It was another argument over the telephone with his worried mother. He was young, in age, but had the attitude to erase age out of a thirty year olds vocabulary. There was pride in his dirty, ripped up jeans, and the punk patch he had sewn on the back of his black zip up hoody. He looked for an escape from the societal norms implanted on him by his culture and took an alternative route, leading him to a telephone trying to convince his mother to let him hop a train to Kansas city to see a band play a show.
At four in the morning he got off a bus. He was on Pecos Street standing with his scraggly friend Oliver. In all black, Oliver’s bleached rat-tail glowed, sticking out of his hat between the straps of his overalls, bouncing with each skip he made down the street. There was nothing to look at but cracked asphalt and the deep black sky, so Oliver’s rat-tail stuck out like a ray of sun through the clouds of a Pacific Northwest winter.
His shoulder muscles ached from the weight of his bag, filled with a gallon of water, a rain jacket, and whatever snacks he could find in the Vitamin cottage dumpster by Oliver’s house. A train whistled in the distance followed by the screech of metal. Probably a crew change. They followed the sound and quickly zigzagged through alleys until they arrived at the yard.
It was unclear whether his body trembled from the vibration of the thousands of pounds rolling effortlessly a few hundred yards away, or if it was his nerves. The rusted steel, covered in chipped paint and corrugated graffiti was numbing as it slowly passed by. He was scared. They hid in the shadows of a silo connected to the yard as the smell of rotting grains and mildew attacked their nostrils, forcing them to hold their breaths as they sat down to make a plan. He looked to Oliver for advice. The lights from a passing train briefly lit the wall behind Oliver’s face revealing the bold red letters “F-U-C-K.”
. . .
In Oliver’s room he waited for the click of the disconnected phone and the ring tone to sound before he screamed in excitement. “I’m can go!” he screamed. After months of negotiation, his mother finally gave in to his incessant begging to let him do whatever he wanted to do, and gave him “permission” to go to Kansas City. They made a few phone calls to people who had ridden the train to Kansas City before and found out that one of the yards to catch out at was on 50 something and Pecos Street and it left around five a.m. That was enough for them. They packed their bags checked the bus schedule and waited.
. . .
They snuck away from the “FUCK” mural and climbed over a few disconnected train cars, but stopped in the middle of the yard, only one row away from what they thought was the train they needed to board. “I think that’s it” Oliver whispered. They slipped up a ladder on a pale colored grainer, and peeked over the roof to the unit of the next train. The unit was running and it seemed like it was under repair. The sound of the engine rumbled letting steam escape from the exhaust pipe, filling the starless sky with more grey. They elevated their heads a few more inches to see more clearly what was happening, but within moments they were smacked in the face by a bright light. They leapt to the ground in shock.
“What the hell was that” he grunted. Had they been spotted or was that just the headlights of the train? The sound of wheels pierced their ears as a white van drove towards the unit in the next row and slowed to a halt only a few feet from where they were crouching. Bulls!
Before they could muster a sentence they were on their feet running. They climbed through a few rows of trains becoming lost in a labyrinth built with decrepit boxcars and walls of daunting double stacks. Every hiding spot was encroached by the sounds of leather boots jogging in their direction and the flame of a flashlight lit every shadow. They were trapped.
He jumped into the abandoned boxcar first with hopes to take a breath. The rotting wood on the ground made a soft surface as he fell. Without thinking he hastily opened his backpack, and pulled out a silver bag filled with salt and pepper ruffle chips, while Oliver paced awkwardly in the shadows. He slowly pulled open the seal and dug his grimy fingers into the greasy chips bringing a handful to his chapped and cracked lips. The contact of salt to his tongue brought him back to the thick woods next to his parent’s house. He could feel the warm summer air caressing his rosy cheeks and his four-year-old body running with no worries in the world. The dew caught on the morning grass and wet his shoes, making his toes numb until his socks were warmed by the sun.
He chomped down, breaking the silence in the boxcar as well as Oliver’s pace. Oliver snatched the bag from his hands and aggressively whispered, “What the fuck are you doing?” The tone in Oliver’s voice slammed him back to reality, back to the rotting floor of a boxcar. He wasn’t a little boy running freely through the forest, he was a teenager running scared from the police. He threw the bag of chips back in the bag, hoisted it onto his back and hopped out of the train.
They hit the stones running and hopped through a few more rows. Miraculously, after a few minutes of the cat and mouse chase, they landed in the last row and sprinted toward the silo they had hidden in earlier, seeing from a far the familiar bright red letters “FUCK”. They gave themselves no time to admire the mural but instead ran past the stained walls of the silo to Pecos Street and out of the yard.
Their exhausted and trembling bodies would not allow their feet to move any further. Sleep was needed. They looked around the abandoned streets and saw a light only a few hundred yards away. Quickly realizing it was a taco stand they made the decision that the roof would be a fine place to rest till morning. They scaled the wall in the alley and ascended to the roof, only greeted by the shiny lens of a security camera keeping watch over the premises. Disappointedly, they kept walking down Pecos. A couple blocks away from where the bus dropped them off earlier in the night they stumbled upon the miserable remains of an abandoned elementary school house. The boarded up windows accented the dark grey cracked walls and smell of forgotten youth haunted the abandoned lot. The school bell was replaced by the screaming whistle of the train heading north and the playground was taken over by plants growing out of the cracked and aging concrete. It was a truly haunted place, left with only memories of skinned knees and the squeaks of dying chalk sticks. It was a truly forgotten place but he found a chilling comfort there, as if he was a ghost.
There was a bush behind the school far enough away from the road that they could lay their heads with no disturbance from the traffic of the morning on Pecos Street.
He climbed into his sleeping bag and felt his mother’s arms holding him. He slept like a small infant dreaming of swing sets and Ferris wheels but awoke to the unforgivable sun in his eyes and the smell of exhaust. He was ready to go home.
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