Whistle stop

The day before I left the Compound for good, Clay asked me to meet him at the barn on the steps up to the room where we keep the chicken feed. I said sure, even though he's rude and ugly. I thought he might want to kiss me. He’s close to my age, unlike Kenny and W.B., who are old enough to have gray in their beards. Dad always joked he’d marry me off to one or the other of them. Clay was twenty, and I was fourteen, but a mature fourteen. Mom taught me, and I read at a college level. She used to work at the best private high school in D.C., so I’ve learned about modern art and astrophysics and real life. Not just Jesus and peach canning, like you hear about with other homeschoolers.

I got down to the barn when Clay said, but he wasn't there. So I went in the feed room and fished a fresh-hatched baby duck out the bottom of the incubator and cupped it to my cheek to keep us both warm. It was so soft and sunny. I thought maybe some of that might reflect back and make me more kissable.

We stood out on the steps for a while, baby duck and me, and I was just about to give up on the idea and go back to my calculus when Clay came down the hill from Building #2. He wore brown insulated coveralls, the ones he got from W.B. the Christmas before, and no hat. His face was red, and his hair stood up like bundled wheat. Watching him slip on the loose gravel and stutter step and spin his arms made me reconsider the kissing. I took the duckling back to the heat lamps, and when I got out front again, Clay was standing there, his tomato face shiny with sweat.

"Well, there you are," he said and grabbed my arm with one hand and halfway unzipped his top with the other. He handed me a magazine from under his suspenders. It was bent and limp and opened to a what I thought was a picture of an underground cavern out West, slick red cave walls closing in on a creamy and ridged stalactite. But what it really was was a close-up of a man and a woman screwing. I turned the page to a shot of one naked woman, spread eagle, and a lot of naked men. Kiss indeed. Before I could figure what was going on in that picture, my mom swooped in from wherever she had been hovering and snatched the magazine. She cuffed Clay into the frozen mud and kicked at him with her Carhartt winter boots until he screamed so loud Dad came out and pulled her off. She waved the magazine and spit at Dad and yelled "this, this." Clay lay flat back on the ground, eyes shut and legs open, kind of like the naked woman, but of course, he had on the snowsuit. Dad stood still too, like maybe if he was silent and calm, Mom would stop yelling and jumping.

 She threw the magazine on the ground and stomped on it. The pages tore, and the naked woman's head stuck to the tip of her boot, like a mermaid on the front of a Viking ship. Clay remained flat but moaned, as if it were he and not the picture getting ripped to shreds.

"You keep them away from her, all of them," she said.

"She's not a baby," Dad said. "She's gonna have to learn to take care of herself. You know, for when you go off, with your boy."

The way he said "boy," two syllables, the first one as deep and echoed as a bullfrog's call, meant he was talking about a black man. I didn't know about Gideon yet, so I assumed Dad meant the substitute UPS driver, Lenny. He was the only black man I knew then.

"You shut up," Mom said. She stepped forward. A wind bit at my ears. It carried with it Sarabeth's distant chattering and the muffled baying of Dad's bear hounds.

Dad put his hand on his holstered 9 mm.

"Do it," she said and inched so close a strand of her kinky bronze hair caught in the stubble on his cheek.

I went up behind her and leaned against her back.

Dad stepped back once, twice, then shook his head and turned and walked down the drive. I put my arms around Mom's waist and moved with her breathing.

That night, Dad and Mom were in his office, fighting, and I was outside the door, listening.

"Jane, you’re a fool, leaving me, for him."

"I'm just leaving you. Not for anyone."

"You're also a liar. Always have been. Not that I care, but you know, I can't keep you safe, if you leave."

Dad was obsessed with keeping us safe. Not just me and Mom. Also, Kenny and W.B. and old Mrs. Speck and her nephew Tiki, who couldn’t drive a truck anymore after a guy at the dump put a ball peen hammer through his left temple. That was two years ago. A bunch of people Dad knew from high school: Eric, Bobby, Hercy, James Moore, Grail, and the women that sometimes went with them and sometimes didn’t: Lottie, Brooke Jewell, Ann, Elestine, and Sarabeth Seamus. The twins Clay and Mitchell belonged to her. They used to live at the Compound until Sarabeth's sister was arrested, and Sarabeth admitted she couldn't handle them by herself and sent them to their uncle in Harrisonburg. They still visited a lot. Father John, a recovering heroin addict. And Juan, an illegal who stayed sometimes with us and sometimes in the shacks the Mennonites set up for the guys who help out in the turkey houses. He was a Mexican, but Dad said he was okay because he spoke good English and once killed a guy in the desert for raping an old woman.

At the Compound, Dad laid in enough Ramen, canned beans, and venison jerky to last us all two years. One thousand pounds of coal. Four thousand liters of sterilized water. A base flock of thirty Black Australorps, twenty-eight broody hens and two roosters. And enough weapons and ammunition to repel those who had not similarly planned ahead.

It wasn't about end days or getting back to Mother Earth with Dad. It was about 9-11 and how they wouldn't let him join the Guard because of his feet. Mom and Dad were married two months before in D.C., where he built HOV lanes on I-66, and she worked at the school. That October, their mailman dropped dead from anthrax, and their letters came late and diverted through Cleveland, crispy and brown around the edges. The next October, on Mom's first day back after maternity leave, a sniper took a shot at a kid in her school's playground. The kid didn't die, but Dad moved us anyway, back to his great uncle’s farm, halfway down the Shenandoah Valley. It’s where he was from and where he’d always planned to build something like the Compound.

"Try and stop me. Try it," Mom said. She howled it, like one of the hounds hitting the electric fence.

A screech then a bump, which could have been a chair falling over or could have been Dad’s fist hitting flesh.

“I don’t need to stop you,” Dad said. “You’ll come back.”

I pushed in the room. Dad was standing behind his desk, both hands on top, sunburn red from neck to brow. Mom was sitting on a wooden bench, knees tight together, looking like she was waiting for a bus she really didn't want to take. I ran to her and pressed my face into her lap. Her jeans smelled sour with sweat and musty with hen house dirt.

"Don't leave, don't leave, don't leave," I cried.

"Take her with you," Dad said.

Mom didn't answer, stroked my hair lightly, like my scalp were a skittish cat.

"I want to go," I said, not daring to lift my head, not daring to see if her eyes were as indifferent as her touch.

"You don't want her either," Dad said. Still Mom didn't answer, not right away. I counted silently to ten and halfway back again before she spoke.

"Of course I want her. Alice, go get your things together."

I moved quick, in case she changed her mind. I didn’t know when we were going, or where, or what to pack, which I guess didn’t matter, because I didn’t have a suitcase to pack in anyway. I went to the main pantry and found a plastic tub that used to hold onions. It didn’t look like luggage, and, if you put your head full in it, it could make your eyes water with the smell of Vidalias gone soft. But it had handles and a lid and wasn’t too big. I put in some jeans in and t-shirts and underwear and socks and my pink Adidas. I started with three sweaters and a sweatshirt but pulled all but the sweatshirt out again. There was hardly any more room, and what if we were going to someplace hot, like Florida? I took a faded flannel shirt of Dad’s I’d found in the rag pile. I tried to squeeze my pillow in, but no go. I slid my math book, Black Beauty, a paperback about vampires that Father John stole from the library, and two Archie comic books down the sides. I set on top the burner phone my dad got me for my thirteenth birthday, the sort all the adults on the Compound carried. I wasn’t even sure it worked. I’d never turned it on. No one to call.

I decided to stay dressed and awake, in case Mom and I were leaving tonight. I pulled back the blanket that covered the window at the end of the bed. From there, I could see to where the gravel driveway circled round the front of the barn. The wind was kicking up, so all Dad’s motion sensor lights had flicked on, and it was as bright as the winter sun at three in the afternoon. Little streams of cold air worked their way around the clear tape at the sides of the window frame and tweaked my cheeks and the outsides of my ears. Something metal clanged against the side of one of the tin outbuildings. The Anatolian in Pasture #1 barked and barked.

Right after the roosters started crowing, so maybe around two a.m., my mom came in and sat on the side of my bed. I might have been a little asleep. I didn’t turn toward her but let my shoulder fall into her back. Her hair frizzed over the left side of my face, and it felt like I was resting on a pillow made of a static cloud.

“We’re not leaving until morning,” she said, still not turning. “You can go to sleep.”

“That’s okay,” I said.

“Well, I’m going to,” she said and skootched herself all the way onto my bed. I swiveled. She lay on her back, eyes closed, still dressed in her dirty work jeans and a black turtle neck. She’d taken off her boots and socks. Her feet were long and narrow and cracked and flaked with white skin tags all around the edges. I pushed myself back a bit, put one hand on one of her feet. It prickled, like stroking a splinter of old fence wood. I went back to watching the driveway.

“Don’t you want to know where we’re going?” she said.

I did, but I said, “It’s okay. I don’t care.”

“San Francisco” she said. “It’s in California.”

I knew that, so I didn’t answer, just made a little noise, not happy, not sad. I sensed my part in all this was too new to be certain, so I was trying to make myself, my responses and expectations and baggage, as small as possible. Smaller is better when you’re on the run. That’s what Dad always said.

“A friend of mine’s going to help us. His name is Gideon. He works for Amtrak,” Mom said.

“Is he your boyfriend?” I asked before I could help myself.

“It’ll be fine,” she said. “You’ll go to public school.” This was an answer to a question I hadn’t asked, but it satisfied me. Gideon might be a boyfriend. Maybe they were planning to get married. But I was still in the equation.

I'd only ever seen San Francisco on a Rice-A-Roni box and only ever gone to school at the black oak table in our kitchen. I’m glad she didn’t ask me how I felt about San Francisco. I wouldn’t have known what to say. I was like the first astronaut, the Russian guy. I don't suppose he could have told you truly how he felt about going into space. He probably would have said, I'll let you know when I get there. Of course, I would miss some things about the Compound. The barn cats. Sarabeth's coleslaw. Shooting the crossbow with Dad. But I would miss Mom more, if I stayed.

I didn’t see Dad again. He didn't even come out when Ed Aerhardt's car pulled up the drive the next morning. That was the first time I’d ever ridden in a taxi. Mom said there were all manner of them in San Francisco. Mr. Aerhardt dropped us at the train station in Staunton just as the sun finished rising, and the metal roof over the platform looked like it was painted with gold. Mom pulled her bag and mine next to a bench facing the track, sat, and started poking at her new iPhone. I stood for a minute smelling the frying bacon from the Depot Grill at the other end of the cobblestone road. Mom snuck me there once, for my tenth birthday. We had extra fries and free cake. Dad didn't believe in eating out.

I breathed one more breath of pork fat and joined Mom on the bench. I nudged her purse, really just a Food Lion tote, with my foot. I hoped she had brought some snacks.

"Live free or die," my mom said and looked up from Angry Birds. The quicksilver light beaming from her iPhone colored her face sterling.

"You have to survive to be free," I said, quoting Dad.

"Surviving almost killed us," said Mom. I knew she would have an answer. I didn't expect it to be serious.

"Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose," I countered.

Mom rolled her eyes and looked down at her game. She lobbed a shedding canary into a pyramid of Corinthian columns and baby blue ice cubes and when it fell, pumped her fist. She flipped her head back and her hand-knitted watch cap dropped behind the bench, and her hair shot out all over like electricity.

"Freedom," she sang. "Freedom."

A young Mennonite couple dressed for the second sailing of the Mayflower backed away from our bench. They edged all the way to the other end of the platform, and the woman stared out at us through the tunnel of her black bonnet. Mom stuck out her tongue and returned her eyes to the phone.

I envied the Mennonites their religion sometimes. On their compounds, they had a rationale for keeping themselves shut away, something bigger and better than fear. Or maybe that's just what I wanted to believe. I wouldn't have liked having to wear long skirts. And even though the girls my age had skin like pink silk, most were missing a finger or two. Those old tools don't have safety guards.

I stretched my neck and leaned into Mom so our temples touched. She was all the faith I needed. I huddled closer to her and down into my parka.

Mom swiped the screen to the Amtrak app, showed me the train would come in twenty-one minutes, and swiped back to the game. She didn't offer me a turn, and that was okay. I was just as happy to watch. It was the first iPhone I'd seen up close, though I'd heard about them, of course. We kept up with technology at the Compound. Dad had a MacBook Pro with retina display, top-of-the-line ID-masking software, and one of the old unlimited data plans from Verizon.

"Twelve minutes," Mom said.

The train whistled from around the rock face of Sears Hill, and a light hit us smack in the face before turning onto the tracks.  The silver cars hissed and groaned and settled and a high door opened with a puff and a black man as big as a bear hooked a brown hand on a steel bar and swung out.

"Jane," he called and my mom pocketed the phone and stood up. He wore a conductor's suit, pressed as flat blue as midnight with gold buttons down his chest and gold braids around his wrists. His voice was as round as he was.

"And this is Alice," he said and jumped down to the platform and reached that big paw toward me and the bench. Mom stretched back and gripped my shoulder and whispered, "here we go."

Twenty-six hours after we left the Staunton station, Mom and I again sat thigh-to-thigh on a cold bench, this time facing the Calder sculpture in Chicago's Federal Plaza. It was called "Flamingo," according to the Amtrak informational brochure my mom had made me read at breakfast. It looked more like an enormous and ailing praying mantis in a color Dad, who loves Mustangs from the 70s, would have called "grabber orange."

"So you just stay here and let me run my errands.” Mom bounced her thighs off the cold concrete. “I’m not going to be long.”

 “Go on,” I said, though I didn’t really want to wait alone. Gideon had tried to talk Mom out of coming to this particular square. He said winos liked to shelter from the wind against the rectangular planters here, and flashers hung out around the bus stop. But Mom brought us anyway. She told Gideon she was sick and tired of taking precautions, of hunkering down, of sticking together. She left all that at the Compound, she said. And if we wanted to be with her, we had to too.

“Okay then,” she said and stood. Her eyes popped to the street, the plaza, the orange bug, me, and the scent of roses pulsed off her. She'd never worn perfume before, that I knew of. What she smelled of mostly in Virginia was propane and wood smoke. She repeated my instructions. I was to sit and not worry about being kidnapped or raped. I was to think about what I would do if I could do anything.

I still felt the train rocking, and the winter-bright sky gave me a headache. "I'll be fine," I said, "Palm, knee, foot." That's the three ways you hit an assailant for maximum impact (palm to the nose, knee to the groin, foot to the top of the foot). She quit hopping and met my eye.

"Try not to put anybody in the hospital," she said, tapped the heel of her hand on my forehead, and jogged off to make the light.

I followed her flashing curls, bobbing above the ski caps and balaclava of the midmorning crowd, until her head disappeared. I didn't like her being where I couldn't reach her. For a long time, she never traveled out of hollering distance. Then around about a year ago, Sarabeth's sister got moved to the Alderson Federal Prison Camp, and Mom started going up there with Sarabeth for visits. Maybe twice a month, they would catch the train at three and come back the next day by two.

That's how Mom met Gideon. For fourteen years, he was a conductor on the Cardinal, New York City to Chicago by way of Washington D.C., Charlottesville, VA, Staunton, and Alderson Federal Prison Camp. Martha Stewart was jailed there. Gideon said no one fancy enough to stand out as her visitor ever showed up on the train. Mom laughed at that. She laughed at everything Gideon said.

Mom’s head disappeared under the Walgreen’s sign, and I burped up a bit of the Yankee Pot Roast ($24.75) I’d eaten in the train’s dining room the night before. We were allowed to order anything we wanted from the menu. It was included in the price of the ticket. Gideon got to sit with us even though he was working, because it was his last run on the Cardinal, and we were his "special friends," according to the dining room attendant, Wylie. He was as white as Gideon was black and talked in the slow way of people from the way-south, like Kenny. All that deep breathing between words makes them sound dumb. But if you think they're slow, go ahead and turn your back for a minute. They're as fast as snakes. I know, because, besides Kenny and Sarabeth, we had, on and off, about ten others in the Compound from Alabama, and they all made me jumpy as hell.

Dad looked for people like that. Sluggish on the surface, but running quick and cold underneath, like Clay and Mitchell. Clay got in a fight with a guy with a hoe when he was twelve and ended up with a scar across his left cheek. Six months later, when it faded and opened up a bit, like a tiny valley, Mitchell cut his own cheek with a hunting knife. But he got the wrong cheek and nicked his eye, so now he wore plastic black-framed glasses, and that's how you told them apart.

Neither of the two boys skateboarding across the plaza had glasses, so they couldn’t be the Seamus twins, despite their matching buzz cuts. That, and there was no reason they'd be in Chicago. Mom said paranoia can't be our second skin anymore. She said I should start worrying about normal things, like zits and prom dates and getting pregnant. Not Iraqi terrorists or whether the government was causing earthquakes through plate tectonics.

I chanted to myself: "Just a normal day. Just a normal day," but after a while, it stopped making sense. Twice I thought I saw W.B. in the swirls of people navigating around the sculpture and the office building behind it. Once I thought I spotted Dad. But when they got closer, I could see these men weren't a bit like W.B. or Dad or anyone from our part of Virginia. They wore shiny navy coats with team names, like "BEARS," written on them in corn yellow block letters. They weren't bulky as much as they were puffy. Still, I couldn't help but stay on high alert for Compound members, and because of that, I missed the approach of the pervert.

He was an old man in a collarless beige sweatshirt and matching baggy track pants, and he plopped down next to me and placed a bare and red and swollen hand on my parka where it covered my thigh. He pressed down, as if he were flattening a grilled cheese. Both of us kept our eyes on sculpture.

"I just don't get it," he said. I didn’t either, but knew better than to discuss it with him. I tried to inch away. He leaned down harder.

"Did you ever think about modeling?" he said, still not looking at me.

I wasn't entirely sure what my next move was. Palm-knee-foot seemed premature. He'd done nothing physical so far but smush my leg, and maybe that was a mistake. In any case, he was to my side, and we were both on our butts, which made any sort of self-defense problematic. No leverage.

I shifted out from under his hand and stood. He stood too, and he was much bigger than he looked hunched on the bench. 

"I've got a car near here," he said, putting himself between me and my view of the street. "It wouldn't hurt to talk over your options." He sounded tired. I wondered if he did this a lot.

"Alice," I heard my mom.

"Mom," I yelled back.

She ran from across the street, ten-mile strides, swatting pedestrians with a white Walgreens bag. For a moment, I was sorry for the guy. I sidestepped right and moved to go to her. He grabbed my hood, and the parka's collar hit me in the throat like a hard swallow of hot tea.

Maybe I blacked out for a minute. I didn't see or hear Mom hit him. She must have clipped him at the back of the knees, because next I know, he let loose my hood and dropped his head to my level. Muscle memory kicked in, and I drove my palm up into his nostrils. The crust and hair tickled before the crunch of cartilage. It felt like smashing graham crackers for piecrust.

I pulled my arm back, ready to strike again.

"Wipe it," yelled Mom, "AIDS," and I noticed the blood on me, not too much. There was more on the guy's face and it spurted onto his sweatshirt. Mom grabbed my clean hand and pulled me away. Three policemen in uniform passed us on the left. They were carrying coffees in Styrofoam cups and ambling toward the wailing pervert, as if they were headed toward some sort of street performance in which they had very little interest.

I put my bloody hand in my pocket, and Mom gave me a tight smile. Nothing good came of involving cops. She gripped me tighter and jogged us into the middle of the crowd. When we got about a block away, she stopped dead and pulled me into a bear hug. My head bounced against her as her chest heaved. I assumed she was crying, because I was crying. But I was wrong. She was laughing. She spun me out and away, like a swing dancer. She was having the time of her life. So I laughed back, what else could I do? We continued toward Union Station, hand in hand, swinging arms, laughing at my almost abduction, laughing at the wounded old man, laughing at our narrow escape.

That night at dinner, our first on the California Zephyr, the train that would take us all the way to San Francisco, she was still laughing when she told the story to a sparrow of a mother from the Chicago suburbs and her pale, silent son. Ten years old, according to the mother, eleven according to the boy, the only word he spoke all meal. She was terrified of my mom and falling in love at the same time. Mom made it sound like we were both superheroes. And maybe we were. The woman asked again "You knocked him down?" Maybe I hadn't been in danger, real danger. Or maybe I had been in just enough danger to make it thrilling, like I imagined riding a roller coaster might be. I bet the boy wished he had my mom. If it had happened to him, he'd have been cut into a million pieces and stashed in the back of that creep's trunk. The thought made me sad, and I pushed the boy my dessert pudding parfait. He nodded and spooned a mouthful.

Mom and I decided to sit after dinner and look out the window for a bit, even though it was so black you could only guess at what was out there: rutted and frozen dirt, bent and broken corn stalks, one white-board farmhouse and miles of empty driveway. We would ride through the plains all night.

I watched the scared mother and her boy wobble their way toward the sleeping cars. He was in front of her, leaning back, and her hands were on his shoulders, like she had to hold him up every step.

Mom stared out into the nothing. I tried to figure what she was looking at, but mostly all I could make out were the streaks on the window's Plexiglas from other peoples' hands and noses. Once in a while, a streetlight illuminated a crossing gate, with a beat-up car waiting there, exhaust settling like rain clouds around its tailpipe. The train whistle sounded like far-off crying, like it was coming from way underground and didn't have anything to do with this train at all.

Mom was looking at her own reflection.

Gideon showed up at the table just then, with an opened bottle of wine in one hand and plastic cups in the other. He wasn't in his conductor’s outfit anymore. He wore a dark blue vest and matching pants with a summer sky shirt and tie.

"I made up your room," he said. "In case you're worn out, from all of the fighting." He laughed. Mom laughed. I even laughed a little, because of the way he said it, bobbing his head, holding the bottle and cups up in front of his face, a boxer ready to jab.

I wiggled myself out of the booth, and Gideon sat down next to Mom. I hung onto the edge of the table and watched him pour red wine. The smell of vinegar and sharp honey mixed with the sulfur emitting from the churning wall heaters.

"You want a Coke?" Gideon asked me.

"Why don't you get ready for bed?" Mom said.

"I don't drink Coke," I said to Gideon. "When are you coming?" to Mom.

"Soon," she said and toasted her smudgy reflection in the black window with her plastic cup.

"How long?" I wasn't ready to go back alone.

She pivoted and stared into me. Her hair mirrored behind her looked like a halo. She sipped her wine. She stared at me for a long time. Until the wine in her cup was almost gone. Gideon thrummed his fat fingers on the edge of the table, cleared throat twice.

"You wanted to come," she finally said.

I couldn’t look at her so I looked at the reflection of the back of her head. The frantic chuck-chuck-chuck of wheels on rail began to slow in tempo and more street lights clicked by. We were coming into a station. Mom waggled her cup, and Gideon poured her some more.

I staggered to the end of the car. I slapped the button that made the door open and straddled the shifting floor joints where the dining car met the sleeping car, riding it like a surf board. Maybe I’d stand here until she came. Maybe I’d get off at the next station, make her come looking for me, if she could be bothered. The train’s rocking slowed then stopped. The engine wheezed and gasped. The car dropped and the doors to the outside opened. Cold air jabbed at my nose with smells of frost and gravel and guns just shot. A couple stepped up to the train. They were bundled, so I couldn’t see their faces. I stepped back to let them through.

 I pretended the woman was me, but an older taller me, holding hands with my own boyfriend. He’d be blond and thin as a reed and have white, white teeth. We’d be riding the Zephyr to San Francisco, or maybe away from it. I'd tell him that, when I was a child, I took Amtrak from the East to the West, and in Chicago, I fought off a kidnapper. He'd wind his arms around me and kiss my forehead. He'd believe me, because he'd know I'd seen things he hadn't, but still, he'd have to ask.

"Where was your mom?"

The cold air on my face felt like it was calling me closer. Steam formed where the inside crossed over to the outside, more steam rose from under the train. Past the lights on the platform was black and more black. I should have been scared, all that emptiness and not even the reflection of Mom to soften it. I wasn’t though. In all of that space spread out forever behind the curtain of dark and cold, there had to be room somewhere for the possibility of love. I half-shut my eyes and leaned into the spitting snow and kicked one foot out into the whole wide world.

“Whistle Stop” was first published in Stories that Need to be Told 2019, an anthology from Tulip Tree Press.