6

The afternoon saw them stalled north of Boston, far out in the green Massachusetts countryside. Brindled cows swung their heads and regarded them with liquid eyes; people strolled along the tracks, sat on the slope of the line and looked back at the cows. 'Will we be here much longer?' Tom asked the conductor.

'Could be a couple more hours, way I hear it.'

'That long?'

'You boys jus' got lucky.'

At intervals a bored, half-audible voice broadcast over the loudspeakers: 'We regret the inconvenience of this delay, but… We anticipate resumption of service in a short… ' Lively rumors traveled through the train.

'Big mess - up at the next junction,' their porter finally told the boys. 'First thing like it in a lot of years. A train clear over on her side, people all bust up - terrible day for the railroad.'

'What can we do?' Del asked, almost frantic. 'Someone's waiting for us at a station in Vermont.'

'Wait is all you can do,' said the porter. 'Nobody g-s anywhere till the line's clear. If your daddy's waiting for you in Vermont, he'll know all about this - they got TV in Vermont too.'

'Not in that house,' Del said in despair.

Tom looked outside and saw a few men in suits and ties passionately hurling rocks at cows.

As the hours went by, Tom felt his energy flicker like a dying candle. His eyes were heavy enough to drop from their sockets. All the colors in the train seemed lurid. Twice he went to the toilet and in a stink so concentrated that it was nearly visible allowed his stomach to erupt and leave him weightless. 'I've got to get some sleep,' he said when he had staggered back after the second time, and saw that Dei was already there, folded up into himself like an exhausted bird.

When they finally moved again, the jolt of the carriage snapped Tom into wakefulness. Del still slept, curled in stationary flight.

The junction where the wreck had occurred was twenty miles down the track. For a moment the boys' carriage, the entire train, silenced: passengers crowded in the aisle to look out the windows but did not speak. A train the size of their own lay sprawled like a broken snake on the left side of the tracks. A gout of sparks blew into the air and died before the brilliant dots could fall on the few who still lay, covered up to the neck with blankets, on the sloping ground. One of the toppled carriages had been folded as neatly as paper; others were battered. Over the half-dozen policemen standing about, heavy gray smoke shifted in the humid air. Tom thought he could smell the wreck: oil and metal, the smell of heat and the smell of blood. The screams too. That was a smell like a taste in his own mouth, familiar and rancid.