Waiting for Augusta (10 page)

“You heard the driver. A new bus is coming.”

“Not until tonight.”

Daddy cleared his throat. “I'm with the girl on this, Ben. Find a way to get going. We'll never get to the Masters at this rate.”

“You sure pick your times to start talking,” I said to Daddy.

“I've been talking since I met you. Don't be a turkey,”
Noni said. “There's something nudging at me about these tracks. It's a sign, maybe. I think we should follow them. Why wait around until eight o'clock at night for a bus that might run into another pig?”

“Because a bus is faster than walking.”

“So's a train.” She pointed far, far down the line, where a tiny dot had appeared. A train, heading our way. Heading east. Noni stood and started singing a low song.

My pencil stopped. I couldn't help but watch her and listen.

Gone wandering, Lord, got my wandering card,

Wandering, wonder why life's so hard,

Found my time on the rail, found a dry way to sail,

Gone wandering, Lord, to my home

Been trying to find my home,

And I'll die on the rail, in my home.

It was magic. The way she sang was magic. I'd never heard someone sing like that, with longing and hope and pain all blended up until you couldn't quite tell what you were hearing. Just that the words mattered.

The last note rang out low and mournful, and she looked lost when she met my eyes again. “It's an old hobo song. My daddy used to sing it while we watched trains go by behind our house. There's more, but that's all I can remember.” She
turned, and I saw her eyes squinting, like she was trying to make something come into focus.

“My grandma's café used to feed the railroad hobos,” I said, “back when they'd come into Hilltop to work the fields. She told stories about how they'd appear and disappear when she was a girl, coming and going without any warning. She said some days she'd been tempted to leap on a passing train herself, just to see where they all went when they left town on the tracks.”

I remembered how Daddy had hopped onto Grandma Clay's stories, calling the hobos Luckies. Saying they had all the freedom in the world. Nothing tying them down.

The train was getting closer, changing from a dot to a thin black line.

Noni nudged me with her elbow. “Let's hop that train, Benjamin Putter. We've got to get to Georgia.”

“We've got to get to Georgia,” Daddy agreed.

“Couple of best friends, aren't you,” I mumbled.

“What?” both he and Noni asked.

That's right
, the train tracks agreed with me.
They're just using you, the both of them. And did you notice how your daddy only talks when he wants something from you?

You're being used, all right,
the bench said.
But I guess you'll take attention any way you can get it, 'cause deep down you know he thinks you're worth—

“Nothing,” I said to all of them.

The train was still a ways down the track, but now I could make out mounds of black in each of the open freight cars. Coal. Smoke puffed out of the front like our smoker at home and it could have been a moving barbecue pit. The golf ball in my throat twisted in place until I reached up and rubbed on it.
Go away
, I said silently.
Make me
, it said back.

“Noni, you really want us to just jump on a coal train?”

“Yep.”

The train was close now, probably less than a minute before the engine car would come charging past us. Coal pieces were piled in each one, some cars looking less filled than others, like those'd gotten less from a bad pour off the filler. Either that or the coal on those cars had done a better job of settling in for the ride. There must have been tons and tons of it with the number of cars on that train. “Where's all that coal going?” I asked, half to myself.

“One way to find out,” Daddy answered.

“We can't,” I told him. “We shouldn't.”

He sighed, and the disappointment hit me right in the gut, just like it always did. One sigh was all it took. I wondered if Daddy knew how much power was in his sighs, even his dead ones.

“Look.” Noni's eyes flashed back and forth over the train as the engine car passed us. “There. We just run alongside and haul ourselves onto a ladder. There's enough space to hunker down and ride between cars on the platform, or climb on top
and sit there. It'll be an adventure.” She yanked me up.

I shook my head. “No, we'll just wait. We already paid for the bus.”

But she stepped toward the train anyway. “We're getting on this train, Benjamin Putter.”

“I'm starting to like her. Let's get on the train, Ben,” said Daddy.

“You don't even know for sure where it's going. No,” I said to both of them. “We'll wait for the next bus.”

“Listen to me, Benjamin Putter,” Noni said, ripping the backpack from my arms.

“Hey! Give that back!” I lunged toward her, but she spun and I lost my balance and fell, pieces of track gravel digging into my palms, breaking my fall.

Her hair whipped back with the force of the passing cars, a few pieces clinging to her face. “No!” she shouted. “My daddy watched all kinds of trains, but none made him sing the way a passing coal train would. This is a sign. I have to—”

She turned while I got to my feet again, and the rest of her words faded with the sound of the train shrieking past. Looking back over her shoulder at me, she started jogging alongside the train. “You have to trust me!” she called out. “It's better for both of us this way.”

I caught up and tried to snatch the backpack, but I was afraid I'd knock her the wrong way and she'd get run over. “Give him back!”

She took the bag off her shoulder, swinging it like she was ready to throw.

I ran after her. “Hey, stop! The bag'll fall and get run over! The rest of your precious pork is in there, not to mention my daddy's ASHES!”

She lowered her arm, even as she kept jogging, and I thought I had her. The train was starting to speed up as the front of it left town and she'd miss her chance. But instead of giving it back to me, she put both backpack straps on and ran faster. She looked back, her voice slipping in and out of the air around me. “You . . . not about me . . . about helping him . . .”

I didn't know what she was talking about. All I knew was that she wanted to take my daddy on a train ride to God knows where. And then I'd be left behind, watching him go off somewhere without me, like all those times he'd spent playing golf. Like a ball and grass and a set of metal rods were better than me. Like golf was so great, he could barely tear himself away to come home.

“Noni, please stop!”

She turned again and smiled a strange, sad, hopeful smile, then caught a train rung. Hauling herself up the ladder, she heaved the pack over the side of the car. The bag bounced once, twice, then lodged itself in a corner. Without pausing, she scooted back down the rungs and let go, tumbling to the side of the tracks while I slowed to a shocked
stop. Ten cars passed me before my head fully processed that Noni'd actually let go of the pack.

Daddy was gone.

So was my paint box.

So was the rest of our pork.

I had the strangest feeling that most all of me was gone along with those things, and the part of me left standing on the side of the tracks was nothing more than an empty plate full of gnawed-on bones.

Then Noni scrambled over, grabbed my hand, and looked me in the eye. “Sorry I had to do that. Get running.”

I'd never been a fast runner, and it'd take a miracle to catch up and not get killed trying to climb on. “We'll never make it.”

She yanked me. “That doesn't mean you don't try anyway. This trip is gonna get old real quick if I have to keep telling you what to do. Now,
run
.”

Metal scraped against the train tracks, chugging and shrieking and creaking and rushing to haul its load far away. Daddy was leaving me again along with it, that was certain, but this time was different. This time I had the chance to run after him.

I took it.

P
umping my legs after Noni, I watched her hand reach for a metal side ladder rung and miss every time another full car passed us. Three times she did that before catching hold and swinging up to another rung, then climbing over to the narrow platform that jutted out at the end of each car. She turned to extend her hand again, this time to me. She was yelling something.

“What?”

“Close your eyes! Just
run
!”

I did. Once again it was like Noni had woven a spell, her magic making me do things that Benjamin Putter knew were wrong and were completely outside the laws of life besides. Things like
don't open your backpack for strangers
, and
don't let people make out like you don't speak
, and
don't run beside a moving train with your eyes shut
. But somehow, it worked. With my eyes closed and my legs pumping, I became some kind of superhero—The Incredible Flying Ben “Bobby Jones” Putter. I
became someone my Daddy would be proud to clink a glass to.

By the time I grazed Noni's fingers with my own, opened my eyes, and grabbed the side ladder, my legs were moving so fast that I practically flew through the air and landed on the bottom rung. Reaching out one foot and getting a tight hold on the end of the train car, I swung around and squeezed in beside her on the platform. We crouched there and caught our breath, laughing in shock and relief, two runaways from Alabama on a train that went steadily about its business, not knowing or caring we were there.

Blurred tracks flew by in the open space between cars. A bar of thick metal and a heavy latch connected us to the next box of coal. Noni crossed over the bar and latch, and I followed, hugging the next car's end ladder like it was my mama. When she started up the ladder, I followed again.

We piled onto a sea of black stones and let the wind cool us for a brief moment. I'd never seen Alabama from a coal train, and it looked different from the landscape I'd passed in the bus. It felt different, too, watching growing fields of corn on one side and budding tobacco and farmhouses on the other, me sitting beside a girl and not talking, just looking. The colors were everywhere and
every
where and
everywhere
. I opened my eyes wider, trying to take in the whole picture at once.

Bluewhitelightskygreenbrowndarkfieldyellowpurplebluepinkflowergreenbrowngold
.

It was a wonder like I'd never seen, and if I hadn't been hunting my dead daddy's ashes, and if my paint box wasn't in the backpack alongside him, I believe I would've liked to take out my watercolors and make an abstract painting of the view for May Talbot and see what kind of story words she picked for it.

Sounds nice
, said the view.
But you
are
hunting your dead daddy's ashes.

“Right,” I said. “Let's go.”

Over the coal piles, down the end ladder to the small platform, across connecting bars and latches, up the next car's ladder. Repeat and repeat and repeat. Though I looked ahead for Daddy, I couldn't make him out in the line of black boxes in front of us.

“What if he fell?”

“He didn't.”

She might have been lying, but it can get tiring on your heart to go around thinking maybe people were always lying to you.
I'll be back by supper
, Daddy would say before staying out after hitting balls, playing guitar with friends instead of coming home to me and Mama.
Your daddy'll be home to take you fishing, don't you worry
, Mama would say before shaking her head and gritting her teeth.
More painting time
, she'd say, like it was what I wanted to hear.
You know your daddy loves you anyway
. That last one wasn't a lie, because maybe she thought that was something she knew. But love isn't a fact,
it's a feeling, and the feeling that my daddy loved me was like catching fog. It was there, but I couldn't get a solid hold on it. I think maybe it was that extra word that made it all seem slippery. It was the
anyway
that made it feel like a lie.

“Okay,” I told Noni.

We went up and down eighteen coal cars before we found Daddy. Noni and I were both filthy-exhausted by then, covered in coal dust from head to toe. It was well worth the time and effort when I saw the backpack tucked into the corner where Noni'd tossed it. The sight of the urn nearly made me cry, and my neck lump moved a little, rotating a slow dance of relief.

“Benjamin?” Daddy coughed himself awake from whatever blank space he'd been in. “Where the heck am I now?”

“You're on a coal train, Daddy. Heading east.”

“You jumped the train?”

“Yep.”

There was a pause while my father considered me. “Good boy,” he said.

With a smile that stretched right through the lump in my throat and into the pool of lumps surrounding me, I felt my insides get filled up until I swelled with that
good boy
. That
good boy
was like a long drink of cool water. That
good boy
made me wonder if I couldn't keep my daddy around if only I could keep finding pigs to butcher and trains to jump on. Maybe I could become who Daddy needed me to be and maybe he could do
the same for me and maybe he wouldn't have to go anywhere because he would realize that he'd belonged with me all along.

“He okay?” Noni asked.

I nodded. “Noni? About you taking my daddy . . .”

“Look, I'm sorry,” she said. “I didn't know what else to do. But we're a team, okay? I'm going to help you, and you'll help me. So far I've been carrying more than my load of the helping part, but you'll get there.” She put her hand on my shoulder and leaned close. “I've got faith in you, Benjamin Putter.”