"Hell." Jim ferociously leaned out. "I've saved up all day. Everyone's asleep so--hell!"
The music drifted by their windows. Goose pimples rose big as boils on Will's arms.
"That is church music. Changed."
"For cri-yi, I'm froze, let's go watch them set up!"
"At three A.M.? "
"At three A.M.!"
Jim vanished.
For a moment, Will watched Jim dance around over there, shirt uplifted, pants going on, while off in night country, panting, churning was this funeral train all black plumed cars, licorice-colored cages, and a sooty calliope clamoring, banging three different hymns mixed and lost, maybe not there at all.
"Here goes nothing!"
Jim slid down the drainpipe on his house, toward the sleeping lawns.
"Jim! Wait!"
Will thrashed into his clothes.
"Jim, don't go alone!"
And followed after.
Chapter 12
SOMETIMES YOU see a kite so high, so wise it almost knows the wind. It travels, then chooses to land in one spot and no other and no matter how you yank, run this way or that, it will simply break its cord, seek its resting place and bring you, blood-mouthed, running.
"Jim! Wait for me!"
So now Jim was the kite, the wild twine cut, and whatever wisdom was his taking him away from Will who could only run, earthbound, after one so high and dark silent and suddenly strange.
"Jim, here I come!"
And running, Will thought, Boy, it's the same old thing. I talk. Jim runs. I tilt stones, Jim grabs the cold junk under the stones and--lickety-split! I climb hills. Jim yells off church steeples. I got a bank account. Jim's got the hair on his head, the yell in his mouth, the shirt on his back and the tennis shoes on his feet. How come I think he's richer? Because, Will thought, I sit on a rock in the sun and old Jim, he prickles his arm-hairs by moonlight and dances with hoptoads. I tend cows. Jim tames Gila monsters. Fool! I yell at Jim. Coward! he yells back. And here we--go!
And they ran from town, across fields and both froze under a rail bridge with the moon ready beyond the hills and the meadows trembling with a fur of dew.
WHAM!
The carnival train thundered the bridge. The calliope wailed.
"There's no one playing it!" Jim stared up.
"Jim, no jokes!"
"Mother's honor, look!"
Going away, away, the calliope pipes shimmered with star explosions, but no one sat at the high key-board. The wind, sluicing ice-water air in the pipes, made the music.
The boys ran. The train curved away, gonging its undersea funeral bell, sunk, rusted, green-mossed, tolling, tolling. Then the engine whistle blew a great steam whiff and Will broke out in pearls of ice.
Way late at night Will had heard--how often?--train whistles jetting steam along the rim of sleep, forlorn, alone and far, no matter how near they came. Sometimes he woke to find tears on his cheek, asked why, lay back, listened and thought, Yes! they make me cry, going east, going west, the trains of far gone in country deeps they drown in tides of sleep that escape the towns.
Those trains and their grieving sounds were lost forever between stations, not remembering where they had been, not guessing where they might go, exhaling their last pale breaths over the horizon, gone. So it was with all trains, ever.