Joe Lansdale - All the Earth, Thrown to the Sky

“Thing to do when you get to Fort Worth,” Floyd said, “is get off. This train is going to slow, but it ain’t going to stop. I’ve ridden it before. You got to jump off before you get into the station, and then you got to walk up close to the station and get another train that goes to Tyler, and then you got to get off there, ’cause its next stop is Lindale, which is a little burg outside of Tyler. You understand?”

We said that we did.

“I can’t help you after we get off,” he said. “I got business to take care of. I can’t be messing with you kids.”

“You’ve treated us fine,” I said.

“You have,” Jane said, and the way she looked at him made me a little jealous.

“I’m glad I could help,” he said. “But after Fort Worth you’re on your own.”

“We understand,” I said.

“I’d rather you stay with us,” Jane said.

“Can’t,” Floyd said.

Floyd looked back at the old man.

“What about him?” I said.

“Time’s got him by the leg,” Floyd said, “and it’s holding on tight, and it’s tugging him away, and I’m pretty sure it ain’t going to give him back.”

After a while we pulled some cans of food out of our bags and shared them with Floyd, and then we all found a place to sit down with our backs against the car, and with the train rocking on the tracks and the excitement we’d had, we all drifted off to sleep.

We rode like that a long ways, and when we did wake up, none of us had much to say. We went back to sleep. That was how it worked until the train rolled us in a few miles outside of the Fort Worth trainyards. We could see them in the distance.

Floyd said, “All right, now. Coming up is the jump-off spot. We all jump off there. I point you to your train, and then I’m gone.”

The old man was awake now, and he had sat up with his back against the boxcar. He straightened out Floyd’s hat and his coat and laid them over his knees.

“You’re going to be needing these, son,” the old man said.

“Yes, sir,” Floyd said. “I suppose I will.”

As Floyd went over and got his hat and coat, the old man looked up, said, “You’re him, ain’t you?”

“Him who?”

“Pretty Boy Floyd.”

“I don’t like being called that.”

“But you’re him just the same, ain’t you?”

“Charles is my first name,” Floyd said. “I don’t like none of that Pretty Boy business.”

“I don’t care what they say,” the old man said. “You ain’t bad in my book. You could run over a child on a tricycle and shoot the eye out of a one-legged librarian lady, and I’d still be on your side.”

Floyd laughed. “You don’t have to worry about me doing nothing like that. And don’t believe everything you read in the papers. I done all that stuff they say I did, robbed all them banks they claim I’d robbed, there’d have to be four of me, and a couple more to rest up for later.”

Floyd put his coat and hat on, said, “You need some help getting out of the boxcar, pops?”

“I ain’t never getting off,” the old man said. “This is my home. I stay here, and I die here. Ain’t no one going to miss me.”

“Someone will,” said Floyd.

“No,” the old man said. “They won’t.”

“I’ll think about you, then,” Floyd said.

“Do that, boy. Do that for me.”

“I will,” Floyd said, tipping his hat. “But I don’t want my last thought of you to be that I left you on a train and you couldn’t get off. I bet we could help you off. These folks are riding to Tyler. You could ride with them.”

“I’ll give it a shot,” the old man said, “but I don’t know how much I got left in me.”

“Why don’t we find out? What’s your name, pops?”

“Daggart.”

“All right, then, Daggart. You ready?”

“No,” said Daggart, “but the way I see it, if I can’t jump out of this train, I can darn sure fall out of it.”

“That’s the spirit,” Floyd said.

29

I got an arm around one side of Daggart, and Floyd got the other side. Me and him jumped with the old man, hit the ground, and tumbled some. It was grassy there and kind of wooded, so we had a soft landing and were partly hid behind the trees. The old man took the fall well enough. We helped him up and he seemed okay. Worst I got was a mouthful of dirt and grass. After all the sand I’d seen, that bit of grass was pretty nice. Back in Oklahoma, green was as rare as a solid meal.

Behind us, Jane and Tony jumped and landed safely. When it was all said and done, we managed to get off without breaking a leg or twisting an ankle.

“Now,” Floyd said. “You see the tracks on the other side of the trees? I’ve caught that line before. It goes to Tyler. It don’t stop once it gets rolling, so that’s the one you want. It’ll take you all the way in. There’s enough of a slant on the other side of them trees, you get to moving downhill pretty quick, you can make the boxcar easy. It’s kind of like a porch that leads down to it. It’s high up and slanted about right, though you got to get off to a good run.”

“I can’t run,” Daggart said. “Maybe I can just roll down and onto it.”

“You’d roll down and under it,” Jane said.

“Hell, I know that,” Daggart said. “I was kidding. Didn’t you know I was kidding?”

“Good,” Jane said. “You’re up to joking. That’s an improvement.”

“All I’m saying,” Daggart said, “is I’ve caught it here before. I just don’t know I can do it today. I don’t know I want to go to Tyler.”

“You’re just being contrary,” Jane said.

“A little, I reckon,” he said. “Maybe it’s because I feel like death warmed over with a match, and the heat’s fading.”

“We’ll stay with you,” I said. “At least until we can get you settled somewhere.”

“Ain’t no place to settle me,” he said.

“We’ll do what we can,” I said.

He sat down with his back against a little pine and looked down the tracks. A few seconds later, he said, “Guess going with you folks is a mite better than just sitting here in these trees and dying.”

“You got to think more positive,” Jane said. “You got to see what’s down the road a bit.”

“I done seen what’s down there. There’s just more road.”

In the cover of the trees, we squatted and waited, the old man still sitting with his back against the pine.

Up a ways ahead of us, I saw there was at least a half-dozen hoboes in the trees and brush, waiting on that train. They looked back at us in a manner that made me a little nervous. We wouldn’t be the only ones riding, and there might be some trouble if we weren’t careful.

“Try and get the same boxcar, if you can,” Floyd said. “That way you can watch out for one another if there’s someone else in the car that might take a mind to bother you. But let me tell you, they got a gun, a knife, it’s best to give them what they want or jump.”

“That won’t be much,” Jane said. “Our bag of goods and a few dollars is all we got.”

“It ain’t worth dying over,” Floyd said.

“You didn’t give them sandwiches away the other night,” Tony said.

“No,” Floyd said. “But I was meaner than them, and I had a gun. I ain’t proud of that gun. It ain’t brought me much good, except that time the other night. A gun just seems to make things go bad. You start to depend on it and give it too much respect. I wish I hadn’t never seen one.”

“Is that the train?” Daggart said.

We looked down the track. A train was moving out of the station.

“That’s the one heading southeast,” Floyd said. “The one you want.”

“Could the line have changed since you rode it last?” Jane said.