The Strangers of Kindness (8 page)

It was more difficult and dangerous hopping a train than they’d realized. The switching yard was brightly lit and heavily guarded. They’d have to jump a moving train, out beyond the lights and guards.

Curt revealed a surprising knowledge of the symbols chalked on the sides of the cars. “My old man worked for the railroad,” he said dismissively when they marveled. “He showed them to me when I was little.”

They waited for two hours, watching trains crawl past. None of them had the right hobo’s inscriptions on the sides. Some of them meant “too heavily policed”, some meant “too many days between towns”, and some he wouldn’t translate for them.
 

Seeing the grim set of his mouth, Jennifer was glad of his reticence. “This one,” he said at last.

Surgeon jumped up on the back of the last car. Theo threw his bedroll up and over the edge, and Winnie and Curt followed it. They turned around and helped Jenny and Joseph up. Theo carrying Sissy trotted along close behind. The train was picking up speed.

Suddenly Sissy let out a wail. “Boom-Bear!” she cried, all the heartbreak of the world in her voice. Theo looked back and saw the bear on the tracks thirty feet behind them.

“Oh shit,” and he ran back and picked it up.

“Theo, come on!” Jenny called. The rail car’s wheels clicked faster on the tracks.
 

He stuffed the bear under his belt and swung Sissy onto his back. “Hold on!” and she clutched his neck. “No!” he cried, choking, running now, with the train gaining more distance. He took her hands into one of his and ran faster. Five thousand tons of momentum kept receding from him and Jennifer was screaming now.

“Hold on!” he yelled again, and pushed his legs to pump harder than he’d ever done in his life. He suddenly had a vision of himself, a grown man with a teddy bear in his belt and a little girl clinging to his back, chasing a train in the dead of night, and an enormous bubble of humor burst out of his chest.

“Whoopee!” he crowed, and Sissy giggled in his ear. The sound gave him the extra juice he needed, and with a last-ditch leap his free hand grappled at the rusty ladder and they were picked up and swept along above the track. Jennifer and Surgeon plucked Sissy off his back.

With their help he climbed up and over and dropped into the empty car in a heap. Surgeon climbed across the others holding a flashlight. “Let’s see those stitches.” Gently he pulled the bandage away.

The strain had reddened the flesh but the stitches had held. Surgeon beamed.

“Nevada here we come!” Curt yelled suddenly, and they were on their way.

* * *

Four nights and three days of riding, two days spent camping under a bridge waiting for the next connecting train, two more nights of riding. They hid out in storm sewers, when they had stopovers in towns, or under rocks or in thickets out in the sticks. They were uniformly filthy, sore from banging around in train cars, and getting hungrier. By common understanding, only Sissy and Joseph ate their fill. The weather was cold and they slept in a pile, glad they’d bothered with the cumbersome blankets.

The train-changes worked smoothly. Toward the end of the sixth day of travel Curt started getting excited. They’d landed in a coal car with a wedge-shaped container, miserable for sleeping. They arranged themselves as comfortably as possible at the front end, sheltering from the wind.

“We’re almost there,” Curt said over the pounding wheels and the wind. “Tomorrow we’ll be in Ne-vay-da!”

They were all too weary to share his elation. Theo and Jennifer exchanged glances, reading each other’s thoughts: And then what?

The bounding train finally rocked them to sleep. Late in the night Theo woke to find the car at a standstill. He stayed immobile, straining his ears. From either end of the train there were distant, sporadic voices, calling back and forth. He scanned the sky above their car. No buildings, no lights; where were they? What was happening?

“Eighty-one okay!” was the first call he could understand, from the east end of the train. Answering, from the west: “Forty-six empty!”

It was a car-by-car check for hobos. Theo sat with Sissy sleeping on his belly, his legs bent up against the other side of the V-shaped bottom, waiting. If they moved, the noise would give them away. If they didn’t, they’d be caught anyway.
 

Finally, he nudged Jennifer sleeping next to him, and lifted Sissy over to her. He put a finger to his lips and she nodded. Sissy didn’t even wake up.

He picked his way carefully out of the pile of kids and stood watching the top rim of the car. A flashlight beam occasionally raked it.

“Seventy okay!”

“Fifty-nine okay!”

* * *

When Felix Johnson stuck his dark brown face over the top of car 63, he almost dropped his flashlight in surprise. “Well I’ll be,” he thought, “it wasn’t no Cry Wolf this time!”

He opened his mouth to shout but Theo held his hands up in supplication, shaking his head. He had a rope coiled in one hand and he tossed it up to Felix, who wound it around the top ladder rung a few times. Carefully keeping his hands in view, and moving quietly, Theo pulled himself up to within three feet of Felix’s face.

“That’s far enough. You had it, boy.”

“I know, I know. But, please, couldn’t you let the others go? They’re just kids, five, eight, ten years old. And a girl who’s taking care of them. They’ve got nobody else in the world, mister. They’ll send ‘em to work camps, you know that. I’ll come with you, okay, but please . . .”

Felix shined his light over to the kids. They were all awake now, their eyes round and white in their filthy faces. The light lingered a moment on Joseph’s African features. Felix looked back at Theo with a grim set to his mouth.

Theo moved his head, pointed to his neck. “Look—I’ll be a great bust. You know what this is, don’t you? They’re looking for me. You’ll get a reward, maybe your boss’ll give you a bonus—”

“They said there was a murderer loose.”

“They might mean me. I never murdered anyone, but the lady who owned me? That’s her, the one taking care of the kids. She came along. They might think I killed her. That’d make it an even better grab for you, wouldn’t it?”

“Hey Felix, what you doin’?” from down the line.

“Takin’ a leak, Billie. Just a sec.” He turned back to Theo and peered at the raw-looking seam on his neck. He looked over at Jennifer whose face was striped now, tears washing through the coal-dust. “She come along voluntarily?”

Jennifer heard, and nodded hard. Felix ruminated. Rewards and bonuses didn’t impress him; he knew who always got the glory of a spectacular bust. He wondered, thinking he knew, what this kid would be telling the cops about the young lady, if Felix did as he suggested. “Lead them a merry chase,” Felix thought, “I buried her here, no maybe it was there, all the while she clackety-clack, clackety-clack, on her way to Nevada with these kids. And in the end . . . they gonna fry ‘im anyway . . .” Dim fragments of stories his grandmother had told him about
her
grandmother came back to him. Something about the Underground Railroad.

Felix smiled.

“Car 63 okay!” he hollered down the line, and stepped down the ladder out of sight. Half an hour later the train jolted to life, to carry them west for another ten hours. Just before dawn, when they were all sleeping, a light aircraft passed over the train. It circled back once, then winged away east.

* * *

Manny Fishbein, an almost-full-blooded Cherokee, came by his name through an unbroken line of first-born sons started by Manny Fishbein, Rabbi, in 1930. Passing through Oklahoma on his way to San Francisco, Manny I fell helplessly in love with, and married, the beautiful Cherokee woman who served him coffee in a diner outside of Tulsa.

Somehow Manny IV had ended up owning a gas station/convenience store just east of the Utah-Nevada border, along a road used little since the Interstate system was completed. He and his wife had eked out a living, raised their family and made their home in an add-on apartment for thirty years. Yet often he found himself pondering on how he could still feel like a wanderer in the world. He reckoned it had something to do with his double-Diaspora heritage: displaced Jews, and displaced Cherokees.

Under a clangorously hot sun he sat resting a root beer can on his barrel belly and staring at the mirage that shimmered between his road and the train sitting on its tracks a mile south.
What’s up with that train? It never stops there. Maybe I ought to load a cooler with ice and sodies, go treat the crew.

His sharp ears picked up prickles of voices from that direction. Sounded funny. He hoisted himself out of the patio chair and got the binoculars off their nail inside the door.
 

Focusing on the train cars he patiently examined each one, looking for the people he’d heard. He expected to see crewmen working to fix a bent wheel, or oiling gears.

What he saw instead made him grunt in surprise. People where no people should be. Two heads poking up over the top of one of the coal cars. No. Three. He adjusted the focus by micrometers. Kids! No. One adult. Male. Two kids, one with a coppery glimmer of hair. He sensed the tiny vibrations of their voices again. He saw them look west to the invisible border of Nevada.

He was simultaneously relieved to know, then, what was going on, and newly anxious. Refugees, from the wonderful New U.S.A.
 

But, the train had stopped. And, there was no sign of any railroad employee. Manny thought he knew what that meant. He swiveled to look east up the road. He sat motionless for a long time before his guess was confirmed by a puff of dust. It drifted from beyond the shoulder of one of the low hills through which the old road wound.

Manny stood up and those acute ears heard two things at once: The distant hum of the approaching car, and the subsonic throb of something else. He sprinted for the truck, not even taking time to call to Helen where he was going.

He was halfway to the train when he saw the helicopter float over the hills from the east. He pushed the metal to the floor.

* * *

Theo saw the truck racing cross-country, skittering wildly when its driver accelerated. It bounced over mesquite and rocks. Fellow’s in a big hurry. Theo’s skin itched with superstitious dread.
It’s all coming to the point now.
He called down to Jennifer: “Get our stuff together! Throw it out on the ground!”

* * *

Manny saw the bedrolls and backpacks fly out. Now he could see the man yelling, and another head popped up next to him, then the kid straddled the car’s rim, hesitated, and dropped to the ground.

Out of the corner of his eye Manny saw the flying black insect dip lower to the landscape and aim for him. He swung the truck in a wide curve to come up parallel to the train. Now there were four kids on the ground, scrambling to pick up their bundles. The man helped a young woman over. She landed with a thump. Manny braked to stop next to her in a cloud of dust.

“In the back!” he yelled. The kids jumped into the cargo bed. They’d seen the helicopter and now its ominous rhythm drummed the air.

Manny looked around in time to see the man leap to the ground with a little girl in his arms. The impact buckled his legs. He handed the child over to the young woman and she ran to climb into the back with the kids. Manny started the truck rolling. The young man ran around to catch up, grabbing the door and getting in on the fly.

He slammed the door just as Manny floored it again, heading west. Manny looked over at him and grinned.

“Going my way?”

“Theo Dahl.”

“Manny Fishbein.” And he laughed at Theo’s expression. “One-eighth Jewish, on my daddy’s side.”

“Funny,” Theo grinned, “You don’t look Indian.”

Manny gave a joyful yell. They careened cross-country, the truck veering erratically to elude the chopper. Over on the road the Highway Patrol car raced trying to pace them.

“Just another mile and a half,” Manny said, “and we’re in Nevada.”

Theo looked back where Jennifer and the kids clung desperately to the sides and each other. Curt was laughing, defiant, flipping the bird at the helicopter as it lagged just a little behind the truck’s wild swerves.

Jennifer, white under the coal dust, lay down grasping Sissy and Joseph and controlled the rolling somewhat with her legs, but still bounced with every bump. Surgeon and Winnie lay belly-down, Surgeon’s arm protectively around her shoulders. He craned his neck watching the ‘copter over his shoulder.

“Why are you doing this?” Theo asked the grinning driver. “We could be a gang of ax murderers.”

Manny laughed again and chased a jackrabbit for a hundred yards, following its evasive twisting. “I don’t know, white boy. Something about people on trains running away from people in uniforms makes me do crazy things. Look! There!” He pointed a little to the north. “That’s Nevada!”

Half a mile away a low cluster of buildings baked in the sun. The patrol car pulled a little ahead of them, still on the road.

“Sissies don’t want to get off the pavement,” Manny sniffed.

Screams from the back jerked Theo’s head around. The ‘copter’s shadow covered the bed. “They’re on top of us!” Theo yelled.

Manny stood on the brakes and the truck slewed maniacally to a halt. The kids slid toward the cab, and when the truck’s suspension bounced forward again, Manny took off to the southwest. They watched the chopper overshoot them, then climb to circle around and re-orient.