SCREAMING WITH THE CANNIBALS

Eleven

61 Eleven I never ate at the house on Sundays. I never knew why. Eli never worked on Sundays and sometimes he would have company at the house. They would arrive in shiny cars and pickup trucks. They would park on the wide gravel turn in front of the barn and I could lie on my bunk and hear the slamming of the car doors as the men and women got out, could even hear the crunching of their stiff shoes on the gravel as they walked off toward the house. I could see the back of the house from the window in my room and sometimes I would see picnics in the back yard, the men wearing coats and looking somehow uncomfortable in white shirts that were too large for their necks, the women in high-necked flowered dresses that hung almost to their ankles. There were large bowls of food spread out on a massive plank table that sat under a huge elm tree. The table was at least twelve feet long and I never saw it moved and I never saw it used for anything but picnics. Chairs of many types and shapes were brought from the barn and the house and men and women sat in the shade of the elm tree and talked and drank lemonade, anticipating a true Kentucky picnic. But I was never asked to any of those picnics. I wanted badly to scrub myself under the hose that hung from the shed beside the barn, to put on my cleanest pants and my one good shirt and go down to the house on Sunday. I wanted to join the picnic and talk and laugh. I wanted to hear the voices of ladies who never got dirty and listen to the men talk of hay, corn and the price of tractors. I wanted to turn the crank on the ice cream maker and drink hot cof- 62 fee after apple pie. But I never did. I was a hired hand. I never ate at the house on Sundays. So I would watch through the window, watch the pitchers of iced tea being passed around, watch the platters of fried chicken and the bowls of mashed potatoes travel around the table, chased by pans of corn bread, mounds of sliced tomatoes, and jars of homemade pickles. Sometimes I would stand silently beside the open window and try to hear what they were saying, try to imagine what they were talking about, try to imagine what I would say if I were down there. But I was too far away to hear. I just imagined what they were saying as they passed the bowls and pitchers back and forth. It made me hungry. In my heart. Fuck that, I thought. I went downstairs to the shop and switched on the lights, staring for a few minutes at the bike. I thought it was beautiful, an old Triumph. I had dragged it to the shop, its flat tires crumbling as I shoved, taken it almost completely apart, piece by piece, and inspected , cleaned and washed each chunk of steel, each bolt, each tiny rust-covered part, even the New York license plate. The carcass of the bike stood in the middle of the shop, held upright by planks. I thought of the day when all the pieces would fit together again, when they would meld and hum and run and pump oil and burn gasoline. I thought of the day when they would carry me to some place I had never been, when the wind would scream past my ears and the tears would come just from the thrill of it. Going somewhere , anywhere . . . This time I would go somewhere. The concrete culvert stuck out of the railroad bed and was big enough for me to crawl into. I hid there, curled into the dark and 63 dampness, my breath coming in rasping gusts and echoing through the yellowing pipe. I had made it just ahead of the freight train and I could 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 was there, above me. The culvert became a huge drum with me inside and my ears went dead, refusing to hear any more of a noise large enough to fill the Earth. The train...