From behind Kootie came a boy’s voice: “Newspapers, apples, sandwiches, molasses, peanuts!” Kootie turned around awkwardly in the seat belt that was still taped to his wrists, and saw the boy in the corduroy cap. A big wicker basket was slung over the boy’s arm now, and he was slowly pacing up the length of the car, looking straight at the two men at the far end.
“Where are we?” Kootie whispered when the boy was beside him.
“An hour out of Detroit,” the boy said without looking down, “two hours yet to Port Huron. Sit tight, Kootie. Newspapers, peanuts!” he went on more loudly. There were only the four people in the train car.
The man who now had two arms was staring at the boy. “I remember this!” he said softly. “You were him? Christ, what year was this?”
For a moment the boy with the basket paused, and Kootie sensed surprise on his part too. Then, “Apples, sandwiches, newspapers!” he called, resuming his walk up the aisle. The train car smelled of new shoes fresh out of the box.
The man got to his feet, bracing himself on the back of the seat in front of him against the train’s motion. “Well enough, I’ll blow down your straw barricades. Uh…papers?” he said, smiling and holding out his two arms.
The boy lifted out a pile of newspapers and laid them in the man’s hands. The man turned to the open window and tossed the stack out into the windy blackness outside.
When he straightened up, he said, “Pay this boy, Nicotinus.”
The black man handed the boy some coins.
“Magazines,” the man said then. He took the stack of magazines that the boy lifted out of the basket, and threw them too out the window. “Pay the boy, Nicotinus.”
Kootie sat on his wooden seat, his wrists moored in the stocks of the anachronistic woven-nylon seat belt, and watched as all the wares in the boy’s basket were dealt with in the same way, item by item, sandwich by bag of peanuts.
Through it all the black man was staring intently at the man who kept repeating, “Pay the boy, Nicotinus.”
When the basket was empty, it too went out the window-in exchange for a handful of clinking coins. The boy put his filled hand into his pocket, then took it out and put his fist to his mouth for just a moment, as if eating one of the coins.
For a moment the boy stood empty-handed, facing away from Kootie, while the train rattled through the night and the glassed-in lamp-flames flared. Then he took off his shoes and coat and hat, and, barefoot, lifted them up and laid them in the man’s hands.
The man’s round face smiled, though his tiny eyes didn’t narrow at all. He turned and pitched the clothes out the window, and then he said, “Pay the boy, Nicotinus.”
The boy held out his hand one more time—and the black man seized it and threw the boy to the wooden floor.
KOOTIE WAS slammed sideways across the back seat of the minivan with a man’s weight on top of him crushing his ribs, and he was choking and gagging on a bulky plastic cylinder that had somehow got into his mouth; the flashlight was jammed between their bodies somewhere, and he could see nothing in the darkness. He knew the man’s face was right above his own because of the harsh hot breaths battering at his right ear and eyelashes.
Something was repeatedly punching him in the side over the steel-cable belt, audibly tearing the denim jacket. He knew it must be the blade of the knife, being stopped by the metal coils of the I-ON-A-CO belt; but the stabs were wild, and he was sure that the next one wouldn’t be another blunted impact but a cold plunge into his guts.
He shoved his tongue against the flat bottom of the plastic cylinder in his mouth, but before he could spit it out to scream and bite, his jaws involuntarily clamped tight around the thing.
At the same moment, No, Kootie! shouted a voice in his head; it was Edison—and the boy train-vendor in the hallucinations had been Edison too. I’ll do this!
At that moment the knife blade grated off of the top edge of the belt cable and the point of it stabbed against the bone of one of his ribs. Kootie sagged in ringing shock.
But an instant later he had inhaled deeply through his whistling nostrils, and then his head was whipped around to lace the man who was killing him, and his lower teeth popped the lid off the plastic cylinder.
And he blew a hard exhalation straight up into the man’s wide-open mouth.
The man drove a knee solidly into Kootie’s stomach, so that Kootie’s long exhalation ended in a sharp, yelping wheeze—but the man had jackknifed off the seat, boomed hard against the sliding door as the flashlight whirled around his tumbling body like a crazy firefly, and then he had bounced onto his belly across the console, kicking his legs in the empty air so that Kootie heard popping tendons rather than impacts. A moment later Kootie cringed to hear him vomiting so hard and loud that the terrified boy thought the man must be splitting open his face, popgunning his eyeballs, his sinus and nose bones cracking out to fall onto the carpeted floorboards.
Kootie’s left hand was gently slapping his ribs, and when his fingers found the knife grip they held on and then carefully pulled the blade out of the hole it had punched in the denim. Kootie winced and whimpered to feel the point pull out of his flesh and the edge violin across the coils of the belt, but he just held still, knowing it was Edison that was working his hand.
Kootie lay half on his side across the seat, and he could feel hot blood roll wet down across his stomach from his cut right rib. He nearly jumped when he felt wet steel slide past his right wrist, and then that hand had twisted and was free, and had “snatched the knife.
At last he spat out the emptied cylinder, and he was sobbing with urgent claustrophobic fright. “Get me out of here, mister!” he whimpered. “Oh, please, mister, get me out of here!”
He was anxious to be just a cooperative passenger in his own body now—gratefully he felt his right hand cut free his left wrist, and then he was sitting up and bending over to cut the tape around his ankles.
The one-armed man had heaved himself forward with each abdomen-abrading retch, and now his feet boomed against the van’s ceiling as he toppled over the console to the floor. “Edison!” he said loudly, grating out the syllables like cinder blocks. ”Wast—thee—agayn?”
Kootie didn’t know whether it was himself or Edison that worked the door handle and pulled back the minivan’s sliding side door. He stepped out, down to the floor of the truck, rocking as if he were aboard a boat, and he groped his way in darkness to the rippling, sectional metal wall that was the truck’s door.
The cut in his side was just a point of tingling chill, but he could feel blood • weighing down the folds of his shirt over his belt, and a hot trickle ran down the inside of his leg.
“Kootie!” he gasped. “Breathe slower! You’re going to make us faint.” Kootie’s mouth snapped shut, and he made himself count four heartbeats for-every inhalation, and four for every exhalation.
Without his volition his right hand went to his side and pressed against the cut. Behind him he heard feet thumping and scraping—inside the minivan, the one-armed man was up.
With his left hand Kootie slapped hurriedly at the ribbed inner surface of the truck’s door until he found a blocky steel lever, and he braced himself on his good foot and heaved the lever upward.
Dazzling sunlight flooded the truck’s interior as the door clattered upward, folding along its track overhead. Without his sunglasses, the day outside seemed terribly bright.