Small Town Girl

a long-the warning for a public crossing.

The whistlepost flashed past and the long wail ended, leaving them in comparative quiet.

'So,' Cy continued, 'I suppose your boy's gonna go to work for the railroad if he doesn't get…' He stiffened and stared up the track. 'Seet Jesus, he ain't gonna make it.'

A car had turned off of Highway 71 and came shooting from the left, trailing a dust cloud, trying to beat the train to the crossing.

For one heartbeat the men stared, then Cy shouted, 'Car on the crossing! Plug it!'

Merle jumped and hit the air brakes.

Cy grabbed the Johnson bar and squeezed for dear life. With his other hand he hauled on the steam whistle. Machinery ground into reverse and the brakes grabbed. From the engine through the entire train life, everything locked in a deafening screech. Steam hissed as if the door of hell had opened. The smell of hot, oily metal wafted forth like Satan's own perfume. The couplers, in progression, drummed like heavy artillery from the engine clear back to the caboose while the two old rails, with fifty-three years' experience between them, felt it in the seat of their pants: forward propulsion combined with a hundred tons of drag, something a railroad man hopes he'll never feel.

'Hold on, Merle, we're gonna hit 'em!' Cy bellowed above the din.

'Jesus, Mary, Joseph,' Merle chanted under his breath as the train skated and shrieked, and the puny car raced toward its destiny.

At thirty yards they knew for sure.

At twenty they braced.

At ten they saw the driver.

Dear God, it's a woman, Cy said. Or thought. Or prayed.

Then they collided.

Sound exploded and glass flew. Metal crunched as the gray '49 Ford wrapped around the cowcatcher. Together they cannonballed down the tracks, the ruptured car folded over the metal grid, chunks of it dragging along half- severed, tearing up earth, bruising railroad ties, strewing wreckage for hundreds of yards. Pieces of the car eventually broke free and bounced along the flinty ballast of the rail bed with a sound like a brass band before tumbling to rest in the weeds. Throughout it all some compressed piece of the automobile played the tracks in an unending shriek-metal on metal-like a hundred violins out of tune. Dust! They'd never seen so much dust. It billowed up on impact, a brown, stinky cloud of dirt, momentarily blinding Cy and Merle as they rode along haplessly above the discordant serenade. The smell of petroleum oozed up, and sparks sizzled off the steel tracks, setting small fires in gasoline drips that flared briefly, then blew out as the train passed over them.

Slower… slower… slower… two terrified railroad men rode it out, one maintaining a death grip on the Johnson bar that had long since thrown the gears into reverse, the other still hauling on the air brakes that had locked up the wheels more than a quarter mile back.

Slower… slower… all those tons of steel took forever to decelerate while the two big-eyed men listened to the fading squeal that dissolved into a whine…

Then a whimper…

Then silence…

Cy and Merle sat rigid as a pair of connecting rods, exchanging a shocked, silent stare. Their faces were as white and round and readable as the pressure gauges on the boil-erhead. Number two-eighty-two had carried the Ford a good half a mile down the railroad tracks and now sat calmly chuffing, like a big old contented whale coming up for air.

Outside, something small fell-glass maybe, with a soft tinkle.

Merle finally found his voice. It came out as tight and hushed as the air brakes. 'No way that woman's gonna be alive.'

'Let's go!' Cy barked.

They scrambled from the cab, bellies to the ladder, free-sliding down the grab rails. From trie caboose, twenty cars back, the conductor and a brakeman came running-two bouncing dots in the distance-shouting, 'What happened?' A second brakeman stayed behind, already igniting a fusee that started spewing red smoke into the gentle September morning, mixing the stink of sulphur with the sweetness of the fresh-cut alfalfa.

Running along beside the locomotive, Cy yelled, 'Look there, the engine's hardly damaged.' The lifting lever on the drawbar was a little scraped up, and a couple of grab bars were marred. The two men rounded the snout of the engine and halted dead in their tracks.

It was a sickening sight, that car riding thin on the pilot as if it had been flattened for a junkyard. The coupler at the front of the cowcatcher had actually pierced the metal of the automobile and protruded like a shining silver eye. Some broken glass remained in the driver's side window, jagged as lightning.

Cy moved close and peered in.

She was brown-haired. Young. Pretty. Or had been. Wearing a nice little blue flowered housedress. Surrounded by broken fruit jars. He closed his mind to the rest and reached in to see if she was still alive.

After nearly a minute he withdrew his hand and stood on a crosstie facing Merle.

'I think she's dead.'

'You sure?'

'No pulse that I can feel.'

Merle remained as colorless as whey. His lips moved silently, but not a sound came out. Cy could see he'd have to take charge here.

'We're gonna need a jack to get her out of there,' he told Merle. 'You better run to the highway and flag down a car. Tell 'em to run to Browerville and get help…' Merle was already hustling off at an ungainly trot. 'And have 'em call the sheriff in Long Prairie!'

At that moment the conductor and brakeman reached Cy, panting.

'He dead?' one of them asked.

'She. It's a woman.'

'Oh my God.' The conductor had a huge florid face that hung in soft folds from his cheekbones. He glanced at the wreck, then back at Cy. 'She dead?'

'I think so. Couldn't feel any pulse.'

They stood motionless, absorbing the shock while Cy-the engineer, and the person whose job it was to take command in emergency situations-took control of the situation.

'Better get that other fusee out,' he told the brakeman.

'Yeah, sure thing.' The brakeman headed up the track to the north, waving a red flag as he went, to set out the warning for any southbound trains. He would go a mile before igniting the flare, while the other brakeman walked a mile off from the rear of the train and did the same thing.

Left alone with Cy, the conductor said, 'There's fruit jars all along the tracks. What do you suppose she was doing with all those fruit jars?'

The two men gazed back along the tracks at the shimmers of sunlight glancing off the pieces of broken glass.

'Probably some farmer's wife with a big garden,' Cy replied.

Reaction to the tragedy only now began setting in, de-layed like the sting that follows a slap. Cy felt it deep in his vitals, a terrible trembling that traveled to his extremities and brought a faint nausea as he stood at the head of the train with a dead woman caught in the twisted wreckage of her gray automobile.

'Her license plate is gone. The back one anyway. I'll see if the front one is there.' The conductor walked further around the train, but came back long-faced. 'Gone too. Want me to walk back along the tracks and see if I can find it?'

'She's got a purse,' Cy said, dully. 'I saw it under one of her…' He quit talking and swallowed hard.

'Want me to get it, Cy?'

'No, that's… that's all right. I will.'

Cy steeled himself and returned to the wreckage while a herd of lethargic holsteins, chewing their cud, watched from inside a nearby fence. The soft morning wind, not yet tainted by the red sulfur from the faraway fusee, carried the faint scent of manure, not wholly unpleasant when mixed with the continuing aroma of cut alfalfa. In the distance, a silo pointed toward heaven, where the woman had probably gone. Nearer, over a copse of shiny green