I fell to the flat tar as Lemour fired. Swung my legs over the side. Extended my body by my fingertips. Lemour ran toward me. I twisted as far to the right as I could and dropped.
Like falling off a bike. The boxcar moved forward underneath me; I fought to keep upright but landed hard on my left hip and forearm.
I lay that way, rocking with the train, so happy at my escape that I almost relished the pain in my side. A badge of the adventure. I wasn’t too old to leap tall buildings after all. I grinned stupidly in the dark.
I lay that way for about ten minutes, watching streetlamps and tree branches rock past. As my euphoria at escaping died down, I began to worry about what to do next. I couldn’t ride this train out of town. Or I could, but what would I do then? A stay in a cornfield overnight. Persuade someone to give a beat–up, disheveled, specimen a ride to the nearest town. Some small–town Wisconsin cop finding me with a gun on me and not believing I had any right to it. Even worse was the possibility that Lemour was following the train. I stopped grinning and sat up.
I had no idea where I was. The city as familiar to me as the bones and markings of my face had changed into a mass of signal lights and looping tracks. I felt alone in the swirling dark. The train was gathering speed, hurling through strange seas toward strange land. A southbound freight rattled past, shaking me so hard I lay down again.
A plane floated over me, a giant grasshopper, its lights bulging eyes. Lying on my back I could see the belly light, the landing gear. O’Hare. So at least we were somewhere near the city.
The train suddenly braked, with a jolting screech that rocked me back again on my sore hip. I didn’t take time to curse or feel my bruises but scrambled crablike to the front of the car, found the ladder and climbed down. The train was still moving, although slowly. I jumped free of the slicing wheels, rolling with the motion of the train, landing on grass, rolling downhill, my gun digging into my breast, until I came to rest against a concrete wall.
I got on my hands and knees, but when I heaved myself to my feet I felt a tearing in my side that took my breath away. I leaned against the wall, tears smarting in my eyes. Gingerly, I touched the area under my holster. An edge of pain cut through me. A broken rib? A badly torn muscle? If Lemour had persuaded someone to stop the train, I couldn’t stand around waiting to heal. I had to keep moving.
When I started to walk the gun bore into the sore area. I used the wall as a brace and held my left arm up to unbuckle the holster. Checking the safety on the Smith & Wesson, I stuck it in my pocket and fastened the holster loosely around my waist.
The sleeves of my sweatshirt had gaping tears from the glass in Special–T’s skylight. The rest of me was covered with oily mud. Blood was caked along my neck and arms—cuts I hadn’t known I was getting were starting to bother me. I hobbled along as fast as I could, straining my ears for sounds of pursuit above the rocking of the train.
Bright lights above the wall I was using for support showed me every detail of the ground—refuse of fast food tossed from cars, Coke cans, plastic bags, even shoes and clothes. I limped my way along the wall to the bottom of the embankment. The street sign said MONTROSE AVENUE. Lying on the boxcar, I had thought I’d been traveling an hour or more and pictured myself in some unknown suburban landscape, but I was still inside the city. The unknown landscape suddenly turned on its side in my brain and I knew it. The concrete wall was a barricade between me and the Kennedy expressway. The roar I was hearing didn’t come from the train, which had moved on, but from traffic.
I followed the exit ramp up, looking nervously behind me but not seeing Lemour. Each step was now a prolonging of fatigue and pain. I made it across the expressway bridge to the L stop, where I fed singles into a ticket machine, then slumped onto a bench waiting for a train.
It was four–thirty now and the summer sun was beginning to turn the eastern sky a muddy gray. When a train screeched in twenty minutes later, the cars were half full, bringing home the night crews from O’Hare, sending early shifts into town to work coffee bars and diners. I found an empty seat and watched people sidle away from me. No one wants to catch poverty or grime from a stray homeless person. In my filth and tatters I looked worse than most.
I dozed my way downtown, changed to the Red Line, and dozed my way back north to Belmont. If someone was staking out my place I was past caring. I staggered the five blocks home and fell into bed.
24 Annoying the Giants