I thought I'd take a cue from
Jim Ryals, who occasionally posts excerpts from his work-in-progress on his blog, and post an excerpt from something I'm working on. Here it is...
From Pullman, Oregon, Carlos hitched a ride with Ernesto, as far south as Reno. Ernesto planned to spend the winter there, with his girlfriend. Carlos figured he could hop a train from Reno, and take it west to Oakland; he’d spend the rest of the trip sleeping in a boxcar, as long as the hoboes left him alone. They arrived in Reno late in the evening. The mountain air was crisp and cold; it smelled like frost. Ernesto directed Carlos to avoid the main street, and dropped him near a curve in the tracks, not far from the empty train station. He hunkered down near the edge of a field of wild wheat and waited, shivering, despite the fact that he was dressed warmly for cold weather in a jacket, sweater and overalls. The moon was nearly full, and provided enough light to see the tracks clearly. He was glad that he’d brought his potato-sacking gloves with him; he took them out of his jacket pocket and put them on.
About a half hour later, as Ernesto predicted, a train rumbled down the tracks. The black Southern Pacific engine towed what seemed to be an endless line of the familiar dirty orange boxcars marked “PFE,” Pacific Fruit Express. Seeing no open cars or gondolas as the train moved sluggishly past him on the curve, on impulse, Carlos finally ran alongside one of the cars for a minute, reached out for the ladder that was bolted near one end of it, and swung himself up. He figured he’d find an open car when the train came to its next stop. But it didn’t stop. It sped up, and kept on going, too fast for him to jump off. So he climbed to the top of the car and “rode the deck,” something he had never done before, and later vowed he would never do again. Friends had boasted of riding the deck, or even “riding the rods”—hanging onto the structural rods underneath the boxcars—so Carlos thought this would be his chance to have an adventure, something he could tell stories about later.
At first he tried to sit on top of the car, but the wind hit him full blast, seeming to tear right through his jacket. He was afraid of getting his head lopped off in one of the many tunnels carved through the mountainsides from Reno to the Central Valley, so it seemed best to lay down. Unfortunately, the deck was wet in spots; it seemed that the car had recently been iced. Carlos remembered seeing workers in Lewiston standing on high platforms next to a train, loading blocks of ice into open hatches set in the tops of refrigerator cars. Suddenly he felt like kicking himself. He should’ve waited for an open boxcar to come by. How stupid for him to pick a refrigerator car!
A narrow metal strip ran along the length of the car’s flat rooftop like a spine; its “ribs” flared out from it horizontally, each about a yard apart. Carlos crawled along the roof until he found a dry spot, and lay down. He could hold on to the metal ribs, but they also made it difficult to stretch out flat, so he had to curl up on his side, one hand locked onto one of the metal ridges to keep him in place. He lay in that position, as the wind chilled him to the bone—until he was so stiff with the cold he could barely move.
In the numbing cold and the darkness, it seemed that only his sense of smell was operating, and it helped him to figure out where he was. For a long time, the medicinal scent of pine and fir trees, the relatively slow speed of the train and its frequent turns, told him he was in the mountains. Then, the speed of the train increased; he smelled the wheat fields of Central California, so familiar to him after working in Washington and Oregon. This was followed by the earthy and slightly rotten smell of marshlands.
Finally, after what seemed a very long time, Carlos saw the lights of farmhouses in what he guessed was Watsonville or Gilroy; he smelled the sweet-sour cent of cider vinegar, familiar in those areas during the winter, after the harvest. In the dim blue light of early morning, he saw the shadowy shapes of two-story wood frame houses near the tracks, empty laundry lines criss-crossing the small, fenced-in backyards. The train passed a few large factory buildings, and began to slow down; Carlos realized it was pulling into the Oakland yards, and it was time to move his sore and cramped limbs; time to climb down, and get off his refrigerator car, to avoid the yard bulls.
Shortly thereafter, he caught a cold, which turned into pneumonia. The doctor told him it was a type of pneumonia caused by breathing in too much dust or smoke. Carlos thought about the previous couple of months in Oregon; the air had been full of fertilizer dust and mold during potato sacking. Then there was the smoke blowing back from the steam engine of the train. He hadn’t thought much of it at the time, but he remembered feeling filthy with grit after getting off the train. He spent two weeks in the old red-bricked French Hospital near Geary Street, and realized that he just couldn’t do another stint in the canneries of Alaska. It was a shame, too, because he made good money there, despite the lousy working conditions.
