JUMP THE TRACKS

Cory Zimmerman

“The boy” was a sixth grader in a small farming community snug in the Spoon River Valley of Central Illinois, a twelve-year-old student at the middle school. Dressing in the morning, he buttoned his dress shirt to his throat, gelled his blonde hair, and examined a new pimple that had popped up overnight on his otherwise smooth, wheat-skinned face in the mirror. He had a scratch in his throat but never missed a single day of school, as school was where she was—his crush. So, he scarfed down two eggs, bacon, two pieces of buttered toast, and a glass of orange juice, and he made his way for the bus stop at the end of the boulevard. There, in the cool autumn air, he waited with a mixture of anxiousness and pubescent excitement that swirled in his full belly. The view from the school bus—from his stop at the end of the boulevard, all the way south down Main through the newly built neighborhood of the northside, past the high school, the town’s only grocery store, a McDonald’s, and a Hardees—was nothing spectacular. Taking a left east on Vine, the bus would rumble past a few dozen old Victorians before crossing a set of railroad tracks the high schoolers liked to jump in their Chevys and Fords. Spewing black soot from its tailpipe, the bus would then pass smaller homes sat on blocks with peeling paint and crumbling brick sidewalks between. However, this day, when the school bus took that left off Main onto Vine, it just barely veered around a leg-braced, handicapped man who’d fallen from the curb to his knees in the street as the boy pressed his nose into the cool glass, as love ached through his heart.

“The kid” was an eighth grader, thirteen, and commuted in on another bus from a small settling five miles to the east of town, where his stilt house sat low in a shaded valley along a dirt road, a rusty railroad track, and a deep meandering ravine creek.

“Why do black people call each other brothers?” asked the kid to another with a missing front tooth named Pig. “Because they don't know who their fathers are,” he answered, as a curly brunette girl sitting behind him told him his joke was not very funny. “Hell, if I had a dollar for every time someone called me a racist,” said Pig, “I’d have enough money for a Black guy to rob me and a Jew to pick up the coins the nigger dropped as he ran away.”

The boy sat quietly with a book report clutched in his arms, nose kept to the vibrating glass, belly rising and dropping as the bus vaulted over the tracks, the kids in the back tossed a good two feet from their seats before plopping back down on their rear ends. The boy didn’t sit in the back. He sat in the middle, as to sit in the back would surely result in flicked ears, spit on the back of his head, or worse. The sun came in through the glass, warming his face, but causing him to unzip his coat as his anxieties heightened. He looked at the reflection at his own hazel eyes, checked his blonde hair fixed in place with gel, and thought of a girl.

The kid’s dust-covered bus pulled into the middle school parking lot without slowing down, jumping the curb as everyone stood throwing their backpacks over their shoulders. Pig closed a knife he’d used to cut out the back of a seat and shoved it in his pocket as the kid dug the chaw out of his lip and flung it to the bus floor, a few bits remaining between his bottom teeth.

The boy’s bus dipped into a valley on Vine, passing a pale blue condominium to the left and the YMCA on the right, before rising near an elementary school, taking a right just before a track looped football field. The boy saw a group of girls slowly making a lap in pairs of stone-washed jeans as eggs, bacon, and two pieces of buttered toast, mixed with orange juice rose into the back of his throat—nerves frayed to bits as the bus pulled into the parking lot of the middle school.

The eight-grade kid stepped off the bus in his overalls and immediately tripped the sixth-grade boy who held the book report clutched in his arms—no rhyme or reason, it just seemed like the right thing to do—before spitting on the blacktop and cracking his knuckles.

The boy walked quickly past the lot of clicked-up students, for a heavy door he pulled open and walked inside to see a cafeteria of low-income children eating school-sponsored breakfasts of Kellogg's, chocolate milk, and maybe an apple or banana. As the bell rang, the halls flooded with students making their way to their lockers. The boy had forgotten his combination again. And while spinning the dial a second time, a steel-toed boot came sharp and hard into the back of his calf, and he collapsed to the floor, looking up in time only to see a rat tail swing on down the hall. He felt a lump forming under his swollen flesh but grabbed his textbook and pencil box nonetheless and made his way to homeroom. He sat at a desk behind his crush, a girl with a head of beautiful, curly, brunette hair. Afraid to talk to her, he stared at the back of her head as the teacher took attendance. He raised his hand only after the third call of his name as he drew her curly strains in his notebook. His heart cracked as the bell rang again, and she stood from her desk, only to walk the opposite way down the hall.

“What do you call an all-black abortion clinic?” the kid asked Pig in shop class. “Crime Stoppers,” he answered, as Pig snorted.

In the locker room, the boy changed into his purple mesh shorts that stank like sour sweat. Two or three students liked to shower in the nude after class, but he was not one of them. And he rarely took his shorts home for a wash. It was Wednesday, and he knew what that meant. And as he walked into the gymnasium sullen, he saw the basket of dodge balls sat at the half-court line. Monday was for square dancing when the girl's class would come to join the boys, and he’d always kept his fingers crossed he’d get another chance to dance with her. She had smiled at him, but he looked away shyly and regretted it ever since. She had made his heart race and tingle, but he had been a coward and blew it. Tuesdays were for jumping rope, or even worse, running the mile. But Wednesday was the day he knew he’d be creamed in the face by the rubber ball that bounced off his face and whiplashed his neck. And he sat with his back against the wall for the remainder of the class.

As the lunch bell rang, the kid stood in line with his tray for a square of pizza, maybe a steamed hamburger, spaghetti, but no salad, and sat next to Pig, clutching his reshaped fork in a hand well callused from scooping hog shit with a shovel.

“Hey pig,” said the kid, “trade ya some chaw for a Marlboro—and I’ll give you five bucks if you punch that pussy in the face.”

Pig stood to his feet, and with no hesitation—large skull ring on his finger—he decked the boy right in the mouth. The girl with the brunette curls covered her own mouth in horror.

The boy kept licking the chip in the bottom left corner of his right front tooth, feeling the roughness and jagged edge that was tenderizing the tip of his tongue, waiting in the front row for his turn to give his book report.

“'The Color Purple,'" said the boy standing before the class, as the kid who had paid for his chipped tooth—having failed sixth-grade English, twice—sat in the very back row, his leg kicked out, with crossed arms. “...is a 1982 novel written by African American author Alice Walker,” the boy continued, “It is a story told through 90 different letters written by different characters, focusing on the life of a young black girl named Celie who, at the start of the novel, is living with her abusive father—”

“What is this shit?” asked the kid in the back with a shout. “You a fuckin' nigger lover!” as he stood, throwing his desk to the side. “I’m gonna whoop your ass, you little nigger lover,” he threatened, thrashing forward with rage through the classroom, students sliding and jumping out of the way as their desks flew everywhere.

Sitting in the principal's office, after the kid was sent back to class, the principal asked the boy with a freshly bloodied lip, “Why would you want to disrupt class like that? Your mother is a fine woman, so I'm gonna let you off with a warning. Now, go to the nurse’s office, get that blood cleaned up before you give someone AIDS, and then get back to class. But, if I see you again, it’s off to suspension!”

The corner of the kid’s mouth curled up on the right side—a crooked, shit-eating grin—as he walked up behind the boy in the hall, giving him a big, unexpected shove, the boy’s neck whiplashed back on his way to math class.

The boy stopped and turned and shouted, “Leave me alone!” just as a fist to the nose slammed the back of his head into a locker behind him. He slid unconscious to the floor.

Spending the last half of the day in in-school suspension, the boy stared at the clock, and those final twelve minutes of the day gutted his nerves, motionless hands wrenching his chest before the bell finally rang. He walked as fast as his feet might, the first to step onto the bus, he waited anxiously in his seat, as he needed to erase the message on the answering machine left by the principal before his mother got home from work. He watched from the bus window as cigarettes were lit. And his crush, with a group of giggling girls, looked up somewhat worried as she passed by for her own bus. The rat-tailed kid followed, giving the boy the finger while spitting on the glass. After the bus filled, the tires rasped at a layer of fresh tar, which burnt the boy’s nostrils, as pebbles and gravel kicked up on the side of the bus. Jumping the tracks, his stomach rose and dropped as he anxiously bounced his knee. Arriving at his bus stop, he ran down the boulevard for home as fast as he could. Unlocking the backdoor with his latch key, he saw the blinking light on the machine. His bowels loosened as he erased the message successfully, and he then sat on the couch in the front room, watching a bird on a wire out the window, his mind utterly seizing to function. When his mom arrived home, she was angry he’d left a glass in the sink and slammed a cabinet door, asking, “How was school?” with a sigh as she walked through the front room.

“Okay,” he lied.

“Want Pizza Hut for dinner?” she asked, “I’m too tired to cook.”

“Sure,” he said, “Mom, when does dad get home?”

“He had to work a double today,” she said, “you’ll be in bed before he gets home.” As the boy stared wide-eyed out the window she asked, “Want to read together tonight?”

“No,” said the boy, “I have a headache—”

“Hey, how did your book report go?”

The kid leaned the pitchfork up against a post in the barn. The pigs squealed. He scooped a dip of chaw out of a can with his finger and placed it in his bottom lip. Sucking on it, he spat a dark stream of spit onto the fresh layer of straw at his feet.

His pa, deep-frying a batch of river catfish for supper on the porch, asked in a holler, “What do you call a bunch of black kids in a swimming pool?”

“What do you call ‘em, Pa?” the kid asked with a smirk.

“Coco puffs,” answered his pa.

In P.E. on Thursday, the students walked the trail through the woods where a short squatty teacher sat in a lawn chair at the end, waiting to take attendance.

The kid walked right behind the boy, hollering “nigger lover,” daring Pig to hit him in the back of the head with a hedge apple—a large round fruit that fell from deciduous trees in the park and looked like a green alien brain but was hard as a rock.

“You a’ white nigger, boy?” the boy heard from behind—the sensation of impending doom engulfing him—but he kept his eyes on the flat pleats of her tweed skirt before him until the whack to the back of his head caused him to see white lights.

“Hey, what do you call a bunch of black kids in a swimming pool?” asked the kid at lunch, the kid waited for the boy to walk by in the lot where the clicked-up students hung out after eating. The kid then snuck up behind the boy and cracked him on the skull with a glass coke bottle, and the boy dropped like a log.

The boy awoke to the kid sitting on his face while punching him repeatedly in the stomach, Pig’s steel-toed boots crashing into his ribs. Later, in math class, the teacher sent the boy to the principal’s office for not paying attention. This caused the boy to miss his bus, and he had no choice but to make the long walk home, his aching head on a constant swivel. A truck had passed by with a bunch of hooting and hollering kids in the back, but the boy managed to duck behind an evergreen tree in someone’s front lawn. Then he walked high on the tracks between 4th and 3rd Avenue but felt nervous peering down at the foreboding lean-to sheds. He finally made his way past the high school, and only once in his northern neighborhood did he dare walk on the sidewalk along Main. Occasionally, he'd trip over a crack, and he wasn't quite sure what day it was or what time. At home, he stood in his backyard for a while facing a fence.

Friday morning the kid brushed his rat tail and threw his can of chaw in a back pocket with a threadbare ring. At the end of his drive, spitting and kicking gravel, he waited as the roaring school bus—a tidal wave of dust rising in its wake clouding the valley—came sliding to a stop at his feet. When the door folded open, he stepped on and walked to the back, where Pig sat with his missing front tooth.

“What’s the difference between black people and snow tires?” he asked.

“Snow tires don't sing when you put chains on them,” he answered.

Pig gave a snort, opening his knife.

The boy waited for his mom to turn on the hair drier before sneaking into the kitchen. He stood on a chair, opened the cabinet above the fridge, and pulled out a fifth of vodka. He filled a large water bottle to the brim with liquor and then refilled the vodka bottle from the tap, replacing it in the cabinet.

“Bye, mom,” he said.

“Have a good day at school, honey,” she said.

“Bye, Dad,” he mumbled, as his father snored behind a closed door.

At the bus stop, he choked down a swig of the vodka. It was rough and burned his throat, and he regretted not mixing it with orange juice or something. But he took another large gulp, grimaced, and buried it in his bag before stepping on the bus. On this day, the boy sat all the way in the back, and no one messed with him with that look in his eye. And by the time the bottle was half-empty, he didn’t feel his stomach jump the tracks. He stumbled off the bus into the lot, past the clicked-up students who turned to face him silently as he drunkenly staggered by. In homeroom, the teacher called the boy's name during attendance a good six times before the boy reached for an encyclopedia from the shelf to his left and tossed it over her beautiful head of curly brunette hair for the front of the classroom. He then threw another—and another—until she turned back and gazed fear into his eyes. And finally, he found the courage to smile back at her, just as the teacher ran for the principal.