Though it was a hot day, the sprawled man wore an overcoat. It was a dirty thing of pale green canvas much patched and mended. The first man dipped into one of the outside pockets and came up with a labeled bottle of amber liquid. He unscrewed the cap and sniffed the contents and tipped the bottle to his lips and drank.
Jake whispered in my ear, “Come on.”
The man below who’d lifted his head to drink must have heard Jake because he tilted his head a bit more and eyed us where we gazed at him through the crossties above. He lowered the bottle. “Dead,” he said. He nodded toward the man on the ground. “As a doornail. You boys want to, you come on down here and see.”
It was not an order but an invitation and I stood to accept.
I look back now and I wonder at this. I have raised children of my own and the thought of a child of mine or a grandchild descending to be with a stranger that way makes me go rigid with worry. I didn’t think of myself as a careless boy. What was inside me was a wonderment desperate to be satisfied. A dead man, that was a thing you didn’t see every day.
Jake grabbed my arm and tried to drag me away but I shook him off.
“We should g-g-g-go,” he said.
“You go then.” I started down the slope of the railroad bed toward the riverbank.
“F-F-F-Frank,” Jake said with fury.
“Go on home,” I said.
But my brother would not desert me and as I stumbled down the bank Jake stumbled after me.
He was Indian the man who now held the bottle. This wasn’t unusual because many Indians lived in the valley of the Minnesota River. The Dakota Sioux had populated that land long before white people came and the white people had by hook and by crook stolen it from them. The government had created small reservations farther west but Indian families scattered themselves along the whole length of the river.
He motioned us closer and indicated a place to sit on the other side of the body.
He said, “Ever seen a dead man?”
“Lots,” I said.
“Oh?”
I could tell he didn’t believe me. I said, “My father’s a minister. He buries people all the time.”
“Laid out in fine boxes with their faces painted,” the Indian said. “This is how it is before they get them ready for the coffin.”
“He looks like he’s sleeping,” I said.
“This here was a good death.”
“Good?”
“I was in the war,” the Indian said. “The First World War. The war to end all wars.” He looked at the bottle and drank. “I saw men dead in ways no man should die.”
I said, “How did he die?”
The Indian shrugged. “Just died. Was sitting there talking one minute. The next he was lying there like that. Fell over. Heart attack maybe. Maybe a stroke. Who knows? Dead’s dead that’s all she wrote.” He drank some more.
“What’s his name?”
“Name? I don’t really know. Know what he called himself. Skipper. Like he was a sea captain or something. Hell, maybe he was. Who knows?”
“Was he your friend?”
“About as much friend as I got, I suppose.”
“He doesn’t look old enough to die.”
The Indian laughed. “It’s not like voting or a driver’s license, boy.”
He began again to go through the dead man’s pockets. From inside the coat he pulled a photograph much handled and faded. He looked at it a long time then turned it over and squinted. “There’s writing on the back,” he said. “Lost my glasses a while back. Can you read it?”
“Sure,” I said.
He held it out toward me across the dead man’s body. I took it and looked at it and Jake who was next to me leaned over to look too. It was black and white and was of a woman with a baby in her arms. She wore a plain dress that appeared gray in the photo with a pattern of white daisies. She was pretty and was smiling and behind her was a barn. I turned the photograph over and read out loud the writing on the backside.
October 23, 1944. Johnny’s first birthday. We miss you and hope you can be home for Christmas. Mary.
I handed the photograph back. The Indian’s hand shook a little and I saw that his palms were dirty and his nails ragged. He said, “Probably called to service in the second war to end all wars. Hell, maybe he really was a sea captain.” The Indian drank some more and leaned his head back against the embankment and looked up at the trestle and said, “Know what I like about railroad tracks? They’re always there but they’re always moving.”
“Like a river,” Jake said.
I was surprised that he spoke and that he spoke without a stutter which was a thing he seldom did around strangers. The Indian looked at my brother and nodded as if Jake had spoken some great wisdom. “Like a steel river,” he said. “That’s smart, son, real smart.”
Jake looked down, embarrassed by the compliment. The Indian reached across the dead man and across me and put his hand with its dirty palm and ragged nails on Jake’s leg. I was startled by the familiarity of the gesture and I looked at the stranger’s hand on my brother’s leg and the realization of the danger inherent in the situation descended on me like a flame and I leaped up dislodging the offending hand and grabbed my brother and yanked him to his feet and dragged him up the slope of the riverbank to the tracks.
Behind us the Indian called out, “Didn’t mean anything, boys. Nothing at all.”
But I was running then and pulling Jake with me and I was thinking about that Indian’s hand and seeing it in my mind like a spider crawling Jake’s leg. As fast as I could force us we returned to Halderson’s Drugstore. The men were still in the back room drinking beer from brown bottles. When we stumbled in and stood before them breathless they ceased talking.
Gus frowned at me and said, “What is it, Frank?”
“We were down on the tracks,” I said between gasps for air.
Doyle gave a grin stupid and satisfied. “His old man don’t let them play on the tracks,” he said.
Gus ignored him and said evenly, “What about the tracks, Frank?”
I spoke with an urgency that had been building all the way from the trestle and that had been fed by my rumination on the Indian’s hand too familiar on Jake’s leg and by my own guilt at the danger in which I’d placed my brother. I said, “A stranger was there. A man.”
The faces of all three men changed and changed in the same frightening way. The stupid satisfaction left Doyle. Gus’s dogged patience fled. Halderson abandoned his mild demeanor and his eyes became like chambered bullets. All three men stared at us and in their faces I could see my own fear reflected and magnified. Magnified to a degree I had not anticipated. Magnified perhaps by all the sick possibility that grown men knew that I did not. Magnified probably by the alcohol they’d consumed. Magnified certainly by the responsibility they felt as men to protect the children of their community.