by Dean Hughes
“I hear there’s work.”
They laughed again.
“Don’t know if they have child labor down there,” the sitting man said, raising his voice but laughing at the same time.
“I’m older than I look,” Jay said.
“What are you, an Indian kid?”
“No.”
For a time there was nothing but the noise and the vibration of the floor against his back. What if everyone said he was a kid, and no one would give him a job? Maybe he should jump off now and walk back to Delta. But this still seemed better.
“This train goes on down to Milford, and it might be going on to California. But I got a feeling you’re running away from your momma and she’s crying already. This ain’t no way for a kid to be bummin’ around. You from Delta?” said the sitting man.
“No.”
“I’ll bet you are.”
“I’m not. I came down from Salt Lake. I’ve been riding the rails for a while, working where I can. I’m not a kid. Not like you think. I’m a ballplayer. I want to catch on with a team in California.”
But this brought the biggest laugh yet. The big man moved back to the side of the car and sat down not far from the others. “You gotta git better at lyin’ if you want to run away. That’s for sure.”
Jay sat up, then slid back against the side of the car, on the opposite side from the big man.
“How long does it take to get to Milford?”
“I don’t know,” the big man said. “I ain’t never been this way before. I just asked a guy and that’s what he said. It’s going to Milford. That’s still in Utah, I think.”
Jay knew it was, but he didn’t say so. He decided not to say anything. But he knew Milford wasn’t very far, and maybe at that point he’d have to get some help from these guys, to know how to switch trains or whatever he had to do. He needed to get them on his side so they would help him. He thought about Gordy, the way he’d do it. Even Ken.
“I’ve had a lot of trouble,” Jay said, and then realized he hadn’t said it loud enough. He raised his voice, said it again, and then added, “My old man beats up on me, and my mother doesn’t care. She just lets him do it. I gotta get somewhere else where I can make my own way.”
But the words had cost him. They had more truth in them than he liked, and they were words he had never said before. Mom never had stopped his dad, and sometimes he’d hated her for that. He wiped the sweat from his face, pushed his hair back, and knew for the first time that he’d lost his hat, maybe back there when he’d fallen.
The second man who’d spoken to him was thin-faced, with a narrow nose and skinny arms sticking out from an old shirt rolled up above his elbows. “That ain’t much different from a lot of guys on these trains. I left home at sixteen.” He pushed his own hair back from falling in his eyes. “But you ain’t no sixteen.”
“I soon will be. I’m fifteen now.”
“Or maybe thirteen.”
“No. I’m just small for my age.”
“You really from Salt Lake, or where?”
“I’ve lived lots of different places. But I’ve played a lot of ball. I might not hook up with a team right away, but teams are looking for players now, with so many away in the war. If I can work a while and keep practicing, I can maybe make a semipro team. I wanna play in the majors someday.”
“The best thing you could do is go to high school, get yourself some education.”
“Maybe I can do that. You know, in California.”
“Soon as you try, they’ll want an address, your dad’s signature, and all that kind of stuff. I know all about that.”
But Jay didn’t really think he’d stay in school, no matter what his mother always said to him. He could go to a store, or maybe a factory, and tell the manager that he needed to work to help his mother while his dad was in the service, and then claim he went to school, too. Something like that. If he got some work at a grocery store, he could maybe get enough to eat. In California it was warm all the time. He could figure out a place to live and some way to practice baseball. He’d need to get himself another glove. The old one his dad had bought him was just a cheap one anyway. To be a really good player, he needed a better one.
The trouble was, he was making up a story and he knew it. He didn’t know if any of this could really work out the way he was thinking it. But the train was real, and it was getting farther away from Delta every minute. His stomach felt sick when he told himself he was alone now and maybe always would be.
He thought of his mom, holding him when he was little, back in Salt Lake. “You have to mind your dad,” she would say. “You know how mad he gets.” He had hated her for that, still hated her sometimes. But she had been everything to him then. At least she’d cried when she’d seen his bruises, and he’d cried when he’d seen hers. She would cry today, once she knew he was gone. He thought again of jumping back off the train and heading home. But he knew what everyone would be saying about him.
And Ken was leaving. Nothing ever worked out right.
“I’ll tell you what,” the man with the thin face said. “If I had it to do over, I’d stay home. I left my family, and I ain’t never been back, and I’m not even sure where they are now. I’d rather see my mother and my little brother than anything else in this world. If I can build up a few dollars working on the coast, then I’m going back to Indiana and figure out some way to find ’em.”
“If you get a few dollars, you’re going to get drunk, like every other time,” the big man said. The third man, who hadn’t said a word yet, laughed again. He was wearing bib overalls, farmer boots, and an old hat. It was just a floppy piece of felt with a hole worn all the way through at the front, where it had been gripped so many times.
“Go on. Jump off now, here where there’s some sand,” the big man said. “You can still walk back to Delta before the heat’s too bad.”
“What do I want with Delta?”
“That’s where you’re from. And I’ll tell you how I know. This is the first train you ever jumped. You don’t know how to do it. So don’t tell me you’ve been riding around on trains. You don’t have no gear, either, not like a guy who’s been out on the road for a while. I’ll tell you what else. You got in a fight with your old man, but he ain’t half so bad as you think he is right now. You’ve been eatin’ good, and that’s more than you might be able to say pretty soon.” When Jay didn’t say anything, the man added, “And one more thing. You ain’t going to convince no one that you’re fifteen.”
“Well, that’s what I am, whether you think so or not.”
They laughed again, all three of them, but this time he laughed with them. He needed to be friends with them.
“What’s your name?” he asked, looking across the car.
The big man said, “Mac is what people call me.”
“Where you from?”
“Nowhere now.”
“He was in the war, out in the Pacific,” the thin man said. “He got shot through both legs, so they mustered him out of the Marines. He went home and found his wife living with—”
“Hey! You don’t need to tell the kid all that.” He looked across at Jay. “I ain’t like these two. I may take a drink now and then, but I ain’t no wino. Jack here, he’s feebleminded now, his brain all burnt up from drinking anything he can find with alcohol in it. I found him in Grand Junction, half-dead, and I’ve helped him a little since then. But it’s what happens most of the time to the guys out here on these trains.”
Mac looked over at the guy he’d called Jack. Jack was grinning, but Jay wasn’t sure the guy even knew what anyone was talking about. “So jump now. Go back home.”
“I can’t. I can’t go back. Will you help me get to California?”
“No.”
“I will,” the other fellow said, the one with the narrow face.
“What’s your name?”
“Wayne.”
“Okay, Wayne,” said Jay. “We’ll partner up for a while
.”
But that was one more reason to laugh, and maybe the reason to stop talking. The other men leaned back, let their eyes shut. He could see their bodies jiggle, their loose clothes shake. He realized they probably slept on the trains as much as they could.
He didn’t shut his eyes. He watched the men, watched the open door, felt the heat rise inside as the rushing air kept getting hotter. But there was way too much to think about, and he didn’t want to think. He just needed to keep moving ahead, doing whatever came next.
Maybe an hour went by, maybe twice that much—he couldn’t be sure—but he realized that the clacking, the vibration, had begun to slow. “This must be Milford coming up,” said Mac, as though from his sleep.
Wayne said, “This is where the trouble usually comes. What’s your name, boy?”
“Jay.” He said it without thinking, and then wondered whether he should have.
“Okay. We can probably sit tight here. There’s a chance we’ll get rousted—and you never know what the railroad guards in some of these little towns will try to do to you. Some sheriff with nothing to do will toss you in jail, or a guard will beat on you, just because he wants to. If they find us and throw us off, don’t say nothing to anyone. Just call everyone sir, and say you’re down on your luck or something. You might have to say some of what you been tellin’ us, whether it’s lies or not. But if you can, stick with me and I’ll think of something. I could say you’re my boy, but I don’t think they’re going to buy that one.”
“Best thing is to hand him over to the sheriff,” Mac said. “They can send him home.”
Wayne didn’t answer. He said to Jay instead, “Move back into the dark a little more, and just don’t say nothing while we’re in the yard. Chances are, this here car is staying on this train and we’ll get through here.”
Jay nodded, and then he slid over, but he didn’t want to be too close to any of these guys. He had the better part of a dollar in his pocket. His grandpa had paid him for his work a while back and made him save most of the money, but Grandpa had said he could keep a dollar spending money, and so far he had spent only fifteen cents. He wondered if Wayne wasn’t hoping to get a little money off him—to buy something to drink.
The train slowly rolled to a stop. The heat in the boxcar got a lot worse as the air stopped moving. He heard someone talking, but far off, and he figured he was going to make it past Milford all right. Another few minutes passed before he heard footsteps crunching in the cinders next to the tracks, and then he heard a voice. “Anyone in there?”
The men were silent, but a man’s head appeared and then his shoulders. He was standing on something, looking in. Jay held still, held his breath, but the man said, “All right, you guys. Outa there.”
“We ain’t bothering nothing,” Wayne said. “We’re just—”
“We’re switching this car off, boys. I won’t worry much if you find another car with a door open, but I ain’t seen any. The company is telling us to shut everything up.”
Wayne got up and whispered to Jay, “Wait until last. He might walk away before we’re all off.” Mac was helping Jack get to his feet, and then he walked him to the door. He got down first and helped Jack come after. Wayne jumped down next, and then Jay stepped to the door. But when he did, he saw the railroad guard, or whatever he was, standing nearby. He jumped down, but as soon as he hit the cinders, the man said, “Hey, boy, what do you think you’re doing?”
“He’s traveling with me,” said Wayne. “He’s my nephew. I promised his mother I’d get him down to California where his grandparents live.”
He watched the man, saw the firmness go out of his face.
But Mac said, “That’s a lie. This kid jumped on in Delta. His name might be Jay. That’s what he said it was. I’ll bet if you call up there, you’ll find out some kid’s run off and they’re already looking for him.”
The guard shook his head. “How old are you, kid?”
“Fifteen. Almost sixteen.”
“Yeah, sure.” He took hold of his arm. “Come with me.”
“Sorry, kid,” said Mac. “But this way’s better. I can promise you that.”
More promises, he thought. Everyone made promises.
CHAPTER 14
JAY WAS SITTING IN THE sheriff’s office in Milford. The sheriff was hunched over his desk, leaning on his elbows, a sheet of paper in front of him. Jay could see how worn his shirt was. The cuffs and the collar had little threads hanging off them. He was not an old man, but his skin looked like leather, like he’d spent his whole life outside. “So first, just tell me, honest, what your name is.”
Jay had thought about a name. “John Belnap,” he said. He had known a kid in Salt Lake named Belnap.
“That guy you were caught with said your name was Jay.”
“They call me that sometimes.”
“So, John—or Jay—Belnap, where you from?”
“I just travel.”
A little smile slowly made dents in the corners of the sheriff’s mouth. “That’s about as true as you being ‘almost sixteen.’ You probably made up that name, too. Tell me what’s going on. I know you got rousted off that train with those bums, but you’re not hardened down. I figure that was your first train ride.”
Jay glanced at a dusty old wooden clock on the wall. It was just after eleven o’clock. He wondered if his grandpa was looking for him by now. Maybe Ken had gone into town and told Grandpa that he’d run off. Jay needed to write a letter and tell everyone he was okay, so that everyone would stop worrying.
What he had to do before he thought about all the rest, though, was lie to this sheriff and then get away from Milford. “Nothing’s going on. I just heard there was work in California, and I need work.”
“One of those bums said you got on the train up by Delta.”
“He’s nothing but a wino. He doesn’t know where I got on.”
“So where did you get on?”
“Salt Lake. But I’m not from there.”
“Right. You’re from all over the place. You ride the rails.” The sheriff let his head sag almost onto his chest, and then he shook it slowly back and forth. “I don’t need this on a Friday. You know that?” He leaned back in his upholstered desk chair, the cover on it as worn as his shirt. “I told my wife this morning I was going to drive her down to Cedar City to do some shopping. I don’t much like doing that, but it’s sure better than having to figure out what to do with you.”
“I can just move on.”
“Yeah, sure. And catch another train? You’re lucky those hoboes didn’t knock you over the head and take everything you’ve got on you—like that wristwatch you’re wearing. If you were just a little bigger, they probably would have.”
“They were nice fellows. I’ve met a lot worse.”
The sheriff was thinking things over. He seemed like a pretty good guy. That was the trouble; he was too good to just send Jay on his way.
“You look like you could be Navajo. You didn’t come off the reservation, did you?”
“No.”
“I guess not. Not dressed the way you are. My guess is, that bum was right—you came out of Delta. I’m going to get in touch with the sheriff up there and see if some kid has taken off. But you could save me a bunch of trouble. If that’s what it is—you got mad at your old man and ran off this morning—you might as well tell me. I’m going to find out anyway.”
“Are you going to put me in jail?”
The sheriff let out a gust of breath. “Sure I am. You were breaking the law—jumping on a train like that. But if you tell me where you’re from, we’ll let that go. I’ll get you home and that’ll be the end of it.”
Jay didn’t believe that. The guy was too nice to stick him in jail. He wondered, though, if he called the sheriff in Delta, what would anyone know? The sheriff might not know he was missing. And he might not know that Kimball Reid’s grandson’s name was Jay.
“I’ve got a better idea,” Jay said. “Give me
a ride over to Cedar City when you take your wife shopping. I can hitchhike from there. I’ll just move on and you won’t have to worry about me.”
The sheriff grinned. “Don’t think I wouldn’t like to do just that,” he said. “I’d like to give you five dollars and put you on a bus—just to get you out of my life.”
“That would be all right too,” Jay said, and smiled at the man.
But the sheriff was thinking again. He sat for a time, looking past Jay toward the back wall, and then he finally said, “What I’m going to do is walk you over to the Star Café. I’ll leave you with one of the waitresses over there. I don’t like to do it, but I think I might have to handcuff you to a table, just so you won’t take off again. You’re not my only problem this morning. I got a few other things I need to take care of. Then I’ll make that call up to Delta.”
“That’s a waste of your time. I’m not from there. I told you that.”
“That might be right. But it’s the only lead I have. The trouble is, if you just took off this morning, it could be no one’s even figured out you’re gone. The sheriff might have to check around and then call me back. But I can’t leave you at the café forever. I will stick you in that cell back there if you don’t give me any options. So do you want to come clean now?”
He almost did. But he thought of seeing everyone, and he just couldn’t do it. “I told you I’m not from Delta.”
“I know. But every time I start thinking you might be giving me the lowdown, I look at you and think, ‘If he’d lie that much about his age, and do it with a straight face, he’s probably lying about everything else.’”
“I just look younger than I am.”
“Yeah, yeah. You told me that before.” He stood up. “I’ll bet you could use something to eat about now.”
Jay nodded.
“Okay. I’ll buy you something over there, and then I won’t feel so bad about all this. I just keep thinking how I’d feel if it was my kid run off—and I’ll tell you, I got a couple of sons who just might get something like that into their heads someday.” He stood up. “Come on, walk over there with me. And if you’ll promise me square that you won’t take off, I won’t put any cuffs on you.”