Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 54, No. 3, March 2009
The Lineup
John C. Boland is a financial journalist. His last story for AHMM, “Sargasso Sea,” appeared in September 2008.
Jay Brooks is a psychologist in New Mexico. “Oil Slick” is his first published short story.
S. W. Hubbard is the author of a book series set in the Adirondack mountains. Her third novel, Blood Knot, was re-leased by Pocket Books in 2005.
Jim Ingraham’s first novel, Remains to be Seen, a police procedural set in Maine, was published by Five Star Mysteries this summer.
Douglas Grant Johnson’s story, “Cliff’s Folly,” appeared in the November 2007 issue of AHMM. He is at work on a novel.
Gilbert M. Stack holds a PhD in history. His last story, “Guilt,” appeared in the December 2008 issue of AHMM.
The Graycats
by Douglas Grant Johnson
“Best not to think about home too much, Arthur,” Orvil said.
Orvil was trying, like I was, to act little older than we were. But I thought he missed his home more than he’d admit. I turned to Arthur. He claimed to be sixteen, like me and Orvil, but I wasn’t so sure about that. He was a little young to be out on the road, but so were me and Orvil, when you come down to it. Still, there we were, all three of us, in the middle of the night, clinging to the top of a boxcar on a fast-moving freight train.
“Nah... it’s okay to think about home,” I said, loud enough to be heard over the noise of the cars. “I think about it all the time.”
“You miss your mom?” Arthur said.
“Sure do. Books too. Back when my pa had a job and we had money, he’d buy books for me and my sister. I wanted to bring one of them... one by Kipling, but my pa said it was best to travel light.”
The train swung away from the flat farmlands we had been passing through and headed into some rougher hill country.
“Think we’ll ever get there?” Arthur said after a moment.
“Sure,” I said.
“California seems like such a long ways.”
“Guess it is,” Orvil said, “but see... we just gotta keep our minds set on gettin’ there.”
“An’ keep puttin’ a few miles behind us ever’ day.”
“How many days, you think it’ll take, Orv—”
The boxcar hit a bad soft spot on the roadbed and bucked so hard it almost threw us off. We grabbed the timbers of the roof walk and held on as tight as we could.
“Ridin’ up here on the roof wasn’t the best idea you ever had, Stanley,” Orvil said to me over the extra clanking of wheels and couplers.
“We’re still here, aren’t we? That railroad bull didn’t see us up here when he kicked everyone else off.”
“Shucks... you’d think the railroad’d keep their tracks in better shape,” Orvil said.
The boxcar settled down to its regular swaying and bumping. About the same time, we heard voices from the platform of the caboose, the next car behind us.
“Thought I heard somethin.’”
“Let it go, Stark. Catch ‘em in the yard in the morning.”
“I’ll be havin’ a look.”
A few seconds later a shape appeared above the ladder at the tail end of the car.
“Well... we got a whole passel of graycats up here,” the shape called over his shoulder.
In no time at all, the fellow was on top of the car with us and he was carrying a big club. Right away, we began to retreat, but Arthur wasn’t as fast. He grabbed Arthur by the collar and sent him stumbling backward, toward the rear of the car.
“Get off!” he said before turning to me and Orvil.
But we weren’t waiting to be invited off. We were already scrambling for the front of the car.
Climbing up or down a boxcar’s ladder while a train is moving is scary enough, but when the bull started for us, even trying it in the dark didn’t seem such a bad idea. We were just reaching for the ladder when we heard Arthur’s interrupted scream, and then nothing but the sound of wheels on the joints of the track.
The last glimpse I’d had of Arthur, he was stumbling backward, trying to regain his balance. Maybe he would have, I don’t know, but what I think must have happened is, he ran out of roof and backed up into thin air between the cars.
We stopped with our feet on the bottom rungs of the ladder and considered our choices. One was to hang on like we were until the next station. But the train was moving at a pretty good clip, and as Orvil said, the track wasn’t in top condition. Every time the wheels hit a few weak ties or a bad track joint, the car would lurch again, threatening to pitch us off.
But the bull was not waiting for that. In no time at all, he was leaning over the top and swinging his big club at our knuckles on the rungs.
“That feller’s pure crazy!” Orvil said above the roar of the wheels.
I felt the stir of air on my fingers as his club barely missed. We both grabbed a lower rung, but this made us slouch down and hang out farther from the car. It was awkward, and I didn’t think I could hold on for long. I glanced at Orvil and I could see he was thinking the same thing. Jumping off seemed like a wise choice. Especially when it looked like that crazy bull was getting ready to climb down after us.
Orvil nodded and we made ready to go.
I was lucky, landing in a spot covered with grass and a lot of small weeds. Orvil, jumping a second later than I did, wasn’t so lucky. He landed in a bramble of small bushes, and it took a while before I found him and got him untangled. It was another while before he found he had suffered no broken bones. But he was in a lot of pain just about everywhere, and for a long time he lay on the ground trying not to move. I sat with him for a while, nursing my own bruises and listening to his moans. And feeling bad that there was nothing that I could possibly do to help him.
Graycats, the bull called us. Well, that’s what the other hobos called us, too, although not with anything like the pure malice we’d heard on top of that boxcar. It was what they called anyone as green as we were about the ways of the road, and right then I couldn’t say they were wrong.
We’d sort of looked after Arthur because he seemed kind of innocent, and we figured if we didn’t, he wouldn’t last long on his own. Orvil and I, we left home because there was no place anymore where we could earn money our folks needed, and we each had decided our folks couldn’t afford to keep feeding and clothing us. There had been a few tears, but no argument. Arthur figured about the same thing one day, and he told us he’d just packed up a few things, left his folks a note, and took off.
We didn’t spend all our time traveling. Most of the time we were just looking for any kind of work and scrounging for something to eat and in general trying to learn from the other hobos about surviving on the bum. Fortunately, there seemed to be no end to the number of likely fellows to learn from after what happened one lousy day in the fall of twenty-nine, and the country went from there straight to the dogs.
So far, I had never felt in any danger among my fellow travelers. They were good people, I thought, and a good number of them weren’t a lot older than Orvil and I. Most were just folk who’d had bad things happen to them. What us three graycats were looking for was what everyone was looking for, a better chance in another place. And if we could find work, maybe we could send something back home.
I’d heard there was work on the farms out in California, and we figured we’d head out there together. But California was two thousand miles away, and one fellow told us early on that the railroads were the fastest way to get there. The most luxurious, too, another promptly said. This was met by a lot of loud laughter from anybody close enough to hear it. What we found out was that a hard floor in the corner of an empty boxcar was a lot more plush than walking, and so we spent our days scouting for a handout and any train that looked to be heading west.