John McManus - Born on a Train - 13 Stories

Like I am born upon the wind, the letter said.

I don’t understand it, Mother said. It’s so confusing.

Maybe you went to the wrong house, I said.

But he’s good, though, she said, laughing emptily. When she left the room to smoke a cigarette I watched her through the window. She moved into the yard and dumped the birdbath’s stale water onto the grass, and I turned the paper over and saw a list in Mother’s cursive script, written in silver ink.

1. Pack warm things. More than you think you’ll need.

2. Little More Hesitant

3. Age

4. growth (benign?) 5. maps

6. glass candy from an Island

Mother’s script is thin with jagged edges. Penmanship should be genetic, like blood, but mine is round and careful like it came from somewhere else entirely. Upstairs Eammon cursed and stomped his feet on the floor. Leroy chased Jackson down the stairs and through the living room, their plastic firemen’s caps ablaze and wailing as I folded the letter along its former creases. Mother held the hose up to the concrete birdbath bowl. She waved at the window, but I didn’t bother waving back.

That night, like every night, I lay awake. The walls distorted Hiram’s and Mother’s whispers into whistles, hisses interspersed with strikes like he was whipping her with a belt, like she was pressed against the blue wall shared by our two rooms. On their side it was white. I couldn’t identify all their noises. Hiram coughed from deep within his lungs and grunted like a hungry boar and snorted when he laughed, and then I was listening to their snoring. When Eammon’s alarm went off at seven, my heart was racing from my fatigue. I went to school with him after all. It’s good to meet the boys I’ll never know. The girls were the same as at the last school. Everyone was lined up for the field trip. In the headcount I filled in for a cheerleader who was puking in the bathroom, so the teachers didn’t notice me. The bus was loud and boring as it bounced along the mountain ridge, an hour to the trail, where we headed uphill through the mud that soaked my socks and feet through gouges in my sneaker soles. I walked on fallen leaves beside the drop-off.

You’ll fall, said Eammon.

I’ll be okay, I said.

He pushed me toward the inside of the trail. You’re not as smart as your mom, he said.

You don’t know my mom, I said. You’ve never talked to her.

She said a lot about you. She sent a picture.

I shook my head, and he nodded his. There aren’t any pictures of me, I said, there’s not even a camera, and Eammon pulled his wallet out and opened it to a year-old photograph of me with short, wet hair and Mother’s hand on my shoulder, the rest of her body cropped off by the photo booth, and a ring on her hand despite the printed date that showed she was married then to Peter, six whole months before we left him for Eureka.

I’m the smartest one in my class, he said. My granny says I’ll be valedictorian.

How would she know?

She’s the guidance secretary, Eammon said. Plus she just knows.

Good for you, I said.

Plus who else would it be?

The rest of the class was ahead of us on the trail. Eammon said his shortness of breath and his red cheeks came from high blood pressure. The trail was too narrow for him to hold my hand, and he probably felt awkward when I jerked mine away from his. When we rounded a curve between high boulders, we came upon three boys sharing a cigarette atop the largest rock. Well, said the one in cargo pants, if it ain’t Fifty Teeth Comin Outta One Place.

Eammon bit his lip and said, Hey, Frank.

How’s it hangin, Fifty Teeth Comin Outta One Place?

You embarrassed him, said the middle one, who swung his jacket out and bounced its sleeve off Eammon’s face. He’s gonna pretend like that ain’t his name.

You missed his teeth, said the third one, watching me.

I might of got one or two.

Forty-eight teeth comin outta one place, said Frank.

They laughed. In another half an hour we reached the mountaintop, where kids were scattered across the summit’s tiers, four thousand feet high, better-looking than Eammon, learning how the rocks were formed and how Confederates had used the summit in the war. I matched them with the corresponding faces at the last school. Everyone was there. I counted the silos down below us, white-capped soldiers smaller than my fingernail. A sparrow flew into a wind that pushed it back toward pine green pimples rising from the piedmont, and I squeezed them. Eammon really did have a lot of teeth coming out of one place. The sparrow gave up and landed to face the catcalls of the other birds. My ears were burning from the air, and Eammon’s hands were so cold that I wished I could fall backwards off the bald rocks.

I didn’t really do anything to those kittens, he said.

What happened to them, then?

They died, I guess.

How did they die?

Clouds cast shadows north to south along the jagged cliffs, but really it was just one cliff. Cars, said Eammon, shrugging with his cross between his thumb and middle finger. There’s a lot of cars in town.

My eyes were watering from the breeze. I noticed hair like cat fur growing from his wrists and knew he’d killed them. Look at your hair, I said and ran my hand across its grease. You’ll be bald by the time you’re twenty-one.

The hell I will, he said.

I knew a guy in Utah who looked just like you. His fell out before his eighteenth birthday.

Eammon scrunched his chin up.

It’s not what you look like, though. It’s the consistency.

Do you like me? he said.

For the first time all day there were more things to say than just one thing. I only shrugged and didn’t speak. What kind of answer is that? said Eammon. Fences in the fields below were drawn by pines and cedars. Five minutes, a teacher yelled from lower boulders, and I leaned into a ledge to jump down to the path between high rock walls, over boulders, waiting for blackberry thorns to prick my skin, but the boy in the cargo pants had trampled them so their stalks weren’t twining anymore. Eammon pulled me into an alcove in the rocks, so my leg pressed up against his cold canteen, and he moved it along his belt so it faced the path. My dad was the one that killed them, he said into my ear. He got some barbecue meatballs from a can and soaked them up with antifreeze, and then he called the kittens over there, all five, and then they ate it.

Eammon stopped talking and snorted his nose a few times and took a drink of water. Four girls from the class walked by us on the path and didn’t notice we were there. Three died right off, said Eammon. Dad told me the neighbors done it. An hour later the two black ones were still moving and crying. I stuck them in the freezer so it would quit. Took half the night to freeze.

Eammon nodded his head at my eyes, like he was proud of everything.

Why would Hiram do that? I asked.

Because that’s what General Forrest did to Sherman’s cats.

The whippoorwill says wurt-wull, wurt-wull. The loon says ree ree ree. I don’t know how the wind could make those calls or why it happened only when I stood by Eammon, who was taller than our cavity in the rock. He crouched there like a halfwit. The trail wasn’t as slippery anymore. I wanted to say, Shut up, Fifty Teeth Comin Outta One Place, but whenever I opened my mouth nothing came out.

The teachers led us to a graveyard at the bottom of the mountain, where I leaned against a sarvisberry tree and watched the corpses shine beneath the ground. They were older than the dead in California. Their surnames sounded like the hills. Look, I said to Eammon, Maybe that’s your grandma.

My grandma’s alive, he said.

Your other one, then.