Charlie Smith - Ginny Gall

He turned the pages of the small gray book, reading the story of his life. In no other place, he thought, did this story exist, not even in his own head. Only here, and in the other four notebooks left at Oliver’s. This is what keeps me from disappearing. In these few years riding trains he had watched and recorded the drifting men rucky times had cast onto the rails. This train was filled with shufflers, jobless characters following the latest rumor of work. After a while the dirt and soot wore in. Seemed like it did. Sleeptalkers, sleepwalkers, divers and chokers, barabys and Airedales. A trainload of boys , he wrote, looking for work. It’s a race. Tramps, not the same as hoboes. And the ones who rode for years without ever saying a word. Sixty-two cars on this train , he wrote.

Thirty or forty riders. Say thirty-seven. Mostly white boys headed for (maybe) jobs in Memphis. Nine or ten colored boys. Many dressed in rags, or close to it. One has a yellow bandana tied around his head. A few boys carrying canvas sacks. A couple have suitcases. Soogans. Most of the colored boys aren ’ t carrying anything, maybe two or three have a few items tied up in handkerchiefs.

To the south clouds were filling up the hollow places in the pale sky, but they didn’t look like rain clouds, just frothy empties and leftovers from summer. The train was passing through grain fields; wheat, he thought. He stood and reached up to steady himself on the edge of the gondola catwalk. A white boy he didn’t at first see, boy with a high freckled forehead, just making his way along the narrow strip below the gondola rim, stepped on his hand.

“Hey,” Delvin said. “Watch those fingers, they’re precious to me.” He was feeling good, glad to be out in the wide world.

“If you want to keep em, chig, then get your ass off the train.”

The boy kicked at him, missed.

“You need to watch yo mouth as well as yo feet,” Delvin said.

He had been stuffing the notebook into his back pocket when the white boy stepped on him. He almost lost his grip — didn’t — but it was not worrisome, little aggravations happened on trains.

“I’ll watch you fly like a sack of shit off this train,” the boy said. He had fish-colored eyes and long pale eyelashes pretty as a girl’s.

A couple of africano boys on the other side of the gondola watched the exchange. Everyone proceeded on his way.

After a while Delvin made a course up the train to one of the two open boxcars and climbed in through the trap. Africano boys were in there talking. They saw Delvin and one waved him over. A burly boy with close-cropped hair said, “You the one that ofay kicked?”

“He didn’t exactly kick me,” Delvin said. “It was more of a step. Just missed being a stomp.”

“That white boy wants to fight about it,” another traveler said, a small, slender boy with not very recently conked hair, slicked back. He wore a long green shirt like some medieval woodsman. “ All them white boys wants to fight. They gon come at us.”

“They sure like to mix it up,” another said, a blocky boy with a wide, friendly, scared face. “No questions about why or what for.”

“No why or what for in this world,” another said in a weary voice. He was tall and had narrow round shoulders.

“Long as they got the numbers,” another said.

They were all suddenly nervous.

A few pocket knives (if it came to that), a couple of round whittled sticks, a leather sap (the cracked leather showing the lead plumb underneath), and a bag of ball bearings in a canvas sack, these the weapons.

Down at the other end of the car a couple of unhappy, plain-looking white girls, one of them fat. The fat one interrupted chinning with her skinny buddy to hurl a couple insults at the negro end. A few white boys down there too, but they were just looking.

“Those men?” somebody asked, a dark-skinned boy unmemorable but for a small white scar cutting his left eyebrow in two. He was looking at the little group down the far end.

“They’s other ones coming,” said another boy — they were mostly, but for a couple, just leaving boy life for manhood, fresh travelers, hoboes, Chattanooga and upline angelicas trekked out of the hollows, headed west looking for work. They’d heard the mills in Memphis were hiring. The mills or the box factory or the riverside warehouses or the meat-processing plant, somebody, someplace. One, a skinny boy with pale gold freckles on a tan face, was so scared already his hands shook; he kept slapping them against his jeans. He was on his way to meet his sister in Tulsa, he said. She needed him to escort her down to Dallas for their brother’s wedding.

“I got to get on,” he said, and Delvin could tell he wanted to slip away. But he didn’t; he was afraid to, Delvin could see this too. Out the door he could see a river, lengths of shining water running between sycamore trees turning yellow.

“Can’t help from it,” he said slowly, referring to the fight; letting the words out carefully, as if they were precious, like special stones held back in a pouch or wrapped in cloth and stowed in a bindle. A whole speech. Like something from Shakespeare. His body buzzed with excitement. He was not particularly angry. But he wanted to experience — here, now — the exercise of his power, wanted to move harshly against something solid and strong. These white boys. They were hardly real to him. They came and went, and it was always the same with them, they knew only one way, had only one side.

“Knock these dicty jeffs on they diasticusses,” the tall boy said, and the others laughed.

The car smelled of cedar shavings. It was beginning to fill up. Two, three, more white boys swung in off the roof and others crawled through the trap at the far end. Tattered boys in denim and patched khaki, farm boys, city boys with shop grease under their fingernails. They too had weapons. Sticks and short lengths of cane pole, what looked like a corner off a metal bed.

The girls started yelling, calling the africano boys names. Nothing they hadn’t heard before.

The air in the car was cool, but Delvin felt a heat on him. He trembled and the heat seemed suddenly to fly out of him and he was cold. I must be coming down with something, he thought, and then thought, yeah, scaredy-catness. The edges of his body felt numb. His palms were sweating, his heart galloped. He had no weapon but his pocketknife and he really didn’t want to set down his soogan and the little cotton sack Mrs. Parker had filled for him; he didn’t want to draw that. He thought of Celia walking across a grassy lawn to her classes. The buildings, she said, were made of stone that changed colors according to the light. He pictured a rainbow, but the ones she named were hardly colors at all: charcoal, gray, brown like a mule’s back. Maybe Mr. Rome would find her one day. He pictured the little man reared-back reciting the wordy love message he had prepared, and choked a laugh.

One of the boys looked at him. “You pretty bugged-up,” he said.

The white boys moved away from the back wall. A dozen, fourteen, fifteen, a clenched little army. Road toughs, scared boys just looking for work, boys on the run from bad daddies, drunk mothers, no mothers, something sad in their eyes, something wild, something hateful. For a sec he wanted to stick out his hand.

Hopeless, Delvin thought, useless. But then he didn’t mind.

An ache in his shoulders, a sorrowfulness like a headache. He wrapped his right hand in his bandana.

The old time — the dream time — slipping away, he thought — it was something the professor said. As if we were supposed to hold onto it.

One of the white boys flung a rotten cucumber. It hit a burly stutterer colored man in the shoulder, Coover Broadfoot. Delvin knew him from the Chat-town streets, from games of clip poker in a house around the corner from New Bethel church, from the Emporium, from his auntie’s funeral, from Coover’s teariness, from the set of his head like a little soot-headed lamb’s.