American Masculine Read Online Free PDF

they look through him, just as Prifflach does. He is nothing to them. He lets them think they own him. He has a job, he bides his time. The railroad furthers the chasm between father and mother. Something lower down is revealed, something more sedentary and rooted even than the earth that had opened and closed, closing over him the darker image of his father alongside the subtle light of his mother, the stiff shock of his father’s hair under snow, the gray, grainy look of his mother’s teeth long after the last exhalation, after he’d found her in her bed.
    Riding the Hi-Line he is mostly unseen by the passengers as he hauls freight and works coal. But a change in duty comes, a change he doesn’t welcome. He’ll provide muscle for the boss-man, the conductor, Ed Prifflach. Three times tossing drunks to local sheriffs at the next stop, twice tracking rich old lady no-shows still wandering after the all aboard. Then the real trouble begins. Just past Wolf Point, when the first theft is discovered, Middie is put in charge of public calm. He keeps to the plan and follows Prifflach’s words though it is distasteful to him, though he begins to feel in the eyes of others he is becoming the conductor’s efficacy, an outline of Prifflach’s power, a bigger, more mobile expression.
    Things aren’t what they seem, Middie thinks. Danger, for reasons a man doesn’t comprehend. On his first trip east a workman at the roundhouse in St. Paul threw himself between the cars of an outgoing train. When Middie got word he went to see. The man was severed in two at the chest. Middie isn’t afraid to die, and when he dies he wants it to be hard and without any hope of return, as physical as rock so he can feel the skin give, the bones in the cavernous weight of his body broken, and blood like a river moving from the center of him, pooling out and away and down into the earth, to the soil that receives him and sets him free.
    In the first compartment Prifflach leans toward him, nonchalant in body in order to avoid alarm even as he yells at him to surmount the noise. First seat, worst position, thinks Middie, while Prifflach sets the course with regard to the thief. Get some leads, he says. Prifflach’s face is wolflike, a man with large buttocks, hairy arms and hands. Middie dislikes him, his sunken eyes, the haughty tenor of his voice. Happening nearly every stop now, Prifflach says. Bad for business. Under a long, narrow nose his mouth tightens. The line ain’t gonna like it, guaranteed. Give me the tally.
    Five people, says Middie.
    Tally his take, says Prifflach.
    Middie uses a small piece of paper, a gnawed pencil. Near four hundred dollars, he says, four hundred ten to be precise. His face feels colorless, his body breathes in and out.
    Get going, Middie, Prifflach says.
    Middie stares at the double doors with their elongated rectangular glass, two top squares open for the heat. Prifflach said he’d picked him because Middie had thighs like cottonwoods and thick arms.
    Look alive, Middie.
    He hears the words, notes Prifflach’s face. Wet lines in a wax head. Then he looks at the people.
    A weight of soot covers everyone. Their eyes are swollen and bloodshot. They have stiff red necks. On their laps they hold children and bags, gripping them as if to ward off death. Middie peers at the faces, and farther back, through more doors at the end of the car, more elongated squares of glass into the second car where expressions breathe the same contempt, the shadow of a shadow, the same self-preservation, the same undignified desire. They are on the upswing through great carved mountains and though Middie has worked the round trip St. Paul to Spokane five times, he still feels unlanded here, awkward under the long slow ascent of the train, the sheer drop of landscape, of trees and earth, and way down, the thin, flat line of the river.
    Side windows remain mostly shut, frozen in place by the interlock of the moisture inside and the frigid