Boys Life

seen summer-baked creekbeds that held more moisture. Every inch of his face was cracked and wrinkled, and the cracks drew his mouth back from his yellow teeth and continued up like a weird cap over the hairless dome of his scalp. His long, skinny fingers, exposed by the matchlight, were likewise shriveled, as was the hand on which they were fixed. His throat was a dried mass of cracks. He wore a dusty white costume of some kind, but where shirt and pants met I couldn’t tell. He looked like a stick in a bag of dirty rags.
    I was frozen with terror, waiting for the blade to slice my neck.
    The wrinkled man’s other hand rose like an adder’s head. I tensed.
    He was holding a package with a few Fig Newtons in it.
    “Well, well!” the foreign man said with obvious surprise. “Ahmet likes you! Take a Fig Newton, he doesn’t speak.”
    “I… don’t think I…”
    The match went out. I could smell Ahmet next to me, an odor so dry it threatened to crisp the hairs in my nostrils. He breathed like the rustle of dead leaves.
    A second match was struck. Ahmet had a black streak across his pointed chin. He still held the Fig Newtons, and now he nodded at me. When he did so, I thought I heard his flesh creak.
    He was grinning like warmed-over Death. Baked and crusted Death, to be more exact. I slid a trembling hand into the package and accepted a Fig Newton. This seemed to appease Ahmet. He shambled over toward the boxcar’s other side, and he knelt down and touched the match to three candle stubs stuck with wax to the bottom of an upturned bucket.
    The light grew. And as it grew, it showed me things I wished I didn’t have to look at.
    “There,” the foreign man said from where he sat with his shoulder against a pile of burlap sacks. “Now we see eye-to-eye.”
    I wished we’d been back to back with five miles between us.
    If this man had ever seen the sun, the Lady was my grandmother. His skin was so pallid, he made the moon appear as dark as Don Ho. He was a young man, younger at least than my father, and he had fine blond hair combed back from a high forehead. A touch of silver glinted at his temples. He was wearing a dark suit, a white shirt, and a necktie. Only I could tell right off that his suit had seen better days from the patches around the shoulders, the cuffs of his shirt were frayed, and brown blotches marred his tie. Still, there was an elegance about this man; even sitting down, he commanded your attention with a stare that had a trace of well-bred haughtiness in it. His wingtips were scuffed. At first I thought he was wearing white socks, but then I realized those were his ankles. His eyes bothered me, though; in the candlelight, the pupils gleamed scarlet.
    But this man, and Ahmet the dried-up one, looked like Troy Donahue and Yul Brynner compared to the third monstrosity in that boxcar.
    He was standing up in a corner. His head, which was strangely shovel-shaped, almost brushed the ceiling. The man must have been over seven feet tall. His shoulders looked as wide as some of the wings on the planes at Robbins Air Force Base. His body appeared bulky and lumpy and altogether not right. He was wearing a loose brown jacket and gray trousers with patches on the knees. The trousers looked as if they had gotten drenched and shrunken while he was still in them. The size of the man’s shoes astounded me; to call them clodhoppers is like calling an atomic bomb a pregnant grenade. They were more like earthmovers.
    “Hi dere,” he said as his shoes slammed on the timbers and he came toward me. “I’m Franklin.”
    He was grinning. I wished he hadn’t been. His grin made Mr. Sardonicus look unhappy. What was worse than his grin was a scar that sliced across his Neanderthal forehead and had been stitched together, it seemed, by a cross-eyed medical student with a severe case of hiccups. His huge face looked flattened, his shiny black hair all but painted on his skull. In the candlelight, he appeared as if something he’d recently eaten hadn’t agreed with him. The misfortunate oaf was a sickly, grayish hue. And lo and behold! There from each side of the man’s bull-thick neck protruded a small rusted screw.
    “You want some wadda?” he asked, and he held up a dented canteen. In his hand, it seemed the size of a clamshell.
    “Uh… no sir. No thank you. Sir.”
    “Wadda washes down da Fig Newton,” he said. “Udderwise get stuck in da troat.”
    “I’m okay. Really.” I cleared my throat.