Story XVIII: Jack London

In a Depression-era boxcar, literary romance collides with harsh wisdom.

“Panhandle,” Steel Rail said.

The tramp sat on the edge of a boxcar door watching empty farms rush past. Oklahoma was nothing now but porch chairs and blinds with no one to draw them.

Tramps called it the Sandbox, with its old plows and Model Ts up to their steering wheels in dust, owners headed West for the orchards or East for the factories.

In the hobo jungle, they said Steel Rail “keeps his cards.” It was hard for the other three to know if he was about to share something or just talking to the cigarette he stared at from time to time.

Even sitting down, you could tell the man was tall and lean, hard muscle under his rolled-up sleeves and suntanned arms as wiry as California grapevine. Foremen hired him first because he kept his mouth shut, he picked fast, and all the rest picked faster around him.

An August morning was coming up over the horizon, red and hot. Outside Denver, the boxcar they’d picked had been a find, planks were up a bit, but still dry after a thunderstorm. In the night, they’d passed through Colorado Springs and Raton Pass, a stretch to take your teeth out, but Oklahoma was new track straight through. Oklahoma was always “good miles” and not too tough on the thighs. The clattering wasn’t too loud, and with the right fellows, you could get shuteye.

Altogether, there were four of them. A second man, Mickey, sat on his bedroll in the center of the car, rubbing his palms in his eyes and swearing “goddamnit to hell.” Some mornings you might get half an hour of quiet out of him, then the man ran his mouth till midnight. “The Mick is too damn loud,” they grumbled, but they listened when he lit into a story. They’d hide it from him, but end up smiling and shaking their heads in the other direction. “Jesus Christ, Mickey, you talk a lot for a man, but wind it up right, now.”

Bonecrack was a yellow-bearded man with deep-set eyes as sunk and shady as the corner of a boxcar. He spoke mostly in the foulest language, low and angry. Curses and gripes came out of him like a sputtering engine. He’d already spent a decade on the rails when five government men snuck at him in a railyard and dragged him off to the war. Then back he came. Out of respect, other men let him roll out his bed first and he always chose the corners.

The last was a teenager who showed up in Colorado, barely a hair on his face, and no muscles either. Everything was wrong. His clothes were too clean, and he still folded them up square. He didn’t pick up that you don’t bed down on Bonecrack’s side. Bonecrack grabbed the kid’s things up right out from under him and dropped them in front of the open boxcar door. “Out,” he growled after he’d turned away. Back in his corner he repeated it with his thumb.

“I didn’t know,” the teenager said, scooping up his things. He seemed to forget what to say after.

The boy showed up banging on their boxcar in Denver. If there had been a railyard bull, the racket would have gotten them beaten. When they let him in, Bonecrack took one look up and down and said he needed to go. “This one will stick to us like a lost dog.” But the boy said he had coffee in a mason jar, rushed to prove it, and promised he’d share it if they wouldn’t kick him out.

Steel Rail nodded. The boy was in, and that was that.

The kid slept where Bonecrack had put him, in front of the open door by his pack. Deep in the night Mickey woke up and sat by him on the boxcar edge. Even under the rails rattling, they got to nighttime whispering.

After a while, Mickey spoke, “Come over and hang your legs out, son. Don’t be a sissy. Come on, now.”

Mickey asked why he was headed to Memphis. “Everyone knows there ain’t nothing in Memphis.” The boy shrugged. After a long glow of moonlit farmland, Mickey started up again. “Don’t think anything of it. The man takes two corners, and that’s how it is.”

For once, Mickey left it quiet. The sky was clear all night, arrow-straight track, midnight ghost towns here and there, a yard watchman with a lamp like the old days.

After a bit, Mickey fired up again like he’d been asked a fresh question, but softer and singsong. “Now if you pick at him, he’ll come at you. He won’t spend a lot of time making threats: not beforehand, not during, not after. He’s just up and at you.” He banged his knuckles into his palm. “He’s all hard business and no warning if you set him off.”

The kid’s eyes widened, but the tramp was quick to add, quieter and leaning in, “But if you steer clear, and you seem like you know that much, you’ll see he ain’t so bad.” He paused, rubbed his palm over his thinning hair. “But he’s got hard rules. He and Steel go back pre-war. Not that they talk much.”

“He seems like an old-timer. Has he been rail-riding a long time?”

The tramp ignored him. The boy might as well have been talking in his sleep.

“Where you from, kid?”

“My people are back east. Charlotte.”

Mickey fell quiet after that. He dug in one of his shirt pockets for what was left of a snipe.

He asked the boy’s real name, and the kid answered flat out, first, middle and last. Mickey looked straight at him and waved his hand in front of the boy like he was waking up a boxer. “You don’t ever tell nobody your family name, no you don’t, and you don’t ask no one’s. Hear me? So, I’m naming you Denver. Got it? It ain’t much, but it ain’t much to live up to neither, Denver.”

“How come you’re Mickey then?”

“I ain’t a Mick, but they call me a Mick because I chat a bit. I can live with it. Micks are everywhere out here, and that’s just as well. No more on that, Denver.” They hushed up for a while and the poles flicked past. Mickey gave the boy the last pull on the snipe.

“You want to know the name my daddy gave me?” The hobo turned and smiled ear-to-ear.

The kid smiled back, couldn’t help himself. “Of course.”

Mickey shook his head and snapped his fingers in front of the boy. “Nope. You hearing, but you ain’t listening, son. Come on, now.”

For the next hour or so as they sat there headed towards Kansas, Mickey started calling him Denver, time after time, teaching the boy his name.

“Yep, you’re Denver. You ain’t Charlotte, and you ain’t Pete Somebody-or-other.”

Mostly the tramp talked at him, but when Mickey settled for a bit, the boy spoke up all of a sudden and asked if the older man had ever met Jack London.

“Fireflies and tramps in camps. If he didn’t write about the jungles in winter, and dollars to donuts on that, then I suppose I ain’t reading it.”

In the morning, once everybody was starting to fuss with things, Mickey announced, “The kid is Denver. I named him while you were all out cold.”

Bonecrack didn’t say anything, not until he was pissing out the boxcar, then he piped up out of nowhere, “I hate that goddamn city and the whole state of Colorado that gave birth to that shithole. Ran me out.” After that, Bonecrack took the name up mean. It got to be a tussle between Mickey and Bonecrack on how to say Denver right and wrong. The tramp made it funny, because he could damn near make anything funny.

“Where’s your coffee, Denver?” Bonecrack growled.

“He’s gonna share his coffee. We don’t need none of that.” Still, Mickey didn’t look straight at him.

Bonecrack went back to his corner, limping a bit, swearing. “Goddamn knees.”

The boy dug into his rucksack and pulled out a mason jar of coffee, handing it to Mickey like he’d bought him a present. The older man twisted the jar open, smelled it good, and handed it back. “Goddamn, Denver. You need to cook that up snappy, kid. Everybody been thinking about it since you hopped on. Two hundred miles thinking about it, thinking you’d never get to it.”

Mickey reached into his own sack and pulled out two empty cans and a makeshift pouch. “Cut it with my chicory here unless you’re celebrating your birthday, and I won’t stop you then. There ain’t much. Get their cans.”

Bonecrack rolled his tin can across the floor like a grenade. “Denver,” he barked. The kid froze up, then lunged on it to keep it from rolling out the boxcar door.

“Make sure he don’t burn us alive in here. This little Denver of yours don’t know his ass from his end hole.”

“I can set a fire, or I wouldn’t be here,” the boy defended himself, mostly over at Mickey. “People say I can set a fire with a wet matchstick.” There was a long silence. “I’m not boasting, though.”

“Not all day about it then, Jack London,” Steel Rail interrupted, surprising everybody.

The boy went red from Steel Rail talking and tucked his head down. He got busy stripping thin strips of boxcar wood floor with the spear point of a Barlow knife, then setting them against newspaper he’d balled up in the center of a bottom can. Mickey stood over him, keeping a close eye.

Steel Rail turned from the wind to roll a thin cigarette, looking out at Mickey as he licked the paper. “You’re a fool to let him light a fire in a boxcar.”

“He’s got it, Steel,” Mickey promised. “Give him a chance. I’ve got an eye on our greenhorn.”

For a few weeks, the boy from Charlotte had slipped into one car after the next looking for his people like a wet dog. The whole time, nobody wanted any part of him. Too young, they said to be riding rails. Too weak. Too cold. Too something. One thing or another, he’d get eaten alive.

Steel Rail lit his cigarette and finally had something to say. He looked straight at the kid.

“It ain’t the 20s, Jack London, and we ain’t pre-war. You don’t have the organizers out here looking out for the readers, all of them handing out union pamphlets left and right. The lot of them went home.”

“I know. It ain’t like that. That’s not why I ended up here.”

“You didn’t end up here. You’re a reader.” Steel Rail let off a long exhale, then seemed to tire of looking at him.

The boy moved an empty coffee can with the kindling on a steel plate by the boxcar door and dug into his sack for a minute looking for matches.

“Keep away from the goddamn door,” Bonecrack growled. “You’ll have sparks everywhere and a bull coming after us for scraping up the floor.”

The teenager picked up the can with the kindling, stood there, turned this way and that, but made no progress in any direction towards a better place to set it. Mickey snapped his fingers for him like he was scolding a dog. You couldn’t make out Bonecrack’s face, but off in the corner it felt like it burned like a red furnace.

“Put the can down.” Mickey put his hand out for the matches, still snapping, but faster.

The older man squatted down and set the can straight on the wood at his feet. He lit the match, cupped it in his hands, and set it carefully into the can. It lit.

“See?” Mickey smiled. “Now there you go, Denver. Don’t need no steel plate. You need to keep half an eye like you’re getting robbed in the night.”

“That ain’t altogether fair that I’m burning anything,” the kid said. It hung in the air.

With the top can cooking, Mickey tried to get things light again. “That son-of-a-bitch over there, he’s as hard a man to figure as anyone, but he can set a bone.”

Then loud enough for Bonecrack to hear it: “He’s broken some fellas’ bones at midnight and reset ‘em at dawn when they begged. Ain’t that right, Bonecrack? You must have been a doctor.” Mickey slammed the floor with his palm and burst out laughing. “Son-of-a-bitch doctor.”

The bearded West Virginia miner spit somewhere into a corner.

After everybody got their coffee, they all got quiet drinking it. Mickey whistled high to low and broke up the quiet, starting halfway into “My Oklahoma Home.”

“Mister as I kissed her,” he sang loud, waiting for everyone to stop sipping, strong for a minute, then backed off into a laugh. “She was picked up by a twister, my Oklahoma woman blowed away,” Mickey pretended to play a banjo while he was sitting there, then got up in a big rush and made like he was flinging his invisible banjo clear out the boxcar door. “Jesus Christ, my banjo blown away,” he announced.

“He don’t understand quiet,” Bonecrack growled. “He talks so much in the drunk tank, they run him out of town to shut him up.”

Mickey laughed. “Well, and there you have it.”

Steel Rail tapped his can on the edge of the door to let the grounds out, doing it long and slow enough that it felt like a thank you. He held his can out. It was the first time the kid got a look at him straight on, from right up close. The man’s eyes might as well have been sewed into hard leather.

Mickey smiled and kept going. “My Oklahoma woman blowed away, dammit, right out the goddamn door in that field of sand and dust, you sons-a-bitches.”

“I know that song,” the kid said and looked around.

Steel Rail turned back facing into the car to get away from the wind and rolled himself another cigarette. He looked straight at the boy a second time.

“You don’t know nothing, Jack London,” he said just loud enough to make out.

“Maybe you’re right, maybe you’re wrong, maybe we don’t know yet,” the boy said, half to himself.

“Now you read that somewhere, Denver,” Mickey chuckled. “I’m betting you read that.”

The tracks got louder for a bit. The train chugged along, trees and a town, railyard men looking straight at them, boys throwing rocks, an old-timer walking that waved, a busted-up church steeple.

“Look at that, now. Even the Lord falls apart when there ain’t nobody to look after Him,” Mickey said.

After that the four of them ran out of things to say. The morning light shifted up towards noon, mile after mile of abandoned fields sped by. Here and there, you could see some folks had stayed home, and it only made everything look worse. Steel Rail rolled up his sleeves as far as he could and opened up the top buttons on his shirt.

Early drought had been bad in spots, but Black Sunday had been rough up and down the line. This stretch was the worst of it. Five years on, the ground was still a graveyard. The sun still rose mornings to light up the fields, a cat waiting on a mouse, waiting on a farmer brave enough to come home and give it a go, and a chance to drive the fool out again.

“Panhandle,” Steel Rail sniffed, shaking his head.

“See that sign, Denver? This is Cimarron County,” Mickey said, then called over to Steel Rail. “I heard Clothesline Bill died out here. Came back to the widow’s place with Shep, tied the dog up, crawled into the outhouse he dug and died. Like he was paying off a loan. Mean son-of-a-bitch he was.”

“It warn’t like that, though,” Steel Rail said, turning around, sharp-like, and he wasn’t happy about something either.

“Why was he called Clothesline?” the kid interrupted.

“Well, I’ll get to it now, and that’s the point, Denver,” Mickey grinned. “You’re getting learned, boy.”

“Jesus Christ. Listen.” Bonecrack kicked the sole of his boot against a loose wooden plank and set it skidding off towards the kid.

“Bring the last of your coffee over to that mean son-of-a-bitch, Denver Jack. Calm him down, then I’ll tell you about Clothesline,” Mickey pointed to the can.

The kid brought Bonecrack’s coffee to the corner of the boxcar. Bonecrack was propped up there, arms crossed, one thick thigh over the other. When Bonecrack reached for the coffee fast and sudden, the kid flinched, and he spilled the coffee. It burned his hand, and he winced, but he kept on. He struggled not to spill any more holding it out for Bonecrack.

“Goddamnit,” the hobo barked like he was the one that got burnt, uncrossing his legs, looking like he was on the edge of getting up. “Set it down.”

A boxcar gets small when a tramp raises up that tone in his voice because there ain’t no door but the open one. The boy froze and looked back to Mickey. The older man nodded his head to the boy to stand against the boxcar wall. The kid leaned up against the train wall looking out at the shadow of Steel Rail framed in the open door.

“I’m gonna throw you out of here.” Bonecrack was getting louder. “Jack London.”

Steel Rail turned around slow at Bonecrack, took a pull on his snipe.

“You shouldn’t have let him in here, Steel,” Bonecrack said, but he was backing off, too.

That settled for a bit, the storyteller leaned back on the boxcar wall. He crossed his legs and rubbed his chin.

Mickey was making a point of taking his sweet time getting started, rubbing his face and slurping the last of his coffee like he was getting his facts in order.

“Well, yes, yes, now,” he said then whistled high to low. “Shep and Clothesline Bill.”

All the sudden, Bonecrack burst out, “Why ain’t you home, kid?”

“I just ain’t.”

“Why ain’t you?”

“I don’t know. I just ain’t.”

“No, you just ain’t, Charlotte Jack London.”

“That’s enough, goddamnit.” This time Steel Rail didn’t turn.

Mickey plowed into the silence.

Now, Jack, this fella Clothesline was the laziest, sneakiest little son of a bitch in any jungle. Little guy. Couldn’t get along with nobody. He didn’t work for nothing after apple picking. The rest of the year, he was begging and finding what “fell off the truck.” Jungle-hot fingers, hot, hot. If he’d been bigger than five feet tall and not an inch, he would have got you drunk and jackrolled you. Least that’s what I heard.”

“Not true,” said Steel Rail.

“I met him, Steel. Met him myself up in Washington during the harvest. 34. He kept to himself. Mean son-of-a-bitch. Had Shep with him, too, then, I think, but maybe I’m remembering wrong.” Mickey swirled his coffee and took a last gulp. “Booze and loneliness.”

“Four tramps got him drunk and jackrolled the son-of-a-bitch, Denver. They took everything: bedroll, kit, money.”

Bonecrack spit again. “They took his boots. Left him with nothing but socks.”

“Are you telling it or am I telling it?” Mickey said and continued right on.

So, Clothesline, he wakes up with nothing. Those boys carried him out of the jungle passed-out drunk, Bender and his sons-of-bitches, and they left him in a field.

Mickey looked away from the boy. “Times then were even worse than they is now, Jack London.” The storytelling left him, then he cleared his throat.

This tramp’s got nothing, and he heads back to the jungle looking for his things, and when he gets there these same four sons-a-bitches are grinning, and acting like they don’t know nothing. They’re telling him they’ve got an idea for him if he’ll dare to do it, and he can make some money to buy brand new boots out at this widow’s house. Clothesline don’t know it’s them that rolled him, see, kid?

And Clothesline don’t know this widow’s a hellcat, don’t know she carries a shotgun around the farm everywhere she goes. Hates tramps. She can barely lift up the end of the damn thing, but if she can lift it, she’s ready to do business. Boom. She was tough as nails, walked everywhere with that gun, carried it right into the outhouse with her. And that’s important.

I don’t know where he’s been, but Clothesline don’t know any of this. He don’t know the property’s “burned,” and this sucker Clothesline comes up her driveway in his socks, and he’s asking for work like he ain’t read the headlines and the war started.

“They told him she keeps her money in a kitchen China tea pot,” Bonecrack chimed in.

“Dammit, Cracker, let me tell the kid the goddamn story.”

Bonecrack let out a laugh for the first time and turned onto his side.

So, Clothesline’s coming up the farm driveway in his socks. He don’t got a pot to piss in, and she’s got a shotgun, and it would get ugly any other day, see, but she’s got her own problem: she got an outhouse gone fierce, and she needs a man to dig up a new one. Three by three and eight feet deep. A week’s work for that little son-of-a-bitch.

The two of them, each a sadder sack than the other. So ‘stead of waving her shotgun at him and running him off the property in his socks, she tells him to dig a goddamn hole and she’ll pay him with pork and beans. Says she’s got her dead husband’s boots. Good ones at that. She’s saying she can’t promise they’ll fit, but if it’s a deal, then he’ll find out when the job’s done. And Clothesline is saying as friendly as he can get that he’ll cut the toes off if they don’t.

“Condensed milk, too,” Steel Rail added quietly. He lay down alongside the open door and closed his eyes to the sun.

“Yeah, condensed milk, too, that’s right,” Mickey answered. “Of course, that’s right. Needs to be for later on.”

Now Clothesline can’t stop thinking about a teapot with a hundred dollars in it, or five hundred, and he ain’t thinking about having to cut the toes off boots or nothing like that. He’d dig a hole to China to get his hands on that teapot. So, she lays him out a shovel and shows him where to dig. It’s hotter than hell, and he’s digging the three-by-three waiting for a chance to slip into the house and get at that teapot. The other outhouse can’t be ten feet away smelling to high heaven.

Mickey turned his face up to the roof of the boxcar like he might just veer off into silence.

“Jesus, Mickey,” Bonecrack growled like he was taking it personally, and Mickey laughed back friendly.

This old widow spends the whole day staring out the kitchen window with the shotgun poking out to see if he’s digging that hole. But things are even worse for Clothesline trying to get his teapot, ‘cause she’s got her bitch out there, too, watching him, barking every time he raised the spade.

So, Clothesline’s got no choice but to do some real work for the first time in his life. And he’s never getting into that kitchen with her watching him like a county jailor.

The boy leaned back on his arms aways and closed his eyes in the sun, like he’s seen Steel Rail do. Mickey let him rearrange.

Now, listen. Here’s the rub. Clothesline would have left except for one thing.

The widow needs to take a crap in the mornings like clockwork, and she gets locked up in the outhouse with that big old shotgun of hers. She's got that dog standing right outside the outhouse guarding her like a junkyard dog. It's probably the one time she can't get that shotgun pointed at nothing but the sky through the roof of the outhouse

So, Clothesline knows in the mornings he's got a 'window of opportunity,' they call it. For a week he's been digging as slow as he can and slipping into the house looking for that teapot, but there ain't no teapot with five hundred dollars in it, not that he can find, but he's got it stuck in his head that money's in there somewhere.

Clothesline ain’t stupid neither. He knows that dog ain’t coming after him when he’s back of the house because that bitch is looking after the number one.

A whole week passes, and little guy’s dug halfway to China, and he can’t find nothing sneaking out back into the kitchen.

“Get to the dog,” Bonecrack ordered.

Well, from the bedroom, Clothesline hears these little dog whimpers, and he opens up that bedroom door, and goddammit if there ain’t a litter of puppies tucked away in there.

“German shepherds,” Steel Rail said over his shoulder. “Good dogs, tramp dogs, damn near the best.”

“If you can feed ‘em,” Bonecrack said.

“But bottom dollar ain’t nobody gonna jackroll you,” Mickey said.

“You’d die with your boots on,” the kid said cheerfully, but nobody said anything. He ran his shirt sleeve over his face.

And those puppies might be the first thing in the world Clothesline ever saw that he liked, 'cause I can't think of nothing else. He might have been in there petting them under the bed, but I think that's probably too much, and I got carried there. And there's one dog in there, the best of them. He ain't four or five weeks old, but Clothesline stays in there too long, maybe he got caught up looking at his new dog.

Then he hears the widow coming back in the house and the screen door slamming, and she’s saying, “You get out of my house, or I’ll kill you, you bum. I’ll kill you, and I mean it,” she’s saying it over and over. His heart must be racing, standing there in his socks, playing with puppies.

She’s racking the slide over and over outside the bedroom door, and he’s a dead duck. A dead duck. So, he grabs the biggest, meanest sweet little puppy up in one hand. And he holds it up in her face for protection coming out of the bedroom and hightails out of there.

“How does anybody know all this?” the kid asked.

“Cause we know it,” Steel Rail said, only loud enough to hear over the clacking.

Clothesline blows right past her, and she’s trying to lift the damn shotgun to shoot him right in the kitchen. Boom. One thing I know, is she ain’t never thinking one fig about no teapot, because there’s no teapot to begin with. The boys in the jungle made up the claptrap to get the sucker in there.

The widow finally gets that goddamn gun high enough to shoot him, and sure enough she blows a hole through the screen door when he’s racing out of it. She’d rather have him take a made-up teapot than one of her puppies.

And if you think she was mad when she found him in the house and was going to kill him, then she sees he’s got the puppy in his hand like a grenade. “I’ll get you, you son-of-a-bitch. I’ll get you,” like that. “You don’t take my dogs.”

And Clothesline is running in his socks off the porch and across the lawn with that puppy.

Off he goes in his socks with Shep, and she's shooting at him, but she don't want to take out the dog, and that gun's so goddamn heavy for her she ain't hitting him for the life of her. He got out of Cimarron County.

“Shep,” Steel Rail said to the boy. “Shep was the dog.”

“Yessir. The dog was Shep,” Mickey said. “Saved the man’s life more times than you can count. Loyal to his number one, like I said, but brought him back.”

“So that’s Shep, for German Shepherd, right?” the kid asked.

Steel Rail tugged at his cap with his cigarette hand.

“It was a sight, not that I’d seen it,” Mickey said and shook his head. “The son-of-a-bitch running across the yard in his socks.”

“Two bitches after him,” Bonecrack said and tugged at his beard.

“Now, if any other man said that, Bonecrack, that might have come out funny,” Mickey laughed. “Leave the stories to me.”

“Why’s he called Clothesline?” the kid asked. “It’s not like he had time to take the laundry down.”

“That’s the first smart thing out of your mouth. Sneaky bastard came back in the night and ripped the whole thing down, pulley and all.”

He made a leash out of that pulley, thing went in and out somehow. Fanciest thing you ever saw walking a dog. Pulley in his hand and the cord was a leash. This I saw, Steel. The damn dog would keep a lookout for him. The tramp slept like a baby after that. The damn dog never got to sleep a wink.

There was a long pause.

“You know Clothesline dug in shit to get himself that dog, a dog he didn’t deserve, better than any money he’d a drank away from a made-up teapot anyway. And I met him once, too, Denver, like I said.”

Mickey leaned over and shook the kid friendly by the neck. “See? You don’t need no Jack London out here.”

Steel Rail flicked his cigarette out. “Shep and Clothesline Bill.”

Nobody spoke a word after that.

After they reached Arkansas, the kid tucked his mason jar away. The sun still burned hot, but it was through with its business for the day. In the late afternoon, he watched the other three napping. He tried to close his own eyes for a bit, but sleep wasn’t in him.

He looked back and forth from one man to the next. Steel Rail slept on his back with his arm hanging clear out the boxcar door. In his far corner, a square patch of light from the low sun lit up Bonecrack on his mat.

The big man slept on his side, his stomach spilling out of an old work shirt. Even from the middle of the car, the kid could make out the lines on the man’s face and the yellow grey of his beard. Two belt loops were missing on his pants.

Mickey slept curled up with his hands between his thighs, out cold.

The boy tried to close his eyes and sleep exactly like they did, but he kept opening them and looking at the other three, over and over. His mouth opened a bit like he was amazed by something, and he shook his head like he was fighting off a grin.

Outside Little Rock, the boy watched the men tidying up their things, saw how they slung their sacks over their arms getting ready to make a run for it, so he did, too. The energy had shifted down after they woke. Nobody talked, not even Mickey.

Bit by bit, the Santa Fe jerked off onto a shunting and screeched to a stop. Mickey leaned barely out the door and squinted with one eye, his cheek pressed into the metal. Two men passed in front of the open door, talking about the shift change and what they weren’t paid to do and whatnot. The four of them kept tucked behind a boxcar wall. Steel Rail and Bonecrack looked at each other across the opening like they were counting off for thunder.

From time to time, Mickey checked if the coast was clear, then nodded to Steel Rail. The tall man hopped down first, moving like a spry cat and dashed straight into the tree line like he was being chased. Bonecrack waved Mickey on next, and he cleared the tracks, too, struggling through the brush, almost dancing to get in there. Steel Rail waited on him, then the two kept moving at a walk now, but steady.

That left Bonecrack and the boy from Charlotte.

Bonecrack let himself down slowly, wincing on account of his knees, but he didn’t run into the tree line like the others. He stood there right out on the ballast, looked this way and that to his sides. He looked up where the boy was standing, holding the freight handle getting ready to slip down.

The boy started to make his move to jump out, too, but Bonecrack raised a thick fist and held it there to cut him off from jumping.

“You ain’t getting off.”

The two of them stood there, the old-timer right out in dangerous, plain sight, the boy standing over him holding the freight handle. Bonecrack didn’t even look side to side now. The boy stood there, gripping his sack.

The train started to jerk again, and the kid looked scared, moving back and forth like he couldn’t decide which side to jump. Whichever side he went though, Bonecrack moved to that side to stop him. Bonecrack started walking beside the train as it was pulling off the shunting.

The kid leaned out to look for the others, but he couldn’t see them. It was just Bonecrack and the boy, one-on-one.

Bonecrack kept walking slowly along with him, fist still raised, his head wasn’t much higher than the boxcar door.

“Steel,” the boy started yelling out. The train clatter was picking up and rumbling over the joints like a living heartbeat, and the train horn going off. Bonecrack started following at a run, struggling to keep up because of his knees, still blocking the kid from jumping.

“Get off this train, and I’ll beat you, boy. Hard.” Bonecrack was starting to pant, his sack banging at his side.

The kid looked younger than sixteen now.

His eyes darted around for help, but there was only Bonecrack. He bent down to the bottom of the door to get as close as he could to jump, but he couldn’t make the move. Bonecrack stumbled in the ballast, chasing the boxcar door.

“Let me out.” The boy was beginning to beg, “Please, Bonecrack. Please.”

“Get home, boy. This ain’t no story. There ain’t no puppy,” Bonecrack kept saying while he ran along. “Get home.”

The boy looked straight at him for the first time. There was nothing left to beg for.

Then the old tramp couldn’t run any more. He pulled up winded in the grass at the side of the ballast.

“Get back home, Jack London,” he yelled out, “or I’ll beat you good.”

The train gathered a full head of steam, the rails pumping and clattering. There was no jumping.

A good quarter of a mile away, Steel Rail and Mickey watched from the tree line. They couldn’t see anything but the kid’s head leaning out the boxcar looking back and Bonecrack hunched over with his hands on his knees.

Steel Rail tugged at his cap and turned away towards camp. Mickey high-stepped after him in the tall grass.