“So this is the area where you saw Dada?”
“Yeah.”
“Rough area for a kid to be walking around. You should think twice about coming down here by yourself, you know?”
“I’m all right.”
Ray gestured down the railroad tracks. “You know those guys?”
About a hundred yards away, Stride saw two twenty-something men in jeans, with no shirts, swigging beer and strolling across the muddy ground, kicking at stalks of wild wheat. Pyramids of taconite and stripped tree trunks rose around the tracks like mountains. One of the men finished his bottle of beer and laid it sideways on the track. When the next train came, it would shear the bottle in two.Stride had come across bottle halves all over this area. Some of the men used the bottoms as soup bowls.
“No, I’ve never seen them.”
Ray stubbed out his cigarette on the ground. “I’m going to talk to them.”
“Let me come with you,” Stride said.
“I’m sorry, Jon. If things get ugly, I can’t have a teenager in the midst of it.”
“Except I know the area.”
“I know you do. Right now, though, I need you to let me handle this myself. Okay?”
Stride shrugged. “Yeah, okay. I’ll hang out here.”
“Good.”
Ray hitched up his pants and set out along the dirt road toward the tracks. Stride climbed onto the hood of the car and watched him go. Ray got within fifty yards of the two men before one of them looked back and spotted him. They both took off. Ray cursed loudly and chased them, but with his limp, he couldn’t run fast or far. The two men cleared a shallow hill and disappeared from sight. It was five minutes before Ray crested the same hill and was gone.
Stride was alone. He felt the ground vibrate with the rumbling thunder of a train gathering speed out of the rail yard. A snake of red and green train cars, littered with graffiti and overflowing with iron ore, shuddered along the parallel tracks, growing closer. Stride slid down the roof of the car and crossed the asphalt highway. On the other side, a shallow slope led to a cluster of oak trees where a creek twisted lazily toward the harbor water. Stride skittered down the hill and hiked to the tracks. He waited for the train engine, which followed the coast of the water as it headed south. The train was long. Dozens of cars shouldered by him. He smelled ore dust, which was as tarry as a cigarette in his lungs. The cars banged, hummed, shimmied, and jolted.
It took ten minutes for the entire train to pass. When the caboose wiggled past him, the giant noise diminished, getting farther away. He watched it go. He realized his skin was damp with rain.
“Who’s your friend?”
Stride jumped. He spun around and found Dada behind him. A dead oak tree loomed behind the black man, and its spindly branches seemed to grow out of his head. Dada dwarfed him, and Stride wasn’t small.
“Is he a cop?”
Dada was six inches away, and Stride wanted to back up, but he didn’t. Thisclose, he could see that Dada was young. Maybe twenty. He wasn’t wearing his colorful beret. His ropes of matted hair sprouted off a high forehead and dangled like wriggling worms to his chest. The whites of his eyes were stark against his dark skin. He had arched, devil-like eyebrows.
“I said, is he a cop?”
Dada’s voice was surprisingly smooth, almost hypnotic.
“Yes,” Stride said.
“Is this about that girl?”
“Yes.”
“They think I killed her?”
“They want to talk to you,” Stride said.
Dada swung a dented canteen by the silver chain on its cap, and then he lifted it to his lips and took a swallow. He wiped his scraggly beard.
“Talk? A white girl gets killed, and a black man is seen with her, and all the police want to do is talk?”
Rain fell harder around them. Water beaded on Dada’s head and face. Stride heard the drops slapping on the earth.
“Did you do it?” Stride asked.
“What do you think?”
Stride stared at him. “No, I don’t think you did.”
“Then get out of my way. There’s another train coming. It’s time for me to go somewhere else.”
“I can’t do that,” Stride said.
He felt the ground shake again with the earthquake of a train getting closer. Every minute, another long dragon left the harbor.
“You’re brave to stand there, but you’re a fool if you think you can stop me.”
“Just talk to him,” Stride said. “Tell him what you saw. Without you, they’re never going to solve this case.”
“Did you know the girl?”
“She was my girlfriend’s sister.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Tell me what you saw.”
A train whistle screamed. The rain sheeted down and dripped from Stride’s eyelashes.
“That girl had secrets,” Dada said.
He laid a paw on Stride’s shoulder and shoved him effortlessly aside. A trainengine growled by behind them, dragging rusted gray boxcars. The grinding of steel wheels on the track unleashed an awful squeal. Stride had seen baby pigs castrated. It sounded like that.
He threw himself at Dada, but it was like tackling a tree trunk. Dada angled an elbow sharply into Stride’s chest and jabbed once, like a single blow from a hammer. The air fled Stride’s lungs. He was knocked backward onto his ass and sat in the mud, struggling to breathe. Dada was steps away from the shuddering train cars. Stride scrambled to his feet and dived again, aiming low. He launched his upper body against the black man’s ankle. Dada’s foot scraped across the wet ground, and then he toppled and fell. The canteen spilled from his hand and rolled.
“Tell me!” Stride shouted.
Their skin was streaked in mud. The train cars clattered past them only ten feet away, deafening and huge. Stride clawed for a hold on Dada’s wrist, but Dada climbed to his feet, carrying Stride with him. Stride chopped at the man’s neck. The blow did nothing. Dada shooed him away like a fly, pushing him backward, but Stride charged again and hung on, hammering the man’s kidneys with his right fist. Dada’s knotted muscles were like a punching bag, absorbing the blows.
“Stupid boy,” Dada said.
He hit Stride across the mouth. His silver ring sliced Stride’s face. The
