Behold

by Barker, Clive

  The whole point of my flying a thousand miles to stay with my mother in the hospital was to try to provide some comfort during what turned out to be her final days. I’d gotten a portable player with her favorite Dead Can Dance and The Incredible String Band CDs. I’d read to her from To Kill a Mockingbird, her favorite book. But the one thing I could have really done to make things better was the one thing I was too stupid to do.

  A few hours later, the morning nurse would come in and declare, “Well, if it were my mother, I’d have called someone in to clean her up!”

  And then, shamefaced and embarrassed, I’d go home to try to sleep.

  And then my mother would die while I was gone. While nobody was looking. While nobody was there to hold her hand.

  The nurse’s words would take root in my memory and grow, tainting every other memory they touched. They were loud in my head when I swallowed the bottle of tranquilizers. And they never went away even after the few post-hospital therapy sessions my insurance grudgingly covered. They would never, ever go away, condemnation and proof that I had failed my mom.

  “Vicky.” My mother sat up in bed and was giving me a stern look.

  My heart jumped when I realized that she saw me. I felt pierced by her amber eyes. “Yes?”

  “The blood was a little uncomfortable, yes. But my intestines were being torn apart by microbes and cancer. My kidneys were rotting inside my body. A little itch on my neck just didn’t matter, you know? Stop beating yourself up over it. That’s an order, okay?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She beckoned me closer and held out her bone-thin arms for a hug. The invisible wall didn’t block me this time. I sat down on the bed beside her and held her close. As I breathed in the familiar scents of her perfume and hair spray, I was overwhelmed at the enormity of what I’d lost when she died, and I began to weep.

  “I’m so sorry you died alone,” I sobbed. “I’m so, so sorry. I wanted to be there for you.”

  “But you were!” My mother gently pushed me back and wiped the tears off my face with her thumbs like she had when I was little. “I heard the music, I heard you read. I knew you were there. I wasn’t even conscious when I died. It was like slipping from sleep into . . . more sleep. It wasn’t scary. You didn’t fail me.”

  She turned to the hospital tray beside her bed and picked up three small brown nuts beside her insulated plastic water jug.

  “Hold out your hand,” she said.

  I did as she asked, and she dropped the nuts onto my palm.

  “What are these?”

  “Hazelnuts,” she replied. “For wisdom, healing, and maybe a little inspiration for those books of yours.”

  “Thank you.” I tucked them into the left front pocket of my jeans.

  “Have a happy Halloween.” My mother gave me a gentle push, and I tumbled backward off the bed into darkness.

  ***

  I came to in the bed in my hotel room. The room was dark except for a head-splitting band of light under the blackout curtain. My head ached, and my mouth felt fuzzy. I still wore my convention clothes. Heather was snoring away in the other bed.

  “Ugh.” I moaned like a zombie.

  “Oh, thank goodness you’re awake!” Elaine said. I heard her get up from the desk chair and walk to the bed. “You need to drink water; here’s an Aquafina.”

  I took a tentative sip from the bottle she stuck close to my face. The water was cool and delicious, so I took a longer draw.

  “We looked all over for you,” Elaine said. “Nicole found you in the convention center basement—how you got down there, we’ll never know! She says you were hugging a steam pipe. You’re lucky you didn’t get burned!”

  “Lucky. Yeah. I gotta go pee.”

  “Let me help you—”

  “Nah, I got this.”

  I rolled out of the bed and staggered toward the toilet.

  Heather’s sleep-frowsy head rose from the sheets.

  “Hey, I saved the Great Pumpkin,” she slurred at me.

  “Good job!” I locked the bathroom door behind me in case Elaine decided I needed assistance. To be fair, she was probably panicking that I was going to sue her and the convention for feeding me illicit drugs. I went to the toilet and unzipped my glitter-smeared jeans and heard something fall out of my back pocket onto the floor.

  It was a package of Lik-a-Stik Yummy Mummies.

  I pulled my jeans back up and reached into my left front pocket. My fingered encountered something round and hard: the three hazelnuts. I took them out and stared at them for several minutes, rolling them around on my palm with the tip of my finger. One for healing, one for wisdom, and one for inspiration. One for me, one for Mom, and one for Joe. One for my past, one for my present, and one for my future.

  Elaine rapped gently on the door. “Are you okay in there?”

  “Yes, I’m fine,” I replied.

  And realized that, for a change, I actually was.

  UNDEFINABLE WONDERS

  THE SHINY FRUIT OF OUR TOMORROWS

  Brian Hodge

  How to hop a train without getting yourself clubbed, caught, or killed, that was the first thing you learned when hard luck set you to riding the rails. It was the first thing Owen taught the green ones when he spotted them, the scared ones who kept their eyes on the other riders instead of on the train, hoping to learn on the run.

  It was the first thing he’d taught Carole, outside of Joliet, while waiting for a westbound to Davenport. He’d taught her how to hop a freight before he knew her name. Taught her how before he’d even known she was a she, and not some fresh-faced boy, lost inside men’s clothes with her hair pincurled up under a newsboy’s cap. She picked it up quick and now she was the one keeping the keener eye out for the green ones.

  It was all about timing. And location. In the train yard, while the locomotive was idling, taking on coal or water or new cars, that was no good. The bulls lurked along the tracks there, on patrol. The mean ones carried clubs. The meaner ones carried shotguns.

  No, you had to wait until the train was chugging along on its way again. You picked your hiding spot on the outskirts of the train yard, or past the platform, and laid low. From up behind the throttle, the engineer might not see a thing, just the two shiny rails and open ground. Then it was like a flock of birds lifting off all at once, men springing up from the sloping sides of embankments, or from behind trees and bushes, or slipping out from between idle cars on the next tracks over.

  Then you ran. You ran like the devil was after you, because he sure enough was. The devil worked for the Southern Pacific and the L&N and the rest, and there wasn’t anything he hated more than someone catching a free ride out of town on one of his trains. Even if the train wasn’t his at all and never would be, because it was owned by some rich man a thousand miles away.

  Do it proper, with a spot of luck, and you got to the train before the bulls could stop you. You matched your speed with the train and closed in from the side and kept your eyes on what mattered.

  “Never watch the wheels,” Owen would tell the first-timers. With some folks, those rolling steel circles had the power to hypnotize. “Wherever you keep your eyes on, that’s where you’re apt to end up.”

  The key was to focus on the handhold you’d picked out. The grab-iron on a boxcar, the ladder up one end of a hopper. Get close, grab on, and grab high, that was the ticket. The tricky part was knowing, feeling, when to let the train take over. You needed strong arms and a good grip for that. You pulled yourself clear of the ground and let the train sweep you up and away, and from there all that was left was to get yourself secure for the ride. It was the best reason for traveling light, nothing more in your bindle or bedroll than you needed to weigh you down.

  On the morning he and Carole left Kansas City, with the sun barely on the rise, there were twenty-odd of them scrambling for whatever they could latch onto, when Owen saw it go bad for two of them on the next cars ahead.

  “Them old boys ai
n’t gonna make it,” he said.

  One fella who didn’t move entirely sober went clomping along trying to dive into the open doorway of a boxcar. He hit the edge with his chest and went down holding his ribs, and didn’t seem to notice someone inside flailing to grab him. Another fella with scraggly gray hair waited too long to pull, and wound up hanging on as the train got to rolling faster than he could keep up. It dragged him another fifty feet before his hands gave and he dropped away.

  It was a miserable thing to witness even when they didn’t slip under the wheels. Owen looked down as their own car rolled past, helpless to help. He’d spend the rest of the morning trying to shake the despondent look in their eyes as they watched him glide above, both men banged up and sprawled in the dirt and rocks and clinkers. Waiting for the bulls to stomp in if bad luck was running double today, to beat a few more knots on their heads and leave their pockets empty.

  He didn’t look back. He helped whoever he could, but he’d stopped looking back more than a year ago. Looking back never showed you anything you wanted to see.

  “The one looked as drunk as my daddy used to get,” Carole said over the rising chug of the engine and clatter of the wheels. “The other one, he was older than either of my granddads ever got to be. Poor old soul.”

  From their grimy perch between the cars, Owen stared down past the rust-brown couplings, saw the ties begin to blur. No bull could catch them now.

  “High or low?”

  “High,” she said. “Feels like it’s fixing to be a pretty day.”

  “High it is.” Owen went first, the gentlemanly thing to do, because while most folks out here weren’t looking to hurt anybody else, you still never knew who might be waiting on the top of the next boxcar. If he was the type to see a girl poke her head over the top of the ladder and decide God had finally answered a prayer and so he’d better get a move on it before God changed his mind.

  This car, there was just one fella sitting in the middle of the roof, and he didn’t look to care much about them either way. Hard to say which the man had gone more days between: decent meals or close shaves. They came over the front edge and crawled along the center planks, picked their spot and gave the man his space. They settled into the rhythm of the rails, same as a dozen others making their way atop the cars ahead and behind. They swayed this way, then that way, as Kansas City fell behind and the endless flatlands unfurled ahead.

  “How far is Salinas from here?” Carole said.

  Owen gave it some thought before saying he didn’t know, to make it look like he might.

  “I couldn’t say, exactly. I never rid straight through to California. Lots of stops. A lot of fruit to pick.” Strawberries in Florida, peaches in Georgia, apples in Washington, hops in Oregon, and bunches more in between. “It’s a long ways off.”

  “You think it’ll still be there by the time we get there?”

  “Salinas? I don’t expect Salinas is going anywhere.”

  Carole gave him a scowl, playful like, the way she did when he was joshing her but sounded serious. “You know what I mean.”

  He feared he did. Wherever a hobo jungle sprang up, they tried to keep it far enough away from the train yards and depots that the bulls wouldn’t take overly much offense to it, but there were no guarantees. A bunch of bulls might gang up and charge in to bust heads and smash everything to pieces and send whoever could still run on their way, for no better reason than because they could and it was fun.

  But Salinas?

  “What can I tell you? If it’s there, it’s there,” Owen said, then tried harder to sound cheery. “Maybe there’s a few things that even a railroad bull could find it in him to hold sacred.”

  ***

  They rode a good portion of the day and stopped in Hays. You got off the trains the same as you got on: quick and watchful. The new bulls weren’t going to be any nicer than the old ones. If you were careless enough to climb down next to a man waiting to swing a club, that only made his day and ruined yours.

  But they came down fast and got away clean, feeling grimy from the ride and the high heat of the September afternoon. They followed a fella who said he knew to a jungle where they could bed down for the night and get some grub. It wasn’t much of a place even by jungle standards, but there was shade from the brush and a few trees, and not much dust blowing through. It would do for a night.

  After they had their bearings, they set off for town. There wasn’t anything edible left in their bindles, and Owen wasn’t going to gamble that if they didn’t contribute to the night’s mulligan they’d get a share regardless, other than what they might lick from the empty pot.

  It was too late in the day to hit the shops and see if they could stock shelves for a few hours, so they went for the neighborhoods instead, where even a leaky roof over your head was better than none. They walked along the streets, eyes down to watch the curbs, until he pointed out a chalk curlicue that was faded but hadn’t yet washed away.

  “Here we go,” he said, then whispered a thank-you to the sky, in hopes it might land on the head of the hobo who’d left the mark, to tell whoever came along next, and knew what to look for, that there was a kind lady who lived here, a soft touch.

  They went around to the back porch, because they weren’t made for front doors. His knock was answered by a stout woman with a cross around her neck. Owen asked if she had any chores that needed doing, payable in whatever vegetables or such she might have to spare. She looked him up and down, and probably found him able-bodied enough, then looked at Carole, then beyond her to the sky, where the sun was low and golden, and said, “How about we save the chores for next time,” and just like that, they had a cabbage and two carrots plus a boiled egg each for the morning.

  Back out on the street, he took a nub of chalk from his pocket and freshened up the mark.

  “She’d’ve put you to work if it hadn’t been for me,” Carole said.

  “And I would’ve been fine with that, too.”

  “I can work just as hard as you, you know.”

  “Harder, probably. Save it for them melons in Colorado, if you want.”

  “Is that the real reason you took up with me? It goes easier on you at people’s doors?”

  “Or how about I enjoy your company? Couldn’t just be that, could it?”

  Carole scuffed along in the ankle-high, lace-up boots she’d snitched from her biggest little brother when her father threw her out. “What kind of company is that, exactly? Because you’re not sweet on me, that much is plain.”

  “I never thought you’d have me.”

  “I’m not saying I would, either, just so you know.”

  “Then what is it we’re arguing about again? Because I can’t tell.”

  She scuffed along awhile longer, then one hand strayed up to her cheeks, one side then the other. “It won’t last, is what I’m getting at. Out in these parts, this dry air, all the dust, the coal smoke . . . I’m not going to have a face these women look at and feel sorry for much longer. I’m going to look as hard as any of the men. So in case you’re thinking of trading me in for a younger one as soon as you find one, you just be man enough to let me know. Don’t sneak off in the middle of the night and leave me waking up alone in someplace I never heard of.”

  “Nobody’s sneaking off and nobody’s getting traded in.” A younger one? She was just eighteen herself, for cripes’ sake. Then he backed up to what she’d said before the trading part. “You think I look hard already?”

  “Are you joking? You’ve got a face that looks like it could drive railroad spikes.” She laughed and gave his shoulder a shove, and things were okay again, and he felt relieved. Because it was the same with Carole as it was with his mother and his aunts and the teachers he remembered, and just about every other woman he’d known. You never realized things weren’t okay until they were so not okay you could hardly think how to fix them.

  ***

  Back at the jungle, Owen used his knife to chop up the cabbage a
nd carrots, a contribution to the mulligan that the others were happy to see. But what really got everyone going was the fare a couple colored fellas wearing shapeless fedoras had just brought in. One had a fistful of wild onions, and the other had honest to God meat, a squirrel he’d clipped out of a tree with a slingshot.

  As the stew cooked down and the sun set as red as a splattered tomato, it was the same as any other hobo jungle. Owen had never seen more colorless places in his life. If there were shacks made of scrap wood, they were paintless and gray. It was nearly always all men, as hardscrabble as the earth, and the older they got the grayer they looked, too. They’d been wearing the same clothes so long the sun had bleached them to a uniform hue, blending into the dust before they darkened again with grime.

  Everybody dipped cans of mulligan from the pot and tried not to burn their fingers. Carole sat close as they waited for someone to get around to asking what they were to each other.

  Once the pot was empty, stories were all they had left to share, nothing else to do but sit around the fire and trade, maybe see who had the worst one. The longer anyone was out here riding the rails, the tougher it got to think of there being a year to it. It was hard times, was all. Or, as Owen had heard one would-be vaudevillian back east put it, “nineteen-hundred-and-thirty-shit-outta-luck.”

  One fella’s lament was that he wanted to go to New York City, because he’d heard there was work there, and if there wasn’t, there were no better docks to ship out from to some better place in the world. Zanzibar—maybe there. He didn’t know where it was, but he loved the sound of the name. Zanzibar.

  “Then what are you doing in Kansas getting off a westbound train?” somebody asked.

  Too afraid to go to New York, the man said, because he figured he’d be more likely to end up in jail than with a job. The first thing he’d probably do when he got to town would be to find out where Wall Street was, then go whale the tar out of the first man in a ritzy suit he saw, for getting them in this fix. Then drag him upstairs a few floors and throw him out a window, and maybe he’d hit somebody else who deserved it, too.