chh
It always began as a solitary chuffing, a sudden explosive snort as if a night beast rising in the distance, down in Conshohocken maybe, had cleared its snout. So faint and faraway was it, so alien, that I usually persuaded myself that it wasn’t there. But sooner or later, again, it was.
chh
It seemed to enter my night room from below, catching on the antenna of my bedsprings, running up the coils, whispering through the mattress, the sheet, making an ear of my entire body.
chh
Then the furious flurry.
chhchhchhchhchhchh
My eyes were wide, groping for light, but I could not even see the pillow. I wished I had the nerve to run for the light switch. I wished my room was not at the back of the house, nearest the tracks.
The sound was still far off, along the Schuylkill (SKOO-kul) River, somewhere in the East End, but it had movement now, direction. It was coming. The breath of the night beast beat faster and louder. It was passing the DeKalb Street station now, turning from the river, behind the empty dark Garrick Theater, under the erector set Airy Street bridge, Marshall Street now, between the black and white striped crossing gate, bell tinkling, red light blinking—louder and louder—past the sand place, where I went with my father to bring home a wagonful; past the shoebox-shaped Orange Car store, where my mother could buy a bagful of Florida in February; crossing Elm, bending with the creek—louder, louder, chhchhchhchhchhchhchh—behind the ice plant now, Astor Street, the stone piles, the dump—louder still—the iron beast pouring sooty blackness into all the world, creating night—how loud can something be?—coming around the curve at the dead end of Chain CHHCHHCHHCHHCHHCHHCHHCHHCHHCHHCHHCHHCHHCHHCHHCHHCHHCHH—into my room, the bedsprings under me singing like the fiddle strings of Hell …
* * *
Did it really happen? In morning’s comforting sunshine I could never be sure—until I ran my finger along the clothesline or over the yellow face of a pansy in the backyard, and the tiny black particles of grit confirmed: yes, a train—a coal-fired, smoke-belching locomotive—had passed the night before.
Nighttime lent a horror not only to trains but also to garbage. Garbage had status in those days. Garbage was garbage, and trash was everything else. Garbage had a can of its own, basically an oversize metal pail with a lid. The garbage pail could be found in the back of the backyard. To lift the lid off the garbage can was to confront all the horrors of the creepiest movie: dead, rotting matter; teeming colonies of pale, slimy creeping things; and a stench that could be survived only in the smallest whiffs.
Ironically, the garbage can was never more disgusting than the day after garbage collection—for the collection was never quite complete. The garbage man would snatch the can from our curbside and overturn it into the garbage truck’s unspeakable trough. He would bang it once, maybe twice, against the trough wall. This would dislodge most of the garbage, including a rain of maggots, but not the worst of it, not the very bottom of it, the most persistent, the oldest, the rottenest, the vilest. I held my breath while putting the lid back on. Sometimes I pushed the can all the way to the backyard with my foot.
When garbage met darkness, the potential for horror doubled.
Emptying the garbage after dinner was a frequent chore of mine, but only one particular instance do I remember. My mother had dumped the leftovers into a cake batter bowl and sent me off. The season was winter; it was already dark outside. The light from the back door petered out halfway down the yard, leaving me to moonlight. At the garbage can I went through my usual ritual: I curled my fingers around the metal handle of the lid, took a deep breath, held it, and with an almost audible winching of willpower, yanked the lid off. Careful not to look directly into the can, I overturned the batter bowl. I tapped it against the can to loosen any stragglers—and discovered I had a problem.
Whatever we had had for dinner that night must have been sticky, because half of it was still clinging to the bowl. I tapped harder. Still the stuff stuck. Risking breakage, I banged the bowl against the can. Nothing came loose. My chest was getting tight, my lungs demanded breath. In the moonlight I caught a glimpse of white worms. I panicked. I dropped the bowl into the garbage can, slammed down the lid, and raced for the house. I waited until I was inside to gasp for air, as I was sure that the garbage can, open so uncommonly long, must have fouled all outdoors. When my mother asked about the missing bowl several days later, I said I knew nothing about it.
Though night at various times conspired with a locomotive or a garbage can or a pup tent to frighten me, at other times night did not scare me at all.
We used to play a game called outs. It was the major leagues of hide-and-seek games. The kid who was It covered his eyes and counted to a hundred while everyone else ran and hid. If the It kid found you, he yelled “You’re out!” and then the two of you were It and went seeking the others, and so on, until all were It but one—the winner.
There were no boundaries. You could hide anywhere. Popular hiding places included the stone piles, Red Hill, alleys, assorted backyards. As if the hiding needed to be made any easier, we always played outs after dark.
My favorite hiding place was behind a stone pile near the creek. I would crouch silently for an hour or more in utter darkness. The dark did not scare me when playing outs. What scared me was being found.
One night I heard the Its coming close to my hiding place. I slipped away down the path to the park and trotted up past the state hospital. I didn’t stop until I was more than a mile west of town, in Jeffersonville. By the time I got back home my parents were calling my name down the dark alleys and streets. All the other players were home in bed.
Night was at its best once a week: outdoor movies in the park. After dinnertime and baseball games and Popsicles for dessert, kids from all over town headed for the band shell. Little kids sat in the cement-anchored benches that still form the stage’s permanent seats. On the hill behind, older kids pulled up wooden benches or just sat on the grass. One night I must have been thinking I was older than I was. As I made myself at home on a wooden bench on the hill, several teenagers decided that was where they wanted to sit. They lifted the bench at one end, and off I slid to the grass.
The movies were usually in black and white. Occasionally we got through the show without the projector breaking down or the film snapping. More often than not the movie was about Francis the talking mule.
Afterward everyone scattered, across the fields to the East End, North End, West End. We George Streeters walked through the American Legion field and over the granite bridge spanning Stony Creek and turned left. Sometimes we took the dirt path, sometimes the tracks.
On moonlit nights the tracks looked like silver ribbons. Behind me, ahead of me, I could hear the voices of other kids. I could see their dark shadows. Atop the ten-foot clay bluff to the right was the spear field, then the dump, then Red Hill. A bald, packed dome of eraser-colored clay, Red Hill was said to be the home of the Devil, the clay’s color coming from the infernal fires burning below. I always looked to see if it was true that at night you could see the hill glowing. Once, I thought, it was.
Always glowing, however, was the dead end, the faint “Welcome home” from the last streetlight. From the path, from the tracks we funneled onto George, the after-dark, midsummer band shell park movie kids. You could always bet that someone would face the row house windows and do his best imitation of a talking mule.
And somewhere beyond the East End a locomotive was moving through the night …
chh