like an hour, but might only have been fifteen minutes. At last another truck backed up to the Southway Express box. A guy in overalls rolled the door all the way open. Luke peered out from between a rototiller and a lawn tractor. The guy jumped into the boxcar, and another steel ramp was laid between the truck and the box. This time there were four men in the crew, two black, two white, all big and tatted out. They were laughing and talking in deep southern accents, which made them sound to Luke like the country singers on BUZ’N 102 back home in Minneapolis.
One of the white guys said he’d gone dancing last night with the wife of one of the black guys. The black guy pretended to hit him, and the white guy pretended to stagger backward, sitting down on the pile of outboard motor cartons Luke had recently re-stacked.
“Come on, come on,” said the other white guy. “I want my breffus.”
So do I, Luke thought. Oh man, so do I.
When they began loading the Kohler crates into the truck, Luke thought it was like a movie of the last stop, only run in reverse. That made him think of the movies Avery said the kids had to watch in Back Half, and that made the dots start to come back again—big juicy ones. The boxcar door jerked on its track, as if it meant to shut itself.
“Whoa!” the second black guy said. “Who’s out there?” He looked. “Huh. Nobody.”
“Boogeyman,” said the black guy who had pretended to smack the white guy. “Come on, come on, let’s get it done. Stationmaster say this bitch is runnin late.”
Still not the end of the line, Luke thought. I won’t be in here until I starve to death, there’s that, but only because I’ll die of thirst first. He knew from his reading that a person could go for at least three days without water before lapsing into the unconsciousness that preceded death, but it didn’t seem that way to him now.
The four-man crew loaded all but two of the big crates into their truck. Luke waited for them to start on the small engine stuff, which was when they would discover him, but instead of doing that, they ran their ramp back into the truck and yanked its pull-down door shut.
“You guys go on,” one of the white guys said. He was the one who’d joked about going dancing with the black guy’s wife. “I gotta visit the caboose shithouse. See a man about a dog.”
“Come on, Mattie, squeeze it a little.”
“Can’t,” the white guy said. “This one’s so big I’m gonna have to climb down off’n it.”
The truck started up and drove away. There were a few moments of quiet, and then the white guy, Mattie, climbed back into the boxcar, biceps flexing in his sleeveless tee. Luke’s once-upon-a-time best friend Rolf Destin would have said the guns are fully loaded.
“Okay, outlaw. I seen you when I sat down on those boxes. You can come out now.”
23
For a moment Luke stayed where he was, thinking that if he remained perfectly still and perfectly silent, the man would decide he’d been mistaken and go away. But that was childish thinking, and he was no longer a child. Not even close. So he crept out and tried to stand, but his legs were stiff and his head was light. He would have fallen over if the white guy hadn’t grabbed him.
“Holy shit, kid, who tore your ear off?”
Luke tried to speak. At first nothing came out but a croak. He cleared his throat and tried again. “I had some trouble. Sir, do you have anything to eat? Or drink? I’m awfully hungry and thirsty.”
Still not taking his eyes from Luke’s mutilated ear, the white guy—Mattie—reached into his pocket and brought out half a roll of Life Savers. Luke grabbed it, tore away the paper, and tossed four into his mouth. He would have said all his saliva was gone, re-absorbed by his thirsty body, but more squirted, as if from invisible jets, and the sugar hit his head like a bomb. The dots flared briefly into existence, racing across the white guy’s face. Mattie looked around, as if he had sensed someone coming up behind him, then redirected his attention to Luke.
“When’s the last time you ate?”
“Don’t know,” Luke said. “Can’t exactly remember.”
“How long you been on the train?”
“About a day.” That had to be right, but it seemed much longer.