Tours of the Black Clock

32

IT TAKES ME ALL day to get to the other side of Pittsburgh and wait with some other guys, hunkering down in the brush waiting for the train heading to Harrisburg, where I’ll have to do this all over again. After Harrisburg I may be able to jump an express to Scranton, and after that another express that cuts across the top of New Jersey to my final destination. So about eight o’clock the train to Harrisburg comes by and about a dozen of us run for it like cats, desperate to catch it. The train’s fast. I set my sights on a handle at the end of one of the cars and push my legs to their limits, it’s all I can do to catch it in the dark. When I pull myself onto the side of the train the wind’s tearing through me and I’m breathing the cold of the night into me so as to freeze my heart. I look back over my shoulder and there’s still eight guys on the ground far behind us, eight who ran like I did but didn’t have the legs to make it. I can see their dark forms in the fields watching me go. For about ten minutes I settle into a nook between cars and get my strength back. Then I have to crawl on top of the car and make my way like a spider, trying to get to what looks like an open box three or four cars down. I’m six-foot-four and two hundred thirty pounds and one good wind would blow me to Ohio.

In the boxcars are three other guys. They’re not among the ones who were waiting with my group in the brush outside Pittsburgh. It’s taken me twenty-four hours to learn that camaraderie among the dispossessed is the sort of nice idea that sixteen-year-olds believe in. Two days ago I was sixteen years old and I would have believed it too, but today I’ve killed my halfbrother with my own hands. I’ve studied in the college of mayhem and graduated when it had nothing left to teach me. These guys in boxcars, there are good ones and bad ones and no formula for figuring out which is which. Who knows what I have on me that one of these assholes wouldn’t slit my throat for as soon as I fall asleep? My belt buckle, my shoes. My coat. One of them maybe has an attraction to one of my ears, or one of my fingers. I doze a bit and sure enough, I wake to some guy hovering over me with a blade. He’s been on the other side of the car watching me in the dark, he doesn’t see whether I’m big or little or what, slouched here against the wall as I am. He just sees I look like a kid, so here he is breathing in my face. I have his face in my grip quicker than he can consider his love of living. “The problem is,” I explain to him in the dark, “you cut off one of my fingers, you got to take the other nine. I mean, you just have to. And if you take the other nine, it’s just imperative you take the hands. And you take the hands—” and he’s blinking at me now in utter black consternation, “—it’s simply a serious mistake not to take the stumps. And when does it end then?” I’ve got his face so hard in my grip he can’t answer, assuming he could think of one. “You just don’t know the havoc, buddy. My hands are just filled with it these days.” I push my body from the floor of the boxcar, catching my balance from the movement of the train, still holding onto him the whole time. His feet are dangling in the air for a moment and then I shotput him through the open door, and I and the other two guys can hear his scream in the night at least three or four seconds. Yeah, at least that. I don’t know that it actually kills him though. On the next train outside Harrisburg I try to let people know what they’re dealing with from the start, and I’ve drained my heart of havoc by the time we reach Manhattan, where my heart will need something stronger.