Free Painted Horses by Malcolm Brooks

the line, closer and closer. A flashlight beams into the interior briefly, just long enough to give him a look at the wooden crates stacked around him. The door slides closed and latches shut. A little after the train lurches into motion and he thinks, Track me with your hounds on this horse .
    He gets very cold in the night and thinks sleep is out of the question but apparently he dozes off because the screech of the wheels slowing against the rails snaps him awake. Feeble gray light filters through chinks in the walls. John H stands and pops the latch on the door and the door takes off sliding with the motion of the train and bangs to a stop in its open position.
    He sees a row of brick bungalows across a road running parallel to the tracks. The edge of some town, kitchen lights cutting through the dawn. He leans out and looks ahead, recognizes a train depot not far down the line. The cars have slowed considerably, rolling no faster than some of the horses he’s fallen from. He tosses his pack and hops himself into the racket put up by the wheels.
    A week later he’s an expert at this mode of travel, realizes also the uncharacteristic ease of his first night on the rails. He has since suffered competition from other riders, which makes boarding in a train yard next to impossible. Hundreds if not thousands of unemployed men and boys are heading someplace else, someplace better, anyplace but here. With the presence of so many vagabonds the only way to avoid the yard detectives is to board while the train is in motion, a risky endeavor at best. But underfed or not he’s quick as a fox and can run down a departing train before it’s up to speed. He can latch on to an iron ladder like a tick, let the train lift him away like an eagle.
    He’s been shaken down by railroad bulls who find he has nothing and turn him loose with threats he ignores. He rides across West Virginia and southern Ohio. Cora is here but he does not know where. He finds a soup kitchen in Richmond, Indiana, and eats until he could burst though the actual amount is surprisingly small.
    In Cedar Rapids, Iowa, he and twenty others slip into the rail yard at dawn and run smack into three bulls on horseback, charging down and shooting pistols in the air. The free riders disperse in a panic. John H goes under a train car and out the other side. He can see the shadowy forms of horses and fleeing people through the ventilation in the cattle cars but he is alone on this side of the train.
    He runs down the cars toward the caboose and the train jolts and clanks to life and begins to travel. John H grabs the rungs of the nearest ladder and goes up the side like a rat up a hawser.
    He rides on the roof’s wooden catwalk, prone on his belly while the last pistol shots pop in the yard. He lifts his head to the sunrise, coming in over the farms and the town and the flat winking rivers. He sees no one else at first, then watches a solitary figure clamber up many cars ahead, a single full-grown man.
    Two evenings later he’s in the West. The realization dawns with the sunset, which he can see magnificently from the roof of yet another boxcar. He’s somewhere in South Dakota. A line of severe hills like the teeth of a saw blade rises massively in the distance. The sun pools like a molten ingot and then drips progressively away, its color changing as it descends and changing in turn the hue of the sky around it. The stripe of clouds above the hills gathers amber then purple then blue. If not for the mountains he knows he would see forever.
    In the middle of the night he startles awake to sour breath on his face, a rasp of stubble against his cheek and neck, a foreign hand sliding under his clothing across his boy’s belly and then down to the warmth of his groin.
    He panics and tries to calculate at the same time. He’s in a boxcar half filled with hay bales he jumped at dusk. He can look over at the open door of the car and see the curve of the moon now. Another rider