Free Faraway Places by Tom Spanbauer Page B

freight. Ever since I heard that that’s what the sheriff thought, that the nigger had jumped a freight, I would say, Geronimo and Haji Baba jumped a freight; it got to be a chant, joined the circus. Geronimo and Haji Baba jumped a freight, joined the circus, a freight for Nantucket, Oshkosh, Timbuktu; I’d say it to myself over and over again while I was ticking off the red flags, while I was swinging, shooting for sunset, and a bull’s-eye.
    It was a Saturday the first time I saw the nigger. That was the time I just knew that he was there. I’m sure it was a Saturday because there wasn’t any school that day and it wasn’t Sunday because we didn’t go to church that day. It was Saturday in the late afternoon. The sky was golden, the way it gets that time of year, that time of day. There was a steady wind and you could hear things from a long way off. I was sitting by the narrow,fast place in the river—my father called them the Popcorn Fart Falls because the river was so low that year—in a sunny spot.
    An orange peel shaped like a heart floated over the falls and down, and then an orange peel shaped like a diamond floated over and down, and then an orange peel shaped like a four-leaf clover floated by; finally an orange peel shaped like a spade floated over the falls and vanished. I turned to look upstream and saw a beautiful boat floating down the river, a barge. It looked Egyptian—like something Cleopatra would have to float down the river. The boat was made from a pod from the catalpa tree, and in the pod, in the boat, there was a layer of orange-peel carpet and trees made out of sticks with orange-peel tops. There were hollyhock ladies in full hollyhock skirts and wide-brimmed hollyhock hats. There were magical animals made from tinfoil that stood around the hollyhock ladies under the orange-peel trees, and there were orange-carpeted steps that went up to an altar.
    There was a photograph of her there, of that woman Sugar Babe.
    But the photograph looked like a lot of women I knew. The photograph looked like Cleopatra, like Hedy Lamarr, like the woman in the ticket booth at the Blackfoot State Fair; the photograph looked like the Virgin Mary, like my mother.
    Around the photograph of that woman was a frame of ribbons and feathers and the beads that bought Manhattan and little white flowers and pieces of sagebrush and silver leaves from the cottonwood trees.
    All around the photograph there were dollar bills that stuck out from the frame, dollar bills pinned to the photograph; pinned to the altar; dollar bills everywhere, sticking out from the orange-peel carpet and the orange-peel trees. Some of the magic animals stood on dollars.
    I had never seen so much money, ever.
    I did not touch a thing, not a dollar, not a flower. In fact, I moved back out of the river and sat myself down on the lavarock and pulled my knees up. I watched as the barge went over the falls, slowly. There wasn’t much current. I sat in the niche of the lava rock in a sunny place that the wind passed by and the sky didn’t get to, and watched the barge as it went over. It went down fast and rammed into a rock. The pod split, the orange trees fell into the river, the hollyhock ladies in their hollyhock hats flew overboard, the magic animals went over the side, their shiny foil sinking into darkness. The dollar bills, the flowers, the beads, and the ribbons went down. The picture sank. Nothing floated back up.
    I sat and watched the water there for a long time. I sat there until way past suppertime and thought about things, one thought leading to another, but mostly leading to the nigger, to Geronimo, all the time the sky getting bigger and darker. There were two butterflies on the grass just sitting there, not flying, though their wings were still going. A green-and-blue dragonfly shined in the twilight as though it held sun from the day. Hawks glided past between me and the moon, just hanging up there,