his pocket, pulled out his knife, flicked it open.

The one with the cap came in again, and Hillbilly stuck him under the short ribs. The knife went in as easy as poking a hole through a sheet of wet paper. The man dropped immediately. Went to his knees, tumbled on his side.

“Goddamn,” said the bearded one, whacking Hillbilly in the eye. “You hurt Winston.”

The bearded man grabbed Hillbilly in a bear hug and squeezed Hillbilly’s hands to his sides. Hillbilly butted him in the nose and he let go. Hillbilly stabbed him in the groin and he stumbled back. Hillbilly’s knife flashed again, high and wide.

The man held his throat, tried to say something, but couldn’t. He sat down as if a chair had been pulled out from under him. He sat upright for a moment, then lay on his back slowly and tried to tuck his chin, as if this might seal the wound.

Hillbilly put his boot on the man’s face and pushed with all his weight so the wound would bleed out. The man wiggled like a snake, but the wiggling didn’t last.

“I told you to leave me the hell alone,” Hillbilly said.

Hillbilly wiped his knife on the dead man’s jacket, put it away, went over and looked at the one who had worn the cap. The cap had fallen off and lay on the boxcar floor.

Hillbilly picked up the cap and put it on, then he bent over the man. He was alive, but in the partial moonlight his dark eyes looked like creek pebbles under raging water.

“You done stabbed me,” the man said. His voice sounded as if it were coming through a squeeze organ.

“You wasn’t gonna give me a picnic lunch,” Hillbilly said.

“That’s my hat.”

“Not anymore.”

“We was just gonna get some loving. There ain’t no fault in that.”

“Unless you don’t want it.”

“I ain’t gonna make it,” the man said.

“You took it under the rib. I think I got your lung. You’re right. You ain’t gonna make it.”

“You’re a sonofabitch,” the man said, and blood poured out of his mouth.

“You’re right about that,” Hillbilly said.

“Just a goddamned horse’s ass.”

“Right again. And I figure you ain’t got but a few seconds to get used to the idea.”

The man jerked and made a noise, then joined his pal in the long fall to wherever.

Hillbilly got up and looked at his guitar. It was junk now. And so was his way of making a living. Hillbilly tossed the busted guitar out the doorway, squatted and thought about things.

He could throw these bo’s out, go into the next town, get off there. Then again, it might be best he got off when the train slowed in Lindale near the cannery. It was a pretty good jump because it didn’t slow all the way, but he had done it before. You tucked and rolled and took your jump where the grass was thick, it was something you could do and not break your neck.

He did that, by the time they found these two, he’d be long gone.

Hillbilly glanced outside. It was black in the distance because of the woods, but the moonlight lay bright on the gravel along the tracks and made the stuff look like diamonds.

Hillbilly rummaged through their goods and found a potato, some salt and pepper in little boxes. He put these in his little bag and fastened it to his belt. He stood in the doorway for a long time, using one trembling hand to support himself on the frame of the boxcar, watched until he could see the Lindale lights.

Out there was Tin Can Alley. He had worked canning peas there, and he had worked picking the peas they canned. He had worked all along this railroad line, picking fruit, cotton, tomatoes, all kinds of jobs, and the only one he had liked was singing and playing that guitar. Now his guitar was broken, smashed over some amorous thug’s head.

He looked back at the two. The one whose throat he had cut had a dark pool under his head. It looked like a flat black pillow there in the darkness. The other lay on his side with his hands pressed against his wound, eyes open, as if thinking about something important.

Hillbilly’s mouth tasted sour with bile. He spat out of the boxcar, and when the train slowed coming into the Lindale yard, he took a deep breath, and jumped before it got there.

Wandering through the darkness, Hillbilly came to a wooded place. There was a little stream there, and in time he saw a flicker of light through the trees. He could smell smoke and he could smell food cooking.

He bent down and used his hand to cup up some water. He sat that way for a while, listening. There were voices coming from the light, and he decided to go to it. As he neared, he called out, “Yo, bo’s.”

A pause. Then: “Come on in. You got any fixings?”

Hillbilly moved into the light. Around a fire were three hobos. They had a can hung on a stick over the fire and were boiling some stew.

“I got a tater in my sack,” Hillbilly said, and wished now he’d nabbed one of those fish in the doorway of the boxcar.

He came into the camp and took out the potato. The men around the fire stood up as he neared, just in case he might not be what he seemed.

“I put in some cooked beans a woman gave me,” one of the hobos said. He was a little man with an old black fedora and clothes that had been patched so much the original clothing was no longer visible. He had been sitting on an old black jacket rolled up on the ground.

“I didn’t have nothing to add but my best wishes,” said a fat colored man wearing overalls. He was squatting by the fire.

“I had the can,” the other man said. He looked pretty dressed up for a hobo. “I cleaned it in the creek there. It’s a pretty fresh can, so it doesn’t have rust in it.”

Hillbilly gave the patched clothes man the potato and the man pulled out a pocketknife and went to cutting it up, skin and all, into the can of boiling water and beans.

“It’d taste pretty good we had some wild onions,” said the colored man. “But I don’t know we could find any in the dark.”

“I got a little salt and pepper on me, too,” Hillbilly said, and he removed the little bag he had tied to his belt and opened it again. He took out the little boxes of salt and pepper. “Give it a pinch of these here.”

When the stew was cooked up, Hillbilly took his cup from the bag and the patched clothes man poured him up some. Then Patches poured some into a tin can the black man had, a metal plate the other man had, and he himself drank out of the cook can.

As they sat and ate, they talked about this and that, and then the important stuff. Where they could get handouts and who was an easy mark on up the road. Patches said, “There’s this woman over near Tyler. She ain’t got no man. She’ll give you food if you’ll come in the house and service her. I don’t know she’d screw a nigger, though, Johnny Ray.”

Johnny Ray shook his head. “I don’t want me none of that. No trouble like that. No, sir.”

“How does she look?” the dressed-up man asked.

“Look at her straight on, you might turn to stone,” Patches said. “And her cunt hairs are all gray. Ain’t so bad when you ain’t had none in a long time. And then she’s got that food. But don’t kiss her. Her mouth tastes like sin.”

“She looks like that, I wouldn’t think of kissing her,” said the well-dressed man. “Least, I don’t believe I would. It’s hard for me to know what I might do these days.”

“What I need is work,” Hillbilly said. “And I need a guitar. Mine got busted.”

“You play guitar?” said Patches.

“That’s why I need one,” Hillbilly said. “I sing too. I don’t have a guitar, I feel like half a man. I don’t feel the half that’s left is my good half neither.”

“Hell, I play the spoons,” said Patches.

“I got me a Jew’s harp and a harmonica,” said the colored man.

“I play them too, if that’s all I got,” Hillbilly said. “But I’m a guitar man.”

“I can’t play anything,” said Well-Dressed. “Formerly I was a school-teacher. Can you believe that? Now I don’t know a thing I need to know. Goddamn Depression. Goddamn Hoover.”

“You can listen,” said Patches. “Me and Johnny Ray, we play good together. I get them spoons going, and he comes in on that Jew’s harp or the harmonica, we get a lively tune playing. It would sound real good if you can sing. Me and Johnny Ray sound like two old frogs a-blowing.”

“I can sing,” Hillbilly said.

“Do you know ‘ Red River Valley ’?” said Patches.

“You strike it up, and I’ll come in singing.”

Patches got out the spoons and went to it. Johnny Ray went to blowing his harmonica, and pretty soon Hillbilly began to sing.

He was good too, and his voice rang through the woods, and they played and sang tunes well into the night.