A calliope began to play oh so softly, grieving to itself, a million miles away.
In one single motion, Will leaned from his window, as did Jim. Without a word they gazed over the trembling surf of trees.
Their rooms were high, as boys’ rooms should be. From these gaunt windows they could rifle-fire their gaze artillery distances past library, city hall, depot, cow barns, farmlands to empty prairie!
There, on the world’s rim, the lovely snail-gleam of the railway tracks ran, flinging wild gesticulations of lemon or cherry-coloured semaphore to the stars.
There, on the precipice of earth, a small steam feather uprose like the first of a storm cloud yet to come.
The train itself appeared, link by link, engine, coal-car, and numerous and numbered all-asleep-and-slumbering-dream filled cars that followed the firefly-sparked chum, chant, drowsy autumn hearthfire roar. Hellfires flushed the stunned hills. Even at this remote view, one imagined men with buffalo-haunched arms shovelling black meteor falls of coal into the open boilers of the engine.
The engine!
Both boys vanished, came back to life binoculars.
“The engine!”
“Civil War! No other stack like that since 1900!”
“The rest of the train, all of it’s old”
“The flags! The cages! It’s the carnival!”
They listened. At first Will thought he heard the air whistling fast in his nostrils. But no — it was the train, and the calliope sighing, weeping, on that train.
“Sounds like church music!”
“Hell. Why would a carnival play church music?”
“Don’t say hell,” hissed Will.
“Hell.” Jim ferociously leaned out. “I’ve saved up all day. Everyone’s asleep so — hell!”
The music drifted by their windows. Goose pimples rose bid as boils on Will’s arms.
“That is church music. Changed.”
“For cri-yi, I’m froze, let’s go watch them set up!”
“At three a.m.?”
“At three a.m.!”
Jim vanished.
For a moment, Will watched Jim dance around over there, shirt uplifted, pants going on, while off in night country, panting, churning was this funeral train, all black-plumed cars, licorice-coloured cages, and a sooty calliope clamouring, banging three different hymns mixed and lost, maybe not there at all.
“Here goes nothing!”
Jim slid down the drainpipe on his house, toward the sleeping lawns.
“Jim! Wait!”
Will thrashed into his clothes.
“Jim, don’t go alone!”
And followed after.
12
Sometimes you see a kite so high, so wise it almost knows the wind. It travels, then chooses to land in one spot and no other and no matter how you yank, run this way or that, it will simply break its cord, seek its resting place and bring you, blood-mouthed, running.
“Jim! Wait for me!”
So now Jim was the kite, the wild twine cut, and whatever wisdom was his taking him away from Will who could only run, earthbound, after one so high and dark silent and suddenly strange.
“Jim, here I come!”
And running, Will thought, Boy, it’s the same old thing. I talk. Jim runs. I tilt stones, Jim grabs the cold junk under the stones and — lickety-split! I climb hills. Jim yells off church steeples. I got a bank account. Jim’s got the hair on his head, the yell in his mouth, the shirt on his back and the tennis shoes on his feet. How come I think he’s richer? Because, Will thought, I sit on a rock in the sun and old Jim, he prickles his arm-hairs by moonlight and dances with hop-toads. I tend cows, Jim tames Gila monsters. Fool! I yell at Jim. Coward! he yells back. And here we — go!
And they ran from town, across fields and both froze under a rail bridge with the moon ready beyond the hills and the meadows trembling with a fur of dew.
WHAM!
The carnival train thundered the bridge, The calliope wailed.
“There’s no one playing it!” Jim stared up.
“Jim, no jokes!”
“Mother’s honour, look!”
Going away, away, the calliope pipes shimmered with star explosions, but no one sat at the high keyboard. The wind, sluicing air-water air in the pipes, made the music.
The boys ran. The train curved away, gonging it’s under-sea funeral bell, sunk, rusted, green-mossed, tolling, tolling. Then the engine whistle blew a great steam whiff and Will broke out in pearls of ice.