By Byron Spooner
It’s one of those strange evenings when the moonlight reflecting off yesterday’s snow gives the whole world a soft bluish radiance. I’m out wandering around, no particular place to go, anywhere but home, and I see the Field House lights are on. The front door is unlocked. I stomp the snow from my boots all over the main Meeting Room floor and walk into the Railroad Club room and meet madness head on. I’m shocked, nauseated, though at the same time not terribly surprised; Jock lying there, blood pooled around his busted-up skull. Duane standing over him, trembling, lower lip quivering, blood on his shirt, on the inside-out parts where he’d cuffed up his jeans. It was always going to come to something like this is my first thought—Jock, always pushing the limits. Duane too.
*
Jock and Duane were the driving force on an ambitious undertaking at the Oritani Police Athletic League they called Project Big. The original goal of Project Big was to construct the largest HO-scale model railroad in the country. Over the last couple of years the project’s ambitions had been scaled down as more information came in until they’d whittled the goal down to building the largest in the northwest corner of Oritani, New Jersey. At that point, the winter of ’70, even in that they hadn’t succeeded, presiding instead over a multi-leveled confusion of jigsaw-shaped plywood nailed to a frame of two-by-twos with miles of multi-colored wires dangling underneath. The highest layer, snugged and braced into the far corner of the room, was slated, if only in Jock and Duane’s imaginations, to become a mountain.
*
I pull my cigarette pack out of the top of my boot and light one. I want to ask Duane what happened, but it seems like an incredibly stupid question given that he still has a hefty Lionel O-Gauge model locomotive, ”Old Ninety-Seven” they’d named it, hanging from his hand, dented and dripping blood. It’s a big sucker, Old Ninety-Seven, a scrap leftover from a different time, when model trains were big and made of solid metal instead of cheap plastic, made in America instead of Japan. The club members venerate Old Ninety-Seven as a relic of the steam era, too, before diesels, a symbol from a better, simpler time they all wish they could live in, a time they are busy recreating in that room in 1:87 scale.
*
Jock was the Civilian Director (CIV DEE for short) of the Police Athletic League’s Model Railroad Club. A sawed-off little tow-truck driver who had apparently won a lifetime supply of Tiparillos somewhere, maybe a game show or a raffle, and who crawled under cars for a living but rarely bathed. “Built from some kind of turd-like substance,” my father said of him. Duane an immense, lumpy fifteen-year-old model railroad enthusiast and midget wrestling fan who had neither the money nor the room at home to build a layout of his own. Lately he didn’t have a home at all. He was my little brother’s best friend, but I felt like I hardly knew him at all.
*
Duane, never the brightest kid, is frightened, paralyzed in place. Normally amiable and funny and a halfway-decent impressionist—teachers, guys from the movies, guys in the PAL. He likes to do impressions of impressionists—“Here’s Rich Little doing Nixon on Carson,” “This is Frank Gorshin doing Burt Lancaster on Merv Griffin.”—though no one knows why. “Did you do this?” I ask, not much of an improvement on the Stupid Question Scale. “I hit him once, yeah, see?” he says, “Then I hit him again, yeah, see?” Edward G. Robinson, he’s not aware he’s doing it even. “And I couldn’t stop, yeah, see?”
*
The PAL was headquartered in a tiny one-story Depression-era building called the Field House that sat about fifty feet off Route 4, the highway that runs east-west from the George Washington Bridge to Patterson. Back in the late fifties, some well-intentioned soul had done a shoestring renovation on it and then immediately lost interest in it, leaving us with cracked linoleum floors, crappy fake-wood paneling that was starting to come unnailed, overhead fluorescent light fixtures, each with a burnt-out tube. Every few years one of the CIV DEEs would get ambitious and organize a Saturday afternoon get-together; a second CIV DEE would buy a couple of cases of beer and a few gallons of bargain exterior white out of petty cash and pocket the change and they’d slap it on the clapboards with a predictably ugly outcome. The leftover brushes and cans typically sat in a box in the corner of the bathroom until they were good and solidified before someone summoned the energy to drag them out with the trash.
*
“Someone should call someone,” Duane says. “No,” I say, “Just gimme a minute here.” There isn’t anybody I can think of, with the possible exception of my father, who could do anything but deepen the trouble Duane is in. My father, like Jock, is a CIV DEE. You never know what he’s gonna do. “You know these cops,” I say to him, “Do you think any single one of them is gonna lift a finger to help you?” Duane looks at me, “They’re my friends,” he says and my heart breaks.
*
My father had signed himself and me and my brother up for the PAL a couple of years before, after he’d read in the paper how fathers and sons were becoming alienated from one another. He considered it a ‘prophylactic’ measure. But, whether he knew it or not, we weren’t as close as we’d once been; we’d moved apart over the previous year or so. He thought Nixon was trying to end the Vietnam War—“Johnson’s War,” he called it—I thought Nixon was trying to kill me and my friends same as Johnson was. It seems like a small difference now, but it was a big deal back then. My friend Aaron had lately taken me to a couple of antiwar demonstrations, and I could tell my father wasn’t happy about it. He called Aaron a ‘peacenik’ and a ‘draft dodger’ and other stuff.
*
“Go wash that thing off and wash yourself off, too, while you’re at it,” I say to Duane. His fingerprints are all over everything in the room of course; he and Jock have been building the layout practically single-handed after all, working three, four nights a week, but it’s the only thing I can think of to keep Duane busy for a few minutes while I gather my wits, what remains of them. Plus he’s got blood all over his hands, his arms, his face, his hair, it’s disgusting.
*
It was called the Police Athletic League, but actual cops weren’t in evidence with the exception of a couple of fat old farts who’d fall by on Friday nights, the regular meeting night, to schmooze with the kids, buy them Cokes, and split a six-pack between them. Twenty, twenty-five kids, ham radio club, model railroad club, no athletes in evidence, either. There was this one detective, Brath, a Staff Director (SD), who hung around pretty regularly; juvenile division, cheap plaid sports coat, flared pants, regulation haircut. Short, taut, pistol strapped to his ankle, flask outlined in his back pocket. He and Jock were tight—Jock brownnosed Brath shamelessly, Brath called Jock ‘shitbird’ about once every five minutes.
*
While Duane is in the can running water and no doubt getting it all over the floor, I hear a key crunkling into the front door lockset, the knob moves a quarter inch one way, a quarter inch the other. Too late I think of turning out the lights; Duane’s already attracted attention, no point to it now. I’m hoping it’s not that prick Brath, stopping by the way he does when he sees lights on at odd times. The front door swings open into the main meeting room, letting in a blast of cold air and a tiny squall of snow.
*
Jock had always bragged that he did undercover work for the NYPD, right across the river. “A tow truck driver hears a lot of really, really interesting shit, I mean really interesting shit,” he would tell us. We were, all of us, ninety nine percent convinced the whole story was bullshit. But only ninety-nine. And Brath wasn’t gonna help us any, even when we asked him outright if any of it was true; keeping everyone in the dark served his purposes quite nicely.
*
Behind the cold and snow, in walks Aaron, “What’s up my man?” He holds his palm out for five. I don’t fall for it the way Duane always does, the way I used to, knowing he’ll snatch it away last second like always and spend the next minutes gloating. “What’s happening?” he says. I don’t respond, and, after a second or two, “All right then, what’s wrong?” I beckon him into the railroad room and Jock’s body and the blood and all.
*
Aaron, an exuberant eighteen-year-old with greasy shoulder-length hair and half-laced combat boots, was the CIV DEE and founder, of the Photography Club. Membership: zero. Consequently, he owned a set of keys, which gave him twenty-four-hour-a-day access to the darkroom he’d built—“The only reason I hang around this dump.” He was two years older than me, drove a bald-tired ‘65 LTD that belonged to his mother, and had a plump girlfriend whose parents let him sleep over. He treated me as his equal and I looked up to him to the point of worship. He was, by several orders of magnitude, the coolest guy I had ever met.
*
“Shit,” Aaron says, “Jesus fuck,” looking at the body, the smashed-in head, the blood. He pokes at Jock’s head with the toe of his boot. The skull is smashed to the point where it no longer has any integrity, a sack of shards leaking fluids and goo from places where the skin is torn open. “‘Jesus fuck’ is right,” I say. Duane has hammered an adult man to death with a toy locomotive, a man who is also possibly a cop.
*
My father always liked Aaron despite his misgivings; calling him ‘erudite’ (one of his favorite words) and said it so he got across how ‘impressed’ (another favorite) he’d been that a longhair like Aaron, a card-carrying member of the ‘certain element’ all the paper had been warning him about, could actually be intelligent. In his opinion ‘peaceniks’ were stupid, useless parasites whose parents lived on welfare and walked around the house half-naked all day. “Are you a hippie?” he’d asked the first time he’d met Aaron. He’d never met a real-life hippie before, having only read about them in magazines and seen them on television looking wild-eyed. “No,” Aaron replied, “I’m no hippie, I’m a freak! I’m a revolutionary!” he thrust his fist in the air. “A fairy, more likely,” Jock hollered from the other room. Another county heard from.
*
“Hammer? Coke bottle?” Aaron says. “The engine, Old Ninety-seven,” I say, and he giggles and looks over to the self where the idol normally stands, “Really?” and I nod. “Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.” There’s blood on the laces of his boot now.
*
The younger kids, Duane included, looked up to Jock, especially the littler kids who thought they were helping but mostly hung around getting wound up on Cokes and grabassing, and to whom Jock dispensed ‘guidance,’ that sounded remarkably like barked orders, around the latest cigar clenched in his teeth. They looked up to him and bought into his bullshit about the undercover work. Anyone who could be as filthy and foul-smelling as Jock without having someone constantly bitching that he should take a bath was A-OK with them. But only until one of the little acolytes encountered the inevitable—Jock’s grease-blackened paw resting accidentally-but-maybe-on-purpose on his knee, his thigh. For months I’d suckled a fantasy of walking in on Jock giving my brother the feel and kicking him several times in the nuts.
*
Aaron says, “We gotta get you outta here,” giving me a steady push toward the door, “they’ll bust us both, me just for being here, sure as shit.” Aaron has already spent some time in jail, he’s always among the first to get picked up at antiwar and Free the Chicago Seven demonstrations. It’s a point of pride with him. At that moment Duane walks in, the dumb bastard, and puts Old Ninety-Seven down on the edge of the layout, right above where space for the controls—a skein of wires and a yet-to-be-connected heap of dials, throw switches, black boxes and levers—has been cut into the edge of the layout and will be camouflaged as the power plant that will run the HO-scale settlement the layout will be centered around.
*
Being an adult, at least technically, Aaron operated on the same level as Jock and my father and Brath and didn’t have to put up with any of their bullshit, Jock’s especially. Aaron hated ignoramuses of all stripes intensely—uncool, right-wing ignoramuses especially—and Jock sat at the top of his list.
*
“He called me ‘re-tard,’” Duane says, “He’s the one that’s a re-tard. Was.” Duane’s not retarded at all, just not very bright; it isn’t like he’s getting left back in school or anything. His giant hands are still wet, he’s shaking them and getting drops all over the place. “Ya wanna stop that?” Aaron says and tears a paper towel off one of the rolls that inhabit random corners of the room. He takes us both by the elbow and escorts us out into the main meeting room. “We gotta think,” he says, “You’re not on the Brath Path, right Duane?”
*
Being on the Brath Path meant you had a juvenile record. It meant Detective Brath had busted you for one thing or another and then had the judge make you join the PAL instead of probation or juvie. From there he could keep an eye on you, keep you on the straight and narrow. At that point about half the membership were on the Brath Path. Nobody was supposed to know who was on and who wasn’t, but everybody did.
*
“Nah, I never done nothin’ that would put me on that stupid thing,” Duane says. “Until now,” Aaron says and we all nod; he has a point. “I just wanna play with the train set, that’s all,” Duane continues. “Why don’t you go in the back there and get us some Cokes,” Aaron says. After a minute we hear Duane roughing up the machine.
*
Outside of Attica, there was probably no better place to learn how to be a criminal than our local Police Athletic League. Kids on the Brath Path did what Brath told them to do; he could put them back in front of the judge any time he wanted. They were supposed to keep on doing whatever it was that got them in trouble in the first place only this time under Brath’s supervision. Anything they stole they had to bring to him. He had kids stealing bikes and cameras and record albums, all kinds of stuff. TVs. Some of the kids stole radios and other gear out of the trains that sat overnight on the siding off the Susquehanna Railway where it cut through town just a couple of blocks down the street. Brath took a decent cut of everything that came through. Jock could sell all the hubcaps they could steal. A few kids who’d been around for a while—kids in their twenties—boosted cars for Brath. Jock would sell them over the bridge and everybody would split the proceeds, trying to chisel each other every step of the way. Nobody squealed; the theoretical consequences of squealing were so great they forever remained in the realm of the theoretical Nobody but Jock and Brath himself knew about this lane of the Brath Path. None of the other Directors anyway, they remained happily ignorant of what was going on right under their noses. They knew but they didn’t know.
*
“I guess I should feel sorry, he had it comin,’ the dirty rat, he had it comin,’ I tell ya,” Duane says doing his Cagney, “the dirty rat, he had it comin’. The dirty rat.” Aaron gives me a look that says, ‘Is he really too stupid to know how much trouble he’s in?’ Duane hands us each a bottle of Coke and takes his down in one deep glug. “We gotta split. We gotta get our asses outa here now,” Aaron says, again, “if that asshole Brath walks in now we’re all three of us sunk.” Duane says, “Badges? We don’t need no stinking badges,” and then just stands there trembling. “Ya gotta knock this shit off, Duane, help me out a little here,” Aaron goes on, “Isn’t there some place you can crash? Don’t you have any buddies around here you can trust? Relatives?” Duane shrugs, “Just you guys.”
*
Duane’d stopped going to school altogether after umpteen suspensions, figuring he’d save them the trouble of expelling him, and his old man had kicked him out a year or more before that, disowned him. Since then Duane’d lived with his aunt up in Ramapo, his cousin over in Hackensack. My father, a fellow railroad buff, let him stay with us for a while until feeding him got too expensive and my mother noticed things going missing.
*
Duane rips open an operatic Coke belch, one with acts and tragic characters and a score. Aaron and I follow suit but really can’t compete in any important department—volume, timbre, tone, modulation. Disgustingness. “I got no place to go to,” Duane says, “The place I been staying at ain’t no good no more.” Aaron nods, “I figured as much.”
*
The Competitive Belching Club was one the many unchartered clubs at the PAL, along with the Jockmying the Coke Machine Club. The Sweeping Up Jock’s Plastic Cigar Holders Club. The Going Out Behind the Building and Splitting a Bottle of Cough Syrup Club. The Running Off with Everything That Isn’t Nailed Down Club.
*
In the four-space parking lot out in front I feel I can finally breathe. The sky over our heads is wide and starry and magnificently clean in the crisp cold. Aaron has turned out all the lights and locked the doors behind us. We hear diesels idling down at the tracks, cars sweeping by on Route 4. The three of us start down the street, toward the tracks, leaving Jock behind to be discovered by someone else.
*
My brother and Duane are the same age. but my brother kept his baby fat, remained beardless, while Duane became man-sized and sprouted man hair. They hung out down by the tracks for hours, watching the rolling stock— the boxcars and the tankers, the coal cars and the flatcars—trundle by, counting them, naming their types, their loads, their places of origin, paying particular attention to the locomotives. They were fully bought into the romance of the trains; the power that lived within them, the places they went, the distances they travelled. Sometimes the locos would idle all night—two, four, even six, coupled end-to-end. We could hear their rumble faintly all over the neighborhood and we would let the sound of it lull us to sleep.
*
Duane and Aaron and I stand alongside the still train in the blue snowlight. It’s colder now, colder than it’s been all year. The whole time while we walked down the hill to the tracks Aaron and I’ve been trying to convince Duane that Aaron’s solution is the right solution. One minute he’s still fooling around, saying, “Dammit, boys, we gotta get organized,” doing Jonathan Winters in his favorite movie, The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming; the next he’s bitching and whining, resisting us. He wants to turn himself in, which Aaron calls “an astoundingly moronic idea.” A quarter-mile up the tracks, under and beyond where the Route 4 overpass draws a perpendicular across the right-of-way, the doubled locomotives grumble. “I don’t know where I’m going,” Duane says, “How will I know where to get off.” Aaron says, “You’ll know. Wherever you end up being will end up being the right place to end up,” ever the hippie, ever the freak philosopher. “Kahlil Gibran?” I say. “Soupy Sales,” Aaron says. “Okay, okay,” Duane says, just wanting to end the discussion, not really agreeing to anything.
*
My friends and I used to go down to the tracks and throw rocks at the passing trains, concentrating with special glee on the car carriers, bouncing rocks off the shiny new Chevys and Dodges as they rocked past, with bonus points for hitting anything glass. We figured if they didn’t want kids throwing stuff at the trains they shouldn’t’ve built the railbed out of fist-sized stones. The summer before Jock’s murder, Aaron and a couple of his freak buddies had hopped a northbound freight and taken it to the Woodstock Festival. He wanted me to go with him. At that point my father no longer gave a shit what I did as long as he didn’t have to hear about it later. I was pulling down a good amount from my odd jobs—more than the old man, it wasn’t hard to beat what Unemployment was paying him—and so I gave myself license to operate outside his supervision. But my mother hadn’t surrendered an inch of control and vetoed the idea; she was worried about ‘the drugs.’
*
Up ahead the train starts to make its move, we can hear the clunk of the couplers unrelaxing; the sound of the train stretching its joints after its nap. The sound comes toward us from the front—chunk, chunk, chunk—closer, and then right past us and loud, before continuing down the line and fading in the direction of the caboose. It’s frightening to hear the great mass of the train shifting on its trucks as the monster engines roar and strain and lean into the inertia. “C’mon, you gotta get going,” Aaron says, “they’re probably up there right now loading Jock into an ambulance.” I say, “Or a hearse.” Duane just stands there, dithering, looking cowed and exhausted. He’s jumped a train a million times before, all of us have; this time will be no different. That’s not the problem. “Do you have any bread?” Aaron says. The train creaks and moans and groans and starts inching forward almost unnoticeably. Duane shakes his head ‘no,’ no surprise there, and Aaron digs into his multi-pocketed Army-surplus trousers and pulls out a pair of fives, I un-wad four and a quarter out of my jeans. We give Duane the money. All we have.
*
Later on, Aaron and I snaked our way back, through the muffled backyards and snow-dead side streets, staying away from the sidewalks and the streetlights, making our unseen way back to the Field House, crouching in the bushes across the street. The place was lit up, every room, with a bunch of cop cars outside, their trees spinning, sweeping the snow with color. Lot of cops, too, standing around the parking lot, leaning against their prowlers, hoisting their nuts and spitting. Smoking. Flash bulbs going off inside. Brath standing in the front door, also smoking, one foot in the parking lot, the other in the main room, Old Ninety-Seven dangling from his hand. I never knew who found Jock’s body.
*
The train is picking up speed as we stand there. Soon it will be going too fast. “I better go,” Duane says, finally getting it. “Wait a minute, Duane,” Aaron says. “I mean, c’mon…he didn’t just call you a re-tard one too many times. That can’t be all of it.” Duane hesitates for a second before putting his hand on his thigh, an inch away from his zipper, the spot where Jock’s filthy fingers had alighted thirty minutes ago. He looks from Aaron to me and back to make sure we get it—we do—and in his best Bogart says, “Louie, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.” And he’s off, running. “Or maybe the end,” Aaron shouts to his back. “Stupid bastard,” he says to me.
*
Aaron and I spied on the crime scene until we got too bored and too cold to stand it anymore. It started to snow again, pretty heavily, as we walked home. We’d backtracked through the yards and crossed the street far enough down so as not to be spotted. “Was that like the dumbest Goddamned thing that kid ever said?” Aaron said, “That line from Casablanca?” The snow was heavy enough to fill in our footprints as we trudged on. “Never said he was a genius,” I said. “By the way, which one of us was supposed to be ‘Louie?’” Aaron said.
*
Duane’s sneakers pound the roadbed. He’s looking back along the freight cars, waiting for the next handgrip, the next ladder, the next open box car. He’s doing it right; he’s waiting for the next handhold to catch up with him instead of running after it like they do in the movies. He’s fading into the distance, the darkness, the noise. He parallels the clackering train, staying with it as it goes under the shadow of the overpass, running like a madman. Running like Jock Brown. Running like hell. And it looks like maybe he’s making a move. A grab for a railing. In the dark under the bridge we can’t be sure. The accumulated snow is blowing off the roofs of the cars and into Duane’s face and obscuring our view all the more. Ten seconds pass and just when we should see him coming out from under the bridge, out from under the shadow it casts and back into the blue moonlight, we don’t see him. He’s no longer running alongside the train. The last cars rush by us in a vortex of noise and wind and snow and we suddenly realize how fast the thing is already going. Just as quickly the noise and wind fade and disappear, Doplering down the roadbed, pursuing the lights on the back of the caboose up the tracks like a dervish and we are left empty, alone with the dull glint of the rails.
*
Aaron and I were back at the PAL the next Friday as if nothing had happened. Brath acted as though Jock and Duane’s absence was a normal thing. A few of the kids asked questions which he simply ignored; kids are used to being kept in the dark. Nonetheless, suspicions ran high among them; the coincidence of Jock and Duane’s disappearances did not go unnoted. My father asked around and got nowhere, “No one gave two shits about either one of ‘em,” Brath told him. The cops asked a few questions, interviewed some relatives, me and Aaron, my father, the other CIV DEEs, but they were mostly going through the motions. I always suspected Brath had more than a little to do with that. And Brath was right, there was no denying it: Nobody ever cared about Duane. He was a re-tard, after all, a moron giant; and if he’d fled to parts unknown, so much the better. Nobody cared about Jock either, everybody hated him—the pervert grease-monkey, the braggart telling made-up stories. Their names still came up once in a while but less and less and pretty quickly. No one seemed to miss them. The custom shelf Old Ninety-Seven—impounded into evidence and never returned—had always occupied stood empty for a while until someone parked a box of tissues there. It remained forever after the Kleenex Shelf.
*
Aaron and I get to where he’s going left and I’m going right. It’s late and cold. He’s got his hands stuffed into the pockets of his long military greatcoat that makes him look like he’s perpetually retreating from Stalingrad, a look he cultivates. “Listen, we can’t say shit about this. You might end up in juvie, but I’ll go to Rahway,” he says. I don’t wanna go to juvie any more than he wants to go to Rahway, but his point is well taken. “And for a long time,” he adds, like it isn’t already obvious. We shake on it and head off in opposite directions. I feel very, very grown up.
*
I never told my brother what became of his best friend Duane. Never told my father. Never told anybody. Maybe he hopped off in the next town north, maybe he waited until he crossed into New York State. Canada? I doubted that, but who knew? It was best just to let him disappear.
The best way to keep a secret is to not know what the secret is in the first place. I’m pretty sure Aaron never told anybody either. We never talked about it after that night, the two of us. Aaron went off to college that fall to study architecture; it was only as far as Brooklyn, a bus and subway ride away, forty-five minutes, tops, but we didn’t see much of each other after that. The PAL went on, though Project Big devolved into a protracted exercise in tinkering and squabbling that never went anywhere. I went on. The war went on. Everyone went on.
Bio: Byron Spooner is the author of Rounding Up a Bison: Stories (Andover Street Archives Press, 2021). He is retired as the Literary Director of the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library where for many years he produced literary events. He founded and edited of The Readers Review, the Friends’ literary blog, where he wrote about books, music, film and bookselling. His writing has been published widely on a variety of platforms and won Honorable Mention in the 2021 Dillydoun International Fiction Prize competition for his story “The Acrobat Rides the Horse in Sequins.” He was invited to the Napa Valley Writers Conference in 2017. He served on the San Francisco Poet Laureate Nominating Committee and the One City, One Book Selection Committee of the SFPL and on the Boards of Litquake, California Public Library Advocates and the Advisory Board of the Beat Museum. He is also an adventurer, a naturalist and a partner in Andover Street Archives, brokering literary and cultural archives to university libraries. From 1982 to 1996 he owned and operated Books Revisited, an award-winning outlaw bookstore in San Rafael, California. Back in the seventies he was a founder, editor and writer of The Paper Tiger, the underground newspaper of the New Jersey Student Union. He lives with his wife, writer Judith Ayn Bernhard, in San Francisco. Visit his web site at:
You can purchase his book, “Rounding Up a Bison: Stories” from the link above or from our bookstore.
