A Firing Offense

NINETEEN




THE RIDGE DROPPED gradually and was dense with pine and the occasional cedar. The ground beneath my feet was soft, in some places almost muddy.

At the bottom of the incline were a clearing and railroad tracks, just as McGinnes had described. A narrow drainage ditch ran along both sides of the track. The clearing looked to be only fifty yards in length. Then it ended and the tracks continued into the forest.

McGinnes was standing at the edge of the clearing, backlit by the sun, which was large and red and dropping quickly below the treeline. He was holding a pint bottle.

“Did you bring any beer?” he asked as I approached him. One of his eyes was covered by a wild strand of hair and the other one told me he was stoned.

I let the knapsack off my shoulder, opened the main flap, and pulled out a cold sixpack. McGinnes reached for one and popped the top. I did the same.

“You’ve been out here all afternoon?”

“F*ckin’ aye,” he said, waving his arm 180 degrees. “This is great. I haven’t had a vacation in years. Here’s to Ric Brandon.” He saluted and took a swig from the bottle, then handed it to me. I hit it lightly, tasted peach brandy, and chased it with some beer.

“Where’d you get that?”

“I hitched to the ABC store,” he said. “Any luck today?”

“A little. I’ll tell you later.”

We had a seat on the tracks. I listened as McGinnes described his day. Occasionally he would stand to illustrate a point, center stage as always.

Twilight came and with it bugs and the sounds of bats and small feet scampering through leaves and brush. I felt warm and relaxed.

A small sound like the ocean increased from a faint to audible rumble. McGinnes put his hand on the rail and led me back to the rightmost edge of the clearing.

“You ready?”

“For what?”

“A ride!”

“No way, Johnny.”

“Why not?”

“It’s stupid, that’s why not.”

“Don’t be such a p-ssy,” he said as the sound of the train grew louder. “You never did this before?”

“No.”

“All right, listen up. All you do, you pick out a boxcar, an open one if you can, or a flatcar. Then you run alongside it, fast, and grab hold of the ladder or door. Swing up with it, don’t try to let it pull you up. Otherwise, you’ll go down. This run here is only forty, fifty yards before you hit the trees, so you’ve gotta be quick.”

“I’m not doing this, man.”

“Okay,” he said. “Then watch me.”

The train sounded loud enough to be upon us. But a half minute went by before the lead car emerged from the pines and passed. McGinnes dashed out as the lead car vanished into the woods at the other end of the clearing.

He reached it quickly, up the ditch and sprinting alongside the train. He grabbed the ladder of a boxcar and swung up, dragging a foot out first, then putting that foot on the edge of the open car and looking back in my direction. After that he put both feet on the ladder, held an arm out for balance, and let go, running alongside the train and slowing to a walk just as he reached the trees.

He spun like a dancer and bowed. As he swaggered towards me, he bent down once to pick up and toss a rock. I could see that he was stoked.

“Easy, huh?” he said. “Goddamn, that brings back some memories.”

“You do that often?”

“I did,” he said. When the caboose passed, we walked back on the high side of the ditch and took a seat on the tracks. “I rode trains all over this state when I was a kid. You had to be careful, though, even then. This was the early sixties. You’d hear stories how these tough-ass railroad men would beat up tramps trying to catch trains out of the yards. Of course, in my old man’s day, they’d throw you right in the chain gang if they caught you.”

“You like growing up down here?”

“It was all right,” he said, and passed me the brandy. “I lived in quite a few places, but I was a teenager in Carolina.” He stared ahead and absently reached back for the bottle, a grin on his face. “I did some crazy shit, like any kid I guess.”

But I had a feeling that he had been a little more out there than most. He had once shown me a photo of himself as a young man, standing balanced atop a split-rail fence, shirt off and arms crossed and flexed, with one eyebrow devilishly raised below a DI brushcut.

Time passed and the night was uncommonly bright. Black woods surrounded the moonlit clearing. As we killed the last of our beer and brandy, I felt a slight vibration beneath me and heard the low rumble begin.

“Come on,” McGinnes said, and I followed him to the edge of the woods where there was no light.

He pushed down on my shoulder and we crouched in some leaves and soft earth. The rumble increased in volume. A swift wind rushed behind and through us, and I felt my adrenalin pick up.

“Talk to me, man.” I was anxious and a little pickled from the booze.

“All right, Jim,” he said, his hand on my arm. “When that first car passes and hits the trees, get out of here fast and run to the right side of the clearing, up the ditch and sharp left so you’re parallel to the train. I’ll be ahead of you. Just watch what I do. Remember, swing up that ladder, don’t let it drag you.”

I could barely hear him between the crush of sound that was on us now and the wind that had picked up and was blowing leaves past us into the clearing. My fists were tight as the first car came suddenly out of the trees. I remember feeling that I only wanted to be up and moving away from the blackness around me, up and out and into the light.

“Book!” he shouted, and we were in the clearing and sprinting towards the train, down and up the ditch where I stumbled, then regained my momentum, then alongside it, feeling its power and thinking it was much stronger than I had imagined. McGinnes was in front of me and moving his head back and forth from the train to the trees ahead, then quickly and fluidly grabbing the rung of a boxcar ladder and rising up upon it. He yelled back at me and I saw that the clearing was running out, and I grabbed, white-knuckled the ladder of the car behind him, and ran as he yelled again, and I put one foot on the bottom rung and pushed upward with my shoulders and I was on the machine, tight against the ladder, as the clearing ended and we all roared into the woods together.

I looked behind and the clearing was gone. Around us were only dark forms, and, ahead, the engine cutting a path through the trees. The cars were rocking wildly, and I kept a tight grip on the ladder.

McGinnes was silhouetted against the moonlight and climbing up the side of his car, which was swaying in an irregular pattern to mine. When he reached the top, he let go one arm and one leg, and released a yell and burst of laughter. His hair blew wildly about his head.

“This is great!” he screamed back at me. “Isn’t this f*cking great?”

“It is,” I said, and realized I was smiling. My grip loosened and I took a deep breath. The time between the clanging of the rails shortened as we picked up speed.

McGinnes was attempting to open his boxcar with his free hand and foot. I tried the door on my car.

“It’s locked,” he shouted.

“So’s this one,” I called back. “What now?”

He looked around the side of the car. “Swing in between the cars. There’s a small platform on either side of the link that you can stand on. And watch your feet.”

I followed his lead and moved gingerly off the ladder and onto a two-foot-wide iron footing, taking my hand off the rung only when I was certain I was secure. McGinnes now faced me across the link that connected our cars. The ground below was a blur that rushed away.

We rode the train for a couple of hours, through smallish towns and low-activity yards and back through woods and clearings. When we crossed a bridge over a wide creek, McGinnes pointed to the moon’s reflection on the still water. In one of the railroad yards a dog barked at us briefly. In another, an outline of a man waved slowly.

When we were again in the middle of a long stretch of woods, McGinnes suggested we get off the train. “It feels like we’re slowing down,” he said, and looked out from between the cars and back at me. “What you want to do is, move back out to the outside ladder. When I tell you, jump off and away from the train. Lean back to counter your momentum, and when you hit, take long strides until you slow down.”

“I’ll watch you,” I said.

We moved out to the sides of our cars. The night air had grown cooler. McGinnes waited for a long while until the land gradually leveled out. Then he pushed away from the train, landed on his feet, and slowed to a jog.

I was concentrating on jumping away from the train—it seemed then to be the main objective—and threw myself way out, realizing as I did that my upper body was far ahead of my legs. My feet barely touched the gravel. I rolled until I was stopped by a log and some brush. When McGinnes helped me up, I was a little dazed but relieved.

“You okay?”

“Yeah,” I said, though my back already ached and I could feel a deep scrape below my knee as it rubbed against my jeans.

The caboose passed and with it the noise, leaving only the quiet of the woods. We watched the last of it enter a curve ahead and disappear into the night.


WE WALKED ON THE tracks in the moonlight, keeping in the direction of the train. He looked at the stars and claimed we were heading northwest. I didn’t dispute it as it seemed irrelevant in any case. I was becoming tired and ornery.

“I don’t know how you talk me into this shit,” I said.

“Relax, will you?” McGinnes stopped me with his hand on my chest. “I bet you can’t even tell me what you did a week ago today. But when you’re drooling in your wheelchair in forty years, you’ll remember this night—the way the woods smell right now, the sound of the train. That rush you got when you were running across the clearing. This is happening, man, this is what’s important. Everything else is bullshit.”

We walked on. I related the course of events from the day Pence had called to the present, leaving out nothing. McGinnes was unusually attentive as he listened. At one point he began coughing furiously, then retched and spit up something bilious. I sat on the tracks and waited until he was ready to continue.

Sometime after midnight we reached a railroad yard and found an office with a washroom, where an elderly man let us get some water and clean up. Then we walked into an adjoining town, found its main road, and put our thumbs out.

An hour after that the driver of a jacked-up Malibu slowed and pulled over. McGinnes looked in the passenger window, pointed me to the back seat, and hopped in front.

A young serviceman was behind the wheel. He checked me out in the rearview, looking slightly apprehensive at the sight of my marked face.

“Where you guys headed?” he asked.

“Elizabeth City,” McGinnes said.

“Elizabeth City?” He laughed. “Hell, you’re in Virginia!”

McGinnes looked back at me and then at the kid. “Where in Virginia?”

“Franklin area,” the kid said. “What are you, lost?”

“We hopped a train,” McGinnes said proudly.

“No shit!” the kid said.

“Damn straight!” McGinnes said, turning his head slightly so I could see his wink. “What you got in this thing, a three-oh-seven?”

“Yeah,” he said sheepishly and added, “but it moves.”

“Good engine. You in the navy?” The kid nodded and McGinnes told him of a base he had once been fictitiously stationed on. We were driving out of town.

“What was it like? Hopping a train, I mean.”

“I’ll tell you what,” McGinnes said. “Let’s grab some cold beer, and I’ll tell you all about it.”

I hunched down in the seat and folded my arms. I closed my eyes, confident that when I opened them next we would be parked in front of the Gates motel.

I woke early the next morning, hiked back into the woods, and found my knapsack in the clearing. Returning to the room, I woke McGinnes, showered, shaved, and gathered up our gear.

After checking out we stopped for coffee and juice, then got back on the highway and traveled east to 158, then south across a bridge over the intracoastal waterway, our windows down and the radio up.

Less than two hours later we crossed the bridge at Point Harbor and, announcing ourselves with a raucous whoop from McGinnes, rolled onto the Outer Banks.