“I liked him,” Tony said. “He was good to that old man, and he ran with me on his shoulders.”
“He robs banks,” I said.
“Banks haven’t treated people so good,” Jane said. “You can rob someone with a gun, or you can do it with a fountain pen. A mark here and there and they can foreclose on your property.”
“They was talking about doing it to us,” Tony said. “Taking our farm.”
“By now, they have,” Jane said. “With Pa dead, ain’t no one to pay for it. Hell, they can have it. It wasn’t nothing but a sandpit anyhow.”
“I reckon ours is gone too,” I said, “but Floyd is still a criminal.”
“Yeah, he is,” Jane said, “but he isn’t like Bad Tiger or Timmy. They started out sideways. Pretty Boy just got turned that way and couldn’t get back.”
“You can’t know that,” I said.
“I think I’m a pretty good guesser.”
I crossed my arms and looked at the floor.
“You jealous of him?” Jane said.
“No.”
“I think you are,” she said.
“Maybe a little. He ain’t one of your knights, Jane. He ain’t Sir Galahad.”
“He’s about as close as I’m going to get to a knight. Let me believe that, even if it is only for a moment.”
“That’s silly,” I said.
“Listen here, Jack. A kiss on the cheek isn’t the same as a kiss on the lips. I don’t want you to make too much out of that. Both kinds of kisses are friendly, but the lips is more friendly. It means more.”
I studied her face. It was hard to know when that girl was lying.
“Really?” I said.
“Really,” she said, and winked at me.
31
It’s the solid truth that when we were riding that train to Tyler, it was the lowest I’d ever been. Even lower than when my folks died. Reason was, them dying was just then coming home to roost. It wasn’t like I didn’t know they were dead, but when I saw that old man, all of a sudden I realized it was real. It had taken me a while, and I guess I had sort of been stunned all that time, but right then I could feel it come down on me heavy as a falling house.
I just sat there with my back against the boxcar so I had a view out the open door and thought about Mama dying, and then Daddy doing what he did, and me burying them in the barn. Then I thought about Jane and Tony coming along, and us going over and stealing a dead man’s car. Next, there had been Buddy, shot by his own partners, and now Daggart, dying while waiting to catch a train. All I could think of was his eyes staring at nothing, and just before that he had been talking and seeing what we were seeing. It was sobering to realize life came and then it went.
It was hard to see how things would get any better. Right then I was feeling that boxcar bouncing over the tracks and it was shaking me down to my bones. I guess the wind was tearing me up, even if I wasn’t right in the doorway, ’cause my eyes got so full of tears I had to use the back of my sleeve to wipe them dry. And I must have been hungry, ’cause my belly started seizing up and cramping.
I glanced at Jane, who had put her back against the boxcar and had her eyes closed. She looked pretty sweet when she was asleep. I decided then and there that Jane was about as big a blowhard as there was, but at the bottom of her bucket there was something real. She knew life was short, and she lived like it was and sucked all the juice out of it. I told myself right then and there I was going to do the same, even if I knew I’d never be quite like Jane. Wasn’t nobody could get to the juice the way she could, and wasn’t nobody ever who could enjoy it as much as she did, even the times when it was sour.
Looking at Tony, I could see he was weakening, and it wasn’t just from the trip and eating kind of here and there, never getting any solid rest, and seeing what he had seen. It was like there was a hole in the top of his head and you could almost see him easing out of it.
He turned and looked at me and tried to smile. The corner of one side of his mouth lifted up and fell down, like a window blind that hadn’t caught good when you pulled the cord to raise it.
There were tears in his eyes.
I glanced back at Jane.
She opened her eyes while I was looking, smiled at me, got up, and come over to the edge of the boxcar. She sat down in the wide doorway and let her feet dangle over the edge. The sun was on her face, and it lit her up good. The way she looked, you would have thought she’d been given the keys to everything there was in life that was good. She was grinning a little. She was in her element. She was born for adventure. And she couldn’t have been happier.
I guess she thought about the same things I had been thinking about, the loss of her family and all, but she could move on quick. Daggart was maybe not forgotten, but she sure wasn’t sweating over him. He was dead and gone and we weren’t. That was how she saw things. It was now, and it was all about the living.
“That’s some pretty country,” she said.
I wanted to answer, but I was afraid my voice would crack. The wind was making my eyes water again. I turned so I wasn’t looking right at her.
The train clattered along and slowed here and there, and we even had a guy jump in our car as we got into East Texas and it slowed going through a station. He wasn’t as ragged as some. He had dark hair and a face that wasn’t as lined as those of most men on the road. He had on good shoes, which made me think he had been someone important once. The leather on them squeaked as he walked to the back of the boxcar. He spoke to us kindly and sat down with his knees pulled up under his chin. If he had any curiosity about us, he kept it to himself.
I put my hand in my pocket and pulled out my pocketknife so he couldn’t see it, kept it down by my leg so that I could pop it open. It was that kind of knife. A flick of the wrist and you had raw blade.
But he didn’t bother us. He rode to the next town, said goodbye, and got off.
I put the knife away.
I moved to where I could let my legs hang like Jane was doing. Tony came and sat down between us.
We passed lots of green and lots of water. At first glance, after where we had been, you could mistake it for paradise. But after a while we saw shacks and old cars and people walking, wearing clothes that had been patched so much they wasn’t nothing but patches.
We passed little farms where chickens ran loose and so did the kids.
We passed sawmills, and we could see the tall sheds that housed the great blades of the mill, and we could hear the blades whining through the lumber, throwing up sawdust like sand in a windstorm. There were glimpses of long trucks and ox-drawn wagons and some with teams of mules, hauling the lumber out.
Finally we passed a river. Jane said it was the Sabine. I reckoned that was so, but I didn’t know for sure, and there wasn’t no use asking her if she was sure. She’d just lie about it. There were some people sitting on a long wooden bridge over the river with lines in the water. Farther down, we saw some kids on the bank fishing. Two boys and a little girl. They waved at us as we went by, and we waved back.
The sky was clear for a long time, and then all of a sudden the air got cool and clouds dark as the bottom of a well rolled in. With them came flashes of lightning and rolls of thunder. The rain hammered the earth and the wind whipped the trees, making the tops of them slash at the sky. We had to pull completely back inside the car to keep from getting wet. It had been a long time since we’d seen a real rain. One with all the power of the heavens behind it, wetting up the earth and making the air smell like dirt. For me, it was like something religious was happening. Like a thing denied me for a long time was now being given, and there was a lot of it.
The trees on the side of the track were close, and they were dark with shadow, but from time to time the lightning came and for a moment the inside of the boxcar was bright as day.
Along the tree-shadowed tracks we went, into the dark rain, and finally into the dark night that was cut open here and there by bright swords of lightning. The air shook the train with explosions of thunder.
