We see a pool of blood and think: someone got murdered.
The track runs in back of old factories nearly the whole way from Paterson to Passaic, isolated, dark, overgrown with weeds in the places the trains don’t reach.
Dave shivers and not from cold, says maybe a train his someone.
Trains don’t haul off the bodies they hit, I say, trying to make my stride match the rail ties, and never can, they always just out of kilter with the stride I take, so I have to hop a little to reach the next or slow down a little.
Dennis, who stages along with us this time, says maybe someone just cut himself on something; broken bottles litter the sides of the tracks, a jewel collection in the rush of train lights when we come here at night.
Too much blood for just a cut, I say. If the person crawled away, he didn’t get far.
Dennis says we should go look for him.
Dave says we should go home.
This is a dance we dance each time we find something bad on the tracks, Dave always wanting to go home or hide under his bed, like the time we saw gang of kids beat up someone we knew from school, or day we heard gunshots, Me and Dennis always go towards trouble, Dave runs away.
Maybe it’s not blood this time, Dave says.
I kneel beside the pool, my face painted red in its reflection – not like the red of the dye we painted that kid once down by the brook. This red smells sweet the way blood does, and feels sticky.
“Don’t touch it!” Dave howls.
Dennis asks if he can touch it too, but Dave grabs his shoulder and says, “Don’t you dare.”
Drips of blood dripped on the rail and down the side of it, and then a smudge of someone else who is not us touching it, maybe the person who bled, who fell here, and then rose again.
“This way,” I say, and follow the trail down the rail, one painful drip after another, not a lot, not often, but stead except where it gets smeared.
Then, we see a food print in the mud, and then more, bent, as if pushing a great weight after a hard fall.
Dave says we need to go back down the tracks and find a cop.
I say a cop will only think we did something wrong.
“What if he’s dead? The cops’ll think we’re in on it if we don’t tell,” Dave says.
I won’t go back, and follow the blood spots to the next smear, and the next, until I find more spears than drops, more of both, not just a pool now, but a stream.
Dennis pants beside me, an excited puppy sniffing out the trail in the dying light.
The tracks grow more dangerous with dark, haunted with voices and lights, sweet scents that are not blood or fire, more exotic, intoxicating, the ghosts of this place filled with intensity I can feel as well as hear.
I almost miss seeing the knife for the dark, glitter a little with the angle of the sinking sun, but it isn’t sun light that makes it look red.
“I’m going back,” Dave says, finally when he sees the knife, too, his shrill voice rising a little too loudly even for me.
I tell him to keep quiet. I tell him we’re not safe. I tell him we need to be careful.
We don’t want our blood in a pool like this guy’s blood is – whoever this guy is and where even he crawled off to.
Our lives swing on a pendulum between two dangerous cities, we drawn from one to the other across the safer ground of the city where we live, a city Dave’s mother desperately sought refuge in, a city rejecting all strangers of her kind, the vagabond gypsies that land like autumn leaves in this pile or that, taking up residences in whatever place they can afford with Dave’s mom pleading with landlords when her son came of age so that they might be on the right side of the boundary so he would not have to go to the wrong school where his face was the wrong color, she convinced his gentle spirit would get crushed in the violence clash of characters who he would meet over there, not tough enough to even toughen up at each beating, finding finally refuge on the lip of the right side where they could watch the violence from the front window of their second and third floor walkup but not be involved in it, with me leading Dave and Dennis to seek out the very violence she sought to protect him from, leading him to this pool of blood on the tracks we walked and he relying on me to lead him back to safety when safety is the last thing I seek.
I hold the knife in my hand feeling the warmth of blood that is no longer there.
In the darkness, howls rise, not of wolves, not of beasts we think of as beasts, yet terrifying still, filling the air with a child, and a lingering sense of hopelessness we all feel, me, Dave, Dennis, and even those who do the howling.
“Do they know we’re here?” Dave asks.
“I don’t know,” I say.
“Can we get back home?” Dennis asks.
“I don’t know,” I say again, knowing how little I know, even not knowing why I come here, and why I come back when I do know I will come across if not pools of blood like this then something equally bad.
“I want to go back – NOW!” Dave says.
I shake my head. Someone is hurt ahead of us, leaving a trail of blood the dark won’t let us see. He maybe dead even. But he may need us to help him. And I tell Dave this.
“We’ll call the cops when we get to the sweet shop,” Dave says. “The cops can help him.”
I shake my head; then stumble on blind, sniffing the sweetness I know is blood, no longer pausing over the places where the man fell; he has fallen too many times for that.
Why is he here? Is he someone we know?
In her madness, my other used to talk about people’s crosses, the burdens they carry on their backs the way Christ carried his cross, that bitter path life sometimes forced them to follow when they seek to go other places, and I wonder, if my footsteps stumble along a path I don’t intend to follow, and I also carry a cross I cannot see.
“I want to go back,” Dave says again.
I ignore him and stumble on.
Dennis agrees with his big brother.
I ignore him, too, sniffing the air, catching the scent of sweetness that is not fire, stronger, more potent, a fresh scene stirring up in me some primitive ability school and life in the city has hidden in me.
“It’s not far now,” I tell them, knowing they are too scared to care, the howling in the night, louder, too, nearer, somewhere ahead, or behind us on the tracks – perhaps both.
We find the feet first, old man’s shoes, thick with mud, curled slight up at the toes, wilting in the heat that has long expired, the man came next, work paints stained with black from the mud along the tracks. The red stains don’t show until we see his chest, and his hand splayed over the region of his heart.
“Is he dead?” Dennis asks, fear and curiosity mingling in his voice.
“I don’t know,” I say, afraid to touch him, my hand clinging to a knife I do know I should not have, yet cannot release.
The man’s pale face shows his age, not homeless or as ancient as I first thought, more like the men I see when I go to fetch my uncle out of Lee’s Tavern on Crooks Avenue, grim face stained with the relentless assault of hard sunlight, a truck driver maybe, or a man working on some loading dock.
Or perhaps a worker in one of the many factories or warehouses that boarder these tracks.
He doesn’t move; he doesn’t breathe. We do all the treating for all of us, heavy, quick breaths we cannot slow down, each needing to get as much air before we like him, can’t take in air at all.
“Now can we go home?” Dave asks.
I nod. He can’t see my nod in the dark and so asks again.
“Yes,” I tell him, hearing the howls that I now know come from one direction, not both, yet in the direction we need to take if we really want to reach home.
There are other ways, of course, long ways, wrong ways, that eventually lead back to where we want to go, ways our footsteps never sought to travel with crosses on our backs we never meant to carry.
And I lead them along one of them, they trusting me once more to get them back from where I’ve lead them in the first place, my cross to bear I guess.
I let the knife drop.
Later, I think about it, about the stain of someone else’s blood left on my fingers, about the finger prints I left on the knife, and how maybe the police will come knocking at my uncles’ door and ask me about the murder.
But I’m not Dave; I lose only a few nights sleep, so like the pool of blood slowing making its way into the earth, the fear subsides, and I move on, down some new path, perhaps a path I do not intend to take, yet a part of some place other than the fearful one I am on.
We don’t talk about the man or the pool of blood. Dave won’t even call the police. We just let it lie, like sleeping downs and making sure when we travel the tracks again we hurry passed the spot where the pool was.
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