One-Eyed Jacks

ONE

That night the old DeSoto finally gave up the ghost, cashing her chips noisily on a nameless gravel road in the dark starless night. She coughed a little, began to hammer and clang, spit some blue smoke and then packed it in, rolling to a halt alongside a deep ditch where bulrushes grew and frogs burped in contentment. The two men deserted her there, just gathered their gear from the back and left her to the ages. They set out on foot and never looked back.

They walked maybe five miles in the dark, setting a good pace, not saying much. After six months on the road, there wasn’t a lot that hadn’t been discussed. Usually that fact didn’t discourage T-Bone Pike from conversation, but tonight he was quiet. This was new territory to him and he was taking it in, not so much the sight of it – not in the pitch dark – but the sounds and the smells of this place, this backwoods Ontario. And his Missouri nose told him this country wasn’t so different from his home. There was fresh-cut hay nearby, he knew, and there was ragweed in the hay and there was something else on the air, maybe leeks or wild onions. When they passed a barn T-Bone could smell fresh manure and hear the morning coming in the cackle of the hens and the low moaning of the cattle.

Beside Pike, Tommy Cochrane was thinking of none of this, noticing nothing as he walked. This was just home and you didn’t notice home when you were there, you just remembered it when you weren’t. Tommy Cochrane had been gone a long while this time, but that didn’t change things. Home was home and it had nothing to do with time.

Near daybreak they hitched a ride into Kitchener with a grey old farmer in a rusty pickup truck, the pickup loaded down with ducks and geese in crates and hampers of vegetables going to market. There was early corn and tomatoes and string beans and lettuce. The two men squeezed onto the narrow front seat with the farmer, who crunched the gears getting the old Ford into low and then humped the truck back onto the highway without a word. T-Bone Pike mooched a field tomato from a basket at his feet and sat happily eating in the outer seat, juice on his lips and cheeks, teeth flashing in his smooth ebony face.

They hit Kitchener with the light of day, with the sun breaking red behind them and the sounds of doomed fowl in their ears. They left the farmer at the corner of Maple and Main, two blocks from the famous old market. Tommy Cochrane had spent a few early mornings there himself, as a kid with his grandfather, arriving sleepy-eyed and tangle-haired in a truck like the one he’d just stepped down from. But that was going back some.

T-Bone stayed behind to talk the farmer out of a couple more tomatoes and then he hurried to catch up with Tommy, who was striding away without a word, heading for the railyards in the center of town.

“Breakfast, Thomas,” T-Bone said, drawing even. He tossed over the largest tomato. “Where we goin’ now?”

In the truck, T-Bone had talked the farmer’s ear off, asking all about the geese and the ducks and the worth of each, about the difference between sweet potatoes and yams, and about the price of hens’ eggs compared to ducks’.

Now he asked again after their destination, but Tommy Cochrane wasn’t saying much today. They skirted the red brick railway station and made their way along the fence at the north end of the yard. Tommy was moving faster now, his eyes on an idling freight a hundred yards away. After a moment he stopped to slide his canvas bag through the fence, then pulled the strands of wire apart to allow T-Bone to crawl through. T-Bone’s belongings, wrapped in an oilcloth and slung with a cord over his shoulder, caught in the wire and Tommy freed the bundle and then followed man and bag through the fence.

“Thank you, Thomas,” T-Bone said in all seriousness.

But Tommy was walking already, watching the train in the yard. It was a short train, a half-dozen flatbeds and a couple of Wabash boxcars in front of a caboose. It began to move as they approached, and Tommy broke into a trot to catch up, crouching low to avoid detection as he ran. T-Bone, behind him, high-stepped in the faint morning light, taking the rails and switches like a hurdler, grinning widely as he ran.

“Jumpin’ a freight,” he sang out loud.

The cars were clicking along as Tommy caught up and pulled himself onto the rearmost flatbed. He hadn’t run a step since the Catskills six months ago, and he was out of breath and blowing like a fat man as he moved to the front of the car to lean against the railing there. He took a moment to catch his breath. Running was one thing he wouldn’t miss. Ten, fifteen years ago he hadn’t minded the roadwork, even looked forward to it as a way to get away from the bullshit that sometimes followed him around. Now he was thirty-five though and that was behind him. This morning he’d run fifty yards only to save himself a ten-mile walk.

In a moment T-Bone Pike joined him on the flatbed, smiling yet, his breath as easy as a baby’s sleeping. Five years older than Tommy, he had the natural conditioning of a thoroughbred, could run like a goddamn Peruvian Indian, all day and all night.

“Jumpin’ a freight,” he laughed. “The rail cops see us, they bust our heads for sure.”

Tommy took the tomato from his pocket, picked some lint from the skin and began to eat. There were no railroad cops to worry about anymore. It was 1959 and the only people riding the rails these days were a few hobos who figured the Depression never ended. Them and maybe a finished-up boxer and his coloured friend just trying to make it home after six years away.