Alan Sincic

  The train pulled into the station with thirteen passengers, a ton of flour, an Allis-Chalmers tractor with a tandem disk, forty-seven steel drums of diesel fuel, a mahogany rocker, an Angus bull, a Duesenberg Model J strapped to the deck of a flatcar and -- asleep on a pallet of seed corn in the hold of a boxcar at the rear -- a boy.

Blocks in the bed of a quarry, the freight that cluttered the platform. The people shuffled on. Around. Away. The porters and the stevedores ambled off to breakfast in the shoebox of a diner across the tracks. A pallet of flour filled the alcove, fifty-pound sacks in a pillar the height of a man. Maggie edged her way into the shade and out of sight behind it. Waist high. That’ll do. With the sharpened tip of her umbrella she pierced the sack. Old King Cole Fancy-Enriched. Funneled the flour into the pocket of her apron. She’d made the apron herself, from out a empty sack of meal and a girding of burlap. Modified the pocket to swallow the booty. What with the far bounty of the earth already spoken for, the ocean auctioned away, the every cloud a colony, and even virtue apportioned out in the price of a wedding, what would it matter she claimed a little fist of flour to call her own? The scrap, the scraping, the salvage is what she took from the others. Stole too strong a word. When she lightened a cow with a midnight milking or lifted a egg from a neighbor’s coop, it was in the nature of a lifting, a lightening, like the flit of the bird to the to and the fro of the nest. You don’t dun the jay for every scrap of trim she gathers, now do you?

Just outside the ticket master window sat the boy. Back to the wall. Butt to the boardwalk. He looked to be thirteen, fourteen maybe. The hair a shock of wheat he – or some fool with a scythe – hacked up into a crown of broken angles. From stop to stop, sale to sale, Maggie made her way down the platform toward him. Ferried the pies in a kiddie wagon she’d scrounged up out a dump and floored with a sheet of plywood. The cracked rubber wheel she patched with a plug of tar, tar she’d softened in the coal that bakes the pies. Spread it with a putty knife to approximate a circle. The wagon limped. Maggie limped.

To no one in particular the boy spoke. Above the din of the depot speaker and the clang of the rails he lifted the shrill of his voice. His leg -- the one leg – shot straight out, onto the path, as if to trip a passerby or jostle a parcel out the arms of a porter. It was barefoot, the foot. The one foot -- but the other? A stump. Stoppered off at the knee with a hunk of denim. A clump. A clot. Below the knee a nothing.

“I don’t blame you,” he said to the comers and the goers. “Bless you. I wouldn’t give a nickel to a fella like me.”

Maggie measured the eddy in the current as the people passed him by. They made a point of not looking. They couldn’t help but to hear, but they knew better than to give a God-talker reason to pray for them in person. It was Maggie who saw what they didn’t see. That he made no effort to meet them eye to eye. That they ducked and shuffled to dodge a gaze he never aimed in their direction. Instead he stared at the far glint of the tin on the roof of the silo, the red at the top of the pine, and there, just over the brow of the hill, the giant ball of fire. Stiff the way he sat, rigid the back, as if he’d been – out of some urgent desire to straighten the spine – basted with lacquer. She listened for the crackle when he moved.

“The handsomest legs,” he said with a sing of a song. “The handsomest legs in the city of Atlanta is what I said to myself in the light of the morning sun, said to my reflection in the waters of the muddy Withlacoochee. But did I pray? No. The gator prayed. And the Almighty answered his prayer, and out of His bountiful mercy fed the gator, favored the gator, served up in a single bite that little leg of mine.”

Shrill the voice, like a boy’s, but Jesus -- the lyrics? Barstool Cicero. Carnival busker. Yodeler of the Holy Writ.

“Snip-snap” he said as he clipped the flat of his hands together like you clip a pair of cymbals. “Snip-snap, into the trap.”

Sat with his back to the wall but – she could see it now – never quite touching. From side to side he rocked. Solid the wobble.

She worked her way down the platform. Angled over to skirt the guardrail. In the come and the go of the gap between the bodies, a glimpse. The shirt. Tattered the flannel. A gandy dancer castaway, stripped of buttons and tarred with a slash of creosote. She figured he pulled it from out the trash back of the flagman shed. Hobo? Hobo not the word. Ridiculous. A scarecrow. And the heat. The flannel. From the hip to the head. Enfolded the whole of him like a portable tent.

She wheeled up under the shade of the station-house. Peered round the corner as if to hail a porter or spot-check a piece of luggage. There he sat. Clownish the word. Crazytown but, still and all, beneath the brutal trim -- give the devil his due -- a comely boy. Rough as any boy, sure, or man for that matter. Cocky and bullish and gracile as a chunk of char – but no. More than that. Hungry the set of the face. Beneath the cuts and the bruises -- not one to bow the head or duck a blow -- scorched. More than angry. Better than angry.

And then it struck her. And such a tiny thing. Laughable. But there you go. And there it was. She could see in him – there -- a flash of the fury that made her, every which way she turned, a misfit. From out a stickpin, a snippet of wire, and the foil topper to a tin of Skoals, he’d fashioned up a boutonniere of silver to grace the tar on the breast, the blood on the face, the smoke in the eyes.

On and on he rambled. “Thanks be to God I said, said I, and seeing as I’d never said a word of thanks before, by God, God is my witness, I got what I deserved.”

Something about the leg – the lack of the leg – troubled her. It troubled the people, sure -- the way the broken waken us to a sight of our own sweet self, broken on the wheel -- but no, that wasn’t it. It was the lack of trim. Any beggar with flair – and the boy had plenty of flair – would sweeten the scene with a set of props. A tin cup. A Bible. A crutch. It’s as if he wanted the crowd to ignore him. As if that was the point. To proclaim – to the hills and the valleys, the quick and the dead, the crooked and the true together – that God was a fraud.

“So let this be an example to you who doubt the tender mercy of the merciful God. The lilies of the field, they neither toil nor spin. His eye is on the sparrow and the lamb and the gator. The gator he feeds, the gator he fattens, the gator he favors with the flesh of the sinner. All hail the God of the gator!”

Amen. And so the morning rambled onward. And onward he rambled. And amid the traffic of the pies -- a scrap here, a scrap there -- she gathered up a semblance of what – whatever the hell it was – he was trying to say. A song is what it was, nonsensical the lyrics but damn, the damndest thing -- bonny the voice. A kind of a cry in the shape of a – what would you call it? A sermon? A scramble? No. A sound from out a pain impossible to frame in a catchment of words.

By the time she worked back around to where he sat, she’d sold the last of her pies. The coins jingled in the leather pouch she hid in the sash at her waist. She waited as the people eddied away -- into the diner, onto the train, down the clay road a-jangle with pick-ups and Chevys and boney Model Ts.

Into a silence the boy settled.

“Boy. Hey boy. You got you a name?”

“Barnett. G.B. Barnett.”

“What happened to that leg of yours, GB?”

“God’s the one you gotta ask. That’s what He give me to start with.”

“Stand up.”

“I can’t. I don’t got but the one leg, ma’am.”

“I ain’t a ma’am. I ain’t but a few years older than you.”

“Miss then.”

“Maggie.”

“Miss Maggie.”

“You got the both ears, right? Maggie. I said Maggie.”

The boy lifted the both of his hands together, like you say hi to a bandit. “Like I was saying. I don’t got – ”

“You got a butt to sit on I see. Got you a leg to stand on, too. How come you ain’t standing on that leg you already got?”

“Maybe I could. Maybe I can. If I want to. If I got the inclination.”

“Got a dollar here says you can. In a upright position. Travel.” She turned. Limped. Up the platform a ways. “From there to here.”

“I didn’t know you was a cripple.”

“The hell I am. You don’t see me creeping up a curb with a cup in hand.” She pulled a dollar from the scarf at her waist. Gave it a rub in the heel of the hand to flatten – like you flatten a pastry – the kinks. Held it up, one-handed, to flutter in the cool of the air.

The easiest thing would be to press his back to the wall, push with the leg, lever himself upwards with the wall as a brace. Instead he curled up into a crouch, the good leg and the two arms a kind of a tripod. Awkward boy. Tried to rise. Toppled. Tried again, sidewards now, hand on the wall for balance. Made as if to hop.

She was no fool. She saw what he was about. Two steps and she was there. With the hook end of her umbrella she snagged his ankle.

“The only thing I hate worse than a cripple is a fraud.”

Gave it a yank. Down he went, backwards, elbows out. Splintered the lid to a crate of oranges. The stack crumbled as if to catch him. Into a heap of citrus and timber and shattered bits of melon he fell. As he struggled to right himself, she sliced at the seat of his jeans with the blade of her umbrella. He kicked. Rolled. The rip opened. Out popped a clutch of toes. The ball of a foot. A final kick and the hidden leg shivered out clear.

“What the hell’s the matter with you?” she said.

He sat in the mess he made. Tugged at the britches. By the fistful he tucked the flannel shirt – ridiculous, triple the size – back into the jeans. “I figured I’d give it a try. You know, preaching.”

“To lie. And for no reason.”

“Sorry.” He tightened the rope at his waist.

“Shameful. A waste of words.”

“I aim to be good.”

“You’re good with a lie, but you gotta be good with a purpose. Gotta lie with a purpose in mind.”

“People don’t like a liar.”

“People love a liar. A good liar’s a credit to the wit of them who listen.”

“I lie for the sport of it. It don’t mean nothing to me.”

“You gather up enough of that nothing, hell, next thing you know you got a pocketful of coin.”

“It don’t pay to lie.”

“The hell it don’t. But a lie’s only worth what get for it. What does it get you?”

“I don’t like to beg.”

“Bully for you.”

“I ain’t a beggar.”

“No. A preacherman. That’s what you are. You with the words. You took us all to church.”

“Mmmm -- Preacher.” He served it up with a hum, as if to ascertain the pitch. “A preacherman.” He laughed.

“You go to church you pay the preacher. You gotta get paid.”

“I don’t want nothing from nobody.”

She laughed. Loosened her apron. Gathered up a melon to hide in the hold of the wagon. “I could use a good liar like you.”

“You’d pay me to preach?”

“No. You peddle the bullshit to the buyers of bullshit. I pay you to fetch and carry. Room and board. That’s the deal.”

And so it was. And so she did. And so it begins. The real story, the only story worth a word, the story that speaks to the hunger we hide when a moment of love – or something near to love – suddenly appears.