Several of the others grunted in agreement.
“How’s she going to find out?” said Junior.
“When I come home with my bike all tore up,” said Johnny.
Junior shrugged. “Not if you do it right. The only tricky part is when you grab onto the ladder of the boxcar and kick the bike away. But if we find a place where there’s a grassy slope alongside the track, it shouldn’t hurt the bike too much when it falls down the embankment.
“It’s dangerous,” said Davy softly.
“I’ve done it before,” said Junior. “It’s a great ride. When the freight train slows down to take the curve, you catch up to it, swing up on the ladder, and ride the rails until you find a nice soft jumping-off place. Don’t tell me you sissies have never tried it?”
Junior looked at each one in turn, daring somebody to admit he was scared. The five Foggy Mountain boys stared back, wide-eyed, and redder than their sunburns, but nobody objected and nobody looked away.
“It’s settled then,” said Junior. “I know just the place.”
The five boys followed him out to the dirt road, riding slowly along in single file up the hill until they reached the place where the railroad tracks crossed the road. Junior led the way on his store-bought red beauty, sitting tall in the saddle and signaling with an outstretched forearm, as if he were a cavalry officer in the matinee.
“We’ll follow the tracks to the right!” he shouted to his troops.
They turned on command and dismounted, wheeling their bikes along the gravel shoulder of the railroad tracks, while Junior inspected the terrain. “We need a long straightaway where we can build up speed, but it has to be just after a curve, so that the train will be slow enough for us to catch up with it.”
Nobody bothered to answer him. He was thinking out loud.
Johnny Suttle, following close behind Davy, was bringing up the rear. “He’s not looking at the embankment like he said he would. He’s not looking for a grassy place. There’s rocks all the way down this slope.”
“He doesn’t care,” said Davy.
They both knew why.
The solemn procession followed the tracks up the steep grade that would send the train up and over the mountain in a series of spirals. The fields below glistened green in the July sunshine, and the Nolichucky River sparkled as brightly as the railroad tracks that ran alongside it for the length of the valley. Here the gravel berm was two feet wide, and just beyond it the ground fell away into a steep slope of clay and loose rocks.
Johnny Suttle touched Davy’s arm. “We could turn back,” he said.
Davy shook his head. You couldn’t chicken out on a dare. That was part of the code. If you showed that you were afraid, you were out of the group, and Junior Mullins would hunt you like a rabbit from there on out.
They trudged on, past two more curves that Junior judged unsuitable for their purpose, and then they rounded the sharpest curve, midway up the mountain, and saw that there was nearly a hundred yards of straightaway before the tracks started up another incline. Junior turned and nodded, pointing to the ground. “Here!”
It was a good place. There was a thicket of tall laurels on the edge of the embankment that would hide them from the view of the engineer. Once the locomotive hurtled past their hiding place, they could give chase, and they had a hundred yards to build up speed and grab for the boxcar ladder.
Junior motioned the pack under the laurels. “Should be a freight train along any minute now,” he said, squinting up at the sun. He had sweated so much that his shirt stuck to his back, making the bulges show even more. He wiped his brow with a sweaty forearm, and surveyed the track. “This will do,” he said. “There’s just one more thing.” He set his red bicycle carefully against the trunk of the laurel, and stared at the gaggle of boys. He was grinning.
Everybody looked away except Davy.
“I’ll need to borrow a bike.”
“I just fixed mine,” said Davy quietly. He wasn’t pleading or whining about it, just stating a fact that ought to be taken into consideration.
“That’s real good,” said Junior. “I’m glad you got it working again. I wouldn’t want to borrow no sorry bike.” He gripped the newly repaired bike with one hand, and shoved Davy out of the way with the other. “You can watch, kid,” he said.
Davy shrugged. It wouldn’t do any good to argue with Junior Mullins. Things went his way or not at all. Everybody knew that. Complaining about the unfairness of his action would only get Davy labeled a crybaby.
Johnny Suttle looked at the railroad track, and then at his own battered bicycle. “Here, Junior. Why don’t you take mine?”
“That beat-up old thing? Naw. I want a nice blue one. I’m kinda used to Davy’s anyhow.”
Davy knelt down in the shade of the laurels next to Junior’s bike. “Okay,” he said.
Junior stepped forward, ready with another taunt, but a faint sound in the distance made him stop. They listened for the low whine, echoing down the valley, a long way off.
Train whistle.
“Okay,” said Junior, turning away as if Davy were no longer there. “Mount up, boys. I lead off. You wait till the coal car has gone past us, and then you count to five, and you start riding. Got that? When you get up alongside the boxcar, grab the ladder with both hands, and pull yourself up off the saddle. Then kick the bike away with both feet. Got it?”
They nodded. Another blast of the train whistle made them shudder.
“Won’t be long now,” said Junior.
It seemed like an eternity to Davy before the rails shook and the air thickened with the clatter of metal wheels against track, and finally the black steam locomotive thundered into view. They hunkered down under the laurels, close enough to see the engineer’s face, and to feel the gush of wind as the train swept past.
“Now!” screamed Junior above the roar. He took a running start out of the hiding place, and leaped onto Davy’s bike in midstride, pedaling furiously in an effort to stay even with the train. The other boys climbed onto their own mounts and sped off after him, whooping like the marauding Indians who attacked trains in the Buck Jones westerns down in the movie house.
Davy watched them go.
Junior kept the lead, leaning almost flat across the handlebar in a burst of speed that kept pace with the rumbling freight train. Fifty yards across the straightaway, he was nearly even with the ladder on the third boxcar.
What happened next seemed to take place in slow motion. The homemade bike seemed to pull up short, and wobble back and forth for one endless, frozen moment. Then, before Junior could scream or anyone else could blink, the bike crumpled and pitched to the left. It, and Junior, vanished beneath the wheels of the train. To Davy, despite the thunderous clatter of the boxcars, it all seemed to happen in perfect silence.
The oldest Haskell girl lingered in the doorway. She fingered the collection can with the words JUNIOR MULLINS printed in black capitals around the side. The funeral was tomorrow. Closed casket, they said. “You were there when it happened, weren’t you?” she said.
Davy nodded.
She leaned in so close to him that he could see her pores and smell the mint on her breath. “What was it like?” she whispered.
“He just fell.”
“I hear you couldn’t even tell who he was-after.”
“No.” The bike was unrecognizable, too. Just a tangle of metal caught underneath the boxcar and dragged another fifty yards down the track. Dad had told him how the workmen cut the bits of it away from the underside of the train. Out of consideration for the Mullins family, they hosed it down before they threw it in the scrap heap.
“You won’t be getting it back,” his father said. “Seems a shame, you losing your friend and your bike, too. It was a good bike. I know you worked a long time on it.”
Davy nodded. He had worked a long time. He had built it twice, almost from scratch, and he had been proud of it. On the night before the pony express game, the last thing he had done was to file through one link of the bicycle chain, so that when any stress was put on it, the chain would break, throwing the bike off balance.