“Just try,” Jack said. “You brought Hoppers last time; maybe this time you can… I don’t know, bring us breakfast.”
You know how in a cartoon when somebody’s got to make a choice, they’ll get a little angel on one shoulder and a little devil on the other? That was how I felt right then. Half of me was saying:
But the word
Jack made a face like he knew I was stalling. “How about ‘I Been Workin’ on the Railroad’?” he said. “Everybody knows that one. Come on.” He started clapping to set the time and sang. “
I forgot about being thirsty, about being lost, and about everything else except this stupid little kids’ song with its driving rhythm and its memories of work gangs so long gone nobody knew what it was about anymore.
I felt it happen. Everything shifted, though my eyes couldn’t see what or how. The whole world just twisted as if we were inside a lock while somebody was turning the key. The feeling lasted less than a second, but when it finished, the air all around us had changed, as if a fresh breeze was blowing in.
A new voice cut across mine. Jack’s hands froze between one clap and the next, and his mouth gaped.
It wasn’t just one voice; it was a full-throated chorus of men. Their rough and ragged singing soared in from the ruined prairie, where a minute ago there had been nothing at all.
Jack scrambled to his feet and ran for the window hole. I followed, slow and afraid.
Sun-bleached grass rippled beneath a pure blue sky. It smelled sweet, sweeter than my bread pudding. Bees buzzed among the cornflowers and Queen Anne’s lace. A hawk wheeled overhead, and sparrows clung nervously to the nodding grass stems. All at once I remembered being a little girl and running through grass like this, up to the hogback ridge to watch rain clouds pile up on the horizon.
A great gash had been cut in the grass for the iron rails. Shirtless men stood carefully spaced on either side of those black lines. Each man held a long-handled hammer. The hammers swung up and the hammers swung down, in time with their song.
“Look.” Jack tugged at my sleeve. I turned, and he pointed to the shanty’s back window. Through that other window, there was still the silent, empty desert.
Out front, the men laying the rails across the lush green grassland kept right on singing. It was like something out of a pulp magazine,
Or maybe it wasn’t a window at all. Maybe it was a gate.
Whatever it was, it was wrong. I felt that down to the soles of my feet. It was completely wrong and I was responsible. Again.
“We gotta get out of here.” I started for the desert window.
“Wait! They got a cook wagon.” Jack leaned out the broken window across the living prairie. I couldn’t help but look. A little, old-timey steam engine with a big red cowcatcher jutting out front waited on the track that had already been laid. That engine was hooked up to a full-fledged railcar with a trickle of smoke coming out of its chimney. The breeze blew through the window again. This time, it carried the smell of cooking bacon. My stomach growled and cramped up. Another breath and I could smell baking bread as well. My stomach didn’t so much growl as roar.
“We can go bum a meal!” Jack had his foot up on the sill, but I hauled him back.
“No! We can’t go out there!”
“Why?”
“Because what if we can’t get back?”
That stopped him. He saw it now. If it was a gate, and if somehow I’d opened it, somebody else could shut it. Or I might accidentally shut it, because sure as sure, I didn’t know what I was doing or how I was doing it.
If my gate shut while we were in that other time, we might never be able to get back.
Jack looked toward the cook car and the smoke coming out its tin chimney. “We have to try.”
“We can’t!”
The face he turned toward me was nothing I’d seen on him yet. Anger and desperation were knotted up together with his hunger. “You stay here if you want,” he said soft and slow, so each word dropped separately between us. “I’m going after something to eat.”
He was out the window and running through the grass while I was still opening my mouth to yell “No!” I grabbed the windowsill and leaned out as far as I could. I felt the strange, shifting parts of the invisible lock all around me. I felt them wobble, and I felt the key begin to turn. I tried to grab it, but it slipped free.
“Jack!” I screamed. “Jack! It’s closing!”
He stopped and turned. “You’re just saying that!”
“No! I’m not! I swear!” It was turning, turning. The barrel and the tumbler were shifting. The hinges were straining, and I was in the middle. I felt the pressure inside my brain and inside my heart. “Hurry!”
Jack looked at the cook car and the singing men, and at me. He cussed loud and angry and came pelting back. I shook. I didn’t know where these feelings were coming from, and I didn’t know how to stop that twisting I could only think of as the key.
Jack slapped both hands on the windowsill and vaulted through. I shuddered and screamed.
Hot, dusty wind blew across the windowsill into our faces as we stood there, panting and shaking and staring out at the unbroken Kansas desert.
Jack wiped his dusty sleeve across his mouth. “You swear to me you didn’t do that on purpose?”
I shook my head. “It started to close on its own. I couldn’t hold it. I tried, I promise I did.”
He took off his hat and rubbed his head. “What do we do, then?”
“Start walking, I guess.”
So we climbed out into our own time to trudge hungry and thirsty over the blowing dunes. We kept our eyes straight ahead so we both had something like privacy while we cried for the smell of growing grass and baking bread.
10
