Fiction by Richard Alley

Richard J. Alley is the author of novels Five Night Stand (2015) and Amelia Thorn (2020), and a contributing author of the anthology Memphis Noir (2015). His work has appeared in Oxford American, Memphis magazine, and a number of other periodicals. A speechwriter and editor, he lives in Memphis.

Freight

Behind the two-story, one-time farmhouse, trains clanged and banged metal-on-metal. Brakes squealed like some mythical creature of the Iron Age. Like the hellhound of Vulcan, god of fire and forge, straining at its barbed collar and leash. Every day, without warning, a line of boxcars a mile long would begin its roll, announcing its departure with a series of bomb blasts down the line that scared up crows like spilled ink staining the morning sky.

But not Hector. He never blinked an eye at the explosions rattling the house’s windows and the tobacco tin collection on his window sill just as they rattled the bones in his chest. His mother, though, never could get used to the trains. Every clang and squeal caused her to jump, dropping whatever she might be carrying—a bottle of milk, gravy boat, cup of coffee, or telephone receiver during those long conversations with her sister back home. On the phone, Hector’s aunt rattled on the way grandmother’s good china plates (unused) rattled in the maple sideboard. From two-thousand miles away, she rattled on about the city’s growth, spanning the Golden Gate, parties and who’d attended. The Stanfords, Floods, and Fairs. Mayor Rolph and Joseph Strauss who, just last week, complimented her stole. While from her end, Hector’s mother ran down a list of disappointments loudly enough for her husband, for Hector, and for any passing train conductor to hear.

The summer Hector turned ten, the trains brought something more than cargo to town.

They brought charm and riddles for Hector to mull over. And they left again with flatbeds of uncertainty and unease, and a newfound knowledge of danger swirling in its steam.

Hector was on his knees. A raised nail in the wood-plank floor pressed into his flesh where blood rose to the surface but didn’t break the skin. He was staring at his father as the man snored on the sofa, his arm outstretched and his hand dangling, palm up. It was pinkish-white and smooth.

Hector took it in from every angle, looking for a line or callous. The fingers were on the smaller side, nails clean and filed. The wrist, where the shirt cuff in the beginning stages of fraying was pulled up, was hairless and blue-veined. If Hector had seen such a hand disembodied, he couldn’t be sure it belonged to a man at all.

A train whistle blew. Hector’s father snorted and lifted one eyelid, then the other. “What the hell are you doing?” Hector smelled whiskey on his breath.

Though a slight boy with little athletic ability, Hector loved being outdoors. The backyard, in the shade of the wood-frame house and oak canopy, was an oasis where the season’s sickness couldn’t touch him. Outside, Hector inspected his knee and rubbed the rectangle indention left by the nail head, watching it turn from red back to white. He inspected his own hands, turning them over and back to see if they looked like his father’s. But they were ruddy and rough from play. Grease in the lines and coal dust beneath the nails. Knuckles scratched and scarred by thorns and brambles. A hangnail caked brown with blood.

The house and yard might have sat on the outskirts of this one-magnolia town, but Hector’s mother still held the rarified air of San Francisco’s Nob Hill in her lungs. At Jones Department Store, where she dragged Hector under the premise of new linens or pots and pans, but where she shopped for the latest fashions on credit she controlled, they ran into women who invited her to lunch. Seated at a nearby table, Hector was told to lean over his hot chicken noodle soup and breathe in the steam. “It chases the sickness from your lungs.” Onion and pepper tickled his nose. He listened as the women spoke of other women: Mrs. Kavanaugh’s thinning hair or Mrs. Siegfried’s frequent visits to the pharmacy and whether those visits were due to illness or to Mr. Dunston, the new bachelor pharmacist from Springfield. The next day, as he ate a cheese sandwich at the kitchen table and his mother drank a Coca-Cola and smoked cigarettes, Hector wondered if the women at Jones that day were talking about her.

Hector shrugged it all off and retreated into pools of shade in the backyard, stepping from the rough wood planks of the mudroom to the stoop’s chipped and baked bricks, to the mossy flagstones of the patio, cool on the soles of his bare feet. He loved the feel of dirt giving way to grass, and knew without looking to sidestep the jagged end of an unearthed, vestigial pipe of some prehistoric era. No one else used the backyard. It was Hector’s alone, with no rights given to the bank or the Kaiser or Coolidge. Not even Vanderbilt, Gould, the Union Pacific, or Chesapeake & Ohio claimed right-of-way. His parents couldn’t abide the train or the unincorporated village of Black families just across the tracks. So the yard was Hector’s, and Hector alone made the rules. He collected nuggets of coal dropped by trains into a mouse-gnawed basket from the basement, using them to draw elaborate panels from fairytale books. He sketched stormy seascapes and jungle scenes on fence panels. His father walked the length of the yard, grumbling about graffiti and private property and discipline. His mother never entered the backyard. Hector didn’t think he’d ever seen her open the screen door to the mudroom.

His father had been in the war and run serpentine through trenches, crawling beneath barbed wire on his way to a life of soft leather seats and perfumed clientele. It might have been anyone’s fate, but it wasn’t just anyone. It was Hector’s father who pulled an injured soldier from a trench seconds before hell cleaned it out. He carried that soldier half a mile to the field hospital, skirting a minefield, and refusing to stop even when a German bullet bit into the meat of his own leg. The injured soldier was barely out of short pants, enlisted before his wealthy and powerful family could stop him. At a hospital in Paris the boy’s father, newly arrived by ship, took a notebook from his valet, tore a page from it, and wrote his name and address. He told Hector’s father to come see him after the war and he’d be assured any job he wanted within the man’s empire. The father touched a gloved palm to his son’s cheek, nodded to his valet, and left the ward as quickly as he’d arrived.

Hector’s father had never heard of the town, had never been south of the Mason-Dixon, but he visited for the promise of a job, a title, and an office full of heavy furniture. A decade later, America went belly-up and the stock market hemorrhaged red, white, and blue. His\ position with the bank turned out to be as immovable as his oak desk, and now he played the part of parvenu with tailored suits and stories of ancestors real and imagined who had once owned land, timber, shipyards, and other men. But his air was stale and as empty as if breathed into a vacuum. He sank nightly into one highball after another of the second most expensive bourbon.

Each morning, he shrank into his Sears & Roebuck pinstripes and pawnshop Bell & Ross wrist watch that couldn’t keep time as well as the Chesapeake & Ohio locomotive did twice every day.

Once, when visiting his father, they’d been invited into the bank president’s office. There, Hector saw a picture of the man’s son on his desk. The boy had remained glassy-eyed even as pretty French nurses jockeyed for his attention. He never thanked Hector’s father for saving his life. Never said a word as far as anyone could recall. Hector’s father only found out later that, as he’d made his way back to America, the boy had jumped ship in the middle of the night, in the middle of the ocean. For the rest of his life, Hector would remain transfixed, as he had been that day in the bank president’s office, by the dark-haired boy trapped in the frame. Trapped in time at the bottom of an ocean.

In the peaceful in-between space of Hector’s backyard sanctuary, he played his own game of war with a broken rake handle-turned-rifle. A butter knife as a bayonet. And when he ran serpentine through the rusted swing set and around fig trees, and crawled beneath a neglected, frayed lawn chair, he never considered whether he was a good guy or bad. American, English, Russian, or German. He thought only about the young, wounded boy at the bottom of the sea.

The boy whose name had been Hector.

His own name—Sebastian—was carried from Norway. Sebastian’s ancestors had traveled to the Americas to make their fortune stripping her of valuable timber and minerals, only to lose that fortune to alcohol, cards, and con men. Sebastian didn’t like the name Sebastian.

He had an imagination as long and deep as his backyard. When his parents’ voices and violence spilled from open windows, the thoughts in his head grew like blackberry bushes, wild and thorny. He had a devil of a time finding the root of his imagination so he might grab hold and control its growth. The nettles of it scratched and irritated from the inside out. His own lack of control frightened him. So the boy who was still too young to distance himself from his family by train, did so by becoming Hector. And his life’s work would be to shape and focus his imagination.

That summer, Jackson LeDuc came to stay. It was the summer of sickness and hobos. The summer when Hector first began wondering where the trains came from and where they went.

And it was Jackson LeDuc who first asked him, “What do you want to be?” He’d never considered the question. He would be whatever he became, a taller version of Hector the kid.

And he would do what grown men did. He would leave the house with a briefcase. Wear a hat and a tie. He’d go to the bank. Then he’d come home smelling of cigarettes and the day’s coffee.

Unless you were a Black man on the other side of the tracks. Then you wore Dungarees all day and drank from a jar. Women like his mother stayed home and cleaned and cooked and, when they thought no one was looking, they cried. But Jackson LeDuc was something different. And when he smiled and his split lip smoothed out, it made Hector feel like maybe he could do anything. Anything at all.

He came at first light on a Sunday morning. A folded-in-half newspaper with the ROOM TO LET notice circled tucked into his fetid armpit. Hector’s father was still in his bathrobe, a smattering of toast crumbs in his mustache, and visibly perturbed by the intrusion. Jackson LeDuc carried with him a cardboard suitcase, yellow-shaded desk lamp, sleeve of papers, and a portable Remington typewriter. He’d arrived, it was obvious to Hector, who lurked behind his father at the doorway, prepared to move in. And he did.

From the start, the attic apartment held as much curiosity for Hector as the train rumbling feet away from where he lay in the shade of a black walnut tree. The tenant himself was as distant as the next whistle stop. That all changed in one afternoon. “Goddammit,” he heard the little round man say. He wore a rumpled suit and a narrow-brim fedora pulled down to his ears.

A cigar—as short and squat as the man himself—was stuck in the corner of his mouth so he had to speak around it to say, “Look, kid, it’s all I can do to climb Kilimanjaro here once a day. Twice’d like to kill me. What say you run up and grab the notepad the idiot-I-am left on the table? Just inside the door. You do that for me?”

Hector’s curiosity bubbled in his stomach and he nodded before taking the steps two at a time. He stopped halfway up to call down, “The key?”

“I never lock it. Got nothin’ worth nothin’. Hurry up now.”

The notion that this mysterious world was open all hours swirled around in Hector’s head as he opened the door and took a cursory look around before snatching the notepad from where it lay. The sense of it, like the fleeting sight of an open boxcar, stoked his curiosity. He hurried back down. Jackson LeDuc took the pad, tapped his hat brim in thanks, and walked to the end of the driveway where a car Hector hadn’t noticed before waited. The engine burped and smoke sputtered from its tail. The little man climbed into the back seat and Hector watched as the car sped off, making the corner at the end of the street with a satisfying squeal of rubber. He looked up at the third-floor door then, unlocked and welcoming, and decided to wait for another day.

The trains carried coal and lumber and war surplus. Cattle ferried to stockyards left a fecund contrail on locomotive steam. The landscape beyond the fence changed by the hour, a film reel of scenery for Hector to chew on. One afternoon, as he lay in the grass bouncing a hard rubber ball off the fence, the train squealed to a stop and Hector looked up. A half-dozen men looked back. They sat with their legs dangling from the boxcar and stood, leaning against the open door.

Some were shirtless. Some wore hats. They smoked cigarettes and pipes, smoke as peppery as the soup at Jones Department Store’s cafeteria, and they carried rucksacks held together with red stitching. “Hobos,” Hector’s father called them later when Hector recounted the scene over dinner. But to Hector, they were world travelers and adventurers, explorers like those he’d studied in the set of encyclopedias a man with one arm had sold to his mother over glasses of lemonade on the front porch. They were pirates. They were free. Blank faces, deeply tanned and lined with their experiences, struggles, and worry stayed with Hector. Each man took up residence in his mind, filling his thoughts just as their laconic bodies had filled the open doorway of the train car.

“Take this envelope upstairs to Mr. LeDuc,” his mother said the next morning. His father had just left for work and Hector was taking his time at the breakfast table, watching sunlight from the window move through a glass of orange juice.

“What’s in it?”

“Two whole fryers. Mind your business, young man, and run along. Be quick, no dawdling, it’s no place for a boy. You hear?” Hector turned to go. “You hear?” she repeated.

“Yes, ma’am.” The rail in his hand and wood risers beneath his feet were familiar. He counted steps silently to himself, though he knew there were twenty-eight. Knew because this wasn’t the first time he’d gone to Jackson LeDuc’s room. Nor was it the second. This was Hector’s fourth trip, and he always stopped in the middle—fourteen—to consider turning and fleeing. But this time he’d been ordered up there and so the climb was easier. Those other visits were made only after Hector had lurked behind the hedge as the little man descended the stairs like a glacier—step, the other foot brought down even, step, the other brought down even—and to the street where the Packard waited, idling. Once he heard the tires squeal into the turn, he started his climb.

Despite what his mother said, the attic apartment of Jackson LeDuc was the perfect place for a boy. A museum of manhood and mystery. Hector crept through the rooms, touching a pocket knife and straight-edge razor, so different from the Safe-T-Razor his father used. He ran his fingertip around the winding road of a corkscrew and dropped a pair of dice until his own lucky number eleven turned up. He sniffed aftershave, pipe tobacco, and gin (though he didn’t taste it). He spun a record with his fingers and gazed for the length of a train whistle at a pulp paperback with a redheaded woman whose bare breast peeked from an open robe. No place for a boy? This was the place a boy could learn to be a man.

“You like music? Hm?” A brassy horn sustained an impossible note from the phonograph in the corner. “I hear some from down there. What your parents play? Schubert? Beethoven? Debussy?” He pronounced it dee-bussy. “Yeah?”

Jackson LeDuc wore a tie, loosely cinched, and suit jacket. His battered fedora balanced on the back of his melon-sized head. When Hector stood in the backyard and looked up, the attic windows turned silver pools of mercury in the sun’s glare. Now, from inside the apartment, light flooded through wavy glass. It shone through the trees’ canopy as green as a gin bottle, spotlighting the writer’s things: a highball glass, papers, an inkwell, and that straight-edge. Dust feathered it all. The horn music itself seemed to come from that sunlight.

“I’m here for the composers, too,” Jackson LeDuc continued. “You know this town got composers? Hm? You know it got cathedrals?”

Hector didn’t. He’d known his hometown only from the backseat of his father’s car and the brief walks it took to get into the department stores and markets his mother dragged him to.

He knew nothing of the Hey-Hay, Dante’s, or the Nickel-a-Plate Jackson LeDuc was talking about now. Nor did he know the saints who appeared in those cathedrals. “George Lee. Ben Moten. Lester Young. Sammy Price. Louis Armstrong. That’s him blowing that horn you hear there. They all come through here, from New Orleans, from Memphis, from Kay-Cee, to Chicago to En-Why-Cee. They come all that way on the Chitlin’ Circuit. You ever had a chitlin’, young man?” Hector hadn’t. “Shoot. But here I am talking music when all you doin’ is looking at my busted up lip.”

“I wasn’t,” Hector said, pulled now from the sunlight, from the horn, from the damaged face he most assuredly was staring at.

“It’s alright. Might as well get the whole picture if you gonna peek.” He lifted his lip to  show Hector the mess of his upper gum—a ruin of purple and black with two teeth missing and half of another. Hector’s skin went cold and his butthole puckered. “It was this typewriter did it. Well, the man swinging the thing like Babe Ruth, I guess you’d say.”

Hector looked down then at the Remington, expecting to see blood and flesh at its corners, a yellowed tooth where the ‘T’ key should be.

“Hell of it is, Remington’s also a rifle. Guess you’d say I got the better end of the deal. Stopped me playing horn, that’s for damn sure. I was good, too. Can’t very well blow when your lip keeps splitting wide.”

“Why, though?” Hector whispered.

“Woman.” The writer smiled and the white scar smoothed out again. Once he’d put his mouth back as it belonged, Hector continued watching the man’s face in a way that made adults uncomfortable. It was the silent intensity of the boy’s stare that sent his father to his study immediately after work, and had turned the bank president to his office window as he spoke. And it was the same watchful gaze that had burned the boxcar men into Hector’s memory. Jackson LeDuc sensed the heaviness in Hector’s stare and, though he tried to hold it, ultimately couldn’t.

He looked away, absently pressing a single typewriter key—Q—over and over, watching it scroll across an otherwise blank sheet of paper. “Anyway, she was a good woman.”

Hector wondered what made a woman “good.”

The needle scratched at the label and Jackson LeDuc stood to put another disc on. The action seemed heroic—the kitchen chair scraping the floor, his hairy hands on the tabletop, the tsunami-like effort to stand and walk to the phonograph. Once seated again, he resumed: “That’s who’s here.” He pointed a thumb, the nail as yellow as his pencil, at the phonograph. “Didn’t even know, did you? Don’t even know such a world is out there? Whole world big as what’s in your head right there. That’s right, I seen you out there drawing. Painting. Making a little picture from what you see … and I ain’t talking about what’s inside them fences or on that train. Right there”—he pointed at Hector’s two eyes with his index and pinky fingers—“in that head of yours. I seen a world like that in other eyes. Duke. Louis. Pleasant. You heard of them? Hm? The composers. They playing a whole world with their fingers. Maybe you do it, too, on canvas. Maybe. One day.

“Anyway, here I am, shackled to the very thing took my own dreams from me. I tell their stories, the composers, the players. Right here on this machine. Tellin’ folks about Bix. He died, sickness in his lungs, ya know. In his mind. Poor ol’ Bix.”

The names ran through Hector’s imagination like a freight train through the backyard.

Names as foreign and exotic as those stenciled across tanker cars. Alameda. Boca Raton. Metairie. Lackawanna. Tarzana. Later, back downstairs in the kitchen where his mother prepared supper, smoked, and drank coffee, Hector said, “Do you know Bix?”

“Who’s that?” she said.

“Bix.”

“What’s ‘Bix,’ son?” Hector hadn’t seen his father come in. He sat at the table and Hector’s mother poured a whiskey.

“He played music.”

“Music? Where?”

“The De-Luxe Club.”

“De-Luxe? Sebastian, what do you know about a night club? About this Bix? Where did you hear such a thing?” his mother said.

Hector’s eyes raised skyward, toward the attic apartment. “Anyway, he’s dead.”

His parents both followed their son’s gaze. “Who’s dead, son?” his father said.

“Bix.”

It was one month after Jackson LeDuc moved into the third-floor flat that Hector’s aunt came to visit. “And who do we have here?” his aunt said in a too-loud voice and with the exaggerated gesture of a silent movie star. A cigarette burned between her fingers in a lacquered quellazaire.

“It’s me,” Hector said.

“Sebastian, say hello to your aunt Gloria. She’s here for a visit, all the way from San Francisco.” When Hector didn’t say anything, his mother added, “On the train.”

His eyes cut to the window over the kitchen sink, out over the backyard, and to the freight train idling there. Flatbed cars with hunks of machine parts strapped down with thick green cables like vines. His stomach rumbled. “I’m hungry,” he said.

“A growing boy,” Aunt Gloria said. She wore a short jacket over a long skirt, both in a black-and-white-stripe pattern. Hector pictured a zebra. A matching set of luggage stood in the corner like zebra babies. She hadn’t yet removed her hat so he could only glimpse dark curls peeking from beneath a drooping brim and brushing her cheek with its mole he would come to learn was transient. She was the most beautiful woman Hector had ever seen and reminded him of a Jones Store mannequin in the Women’s Travel Wear department.

Hector had gleaned a few facts about Aunt Gloria over the years. She once had a husband who left her to seek his fortune in the South American banana trade. He’d heard his mother telling his father so after one of their phone calls. She’d also had a husband who died, a man his mother had never even met. Hector didn’t know how the husband died, but he hoped to find out. He’d never known anyone who died, except for the soldier who went overboard and Bix. He didn’t know if his aunt was currently married, but he didn’t think so. She wore big rings on every finger except the one where a wedding band belonged. During marathon phone calls Hector could hear Aunt Gloria crying from across the kitchen and across the country. His mother would say things like, “You’re better off without him” or “There are other men in the sea,” which didn’t make any sense to Hector. Once, when Hector had come downstairs without his mother’s knowing, he heard her say, “Consider yourself lucky. I wish my husband were a confirmed bachelor.”

“I’ll make sandwiches,” his mother said. But the women didn’t eat sandwiches; they drank martinis. The more the sunlight pushed shadows around the kitchen, the more often his mother looked at the clock over the stove.

“My daddy’ll be home soon,” Hector told Aunt Gloria. His mother lit another cigarette then dropped the lighter and Hector slipped beneath the table to retrieve it. A high-heel shoe hung from Aunt Gloria’s toes. A purple and white blister on her heel. He wondered if Aunt Gloria was a good woman.

“Yes, honey. Why don’t you go outside and play?” his mother said.

Hector was always glad to leave the house, but especially today. He hadn’t known his mother's sister was visiting from San Francisco and he’d bet a bag of purey marbles his father didn’t either. Hector didn’t want to be around to find out.

The other side of the tracks was a small village. Gray, warped-slatted houses with rusted tin roofs. A fire burned day and night no matter the weather and women cooked with copper pots and spits skewered with meat. The meals gave spice and texture to the air. “What on earth is that odor?” Aunt Gloria said the next day at lunch.

“I don’t smell anything,” Hector said.

His father had stayed home from work complaining of a headache. He sat slouched in his bathrobe, unshaven, and staring into the desert rose plate Hector had never before seen at table.

He’d heard his parents arguing late into the night. “It’s a fire. Negroes on the other side of the tracks are cooking. They’re always cooking,” his father said and scratched his jaw.

“My word.” She lit another cigarette, adding to his father’s pipe and mother’s cigarette smoke. “Someone should put an end to it. It’s positively unhealthy.”

“Who?” Hector said.

“The authorities.”

“But they have to eat.”

Aunt Gloria pinched an unseen flake of tobacco from the tip of her tongue. “My, but someone is feisty today.”

“Sebastian,” his mother said, “outside.”

The women spent their days indoors where Hector’s mother read and reread the fashion and society magazines brought from San Francisco. Her sister paced the living room saying,

“I’m bored,” over and over. Late at night, Hector practiced this in his bedroom. Pacing the wrinkled throw rug in sock feet, he’d say, “I’m bored! I’m bored!” He mimicked Aunt Gloria’s hand gestures and tried to hear the italics in his own voice. He never could get it right because, in fact, Hector was never bored.

One night, after his father returned from work, Aunt Gloria persuaded Hector’s parents to go out. “Mr. LeDuc said he’d leave our names at the door. At the door, Helen! We must go.” It was a team effort, but eventually Hector’s father relented and put his suit back on. Hector’s mother looked pretty in her dress. But Aunt Gloria looked elegant. It was the only word Hector could think of to describe her, one he’d read in one of her magazines he’d sneaked. His father looked like he was going back to work.

Hector tip-toed down the hallway, alone for the first time ever in that big house. In the guest bedroom, he went through Aunt Gloria’s things. Slips. Scarves. Brassieres. Stockings. All silk. With each garment, he repeated, “Elegant … elegant … elegant …” He had his drawing pad with him and an ebony pencil his father had brought home from the office. “Now you can pretend to be  a banker,” his father had said, showing him how to draw the gridlines of a ledger and make check marks in the boxes. “He doesn’t want to be a banker,” his mother said. Jackson LeDuc’s question followed Hector like a cloud: What do you want to be? In thick, black lead, Hector drew a silk bathrobe hanging from the bedpost. He couldn’t wait until he could add color to his drawings.

In his parents’ bedroom he looked through their things. He didn’t know what he was looking for, if anything, until he did: something manly. Anything. His father, after all, had been in the war. Had saved another man’s life. Had been shot, for Christ’s sake. Perhaps the bullet would be there on the bathroom vanity, encased in glass. A totem to manhood. But it wasn’t. Hairbrushes. Bottles of makeup and nail polish. Two ashtrays, filled. Nail clippers. An atomizer. Hector squeezed and the mist made him sneeze. Nail files. He wondered if his father even used this room. No pocket knife. No cigar snipper. No girlie magazine. Then he saw it, on the edge of the sink, still wet and looking every bit as safe as its name implied—his father’s Safe-T-Razor.

He picked it up and studied it, looking for any hint of danger in its dull glint, and trying to picture Jackson LeDuc using it. He pictured it alongside the straight-edge blade he’d fingered in the apartment upstairs. He ran it along his soft jawline and down to his chin. And then he nicked his lip. Curling it in, he tasted blood. Nothing in the world, he knew then, was safe. When he looked in the vanity’s mirror, he saw himself, red-lipped and wearing Aunt Gloria’s silk robe.

The next morning, Hector took a piece of toast from his mother and went straight to the backyard. He didn’t say anything to her past “good morning” and she didn’t respond. They’d come home late, and not together. From his bedroom, Hector had heard the door slam and a single set of feet—high heels, he was sure—climb the stairs, and then his parents’ bedroom door slam. It was a while after, and Hector couldn't be sure he hadn’t fallen asleep in the interim, when he heard the front door again. More footsteps downstairs. Ice in a highball. Laughter. Debussy’s lilt. But then, later still, arguing. Raised voices from his parents’ room before sleep came for him. He woke up hungry but not hungry enough to sit at the table with his mother’s smoke and scowl.

Beneath a saucer magnolia, he chewed a piece of dry toast and lightly touched the cut on his lip thinking of Jackson LeDuc’s face. He eyed a diamond in the rough: a chunk of coal as large as his fist. He could splinter it and draw for a year on that beauty. He knelt and reached. His shoulder pressed against the fence board, his teeth clenched a crust of toast like a cigar.

A sliver of wood was in his cheek and creosote in his nose. He pulled back to reevaluate. His fingertips were blackened, he was that close. That’s when he saw the boy across the tracks looking back at him. He was wide-eyed with a look of terror on his face, but there was no train coming. If there had been, he would have heard it. He would have felt it in his bones. Hector waved across the tracks and went back to his task. He lay on his stomach and reached with his other hand as though that arm were longer. He gritted his teeth and nudged the lump, pushed with his feet and, finally, gripped the dusty brick in his palm. That’s when the pain hit his thumb like a baseball bat. Fear held him in place, allowing time for the fangs to sink deeper, pumping poison into his blood. He screamed once, the length and volume of a train blast. Or a brass horn.

He was conscious just long enough to hear the spring on the backdoor slap shut and his mother’s fading voice.

The story Hector would be told later while in a stark-white room at Sts. Maria and Joseph Cathedral Hospital, and for years after, was that his mother hadn’t known what happened. She heard him scream and thought her son had been hit by a train. In her mind, in those terrifying seconds it took her to race across the backyard, the medical examiner had put his body back together for a proper, open-casket funeral. She wore a black veil and the pink pearl necklace Hector’s father had brought back from France. But Hector wasn’t on the tracks. He hadn’t even left the backyard. He was lying on the ground, arm outstretched, as though he were napping.

“That’s how peaceful you looked,” she told him. “Like when you were a baby.” Her only clue was the boy standing on the other side of the tracks who stared in disbelief at what he’d seen.

“‘Mocassin.’ That’s what the little boy said. It took me a minute to understand just what he meant.” That’s when she screamed. And the two screams together were enough to pull Jackson LeDuc from his Remington.

He’d come huffing down the stairs, cigar puffing like a locomotive, and across the backyard. “He’s snakebit,” Hector’s mother cried. She was standing beside her son, wringing her hands as Hector’s own hand turned purple and black. A deadly rainbow inched its way up his arm. Jackson LeDuc took a card from his pocket and thrust it at his landlord. “Call that number,” he said. “Tell him to come quick.”

“Call?”

“The phone,” he shouted. “Call the number, a car will come.”

By the time she returned from the kitchen phone, the little man had gathered Hector into his arms and was through the gate, trudging up the driveway like a soldier at the Somme. As he reached the street, the Packard screeched to a stop.

For three weeks after leaving the hospital, Hector sat at the kitchen table in front of the window that looked out over the backyard. He didn’t speak and he didn’t draw on the butcher paper his mother spread in front of him each day. He’d spent ten days in a coma, the poison strangling his heart and clouding his mind. His mother wouldn’t let him in the backyard for fear of snakes, uncertain now which was the wrong side of the tracks.

In the middle of the fourth week, he realized he hadn’t heard music seeping through the ceiling of his bedroom. Hadn’t heard the muffled footfalls of thick brogans on the twenty-eight steps outside, or the rasped wheezing of a heavy smoker. “Where is he?” Hector said one morning just as rain began its patter on the window.

“Who’s that, dear?”

“Mr. LeDuc.”

“Oh. He went away,” she said, adding Aunt Gloria had, too, though Hector hadn’t asked.

“And you just let him?”

“Well … what was I to do?”

Hector noticed the broken coffee cup on the floor, its desert rose pattern now a puzzle to be put back together. He noticed the long, unbroken gaze of his mother out the window, past the yard to an empty boxcar. In the same instant, he wondered how long it had been since he last saw his father.