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The Train - 1953
- West Virginia University Press
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63 1953 The Train This time I will go somewhere. I will get the hell out of here. The concrete culvert sticks out of the railroad bed and is big enough for me to crawl into. I hide there, curled into the dark and dampness, my breath coming in rasping gusts and echoing through the yellowing pipe. I make it into the pipe just ahead of the freight train and I can hear it coming around the bend, pounding slowly up a slight grade, the weight and power of it shaking the earth and the culvert. And then it is there, above me. The culvert becomes a huge drum with me inside and my ears go dead, refusing to hear any more of a noise large enough to fill the Earth. The train is empty, long, the cars rattling and loose, a string of black metal boxes coming from downstream, heading up through the narrow valley, past our tiny cabin on the hillside, through Crum, and then on to the coalfields. I know most of the train is empty coal cars, but usually there are some freight cars in the string somewhere, their doors sagging open, square empty eyes staring at the passing ridges and small open fields of stunted corn and sugar cane. Lee Maynard 64 The bend is a long one, the train pinned between mountains on one side and river on the other, and I know the engineer can’t see me, once the engine has gotten well past. All I have to do is find an empty freight car, its door open, before the caboose comes into view. Nothing to it. I jump from the culvert and scramble up beside the moving train. The railroad bed is wide in front of me and I wait for a freight car, knowing that I will have to time my run at the car just right. I have never done this before. The drumming in my ears gets louder and I realize it is my heart. I am going to hop a freight train and ride away from Crum, West Virginia. The open door is directly above my head before I realize it. I start to run with the train, keeping one eye on the track and one on the open door, my old high-top basketball sneakers sliding sometimes in the loose cinders and gravel. It is easy. Almost loafing, I catch the car and pull even with the open door, then in a burst of speed I gain the middle of the door and run beside the car, trying to look inside. I see nothing. The roadbed is narrowing and seems to drop away from the car and the open door rises slowly above me, sneaking gradually out of my reach. I aim my hands at the corner of the door and jump. My fingers lock on the edge and I swing upward, legs flailing behind me, the wind screaming past my ears and the tears coming just from the thrill of it. I am going to make it. I am going to some place I have never been. Going somewhere, anywhere. Somehow, I have done it wrong. I had watched some guys in Crum jump the trains and I thought I knew how to do it but this is one of those times in my life when I learn that watching and thinking do not make up for doing, and sure as hell I have done it wrong. My own speed and the movement of the train do not join in the effort and I dangle from the edge of the car, my feet dragging [3.230.1.23] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 20:44 GMT) The Pale Light of Sunset 65 in the cinders of the road bed, my body flailing at the side of the car like a heavy sack being dumped in the wind. There is no way to get into the car. I pull my legs up under me and let go, trying to turn and hit the cinders running. And that doesn’t work, either. One foot hits the ground and I never know what happens to the other foot but it isn’t there and then the front of my shirt is gone and cinders and railroad gravel are scraping the skin off my chest, working down to my belt buckle. My face augers down into the gravel and my mouth opens, a large mistake in the general scheme...