20. Blue #2
The last thing I found, the most important thing, was a pair of sneakers.
They were blue Converse high-tops with white toe caps, so completely out of place in the middle of the newly mown field that I paused during trash picking.
They’d been rained on, so they had dried out just about flat.
They had red paint spattered on those white toes.
Someone shouted at me to get moving, so I swooped up those sneakers and stuffed them in my pants.
And thought about Room. And looked up at the top floor as I went inside, holding those sneakers to my belly like I was about to give birth to them.
There was a drainpipe coming down from the roof.
The clapboard siding, newly painted white, was warped by weather, with rickrack handholds all the way down. I’d be fine.
The thing was to be smart. To wait. For darkness.
For a thunderstorm, so the bangs of thunder could velvet my footsteps, and the lightning could light my way.
The other thing was to be crazy-smart. To not put on the paint-spattered sneakers and leave the clogs under my bed.
But to wear the clogs and carry the sneakers.
I waited, then tip-toed up to Room, and let myself in.
Tugged on the slender latch on the window, already softened by humidity, and opened the window to the outside.
Tied the laces, looped the sneakers around my neck, and crawled down the drainpipe, using the warped siding for foot and handholds.
Rain got in my eyes, the wind whipped the shirt up my back, baring it to the rain.
I crawled on my hands and knees to the edge of the property where the box cutter and jeans were. I changed into the jeans. Laced up the sneakers while the rain soaked me to the skin.
I tucked the box cutter into my back pocket, where it sat like a cell phone, and then, because I was smart, so fucking smart, I took the clogs and my canvas pants with me.
I didn’t leave them behind like an arrow that would point out I’d changed into something else. No. It would look like I’d run off in Reserve-issued clothes. They wouldn’t be looking for a guy in blue jeans and blue sneakers at all. I’d get rid of those clothes later. Which I did.
After crossing through the industrial area, and over the cement watershed to get over the creek, I made my way to the train tracks, going through the spicy smelling loblolly pines, their needles smacking together in the storm, the humidity of the dense thicket soaking into me.
Sat on the low rise above the tracks and waited for whatever train would come next, going in whatever direction it was going.
Fate would decide for me: north or south.
At the first wail of train horn coming up the tracks, I stood up and listened, the electric wind lifting my hair. I heard two long blasts, one short blast, and another long blast, the sound slithering between hard raindrops.
Someone had told me the Reserve was at the top of a rise.
Logic told me the train would be going slow up that rise.
But I didn’t know. Nobody I knew or had ever heard of had made it this far.
I slid on my bottom to the tracks, grabbing at wet grass, and waited right by the steel rails, shining in the lightning, slick with rain.
The first engine thundered past, chuffing a diesel scent at me. Two more chugged right behind. A scream of metal on metal, the chunk-chunk sound where the cars were hooked together. Sparks beneath the trucks, flickering like fireflies.
I watched in the lighting, scraping my hair back from my face. And saw a flatcar coming. It had a bulkhead at either end, but there was nothing between them. The train chugged along. Lightning flared sharply in the rain-drenched sky.
The bulkhead had a ladder along the side of it, and as the train slowed, it was as if the ladder was an invitation. I didn’t know how far I’d get being so exposed, but I would get somewhere that wasn’t where I was.
I grabbed the ladder and climbed up and didn’t let myself think about it as I held onto that ladder with one hand and eased my leg around the bulkhead in the dark.
Where I found a solid wood floor. I landed there as if I’d been practicing the movement all my life.
I sat cross-legged in the lee of the bulkhead as the train picked up speed and headed north.
It was only later that I realized the Reserve was less than fifty miles from Richmond.
That the train I’d been on had gone close to my childhood home, where my parents would have been nestled in their beds, sweetly slumbering with the knowledge that their youngest and now only son was tightly locked up and getting the just punishment his delinquent gay heart deserved.
I had realized I was gay just about the time my brother did.
We never really talked about it. The best defense in our house was to divide and conquer.
Be your own man. Never squeal. Know nothing.
Admit to nothing. Just yes, sir and yes, ma’am, and when guests came over for bocce and sparkling wine, you put on your white lawn clothes and joined in with a smile on your face.
I hadn’t gone to art class. My parents hadn’t allowed me any creative stuff, even in high school. It was all math and history and politics. I didn’t mind the heavy learning, but it would have been nice to be allowed other things. Though I did sneak it into my life.
Cameron caught me drawing once or twice, standing in the open doorway to my room—no closed doors to our bedrooms in that house—watched me draw a fox I’d seen on the back lawn and, without telling me I was terrible or faking it or that I’d get holy hell, he went away.
That was how he could best love me. By not drawing attention to myself.
Did he draw it to himself? I could never figure it out, but I did know he was a rebel to the end.
Sitting against the bulkhead of that flatcar, I waited until dawn to throw away those clogs and those pants. One clog on either side of the slow-moving train, ten minutes apart. The pants in the river as the train went over a bridge.
The train paused to show me rail-signs that indicated I was just outside Staunton. Which meant that I’d be passing into Ohio. It was September. I was heading north. I’d need warm clothes. Maybe I should have headed south.
As the train slowed, passing other engines and boxcars and flatbed cars, I was also beneath lights. Yard lights. A water tower. A warehouse. And laughed. I was as findable as if there’d been a spotlight thrown on me.
I could always, always, hop a train going south.
My life was mine. Yes, it felt precarious at that moment, enough to make me want to go back to the Reserve, where at least I knew what was what.
Out here? Any step could take me straight down to a worse hell than the Reserve.
But really, anywhere was better than that.