"What are you standing there looking at, boy? Give me a hand! Come on, don't cry-remember, crying is for sissies and women. Do you want to be a woman, boy?"
His father's face was red, and there was sweat under the rim of his green John Deere tractor cap.
"Do you want me to cut off your little pecker so you can be a little crybaby girl? No? All right, then, stop crying-that's better. There's a little man for you. Now, give me a hand and open the door for me. Good-that's good. Now get the trunk for me-open it wide. Hurry up-this is heavy, you know. All right, now get in the car.
"We're going down to the river… because we have something to do there. Mommy has been bad-very, very bad, and you remember I told you what happens to bad women? Do you? Well, that's right-that's why we have to take her to the river."
She must have done something so awful to make Daddy so angry. I wonder what it was. Maybe she tried to cut off his pecker and make him like a girl, so he had to stop her. I would have to stop someone if they tried to do that to me. I
would have to, because I'm just like Daddy. That's what he always tells me: you're my little man, just like me.
He bent down to pick up the heavy object, a dead weight inside the black plastic tarp. He remembered worrying that if they left the tarp down at the river, they would have to find something else to cover the tractor so it didn't get wet in the rain.
That night, lying in bed, he heard a freight train passing in the night. Its horn blared a harsh chord, mournful and plaintive and lonely. The whistle rose in pitch as it approached, then descended as the train sped by, the Doppler shift creating a feeling of mystery and loss. The wheels clanked and screeched sharply; he could picture the sparks flying as the train rounded the bend, metal grinding on metal. He imagined the engineer at his post, peering into the blackness as the mechanical beast churned through the night, spewing smoke and ash as it clattered through towns and fields and woods. He wished more than anything to be on that train, hurtling blindly into the night, alone with his thoughts, his future unfolding before him as smoothly and inevitably as railroad tracks.