Finn (16 page)

But then the anger started letting go. A long freight train rumbled by, shaking us. I wished it would keep coming until it shook us to pieces. But it passed, and afterwards the only sound in the boxcar was Clark snuffling and saying, “Freakin’ unbelievable!” every time he touched his face. Whatever extra strength I had felt before was now gone. The only anger left was aimed at myself, for losing it before, and now for getting weak. All I had done was make things a thousand times more dangerous for Silvia and me.

There was an aluminum taste in my mouth. I smelled the boxcar as if for the first time that day: it stank of manure and sweat. I had an impulse to drop the crowbar and throw myself at Clark’s feet, to beg him to please hit me back, much harder if he wanted to. But that was impossible. I had started playing at being a boy. Now I had to keep it up, no matter what.

James was everywhere I turned. When Clark told him to fetch some napkins for his cut, James looked to me for permission first. Clark noticed him doing it.

“You’ll regret that,” Clark said, as much to me as to James.

“You’re saying you want some more of this?” I said, shaking the crowbar at him. James said “Damn!” again and went out to see what he could find.

Silvia looked down, shaking her head. She quietly asked if she could leave.

I told her “No.”

We spent the rest of the day in a bizarre standoff. Clark sulked in his corner, eyeing me murderously, mopping his cut with the fresh newspaper James had brought back instead of napkins. James buzzed around Clark’s wound like a hungry fly. Silvia avoided eye contact with everyone, including me. The crowbar and I kept on top of things. I didn’t plan to let Clark out of my sight until the train was rolling and I could make him jump out.

We waited and waited. I sent James out every two minutes to see if our engine car was coming. Each time I asked him to go, he arched his wispy eyebrows. When he came back, the answer was always, “Uh-uh.”

We distracted ourselves by eating. Without any discussion, James had moved the bags of food from Clark’s corner to mine. I gave most of the good stuff to Silvia, then me, then James. Clark got whatever was left. He threw tantrums, but ate the nasty leftovers anyway.

We heard the station clock strike noon. The sound was so out of place, so civilized, that I had to laugh. The air in the boxcar was warming up. Clark moaned in his corner for a while and then napped. James and Silvia nodded off. I was sleepy, too, but I didn’t dare close my eyes.

The drowsier I got in that afternoon heat, the deeper I fell into confusion. While the others slept, I stared at the rings and droplets of Clark’s blood in the dust. I tried to connect the bloody dots in my imagination. I kept looking for a pattern—a shape, a face, a beast from the Zodiac—something mystical that might help explain what I had done. But the harder I looked for a grand plan, the simpler it seemed: I smashed Clark’s face because I wanted to and because I could.

My thoughts were spinning around like one of those thumb-driven Easter toys, the metal flower buds that spin faster and faster until the petals open, revealing a secret scene. Something was unfolding in my mind. I began to search the day for clues, looking between the cracks for the secret scene inside what had happened. Faces changed, the true faces coming through. Silvia and Clark and James melted away, leaving Mom and Dad and me in the sweltering boxcar. As I remembered the way the crowbar felt, raised in anger, my father replaced Clark at my feet. I pictured myself standing over him, listening to him whimper and say he was sorry, and yet still hitting him, without mercy, for his own good.
Teach him a lesson.

Then I imagined it a different way, where my Mom had the crowbar and I was at her feet, pleading. Dad was watching helplessly, like Silvia, terrified, but also happy that Mom was saving him from me.

All the faces kept spinning and changing, until there was no telling who was hitting, who was being hit, and who was being saved. I was all of them mixed together, the hand causing the pain, the face receiving it, and the horrified girl looking on. My father’s voice was the soundtrack, the way he used to tease me, pretending to be blind, asking again and again, “Is that my Chlo?” I didn’t want to hear him. I did not want to hear that voice. It must have been a hundred degrees in that boxcar.

Sometime in the afternoon, James asked me if he should give Clark his beer. The question jarred me out of my half sleep, making me realize how foolish it had been to let myself go, even a little. Luckily, Clark was still snoring. I said yes to the beer. Drinking might dull Clark’s mind, the way it used to slow my Mom down. I needed every advantage.

James opened the first beer and put it in Clark’s hand. Clark drank it without seeming to wake up. He jammed the neck of the bottle deep in his mouth, as if he wanted to bite it off. When he was done, he pulled it out like a pacifier and gasped. He sat up, but his eyes were still closed. James gave him another bottle. Clark drained it, too.

That opened his eyes. The only pause between bottles two and three was the time it took for Clark to peel off the sweaty labels, all the while staring at me as if he wished he was peeling off my skin. Then he wadded up the labels and threw them, one at a time, at James.

After three bottles, I said, “Enough.” You wouldn’t have believed the hatred Clark beamed at me when I said that.

I had hoped that the beer would slow Clark down, make him easier to deal with, but it had the opposite effect. Now he seemed super awake, his eyelids never closing, his reptilian eyes constantly tracking me.

Trains were coming and going, but ours was just sitting there, baking in the sun. By evening, I was going out of my mind. “Why aren’t we
going?”
I said.

Silvia agreed. “Really, Finn,” she said. “It’s too tense.”

Clark had been lying on his side, turned away from us. When he heard that, though, he sat up, folding his legs under himself like some kind of swami. After a final delicate dab at his cut, he put down his bloody newspaper as if it were a smoldering peace pipe. He turned to Silvia. “I apologize,” he said. “For before. I hope we can still be friends.”

I wanted to shout: liar! but Silvia was tired of all the silence. She looked exhausted. “We’re going to California,” she said. Clark nodded, then tried to hide the fact that nodding made him wince.

“Absolutely,” he said. “That’s excellent.”

“Actually,” I said, crossing eyes with Silvia, “it’s not definite.”

“But you
are
going west,” Clark said.

“Maybe. Maybe not,” I said.

For some reason, Silvia kept talking. “How long will that take?”

“What? To go west?” Clark said.
“West
is kind of vague.”

“He’s playing games with you,” I said.

“Vague,” Clark said, ignoring me, “because west’s a direction, not a place. How long do you plan to rest here?” He was asking Silvia again, but I was sick of his questions.

“Until this goddamn train gets going,” I said.

Clark’s eyes widened, his nostrils flared, and then he doubled over, laughing silently. “Oh! Oh! That’s rich!” he gasped.

“Shut up,” I said.

“‘Until this train gets going,’” Clark said, turning to James.
“Going!”
he wheezed.

James started to laugh, too, as if it was finally time to acknowledge the private joke between them. When I saw that, my heart sank.

“So?” I said.

“These cars are here for service,” Clark said.

“They ain’t going nowhere,” James added.

I thought Clark would throw up, he was laughing so hard.

“What does he mean,
Nowhere?”
Silvia said. I wanted to shush her, but I didn’t want Clark to show me up anymore, so instead I said, “It means we’re on the wrong train.”

“Bing bing bing bing bing!” Clark said.

“Say we
were
going to California,” I said. “How long would that take?” Clark picked up his soiled newspaper and began folding it neatly in half, then in quarters, as if he wanted to save the business section for later. He liked making me wait for his answer. The fact that I wanted his opinion was restoring his confidence.

“You might be able to catch a coal train to Chicago,” he said. “From there you could maybe ride out with the piggies on a nice hog train. Good weather? Say, two weeks.”

“Two weeks!” Silvia said.

“Maybe less, if you had a decent guide,” Clark said. I hated the sugary way he was talking to Silvia. I felt like saying the word “rape,” just to remind everybody what I had saved her from.

“Well, that’s out of the question,” I said, but Silvia disagreed.

“It’s not for you to decide, Chica,” she said. She immediately added, “Finn.”

“‘Chica?’” Clark said. He stared at me for a long time, especially at my chest. “Isn’t that a girl’s name?”

“Mind your own damn business,” I said. But he came nearer, squatting down and sniffing the air, as if he had just caught a whiff of the sheep under the wolf’s clothing.

“Chica,” he said. “Aw. That’s sweet.”

Just then I felt the crowbar slip away.

“I got it,” James said, moving behind Clark. “Right here.”

“Nice move,” Clark said, taking the crowbar from James and smiling at me.

“Yeah, thanks a lot, James,” I said.

James shrugged. “Man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do,” he said. He clapped his hands together, the way he did at the end of a routine.

It made a little cloud of chalk.

Clark had some fun with the crowbar for a while, pretending it was a sword, pointing it at my heart, lunging and saying “En garde!” like some kind of Musketeer. I was scared, but I was glad he was paying more attention to me than Silvia. I tried always to be in between them. It wasn’t too hard. He seemed fascinated with me, now that I was a girl.

“We’re going to have us a party tonight!” Clark said. He was sweating, and not just from the heat inside of the boxcar. The cut had made him feverish. His eyes went in and out of focus, and he forgot to wipe his wound, which was pouring out a clear yellow stream.

Dancing around with the crowbar, dripping with sweat, Clark looked like an Indian whooping it up in front of a bonfire. Silvia and I seemed to be his flames. He tried to take my arm to get me to dance with him, or at least spin around like a moron, which was what his dancing amounted to. Each time I pulled away from him, he thrust out his lower lip and said, “Cwark is vewy, vewy disappointed.” But then he grabbed my arm and held the flat end of the crowbar—the sharp end—to my throat, hissing, “Dance with me.”