A
SMALL, UNNOTICED CRIME
by
Margaret Symmank
The railroad tracks ran past our house just the other side of a narrow,
winding road and a weed-grown gully.
They crossed a trestle over a drainage ditch banked with sour-smelling
mud and teeming with minnows and crawfish destined to be seined up in a tow
sack – a task my brother and I undertook with religious regularity. On occasion we’d stop seining and stand stock
still, knee-deep in the slow, brown stream for the passing of a water moccasin.
The possibility that one of us might be flattened by a train, bitten by
a snake, drowned or carried off by some rail-riding vagrant was, for our
mother, a constant concern. It was also
the force that drew us like small, barefoot magnets to the railroad tracks
against her daily warnings. We were
confident in our ability to escape any threat that came our way. The chance that we might have to held
irresistible appeal.
My brother was six years older than I, and
at twelve was admirably reckless and capable of any number of wonderful
things. He could catch crawfish, cook
them over an open fire on the ditch bank and eat them right out of the
pan. While he engaged in this remarkable
activity, I hung around gathering sticks for the fire and trying to look as though
I would eat muddy crawfish if I felt like it – I just wasn’t hungry. Secretly, I knew I would never be that
hungry. If he sent me back to the house
for supplies, more Tabasco sauce or bacon for the frying pan, I’d build one of
my special deluxe, double-decker, peanut-butter-and-sweet-pickle sandwiches and
eat it as I trekked back, feeling vaguely unworthy.
My brother made lucky pieces from pennies
and dimes he’d stack together on the tracks to be smashed flat by a train. The
result was predictable and impressive. In an instant, pocket change was
transformed to a tiny silver moon rising against the copper circle of a
miniature sun, marked with the name of God
– paper thin and warm in your hand. I’d watch the artistic process from
a nearby tree, then scurry down when the train had passed to retrieve the
latest creation. It was an illegal act, my brother told me – damaging federal
property. But it was really his money
after all, and he wasn’t afraid of any government agent. He wasn’t afraid of anything. He once picked a live wasp nest from under
the railroad bridge and put it in a cigar box.
I’d seen him haul a snapping turtle from the water, clamp-jawed and
hissing, on a stick. I would have
followed him anywhere, and often tried, to his considerable annoyance.
My sister was sandwiched between us in
age, three years my senior, three years his junior, and a stabilizing influence
on the both of us. When B.J. prepared to
fry up the crawfish, Millie insisted he sterilize the blade of his pocketknife
before cleaning his catch. Listerine was
her antiseptic of choice. She often
stepped in as the voice of reason, quelling my attempts to launch a kitten on a
kite, dye my hair with food coloring and eradicate a large bed of ants from
under the house by setting fire to them.
The summer I scared myself silly inventing stories of criminals hiding
out by the railroad tracks, she did her best to resolve my fears by explaining
that there was no suitable place for them to sleep by the tracks; nothing to eat,
except crawfish, which we both agreed didn’t count as real food; and surely not
even a criminal would wash himself in that nasty ditch water.
It was a logical argument. But, logic had
little effect on imagination gone out of control. I first began to worry when I
heard the grown-ups reminiscing one night during a summer storm. In those days, rain and high wind invariably
knocked out the electricity, and we spent many an evening reading comic books
or playing cards by the light of a kerosene lamp, waiting for the power company
to work its way out to us.
My parents and my aunt and uncle sat
around the dinning room table, talking and eating sardines and crackers, their
faces golden in the lamplight, their voices lapping over each others’ in collective
memory. Favorite topics were the wars,
both I and II, and the Depression.
During the Depression, our house belonged
to my grandparents. They built it in the
early thirties in Arcadia – a rambling, 1½ story structure with high ceilings
and tall windows shuttered with metal storm blinds. My grandparents struggled through the grim
decade of the ‘30’s in that house, selling fruit from a small fig orchard. After the fig trees froze in a record-setting
South Texas freeze, they raised chickens and sold eggs.
They witnessed boxcar loads of men riding
past the house looking for work, or hope, or sometimes just for supper. They were desperate men, my father said. Family men, many of them, who had left wives
and children and places where there were no jobs and headed off to other places
where there were likely no jobs either.
They would appear at the back door of the
house offering to do work for a little money or something to eat. There was no work and no money. My grandmother invented odd jobs to salvage
their pride and swapped the chores for egg sandwiches. She always had cracked eggs she couldn’t
sell, so she fed the men as many sandwiches as they could eat, then gave them a
sack full to take along when they went.
In time the rail-riders diminished in
number, and only a few unfortunates stopped by for food. By then, the masses of unemployed had
dwindled – absorbed by a world busy with war.
Those who were left became a nuisance to many, suspect for not being
soldiers or otherwise engaged in the war effort. They were dubbed “hobos” – of questionable
character at best and generally unwelcome.
But my grandmother still fed any who stopped and asked. She would leave the food on the back porch
and step back in the house while the travelers ate. When they’d gone, she’d collect their dishes.
Some said that the hobos left markers near
the tracks for the benefit of others who came after them, a pattern of sticks
or rocks indicating where a meal might be had.
Only one or two came to the house the year before my grandmother
died. Now, in the prosperous fifties, no
hobos came at all.
I sat in the thin spill of lamplight,
spellbound by tales that seemed very long ago but not at all far away. My aunt was of the opinion that my grandmother
had taken unnecessary risks and was lucky a hobo hadn’t knocked her over the
head for her trouble and then come in to rob the house. She said they were only common criminals
toward the end. Neighbors had also
questioned my grandmother’s judgment, asking her why she would take such a
chance. They were hungry, my grandmother
said.
I tried to visualize those common
criminals who had once sat eating egg sandwiches on our back porch. I’d never seen a criminal, common or
otherwise, and I wrestled with the image, until I came face-to-felonious-face
with an entire wall full in the post office.
I don’t know how I’d missed them before.
The “Wanted” posters displayed dozens of devious types in front view and
profile, charged with a staggering array of crimes. They stared out at me from smudged, black and
white squares, tight-lipped and mean-eyed, their hair in wild disarray. They looked as though they’d been wakened too
soon and were plenty mad about it. There was no doubt – these were desperate men. Desperate enough to commit armed robbery or
kidnapping, then hop a train and turn up hungry.
As I stood before that wall of would-be
hobos, my heart pounded against the smashed penny and dime medallion that hung
on a string around my neck – a reminder that I had been party to the
destruction of federal property and now stood on federal ground wearing the
evidence. Evidence that could, I
suddenly realized, expose me for what I was – a common criminal. In an instant I saw my school picture, front view
and profile, among the “Wanted” posters.
I snatched hold of the lucky piece and dropped it down my shirtfront,
praying that no one had seen. Government
agents could be anywhere. From that
moment on, there were two things I wanted desperately. One was to wipe away my dishonorable past,
forget my transgressions and go straight.
The other was to make absolutely certain that I never saw any of those
faces I’d seen on the post office wall turn up at our back door.
I took to combing the railroad tracks and
surrounding areas for hobo signs. Search
and destroy missions. Maybe I’d find
rocks laid out like an arrow pointing to our house, or a cryptic symbol etched
in the hard, black dirt, some long overlooked message from one hobo to another,
a mysterious communication that would bring common criminals to our door. But there were none. Only the blackened remains of my brother’s
cooking fire and a little pile of crawfish pincers, sun-bleached and closed
harmlessly for all time.
I sometimes thought I saw a distant figure
on the railroad tracks, stooped and sinister, moving slowly and steadily in my
direction. It usually proved to be our
dog, Madge, trotting casually between the rails or, more often than not, an
apparition left from last night’s dreams.
That year, sometime in October, summer let
loose her last hold on fall. The wind
turned sharp and pushed around the eaves and whistled over the slats of the
blinds. The days grew gray and
shorter. One late afternoon, Millie and
I lay on our stomachs on the living room floor by the fire, dully turning comic
book pages, one eye cocked toward the TV screen. The Mouseketeers announced their names in
cheery salute, one after another, for the one-hundredth time.
Mother, back from town with groceries to
be brought in, knocked loudly on the back door, then rattled it for
emphasis. We detached ourselves from
Nancy and Sluggo, and Archie and Veronica, respectively, and scooted through
the dinning room into the kitchen.
Halfway across the room, Millie halted abruptly. I shot past her, stopping inches from the
back door. The red and yellow roosters
on the kitchen door curtain framed a face dead center in the door glass. It was not my mother waiting to be let
in. It was a hobo.
He was the most remarkable looking person
I had ever seen. He was very, very
dirty. It seemed to be accumulated dirt,
a dark olive-gray-brown that permeated his clothes and skin and hair, making
them sooty and greasy and all the same flat hue as though he’d been colored top
to bottom with some large, horrid Crayon.
His eyes were pinched and his mouth was tired. There were wrinkles – folds in his skin and
in his old, old clothes. His jacket was
alternately frayed and slick. He seemed
to be all but used up from head to toe, but whatever part was left hung on just
beneath his skin. It peered out hard
through his glistening eyes, through the window glass and straight at me.
There were mere inches and a pane of glass
between us. I barely breathed. Suddenly Millie was beside me. She reached for the window shade, jerking it
down with a swoosh, and the hobo disappeared – wiped away like a drawing on my
Magic Slate when the plastic sheet was lifted.
We tiptoed back to the living room where
we crouched behind an armchair and peered out through the lowered blinds. The hobo walked around the side of the house,
across the yard and out the front gate.
He crossed the road, dropped down in the gully momentarily, then came up
again onto the tracks, heading on in the direction he had been going. We were a small detour – a momentary hope,
unfulfilled.
I only saw the hobo’s face for a few,
fleeting seconds, but I see it clearly still.
It’s a face I’ve seen many times since, on the news, in the streets, on
old men, young women, babies and children.
The face of want is recognizable in all its soul-wrenching variety. It’s sometimes edged with sickness or pain,
pride or anger, and always an ongoing weariness that feeds on the constant diet
of too little, too late.
Sometimes I recall the hobo’s visit, and
in my mind I change what happened. In
the style of my grandmother, I ask him to wait in the yard, and I build a stack
of my special deluxe, double-decker, peanut-butter-and-sweet-pickle
sandwiches. I leave them on the back
porch for him, along with a sack full to take with him. I smile at him politely through the door
glass. The smile means that I know a
desperate man does not necessarily make a hobo – any more than a smashed penny
on a string makes a common criminal.
The summer after the hobo, my brother
stopped making lucky pieces. When he turned thirteen he gave the last one to a
girl. As far as I know, he remained on
the right side of the law thereafter and is now retired to a ranch in the Hill
Country and leads a reasonably respectable life. My sister and I never ate any crawfish from
the ditch. I had been right about that;
I’ve never been that hungry.
In my second version of the hobo story –
the one that didn’t happen – I always think about giving him my lucky
piece. But I never do. I know it’s not enough.
