by Jeff Tapia
Our railroad station wasn’t no Grand Central, that’s for sure. It was just a one-story brick building that didn’t look any different than any other brick building in Wymore. There wasn’t a line of yellow cabs honking out in front, and there wasn’t any fancy-looking people fighting to get in them. Alls there was, was some buffalo grass growing up through the cracks in the blacktop and switch grass sprouting high as the roof and attracting butterflies.
We walked around the building and were as struck as a lightning rod to find our grandmas already setting out the plates and bowls of vittles, seeing as how we’d just licked our donut sticks clean and stuck them in our back pockets. There was everything and more laid out on the tables because our grandmas always made sure there was something for everyone. We spotted corn on the cob piled high as haystacks, and big bowls of steaming whistleberries accompanied by chunks of bacon, and tube steaks7 floating like logs in hot water, and racks of first ladies8 all smothered in homemade BBQ sauce, and leaning towers of hockey pucks,9 and icebergs of potato salad, and giant pickles the size of submarines, and all sorts of other with-its. Then there was fly cake10 and Georgia pie11 and Magoo.12 Generally you could tell what we ate at Train Day just by looking at the stains on our shirts afterward.
“Why we eatin’ so early?” we asked, and each nabbed a bacon bit out of the pot. The picnic usually didn’t get under way until the train went by and Grandpa Homer and Grandpa Virgil had sung their ballad. That’s just how the tradition was set up, and traditions die hard in places like Wymore.
And our grandmas told us, “’Cause you ain’t gonna be here once the freight passes. Or did you forget?”
Forget? How could we have? Because that’s what was making this Train Day even more special than normal. Remember when we told Pops we had an even better idea? Well, our idea wasn’t just better—it was better than butter. We asked if instead of just handing off our school box to the train engineer and waving “oh revwah,”13 why couldn’t we hop on and ride with it for a spell?
And Pops said, “Ooh lah lah!”—which means something like “Oh, boy.” And then he said, “We just better not tell Mom about this until you’re back home.”
And we said, “It’s a deal!”
So that’s why we were sitting down early to fill our shirts. One by one, our grandmas and grandpas joined us at the center table. But we didn’t want to start grubbing until Grandpa Homer and Grandpa Virgil performed their Train Day ballad. Grandpa Virgil broke out his box of teeth, and him and Grandpa Homer took their seats at the edge of the long picnic bench, right where everybody could see them good. We all sat at attention while Grandpa Virgil pulled and squeezed his accordion and Grandpa Homer warbled with affection. And soon we all began singing along:
Train Day comes each week at ten
Unless the train runs late.
Warn’t never a town like Wymore is
That honors cargo freight.
Grandpa Virgil finished the song in a flourish of notes, and we clapped our hands sore. And that’s when you could say the picnic got into full swing.
Everybody made long arms in every direction to get to the food they desired, and everyone was reaching so fast you would’ve thought we were gonna get tied up in one big arm knot. Once we all had a full plate, we picked up our pitchforks and saws and began filling our shirts, and for a time ain’t no one spoke, and the only thing you heard was chewing, slurping, an occasional burp, and cutlery knocking against each other like a sword fight.
If we hadn’t been departing after eating that day, we would’ve played washers14 and I Spy and sardines, and then listened to Grandpa Virgil chatting a little more on his box of teeth and witnessed some good toe-smithing15 on the part of our grandparents. But we were departing that day. So what happened instead was that we heard the toot of a train whistle, and everybody jumped up from the table all at once. Our grandmas hurried over to us and brushed off our crumbs and tucked in our shirts and wiped the corners of our mouths and the bottoms of our chins and tidied us up all uncomfortable like we were going to church. Then we all stood there lined up straight as flagpoles two feet from the edge of the platform and waited eight more long minutes until we saw the lead locomotive come around the bend and then stop on a dime right smack in front of us. And the screeching it made to do so just about split our ears in two.
HERE’S A QUESTION FOR YOU. How many times can twenty-eight grandmas tell you to be careful and to be good and to not misbehave and to pay attention and to listen to what the train engineer tells you and to be careful? Well, the answer is such a big number that you ain’t gonna be able to pronounce it out until you’re at least in high school.
But somehow we managed to break free from our grandmas. Our grandpas who were talking to the engineer stepped aside, and we climbed straight up these rungs welded onto the outside of the locomotive and climbed in through a door that if you ask us was awful small for such a huge train as the one we was now on.
“Howdy,” said the man sitting there. Then he turned and aimed a stream of juice1 straight into a coffee can down by his feet. We knew it went in because it rang out like rain tinkling on one of them rusty hubcaps laying in the square.
“Hi,” we said, and sorta held on to each other just in case the other one felt a bit scared.
“Call me Fitz,” he said, and tipped his hat that said MILES on it. His hair was all matted down underneath in a way our Mom would never allow us to leave the Any Hotel with.
We didn’t have the guts yet to tell him what he should call us, but then he smiled at us just standing there and showed us a mouth full of brown teeth, and so we smiled right back at him. Then he shook our hands so tight, we were certain we heard knuckles snap and our smiles turned into more of a grimace.
“Welcome to CNABTB!” Fitz said.
And we said, “Huh?”
And Fitz said, “Explain it to ya later.2 Now you better lean out the window and wave to your folk. ’Cause we’re outta here.”
So we did like we were told, just like our grandmas and grandpas told us to do. The window was even tinier than the door was, and we could barely squeeze our two heads out of it. But when we did, we saw how high up we were and that we must’ve been 15 feet up above the tracks. Mom would’ve undergone a fainting spell for sure.
Whatever our grandmas and grandpas were saying to us, we couldn’t hear none of it on account of the locomotive noise. That was fine with us, since we figured it was the same stuff they’d already been telling us hundreds of times. So we just waved and saw our grandmas waving with their handkerchiefs, and our grandpas lifted their hats solemn off their heads.
Gradually and slowly they turned smaller and smaller, and then more parts of Wymore came into view. And we was like, “Hey, look, there’s the Any!” and “There’s the water tower!” And soon enough the whole town grew so small that we could cover it up first with our hand, then with our fist, and then with just our thumb. And then when we took our thumb away, the town was gone altogether, and we were officially on an adventure.
“Take a sit-down,” Fitz told us.
There was a seat next to his, and when we sat on it, it was like sitting up on a throne, that’s how big and cushy it was. It easily fit the two of us plus our school bag in the middle. That’s when we looked out ahead of us through the windshield for the first time and saw the two long lines of rails we were traveling on. And the farther you looked at them, the closer and closer they got together, until way up ahead of you they turned into a single dot.
“Pretty amazin’, ain’t it?” Fitz said, like he knew what we were thinking.
We nodded our heads.
“So, I hear you’s carryin’ somethin’ special in that school bag of yours.”
We just stared down at it and maybe held it a little tighter. How did he know?
“Old gentleman at the station told me about it whiles you was being tended to by the ladies.”
“Oh,” we said. Which was only the third word we’d yet sp
it out, and they’d all been roughly that small.
“Said I’m to take you down to Maggie’s Crossing. Hand you off to Mr. Buzzard.”
“Yes, please,” we managed to say.
“Yes, please,” Fitz repeated, and slapped his leg and laughed like we said something funny. “You two kids are all right.” Then he turned his head some and nailed that coffee can again.
We sat looking straight ahead without moving our heads a single notch.
“Maggie ain’t gonna like that none, tell you that much.”
We didn’t ask him how come, but he told us, anyway.
“She don’t like it none when a mile of coal sits there rumblin’ on her land. Even been known to come out with a shotgun. Wearin’ them big boots of hers stickin’ out from under her skirt.”
Our throats went dry. Why didn’t Pops tell us nothing about Maggie? And nothing about Fitz? And we thought that we maybe should’ve asked Mom first.
“Still lives in a dugout, she does. You two know what a dugout is? And I ain’t talkin’ baseball.”
Our eyes glanced over at him, but our heads didn’t move none.
“It’s like a little hut dug right into the side of hill. Nuthin’ but a dirt floor and a potbelly stove. And yet they say she’s sittin’ on natural gas worth millions of dollars. You believe that?”
Our shoulders went up and down a little bit.
“Good ol’ Maggie,” Fitz said, and shook his head and laughed some more.
We asked each other what natural gas was and if it had something to do with what happens when you eat too many whistleberries.
“What you kids whisperin’ over there?”
“Nothing,” we said. But it turned out he heard us, anyway.
“Well, I ain’t right sure exactly what natural gas is, neither. Alls I know is it’s fuel, like oil, and you can get it out of the ground.”
“Oh,” we said. Another big, long word.
“I tell you what. It’s about time we had some fun here. Whaddaya say?”
We didn’t say nothing, but it sounded good to us.
“You think you two is able to help ol’ Fitz out some?”
We first looked at each other to make sure we thought it’d be okay. Then we said, “Yes.” Slowly we were starting to warm to the situation.
“Good deal,” he said. “Now, see that there post coming up down on your right. Gotta a black X on it?”
We did, indeed.
“Means we got a grade crossin’ comin’ up.”
A grade crossing?
“Just means a road of some sort is gonna be crossin’ the tracks. And when that happens, you know what we gotta do?”
We reckoned we did. “Blow the whistle!”
“Right on, brother!” Fitz said. And then he said, “And sister.” Then he did a double-take and said, “Hey, wait a sec. You two twins or somethin’?”
That got us giggling, which got Fitz laughing. This trip of ours was beginning to look better and better.
“Now, take a look at this here,” Fitz said. He meant this whole big panel of buttons and knobs and switches and lights that he was sitting right in front of. “See this mushroom thing?”
We told him we did. It wasn’t no real mushroom, but it sure did look like a big metal one, and it grew straight up out of the middle of the control panel.
“Good,” he said. “Now, take your hands on it, and when I say three, use some of them muscles you got and plunge it down. Got it?”
“Got it!”
“All right, now. One . . . two . . . and . . . THREE!”
We pushed hard, and that mushroom sank down beneath our push, and out came the long, loud toot we’d been hearing all our lives. The sound reverberated up from the floor and through our shoes and up our socks and even into the seats of our britches so that it tickled.
“Now let off and play her again.”
We followed his directions, and once again our train howled, and once again our britches tingled.
“Good goin’,” Fitz said. “Now give it just one more short tap for good measure.”
We did that, too, and within no more than five seconds, we crossed a deserted gravel road with a rusty STOP, LOOK & LISTEN sign posted right next to it.
“You two is pretty good musicians. That was an F-sharp you just played.”
We looked at each other and smiled.
Then Fitz said, “Always my dream to blow the horn in a jazz band. But wasn’t meant to be.” He said that more to himself and his panel of knobs than to us. “Ain’t no matter, though. Now, just sit back and enjoy the ride.”
So we hopped back up on our throne and did what we were told and stared out the window at nothing but grass and sky and the two strips of iron cutting straight through it. We had lots of time to look and stare because we weren’t even going that fast. A big number on a dial on Fitz’s panel said 38 mph. And when you’re in the middle of all that space, you can hardly tell you’re moving anywhere. We reckoned it was a bit like being on a boat out in the middle of the ocean. We’d never seen so much nothing in all our lives.
“You mean this is what it looks like where we live?” we asked Fitz.
And Fitz said, “Yup. Pretty amazin’, ain’t it?”
While we took it all in, Fitz was constantly busy twisting knobs, flipping switches, and pushing buttons. But at some point he had a free moment and a free hand to offer us a container of smoked trout. “Caught and smoked it myself,” he said.
Fish? Growing up in a place as dry as Wymore, the only fish we’d ever seen was in our schoolbooks.
“You just gotta know where to look for ’em,” Fitz said. “Now, go ahead and use your fingers. The queen ain’t comin’ to dinner.”
So even though we were still full of potluck, we thanked him and opened the container. And what we saw there was a real honest-to-goodness dead fish. If it hadn’t been missing its tail and its head, you would’ve thought it could’ve swam away.
“Go on,” Fitz said. “It ain’t gonna bite ya.”
And so, well, we started picking at the fish with our fingers just like he said we should. And you know what? It was real good! And so smoky that it dang near made our lungs cough.
“Just watch out for little bones,” Fitz said, then blew the whistle, and we looked out the window, and sure enough, there was one of them posts with an X on it, just like he said there would be.
Time passed, and even though to us it didn’t ever look like we were going past anything, Fitz kept pointing out landmarks to us left and right. “There’s an old Indian burial mound right there.”
We looked and squinted, but couldn’t see no mound.
“See that little hump back off that way?” he asked a few minutes later.
“Hump?”
“Covered ammo during World War II.”
Wasn’t that in the last century?
“Look at that red-tail on that cottonwood over there!”
He kept going on like that, and that’s how we got to see all the things that Fitz saw and we didn’t.
And then there was all the towns we went through. Or rather what was left of them. Bunch of places we ain’t never heard of. Hyannis. Mullen. Jewell. Ord. Yellville. Usually nothing left but a single shed or one lonesome brick building or a patch of blacktop stretching from nowhere to nothing or a tall grain elevator no longer in service. Our favorite was the town of Wunce.
“Check it out,” Fitz said, and pointed. “Ain’t nothing left but that there yellow DEAD END sign you see sticking up outta the bluestem.”
“How come you know all this stuff?” we finally asked.
“Been working this stretch over ten years is how.”
That was as long as we were alive! “Is that why your hat says ‘MILES’ for? For all the miles you done traveled?”
Then Fitz took off his hat and looked at it and said, “Yeah, guess it could mean that, too. Never thought of that.”
But he didn’t have a chance to tell us what it really m
eant because the control panel butted in and started to say something.
“Now en turr ing dark terr uh torr eee.”
It was like a robot voice. “What was that?” we asked.
“That? Just the trackside scanner.”
“The what?”
Fitz told us that his train automatically told him stuff, like if it had any defects or what the temperature was outside. And in this case, it was telling us that we were now entering dark territory.
So of course we had to ask, “What’s dark territory?” Because it was as sunny as a song outside.
Fitz adjusted his cap and said, “It’s kinda complicated. But basically it means I gotta talk to somebody directly on the radio to find out what I need to do instead of readin’ my directions from off this chart here.”
He flipped a switch and bent over and spoke into an intercom thing built into the control panel. “CNABTB goin’ dark,” he said.
And about ten seconds later, a crackly voice came back out of the intercom and said, “All clear.”
And that was it. Until about five minutes later, the robot said, “Now lee ving dark terr uh torr eee.”
“Understand it this time?” Fitz asked us.
And we said, “‘Now leaving dark territory’?”
“You got it! Couple of future engineers right here.”
That made us feel good.
We traveled some more and looked out the windows at the dramatic and sensational3 amount of empty space all around us. For a while we got to push the mushroom and blow the whistle about every mile or so, and soon thereafter we passed by a deserted road, and the whole time we ain’t never once seen a single pickup. And the more we chugged along, now at only 26 mph, we started to get a bit drowsy from the sun and the rocking of the train and the slowness and the sameness of it all. If the cabin we were in had air conditioning, it sure wasn’t working no good.