Rock Island Line

by David Rhodes

  As quietly as possible, he moved the dresser over against the door. It was surprisingly light. He checked the drawers and found them empty except for a Bible, which he took out and put on top of the bed, seating himself beside it. Then with slow, nearly sensual motions, one at a time he drew out every object in his pockets and arranged them carefully on the bed, all of the pennies in a long line, quarters together, dimes and nickels. The paper money refused to lie neatly and he pressed the bills several times in the Bible and set them down stacked a quarter-inch apart. He opened both blades of his knife and put it down, pulled out the pistol and sat for a long time holding it, then took out the clip, unloaded it and laid the bullets side by side in a row, their yellow jackets beautiful. He polished the chrome of the gun and the pearl handle with his shirt and put it down too, at right angles to the bullets. He took each key from the ring and laid them out. Then most slowly, and with the most ceremony of all, he took out his billfold, opened it and one after another laid out the pictures, not in a row, but in the pockets left between the other things in his personal inventory. His father and mother smiled up at him from the bed. One picture showed him with them, standing next to the garage eating a piece of cheese. He felt their approval: they wanted him to run away. They were proud of how brave he was. They were pushing him on—on to what he wasn’t sure, but he felt right.

  He sat looking, and several times changed one picture’s place with another for a better balance. He counted his money. Less than ten dollars. He put the money in piles. Then he had a new idea and laid it out again. He counted everything, all of his personal inventory. Every piece that could be called something of itself, he counted. Seventy-three. He had seventy-three things counting the Bible, which he decided was his as well, or would be. He looked around the room for something else that could be his, but there was nothing. Then he pulled off a button from his shirt and put it on the bed. Immediately he felt it was a stupid thing to do, and wished he hadn’t done it and began to be afraid. But the smiling pictures looked up at him and his parents’ voices told him, no, it was OK. They wanted him to have seventy-four things.

  He began to count them again. He heard a bell sound somewhere. Then many quick footsteps, but little talking. He put his money into one pile and was putting it into his pocket when a knock came on his door; the doorknob turned. “Lights out,” said an older man’s voice as the door bumped into the bureau. “Let me in,” the man demanded angrily. “These doors are to be left open.” The bureau was noisily pushed aside and from the dark hallway into his lit room stepped a man of about fifty, wearing a dark lightweight suit tattered around the sleeve cuffs. July sat still, not knowing what to do. The man came several feet into the room and stopped dead still, as though struck in the face. July could see that he was looking at the gun on the bed. Still he didn’t know what to do. The man seemed paralyzed for what seemed like hours, but finally he moved and shut the door so that none of the boys who were hurrying down the hall to see what was up could look into the room. July began quickly stuffing the keys, knife and pictures back into his pockets.

  “Give me that gun,” said the man, advancing toward him, his voice shaking slightly from his outstretched hand. July was pushing the bullets as fast as he could into his pants pocket. One fell to the floor and clattered. The noise seemed to make the man more shaky, but move more quickly. “Give me that gun,” he repeated.

  July picked up the empty clip, shoved it up into the handle of the pistol and sat there with it, tears beginning to form in his eyes. “It’s mine,” he said.

  “Give it to me,” the man repeated, coming up all the way and touching him on the shoulder.

  July, having decided what to do at the split second he began doing it, ran past the man and made it to the door, where, trying to get it open, he felt hands grab him from behind.

  “Stop. Give me that gun.”

  July turned and with all of his force pushed. To his astonishment, the man went backward almost to the bed, giving him time to get the door open, get the empty pistol into his pocket and begin running down the hall.

  “Stop him!” yelled the voice, and three boys at the end of the hall, two older than himself, stepped out of their rooms, barring his way to the staircase. July fixed his eyes straight on the biggest one, the one on the right, and ran at him; then just before making contact he changed course and ran through the middle, taking the smaller boy halfway down the stairs with him.

  “Stop him!” came the shouting again, but the man with the hole in his windpipe couldn’t get around the counter before July was through the lobby, through the door and into the city night. Down the staircase tumbled counselor Tracy and thirteen or fourteen boys, one of them yelling, “Get the fucker, he broke my arm! My arm’s broke!”

  “Terry, stop that kind of language! The rest of you get back up to your rooms or you’ll all be put on probation.”

  They reluctantly left. Bill Jensen and counselor Tracy looked at Terry’s arm, found it to be not broken and sent him upstairs, reprimanding him again for his bad language.

  “What’d he do?” asked Terry.

  “Never mind. Get on upstairs.”

  He went. Together, the older men went outside onto the sidewalk and looked down the street as far as they could see. Bob Tracy lit a cigarette. His hands were still shaking. He threw the match beyond the curb. “I’m going to quit,” he said sadly.

  “What happened?”

  “The kid had a gun. I panicked. I guess I wasn’t expecting anything like that on the second floor with the younger kids. I’ve handled things like that before. But this time I panicked. I didn’t know we had a new kid—just saw the light under the door and stopped in to get him to douse it. Then the gun on the bed . . . I panicked, and scared him. Now God knows the damage. The last thing in his mind was to point that gun at me, but I went at him like a hardened criminal—‘Give me that gun, give me that gun,’ like some kind of cop.”

  “It happens to everybody.”

  “Well, everybody it happens to shouldn’t have a job working with kids. Who knows what the damage—”

  “Come on, let’s get some coffee. We’ve got to put together that requisition for film equipment.”

  “They’ll never give it to us. If it costs one red cent . . . That poor kid.” They went inside.

  July was running. Every shadow, every moving car, every doorway he thought concealed a policeman whose only goal that evening was to kill the kid with the gun from the YMCA. One old woman sitting on the step of her house yelled at him, calling him a thief. Four blocks later he stopped running. Run when you have to, he thought, otherwise it attracts too much attention. Far away he heard a siren and the adrenaline froze his blood. Then he heard another siren in another direction. Surrounded. He saw a stone wall across the street from him, and with the help of an iron fence, he got over it to the other side. He found himself in a small courtyard of an apartment complex. He stood back against the wall in the shadows and waited. He stayed there until after all the lights in the apartments had been turned out and he’d heard enough sirens to know that if they were all after him, they didn’t have a very good idea where to look. Then he decided to move. The door from the courtyard into a back alley could be opened from the inside, and he used it. He was hungry.

  After an hour of walking, he managed to find his way back to the diner, which was still open. One of the movie palaces was spilling its patrons back onto the street, and in the commotion July felt safer. He bought another sausage sandwich, this time of a different color. There were no places to sit down and he ate it standing, being thankful for the well-lit room and the people impervious to him. He bought a bag of potato chips. A police car pulled up in front. There was a moment while it sat there like a white-and-blue toad. Then both doors flew open and two policemen came rushing into the diner crouched low like two halfbacks. July dropped his potato chips. One of the policemen threw him back away from the counter with a quick brush of his arm. A girl at the end of the count
er next to the rainbow punch machine made an effort to run, but was quickly caught. She screamed, kicked and swore, and one of the policemen cuffed her on the side of the head. Then they bodily lifted her away from the edge of the counter she was holding on to and carried her out, arms and legs flailing, cursing, and stuffed her into the back seat of the car and drove away.

  “You better pick them up,” the man behind the counter said to July, motioning down to the potato chips. “Someone’s likely to step on them.”

  Having someone’s attention, July mustered all the courage he had and asked, “Why . . . why did they do that?”

  “I don’t know, probably just some hooker on junk. Maybe she’s in the rackets.” He went away to wait on someone.

  July picked up his potato chips and went outside. He was beginning to be very tired. Just as he had felt the lights of the diner bring him comfort, now he felt the comfort of the darkness enfold him. He crossed Broad Street and went over to City Hall, creasing the bag across the top and putting it gently in his jacket. In the open walkway through the building he stopped and looked at the walls, which seemed to be made in order to resemble millions of fat worms wiggling over each other—one big seething mass of living stone worms without faces. He walked through the square, over the metal marker—the historical center of Philadelphia.

  Following the only two people he saw, he went down some steps to a trolley landing beneath City Hall. Then, out of curiosity, he went down another flight of stairs to where turnstiles like robots stood in a long row, a fat man behind a heavy wire screen made change and beyond him lay the loading platform of the L. One more flight down, he came to the waiting platform of the Crosstown Express. Huge cement walls as thick as refrigerators with torn posters and writing from some prehistoric age. More turnstiles.

  He stood in the darkness. Then the earth itself began to shudder and a light appeared like a frightened beacon and the Express came flashing and banging, metal screeching and doors clattering, up out of the black cavernous hole, stopped still like a giant metal insect and crawled off again into the darkness. July was filled with wonder. He imagined those cars could take him anywhere in the world, China even, if he got on the right one, without ever coming up out of the ground, unknown by the millions of people above, the driver’s eyes gleaming wild like a madman’s—two holes bored in the walls of a furnace.

  To his astonishment, there was still a level lower, and he descended sleepily to the wooden landing platform of the Frankford Elevated. This was empty except for three long benches and a large green wastepaper basket. July went to the edge and looked up and down the tunnels. He let himself down the five-foot drop from the platform to the track level, went back underneath the landing and lay down on the dirt, his consciousness hanging from him by a thread. The inhuman thunder of the cars began to lull him. The maze of wires, discernible here and there by cracks of light from the wooden planks above him, hummed like tuning forks. He took out his gun and loaded it, leaving the chamber empty, however, wrapped his hand securely around it and fell asleep, dreaming of women with large savage hooks who flayed people alive and ate trash from garbage pails. Twice he woke cold and shivering, and pulled his jacket tighter around him. Especially his back was cold.

  The following day July left his gun and extra bullets under the landing. He ate pancakes in a grease shop on Broad Street. Then he went to a dime store and bought a flashlight to study his new home. He noticed a change in the way people looked at him this day as compared to the rest of his life, and within a short time accepted it as a normal response without realizing that it was because of the dirt which had soiled his clothes. He wasn’t able to get back unobserved to where his gun lay concealed because there was always somebody there on the platform, or across the tracks on the opposite side. He realized fewer cars ran at night, and fewer people were on them. He would have to wait always until dark—or later, maybe on a Sunday, find another way to get down.

  He went off to buy some blankets. He entered the first large department store, and when the salesgirl saw the look on his face when she told him the prices, she promptly and courteously gave him directions to the Army surplus store, where he purchased two—leaving him with only one dollar of his paper money.

  He bought a large bag of popcorn and ate it sitting on his blankets in the park. He wanted to take out his pictures, but he didn’t want to do it there in front of everyone and without the gun. He stayed until just before dark and returned to beneath City Hall.

  Around seven o’clock he slipped down under the platform and put his gun back in his jacket. Using the flashlight with great caution (in order to avoid being seen from across the tracks on the other side and, because it was new, not to wear down the batteries), he found a small dirt-floored alcove tucked back into the solid concrete behind and beyond the wood roof of the platform. Originally it had been built to accommodate a set of control switches and relay boxes; but because it wasn’t needed, except for wires shrouded in conduit pipes running in every direction across the top, it was empty. It was long enough for him to lie down twice lengthwise, once and a half the other way, and stand up, excepting in two places where a low conduit pipe was directly above. Because it was not just beneath the platform and had a cement roof, he felt more protected from the footsteps above—they were less audible. He could also shine his light directly into the back of his room without being afraid of anyone seeing it from across the way. There was no wind. The rushing clatter of the L, though less overbearing, was still close enough to be reassuring in its monstrousness, like a drunken night watchman who would come stumbling up the dark tunnels with a torch, stop, look around and be gone.

  He decided he would have to get a tarp from the Army surplus store. He took one blanket, folded it into a two-foot square and sat on it, crossing his legs and feeling the concrete of his wall against his back. The other he folded in the same way and put in front of him. Then out came the pictures, and in the darkness—for he could barely see in there except when a train was coming—he symmetrically spread them out. Then he took the flashlight and one at a time let the intense circle of yellow light spill onto them. Then he closed his eyes (in order to build the suspense) and reorganized them so that each of the eight pictures had a new place. He sat and concentrated—which card is in the middle? which card is at the bottom left?—and tried to let the feeling of each picture reveal itself. Then with the flashlight he’d check, and see the faces come looking up at him.

  Next he laid out all of his things, the three favorite pictures in the middle. And counted them. Forty-seven, counting the two flashlight batteries, the lens and the bulb. There was shouting outside and the sound of a bottle breaking and he ran out to the front of his room to look, fearing he was in danger. But after the sound of fast-running footsteps and a single long wail, everything was back to normal. The train pulled away, and he went in again.

  When he was ready for bed, he reloaded the gun and, like the night before, closed his hand tightly around it, pulled the blankets up around his shoulder and shut his eyes. Only then did he begin to worry about money. He remembered the potato chips, ate them and fell asleep.

  The following day was a Thursday. He got a chance after the morning rush to get out unseen and climb up onto the platform. He had a glass of milk and a hamburger for breakfast, and ate slowly. It was sprinkling needles of rain outside. He went to the Army surplus store to see about getting a tarp. They were too expensive.

  Walking back out of the store, he realized the deadly implications of his situation: the things he wanted—and he did want them—he couldn’t buy. In order to get them he’d have to steal them. His whole sense of himself reeled at the thought. A thief! He began walking aimlessly, thinking the matter out. He saw other children not much older than himself, most of them black, on the streets away from school and he wondered if they were thieves as well as shoeshiners. He already knew that some of them were beggars. In fact, he’d given one a dime the day before, but had resolved never to do it
again because of the coldness with which it had been accepted—so cold that July had wondered for a second if he’d been asked at all, or if he’d simply taken out a dime and tried to force it on this little kid.

  Then he began picturing himself as a thief, and everything he looked at he thought of carting away and taking back to below City Hall. It exhilarated him to a certain extent. He imagined that the eyes of the people he passed were looking at him and thinking in awe, There he goes, the thief. How brave he looks. Will the police catch him today? But whenever he thought of his parents he could not keep his mother from going to the kitchen to get the flyswatter, dragging him behind her, and as these thoughts kept returning, he found himself mentally giving back all the things he’d stolen and put in his cement room. So, finally, everything was back where it belonged and the eyes said, There’s that wild kid, the one who could have been a thief but wasn’t, who stole cars and diamonds but took them back. He went into the library off Rittenhouse Square to use the bathroom.

  He looked in the daily newspaper for a job. He knew about doing this because his father had told him stories of the Depression when maybe twenty men would gather at another man’s house to look in the want ads—there being only one paper among them all—and then, defeated, would go outside and play horseshoes all day—anything to be away from home for a while. He found nothing that sounded as if he could qualify for it. Most of the kinds of people advertised for he’d never heard of: trainees, lab techs, production-line operators. But he thought he could order books, so he asked the librarian if they needed help, but they didn’t.