Rock Island Line

by David Rhodes

“Come on, man, that kind of thing ain’t it.” Pause. “Sure, OK. I’ll pick it up.”

  “Forget it,” said John. “You’re right. It doesn’t have much to do with that.”

  “No you don’t. You think I can’t. You saying in your mind, ‘He can’t . . . he ain’t the real thing.’ “ The black muscles tightened. The jaw fixed. The anvil came off the ground. He dropped it.

  Then John picked it up.

  “We’ve got some in the city,” the black man said, “who could pick that up with their teeth.”

  “We got them too,” said John. “What’s your name?”

  “Prentiss Hilton Brown,” he said, with great dignity. “I already know yours, so let’s get down to what’s this all about.” He took his pocket knife out of his pocket, opened it and went over to the workbench. He cleaned the tools away from an area so that only the dark grease- and oil-stained wood was exposed. Then he opened the front of his pants, took out his penis and laid it out on the table, standing up close to do it. He pushed the knife into the wood as a marker for the length of his soft organ, resealed it back inside his pants and looked at John. The polished knife blade stood poised straight down into the wood, a respectable length from the edge.

  My God, thought John, and was so embarrassed and shocked it took him a minute to move or speak—staring as though hypnotized at the knife, wondering if it had really happened.

  “That’s ridiculous,” he said. “That’s got nothing to do with it.”

  “No, no. That’s it. That’s the whole matter.”

  “It’s stupider than the anvil business.”

  “Maybe.” He considered. Just from his face John could tell that the man before him was no fool and had every ounce of reasoning ability that John did. “Maybe. OK, forget it. That’s not it.”

  “Oh no,” said John. “I know what you’re thinking,” and in one tremendous rush of willpower he took out his own penknife (a smaller, less decorative knife with a rounded end and a screwdriver), exposed himself upon the workbench, pushed in the knife and recomposed himself.

  Prentiss Hilton Brown quickly pulled the knife out of the table, shut it and put it into his pocket, even though it had stood farther from the edge by almost three quarters of an inch . . . longer, but definitely lacking in breadth. “You’re right. That ain’t quite the right thing.”

  These first two stages of their encounter happened very slowly. Mostly they looked at each other in deadly seriousness. At this point they both still believed, as surely as they had the day before, in the undeniable truth of their own convictions: John, that no one could ever be more alive than himself, and Prentiss, that he was. John was attracted by his belligerence. He feared and pitied it. What would it be like, he wondered, to be able to assume that the world at large was hostile to you and would wish for your personal demise as a simple matter of course? And to assume that not out of naive egotism (like someone who believes he is of a different kind) but out of an accumulation of experienced facts. It would be like an animal, he thought for one terrible minute, hiding and smelling for wolves. It would be tragic, because the whole purpose of the developed intellect, so far as he could see, was in allowing one to be free from that criminal hypothesis—in being able to say, “Nothing out there wishes me harm intentionally, and when I think it does, the very thought betrays my own shallowness and malfunction.” But him. What does fairness mean to him? When happiness for me seems to be a feeling of harmony with the world, what is his happiness? Is it protected isolation? But that would lead to introversion. No, it would be either complete neglect of the other side or the pride of being a noble, even superior adversary. Then a tin bell rang in his head and he realized, in depth, something he had known before in a trite way: So long as any one person is oppressed, he will bind me to his outlook; he will declare himself an adversary, and in so doing the line will be drawn and I will find myself on one side or another. So goes the harmony. So goes any chance of prolonged happiness. His mind reeled. He rejected ideas as fast as he thought them.

  They stood looking at each other in absolute silence. Then a knock came from the side door, followed by one from the front, both quick, sharp raps. Then another from the front, at a different place. A long silence. Two more knocks from the side, accompanied by the hesitant voice of one of the blacks: “Hey, Prentiss, let’s get going.” Then Marvin’s voice from the front: “Hey, John ... John, hey, open up.”

  Prentiss and John took a step closer together, as though they were both about to say something and wanted to be heard over the noise outside, coming to within ten feet of each other.

  Outside, one of the blacks rattled the door handle impatiently and spoke again, somewhat pointedly now. “Prentiss, let’s go. We don’t want to stand around out here in this cruddy little town all day.” At the same time Sy called from the front, “John, open here. I’ve got some work that needs to be done. Open up.” And Clara Hocksteader shouted then, “John, say something. Are you all right?” and they started trying to raise the heavy overhead door which was swung down barring their entrance. Someone had got a board and was prying with it.

  The side door opened six inches, one of the blacks pushed his head in and reissued the earlier request to leave, hesitated, nearly reclosed it as they finally got the door started up in front, opened it wide and presented his physical self as an urgent demand to get moving. The overhead door was swung halfway up and John’s neighbors were coming in like a drove of sheep through a narrow opening. He looked at Prentiss again and together they started forward once more, just ready to say something. But in the same instant, as though at an agreed signal, they gave up and joined ranks. John watched as the half-sneer crept again into Prentiss’ face, and felt himself bristle at it. Prentiss Hilton Brown turned and walked out the door, got into the car and was driven back to Burlington.

  John resumed welding.

  FOUR

  “OK, bring it along, but hurry up,” said John through the screen door. Then he returned to walking impatiently up and down in the yard. This grass needs to be cut again, he thought. I’ve never seen such a summer, an inch a day. An inch a day! A person ought to be able to watch it move.

  “Should we bring some paper for starting a fire?” sang out Sarah from inside.

  “No . . . yes . . . I don’t care. Hurry up.”

  “Don’t shout,” said Sarah, bumping the door open with the picnic basket. “Oh, I forgot the blanket.”

  “We don’t need a blanket.”

  “Yes we do. Here, hold this.” She hung the basket on his arm and ran back inside. He began pacing again. Sarah returned with a heavy wool blanket, dropped it on the ground and went back for the small canister of cream. John began counting to himself, but at twenty-seven a dragonfly settled on the rim of the basket. It was solid blue, nearly iridescent, and its double wings were tinted the same color, like thinly colored glass, with lines of silver and sun dust. John stood very still. He’d seen many dragonflies, especially when he was little, fishing with his father, stacked up two and three at a time on the end of his pole, but never, so far as he could remember, one this color. It seemed so beautiful to him that even while looking at it he couldn’t believe it. When it flew away he felt as if he just had to have another look at it, dropped the basket and carefully pursued it, bringing the glasses up to his eyes whenever he had a chance to look at it sitting still.

  Sarah came out with the cream, saw the abandoned basket of food, a cat within three feet of it, and her husband walking quickly down the road, crossing over a fence, off into a field, looking every once in a while into space with his binoculars. “Get out of here,” she yelled, rescuing the basket and sending the cat off down below the fence. Sarah secretly didn’t like cats and felt they were much too sneaky, and where some people thought they were independent and cunning, she thought they were stupid, vile, insensitive and cowardly. She threw a stick at it and it went across the road; then she looked around quickly for fear Mrs. Miller might have seen her. Satisfied, she w
ent over to John’s Ford, put the basket and blanket in the rumble seat and got into the passenger’s side, easing herself down onto the soft leather. Wearing blue jeans was fun. She tied her scarf more tightly under her chin and just sat. No thoughts came to her, or pictures. She could see her husband coming back down the road, feel the warm sun, smell fall, hear noises and find small prism colors in the windshield; but vacantly, taking a mild pleasure in through all her senses, passively enjoying being alive—taking a vacation from motivation, interest and control.

  John got in and started the motor. “What’s up, fat-face?” he asked, easing out of the driveway, smiling inwardly at the sound of his mellow-toned muffler.

  “Just sitting,” said Sarah, putting her feet up on the glove compartment and accepting her whole self back. They almost never rode in the old Ford and when they did it was a pleasant novelty. It was a convertible with running boards, mechanical brakes and red paint. It made her feel important to ride in it, and waving at people from it was especially nice.

  Still, she couldn’t bring herself to wave at Ronny McClean, who stood in the ditch in front of his parents’ house at the edge of Sharon. John would. She looked into her faded denim knees and put her feet down.

  “I wonder what it’s like to be like that,” asked John.

  “Don’t talk about it. I’ll get upset.”

  “One day he rode his bicycle over to Frytown and they finally found him in Lloyd Brenneman’s fruit cellar, eating a little banquet he had spread out on the floor. That’s the farthest he’s been from home in forty years. That was . . . let’s see . . . thirty or thirty-two years ago.”

  “Don’t talk about it, John. It’s awful.”

  “No it isn’t. At least, if you grew up with him. He’s never been any different.”

  “That makes it worse.”

  “It doesn’t. I kind of like him. He’s all right.”

  “ You don’t like him. You just say that because you think that’d be good to feel that way—I’m sure you have a secret ambition to be a saint.”

  “Sarah, that’s unfair. I only—”

  “I know,” she said, and moved over closer to him. “It’s just, you know, how you are. Being bad isn’t so serious.”

  “Yes it is.”

  “You worry too much.”

  “Besides, I do like him.”

  “Why can’t you just accept that a madman gives you the creeps? You never learned to accept things and forget them.”

  John’s voice rose to nearly an argumentative level. “It’d make more sense for you to learn to accept that there’re people like Ronny, and accept that it’s not so bad if there are. It’s possible to like someone for—”

  “John, let’s don’t talk about it.”

  “Not talking about it doesn’t solve anything.”

  “There isn’t anything to be solved.” Both sat in a gloomy silence. John felt the beginning of what could materialize into a roaring headache. The air seemed too wet, too hot, and his most cherished car seemed made of wood and corrugated fasteners. He drove faster. They turned off the blacktop onto gravel, and the dust flew.

  Two hundred feet in the air a large bird looked down on them. At that height the wind covered all the noise from the ground, and he could not hear the muffler or the popping of the gravel against the tires. Only the motion, and the dust stretching out behind the red car like so many giant balloons. He was too high to be hunting, cruising in long circles. He veered slightly to intersect with a lesser angel, the sensation passing through him in all its colors, and quite out of his own control he let out a joyful krreeeee. Below, the car slowed down and stopped, the dust catching up with it and blowing on ahead. Lights flashing: two tiny glass reflections. He swung off toward the west, the hayfields and long-grass pasture.

  “It’s a broad-wing! I’m sure of it. Look at him—just look at him! Oh man, can you imagine him up there, the wind and—There he goes. Just look at him.”

  Sarah was turned, unhurriedly going through the basket, looking for her own pair of field glasses, wondering if she hadn’t forgotten them.

  “Here, take these, quick, look at him!”

  Sarah adjusted the left eyepiece one half a digit to the plus side.

  “Hurry up!”

  She put them to her eyes, couldn’t find the bird, took them down, relocated it and brought the glasses back up.

  “That’s nice,” she said.

  “He’s too far gone now,” said John.

  “I saw him,” she complained.

  John put the car in gear and they were off again. Sarah waved at the Brogans sitting in their yard on steel-rung chairs. It seemed the motor was running smoother and he drove more slowly; soon he didn’t think about the rattles, and by the time they arrived at McDuffs pasture both of them were enjoying themselves immensely. They left the convertible in the road and crossed the woven-wire fence at the place it was nailed to a maple tree which not only supported the old wire but had engulfed it and held it toward its center with a hand’s breadth of wood. They walked back into the timber.

  “Look,” said John. “There’s a kinglet. Look.”

  “Don’t stop walking,” said Sarah.

  “No, wait. Look. Right over there.”

  Sarah stopped, and was immediately bitten by a vicious mosquito.

  “Over there,” said John. Then, “This place is full of mosquitoes!”

  “I told you.”

  They continued on to the picnic table Marion McDuff’s father had built. The pasture had been his wife’s joy, and as a symbol of devotion he had built a table and a fireplace recessed against a sharply inclined bluff, in a partial opening of elms (the cursed tree), her name written in the fireplace cement. John and Sarah loved the little wild park. They fought off the bugs by cupping their hands and swinging them by the sides of their heads, and built a fire with the paper Sarah had brought. The gnats tenaciously hung on through the smoke, but retreated with the rising heat.

  Then they sat on the picnic table and drank iced tea with lemon and honey. Out of the basket they took the warm turtle meat and ate it with salt, brown bread and butter. They talked about what animals it would be preferable to be, if you had to be born one.

  “I wouldn’t want to be domestic,” said Sarah. “I’d rather be wild.”

  “It’d be nice not to have to be afraid of people, though.”

  “Domestic animals are afraid of people too.”

  “I’d like to be a dog,” said John, “if I could be one of my father’s.”

  “I wouldn’t. I’d be a wild horse—a mustang!”

  “Anything wild has to spend all its time scrounging for food, or being afraid of bears.”

  “Bears wouldn’t bother a mustang,” said Sarah.

  “Of course they would. A horse wouldn’t have a chance against a bear.”

  “It’d trample it to death with its sharp hooves. Jab! Jab!” Sarah made pummeling gestures, her fists representing hooves.

  “That wouldn’t be much of a threat. Bears have claws, you know, and have enough strength in their arms to whing a horse, especially a mustang—a very small horse—several feet in the air.”

  “Bears aren’t that strong. Nothing’s that strong. A fierce fighting mustang stallion could smash the biggest bear in the face.” And her fist came down on the table.

  “Many times bullets don’t even penetrate a bear’s head. It’d just pounce on a horse’s back and it’d be all over.”

  “A mustang stallion,” said Sarah, “would grab him off and fling him up into the air.” And with her clenched teeth she imitated the action.

  “I’d rather be a fish,” said John. “A mud cat.”

  “And get caught on a hook,” said Sarah, pouring out only one third a glass more of the iced tea, so that there would be two glasses left for later.

  “Not just an ordinary fish. A smart one.”

  “I see what you mean, I think,” said Sarah. That would be nice, she thought, lying in the deep hol
es during the day, sleeping on the bottom and watching the watery things . . . in a kind of liquid dream, the sunlight shimmering on the rocks, greenish yellow, all sounds soft and low—cows in the distance. Then going out at night into the shallows, hunting for smaller fish like a cunning, silent submarine, feeling the faster water carry you downstream, in among the roots of the shore . . . seeing the moon from underneath and hearing the oars of the Dark Lords in their long black boats, their footsteps on the bank, their fires winking across the tops of the ripples, deer drinking. Woodchucks eating green shoots. Leaves and water insects on the surface.

  Their clothing inundated with smoke, an insect deterrent, they set off in search of birds, taking with them both binoculars, the thermos and the wildlife book. Sarah carried the blanket around her shoulders. She frequently let her thoughts be carried away by merely walking, or by the embroidery of the grasses. They waded in the stream, and she found smooth stones with color veins and put them in her pocket as remembrances. John saw a bobolink. They tried to catch crayfish until he became obsessed with finding an owl’s nest, and they tramped over what seemed to her several miles. But the reward so outweighted the walk she could hardly contain herself and broke into laughter when she raised the glasses and saw as though directly above her two huge, round, dusty white horned owls frowning at her. “Who,” she said. “Who. Who.” That made her laugh more. John was so excited he could do nothing but talk about how owls’ eyes were made and how, per square inch of flying surface, they were lighter than all other birds, their feathers softer, and how they had asymmetrical, adjustable ears nearly as long as their whole head. He read out loud from their book every scrap of information about them, and remarked that because there were two, it was a good year for owls and was an indication that the land would support them even through the winter. They seemed so comical because of their size, helplessness, dumb interest and aloofness—their unshakable faith in their own invulnerability at that height. They were also going to sleep.

  Reading and thinking about owls made John want to find a place they could sit until it was dark in hope of seeing the parents hunting, gliding over with wild, burning eyes. They drank the last of the iced tea. They found a tall hayfield and lay down in it so that they would be invisible except from directly overhead. But despite the spectacle of the cloud formations, as subtle as frozen breath, with the darkening air came the bugs, and they were forced to give up the vigil and return to the fireplace. Several broken logs placed on top of the coals soon revived John’s defeated spirit and they sat against the nearest elm and watched the flames. Darkness descended around them with the cooler air. Sarah went over to the fire and put on more wood and let the warmth saturate her clothing until just that point where it was too hot, and moved back, turned and began on the front side.