Hippomobile! (12 page)

 

Grandpa Virgil finished the song in a flourish of notes, and we clapped our hands sore. And that's when you could say the picnic got into full swing.

Everybody made long arms in every direction to get to the food they desired, and everyone was reaching so fast you would've thought we were gonna get tied up in one big arm knot. Once we all had a full plate, we picked up our pitchforks and saws and began filling our shirts, and for a time ain't no one spoke, and the only thing you heard was chewing, slurping, an occasional burp, and cutlery knocking against each other like a sword fight.

If we hadn't been departing after eating that day, we would've played washers
¹⁴
and I Spy and sardines, and then listened to Grandpa Virgil chatting a little more on his box of teeth and witnessed some good toe-smithing
¹⁵
on the part of our grandparents. But we
were
departing that day. So what happened instead was that we heard the toot of a train whistle, and everybody jumped up from the table all at once. Our grandmas hurried over to us and brushed off our crumbs and tucked in our shirts and wiped the corners of our mouths and the bottoms of our chins and tidied us up all uncomfortable like we were going to church. Then we all stood there lined up straight as flagpoles two feet from the edge of the platform and waited eight more long minutes until we saw the lead locomotive come around the bend and then stop on a dime right smack in front of us. And the screeching it made to do so just about split our ears in two.

 

 

 

 

HERE'S A QUESTION FOR YOU
. How many times can twenty-eight grandmas tell you to be careful and to be good and to not misbehave and to pay attention and to listen to what the train engineer tells you and to be careful? Well, the answer is such a big number that you ain't gonna be able to pronounce it out until you're at least in high school.

But somehow we managed to break free from our grandmas. Our grandpas who were talking to the engineer stepped aside, and we climbed straight up these rungs welded onto the outside of the locomotive and climbed in through a door that if you ask us was awful small for such a huge train as the one we was now on.

“Howdy,” said the man sitting there. Then he turned and aimed a stream of juice
¹
straight into a coffee can down by his feet. We knew it went in because it rang out like rain tinkling on one of them rusty hubcaps laying in the square.

“Hi,” we said, and sorta held on to each other just in case the other one felt a bit scared.

“Call me Fitz,” he said, and tipped his hat that said
MILES
on it. His hair was all matted down underneath in a way our Mom would never allow us to leave the Any Hotel with.

We didn't have the guts yet to tell him what he should call us, but then he smiled at us just standing there and showed us a mouth full of brown teeth, and so we smiled right back at him. Then he shook our hands so tight, we were certain we heard knuckles snap and our smiles turned into more of a grimace.

“Welcome to CNABTB!” Fitz said.

And we said, “Huh?”

And Fitz said, “Explain it to ya later.
²
Now you better lean out the window and wave to your folk. 'Cause we're outta here.”

So we did like we were told, just like our grandmas and grandpas told us to do. The window was even tinier than the door was, and we could barely squeeze our two heads out of it. But when we did, we saw how high up we were and that we must've been 15 feet up above the tracks. Mom would've undergone a fainting spell for sure.

Whatever our grandmas and grandpas were saying to us, we couldn't hear none of it on account of the locomotive noise. That was fine with us, since we figured it was the same stuff they'd already been telling us hundreds of times. So we just waved and saw our grandmas waving with their handkerchiefs, and our grandpas lifted their hats solemn off their heads.

Gradually and slowly they turned smaller and smaller, and then more parts of Wymore came into view. And we was like, “Hey, look, there's the Any!” and “There's the water tower!” And soon enough the whole town grew so small that we could cover it up first with our hand, then with our fist, and then with just our thumb. And then when we took our thumb away, the town was gone altogether, and we were officially on an adventure.

“Take a sit-down,” Fitz told us.

There was a seat next to his, and when we sat on it, it was like sitting up on a throne, that's how big and cushy it was. It easily fit the two of us plus our school bag in the middle. That's when we looked out ahead of us through the windshield for the first time and saw the two long lines of rails we were traveling on. And the farther you looked at them, the closer and closer they got together, until way up ahead of you they turned into a single dot.

“Pretty amazin', ain't it?” Fitz said, like he knew what we were thinking.

We nodded our heads.

“So, I hear you's carryin' somethin' special in that school bag of yours.”

We just stared down at it and maybe held it a little tighter. How did he know?

“Old gentleman at the station told me about it whiles you was being tended to by the ladies.”

“Oh,” we said. Which was only the third word we'd yet spit out, and they'd all been roughly that small.

“Said I'm to take you down to Maggie's Crossing. Hand you off to Mr. Buzzard.”

“Yes, please,” we managed to say.

“Yes, please,” Fitz repeated, and slapped his leg and laughed like we said something funny. “You two kids are all right.” Then he turned his head some and nailed that coffee can again.

We sat looking straight ahead without moving our heads a single notch.

“Maggie ain't gonna like that none, tell you that much.”

We didn't ask him how come, but he told us, anyway.

“She don't like it none when a mile of coal sits there rumblin' on her land. Even been known to come out with a shotgun. Wearin' them big boots of hers stickin' out from under her skirt.”

Our throats went dry. Why didn't Pops tell us nothing about Maggie? And nothing about Fitz? And we thought that we maybe should've asked Mom first.

“Still lives in a dugout, she does. You two know what a dugout is? And I ain't talkin' baseball.”

Our eyes glanced over at him, but our heads didn't move none.

“It's like a little hut dug right into the side of hill. Nuthin' but a dirt floor and a potbelly stove. And yet they say she's sittin' on natural gas worth millions of dollars. You believe that?”

Our shoulders went up and down a little bit.

“Good ol' Maggie,” Fitz said, and shook his head and laughed some more.

We asked each other what natural gas was and if it had something to do with what happens when you eat too many whistleberries.

“What you kids whisperin' over there?”

“Nothing,” we said. But it turned out he heard us, anyway.

“Well, I ain't right sure exactly what natural gas is, neither. Alls I know is it's fuel, like oil, and you can get it out of the ground.”

“Oh,” we said. Another big, long word.

“I tell you what. It's about time we had some fun here. Whaddaya say?”

We didn't say nothing, but it sounded good to us.

“You think you two is able to help ol' Fitz out some?”

We first looked at each other to make sure we thought it'd be okay. Then we said, “Yes.” Slowly we were starting to warm to the situation.

“Good deal,” he said. “Now, see that there post coming up down on your right. Gotta a black
X
on it?”

We did, indeed.

“Means we got a grade crossin' comin' up.”

A grade crossing?

“Just means a road of some sort is gonna be crossin' the tracks. And when that happens, you know what we gotta do?”

We reckoned we did. “Blow the whistle!”

“Right on, brother!” Fitz said. And then he said, “And sister.” Then he did a double-take and said, “Hey, wait a sec. You two twins or somethin'?”

That got us giggling, which got Fitz laughing. This trip of ours was beginning to look better and better.

“Now, take a look at this here,” Fitz said. He meant this whole big panel of buttons and knobs and switches and lights that he was sitting right in front of. “See this mushroom thing?”

We told him we did. It wasn't no real mushroom, but it sure did look like a big metal one, and it grew straight up out of the middle of the control panel.

“Good,” he said. “Now, take your hands on it, and when I say three, use some of them muscles you got and plunge it down. Got it?”

“Got it!”

“All right, now. One . . . two . . . and . . . THREE!”

We pushed hard, and that mushroom sank down beneath our push, and out came the long, loud toot we'd been hearing all our lives. The sound reverberated up from the floor and through our shoes and up our socks and even into the seats of our britches so that it tickled.

“Now let off and play her again.”

We followed his directions, and once again our train howled, and once again our britches tingled.

“Good goin',” Fitz said. “Now give it just one more short tap for good measure.”

We did that, too, and within no more than five seconds, we crossed a deserted gravel road with a rusty
STOP, LOOK & LISTEN
sign posted right next to it.

“You two is pretty good musicians. That was an F-sharp you just played.”

We looked at each other and smiled.

Then Fitz said, “Always my dream to blow the horn in a jazz band. But wasn't meant to be.” He said that more to himself and his panel of knobs than to us. “Ain't no matter, though. Now, just sit back and enjoy the ride.”

So we hopped back up on our throne and did what we were told and stared out the window at nothing but grass and sky and the two strips of iron cutting straight through it. We had lots of time to look and stare because we weren't even going that fast. A big number on a dial on Fitz's panel said 38 mph. And when you're in the middle of all that space, you can hardly tell you're moving anywhere. We reckoned it was a bit like being on a boat out in the middle of the ocean. We'd never seen so much nothing in all our lives.

“You mean this is what it looks like where we live?” we asked Fitz.

And Fitz said, “Yup. Pretty amazin', ain't it?”

While we took it all in, Fitz was constantly busy twisting knobs, flipping switches, and pushing buttons. But at some point he had a free moment and a free hand to offer us a container of smoked trout. “Caught and smoked it myself,” he said.

Fish? Growing up in a place as dry as Wymore, the only fish we'd ever seen was in our schoolbooks.

“You just gotta know where to look for 'em,” Fitz said. “Now, go ahead and use your fingers. The queen ain't comin' to dinner.”

So even though we were still full of potluck, we thanked him and opened the container. And what we saw there was a real honest-to-goodness dead fish. If it hadn't been missing its tail and its head, you would've thought it could've swam away.

“Go on,” Fitz said. “It ain't gonna bite ya.”

And so, well, we started picking at the fish with our fingers just like he said we should. And you know what? It was real good! And so smoky that it dang near made our lungs cough.

“Just watch out for little bones,” Fitz said, then blew the whistle, and we looked out the window, and sure enough, there was one of them posts with an
X
on it, just like he said there would be.

Time passed, and even though to us it didn't ever look like we were going past anything, Fitz kept pointing out landmarks to us left and right. “There's an old Indian burial mound right there.”

We looked and squinted, but couldn't see no mound.

“See that little hump back off that way?” he asked a few minutes later.

“Hump?”

“Covered ammo during World War II.”

Wasn't that in the last century?

“Look at that red-tail on that cottonwood over there!”

He kept going on like that, and that's how we got to see all the things that Fitz saw and we didn't.

And then there was all the towns we went through. Or rather what was left of them. Bunch of places we ain't never heard of. Hyannis. Mullen. Jewell. Ord. Yellville. Usually nothing left but a single shed or one lonesome brick building or a patch of blacktop stretching from nowhere to nothing or a tall grain elevator no longer in service. Our favorite was the town of Wunce.

“Check it out,” Fitz said, and pointed. “Ain't nothing left but that there yellow
DEAD END
sign you see sticking up outta the bluestem.”

“How come you know all this stuff?” we finally asked.

“Been working this stretch over ten years is how.”