Rock Island Line

by David Rhodes

  Soon the long, black-headed snake line was curling its way over to the cemetery, where from just over the top of the hill you could make out the imported angel. An opened book at her feet contained a short quotation from a letter John had sent to Becky several years ago: No one could be happier than we are. Today, the twenty-first of April, there are over two hundred birds in our yard, each one singing and eating from our three feeders like there was no tomorrow.

  “That’s some stone,” said Uncle Perry, and Sid smiled as though he’d made it himself. Clearly, there was nothing anywhere near its size—a giant among tombstones.

  July was glad he was able to leave before they began filling in the dirt.

  That night, at the table with Becky, Perry, Aunt Franny and Uncle Sid, he ate something.

  “Tomorrow you must go back to school,” he was told. He spent the rest of the evening in his room reading comic books. Most of them he’d read before, but some were new, presents from the parents of his school friends. He read both the new and the old with the same enjoyment. He let the words run slowly into sentences and understood them with little interest. He let the pictures flash onto an opaque screen just in front of his mind—an area where there was almost no thought—looked at them one at a time, then let them disappear. He realized that he was reading only at the beginning and end of each book. He read a Bible Stories comic (something which he normally could hardly stand) three times, and even then realized that once again he’d missed the plot. Who was the rightful king? And whose fault really was it that Saul was the way he was? And what could possibly be wrong in letting your enemy live and in not slaughtering his animals but giving them to your own men to feed their hungry families?

  Then he undressed and went to bed. He listened to the talking downstairs, but couldn’t understand it. He knew they were being especially quiet so that he wouldn’t hear. His parents used to talk down there and he could hear every word. He lay awake until after Sid and Franny Montgomery’s car had left and Becky and Perry turned out all the lights and shut the door of the guest room. He wondered if the string would still pull the bell, or if the top of the door would squeeze it tight.

  Then he began to think again of what a fool he’d been, and imagined what going back to school would be like. He pictured himself coming home from school, his friends on the bus, old man Collins’s cats and the front yard. He went on picturing these things until an arc of electrical understanding flashed across his mind: they were trying to fool him again. All of them. Everyone he knew was trying to make him into a fool again. They were trying to make everything easy for him so that he could forget, and within a year maybe—the time didn’t matter—he would have forgotten. He would be so happy that he’d be set up again . . . believing again nothing bad will ever happen to me. No! he decided. I’ll never forget. Just at that point when they think they’ve got you, when the odds are ten thousand to one, to get away! He slipped out of bed, dressed, took all the money he had in his bank, $12.43, his jacket, his father’s pocket knife, a small automatic pistol he’d taken a month ago from among his mother’s things in the attic and kept hidden in the bottom of his drawer to take out to look at when he was alone and wonder how she’d ever come upon it, eight shells, the ring of keys for good luck, a dark blue stocking hat, a billfold full of pictures, and was gone from the house.

  Not wanting to be seen close to home—for fear the drivers of the cars would know him—he kept to the ditch all the way to new Highway 1. Twice he had to lie down among the weeds so that the headlights of the pickups would miss him.

  Once at the highway he began hitchhiking immediately, and within several cars was given a ride. A middle-aged fat man leaned over with much effort and swung open the door for him. “Kind of late to be out, isn’t it?” he asked, and did not start the car rolling.

  “I guess so,” said July.

  “What seems to be the trouble?”

  It was an odd moment for July, one in which it seemed things could go one way or another—either end or begin. On one hand there was a true desire to be back, unsuspected, in his room. On the other hand, the very idea of such comfort made him feel sick.

  “I’ve run away from home,” he finally blurted out.

  The man smiled. “OK, now we’re down to the truth. Where do you live?”

  “In Iowa City, and I want to go back home.”

  “Sure you do. Let’s go.”

  The automobile pulled out onto the pavement and sped through the night. In town, July told him that he lived near the depot, and they turned off Riverside Drive.

  “That’s it,” said July. “Let me off here.” He pointed to a yellow house uphill from the railway station. After he was out of the car he walked around to the back of the house as though to use the back door, slipped down a walkway and came out on the street.

  Although the railway station was closed for the evening, the first train to come by stopped and let off three people. Several cars down, on the other side, away from the boarding ramp, July climbed on. After he was out into the open air of the country, the wheels banging on the rails under him like demons pounding rock with cold hammers, he swung open the door and went inside. Some people looked up from their seats, but looked away, disinterested. Though it was before eleven, most everyone was asleep. He found two empty seats and sat down next to the window. A conductor came in from the front and July felt him linger for a moment next to his seat and pass on.

  Before the sun came up they stopped four times, then kept rolling clear up until noon. By overhearing conversation he learned that there was a diner ahead somewhere, and at the next stop he went to find out. There was. He took a table to himself and a black waiter dressed in white came over to get his order. “Hamburger,” he said, without looking at the menu.

  “And what has we to drink?” asked the waiter in a fast, clean voice.

  “Water.”

  The waiter went over to a window, spoke through it and sat down.

  The train lurched ahead. July took out his money and disentangled a dollar bill, and put it on the table, feeling, as he did it, grown-up. The waiter returned with a plate from the window ledge—put there by unseen hands—and a glass of water, set them down and snapped up the dollar quickly and as though it had no value, punched out the change from the machine at his belt and went back to where he’d been sitting. July counted the change . . . fifty cents. Then he secretly looked at the menu, hamburger . . . 45¢. Cheated out of a nickel! He looked over at the black man and wondered how he could look so innocent, but knew he hadn’t nerve enough to go over and demand his nickel back. He accepted the loss—deciding at the same time never to let it happen again. As he lifted the sandwich sideways, grease dripped onto the plate from between the halves of the bun. He bit into it, tasted the gristle and began to put it down. No, he thought, that’s little-kid’s stuff. This here is the real thing. He opened up the sandwich and put salt on it, the way he’d seen his father do many times, and ate it, drinking the water in one lift to his mouth. Then he went back a car and sat down. Later the same conductor came up to his seat and told him to “stop moving around.”

  “OK,” said July, realizing, as he should have before, that his age was his disguise—he was taken for belonging to one of the little clusters of family in the car behind him. The thought made him smile, and he mused pleasantly, looking out the window after the conductor had gone, dark shapes like flying witches flashing past outside: If that joker’d given me any more static, I’d’ve blown off his head. He felt quite dangerous. A blue fug of smoke enveloped the car. A boy about his age walked past toward the diner and looked at him without stopping. July saw him in the window reflection. Better watch out, little kid, he thought almost kindly, or you’ll have the trouble of your life. He felt in his pocket and the gun was warm to the touch. Then he went to sleep.

  At the next stop everybody got off, so he did too, judging it expedient. There was also the chance that the train was going no farther. In the station he bought tw
o candy bars from a vendor, twenty cents, and thought for the first time about where he might be going. He went over to the opposite wall and looked at the schedule in order to find out where he was. Cleveland. Then he found a map with railroad lines drawn on it and looked at Cleveland in relationship to Iowa City (Sharon Center wasn’t marked) and smiled. It made him feel important to be out in the world for the first time. He followed the railroad lines out of Cleveland and decided where he was going to. Philadelphia. Yes, he decided, thinking very clearly and without emotion—completely detached from any reason—Philadelphia. Then he checked the schedule again and planned out to his own satisfaction when the train he wanted would be leaving. He tossed the last candy wrapper into the trash and went into the bathroom. As he was standing with his back to the room, someone came out of what he’d taken to be an empty stall, stood several feet behind him and said, “Hey, buddy, you want to blow me? Fifty cents.”

  The voice was hostile and his urine immediately stopped flowing. He tucked himself back inside his pants, managed to say, “What?” and turned around.

  “A blow job, punk,” said the young man, his pink shirt opened halfway down his stomach, his black hair slicked back against his head, curling at the neck, “Where you been, born yesterday? Suck my dick for fifty cents. Come on, hurry up.”

  July couldn’t talk, and the youth was advancing. In horror, July could see what was expected of him.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t want to.”

  “Come on, punk—” Then the door opened and his assailant went quickly over to a urinal beside him, where he appeared to be relieving himself. Two older men, coming in, caught enough of the abnormally hurried movement, and intuiting from July’s expression, they immediately separated. One of them went outside to guard the door. The other took off his jacket.

  “You lousy fairy,” he said, talking to the back of the pink shirt. “You gonna wish you never tried anything like this on a young boy. I’m gonna beat you within an inch of your life.” Violence seemed to ooze out of every word. The young man in the pink shirt looked over his shoulder and terror filled his face. His eyes were wild and for a second he looked at July with such pleading, hopeless fear that July completely forgot his own previous dread of him. Compared to the man waiting for him to turn around, he might as well have been an invalid, so terribly bad were his chances. The man kicked him in the small of the back and he screamed, his head striking the chrome pipes. Half falling, he turned to run, but was hit back up against the urinal. His legs began to fold and he screamed again. The man held him up with his left hand and beat his face. Blood ran down into his opened shirt. Then he was kicked and he doubled over with an agonizing groan, falling to the tiled floor. Then the man stomped him, a look of impersonal disgust on his face such as July had seen on the face of Bob Sloan as he beat a garden snake in the schoolyard with a stick. Finally, he was unconscious, though July thought dead. Then he saw the breathing.

  The man turned to July. “Are you all right?” the man asked, in a gentle, fatherly voice. July nodded. “Come on, let’s get out of here,” and he picked up his jacket, led July carefully around so he wouldn’t step in the blood, with his arm on his shoulder. Out in the terminal the men asked him if he wouldn’t like to have an ice cream. July shook his head. They shook hands and the men left when they saw someone walk toward the restroom.

  July went outside to wait for his train and sat down. Two hours passed without his noticing. A shroud of violence covered everything. He was stranded in the gap between what he imagined he was and what he was. He felt a sickening fear threaten to take him over—the stranger in him rise up very far. But before the train to Philadelphia arrived, he had escaped. I’m sorry for what happened, he thought. I’d have stopped it if I could have. I didn’t want it to happen. I . . . I don’t care. He’s of no importance to me. And to prove it to himself, he went back into the men’s room. The victim was gone. The floor and walls had been cleaned. He was vaguely disappointed, but very relieved.

  The train came and he nestled in among a large family as they boarded, and sat among them until the conductor had passed, making sure not to look at any of them. (Children at that time rode free when accompanied by their parents.) Then he separated himself and got a seat of his own. In the middle of Pennsylvania the family got off and he thought it best to find another seat. He chose one next to an old lady, who let him sit by the window. Right away she began to talk to him about arthritis and sewing kits and he felt safe.

  He got off in Philadelphia at an underground terminal, 30th Street Station, and walked up to Walnut Street. He felt a mixture of excitement and agitation at being at his destination. He listened to the noises and watched people walk by him. It seemed like a good place. The river was not too far away. He walked for a long time.

  He went into a diner opening on to the street and bought a sausage sandwich for forty cents. A large sign above the grill said no tipping. He didn’t know what that meant and decided he’d have a lot to learn. But it certainly seemed good. The sense of being on his own filled the sausage and he ate it as he walked along the street, looking into the shops and offices. He saw a couple sitting on the steps of a town house, judged from that that it was legal and two blocks later sat down himself. Several people passed by who smiled at him. As it began to get dark he found himself in a park sitting on a bench. He went up to a pleasant-enough-looking man sitting across from him to ask where he might find a place to spend the night, but only was able to get out, “Say, mister, I wonder if you couldn’t—” before he was cut off.

  “Beat it, kid. Write to your Congressman for money.” The man got up and walked briskly away.

  July watched him sit down again in a different part of the park. Then later, as it grew darker, he watched him walk away and enter a very tall building. Because of nothing better to do, he followed, but was stopped from entering by a doorman in a blue, brass-buttoned suit and hard-billed hat. “Go on, now,” he said. “Only people who live here can go in.” He seemed kind, however, and was old, as though held together by the very uniform itself because it was so tight and stiff.

  “I need a place to sleep,” said July.

  “Holy cow!” said the doorman humorously, and July smiled. “Get on home quick as you can while they’ll still take you. Parents may be terrible, but they’ve always got spare beds to sleep in.”

  “My parents are dead.”

  “I’m sorry,” said the old man. July could see a change come over him, a look of sinking back into his tough, wrinkled face. “Get on away from here now. I can’t have you standing around, the people don’t like it. Get on, now. Go down to the YMCA. Over there—” He pointed. All of the kindness had drained from his voice, and July realized he’d been shut out. He’d seen the look before. In fact, his father had worn it once or twice while listening to the news and reports of accidents and calamities, and July had realized that the announcer could say anything and his father’d think nothing whatsoever about it.

  He walked in the direction the man had pointed out, repeating over and over again the letters YMCA, having no idea what they stood for. Naturally, he didn’t find it right away and, it being after dark by then and few people about, he went into a bar and asked the bartender.

  “Why, a young fellow like you should be after the YWCA!” There was great laughter. July didn’t understand and his look conveyed that. “OK, I’m sorry. Just go out and turn right. Go two blocks and make a left. It’s right there.” July followed the instructions and, to his surprise, found just that—a building with the letters YMCA running down the side. He went in.

  There was a little bell on the counter to ring and he touched it gently. Three boys, older than himself, came in and went by him, up the stairs. One of them had his shirt opened halfway down his front, revealing a dirty T-shirt. He wondered if that boy would know what had happened in the men’s room in Cleveland, or know the person who was almost killed. Right away July wanted to leave, and was just beginning to when a hea
vyset middle-aged man came in-from somewhere and, in a voice sounding as if he had a hole in his windpipe, asked what he wanted. July told him. The charge for a room was $1.50 per day; provided he would stay on the second floor (the other rooms were more expensive), which gave him the use of the common bathroom and access to the Ping-Pong table, magazine room, television room and cafeteria. Before he could take out his money to pay, the man began reading from a list of new regulations, explaining as he did that these new inexpensive rates, facilities and advantages were only available to those who were making a considerable and conscious effort to better themselves: no drinking, lights out after ten thirty, no smoking, no fighting, meals were served at regular times in the basement for money, going to school was an absolute, income from after-school jobs had to be reported, no girls allowed upstairs or in the television room, chapel service on Sundays required, a choice of Catholic or Protestant services, linen to be turned in Monday morning and checked out the same evening, no spitting or swearing, and any breach of these requirements would necessitate going into a probationary period of two weeks, at the end of which time it would be decided—given that no more rules had been broken—if the desire for self-betterment was strong enough. The ward he was to be on was an experimental one, just being tried. The doors were not to be locked and counselors were always on the floor.

  July could see no way out of it. He had his money in his hand and got out $1.50 and put it on the counter. “Your room will be number twelve,” he was told. July looked again at the man’s neck, thinking that surely he must have a hole someplace where air was escaping and robbing him. Then the man started to cough and July went upstairs, and drank from a drinking fountain before locating his room.

  There was no lock on the door and that disturbed him. He could hear talking, but not well enough to know how far away it was coming from. He shut the door and surveyed his room: a bed, a dresser, green walls and a window. He looked out and felt a surge of confidence—thinking of himself as a part of the human immensity outside. He stood and let this feeling saturate him, then he turned and sat on the bed. An unspecified number of people walked by his room, talking and joking. He could distinguish some swearing.