“Yeah, right.”
I hated the man for that. For putting Jake through torture and then dismissing the result.
Gus said, “Their father doesn’t let them play on the tracks.”
“You think they don’t go there anyway?” Doyle shot me a look that seemed to contain a whisper of conspiracy, as if he knew me and didn’t entirely condemn me for what he knew. As if in a way we were brothers.
I took a step back, hating the man more every minute. “Can we go?”
“Yes.” Doyle dismissed us as he might have a couple of suspects he’d decided not to collar.
I put my arm around Jake who was staring angrily at the floor and I turned him. We left the men. Left Doyle laughing quietly and meanly at our backs.
Outside the day sweltered. The sun threw heat from above and the sidewalks gathered it and roasted the soles of our sneakers. The tar that filled the cracks on the pavement had turned to black goo and we were careful to watch our step. We passed Bon Ton’s barbershop where the easy voices of men and the scent of hair oil drifted through the open door. We passed the bank which had been robbed by Pretty Boy Floyd and Ma Barker’s boys in the thirties and which had long been the source of a good deal of my own daydreaming. We passed store after store deserted in the drowse of that hot day in late June. We kept to the shade of the awnings and didn’t talk and Jake stared at the sidewalk and fumed.
We left the shops behind and walked Main Street toward Tyler. The houses on the hills were old and many of them Victorian and, though the heavy curtains were drawn against the heat, every once in a while we caught the sound of a baseball game broadcast from the cool dark inside. We turned down Tyler toward the Flats. I could feel Jake’s anger hot as the concrete under our feet.
“Forget him,” I said. “He’s an asshole.”
“Don’t s-s-s-say that.”
“But he is.”
“That word I mean.”
“Asshole?”
Jake shot me a killing look.
“You shouldn’t let him get to you. He’s nobody.”
“Nobody’s n-n-nobody,” Jake said.
“Hell everybody’s nobody. And I know I said hell.”
Grain elevators rose beside the tracks on the Flats. Tall and white they were connected by catwalks and conveyor belts. There was a stark kind of beauty in the way they stood against the sky like sculptures made of bone. Next to them ran a siding where the hopper cars were rolled so they could be filled with grain but that afternoon the rails were empty and the elevators deserted. We strolled over the tracks at the crossing on Tyler. Jake kept walking toward home. I stopped and turned and began to follow my shadow stubby and black along the rails toward the east.
Jake said, “What are you doing?”
“What’s it look like?”
“You’re not supposed to play on the railroad tracks.”
“Not playing. Just walking. You coming or you going to stand there and cry?”
“I’m not crying.”
I walked a rail like a tightrope. Walked through waves of heat. Walked in the fragrance that rose up from the hot rock of the roadbed and the creosote of the crossties.
“And you’re not coming either,” I said.
“I’m coming.”
“Then come on.”
His shadow caught up with mine and he walked the other rail and together we walked out of the Flats and though we did not know it we were walking toward the second death that summer.
• • •
The valley of the Minnesota River was carved over ten thousand years ago by great floods released from the glacial Lake Agassiz which covered an area in Minnesota and North Dakota and central Canada larger than the state of California. The drain was called the River Warren and it cut deep and wide into the land through which it ran. What’s left now is only a wisp of that great river. In summer the land along its banks is green with soy beans and cornstalks and fields of rye that roll in the wind with the liquidity of an ocean. There are stands of old deciduous trees whose branches cup the nests of Forster’s terns and black terns and great blue herons and egrets and bald eagles and warblers and other birds so ordinary and profuse that they fill the air like dandelion fluff. The river runs nearly four hundred miles and it runs brown. It flows out of Lac qui Parle. The Lake That Speaks. At its end are the cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul.
To this day for much of its length the river is shadowed by railroad. To a thirteen-year-old kid in 1961 that set of tracks seemed to reach to a horizon from beyond which came the sound of the world calling.
We walked to a place half a mile outside the Flats where a long trestle bridged the river. Wild rye and blackberry thickets and thistle grew to the edge of the railroad bed. Sometimes people fished from the trestle though it was a dangerous thing to do. This was where Bobby Cole had been killed.
I stopped and Jake said, “What do you want to do?”
“I don’t know.”
The truth was that I was looking for evidence of a thing I hadn’t considered before. Bobby Cole was not a fisherman and so to my mind he’d come there looking to eat the blackberries that were ripe or to sit on the trestle and watch the river run below and look for the carp and catfish and gar that sometimes broke the surface. That’s what I did there and Jake when he came with me. Or we’d toss a stick into the river and try to hit it with a harvest of rocks gathered from between the railroad ties. But Officer Doyle had speculated there was something more sinister in what happened to Bobby than just the tragedy of a boy too lost in his daydreams to hear the thunder of death approaching. That had me wondering.
Jake said, “Want to throw rocks?”
“No. Hush. Listen.”
From down the riverbank near the trestle came a snapping like the break of a million tiny bones. A large animal was forcing its way through the brush. We sometimes found places along the river where deer had bedded and the flattened vegetation still carried the outlines of their bodies. We didn’t move and our shadows roosted on the rails. From under a willow that overhung the bank and that was surrounded by bulrushes a man emerged plucking burrs from his clothing as he came. He seemed old to me because his hair was no longer black but the dull color of a long-circulated five-cent piece. He wore dirty khakis and a sleeveless undershirt and he swore at the burrs snagged in his clothing. He disappeared under the embankment where the rails crossed the river. I crept forward onto the trestle and knelt and peered down through the gap between the first two sets of crossties. Jake knelt beside me. Directly below us the man had seated himself on the dry clay of the riverbank and next to him was sprawled another man. The second man looked as if he was sleeping and the man who’d come from the bulrushes began going through the sleeping man’s pockets. Jake tugged at my sleeve and pointed back down the tracks indicating that he thought we ought to leave. I shook my head and returned to watching the activity below.