To the south clouds were filling up the hollow places in the pale sky, but they didn’t look like rain clouds, just frothy empties and leftovers from summer. The train was passing through grain fields; wheat, he thought. He stood and reached up to steady himself on the edge of the gondola catwalk. A white boy he didn’t at first see, boy with a high freckled forehead, just making his way along the narrow strip below the gondola rim, stepped on his hand.
“Hey,” Delvin said. “Watch those fingers, they’re precious to me.” He was feeling good, glad to be out in the wide world.
“If you want to keep em, chig, then get your ass off the train.”
The boy kicked at him, missed.
“You need to watch yo mouth as well as yo feet,” Delvin said.
He had been stuffing the notebook into his back pocket when the white boy stepped on him. He almost lost his grip — didn’t — but it was not worrisome, little aggravations happened on trains.
“I’ll watch you fly like a sack of shit off this train,” the boy said. He had fish-colored eyes and long pale eyelashes pretty as a girl’s.
A couple of africano boys on the other side of the gondola watched the exchange. Everyone proceeded on his way.
After a while Delvin made a course up the train to one of the two open boxcars and climbed in through the trap. Africano boys were in there talking. They saw Delvin and one waved him over. A burly boy with close-cropped hair said, “You the one that ofay kicked?”
“He didn’t exactly kick me,” Delvin said. “It was more of a step. Just missed being a stomp.”
“That white boy wants to fight about it,” another traveler said, a small, slender boy with not very recently conked hair, slicked back. He wore a long green shirt like some medieval woodsman. “
“They sure like to mix it up,” another said, a blocky boy with a wide, friendly, scared face. “No questions about why or what for.”
“No why or what for in this world,” another said in a weary voice. He was tall and had narrow round shoulders.
“Long as they got the numbers,” another said.
They were all suddenly nervous.
A few pocket knives (if it came to that), a couple of round whittled sticks, a leather sap (the cracked leather showing the lead plumb underneath), and a bag of ball bearings in a canvas sack, these the weapons.
Down at the other end of the car a couple of unhappy, plain-looking white girls, one of them fat. The fat one interrupted chinning with her skinny buddy to hurl a couple insults at the negro end. A few white boys down there too, but they were just looking.
“Those men?” somebody asked, a dark-skinned boy unmemorable but for a small white scar cutting his left eyebrow in two. He was looking at the little group down the far end.
“They’s other ones coming,” said another boy — they were mostly, but for a couple, just leaving boy life for manhood, fresh travelers, hoboes, Chattanooga and upline angelicas trekked out of the hollows, headed west looking for work. They’d heard the mills in Memphis were hiring. The mills or the box factory or the riverside warehouses or the meat-processing plant, somebody, someplace. One, a skinny boy with pale gold freckles on a tan face, was so scared already his hands shook; he kept slapping them against his jeans. He was on his way to meet his sister in Tulsa, he said. She needed him to escort her down to Dallas for their brother’s wedding.
“I got to get on,” he said, and Delvin could tell he wanted to slip away. But he didn’t; he was afraid to, Delvin could see this too. Out the door he could see a river, lengths of shining water running between sycamore trees turning yellow.
“Can’t help from it,” he said slowly, referring to the fight; letting the words out carefully, as if they were precious, like special stones held back in a pouch or wrapped in cloth and stowed in a bindle. A whole speech. Like something from Shakespeare. His body buzzed with excitement. He was not particularly angry. But he wanted to experience — here, now — the exercise of his power, wanted to move harshly against something solid and strong. These white boys. They were hardly real to him. They came and went, and it was always the same with them, they knew only one way, had only one side.
