The night took on vast, grand proportions; the night was liquid and runny, stretched taut until it was no more than a thin strand of hot white burning his foot and palm.
With great laborious heaves the train slowed and began to lug up the grade into the foothills — but not slow enough to allow him to jump from his strange position, twisted partway around so he wasn’t able to find the leverage for a leap that would clear him from the wheels and the girth of the car; in any case the energy he’d need for such a stunt was gone — or so he thought, calculating and making odds. It was the slow deceleration of the train, the decreasing clicks of rail links, that broke him from his odd reverie about his mother (which as far as he knew was the last real thing he’d thought of aside from his grip, the nub that was burning hellfire into his foot; maybe a stray thought of how good a slug of Roy’s Ripple would taste at that very moment). He had no large philosophical map of the world upon which to consider his situation. His intention, his sole intention, was to live through the night, to hold on. Far in the dark the train gave a low whistle, probably to scare off a coyote from the tracks. No God-fearing soul would find himself this far in the desert, even with water towers spaced periodically. Again he considered the stories of men who had ventured out into the desert only to watch the sardonic waves of brakeman and fellow hobos from the open mouths of passing boxcars; he considered again the fantastic tall tales of men such as himself, holding on for dear life in stupefying positions for days on end. Those tales had always sounded preposterous and stupid and impossible to anyone who’d gone through the experience of riding between cars for more than an hour. But those were the best stories, the ones that held the campfire crowd longest, the bullshits and yeah rights just adding to the fun of telling them.
One of two things was going to give: the grip or the toehold. If the grip went — already he’d lost it a bit that one time he was changing feet — he would count on the foothold. If the foothold went he’d hope for the strength to cling with his fingers long enough to regain his footing. The car had a slight rhythmical sway to it. The tracks were set in clean, white ballast, but they weren’t perfect. In the time he’d been holding on — an hour, maybe four, most likely not more than that because there wasn’t even the slightest trace of dawn-light in the sky — he’d learned the dance she made; his cheek rested against the metal side; he tasted it with his lips, metal and old paint and creosote and ashblack. The dance was the waltz, a three-count thing. Now it was slowing, and he did a shift, putting all the weight on the nub as he switched to his cold, dew-damp left hand and then spun slightly — in congruence with the sway of the car, it seemed — to the other foot.
Again far up in the future there was the thin squeal of the whistle.
The train seemed to be slowing even more, although if there was one thing that he had learned from Roy it was that there was no speed better than a dead stop for departing a train; and any hobo worth shit knew that there was nothing harder than gauging the speed of a train once you were under her spell; men were betrayed by all kinds of things, and one thing that could do you in was thinking the clacks were slowing, that there was a long space between them, when all you’d done is stopped hearing them; stopped listening; or the rails were longer, or it just didn’t matter anymore and you were ready to pack it in.
His relationship with oblivion was a tight one. He’d looked out into the long blank stare of the Great Plains for hours on end. He’d lain atop a load of coal clear across the plains of Nebraska and let his eyes swallow the cosmos from one end to the other.
Roy had one of those strange, twisted voices, half yokel but with a hint of some kind of feigned dignity that came from attending a good college out East before Wall Street fell out from under his life. Some said he had a house and two kids and even a little cocker spaniel behind him like so much refuge, trash tossed along the roadway. Others said he’d once been a strong businessman, a compatriot of Rockefeller. In a hobo shack someplace outside of Cleveland a man had whispered into the darkness — secreting his words in soft, husky grunts — that Roy had once played croquet with Lindbergh. Who knew? It was as possible as anything else in the world. So when Roy’s voice appeared up over the top edge of the car it seemed both angelic and harsh at the same time; he barked commands over the roar of the train. The commands were grand and oratoricaclass="underline" To jump clear of the tracks, Jim, all you have to do, he said, is find the resolve, the spunk, the go-get-it attitude. It was the voice of a man addressing the Rotary Club about civic pride and boosterism on one hand, and on the other it had undertones of fatherly advice.
Outlined with starlight and what perhaps was the first fine hints of twilight, he could see Roy’s hand up there reaching down to him with a furtive little waving motion. Give me your hand, the voice said firmly. It would be simple. Roy would haul him up and over the side of the car and then they’d have a celebratory smoke, flicking the ash and spark off into the slipstream, not saying a whole hell of a lot but letting the silence itself spread around the fantastic way in which he’d survived the ordeal. He’d wait out asking Roy if he had any sense at all of how long he’d been hanging on with his grip; he’d savor the response that was about to come: two fucking hours, or three, or longer. Then with this information imparted they’d chuckle at the odd ways of the universe and shimmy their way along the top of two cars until they found a hopper in which to dig out rounded spots of coal upon which to catch a bit of shut-eye.
Jim had to persuade himself of the truth, to go about it systematically. The voice he was hearing was nothing more than the constant stream of passing air being twisted by his pain; and the waving hand above coaxing him to let go was nothing but his tired eyes giving way to hope. He’d seen mirages before, fantastically real, opening up over the fields of Iowa and Utah; he’d seen a great lake of pure fresh water amid which there was a raft and girls being towed on skis behind a boat; he’d seen large Indian faces, passive with judgment and wisdom, staring down out of the sage and bramble. To believe in them was one thing, because it was just as possible to believe in a mirage as it was to believe in anything else; but to expect out of a mirage what you’d expect out of something real and tangible was nothing but foolhardiness; many a good hobo had gone that route, put faith in the visions — gone the way of large open lakes with speedboats towing skiers; and died for it. He’d learned that the best visions were the ones you sat back and took in without trusting one bit; on the other side of the coin he’d seen real sights that were as good as mirages because they were so far removed from his trust, his fingers. Once, on the East Coast, on a New York stopover selling pears on the street, he’d taken a train out to the edge of the Bronx, and then a street car farther out until he found himself on the verge of some avenue of great wealth on which the houses, stately and large, were draped by sweeping crowns of maple and oak. It seemed to him to be vestiges of a land so grand and fantastic that he sat down on the sidewalk right there, crossed his legs, and wept with his face cupped in his palms. Then a man came along, a colored gentleman in a wide white shirt and dark blue dungarees, his face as dark as pitch, swollen with years of hard work. He asked if things were right. Then he offered a glass of water, taking him back along a side path to the kitchen door of one place, making him wait there until he came back out with a tall, dark green glass, actual cubes of ice clinking inside it, and made him take a long drink before telling him to get on his way because the likes of him weren’t appreciated around those parts. Back on the sidewalk, facing the house again, he’d been uncertain as to the validity of the event. Had he gone with the Negro to the back door to have his thirst quenched? Or was he just working into the scene his own form of indulgence, spurred on by the thirst he was feeling? Sitting on that sidewalk his throat was as parched as it had been on any of his travels across the desert, not even a small trace of spittle available to relieve the clench of his esophagus or the dry paper of his tongue; and now on the train with his grip failing he was just as thirsty. But he was awake. That much was sure. He was as awake as he’d ever be. He made a little shift of his root — now so numbed he was hardly able to call it his own — and tried to flex his fingers without letting go, and instead he did let go and the full brunt of his body was on the nub for a second and then his foot slipped completely off and just in time — in conjunction with another heartfelt wail of the horn far up — he regained his handhold.