I almost eat it hopping a gondola on the fly, with my headphones on and a Sonic Youth tape playing. My foot slips and then my left hand goes and I fall back down onto the yard's gravel. Pitch black midnight and the train keeps on. I watch it trail off until it's out of sight. The Walkman's in a whole mess of pieces, shattered on the rails, and a dirty old son of a bitch is laughing at me perched on top of a pile of wooden planks and he starts in on me, telling me two-hands-and-one-foot and then he takes a drink from a dented flask, gurgles and spits, stands and helps me off my ass.
"This is a yard, kid. You can catch 'em before they start rollin'," he says, dusting my jacket off with a soot-dirty hand and ends up leaving more grime on me than he brushed off. The entire place is silent, even the city traffic. I pick my bag up and look the old man over. He reaches his hand out, introducing himself as Old Jack. I tell him the nickname I've most recently been given, 'Rudeboy.’ He tells me I got shortchanged on that one. He doesn't believe me when I tell him I'm fourteen. He asks me what I'm doing out here. I tell him I'm getting the hell out of town.
"Well you can't do it the way you been doin' it," he says.
"Man, I hopped before. Shit, I rode here. I just ain't had a grip that time," I say and Old Man Jack laughs, looking me over, pulling at the flask stuck in his pants pocket. He swigs it and offers it my way but my hands goes up; these are my straightedge days. Arctic chill's got me rubbing my hands, unreasonably cold for March. Jack talks:
"I'm bettin' on another to come around in a few hours. We can hold up in the drainage on the other side of the yard until then. Keep out the way of the bulls."
And I'm not arguing. I'm freezing and exhausted and all I want to do is get somewhere, away somewhere. We walk across the tracks, watching a pair of headlights sweep the yard to our left—we're both breathing heavy, him from the weight of his age, me from the weight of my bag. The yard falls off at a strip of dead high-grass and we continue past a mangled chain-link fence, down through the concrete ditch and into the drainage pipe. Old Jack makes himself comfortable, propping his legs against the walls. I sit at the opening with my feet dangling, digging my soiled-black hands into my bag for my water jug. Jack speaks up:
"Y'know, my first time riding—"
"Ain't my first time riding."
"Well, my first time, I knocked myself real good, fallin' off the coupling. The old kind. Nasty. Slick from rain. I fell back just as a bull was checkin' the other side. M'head bled like a stuck pig." he chuckles. I take a mouthful of water from the jug and offer it up to him. He nods 'cheers' and drinks long. I size Old Jack up and I'm scared. Terrified. I had hopped out of Reading and been stuck in Philly for almost two days, watching nothing but double-stacks and tankers passing. I was starving and exhausted. And the whole time, I hadn't met one rider. Until now. The moment I heard Old Jack laugh deep in the darkness after I fell off the gondola, all the stories told of murderous hobos came flooding into my head. My right hand had been concealing my switchblade since Old Jack had pulled me up off the ground. Jack senses the tension. He says:
"Guess we'll just have to trust each other."
And I don't see any other way, either. I relax my fingers and the knife drops into my pocket. We wait into the night, into the morning, near noon for another train pointed in the right direction. Around five o'clock in the day, we emerge from the pipe to gray overcast skies, ducking low in the ditch, peeking over the edge at the yard. On the far side sits a long freight pointed south; Old Jack whispers a "Let's go," and we take off jogging low, behind high grass, eyeing our left and right for a bull. Jack puts a hand to my chest:
"Kid, you gotta watch out for cars that the railroad workers hump down the line. You'll get yourself perished."
We eye the yard carefully as we move on. The train is rolling slow by the time we get to it. I hear Jack call out: "Two hands, one foot!" and I take to the advice without thinking, hauling myself up the backend of a grainer, watching Jack swing onto the car's rear porch. My insides freeze and in my head I'm panicking, the wheels of the train waiting below to grind me into a smear of red. The train is pulling out and I'm hanging on the ladder, dangling. Old Jack stands up and grips my jacket and pulls me over to the porch. I collapse against the metal, shaking, eyes wide. Jack's serious now:
"Goddamn, kid. You sure as hell shouldn't be ridin'."
We move slow out of Philly swaying and bucking; my legs are crossed, my hands clamped over my ears. I look over at Old Jack and his earplugs as he shakes his head at me, disappointed. I was on the rails with no idea of what riding truly entailed. Including not knowing how incredibly loud riding a freight can be. Barely out of Pennsylvania and a bout of hunger sets in on me. I sacrifice my ears, pulling a couple of dumpstered apples from my bag and hand one to Jack. Everything's vibrating me numb, I can't even hear myself chew. Now, it's the first time I take a look at Old Man Jack. He's got to be in his fifties but he's weathered, his face is covered in brown-gray hair and a collection of scars, the largest looks to be from a burn and it covers half his cheek. Hard mud is caked on his heavy black boots, the boots I've seen in Vietnam flicks. He sees me staring at his olive-colored military jacket, the same kind I'm wearing. Over the sound of the freight, he yells to me: "Ain't no vet, kid. Got it from a friend." I notice the blood stain on the cuff, I turn away, yawning and leaning back against the grainer. The clouds break and the last bits of the day's sunlight hit us. I pull my knit cap over my eyes and take a bite of apple.
Time passes.
My dog. I'm wondering who will feed my dog and I almost start to cry, thinking "I should've brought him. I shouldn't've left him behind. I never leave him behind." But he's back home, curled up next to the radiator, with a bellyful of table scraps. I'll see him again. The sounds from the train have receded into my bones, flowing right along with my blood. There's nothing to hear anymore and I'm content with going deaf. Between the heavy wind and the click-clack bop-jazz rhythm and the booming, the afternoon sunlight blankets it all out. I cross my legs and close my eyes and it's two years before I'll lose faith in Jesus, so my thoughts are with some kind of god. Towards the empty sky I pray to survive the rails and give thanks for the possibility of this life and I take a deep breath through my nostrils. The air is sweeter, the ocean is close. But we're moving out of Delaware, we're turning southwest, inland toward Baltimore. Out across the northern tip of the Chesapeake Bay, we crisscross highways and roads, watching men driving home to their women and their children for a roast beef dinner with potatoes and gravy and lima beans. Darkness creeps over the horizon to the East, the first stars surface above. I think about dying out here, in foreign countryside. By the side of the tracks. Rotting away inside my coat and my hoodie and my boots; wondering what would bleach in the sun first, my bones or my jeans. I think about a lot of things on our ride south. Mostly, I think about how I don't know where this train is headed. And I think about never going home again.
I remember watching trees blur and run fresh like graffiti. The wind froze me stiff and the freight shook and scared me to death. The world stops at a moment when you hit that particular speed. It all just hangs right there for a second, the atoms and molecules of everything, and it's all so wonderful that you sit completely paralyzed, forgetting to even breathe. As if it's all one of Earth's last surviving tricks, like wild horses or like the Northern Lights.
I remember everything changed.
Your first ride, your very first ride, will crack you wide open and show you everything you've been missing. All the pretty wrapping paper around the world is torn off in long strips and what's left stings a little, light and dark and good and evil and everything in its entirety. You're a tiny speck of animal riding a tiny speck of machinery on a tiny speck of a planet in a tiny speck of a solar system on the outer arms of a tiny speck of a galaxy somewhere in the deep, immeasurable nothingness. And your heart beats harder than it's ever beat before, because it's the first time it's really had to.