Page 48 of Boy Blue
Someone had told me the Reserve was at the top of a rise. Logic told me the train would be going slow up that rise. But I didn’t know. Nobody I knew or had ever heard of had made it this far. I slid on my bottom to the tracks, grabbing at wet grass, and waited right by the steel rails, shining in the lightning, slick with rain.
The first engine thundered past, chuffing a diesel scent at me. Two more chugged right behind. A scream of metal on metal, the chunk-chunk sound where the cars were hooked together. Sparks beneath the trucks, flickering like fireflies.
I watched in the lighting, scraping my hair back from my face. And saw a flatcar coming. It had a bulkhead at either end, but there was nothing between them. The train chugged along. Lightning flared sharply in the rain-drenched sky.
The bulkhead had a ladder along the side of it, and as the train slowed, it was as if the ladder was an invitation. I didn’t know how far I’d get being so exposed, but I would get somewhere that wasn’t where I was.
I grabbed the ladder and climbed up and didn’t let myself think about it as I held onto that ladder with one hand and eased my leg around the bulkhead in the dark. Where I found a solid wood floor. I landed there as if I’d been practicing the movement all my life. I sat cross-legged in the lee of the bulkhead as the train picked up speed and headed north.
It was only later that I realized the Reserve was less than fifty miles from Richmond. That the train I’d been on had gone close to my childhood home, where my parents would have beennestled in their beds, sweetly slumbering with the knowledge that their youngest and now only son was tightly locked up and getting the just punishment his delinquent gay heart deserved.
I had realized I was gay just about the time my brother did. We never really talked about it. The best defense in our house was to divide and conquer. Be your own man. Never squeal. Know nothing. Admit to nothing. Just yes, sir and yes, ma’am, and when guests came over for bocce and sparkling wine, you put on your white lawn clothes and joined in with a smile on your face.
I hadn’t gone to art class. My parents hadn’t allowed me any creative stuff, even in high school. It was all math and history and politics. I didn’t mind the heavy learning, but it would have been nice to be allowed other things. Though I did sneak it into my life.
Cameron caught me drawing once or twice, standing in the open doorway to my room—no closed doors to our bedrooms in that house—watched me draw a fox I’d seen on the back lawn and, without telling me I was terrible or faking it or that I’d get holy hell, he went away. That was how he could best love me. By not drawing attention to myself. Did he draw it to himself? I could never figure it out, but I did know he was a rebel to the end.
Sitting against the bulkhead of that flatcar, I waited until dawn to throw away those clogs and those pants. One clog on either side of the slow-moving train, ten minutes apart. The pants in the river as the train went over a bridge.
The train paused to show me rail-signs that indicated I was just outside Staunton. Which meant that I’d be passing into Ohio. It was September. I was heading north. I’d need warm clothes. Maybe I should have headed south.
As the train slowed, passing other engines and boxcars and flatbed cars, I was also beneath lights. Yard lights. A watertower. A warehouse. And laughed. I was as findable as if there’d been a spotlight thrown on me.
I could always, always, hop a train going south. My life was mine. Yes, it felt precarious at that moment, enough to make me want to go back to the Reserve, where at least I knew what was what. Out here? Any step could take me straight down to a worse hell than the Reserve. But really, anywhere was better than that.
CHAPTER 21
blue
Imade it to Chicago, eventually. It took me three days, and I didn’t sleep the whole way. Chicago was a rough city. I’d been there once or twice with my family to go up the Sears Tower and to go to the Museum of Science and Industry. My parents shook hands with the people they met. We ate deep-dish pizza.
This time was different. I slunk away from the rail yard, east of downtown, and made myself invisible as I walked. It wasn’t hard to blend in with the great unwashed because there were so many of them. In alleyways. In tenements along the tracks. Sprawled out at bus stops. This was different for me because my previous trips had involved white napkins at dinner. Shined shoes. Sleek black taxis. Credit cards. Doormen.
I stole. Not from people like Mike, who were starving. But from people who looked like it wouldn’t matter if their wallet went missing. Or maybe it would. I’d never find out, so I didn’t care.
I bought a nondescript gray hoodie from a guy selling stuff out of a shipping cart on West 26thStreet. Bought an orangefrom a Hispanic lady selling fruit beneath a bright red umbrella. Ate it while walking, juice dripping along my wrists.
I bought a poor boy from a steak shop on a corner. Then threw away the wallet at the Chicago River, traffic zooming behind me on Wells Street, and realized where I was going. Or where my feet had been taking me. The Ritz-Carlton, just off Navy Pier, had been where my family stayed when in town.
I couldn’t even afford to look at the lobby, let alone get a room there. But I kept going, and when I arrived, footsore, starving, sweating, I realized I’d come to get my bearings.
The tall buildings offered no shelter. I stood out like the runaway bum I was. I spent the night beneath a bench in Lakefront Park, a spot on the map I’d only glanced at from the back seat of whatever taxi I had been in on previous trips. Nobody found me. I was invisible. Didn’t exist. And I liked it fine that way.
In the morning, a September mist settling on the beech trees and oak trees casting shade, and soft willows draping the ground, I knew I needed to head south for the winter. Then head north for the summer. Or head west, though that part of the country was mostly a mystery to me.
I limped along those first few months, making a boxcar boy's life on my own. Riding the rails. Sleeping rough. Hiding on top of boxcars when the train I was on would roll through a rail yard, slowing down to pick up freight.
I dodged rail bulls, learned to get off a train to get food and to get back on before the engines started growling because they meant to be going. The days blurred into each other. I froze at night. Sweated during the day, thinking I ought to get off because I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing.
Then one day, in February, I hopped off when the train slowed down in a rail yard somewhere in the South. I quickly learned, walking east, that I was in New Orleans. I thoughtthe South would be warmer, but it was so cold that fountains in yards froze, and palm fronds were iced to the walls of old brick buildings. And there, on the stairs near Jackson Square, overlooking the brown slowness of the Mississippi River, I met Star.
He saw me first. He was so smart, he saw me for who I was. Waved me over to him, holding a cup of coffee from Cafe du Monde with his fingerless gloves, like he was a tourist in shoulder season.
“Hey,” he said. He held out one of the yellow and brown to-go cups. Another sat at his feet. He picked this up when I took the offered one. “Sit down,” he said, in a bright way, a welcoming way. He was the first person I’d talked to in a long time, it seemed. Everything up to that moment was a blur. “And yes, they’re stolen.”
Star’s hair was a distinct color of dark red. Burnished copper, like a penny that had been through many hands. His eyes were dark brown, deep sparks in his pointed face. His forelock fell across his forehead like that of a rough pony, and he often didn’t sweep it away, but would look at you through it, like he meant to pivot and run the first chance he got.
He’d been a boxcar boy for a while, though I never did find out how long. It had to have been years for what he knew about trains and schedules and weather, always writing in a little black book.
