When I was eight my twin brother Ray and I hopped a train to St. Louis. The news stories said we “went missing,” but we knew where we were the whole time, viz., riding in a coal car through mountains and prairies. Ray and I were secondary exports of Wyoming. The primary exports were coal and meth.
What happened was Vicki Kimball stole my plastic bookbag while we were walking to school. Vicki Kimball’s primary export was being mean. She always stole my plastic bookbag on the way to school. Usually she just dropped it in front of the school but that day she ran into the train yard and tossed it up into a coal car. So Ray and I climbed up the sides and jumped down into the car to get it, and then we couldn’t get back out. The coal came up to about six feet below the top of the car, and neither one of us could reach the top to pull ourselves out. We tried to pile up a little mountain to climb but the coal was too heavy. Then the train started and away we went.
A couple years after our hobo adventure, my dad got a transfer to Syracuse. My mom’s primary imports after the transfer were religion and cancer. The way she got religion was going to mass and confession every time she got a chance. The way she got cancer was living in Syracuse. The primary export of Syracuse used to be heavy manufacturing and steel. These days it’s healthcare. Cancer is a secondary export.
“FFS,” says my older sister Wilma. She actually says it like that, “F-F-S,” because she’s trying to stop swearing. She is putting some dry toast on a plate to take to Mom. Mom is way past the point where toast means anything to her but Wilma brings her some every morning anyway. I don’t know what she’s F-F-Sing about, maybe she burned the toast or stubbed her toe or something. I’m not really paying attention until she says, “Hell’s wrong with you?”
She says this because she notices I am not really into my cereal. I am too freaked out to be into my cereal today. Last week I was freaked out because I didn’t have my period. This week I’m worried because I’ve got it and it’s super-bad. I didn’t have a period for two months and today I’ve already blown through two pads and I haven’t even made it to school yet.
I go back to the room I share with my older sister Beth and dig around for some long underwear. At least that way if it seeps through it won’t get to my jeans immediately. Beth is already off to school for volleyball practice or cheerleading or Student Council or whatever it is she does before school. I never see Beth at all these days, because she leaves before I’m awake and I usually get home after she’s asleep. Beth’s primary export is Achievements.
When Ray and I hopped the train we were pretty freaked out but also pretty excited. The coal car was open at the top and only partly full, so all we could see during our trip was coal and the tops of mountains rolling by and telephone wires and sky. All we did all day besides freak out was watch the sky change from solid blue to blue with puffs to pink purple gold and red at sunset. At night we watched for shooting stars. If I saw one and Ray didn’t, he had to find me a small lump of coal. If he saw one and I didn’t, I had to find him one. We stacked our small lumps up on the big lumps like end tables beside us.
I am rummaging through the dresser when I hear a knock on the door. I tie a bathrobe around me so the blood doesn’t show and say, “Yeah?”
“Ruth?” It’s my dad.
I know he’s freaked out because he never comes upstairs. Even before cancer, Mom and Dad’s room was downstairs. I think at some point it was just too exhausting for them to be near us even when they slept.
My dad is thin and tall with his grey-blond hair combed over the bald place on top. He wears glasses with metal frames and always has a company pen in his shirt pocket. Today he is wearing a tie that is deep blue with little orange “S” shapes all over it, to show his solidarity with the local basketball team. My dad’s face is lined and weary. It has been lined and weary for as long as I’ve known him. It was lined and weary even before Ray and I hopped the train.
“Ray says you have the Divine Office?” He sounds like he thinks Ray is mistaken.
I just nod.
“Your mother would like to borrow it,” he says.
I walk around the bed and pick it up off my bedside table. While I’m walking to the door to hand it to him a cramp hits me so hard I think I’m going to fall down but I don’t.
Dad says, “You read this, Ruth?” He sounds like he’s asking, “What’s the square root of 32?” It’s that kind of figuring-out tone of voice.
The cramp has still got me so I just nod my head and he goes away. I wonder how Dad thinks we all got here. He always seems so bewildered by us. Sometimes I’m surprised he remembers our names. Now he thinks I’m a religious nut. But I’m not. I’m not like Mom going to mass all the time and saying hail marys. I just read the Liturgy of the Hours when I have a chance, because I started doing it last year and now I’m scared of what might happen if I quit. The cramp lets up for a second and I take another Motrin. I’ve already had three. I figure if I overdose then it will at least stop the pain.
The main problem for Ray and me when we were being exported from Wyoming was water. It got so bad that we started drinking drips from the corners of the car. Then one night it rained a little and we collected some rain in my plastic bookbag, which is probably why we lived to see St. Louis.
After a while, we got to the point where we didn’t feel any pain. At first the coal stuck us and we couldn’t get comfortable, and the wind was constantly on us, and the heat, and the thirst and hunger. Whenever the train stopped we banged on the sides of the coal car and hollered and screamed for help. We took turns crying to go home. But after the first day there were long hours where we just floated along under the sky, watching the clouds and birds and airplanes and telephone wires. At first there were mountain tops. Then there was just sky.
In the bathroom I try to stopper up with a tampon but it just gushes out around it. I’m starting to realize I’m not going to get through the first hour of school at this rate. I sit on the toilet trying to think. Ray is pounding on the bathroom door. “The hell you doing in there Ruth?”
“I’ve got bad diarrhea,” I yell back. If you ever want to be alone in the bathroom in our house, all you have to do is pretend to have diarrhea. “Go use the downstairs bathroom.”
“Man my stuff’s in there!”
“Where is it?”
“There’s a loose tile by the mirror.”
Our house is full of these little stash holes, behind tiles and panels and bits of drywall. Ray uses them for his business. Ray’s primary export these days is prescription medication. It’s also his primary import. I find a plastic baggie of something medicinal behind the tile. “Hey Ray is this any good for pain?”
“Uh...” he says. I push the baggie out under the gap beneath the door and he goes away.
I hear the front doorbell ring, meaning Mrs. Easton the nurse has arrived. This means Dad can leave for work, and Wilma can start bossing everyone around. Wilma is friends with Mrs. Easton because Wilma is in nursing school. Once Wilma gets her RN certification she’s going to move out and then Beth will get Wilma’s bedroom.
I clean up and sneak out the bathroom back to Beth’s and my room. I can hear Wilma and Mrs. Easton talking at the bottom of the stairs.
“He’s tripping his balls off,” says Wilma.
“Her stuff still locked up?”
“I don’t think he even knows where it is,” says Wilma.
I guarantee Ray knows where Mom’s fentanyl is, and has figured out how to get it. But the way Ray is acting, I don’t think he’s on fentanyl this morning.
Toward the end, we didn’t even bother to bet coal lumps on the shooting stars. I think we were too weak. One night I started hearing the stars. I looked over at Ray but his eyes were closed. We had found places for our butts in the coal pile so that it fit around and held us like a La-Z-Boy recliner. I thought the stars were buzzing or something, humming. If I focused on Cassiopeia, it hummed louder, one voice for each star, like a jazz chord hanging up there. If I switched to the Little Dipper, two more voices came on, with the north star a high sweet tenor. The twinklers waggled up and down between two notes. The sound was so pure and buzzy that I thought Ray would wake up, but he slept through it. All that shimmery fizzy twingling humming and I was the only one who knew.
Eight years later I still dream about it.
Before she leaves, Wilma goes into each room of the house to make sure we’re not skipping school. I crawl into the closet and keep quiet. She comes into our room and yells, “Ruth?” But she doesn’t check the closet. I hear her go into Ray’s room and yell, “Ray?”
When we lived in Wyoming, before my big brothers Joe and John grew up and moved out, Mom would start her day by going into all our rooms and yelling to make sure we were gone. “Joe? John? Wilma? Beth? Ray? Ruth? Steve?” Steve is my dad’s name.
When Mom was satisfied we were all on our way to wherever we were supposed to be on our way to, she’d pour her primary import into a coffee mug and start her housework. We all know that she did this because when we were too sick to go to school, she’d put us on the couch in front of the TV before she made her rounds.
Wilma slams the front door and the house quiets down. I hear little clatters of Mrs. Easton moving around downstairs, washing things and making Mom’s equipment beep. The closet feels good because it is dark, and closed in, and warm. It reminds me a little of the coal car because it’s all jumbled with shoes that stick into my back. I shove the shoes out of the way and hunker down. I could stay here forever, if only the roof were open so I could see the sky. If only the sky were the silken blue of the west, rather than the gunmetal grey of Syracuse. My primary export is blood.
We could tell we were in St. Louis because we saw the top of the arch. The train stopped and there was a lot of noise, so much noise that we didn’t bother to call out for a while. But in the morning we heard somebody walking by and we started pounding on the sides of the coal car and yelling. So the railroad guys got us out of the car and we went to the hospital and they fed us Seven-Up and Jello. The paper came and interviewed us. We didn’t tell them about the stars, about the sky and the tops of mountains sliding by. We just said we got stuck in the coal car and couldn’t get out.
I wake up. I didn’t realize I’d passed out. I try to stand up but I’m pretty dizzy so I crawl out of the closet to the top of the stairs. Mrs. Easton is watching Days of our Lives on the TV in Mom and Dad’s room, which is right at the bottom of the stairs. The door is open and I can see the light of the TV flicking across the foot of Mom’s hospital bed.
“Mrs. Easton?” I call. I hear a crash like Mrs. Easton dropped something. She comes to the door of Mom’s room with her face all sunk in. “Mrs. Easton is Mom awake?”
She looks up the stairwell and sees me, then looks back to the bedroom. “No, she’s asleep. Is that Ruth or Beth? You scared me to death, honey.”
“Mrs. Easton can you help me?”
She wants me to go to the hospital and I don’t want to go. She says if I’m hemorrhaging I might die. I say it’s slowing down. This is true. Ever since my little nap on the closet floor, the blood has slowed down and the cramps are easing off.
“Probably the ibuprofen,” she says. She says if the bleeding stops this afternoon she won’t make me go to the hospital. She puts me on the couch in the living room with one of Mom’s rubber pads under me and she feeds me some more Motrin and a lot of water.
In the afternoon I ask Mrs. Easton if Mom is using the Liturgy of the Hours. Mrs. Easton brings me the book and I sit up to read it. I’m a little wobbly but I figure out what day it is. I read it out loud. I don’t even care if Mrs. Easton is listening. She watches me with her mouth all pressed together. When I’m done she puts her hand on my forehead like a mom.
“What’s his name?”
“What?”
“Do your parents know?”
“Mrs. Easton if you tell them about this they’ll kick me out of the house.”
“Then you better be ready to get up and act normal when they get back.”
“I’ve been through worse,” I say. I stand up and start rolling up the rubber sheet and folding the blankets. I say, “Did you ever hear about the time Ray and I hopped a train to St. Louis?”
Mrs. Easton says, “You call this number before you even think about looking at a boy again, you hear me?”
She gives me a hot pink business card and I slip it between the pages of the Divine Office. It clashes with the jewel tones of the ribbons. Purple, red, yellow, blue, green. Pepto-Bismol pink. I think the card will burst into flame or something but it just rests quiet like a pink lump of coal in the Invitatory. Mrs. Easton watches me for a second longer, but I am exporting nothing.
When Ray and I got home from hopping the freight train, everyone was at the front porch with a crew of reporters, even Joe and John, who by then were old enough to work the swing shift. Everyone kept asking, “Aren’t you glad to be home?” and Ray and I kept saying, “Yes, yes, yes.” But when I looked at Ray and Ray looked at me, all we saw was the tangy black coal, the whip of the wind, and the endless sky slipping away over our eyes.
Sarah E. Ruhlen’s fiction and poetry have appeared in The Coachella Review, DIAGRAM, Waccamaw, Guesthouse, Boiler Journal, Slipstream, and Rhino, and she has received multiple Pushcart nominations. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in Hobart and was anthologized in Essay Daily’s June 21, 2018 project. She lives and writes in Camillus, NY.