The memory keeper's daughter - Kim Edwards [97]
II
THEY WERE WALKING ON THE TRACKS, DUKE MADISON WITH his hands shoved in the pockets of the leather jacket he’d found at Goodwill, Paul kicking at stones that zinged against the rails. A train whistle sounded, distant. In silent accord, the two boys stepped to the edge of the tracks, their feet still on the westward rail, balancing. The train was coming for a long time, the rail beneath them vibrating, the engine a speck, growing steadily larger and darker, the driver blasting on the horn. Paul looked at Duke, whose eyes were alive with the risk and danger, and felt that rising excitement in his own flesh, too much to bear almost, with the train closer and closer and the wild horn sounding through all the neighborhood streets and far beyond. There was the light and the engineer visible in the high window and the horn again, warning. Closer, the wind off the engine flattening weeds, he waited, looking at Duke, who stood balanced on the rail beside him, the train rushing, almost on them, and still they waited and waited and Paul thought he might never jump. And then he did, he was in the weeds and the train was rushing a foot from his face. For an instant only the conductor’s expression, pale shock, and then the train—darkness and flash, darkness and flash—as the cars passed, and then it passed into the distance, and even the wind was gone.
Duke, a foot away, sat with his face raised to the overcast sky.
“Damn,” he said. “What a rush.”
The two boys brushed themselves off and started walking toward Duke’s place, a little shotgun house right by the tracks. Paul had been born over here, a few streets down, but even though his mother sometimes drove him over to see the little park with the gazebo and the house across from it where he’d first lived, she didn’t like him coming over here or to Duke’s. But what the hell, she was never around, and as long as his homework was done, which it was, and as long as he’d mowed the lawn and practiced the piano for an hour, which he had, he was free.
What she didn’t see wouldn’t hurt her. What she didn’t know.
“He was royally pissed off,” Duke said. “That train dude.”
“Yeah,” Paul said. “He sure as hell was.”
He liked swearing, and the memory of the hot wind on his face, and the way it quelled, for the moment anyway, this quiet rage. He’d gone running on the beach that morning in Aruba with a carefree heart, pleased at how the wet sand at the water’s edge gave just slightly beneath his feet, strengthening the muscles in his legs. Pleased, too, because the fishing trip with his father had fallen through. His father loved to fish, long hours sitting in silence in a boat or on a dock, casting and recasting and—every once in a while—the drama of a catch. Paul had loved it too, as a child, not the ritual of fishing as much as the chance to spend time with his father. But as he’d grown older, the fishing trips had come to seem more and more obligatory, like something his father planned because he couldn’t think what else to do. Or because they might bond; Paul imagined him reading it in some manual for parents. He’d gotten the facts of life on one vacation, sitting trapped in the boat on a lake in Minnesota as his father, turning red beneath his sunburn, talked about the realities of reproduction. These days, Paul’s future was his father’s favorite topic, his ideas about as interesting to Paul as a glassy flat expanse of water.
So he’d been happy to run on the beach, he’d been relieved, and he’d thought nothing of the pile of clothes at first, discarded in front of one of the little cottages so widely spaced beneath the casuarina trees. He had run right past them, deep in a rhythmic stride, his muscles making a kind of music that sustained him all the way to the rocky point. Then he stopped, walked circles for a while, and started running back, more slowly. The clothes had shifted: the sleeve of the blouse was flapping in the ocean wind, and the flamingos, bright pink, danced against the dark turquoise background. He slowed. It could have been anybody’s shirt. But his mother