Five Minutes Alone Read Online Free PDF Page A

didn’t even see the body. Didn’t even know he’d hit anything. It was a guy moving cows from there,” he says, pointing to a field on the other side of the tracks that we can’t quite see because of the elevation, “to here,” he says, pointing to what I imagine is the same kind of field, only on this side of the tracks, “that found it. Or at least he found the biggest part of it. Last train of the night was one thirty in the morning, a freight train heading into Christchurch. Medical examiner is on the way, and we’ve got a forensic team heading to check the front of the last few trains for blood so we can figure out which one hit him.”
    Another car pulls up. It’s a guy in a suit and a bright green safety vest who must work for the railway. He gets out of the car and he looks flustered and stressed and he takes three seconds to scan thescene and to figure out who looks like they can make a decision. He heads towards us. He doesn’t get far, as one of the police officers intercepts him. There’s a brief discussion, and a moment later the man is being escorted towards us.
    I climb the stones up to the tracks, my old man knees protesting along the way. The guy in the vest reaches Hutton and Kent, and soon they’re arguing about trains and times and schedules, and of course the train line must have been shut down once the body was discovered. The guy in the vest wants to speed things along, he says the words time is money repeatedly, occasionally slapping the back of one hand into the palm of the other for added emphasis. “This is bullshit,” Vest guy says. “You got some prick who jumps in front of a train and now I’m the one whose day is shot to hell? Tell me how that makes sense.”
    So Hutton tries to tell him how that makes sense, and I’m just pleased not to be part of the argument. Trains running late is just a part of life, just as people jumping out in front of them is a part of life—that’s what I’d be saying. We used to call that spontaneous suicide. Catch the ten-oh-four from Why-the-Hell-Not to Oblivion. That could be why Dwight Smith drove out here. He came for one reason and stayed for another. Maybe Smith was a good-behavior and no-boundaries kind of guy, and Mr. Spontaneity too.
    There are officers walking up and down the tracks looking for the missing hand. The point of impact is fairly obvious by the blood splatter. The train hit Smith at seventy or eighty miles per hour, and the result is that Smith’s body was turned into a salvo of flesh projectiles, blood shooting in every direction, like hitting a water balloon with a baseball bat. On the tracks the blood looks like rust and on the thick wooden sleepers it looks like oil, and on the stones it looks like blood. The bits of Smith are all close by, the bulk of it his torso, which has both legs removed from above the knee and one arm removed too. It’s covered in dirt and grease and a few broken dandelions have stuck to it, and most of it is wrapped in the uniform of the gas station he worked for. I feel sick looking at it.
    I walk fifty yards along the tracks. I walk on the sleepers. Theview ahead isn’t much different from the view behind me. Weeds. Tracks. A road and farms and some tired-looking farmhouses in the distance. Only real difference is the direction of the shadows and the amount of body parts. I walk another fifty yards. No blood out here. I turn around and head back. Every twenty or thirty seconds I look over my shoulder in case a train is barreling towards me even though I’d feel it and hear it and people would start shouting warnings. I look anyway, the same way kids would throw glances behind them running through a graveyard at night. I think about Dwight Smith lying on the sleepers and the rails vibrating like they’re being powered by a nuclear reactor. Instead of him going towards the light the light came towards him. Up ahead Kent and Hutton are taking a break from their conversation with the railway