Blood on the Tracks Read Online Free PDF Page A

worst.”
    “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”
    I hung up thinking Mauer had just gone up in my estimation.

    Nik Lasko lived in the Royer district, a low-rent urban blot where a lot of railroading families had addresses when they weren’t out on the line. My family had moved away from here eighteen years ago, when I was nine, after my dad had a falling-out with some of the union guys. When my dad walked out six months after that and my mom went to prison a year later, Nik took me under his wing—a long-ago promise he’d made to my parents. So Grams and I came back often, alighting like migrating geese for birthdays and anniversaries. Royer was the home that sang in my blood. My dad had been born and raised here, the son of a dispatcher and a brakeman; I had been suckled on the stench of diesel and the clatter of wheels, brought up on tales of union strikes and derailments and—to my childhood terror—stories of ghosts that followed the railmen home from distant lands. Ghosts that lingered in attics and cellars haunted the smoky confines of Joe’s Tavern and stirred a cold wind in the alleyways.
    The houses in Royer were older than my neighborhood, boxed in on two sides by warehouses and boom-then-bust factories. On the third side was I-70, swollen with traffic. Maybe everyone here slept better than my family did—surrounded by kin, lulled to sleep by the river-roar motion of wheels. No matter that some of those wheels glided on pavement instead of iron; they heeded the call to move, always move, rocking us to sleep with dreams of the white-line fever.
    Royer had donated sons and daughters to the wars, more than its share. From Korea and ’Nam to the Gulf War and Operation Enduring Freedom. Probably back to the great wars, when a lot of these folks fled here from the poverty of Appalachia. Faded, weather-blotched ribbons fluttered in front yards as I drove past, and the cars on the street sported yellow ribbon decals and bumper stickers exhorting everyone to Support Our Troops .
    I slowed as I turned onto Navajo Street. Five boys and a single, fierce-faced girl played soccer in the street leading to Nik’s cul-de-sac. Beat-up orange cones served as goals; the curbs worked as the outside lines. The kids’ faces were vaguely familiar from one of Nik’s block parties. For all I knew, I was going to deliver bad news about someone they were related to—there was a good chance Elise was an aunt or cousin or a years-back babysitter. They glared at me as I drove past. With the exception of Nik, in Royer the law was an authority recognized only as an object of contempt. But the girl saw Clyde sitting in the passenger seat, and her face fell into an openmouthed gape of longing. I made a mental note to stop and let her meet him on the way out.
    I parked in the driveway and stared at the single-story house with its recently painted green shutters and the white siding Nik had installed last summer with the help of his son and some local boys. A sturdy picket fence lined the front yard, and an American flag filled half the front window.
    The Ford’s engine ticked as I shut it off, pinging in the cold air. From the backyard, Nik’s Doberman, Harvey, barked a couple of halfhearted woofs then lapsed into silence.
    I draped my arms over the steering wheel and closed my eyes.
    Nik was fifty-nine, but he hadn’t slowed much with age. Still strong as a bull and with the same calm stubbornness. Grams had raised me, but Nik had shaped my life. He’d mentored me through boyfriends and algebra, through stolen cigarettes and faithless friends and my disillusionment with community college. He’d tried to talk me out of enlisting and, when I signed up anyway, he’d tried to listen when I came back broken.
    That was hard for him. Nik was more of a fake-it-till-you-make-it kind of guy when it came to dealing with tough times and dark thoughts. After my tours, he bought me whiskey down at Joe’s Tavern and told me we all had ghosts to carry.