Firebirds Soaring (4 page)

T
he lights in the library flicked on and off, and Jason knew it was time to go. The librarians already had their coats on. One of them, Mike, was waiting impatiently at the door.

Mike patrolled the stacks, pouncing on readers with cell phones or those who had too many books piled in front of them. “You’re making work for the staff,” Mike would say accusingly. “We have to reshelve those, you know.” He prowled the library like a guilty conscience, taking books on sex away from teenagers, removing large-print novels from readers who had perfectly good eyesight, and evicting homeless people from the restroom.

Mike stood at the door with his keys. Jason slunk past, avoiding eye contact. He knew he was out after curfew and that Mike had the right to call the police. Twelve-year-olds weren’t supposed to be on the street. But Jason had learned how to creep into his group home after hours. If he was lucky, he would miss getting beaten up by the older boys.

Rain was pouring down outside, and Jason pulled the hood of his poncho over his head. He knew he looked weird with his skinny arms and legs and the backpack of books sticking out like a hump. But the books were more important to him than anything. If need be, he would wrap the poncho around them and let himself get soaked.

He saw a dark shape under a tree and prepared to flee—but it was only old Shin Bone bedding down for the night. The hobo spent his days on the lawn of the public library, playing a flute and stopping people for conversation. He treated Jason seriously, speaking to him adult to adult, and the boy liked him.

Jason suddenly became aware that Shin Bone hadn’t put up his tent. The rain had overflowed the gutters and the lawn was flooded. The old man lay in the water like a stone in a river.

“Wake up!” shouted Jason. He grabbed the old man’s coat and tried to rouse him. A light in the library switched off. Now all the boy could see was the slick of a streetlamp reflected on the rain-filled gutter. Shin Bone’s chest heaved and his breath rattled in his throat.

Jason ran to the library door. It was dark inside, but he pounded on it anyway. Mike was always the last one out, and he didn’t go until he’d checked the locks. “Mike! Mike!” screamed Jason. After a long moment a light came on and the surly librarian approached the window by the door.

“I’m calling the cops,” he said, his voice muffled.

“Yes! Call the cops! Call an ambulance! Shin Bone’s dying!”

For a moment Jason was afraid the librarian wouldn’t do anything, but at last he said, “Oh, bother,” and picked up a phone.

The boy went back to Shin Bone, wishing Mike would open the door and help drag the old hobo inside. But perhaps it was dangerous to move him. Jason didn’t know. He held the man’s hand and felt a slight squeeze. “The ambulance is coming,” he told him. “They’ll fix you up. Just hang in there.” Jason heard a siren wail in the distance.

A scrap of paper floated down the gutter, winking and turning in the light of the streetlamp. Points of light fizzed all around it like bubbles in a glass of soda. Jason felt a whisper of alarm.

It washed out of the gutter and swirled across the lawn. Jason reached for it and then drew back his hand. He didn’t like the paper. It was up to no good, moving like a live thing, coming straight at them. It slid past his legs, turned two or three times in an eddy, and made its way to Shin Bone’s side. The old man, with great effort, moved his hand. “I’ll get it for you,” said Jason, picking the paper out of the water.

The fire engine roared into the parking lot, sending out a tidal wave of water. The fire department was always the first at an emergency. The cops would be next, followed by the ambulance. Jason had seen the procedure at the group home, when someone had a drug overdose or got stabbed. He scrambled out of the way as the firemen bent over Shin Bone.

Mike came out of the library carrying a large black umbrella.

He could have done that before,
Jason said to himself, thinking of the rain pouring down on the old man’s face. The firemen were pressing on Shin Bone’s chest. They shone a bright light on him and one of them shook his head. Then the police arrived.

“That’s the boy who found him,” Mike said, pointing at Jason. “It wouldn’t surprise me if he was going through the tramp’s pockets.”

Jason was both shocked and outraged. He’d never stolen anything from the library. He’d kept every one of their rules, not even returning a book late. The library meant too much to him, the only place that was safe and warm, where he didn’t have to constantly look over his shoulder.

“Hey! I know you,” the cop said. “You’re from that group home—”

Jason ran. It was a split-second decision and he regretted it at once, but by then it was too late. Once you ran, you were already guilty. You’d be sent to Juvenile Hall, where the boys were bigger and hit harder.

Jason climbed over a fence with the cop yelling at him to stop. He tore his plastic poncho and had to throw it away. He wriggled out of the backpack and the books splashed into a puddle. Now he’d never be able to go back to the library. He almost ran into the arms of another cop waiting at the other end of an alley. Fear gave him a burst of speed. He zigzagged, leaped a ditch, scrambled over a hedge—

—and found himself in a vast empty field. Jason was so startled he skidded to a stop. He listened. There were no pounding steps behind him and no shouts. He couldn’t even hear the rain because it had stopped raining. The sky had not a single cloud in it and was lit by a moon so bright it was slightly frightening. Jason had never seen such a moon.

In the middle of the field was an old-fashioned train. Steam hissed around its wheels and the clock-face of the engine, glowing in the brilliant moonlight, trembled with heat. The engine huffed gently as if talking to itself. It rolled slowly past and stopped.

Directly in front of Jason was a boxcar with the doors open on either side so that he could look through. He approached it cautiously. The floor was piled with what appeared to be empty flour sacks, and the space inside had a neat, comfortable look about it. It felt safe, as the library did when Jason had a good book and a whole afternoon before him. Almost without thinking, he climbed in and lay down on one of the heaps, pulling a flour sack over him for warmth. Soon he was fast asleep.

The engine quivered. The whistle gave a short, soft call, and the wheels began to turn. The train moved out. Long, low, and mournful it sang through the canyons of the city, past shopping malls and apartment buildings, until it reached the wilderness beyond.

 

Jason sat up. Sunlight was streaming into the side of the boxcar, and the wheels were going
clickety-clack
at great speed. Outside, a desert stretched away to distant purple mountains. At the far end of the car two men were playing poker, using beans instead of chips. One had a broken nose and the ruddy face of an alcoholic; the other resembled a wrestler Jason had seen on TV. They looked up at him at the same time.

“Feeling rested?” said the one with the broken nose.

Jason looked around frantically for a rock or some other weapon. In his experience, such men meant trouble.

“We let you sleep,” the wrestler said. “You looked like death warmed up last night.”

“Yeah, death warmed up.” The other man chuckled. “But we’ve got to ask you questions now.”

“Don’t come near me!” cried Jason, inching toward the door.

“Whoa! Don’t go there,” said the wrestler, bounding over to pull the boy back from the edge. He carried him easily to the poker game, paying no attention to the blows and kicks Jason gave him.

“Settle down, kid. Haven’t you seen a guardian angel before?” said the man with the broken nose. He swept the beans into a Mason jar and screwed on the top. “The kidney beans are worth a dollar, the pintos five, and the limas ten,” he explained without being asked.

Jason crouched on the floor, sweating. “You don’t look like guardian angels.”

“That’s because we watch over Shin Bone. These are the shapes he’s comfortable with. Normally, we look like this.” The wrestler turned into a towering Presence in a white robe, with huge, rainbow-colored wings sweeping from one end of the boxcar to the other. In fact, he looked
exactly
like the stained-glass window in the cathedral near Jason’s group home. The boy covered his face and when he looked again, the wrestler was back.

“W-well,” Jason said, trying not to be afraid, “If y-you’re Shin Bone’s guardian angels, you did a rotten job last night.”

“See, that’s what we’ve got to discuss,” said the man with the broken nose. “By the way, my name’s Chicago Danny, and that’s Three Aces over there. We watch over people for the years allotted to them, and when their time’s up, we call them home. Shin Bone was supposed to board the train last night.”

“Only you showed up instead,” said Three Aces. “I assume you have his ticket.”

“Ticket?” Jason said faintly. He felt in his pants’ pocket and pulled out the rectangle of paper with light fizzing around the edges. TICKET TO RIDE, it said in swirling gold letters, and in finer print, ONE WAY.

“Thought so,” said Chicago Danny. “Problem is, it isn’t yours.”

“I didn’t steal it!” Jason protested.

“Never said you did, but it puts us in a pretty pickle. Why don’t you explain how it happened.”

And so Jason told them about the storm and finding the old man under the tree, the scrap of paper floating down the gutter, and how he ran from the cops. “Can’t we return and fix things up?” he asked.

“That’s a one-way ticket,” Three Aces pointed out. “Most trains go farther and farther into the past, until the bearer finds the place he was completely happy. That’s where he stays.”

“I can’t remember ever being happy,” said Jason, and he wasn’t angling for sympathy. It was simply true. He’d been born addicted to crack and placed in one foster home after another. No one wanted him because he wasn’t cute. As he grew older, he learned to spread his own misery around to make others unhappy. And he
did
steal, no matter what he told the angels, only not library books. That was how he’d ended up in the group home, one step away from Juvenile Hall. His life had been bad experience after bad experience, and there wasn’t a bit of it he wanted to repeat.

“You’re not reliving your past because that’s not your ticket,” explained Chicago Danny. “You’re going to where Shin Bone was happy. Looks like the first stop is the town of Amboy.”

The train pulled to a halt next to a cluster of houses and businesses. They got out and went into a café. Cowboys, truck drivers, and families on vacation crowded into booths with yellow plastic tables and vases full of yellow plastic flowers. A juke box played in a corner, with globes of colored light rippling around its edges.

“What’ll ya have, gents?” said the waitress, pencil poised over an order pad.

“I don’t have money,” Jason whispered to Chicago Danny.

“Sure you do. Look in your pocket,” the angel said. Jason pulled out a dollar bill.

“I’ll, uh, I’ll have a hamburger and a slice of apple pie— with ice cream,” Jason added, daringly. He was sure he didn’t have enough money, but the hamburger turned out to cost thirty-five cents and the pie
with
ice cream was only twenty-five. He looked out the window and saw a car with enormous tail fins, and chrome just about everywhere you could put chrome, pull up. A man Jason had seen only on midnight television got out.

“Isn’t that . . . ?” He hesitated.

“Elvis,” Three Aces said.

“But isn’t he . . . ?”

“Dead? Sure, and so is this town. They built the new freeway on the other side of those mountains, and one by one the businesses folded up. You’re seeing Amboy as it was when Shin Bone was here. This was one of the best days of his life.”

Elvis came in, and since all the other tables were full, he asked if he could sit with Jason and the angels. “
Sure
,” said Jason, thrilled beyond belief. He sat in a happy daze as Elvis ate three slices of pie with ice cream.

But it seemed this wasn’t the final destination for the train. Its whistle blew long and lonesome, and Jason, Chicago Danny, and Three Aces climbed aboard.

The next stop was Yuma, where they attended a rodeo and Jason rode a bronco for three minutes and won a prize. Then they went to Albuquerque and New Orleans, followed the Mississippi River up to St. Louis, and turned right to get to Chicago. “My town,” said Chicago Danny, “when I was alive.”

It was there Shin Bone had had the accident that ended his career. He’d been a fireman for the railroad. “He was the best,” Three Aces said. “He should have been promoted to engineer, but in those days a black man couldn’t get that job. One night he fell between two cars that were being coupled and got his leg smashed.”

“But he kept riding the rails,” said Chicago Danny. “Once you get that wandering spirit, it never goes away.”

At each stop Jason had a wonderful time, but sooner or later, no matter how much fun he was having, he would feel restless. He wanted to see what was around the next bend, over the next hill, beyond the horizon. Then Jason and the angels would get back on the train and travel on. Until they got to the farmhouse.

It was a rickety, falling-down structure at the bottom of a deep valley. Rows of scraggly corn grew next to lima beans, broad beans, and tomatoes. Chickens pecked their way through the vegetables, and a mangy hound lay on the porch. She looked up and thumped her bony tail.

“How can she know me?” whispered the boy.

“She knows Shin Bone,” replied Chicago Danny. “He loved that dog Beauty, and when she died, he was heartbroken.”

“I thought this was supposed to be a happy memory.”

“This is
before
.”

And now a skinny black woman came out onto the porch, followed by four raggedy kids and a pair of men, followed by a very old man and three more women with three more children, not counting the baby one of them carried.