cue.
‘Stand back, Billy.’ Sam stretched a hand out for the boy’s.
‘Aw get real, Dad. That’s not gonna be here for at least five minutes.’
Sam stood up and looked towards the tunnel mouth, his hand still extended to his son. ‘No, you’re right, Billy boy. Why don’t you just lie with your head on the rail, and if it gets cut off at the neck your Mom and I see what we can get for your bike at a jumble sale?’
Billy sighed and rolled his eyes. He stood up and took the large offered hand, and together they moved back from the track. Still holding hands, they squatted on the snowy embankment ten feet away to wait.
From behind the forest came the deep, long, discordant hoot of the train’s horn, filling Silver Valley with a sound so thick it resonated in the spine as well as in the ears. Sam lifted his head like a cat smelling fish.
‘You like that sound, Dad, don’t you?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I like it too.’
Sam looked down at the face of the boy, framed now in his blue anorak hood, his black eyes glittering in a brown face. ‘What’s it make you think of, Billy?’
The boy looked solemn. ‘You.’
Sam was silent. He tightened his grip on the mitten containing his son’s small hand and resumed gazing up the track.
Billy smiled up at him. ‘Don’t you want to know why?’
‘Do I have a choice here?’
The boy giggled, a sound so sweet that Sam thought it might make primroses poke through the snow at their feet. ‘It just sounds like you, that’s all. I don’t know why.’
‘So I sound like a freight train horn, is that what you’re saying? Remind me of that if I’m ever tempted into a Karaoke Bar.’
But he’d lost his son’s attention. Billy had his timing wrong for once. The train was already in sight on the long straight leading into town, and it would be on top of their dollars in about a minute.
Billy yelped like a rodeo MC and jumped to his feet.
‘How big, Dad? How big? What’s the record?’ He was jumping on the spot.
‘Two-and-a-half inches. I think.’
‘Metric, Dad. What’s that in centimetres?’
Sam, legs drawn up to his armpits, his arms flopping lazily over the knees, looked down into the snow and laughed. ‘Got me there, Billy boy. Guess I’m not doing so hot today. Sound like a horn and can’t count modern.’
The rails were singing now as fourteen thousand tons of iron tested their rivets, and when the horn sounded again, father and son nearly felt it blow their hair.
Billy was right. Sam loved that sound. He remembered seeing a small ad in the Silver Valley Weekly that read, ‘Superior condo to let near ski slopes. Off highway and no train noise’ and thinking he wouldn’t much care for that, not if you couldn’t hear the trains. He also knew the advertiser was lying. There was nowhere in Silver, or anywhere in the whole valley for that matter, where you could insulate yourself from that melancholy trumpeting. Not even the grazing elk looked up when it sounded. As far as Sam figured, it was part of the mountains, a sound as natural as the woodpecker or the squirrel, and anyone who wanted a condo where you couldn’t hear it deserved a dunce cap.
The train was on them. They could see the men in the cab, sitting high in the dirty red-and-white-striped metal box. The engine looked like a face, the crew peering out of small windows that made eyes at either side of a huge snout housing the horsepower.
Billy waved up at the big metal face, yelling hopelessly, his voice lost in the roar of the thundering diesel engine, unaware that Sam held the hem at the back of his anorak protectively.
From one of the eyes in the iron face, the flesh-and-blood face of a fat man scowled down at them as the engine rumbled past. No one was going to wave at Billy today. Sam watched his son’s expression turn from excitement to disappointment as the cab slipped away and they faced nothing but a mile of coal cars, shedding ice as the sun got to work on them.
‘He didn’t see us, Dad.’
Sam knew they’d been seen all right. In fact he knew exactly what that fat face had been thinking, as it looked lazily out of its window and fixed its beady eyes on them. But he would do everything in his power to protect Billy from that thought.
‘Guess not. How’re the dollars doin’?’
‘Still there I think. I can see mine. Only about twenty cars to go.’
Man and boy waited patiently, man perhaps more patiently than boy, until the last car rolled by, and they watched the back end of the train slide away.
Billy looked down at Sam, who still squatted in the snow, lost in thought. ‘Can I get ’em?’
‘Yeah. Go for it. Remember they’re hot.’
Billy darted forward to the rail as Sam stood and stretched his six-foot body beneath its down-filled jacket: by the way his son was breathily mouthing, wow, he guessed they’d had a result. He joined him by the track.
‘At least eight centimetres, Dad. Look.’ Billy passed the flattened disc of yellow metal to his father, eyes wide in anticipation of approval as Sam turned the hot trophy over in his gloved hand.
‘Matter that it ain’t exactly round?’
Billy shook his head.
‘Then I guess it’s a record. Official.’
Billy cheered and snatched back the metamorphosed dollar. He ran to where Sam had placed his. ‘Sorry, Dad. Yours slipped.’
True enough. Sam’s dollar had fallen off the track before the train could do its business. He was glad the glory had all been Billy’s but he feigned a little hurt as he pocketed the unchanged coin. ‘Gee. This isn’t my day.’
Billy came up to his father, put his short little arms around Sam’s padded waist and hugged him. ‘I love you, Dad. You can have mine.’
If love could have weight, Sam thought that freight train would have trouble shifting his. He wanted to squeeze his son so hard his muscles ached at the restraint they were under. ‘I love you too, Billy. You keep the dollar. There’ll be plenty more. I’ll beat ya yet.’
Billy broke the hug and ran through the thick snow, stumbling like a cripple to the parked car, making a noise like a train as he went.
Sam looked at the retreating train, the distant sound of its bell clanging as it slowed up through town.
If that driver really had been thinking what Sam suspected, he thought at that moment, he might be inclined to pull the fat bastard from the cab and kill him. But how could Sam know that Wesley Martell was innocent? Martell wasn’t thinking That kid must be crazy if he thinks I’m going to wave at two stinking Indians. In fact Martell hadn’t even noticed them. Nothing had been further from his thoughts.
‘The light you can leave on all day. Light 96 CHFM. Stevie Wonder comin’ up next …’
Sam’s hand couldn’t get to the car stereo off-button fast enough. What the hell did Katie do with his cassettes? The radio would kick in if there was no tape in the player, and even after ten years of marriage, Sam still hadn’t learned to turn the goddamn thing off before he started the ignition. Katie always left the radio on, he should know by now. There were only two stations a car radio could pick up this far into the mountains, both of them beaming in from Calgary, and both of them made Sam long for legislation to shoot disc jockeys. He could just about stomach 107 Kick FM, pumping out dinosaur rock music until the signal broke up, but when Katie had been driving the radio mysteriously tuned itself back to this easy-listening nightmare.
He remembered how once, exasperated,