Joe Lansdale - All the Earth, Thrown to the Sky

I watched the water go by. There wasn’t a river or a creek, but there were some big pools out there. I thought I might like to get some worms and a pole and fish it. I knew some of the water was fed by a creek somewhere. There would be fish in the deep parts. Not big fish, but hungry fish that I could catch and eat. I was hungry all the time. Some place inside of me was always empty.

We passed a crossing where a pickup waited on the train. The pickup was stuffed with kids. When they saw us they waved at us, but we went by so quick we didn’t have time to wave back.

“I saw a sign,” Jane said. “It said Tyler, four miles.”

“We’ll be there pretty quick,” I said.

“Yeah,” Jane said, “and my thinking is we’ll start slowing down soon. I think when it’s slow enough we ought to jump off right away and not even mess with being close to the station and those bulls.”

“It may not slow enough,” Tony said.

“It will,” she said. The way she talked, you’d have thought she’d been a hobo for twenty years.

But she was right. Not long after, the train began to slow. And then it slowed a lot. I leaned out the door and looked up the track. There was nothing to see.

“I think it’s better to walk a little,” Jane said, “than be in sight of the station.”

“You said that,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said, “but I wasn’t sure anyone was listening.”

We got our bags, and when we came to a place where there was some thick-looking grass, we tossed our bags and jumped.

I couldn’t stop tumbling on the grass, and finally I fetched up against a tree with my feet in the air and my back on the ground. By the time I was on my feet, Jane had both our bags and Tony was scrambling. She brought me mine and I threw it over my shoulder. The three of us started walking along the edge of the track. The train was still going by, but it didn’t take long before it left us. We could hear those boxcars rattling for a long time, and we could see the smoke from the engine hanging in the air and we could smell it.

After a long time walking, I said, “Are you sure it said four miles and not forty miles?”

“I been thinking about that,” Jane said. “Actually, I just saw a four. But there might have been a number in front of it. Or behind it. But I did see a four.”

I stopped. “That’s a big difference from saying it was four miles, and now you’re saying you don’t know if it was four or fourteen or almost any number that either begins or ends with four.”

“I guess I got a little excited,” Jane said. “I wanted to get off. And the train did slow, didn’t it?”

I was starting to think it had just slowed because of a bad curve, and not because we were near a station, but I didn’t feel any need to say it right then. It didn’t matter. We were off the train.

“I’m tired of walking,” Tony said. “And it’s hot.”

“There’s plenty of trees,” Jane said. “We can find shade.”

“And with all those pools of water,” I said, “we can find mosquitoes in the shade.”

“And dad-burned snakes,” Tony said. “I don’t like snakes.”

“You both are such pessimists,” Jane said. “Where is your spirit of adventure?”

“Who says I have to have one?” I said.

33

It was like I figured. Jane had read the sign wrong because she hadn’t paid attention or because, like she said, she wanted off the train. Whatever, it was more than any four miles, and it was starting to get dark by the time we did see a sign for a town.

But it wasn’t Tyler. It was Winona, and the sign said WELCOME TO WINONA, POPULATION 340. Fact was, it was pretty much just a hole in the road with a couple of stores. Stopping at one of the stores, we decided to buy some Coca-Colas and eat some of our food. We opened up our sacks and got our can openers and had some beans, which I was getting really tired of. They wasn’t doing my stomach any good either, and on more than a few occasions as of late, I’d had to make a point of walking behind Jane and Tony so if I passed wind it wouldn’t make things difficult for my traveling companions. And I darn sure didn’t want that sort of thing to happen when I was next to Jane. I couldn’t hardly even live with the idea of it.

Tony, however, was less concerned. He was more than willing to run up in front of us and let it fly and laugh about it.

But now we were in town and we sat on a bench under an oak by the side of the road and ate our beans and drank our Coca-Colas and watched it get dark. Fireflies were starting to move under the tree, and I could see them across the streets and in the yards where there were houses. Unlike at home, these houses weren’t piled with sand, their paint stripped off by it blowing and gritting the color away. They were painted, and the grass in the yards was green, and the trees were tall and full of leaves. Squirrels were in the trees. I watched them play. A man in the house across the way came out on the porch and cleared his throat in a way that made me feel a little sick, and then spat a stream of whatever had been down in his chest out into the yard. It was so loud it startled the squirrels. The man went back inside.

A man in a new car pulled up at the curb and got out. He was a short man with a big straw hat, and his belly fell over his belt like it was trying to find some comfortable place to lie down.

He came over to where we sat and put his boot on the edge of the bench, right by me, and wiped the top of it off with a red kerchief he took out of his pants pocket. “You kids live here?”

“No,” I said.

“I didn’t figure you did,” he said. “Haven’t seen you around here before.”

“We’re just passing through,” Jane said. “Truth is, we inherited a little oil money over in Tyler, so we’re trying to get there, and we got our train tickets mixed up and ended up off the train.”

“Tickets, huh?” the man said, and snapped the handkerchief loudly, then folded it and put it back in his pants pocket.

“That’s right,” Jane said.

“From the looks of you,” he said, “and looking at your luggage,” he said, eyeing our bags, “my guess is your ticket was how fast you could run and jump inside a boxcar.”

“We rode a boxcar,” Jane said. “That part is right. But that’s because there was that ticket mix-up. Where was it, Jack? Fort Worth?”

I didn’t know what to do, so I just nodded.

“So we didn’t have tickets, even though they were paid for, and when we borrowed a phone and called our relatives in Tyler, they were out. We decided to just go on and catch a train hobo-style and ride in.”

“This ain’t Tyler,” the man said.

“No,” Jane said. “I was just explaining to my cousin Jack here, that he had us jump off the train too soon. Right, Jack?”

“Sure,” I said.

“If this is your cousin,” the man said, “who’s the little one?”

“I ain’t that little,” Tony said. “I’m young.”

“That’s my brother, Tony,” Jane said.

“Uh-huh,” said the man. “Well now, I got an idea for you. You can take it or leave it, but I figure on your way to your rich inheritance, you might be in need of money, ’cause Tyler, that’s still a good twelve, fifteen miles away as the crow flies. And since you ain’t no crows, maybe for you three it’s twenty-five walking by the highway, if you don’t get a ride. You might want to take yourself a break for a while if you need some pocket money, and a job might be something you’d consider.”

“We don’t need a job,” Jane said.

As much as I didn’t like eating beans, I had noted that when we opened our bags, we were down to one can of beans per bag. There were two bags and three of us. We did have some cooking gear, flashlights, and the like, but you couldn’t eat that.