Look at Me and My Backyard Go By

Michael Burge

I was lying on my bed that afternoon, killing a bunch of these tiny black and white beetles crawling up my window, feeling air blow from the ceiling fan, when I heard the train coming. The window shook like usual but then I heard the train screech and the cars bang up against each other. When I looked out the back door I saw the Amtrak had stopped past my house and Amy’s house.
I knew what had happened. It was Amy’s brother. It was going to happen and now it finally had. I knew that somewhere beyond the rusty piles of sinks and bathtubs, skeleton cars and bent chain link fence, satellite dishes and beer bottle glass, he was lying dead in the dirt.

Spencer was her brother’s name and he was retarded so I felt bad for Amy having to take care of him. Her mom didn’t do it because my mom said she was a shit-crazy drug-whore.
Trying to be Spencer’s friend was impossible. He was always out by the tracks alone so I went out there once but he could hardly talk. I was eating one of those Otter Pops, the red kind I think, and when I was done with it I threw the wrapper on the ground and he got mad and told me to pick it up but I didn’t so he picked it up and tried to hand it to me but I just left.
Another time I pulled my pants down and mooned a freight train to try to be funny but he said no, and pushed me and told me not to do it or else. Or else what, I said. He turned away, mumbling something. All he could do was squat on the tracks and watch the train disappear.
Every day he was out by the tracks. He liked to put coins on them right before a train came – I don’t know why. He’d watch the train rumble over them and then after it passed he’d look for the ones that fell into the grimy dirt.
I used to find some of them once in a while, the ones he forgot or just left. They’d be flat like Fruit Rollups and sometimes the faces on them would be completely gone and sometimes they’d be only half gone and you’d see their heads like they were comics that had been pressed onto Silly Putty and then pulled. I put a nickel on the track once but what’s the point, all it did was make the nickel worthless.
Sometimes I’d find dead coyotes or jackrabbits lying by the tracks. You’d think in this entire big desert and at the few quick times the trains came through animals wouldn’t try to cross. But they did and when they did they’d rot out there under the sun forever and parts of the bodies would go missing and I’d think, vultures, but there’d be shoe prints around the body and vultures don’t wear sneakers or cut paws off.
 
The bugs were driving me crazy. The heat made it worse. My boxers were sticking to me so I took them off and just wore shorts – commando. I’d keep the windows open but there was no breeze. The air in the house was the same as the air outside.
I could always tell it was summer when the beetles started coming into the house from nowhere. There’d be so many of them. They’d crawl on the yellow stucco wall and up the window next to my bed. Sometimes they’d be in my bed, on me, crawling through my arm hair. They looked like tiny drips from a cookies and cream Blizzard from Dairy Queen, only they had legs thinner than hair and they crunched when you squished them under your thumbnail.

One time Amy told me her mom’s mind was fucked up. I looked up at her. She was taller than me and a year older and always wore dirty rubber shoes that used to be clear but turned yellow and small dresses with black spandex shorts underneath.
Oh, I said. Yeah, she said, she was born that way just like my little brother and there’s nothin to do about it. I said, why don’t you take her to a doctor, and she looked at me angry and told me her mom didn’t want to go and they were fine and there wasn’t nothin they could do.
Sometimes I’d be outside at night crouching behind the rusty brown Mercury Cougar tilted where our property line met theirs and her mom looked normal to me, standing in her backyard watching the sky. I’d watch her hand, two of her fingers squeezing the end of a cigarette, the orange tip like what I imagined a firefly looked like at night.
But then during the day I’d hear the TV turned up loud from inside their house and then turned down again so you couldn’t hear it and then back up and she’d yell stuff I couldn’t understand and that’s when Spencer would be out by the tracks.

The trains went faster at night. I’d listen to them in my bed and they’d rattle my walls. The window shook and the ground vibrated up into my bed and I almost wanted to laugh when I felt the engine roll through me like a dust devil. Sometimes the horn blew and I’d clutch my blanket and close my eyes and I’d be carried with the train. The house shook harder and it felt like the whole world was going to crack.
Then I’d hear my mom scream goddamit! from her bedroom because she doesn’t like it when they blow the horn because she says there’s no reason to do it especially at two o’clock in the fucking morning.

A few days ago Amy was over at my house and we were looking at pictures in a magazine I’d found in my mom’s room called Better Homes and Gardens. We were leaning back on my bed and I could smell the air puffing from her – hair oil, dried spit, deodorant like baby powder – and her house smells – cigarettes, alcohol, cat piss. I wished only her smells were on her. I was going to ask her if she wanted to watch a movie when Spencer banged on the back screen door and called her name.
What’s he doing in my backyard, I said, and she got up to let him in and I said, no, he can’t come in, my mom’s not home, and she said, well I’m here, and I said, yeah but, fine.
As we walked back to my room I heard Spencer’s wet nasally breathing behind me and felt his eyes going all over my school photographs on the dark hallway wall.
Amy didn’t say anything to him and he didn’t say anything to her and I told him he could sit on the ground if he wanted to. He sat right in the doorway and picked at the paint chipping on the doorframe. I watched his head roll around and his stupid eyes roll over everything I owned, things that only I knew the history behind and where they came from. A bunch of hairs like weeds sat underneath his oily nose. He smelled like he hadn’t had a shower in weeks and the lines in his palms were filled with dirt made into mud from his sweat. I had to tell him to stop picking at the paint when he started making a huge pile that looked like big flakes of dandruff on the carpet. He just sat there, doing nothing but looking. It drove me crazy.
When they finally left, after Spencer had slobbered up the rest of my Kool-Aid, I went back to my room and looked at everything as if I’d be able to see the germs crawling over my stuff like the black and white beetles. Everything was there except my penny. The penny I’d gotten on my first and only trip to Disneyland.
I described to Amy the next day what my penny looked like and that it was on my dresser and that it was missing and she said, so, and I said, I think maybe Spencer might have taken it, and she said, why the fuck would he take a penny, and I said, it has a picture of Splash Mountain on it, and she said, he has his own pennies, and I said, I know, and she said, why would he take a fuckin squished penny when he’s got his own, and I said, I don’t know.
That penny was the only piece of evidence I had that I’d been somewhere besides here. He had no right to steal it, just because he was retarded. I paid fifty cents and a penny for that penny. It was smoothed out and had a picture on it and I had watched the tiny silver gears turn in the glass box that it was made in so it had been worth it and now it’s gone.

I hadn’t been outside all day because it was so hot. The TV was on in the living room but I wasn’t watching it, nobody was. I was looking at the flattened beetles on my thumbnail, thinking about turning the air conditioning on although my mom had said it was too damn expensive to run it, when the train came and hit Spencer.
I got up from my bed, walked down the hallway into the kitchen and looked out the back door. I could hear pounding in my chest go up into my head.
The sun was bright. For a second I had to close my eyes. Other neighbors came running out of their houses and Amy peered out her back door. She looked over at me as if I had the answer, which I did, but she had to see for herself. So she ran all the way to the front of the train, a two-story sleeper train, bright silver with red and white stripes and one big blue stripe along the sides of the cars. She must have thought the train had stopped quick like a car or something. But Spencer was lying far behind it by their backyard.
 I walked so slowly to the tracks, thinking, I’m not supposed to be doing this, I don’t want to look, but I did.
It wasn’t Spencer anymore. I turned and felt acid food come into my throat but I swallowed it as everyone came running and Amy came and screamed and a neighbor pushed me away and told me to go home.
I sat down by a pile of brown hubcaps, feeling dizzy in the heat, and watched them circle around the body. It felt like my eyes were spinning and I couldn’t really focus on anything. People in black pants and jackets were jumping from the open doorways on the train and talking into crackling radios. It was weird to see all those people out there when usually no one was ever out there except Spencer.
I looked to Amy’s house and the mother was jogging towards the circle of people. I thought, Amy, you better stop her, but Amy was screaming and looked like jelly in a man’s arms so the mother in her orange sweat pants like deflated balloons ran and nobody stopped her and she screamed. She pushed her way to the body and grabbed it and blood went everywhere on her white shirt and her orange pants. She hugged it and screamed and rubbed its head and threw up all over it kept screaming.
Right before they pulled her away she picked something off the ground and held it up.
 “My baby - look what he did,” she said. “Look what my baby did for me.” A man and a woman led her past me and I saw it glimmer in the sun between her fingers. My penny - the picture of Splash Mountain dark on its flat surface.
“He made this for me,” she wailed through runny snot and chunks of vomit dripping from her mouth, her hair crazy on her head like burnt wires.
By the time the firefighters and the ambulance came I was able to feel my legs again so I stood up and walked past all the backyards towards the train. I walked away from it and the people standing in the open doors didn’t see me or didn’t care when I got closer to it.
I had never been so close to a train when it was still. The sun reflecting off its hot clean metallic surface made me squint. I walked to one of the cars that said Sleeping Car on the side below the dark second-story windows high above me. I felt the heat heaving from the silver wheels. I could reach the first story windows on my toes but I could barely see through them because they were tinted so I framed my eyes with my hands against one of them. A face stared back at me, pale but dark through the glass. I jumped back. I felt mad for some reason but what did I expect to find in there?
The wind picked up and blew dust against the train and in my eyes. One of those cookies and cream beetles landed on the window where the face had been.
Two hands and the pale face pressed against the window again, squinting in the sun, looking down at me. It was a kid’s face, younger than me, and it was saying something. I hated looking up at that stupid face, not knowing what it was saying in there. Why’d they have to look at us like that? Why’d they have to sit there in those windows and look over everyone’s houses and everyone’s yards and me and probably think mean thoughts about me?
The beetle crawled over the face and I rushed forward and heard my fist pound against the glass. The face disappeared. I would have done it even if the beetle hadn’t been there, I felt so hot inside. I wiped the dead bug from the side of my palm on my pants and one of those train people in black walked up to me and told me to stand back from the train, son. He pointed at the houses behind me and told me to go home.
I looked into the open door he had come through. Other stewards and passengers were piled up watching me. Their heads were bobbing around like gophers poking out from their holes. They turned back to the clump of people far down on the tracks. Angry words came to my mouth. I wanted to say, fuck all you fuckers, but I just stood there and kicked dust into the air.
For a second I could feel myself jumping through the door and running past them through thin hallways where I’d hide in the cool dark that I imagined grew from inside the cars.
But their ugly faces stopped it. I turned around and walked back towards my house. For the rest of the day I watched the firefighters and the ambulance and police and Amy and news cameras and later, when they were all gone, when the sun was down, nothing but the empty desert.