THE GRIP
BENEATH HIM the metal gave and sang accompanied by the tedious clack of rail gaps; it was the couplings whacking each other, or something. Jim didn’t know the parts the way some did, the ones who had worked on the lines; he was just hanging on, and had been since the yards in Albuquerque, where he’d clambered up between cars and then, before he could jump back down, found himself stuck as the train opened up full throttle and darkness fell, which it did along this stretch of the Rio fast and quick, the sun sliding off the emptiness, leaving him with only his grip and a foothold that wasn’t sure. It was very cold. The heat rose up through the translucent sky, was gone, and he was left in his cotton shirt — moth-holed and tattered. (He’d left Ohio in this same damn shirt, the very same one.) He’d heard stories of men in the same circumstances, men betrayed by bad leaps onto sluggishly moving freights; he’d heard the tall tales of men who held on in poor positions all night, into the next day, and through another weary night until their tendons locked and their muscles broke and they were saved at the last second when the destination was reached or the train pulled to a siding to let an express pass. Then with their arms out like zombies they’d stumble off between the couplings and lay in the grass, scream into the sky. The other side, too, he’d heard. Those who held on for a night and then tried to find some way to climb up to the walk only to fall to a depraved death. The grip he had was a solid one, and there was a toehold below, on a shank of metal coming out of the car, a piece of broken hardware that had no apparent use. The foothold wasn’t much, and to keep it he had to rest his weight on the side of his boot, his arch; when that got sore, he moved back to his toes. About fifty minutes into the ride, he slipped off his toes and had to rely on his grip to keep himself from falling. That was when he decided it would be best to keep his arch over the nub. His buddy Roy was farther down, probably on top of a car, and maybe he’d work his way along and, looking down, see him there and somehow conspire to find a way to help him up, maybe making a loop with his belt (did he have a belt?), because Roy had been riding for months and knew the tricks of the trade. Roy had a tight-lipped, know-it-all look. He chewed over his knowledge, his tales of the road, long and hard before talking them out.
This was a long dull stretch of empty land, desert hard and straight, allowing the engineer to open it up so that the train, despite its enormous length, might sizzle through the landscape and make the yards in Fe by dawn; he reckoned his grip would hold until dawn, to say the least, and maybe through the next day if he had to do it, because he knew what had to be done to stay alive in this life. He’d been called an animal by his adopted aunt, and he found himself — as he wandered around — drawing strength and life from the comparison. One day after another it had been basically by living the life of an animal that he survived (he’d confessed all this to Roy in an apostolic rant by the campfire one night over a couple of bottles of sour mash); he figured his grip was tough enough, fingers thick and hard from the last job he’d had hauling ice in Ohio, wrists good and thick as the rest of his torso, at least down to his legs, which were long and thin and rather elegant; he figured all this would conspire to hold him onto the car at least to Fe.
Night settled on the train. The trails of light in the sky, which flickered above him, little feathers of high cirrus with orange and magenta hues, were swallowed up by the purest and finest dark he’d ever known. The dark seemed to be a thick oil pouring from under the train and up and over him until — this was an hour or two later — he wasn’t sure how long he’d been there and how long he was going to have to wait for dawn. He wasn’t sure of much except of the pain in his arch above the nub, and that he’d had to loosen his grip, flex his fingers, putting even more weight on that nub before he made the contortion — almost slipping off in the process — to get his weight transferred to the other foot.
Above him the sparkling display of the cosmos framed by the lip of the hopper gave testimony to the train’s movement, to space and time passing, but he didn’t see it. He didn’t see the passing of stars; the spiraled celestial movement. He held on and held on tight and time slipped away. Time didn’t pass. Or it did pass. He was remembering the time he’d been at the house, in Galva, in the backyard, playing beneath large double sheets on the line as they bloomed and folded with wind like spinnakers, starched by the sun while his mother — making that soft little hum sound she made when she was occupied by herself — put more pins into more cloth, or just stood there with her back to him scrutinizing the horizon, as if in the view his father would appear as an aberration of light; for his father was one of those long-lost salesmen who took to the road selling and rarely came back: a scuff of his hard soles on the kitchen floor, the bootblack smell, his thick ungainly arms were the sole fragments left of the man. That one single moment in the yard reclining against the grass watching his mother, or just listening to her make sound out of air against her teeth and lips; and then, along with that, a memory of her arms giving him one of her great, big bear hugs. That moment seized up and fell away when the great strain of the grip — the flaring pain of it — superseded all memory and he held on for dear life. The fear burned the memory away, like a projector bulb melting a hole in jammed film. What did it matter? It was the last memory of her anyhow, all he had left of it. She died before she could fully reveal herself to him. After her death the rest of his childhood was short-lived and brutal, a series of bleak portraits, fuzzy daguerreotypes of his aunts — he was passed from home to home until his body hardened to adulthood and the Depression set in and he began to drift.