I Might As Well Because I Have No Choice

The fire was warm, the wind had gone down, and the rain had about stopped. There were still the sound of big drops falling off of the trestle.

  For a long time we sat quiet, and I were wishing I could catch some shut eye, but little time remained if we were going to catch a nap. I kept squatting there thinking about how I wished there were a fucking empty on that train. I never enjoyed riding freights unless there were an empty freight car.

  "We’re partners Pacino?" Jaquan Vessey asked.

  "Why not?" I questioned. And then the train whistled far off in the distance.

  We got up and Jaquan kicked out the fire mostly and then scooped water from the creek with an old can and poured it on what was left to put out. Then we strolled to the trestle together.

  The train slowed up along here with a good grade ahead, an a man could catch it moving.

  "Can you make it toting that fucking thing?"

  "Why not?"

  We let a dozen freight cars go by and then Jaquan saw an open door as it passed a red light on a switch and called out to me. He was a fast man making the run easy and swinging up and he caught my gear for me as I swung it at the open freight car. Me, I caught the edge of the floor and hauled myself off the ground.

  Long after, Jaquan had rolled up in some paper he found at one end of the car. I sat there by the open door looking out at the country. Here and there we passed by lonely farms with lights on in the windows. One time there were a man walking toward a house with a lantern on a pail, and a dog barking at the train.

  "Crop farmers," I sneered. "Home guards." But away down inside, I wasn’t sneering at all. That man was going into his own home to sit down to his supper at his own table with his kinfolk around him.

  And me, all I had were a lonesome whistle sound as the train bent around a curve, the distant glow of the firebox, and somewhere down the train, a flea bitten cow pony, on a chuck wagon for home.