I just sat there with my back against the boxcar so I had a view out the open door and thought about Mama dying, and then Daddy doing what he did, and me burying them in the barn. Then I thought about Jane and Tony coming along, and us going over and stealing a dead man’s car. Next, there had been Buddy, shot by his own partners, and now Daggart, dying while waiting to catch a train. All I could think of was his eyes staring at nothing, and just before that he had been talking and seeing what we were seeing. It was sobering to realize life came and then it went.
It was hard to see how things would get any better. Right then I was feeling that boxcar bouncing over the tracks and it was shaking me down to my bones. I guess the wind was tearing me up, even if I wasn’t right in the doorway, ’cause my eyes got so full of tears I had to use the back of my sleeve to wipe them dry. And I must have been hungry, ’cause my belly started seizing up and cramping.
I glanced at Jane, who had put her back against the boxcar and had her eyes closed. She looked pretty sweet when she was asleep. I decided then and there that Jane was about as big a blowhard as there was, but at the bottom of her bucket there was something real. She knew life was short, and she lived like it was and sucked all the juice out of it. I told myself right then and there I was going to do the same, even if I knew I’d never be quite like Jane. Wasn’t nobody could get to the juice the way she could, and wasn’t nobody ever who could enjoy it as much as she did, even the times when it was sour.
Looking at Tony, I could see he was weakening, and it wasn’t just from the trip and eating kind of here and there, never getting any solid rest, and seeing what he had seen. It was like there was a hole in the top of his head and you could almost see him easing out of it.
He turned and looked at me and tried to smile. The corner of one side of his mouth lifted up and fell down, like a window blind that hadn’t caught good when you pulled the cord to raise it.
There were tears in his eyes.
I glanced back at Jane.
She opened her eyes while I was looking, smiled at me, got up, and come over to the edge of the boxcar. She sat down in the wide doorway and let her feet dangle over the edge. The sun was on her face, and it lit her up good. The way she looked, you would have thought she’d been given the keys to everything there was in life that was good. She was grinning a little. She was in her element. She was born for adventure. And she couldn’t have been happier.
I guess she thought about the same things I had been thinking about, the loss of her family and all, but she could move on quick. Daggart was maybe not forgotten, but she sure wasn’t sweating over him. He was dead and gone and we weren’t. That was how she saw things. It was now, and it was all about the living.
“That’s some pretty country,” she said.
I wanted to answer, but I was afraid my voice would crack. The wind was making my eyes water again. I turned so I wasn’t looking right at her.
The train clattered along and slowed here and there, and we even had a guy jump in our car as we got into East Texas and it slowed going through a station. He wasn’t as ragged as some. He had dark hair and a face that wasn’t as lined as those of most men on the road. He had on good shoes, which made me think he had been someone important once. The leather on them squeaked as he walked to the back of the boxcar. He spoke to us kindly and sat down with his knees pulled up under his chin. If he had any curiosity about us, he kept it to himself.
I put my hand in my pocket and pulled out my pocketknife so he couldn’t see it, kept it down by my leg so that I could pop it open. It was that kind of knife. A flick of the wrist and you had raw blade.
But he didn’t bother us. He rode to the next town, said goodbye, and got off.
I put the knife away.
I moved to where I could let my legs hang like Jane was doing. Tony came and sat down between us.
We passed lots of green and lots of water. At first glance, after where we had been, you could mistake it for paradise. But after a while we saw shacks and old cars and people walking, wearing clothes that had been patched so much they wasn’t nothing but patches.
We passed little farms where chickens ran loose and so did the kids.
We passed sawmills, and we could see the tall sheds that housed the great blades of the mill, and we could hear the blades whining through the lumber, throwing up sawdust like sand in a windstorm. There were glimpses of long trucks and ox-drawn wagons and some with teams of mules, hauling the lumber out.
Finally we passed a river. Jane said it was the Sabine. I reckoned that was so, but I didn’t know for sure, and there wasn’t no use asking her if she was sure. She’d just lie about it. There were some people sitting on a long wooden bridge over the river with lines in the water. Farther down, we saw some kids on the bank fishing. Two boys and a little girl. They waved at us as we went by, and we waved back.
The sky was clear for a long time, and then all of a sudden the air got cool and clouds dark as the bottom of a well rolled in. With them came flashes of lightning and rolls of thunder. The rain hammered the earth and the wind whipped the trees, making the tops of them slash at the sky. We had to pull completely back inside the car to keep from getting wet. It had been a long time since we’d seen a real rain. One with all the power of the heavens behind it, wetting up the earth and making the air smell like dirt. For me, it was like something religious was happening. Like a thing denied me for a long time was now being given, and there was a lot of it.
The trees on the side of the track were close, and they were dark with shadow, but from time to time the lightning came and for a moment the inside of the boxcar was bright as day.
Along the tree-shadowed tracks we went, into the dark rain, and finally into the dark night that was cut open here and there by bright swords of lightning. The air shook the train with explosions of thunder.
Finally we lay in the center of the car and closed our eyes. We didn’t talk at all. I just lay there thinking on things, and none of the things I was thinking on were cheering me up much, except maybe that rain. The air felt so cool, and it was dark with cloud shadow. But the rain was all there was that was good right then. I just couldn’t get away from all that had happened back home, from Mama and Daddy down in the dry earth. I hoped it was raining there.
I tried to feel better by thinking about finding Strangler and about us warning him that Bad Tiger and Timmy were coming. But I kept thinking it wasn’t going to be easy, and Bad Tiger and Timmy were looking too. They might have already found him. We might never find him. And no matter what Strangler was wanting to do with the money, he was still the same as them. Same as Pretty Boy Floyd. They were all crooks. Maybe some crooks are better people than other crooks, but they’re all crooks.
I thought about Jane’s East Texas relatives. She didn’t even know their names. I assumed they had the same last name as her, but then I come to realize that she hadn’t actually told me if her original kin was the uncle or the aunt. If it was the aunt, then she’d most likely taken up her husband’s name. And on top of that, wasn’t anything that said they’d be glad to see her and Tony, let alone me, who wasn’t no kin at all.
What it came down to was we were just sort of out there in the wind.
Still, trying to stop someone from being killed had to be the right thing to do. It would be nice to save someone once. Or if they died, to bury someone once, or see to it that they were buried. We were sort of like bad luck charms. Wherever we went, a dead body was bound to show up before long, and it was bound to be left unburied or unreported. It was a knack.