Bert, Alice and Chet were seated at the table, lunch just eaten, in a rather perplexed silence. Bert was gazing at his plate as if trying to make sense out of the last crust of a grilled cheese sandwich and smear of ketchup but Alice and her father were looking at one another.
Emily had brought about this hiatus in a normal meal by catching her mother’s attention with a weird look.
“What is the matter?” Alice had suddenly inquired of her daughter, interrupting Bert who was complaining about the results of rough spackletone in a client’s rec room. Emily turned her crossed-eyed expression to her mother and asked, “Did you ever wonder what would happen if we couldn’t help but see our eyelashes? Or our nose? Would we be able to live normally? Would we go crazy?”
They all stared at her. Bert was about to say something flippant but Emily seemed to realize it and she prevented him from speaking by stating, “I am dead serious about this.”
“We know you are, honey,” Alice began but stopped as Emily sighed and pushed back her chair. “May I be excused,” she asked but did not wait for a reply. The look on her face was patiently tolerant and Alice would not have been surprised if Emily had patted her head as she left the table and the room. Thus the silence.
Then they all spoke at once. “’ I am dead serious’”, Bert mimicked and laughed. “It’s that Stanley,” Chet said. “I don’t remember being so intense at her age,” Alice worried.
“Well, I don’t know if you were or not, Edie did all the raising, I was too busy working,” Chet answered Alice.
Bert ate his remaining crust and transferred crumbs from the yellow formica table top to his mouth with a licked forefinger.
Alice responded to her father, “Yes, I think Stanley is an influence. And it also could be – “ she paused and both men looked at her. “Well, you know, at that age, becoming a woman.”
Chet looked startled. Bert looked embarrassed.
To alleviate the situation Alice jumped in with, “About Stanley. I think it is harmless enough but I wish she was better friends with some girls. Since he moved into the neighbourhood they spend all their time together. And he seems to be as, well, intense, as she is. They do strange things.”
Now she really had the attention of her father and husband.
“Like what?” Bert wanted to know and he sounded alarmed.
“Well. I happened to overhear” (she did not say she had paused by the window and deliberately listened to Emily and Stanley who were out on the veranda) “them with Emily’s transistor radio. They had it turned down and they would ask a question and then turn the radio up for a second or two and write down the words they heard. They did this five times for each question and then read all the words together and seemed to get some kind of answer.”
Bert looked stymied but Chet seemed more interested. “What kind of questions?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Silly things. Like why does Mrs. Chambers wear green all the time. She’s one of their teachers. And would it rain for the ball game on the weekend.” She did not mention that Emily had asked why her grandfather had hairs growing out of his ears and both she and Stanley had laughed themselves silly at the resulting “ pigs in a parking lot with hard times expected unless Mickey Mantle danced” answer. Alice smiled slightly at this non-disclosure and her dad responded to the smile with, ”Well, it is funny if you don’t take it too seriously.” He had been a teacher for many years and his claim to fame was his ability to laugh if not in, at least after, most classroom situations.
“Gotta go.” Bert jumped to his feet, caught Alice’s eye and made an exaggerated clearing of plates, cup and silverware to the counter. Alice had commented recently that she would like help with household chores especially since she now had a part-time job. As he came back to the table to stoop and give Alice a kiss on her cheek he picked up Emily’s dishes as well. “Brownie points,” he grinned. “For when I want to go off fishing for a week.”
“Good luck with the spackling. Tell them they can always paint it.” Chet offered.
“Oh, sure,” Bert began, but then he paused by the door. “You’re right. Thanks. But I think it’s more her worry that her precious dogs might rub against it and…” his voice faded as he left. He was thinking less of wall treatment and more of having a nifty jukebox in his recreation room if he ever found the time to make one in their basement.
Alice craned her neck to see the clock over the frig. For the hundredth time Chet thought it a dumb place to hang a clock but since coming to live with his daughter and her husband he had bitten his tongue many times in an effort not to interfere.
“Dumb place for that clock,” said Alice, turning back toward the table. “I’ve asked Bert a hundred times to move it over on that wall but he says he’s not sure the cord is long enough.”
“I’ll move it for you.” Chet wondered how many other little irritants he could acknowledge aloud and find support in their correction. The towel rack in the bathroom, for instance, behind the darned door. “Want me to talk to Emily?”
Alice was clearing her space at the table. “Oh, I don’t think it’s that serious. Didn’t Mom used to say ‘least said, soonest mended’? No point in making an issue, and what are you going to say, in any case? She’s just putting together the jigsaw of her life and having trouble fitting in some of the pieces.”
“You should’ve been a writer, Alice. Leave those, I’ll do them.”
“You will not. It’s Emily’s job, one of the reasons she gets an allowance. I was just rinsing them in case she doesn’t get around to doing them right away. And I do write, Dad. I write great letters. People tell me they save them. And school notes. Emily was horrified when one of her teachers taped one of my notes explaining her absence up on the board. She thought it was a good example of humour writing. Emily did not find it funny. I’ve got to go or I’ll be late. Say bye to her for me. I’ll be home in time to get supper.”
She kissed the top of his head and stopped in the downstairs bathroom before leaving for her part-time job at Kresge’s. Chet couldn’t understand why she used the small, dim bathroom to put on make-up but when he asked her she just said, “Oh, I don’t know, it’s handy.” He would never understand women. He would have been even more puzzled if she had tried to explain that she liked to see the upstairs bathroom looking tidy whereas she could leave her makeup scattered messily on the shelves in the one downstairs.
“Have a good afternoon,” he called as she left by the cellar door. It was a few short blocks to downtown and she had plenty of time but she seemed to walk with a sense of purpose now, on her way to a paying job. Chet sort of approved of it. Edie had not worked. But it was a different time, he knew. Women expected to have careers now. Why, he knew three households, not counting theirs, where the wives had a job. Times were changing.
He went to find Emily. She was lying on the lumpy lounger on the back patio. Someone had forgotten to put the plastic cover over it earlier in the summer and it had gotten rain soaked. It had dried out but was never the same.
Emily was peeling her ankle socks off with the toes of the opposite foot and then trying to put them on again the same way.
“You okay?” he asked. He seldom saw her alone these days. That Stanley always seemed to be around.
“I’m fine. Did you all have a good talk about me after I left?”
Chet had had too much exposure to smart-aleckyness during his teaching years. It had grated then and it grated now. “Yes, we raked over the coals such a very important young lady.”
“Boy, what cynicism,” she said, but with a smile.
Chet softened at this burgeoning experiment with communication and the complexities of grammar and also at her pronunciation: she sounded the last c like a k. “I think you mean sarcasm,” he told her, ever the teacher. “And the word is cynicism.”
“Oh.” She laughed. “Thank goodness I want to be a stewardess and not a writer or a teacher.”
“Last week you wanted to be a nurse.”
“That was when I was reading Cherry Ames. Now I’m reading Vicki Barr.” She reached down, replaced her socks, replaced her sneakers. “I wish Stanley would come home.”
Chet poked his finger into the plant on the picnic table. No wonder it looked half-dead. It was bone dry. He’d given it to Alice a few weeks back thinking it would make a nice spot of colour on the patio. You’d think she’d take care of it. That’s what came of women going out to work. He fetched a can of water from the outside tap.
“Where is he?” Chet asked when the plant was nicely dripping.
“Who?”
“You know who I meant. Stanley.”
“Why don’t you like him?”
Chet sat down at the picnic table and looked at his granddaughter. It was a good solid table. Bert had made it in one of his infrequent slow periods. He knew how to build things.
“Who says I don’t like him?”
“Whenever you say his name you put a “that” in front of it.”
“No I didn’t. I just said, Stanley.”
“Most of the time you do. And even when you don’t, like now, I can hear it being there.” She had pulled her pony tail down in two strands over her eyes and was forming bushy eyebrows. She was very pleased with the bangs she had persuaded her mother to let her have cut for her birthday and no longer needed to drape her hair over her forehead to see how they would look. She thought they looked just fine.
“You’re too sharp by half.” That was another of Edie’s sayings. Marrying a British girl had certainly added to his vocabulary. After five years he still missed her. He hated that dreaded C disease.
“So where is that Stanley?”
“Come and help me with the dishes and I’ll tell you about it.”
They did the dishes together but after telling Chet that Stanley was visiting his cousins in Sarnia and was supposed to come home today they talked of other things. She was changing. The little girl was being replaced by someone quieter, less spontaneous, and she did not seem to need to toss out startling statements at him as she did to her parents.
“So, why don’t you like him?” she asked again.
“It’s not that I don’t like him, Em. It’s just that, oh, I don’t know.” Chet felt confused, unwilling and unable to shuffle the cards of his thoughts and expose the deck to his granddaughter. He floundered, chose a wild deuce. “Maybe I don’t think he is very responsible.”
Emily turned and gave him a thoughtful look. She’d been afraid he might touch on the boy-girl issue which was topmost in her mind most of the time. If he had broached this and brought to mind her and Stanley’s timid and exciting exploration of kissing, their spin the bottle a deux game, she did not know what she would have said. She could tell her Gramps almost anything but she simply could not speak of this. Even thinking of talking with her mother gave her a stomachache. Alice kissed Bert, sure, but it had nothing to do with how she felt when she kissed Stanley. She was certain of this.
“Responsible? He has a paper route and gives his mom money.”
“That’s not exactly what I meant.” Chet dried the same plate over and over. “
“I guess I should spend more time with you, like I used to,” Emily said, causing Chet to jump away from this admission of loss, of need, by stating, “Oh, it’s not that, I’ve got lots to do.” And he busily picked up the dishes from the counter and began to put them away in the cupboard.
As Emily was leaving he said, “I think it would be annoying to suddenly be aware of our nose all the time.” He was fiddling the tea towel into the too narrow rack under the sink, a nuisance. Edie had always gone to the trouble of hanging hers out on the clothesline after each use. That had bothered Chet when she had asked him to go and fetch it next washing up. It was equally irritating to hang it under the sink. He would have just tossed it over a chair to dry but Edie had thought this messy. Likely Alice would too. Then, thinking of the dumb clock position he stopped trying to settle the cloth under the sink and instead folded it neatly on the back of the padded plastic chair.
Emily looked back at him, caught his tongue-in-cheek tone and smile-twisted her lips exactly as Edie used to do. “Oh, Gramps. It’s just that they take everything I say so seriously. Stanley would say something like that and everyone would just laugh.” She walked across the kitchen, picked the dishtowel off the chair, manoeuvred it clumsily onto the under-sink rack making a face as she did so.
“Stanley has four brothers and sisters.”
“I’d sure like one or two.”
Chet shrugged. “A bit late for that. Where are you going?”
“I don’t know. Out.”
Chet waited until she was gone to let out his sigh. Used to be she would say she didn’t know but leave a space in her voice and life that invited him in. He missed the walks with her. She was becoming so distant as she got older. And that Stanley… He sighed again and turned his attention to the clock dumbly over the frig.
Emily did know where she was going but she wasn’t about to tell her grandfather. He was tolerant but even this had its limit and the train yard with its empty boxcars was not a place he would want her to go. Her mother had told her on more than one occasion, “I don’t want you playing around the tracks.” Well, she wasn’t going to play there. So it was allright. Her conscience was eased with such reasoning.
Emily loved the train yard. She had been attracted to it long before Stanley moved into the neighbourhood and its appeal had doubled when she realized it worked charm on him as well. In fact she had first met him there, sitting on the cinder bank, staring at the tracks, waiting on a train, satisfied to wait.
“I’m going to travel a lot someday,” he had told her. Considering that he had just moved here from Alberta she considered that he had already made a long trip. The furthest she had ever been was St. Catherine’s last summer on a train and once a trip to Toronto by car but she had been too young to remember this.
The tracks were on the edge of town and for some reason, no matter how hot and humid the rest of the city, the train yard always seemed to have a breeze. A coal-smelling hot breeze but air movement enough to cool the body and stir the mind. Sometimes she would stand on the tracks and look as far as she could into the distance. It never seemed possible to stand perfectly still and do this and it wasn’t simply trying to balance. The longing to travel from the present drew her into a slight but definite sway.
Today Emily did not go as far as the main track, there was a train due, or maybe it had passed, she had stopped to pat several cats on the way and was unsure of the time, but the empty boxcars on the sides were more appealing. The sun was hot.
She loved the names on the cars. Chesapeake and Santa Fe. Milwaukee. She and Stanley had had their first argument over how to pronounce Chesapeake. It still wasn’t settled. Stanley said it was Cheese-peek. She was sure it was Chess-a-peeky.
“What do you know about names from the States, in any case,” she had demanded, “You’re from the Prairies.” She had meant to say it in jest but he had had much practice arguing with his brothers and sisters and she felt he was topping her.
“Alberta is on the border with the States as much as Ontario,” he had shot back and then seeing her blush at feeling foolish he had relented and made her laugh with, “It’s likely She’s-a-peachy.” He had learned about women from having sisters.
The door of a lovely green boxcar was open enough for Emily to boost herself up and squeeze through but first she spit on one of the iron wheels for luck and gave herself shivers by putting her sneaker just in front of the wheel, knowing it would not run over her foot, giving herself a thrill by the thought of “what if…” Imagined danger was beckoned to a delicious proximity.
Then she pushed the door open wider to let her sit in the opening. First she checked that she hadn’t dirtied her pedal pushers. She loved them, the knee-hugging hem, the matching buttons, the pockets on each side. Maybe she’d be allowed to wear them to school, at least on sports day.
The boxcar smelled like warm dust. If Stanley checked for her at her house when he got home and found she wasn’t there he’d likely think to come and see if she was here. She’d moved the log at the top of the path just enough for him to know she was at the train yard: it was their signal.
It was comforting waiting for him. She didn’t want to think about school starting in a week or two. Not that she minded school all that much but it didn’t make her happy like the train yard and the box car and Stanley …
She could hear someone coming along the path on the bank and started to laugh in delight but then the extent of the commotion told her it was not Stanley and she scooted herself back into the box car and moved behind the partly open door. She didn’t have time to close it.
Footing was missed on the end of the path where bushes had given up a firm hold on the slope and a body fell into the train yard closely followed by another who managed to descend in an upright position. Pebbles scattered in a hard rain sound.
“You all right? Billy are you allright?”
The man who had stumbled righted himself and sat down on the incline. “Of course I’m okay, you idiot. Shut up or the whole county’l hear you.”
Emily moved slightly so she could see and then put a hand over her mouth to stifle any squeal as she saw that the man who had fallen was in handcuffs.
“You think the train’s coming soon, Billy?”
Billy didn’t answer, putting his head forward between his knees and cupping his manacled hands behind his neck. The other man didn’t say anything, stood there moving from foot to foot, fingers scratching at the fabric of his pant legs. Then he moved a bit to the right where there was an old fence and stood facing it. When Emily realized he was relieving himself she was more horrified than at the sight of the handcuffs and she hastily closed her eyes.
His voice back beside his companion – somehow she knew they were brothers – got her attention again.
Billy took his hands from behind his head, put them between his knees and stared at them. “Find a rock, Ed.”
“A rock, Billy?”
“I gotta get these off, Ed.”
“Oh. Yup.”
Ed passed back and forth in her field of vision as he scouted out something suitable.
Billy looked at the rocks, got up and moved to the track, kneeled down and held his hands so the two links of the gunmetal cuffs spanned the rail. Ed finally figured out what was required of him. It bothered him that Billy was being so quiet. He was used to him trying not to swear and shout and tell him what to do.
The attempt to break the chain holding the cuffs together did not go well. He couldn’t get a good grip on either rock, the shape was wrong, and he was afraid of smashing it down too hard. If he missed and hit Billy there’d be hell to pay.
“Hit harder,” Billy told him.
So he did. A chip from the rock shot up and cut Billy’s cheek. Billy leaped up, brushed at the wound, saw the blood, cursed heavily. Emily wondered what a couple of the words meant. “You coulda taken out my eye, you idiot,” he added.
“Billy, I am doing my very best. I was where you told me to be, when you told me to be, with the truck. I waited when you didn’t come when you said. I helped you even when you told me it all got buggered up. I didn’t know that tire was so bald. I am doing my very best.” He sounded tearful.
Billy crouched into himself again, hands again cupping the back of his head.. He’d spent a lifetime feeling guilty over this older brother. Ed was worse than prison.
“It’s okay, Ed. It’s not your fault. I didn’t know about that extra guard. It woulda been so easy and you woulda got me here on time and I woulda bin on my way to the States. Damn bloody luck.”
“You shouldna hit him, Billy.”
Billy hadn’t told his brother it was more serious than just hitting. The first guard he’d just hit. The second one, all because of these damned cuffs, he’d left never to move again. Just a simple little transfer. Just a simple little escape. How the hell had it gone all so wrong. Just his luck.
Well, so he’d have to wait an hour or so for the next train that slowed. They’d be looking for him, oh yeah, they would, and the train yard would be on their list. How soon they’d find the car with the two guards was anyone’s guess. If he’d only thought to get the key for these bloody cuffs offen the guard before he’d stuffed him in the trunk. He’d gotten the other one’s wallet, that he had remembered. Hadn’t needed to stuff him anywhere, he weren’t going nowhere. Made him feel so tired to think of it all. Coulda been so simple. Just his luck.
He sat up, reached inside his shirt and dug around until he found the wallet.
“That guy’s going be allright, in’t he, Billy?” Ed had seen the blood on his brother’s knuckles before he’d spit and wiped it off on a rag in the truck.
“Yeah, fine. Don’t worry ‘bout him. Head wounds bleed a lot. Why, just like this.” He angled his cheek up toward Ed and tried to stare down at the cut.”
Ed leaned over and peered at it. “Stopped bleeding. Just a nick.”
“Yeah, well.” He didn’t tell Ed it wasn’t a blow to the head that had done in the second guard like a couple blows to the face with the first guy, it was these damned cuffs putten around his neck. Billy had managed to open the wallet and take out the money. Eleven bucks. And forty-seven cents. He put the bills and the change in his shirt pocket and buttoned the flap He handed the wallet to Ed. “You can have this. It’s nice leather. Burn all the stuff in it when you get home.”
Ed took the wallet but didn’t say anything, just held it in his hands.
“Put it away, you idiot.”
Ed hastily rolled to one side and stuffed it in his pants pocket.
“Give me my money now,” Billy suddenly said . Ed jumped and jerked his shoulders in the nervous mannerism he’d had ever since he was a kid.
“You did get my money, didn’t you?” Billy had gone cold inside and his voice was frigid. “Like I told you.”
“It weren’t there.”
Billy was on his feet and on his brother in a second. Emily had her hand again clasped across her mouth. He gripped the vest his brother was wearing, yanked him to his feet and stared into his face.
“What do you mean. I put it there. I told you where it was.”
“It were gone, Billy. I think maybe Millie took it. It weren’t there.”
Billy pushed him so hard he stumbled and nearly fell. “Did you ask her?”
“No, I had to leave before she got up, you know, to be where you said I should be, with the truck. I didn’t want to be late. I brung you what I had of money, Billy.”
Billy held out his hand. Ed dug in his pants pocket , dug around the guard’s wallet which he was unwilling to bring out again in case Billy yelled and finally managed to extricate a neat fold of bills.
“Whatja do, iron them? You are always so damned neat.”
“Aw, Billy.” Ed gave a chuckle.
Billy counted the bills. Two ones, three twos, two fives. Eighteen dollars. He’d had hundreds stashed away, left with Ed, for such a time. Eighteen dollars and eleven dollars from a guard who had cursed him. Twenty nine dollars to start a new life. He swallowed.
“Ed, you gotta get me more money. Go back and ask Millie. You gotta, Ed. I can’t do nothing with twenty-nine dollars. And get a hammer, the big one the old man used for chipping rocks. And a spike. Biggest one you can find.”
“It’s a long walk, Billy. There’s no spare in the truck. You know I can’t drive it with a flat.”
“Hitchhike.”
“You be here when I get back, Billy?”
Billy only looked at him. Ed sprinted away in that careful, studied way of his.
He shoulda reminded Ed to be careful, not to go blowing off his mouth if he did get a ride. Then the thought hit him that the police knew he had a brother… Billy once again leaped to his feet as the lifelong restriction on his temper was disappearing along the path back toward the road. Ed had some sort of fit if Billy got really angry with him and Ed in one of his fits was scary enough to keep Billy bottled.
Even now he would not let himself shout his anger and frustration as he swung his imprisoned hands around in maddening circles, but low growling sounds came from his throat and he worked his mouth like a caged animal.. Emily watched, breathlessly, and when he stopped moving and stood completely still and water spurted from his eyes, she could not have said how she felt. He brushed the tears away, making his cheek bleed again, rubbed his nose along his sleeve, rolled his head back and stared at the sky. Then he shrugged. He couldn’t afford to wait for Ed. He couldn’t afford not to. Maybe if he got out of the sun he could think better.
In two strides he was at the boxcar and in spite of his bound hands he tossed his body up into the interior. Stanley could do that. Emily envied him this ability and had tried to mimic it but had only succeeded in bruising her hip.
She had anticipated Billy’s intention by a split second and pushed herself backward further along the car and up against a pile of old blankets, likely someone’s sleeping arrangement. Likely one of the hoboes that Alice worried about if she thought of Emily at the train yard.
He might not have seen her, consumed by his own thoughts as he was, shielded as she was by the darkness. But her stomach gave a loud growl, the tension of the moment playing havoc with her undigested breakfast and her body protested.
In his instinctive reaction of raising both hands he kicked out, his flailing feet pushed open the door further and he could see what he was dealing with. “Bloody hell sakes alive!” he shouted, combining often-heard phrases of his mother and father, scrambling to his feet, overwrought, and rushed toward her. By some uncanny coincidence he had fed her part of a line to which she had repeatedly responded in a school play and that, with the kicking prompt, may have saved her life. In an instant she had unfocused her eyes, let her mouth go slack, lifted her arms with flailing hands and uttered gutteral sounds.
His raised hands were ready to strike and harm but her behaviour caused him to pause for an instant and reconsider. Then he grabbed her by her pony tail and jerked her to her feet where she stood, hunched, in character. There was no need to project sightlessness: she was blind with terror.
“What the…whasit….a retard? Where the hell did you come from?” He looked around in alarm, checking out the corners of the boxcar. The movement, and the release of her hair, gave Emily a second to think, to realize she was being handed another role, not the young Helen Keller – he would not believe she could have found her way here by accident if she were blind – but someone equally harmless. A handicapped child.
She made some more sounds, made the motion for mamma with fist against cheek.
“Aw, you poor kid,” he said, sitting down again in the doorway and pulling her with him so that they were seated side by side. “How’d you get here? Bet people are looking for you. Well, well. Ain’t that something. Just when I need a bit of luck, here you are. You could be my ticket to freedom.”
Then everything happened at once. Something large and heavy landed to the nearest end of the boxcar and Billy immediately threw his shackled hands over Emily’s head, the chain coming up against her throat, the least and last thing Stanley had expected when he tossed the rock, intending to shout at Emily to jump down and run, intending to throw at the handcuffed man any or all of the stones he had quickly collected in his hiding place. Emily’s breakfast in a hostile stomach revolted and she threw up extravagantly all over Billy and herself. He reacted by pulling back from the disgusting mess, yanked his arms free, and pushed her out the door. She fell on the cinders, rolled, straightened.
Now Stanley did shout, at the top of his lungs, “Run, Emily, run” and as she recovered and took off he started to pelt her adversary with rocks. Billy ducked, scrambled back and made for the door at the other side of the boxcar but it would not open. He then disappeared sideways into the dimness of the interior.
For a long moment there was silence and stillness. Then Billy’s head inched out from the edge of the door and he looked around. Stanley pegged a stone, barely missing Billy’s head. The man shot back inside. Stanley lobbed another stone, then another, displaying his speed, his accuracy. They hit the back of the boxcar with an impressive thud. Many hours throwing rocks at cans lined along tops of fences was now paying off.
A long silence. A cicada split the air with its sound and grasshoppers whirred in the long dry grass on the slope.
Then Billy’s voice came from the interior. “Kid? I know you’re there. Whadya want? Whadya doing this for? Is that your sister? I weren’t gonna hurt her. I got a sister. Somewhere. Kid? You wanna talk?”
Stanley didn’t move or speak. He kept a rock at the ready. Hurry up. Oh, Emily, hurry up.
Emily was breathing hard as she approached the first house she came to down the road from the tracks. As she headed toward the front door she caught sight of a woman standing in the side yard staring up into her apple tree. All thoughts of the reasons for poorly forming fruit left the woman’s mind at the sight of the girl, her ponytail half undone, her clothes, hands and face filthy and not just with dirt, her breath rasping. “Please could you help me,” Emily gasped.
“Why, Emily – “ came a voice from behind the screen of the front door. It was a girl she knew from school. “Ma, it’s Emily. What’s the matter?”
“There’s a man, with handcuffs, in a boxcar. Stanley is there. Oh, please call the police.”
The woman hastened to action and made the phone call, looking to Emily for directions. Then Emily, memory hovering of Chet’s wistful look as she had last seen him in the kitchen, called her grandfather, not so much to be rescued, to include him.
“In a boxcar? At the train yard? Oh, Emily. I’ll be right there.”
At the train yard a few cinders dribbled down the path but otherwise all was quiet. Stanley wondered what the man in the boxcar was doing. He hoped Emily would get help in a hurry. It was making him nervous to wait and he was beginning to feel vulnerable in spite of his hiding place. His hand was going stiff from gripping the stone.
There was a sudden sound of movement and Billy erupted from the open door of the boxcar in a flying leap. He would have made it, off and running, possibly to find and terrorize another hostage, but he hit the ground and the edge of a cement block and went over on his ankle. He made two desperate attempts to stand and run but the pain was intolerable. Twisting around he stared at Stanley who slowly stood up from behind bushes.
“Come here, kid. I won’t hurt you.”
Stanley shook his head slightly. Billy made a defiant attempt to stand and rush him but he collapsed in pain. Stanley did not raise his hand but neither did he drop the rock.
Billy sat squarely on the ground and tried to ease his ankle. Just his damned luck. Well, he’d have to go to hospital now and they’d put him back in the same old prison he was used to. He wouldn’t have to worry about being transferred now. He felt so tired.
Reaching into his shirt pocket he took out the twenty-nine dollars, and held them out toward Stanley. “I weren’t gonna hurt her. You buy her something nice for me, okay. She gonna be okay, running off like that?”
Thinking he meant her vomiting Stanley just nodded.
Billy gave a huge sigh. “Well, kid, it ain’t that I don’t like your company but my ankle is killing me. Why doncha go and get some help. You know I can’t get away.”
Suddenly there were policemen and Stanley caught sight of Emily at the top of the path, dirty, dishevelled, but not at all handicapped.. Billy stared at her for a moment, rolled his head, glanced at the sky, slipped the twenty-nine dollars back in his shirt pocket and then slowly raised his manacled hands.
Chet let go his arm from around Emily’s shoulders and released her to walk down the hill toward Stanley. Stanley dropped the stone as she approached.
-30-
