aloud. I think he was down here and relatively intact instead of up there between the
rails and completely mangled because be was trying to get out of the way when the
train hit him, knocking him head over heels. He had landed with his head pointed
towards the tracks, arms over his head like a diver about to execute. He had landed in this boggy cup of land that was becoming a small swamp. His hair was a dark reddish
colour. The moisture in the air had made it curl slightly at the ends. There was blood in it, but not a great deal, not a gross-out amount. The ants were grosser. He was
wearing a solid colour dark green tee-shirt and bluejeans. His feet were bare, and a
few feet behind him, caught in the blackberry brambles, I saw a pair of filthy low-
topped Keds. For a moment I was puzzled–why was he here and his tennies there…
Then I realized, and the realization was like a dirty punch below the belt. My wife,
my kids, my friends–they all think that having an imagination like mine must be quite nice; aside from making all this dough, I can have a little mind-movie whenever
things get dull. Mostly they’re right. But every now and then it turns around and bites the shit out of you with these long teeth, teeth that have been filed to points like the teeth of a cannibal. You see things you’d just as soon not see, things that keep you
awake until first light. I saw one of those things now, saw it with absolute clarity and certainty. He had been knocked spang out of his Keds. The train had knocked him out
of his Keds just as it had knocked the life out of his body. That finally rammed it all the way home for me. The kid was dead. The kid wasn’t sick, the kid wasn’t sleeping.
The kid wasn’t going to get up in the morning anymore or get the runs from eating too
many apples or catch poison ivy or wear out the eraser on the end of his Ticonderoga
No. 2 during a hard math test. The kid was dead; stone dead. The kid was never going
to go out bottling with his friends in the spring, gunnysack over his shoulder to pick up the returnables the retreating snow uncovered. The kid wasn’t going to wake up at
two o’clock a. m. on the morning of 1 November this year, run to the bathroom, and
vomit up a big glurt of cheap Halloween candy. The kid wasn’t going to pull a single
girl’s braid in home room. The kid wasn’t going to give a bloody nose, or get one. The kid was can’t, don’t, won’t, never, shouldn’t, wouldn’t, couldn’t. He was the side of the
battery where the terminal says NEG. The fuse you have to put a penny in. The wastebasket by the teacher’s desk, which always smells of wood-shavings from the
sharpener and dead orange-peels from lunch. The haunted house outside of town
where the windows are crashed out, the NO TRESPASSING signs whipped away
across the fields, the attic full of bats, the cellar full of worms. The kid was dead, mister, ma’am, young sir, little miss. I could go on all day and never get it right about the distance between his bare feet on the ground and his dirty Keds hanging in the
bushes. It was thirty-plus inches, it was a googol of light-years. The kid was
disconnected from his Keds beyond all hope of reconciliation. He was dead.
We turned him face up into the pouring rain, the lightning, the steady crack of
thunder. There were ants and bugs all over his face and neck. They ran briskly in and
out of the round collar of his tee-shirt. His eyes were open, but terrifyingly out of
sync–one was rolled back so far that we could see only a tiny arc of pupil; the other stared straight up into the storm. There was a dried froth of blood above his mouth
and on his chin–from a bloody nose, I thought–and the right side of his face was