In the back bedroom she dressed for school in a short skirt and white tee-shirt and put on a jeans jacket, the same clothes she’d worn the day before, and looped a red shiny purse on a long strap over her shoulder. She left the house without eating anything.
She walked to school in a kind of dream, walking out of the meager street onto the pavement of Main, across the tracks and then up onto the wide vacant early-morning sidewalks past the display windows of the stores, watching her reflection, how she walked and carried her body, and as yet she could see no change. There was nothing she could discern outwardly. She went on in her skirt and jacket with the red purse swinging at her hip.
Ike and Bobby.
They mounted their bikes and rode out of the drive onto the loose gravel on Railroad Street and east toward town. The air was still cool, with the smells of horse manure and trees and dry weeds and dirt in the atmosphere and something else they couldn’t name. Above them a pair of magpies swung on a cottonwood branch screaming, and then one of the birds flew off into the trees beyond Mrs. Frank’s house and the other cried four times, harsh and rapid, before it too flapped away.
They rode along the gravel road and passed the old vacated light plant, its high windows boarded over, and turned onto the pavement at Main Street and then bounced over the railroad tracks onto the cobblestone platform at the depot. It was a single-story redbrick building with a green tile roof. Inside was a dim waiting room smelling of dust and being closed up, and three or four highbacked pewlike wood benches set in rows facing the train tracks and a ticket office with a single window set behind black grillwork. An old green milk wagon on iron wheels stood outside on the cobblestones beside the wall. The wagon was never used anymore. But Ralph Black, the depot agent, admired the way it looked on the platform and he left it there. He didn’t have a lot to do. The passenger trains only stopped in Holt for five minutes, coming and going, long enough to allow the two or three passengers to board or get off and for the man in the baggage car to drop the Denver News onto the platform beside the tracks. The papers were there now, bound in twine in a single stack. The bottom papers had torn on the rough cobblestones.
The two boys leaned their bikes against the milk wagon, and with a jackknife Ike cut the twine. Then they knelt and counted the stack of papers into two piles and began to roll and rubber-band them.
When they were almost finished Ralph Black walked out of the ticket office and stood over the boys, his long shadow hanging across them, obscuring them while he watched them work. He was a gaunt old man with a paunch, he was chewing a cigar.
How come you little boys are late this morning? he said. The papers been there almost a hour.
We aren’t little boys, Bobby said.
Ralph laughed. Maybe not, he said. But you’re still late.
They didn’t say anything.
Ain’t you, Ralph said. I said, Ain’t you still late.
What’s it to you? Ike said.
What’s that?
I said . . . He didn’t finish but went on rolling papers, kneeling on the cobbles beside his brother.
That’s right, Ralph Black said. You don’t want to say something like that again. Or somebody might just paddle your little behind. How would you like me to do that for you? I will, by God.
He stared down at the tops of their heads. They refused to say anything or even to acknowledge him, so he looked out along the train tracks and spat brown tobacco over their heads toward the rails.
And stop leaning those bikes against that wagon there. I told you that before, he said. Next time I’ll call your dad.
The boys finished rolling the papers and stood up to put them into the canvas bags on their bikes. Ralph Black watched them with satisfaction, then spat again onto the nearest track and returned to his office. When the door was shut Bobby said, He never told us that before.