No Promises in the Wind Read Online Free PDF Page B

fine. It all depended, he said; it all depended on your luck.
    I asked about the dangers. Yes, he’d seen kids—men too, but mostly kids—get killed if they were careless. Big loads of lumber or steel might shift with a sudden lurch of the train and crush an unwary rider. Some people misjudged the speed of a train and made their grabs for the ladder or the open car too late. Legs were often crushed in accidents of that sort.
    A feeling of uneasiness chilled me, uneasiness especially for Joey. He was thin, even to skinniness, and he wasn’t as active as most kids his age. He hadn’t grown up accustomed to the leaping and climbing and bike riding that I had done as a youngster; he’d had too many years of illness for that. Howie was slender, too, and short, but he was an agile little guy who had survived Chicago’s traffic and some of its worst slums. Howie could keep up with me, I was pretty sure, but I was worried about Joey.
    I decided against waiting until the freight started. We’d find an open car and hide until we were on our way. If the bulls discovered us and threw us off before we got moving, we’d just have to find another train. I couldn’t see Joey undertaking a scramble that was dangerous even for men who had jumped on moving trains for years. Howie agreed with me.
    We found an open car filled with big sacks of lime, which farmers use to fertilize their fields. There were some fairly good hiding places among these piles, fairly good, that is, if a railroad bull happened to be lax in his car inspection. And, of course, that all depended on your luck. We jumped inside when we felt no one was watching, and in the hour of waiting for the train to start, not a soul came near us. We got to feeling pretty confident after a while, almost as if we had bought tickets for a ride somewhere “out west.”
    Three men jumped into our car when the train began to pick up speed, but they didn’t pay any attention to us. They looked very blue and tired; they didn’t even talk to one another.
    We rattled out of Chicago, and in an hour or two we were passing farms and small towns; the fields, brown with withered cornstalks, looked ghostly as twilight closed in. We crossed rivers, most of them low and sluggish after the drouth that had burned things up that summer, and then finally we were rushing through nothing but black night with only the light from the engine, at least a mile ahead of our car, to cut the darkness.
    Talk lagged that night. All three of us were quiet, a little thoughtful. Once Howie stroked the strings of his banjo a few times, but somehow the chords sounded mournful. I felt as if I couldn’t stand to hear them, and I was glad when he shook his head and laid the banjo aside.
    Joey had charge of the leftover bread. He took it out after a while, and we cut it up into chunks with Howie’s knife. We ate it very slowly, chewing each bite a long time to stretch out the experience of having food in our mouths. Joey finished first and Howie handed him a crust from his own share. “Here, Joey, you eat this. I hate the crusty part,” he lied indifferently. That was like Howie.
    The rhythmic roar of the wheels soon made us drowsy. There wasn’t much to talk about anyway, so we leaned against a high stack of the lime sacks and closed our eyes. Suddenly I remembered what the hobo had said about heavy loads that shifted with a lurching train and sometimes killed riders. I got up and tested the stack above us. It seemed firm as a stone wall. Then I relaxed and went to sleep.
    It was toward morning but still dark when a couple railroad bulls came through our car. One of them kicked me in the shins, not hard, but lively enough to let me know he meant business.
    â€œCome on, you kids, you’re gettin’ off in just about fifteen minutes. You’re gettin’ off and stayin’ off, the whole lousy lot of you.”
    One of the men over in the