The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [103]
shell of the boiler black. The train crashed its boxes and went backwards a moment. It was picking up its last cars. In that moment I got under a gondola carrying coal, into the angle of it between the slope end and the wheels. When we rolled forward the wheels creaked and bit out sparks like grindstones, and the couplings played free and hooked tight in a mechanical game into which your observation and brain were forced. Having to recognize whose kingdom you were in, with tons of coal at the back and ndmg in the tiny blind gallery with the dashing dark rain at the sides. There were four of us sitting in this space; a lean, wolfy man, who stretched his legs clear over the wheels, on the bar, while the rest of us fetched ours up short. I saw his face when he lit a butt, grinning and somewhat sick, blues under his eyes like chain links. He held his fingers in his crotch. On the other side was a young boy. The fourth man, as I didn't know till we were chased off the train at Lorain, was a Negro. All I saw of him as we were running was his yellow raincoat, but when I caught up by a trackside shack he was leaning on the boards, his big eyes shut, a stumpy, heavy man getting his breath with much trouble and his beard sparkling about his mouth with sweat or drizzle. The hotshot stopped at Lorain; it wasn't a hotshot at all. Or perhaps they stopped it because it carried too many free riders. These made a ragged line, like a section gang that draws aside at night back of the flares as a train comes through, only much more numerous. There were flashlights swinging from car to car as the cops emptied them, and then the train went off, cleared of riders, down into the semaphore lights and the oily blues of the track. This stocky young boy Stoney was his nameattached himself to me and we went into the town. The harbor with its artificial peaks and cones of sand and coal was visible from the muddy main stem. In the featureless electric faces of bulbs hung on the dredges, cranes, cables, the rain looked like nothing either and was nullified. I laid out some of my money for bread and peanut butter and a couple of bottles of milk and we had supper. It was after ten and streaming rain. I wasn't going to chase another freight that night, I was too bushed. I said, "Let's find a place to flop," and he agreed. On the sidings we found some boxcars retired from service, of great age, rotten and swollen, filled with old paper and straw, a cheesy old hogshead stink of cast-off things such as draws rats, a marly or fungus white on the walis. There we bedded down in the refuse. I buttoned up, for security as well as the cold, and stretched out. There was plenty of room at first. But till far into the night men kept arriving, roiling back the door, and passing back and forth over us, discussing where to sleep. I heard them coming, grating with the feet along the rows of cars, until our boxcar was so full that newcomers would look in and then pass on. It was no time to be awake, or half awake, with the groaning and sick coughing, the grumbles and gases of bad food, the rustling in paper and straw like sighs or the breath of dissatisfaction. And when I fell asleep I didn't sleep long, for the man next to me began to press up, and I thought it was only his unconscious habit of the night, that he was used to a bedmate, and I just drew away, but he drew after. Then he must have worked long in secret to open his pants and first to touch my hand as if by accident and then to guide my fingers. I had trouble getting free because he finally held my wrist with both hands, and I knocked his head against the. boards. That couldn't have hurt much, the wood was so rotten it was almost soft, but he let me go and said almost with laughter, "Don't raise a fuss." He rolled back from me a space. I sat up and I reasoned that if I didn't move he might think he wasn't unwelcome to me. As a matter of fact he was waiting and he began to talk, with a hard tremble, both cynical and hopeful, about the filth of women, and when I heard that I went away, helping myself up in back