by Billy Coffey
(Don’t say it, Lisa thinks, please, Charlie, don’t say it)
“—special,” Charlie says. “That ain’t no bad thing. But you keep away from Chris Jones this summer. Give him time to calm down, maybe he’ll forget all this before next year. And I’ll give you some advice too, Lisa. If you’ll hear it.”
She’ll take anything just now, so long as they can get out of here with the lunch crowd still at the diner and without Charlie calling Sheriff Barnett. Lisa can’t think of what charge would be levied. Improper use of an over-the-counter medication maybe.
“I know this is a hard time,” Charlie says, “for the both of you. It’s a struggle for a single mom. Now, I’m not one to get religious on anybody—”
Lisa holds up her hands—
“—but there’s revival going on tonight—”
“Charlie, I don’t think—”
“I know, I know. But this is different, Lisa. The preacher they’re bringing to speak?” He shakes his head. “I’ve heard stories. He’s got the true gift. It’s up at the old barn off 42, across the hill. Seven o’clock. Just follow the signs. Or everybody else.”
“Across the hill?” she asks.
Principal Rexrode shrugs, then smiles again. “Lord loves all kinds, Lisa. Even the hill folk.”
*
There is only silence on the ride home. No What the world was in your head, Abel? or Let me explain, Momma, just Lisa smoking and Abel pointing his nose out of his open window and letting the wind play in his hair. She knows the smoke bothers him and keeps the cigarette pointed near the vent. People would say it’s child abuse, that’s fine. Wouldn’t be the first time Lisa Shifflett was accused of that, and besides, they don’t understand.
Some days (this one, for instance) Lisa thinks she doesn’t much understand either. Not anything. Some days she thinks understanding has always been a thing short in supply and long in demand, at least as far as her life is concerned. In spite of what the majority of town might say, their hardships cannot be laid to Lisa and Abel alone. She works hard at the diner and does all she can to provide and nurture. Abel had no say in the course given him—his specialness, a word that makes Lisa wince just as much as it does her son, even when spoken in the privacy of her own thoughts. So why must their days then be spent on love alone, rather than with some of the finer things thrown in? Why must it always seem a struggle, one foot in the grave and the other on muddy ground?
In the shadow of the hill that divides Mattingly not only by geography but class and reputation, Lisa’s little Honda veers onto a narrow way known as Holly Springs Road. She has always considered the name too pretty for a stretch of dirt road that fronts a smattering of single-wides and a long field stretching to the railroad tracks beyond. Dust here is a constant enemy, stirred up from spoiled ground by winds that blow unceasingly from the mountains and left to cling to clothes and cars alike. Abel coughs (From the dust, Lisa tells herself, not the smoke) as they wind their way over potholes and ruts to the little trailer last on the right, where the road dead-ends.
Mister Medford Hoskins is the man who owns their trailer, a crotchety old miser who believes the one thousand eight square feet of living space contained therein plus the acre of land it sits on is well worth the four hundred dollars a month Lisa pays in rent. It is the only house Abel has ever known, which Lisa had once promised would be “their new beginning” before she came to understand that every promise made is sworn through a curtain of the unknown. People everywhere begin a thing with hope and certainty in equal measures only to find those things are not stolen so much as they simply fade. Now “their new beginning” is a broken-down and mouse-infested trailer not their own, set in a yard where chicory and dandelions overwhelm the tall grass and where everything leads to a dead end. But it is home, and it is theirs, and as such a castle wouldn’t mean more.
The car stops when the gravel driveway meets a worn path leading to the front steps. Lisa grinds the transmission into reverse and waits for Abel to open his door.
He keeps his gaze out the window and says, “Guess you’re going back to work.”
“Got to. Lunch rush. I’ve already missed most of it.”
“Because a me,” Abel says.
“I think that’s a fair way of putting things.”
“Are you mad?”
“Yes. That’s kind of what mommas get when their sons do something like that.”
“You gone punish me?”
“I about have to, don’t you think?”
“I could work it off,” he says, still gazing out toward the weeds. “Clean the wreck room, maybe. Or cut the grass.”
“You know better than go in that room without me, and you know you’re not fit to cut the grass. I think it’s best you go on inside, Abel. I think what you need is to keep in your room and think hard on what you done, because what you done was inconsiderate. Not just of Chris, but of me.”
“Think I’d rather mow,” Abel says.
“And I think I’d rather not gotten wind of a deed sprung from a thought I believed could never grow in your heart.”
“I left my book bag at school,” Abel says. “It’s got some of my best tricks in there.”
“I’ll get it after work. Maybe Willie will be there.”
“Dumb Willie left at lunchtime. His daddy had to get him in the garden.”
“Principal Rexrode then, though he’s like to be duly sloshed. Now get on.”
Abel opens the door.
“Wait,” Lisa says. “Sugar me.”
He turns that perfect face and looks at her with those perfect eyes and grins through those perfect teeth, then leans his perfect body over to peck her cheek.
“Lock the door. I trust Royce Jones no more than I do his idiot boy.”
“Okay. Toots love,” Abel says, which is what he’s always said.
“Toots love.”
She backs out of the drive and forces the gear from reverse to first, which creates a sound deep in the Honda’s bowels that reminds her of a dying sow. Lisa waves as she pulls away. Abel stands alone in a yard of blooming weeds as though weighing past and present and future in scales of his own devising, only to judge all three as wanting. Through the rearview Lisa watches as he picks a dandelion from the grass and twirls it in the fingers of his good hand, holding the fluffy top high to the sun. Lisa watches her son blow and blow, scattering wishes to a dry breeze.
-3-
Next time I see you, you’re dead.
That’s what Chris whispered just before he left. He bent down like his stomach was hurting again and stared straight at Abel, eyes hard and empty, and that’s when he said it.
Next time I see you, you’re dead.
This afternoon was not the first time Chris Jones warned of murder. Near to every kid at school has lived under that same sentence of death at some point, which Chris distributes between boys and girls equally like some modern, enlightened bully. The promise alone is enough to send the most stalwart child cowering to the nearest teacher. That the closest Chris has ever come to going through with his threats are boxing a few ears and pantsing some poor kids on the playground matters little. What matters is he could do it—Chris is mean enough that he could murder—Abel has even heard a teacher say those very words—and so in the minds of the town’s children, it’s only a matter of time until Chris will.
And there is this: Abel can’t ignore the feeling that something is different this time. It was the way Chris whispered his threat, how it had been in a voice somehow not his own. Gone was the deep and menacing tone perfected in empty hallways and lonely playground corners, one that not even Abel’s magic could keep away. Their first day together in kindergarten, Chris demanded lunch money that Abel didn’t have. Abel tried reasoning, saying they was poor and his momma said the school would pay his lunch for him, though reasoning never worked with Chris Jones, not then or since. To pacify the big kid (even then, Chris was the size of a monster) or perhaps even make a friend, Abel proceeded t
o make an acorn appear from behind Chris’s ear. Chris responded by thumping Abel in the neck, thereby cementing one of the many truisms Abel Shifflett would obtain while working at education: bullies cannot be charmed. Chris did little more than growl at Abel from that first day on. Yet the way he had spoken in Principal Rexrode’s office carried a sense of sureness to it, like Chris had in a matter of seconds jumped forward in time to witness Abel’s death outright and jumped back to report the deed. It was no threat, what Chris said. It was rather a promise. One made by a boy who in the span of a single morning had crossed the threshold from bully to something worse, a human wholly spoilt.
Abel doesn’t guess that’s what his momma had in mind when she said stay in your room and think on things, but that doesn’t matter. What Chris said
(“Promised,” Abel whispers)
is all he can think about. What Chris said, and how even if anybody else had heard it, nothing much would have been done. Abel’s momma was too mad about what Mister Jones had said, that part about her boy being a bastard. Principal Rexrode wouldn’t have cared; all he wanted was to get into his whiskey and talk about how bad the world is. And Mister Jones? Shoot, all Mister Jones would’ve done is pat Chris on the back and say, Atta boy, son. Don’t you let the little bastard freaks of the world ever think they’re anything but what they are, them Shiffletts is plain country trash even more than us.
And so Abel lies on his bed for most of the afternoon, broken arm across his chest and good arm behind his head, wondering if passing off a bunch of laxatives as chocolate so the school bully would mess his pants right in the middle of recess was worth this trouble. Nothing else seems of consequence. He is some afraid of what his momma might do, but that fear pales against the terror Chris Jones kindles. His momma won’t do much more than maybe yell a little bit and say how disappointed she is, because Abel knows deep down his momma thinks all Chris really got was what he deserved. There will be no spanking; Lisa Shifflett has never raised a hand to her son and would never, even if Abel did not walk around in a glass body. Nor will she ground him; Abel never goes anywhere, not unless Dumb Willie goes along.
That thought gives Abel pause. His momma could keep him from Dumb Willie. Could call an end to Abel going through the cut in the trees where the road dead-ends and walking the woods to Rita and Henderson Farmer’s place. No more visiting Dumb Willie and no more Dumb Willie visiting, no more fishing and roaming in the woods or taking rides on the tractor when Dumb Willie’s folks are gone, maybe for the whole summer. That would be awful, and for more than the obvious reason of Abel having to live the next months without his only friend. If Chris means what he said—and Abel knows Chris does, all he has to do is shut his eyes and he hears that spoilt voice all over again—Dumb Willie will have to be kept close. Shoot, Dumb Willie will practically have to move in.
Abel’s vow to shelter in place as his momma instructed holds just over four hours. Three, if he doesn’t count the bathroom breaks and the time it took to eat his peanut butter sandwich. It is the distant whistle that calls him, coming soft and building from the far edge of town and over the trees behind his house and now around, to the porch and the bedroom’s open window. Abel doesn’t have to look at the clock on his dresser to know it’s past five, nor does he need to move from his bed to know the train is a long one. The low and hard grinding of the big diesel engines is proof enough.
It’s a risk, going out. The grass is tall in the yard and taller in the field. There are rocks, big ones that lie buried except for their thick tips, but even worse is that Abel knows his momma will soon be home. She’ll catch him out and call him a liar for going out of the house. One thing Lisa Shifflett never abides is lying. The trouble Abel would find himself in then would be even worse than the trouble he’s in now.
But it’s a train, a long one, and Abel has to see it. He has to.
The pocket notebook is still on the desk from this morning. Abel grabs it along with the nub of pencil by his lamp, then restocks his pockets with a few of the tricks he took out earlier. Just the rubber band and the ring, the playing cards, and a few of the smoke bombs. He runs (or tries to) down the hallway and straight through the back door, keeping one eye to the ground for those tricky rocks and the other to the road. Watching for Chris Jones’s bike, or a puff of dust made by his momma’s car.
*
Three trains make daily runs through Mattingly: the morning one that passes just before seven o’clock, the evening one sometime after four, and the late train, arriving in the full dark between eleven and midnight. For years, Abel has been present for as many of them as he can.
Lisa is gone by six each morning to ready the diner for the breakfast crowd and isn’t home until well after the evening train rolls through, leaving Abel alone to stand at post for their passing. Usually she is present on the weekends, sometimes making a picnic for them both to sit in the field along the tracks while the big engines pass, always making that pulling motion with her arm so the engineer blows his whistle. The night train is different. Lisa doesn’t know Abel snuck out to see it, though only once and to great disaster. Otherwise he has lain still in bed instead, squinting his eyes and flexing his ears as he marks the pages with hashes, trying to judge the number of cars by the heavy clunking of the rails.
His daddy once drove a train, back before he died. That was when they’d lived in North Carolina, before Abel was born. Some nights Abel and his momma will sit out by the wobbly little table on the wobbly little front porch of their trailer and she’ll tell him stories. They’re all like tall tales, how Abel’s daddy once drove a train from one end of the country to the other and how not even snowstorms or hurricanes could stop him, how he was the strongest man in the world and the most handsome too, which accounts for Abel’s own pleasant face. And he was kind, Lisa tells him, a kinder man than the world has ever known since. When she says it there are always tears in her eyes, like the memories are so sweet they pain. Abel counts all this as reasons for his obsession, that quivering he gets inside whenever he hears the whistle call. He would walk through a field of fire to get to the curve in the tracks where the trains slow as they pass by the backyard of the trailer. Some old weeds and rocks won’t scare him, not even now. There have been occasions when Abel very nearly did not make it back in time, mornings when Mister Houff was just about to pull away in the short bus. He doesn’t think his momma would mind if he missed a day or two of school for the train. Just a day or two. Not when she knows her boy is out there looking at those cars roll by. Not when Abel is pulling his good arm so that a man who is like his father once was can wave and blow the whistle.
Though he’s told no one, not Dumb Willie and especially not Lisa, that is why Abel snuck from the house on a Friday night two weeks back to witness his first night train. It had been one of those close-to-the-end days at school, when all the testing was done and everyone (including Abel, including Missus Heizer) had decided they could bear no more learning. Since Father’s Day loomed, Missus Heizer suggested the class make cards with notes inside. She’d handed out construction paper and glue and pledged her help with any wording, then watched as everyone got to work. All but Abel, who could only stare out the window and try not to cry as Chris Jones and everybody else cut and pasted and raised their hands to ask if “love” was spelled with an o and an e instead of a u.
That was why Abel had gone out that night, to feel a comfort that the trains were still coming through and men like his daddy still drove them and not everything in the world was so bad after all. He’d seen every rock in his way, including the one he tripped over. He’d screamed, wailed, screamed again; the train whistle drowned it all. And after that there was nothing left to do but make the long walk back inside, clutching his right arm and knowing it was broken. Just like before, like his other arm and the one leg and both feet before. He changed back into his pajamas and woke his momma. Both tasks proved excruciating, though in different ways. What Abel said was he’d fallen out of bed. Lisa wr
apped him in a blanket and carried him to the car, saying he was the only boy in the history of everything who could hurt himself sleeping. Off they’d gone to the hospital in Stanley. All of that, and Abel never had gotten a glimpse of the train.
But he sees the evening one now, way far in the distance, and hears the slow unwinding of the engine as it peeks in and out of the trees. The tracks curve at the edge of the field, where the trains always slow to near a crawl before gathering speed for the hill country and the mountains beyond. This is where Abel stands for his counting. He digs for his notebook and pencil just as the lights of the engine appear, three white lamps in the shape of a triangle, flipping through the dates and marks until he finds a blank page near the back. The date goes on the top line, Evening Train beneath.
The whistle calls hard. Abel stands afar off and pulls his good arm, making the screech go again. Here comes a snake of iron and steel, head as black as night and smoking, cutting its way through quiet country. The air gathers. The ground beneath his feet quivers as the rails begin to sing, and even as he fumbles for the notebook and pencil as the first engine approaches and the second and third—a third!—and the long stretch of cars behind, Abel’s eyes are drawn to those three glowing lights and the black space that fashions the middle of their triangle.
Six cars pass. Abel marks them with four hashes, a diagonal, and another hash. Chemical cars and flats, hoppers pregnant with Appalachian coal, boxcars of every color, their doors wide to the day. One page filled, another.
On and on this dark line stretches, past the curve and beyond, two pages becoming three. Abel’s lips are moving—ninety-two, ninety-three—his good hand beginning to shake. Because not only is there a genuine caboose on the end, faded red and clacking on the rail, that caboose makes one hundred cars.
A hundred even. One-double-zero on the nose.