Racing in the Street

The whole world is quiet as we sit on the cold steel fence in front of the station. A train comes through Seymour once, maybe twice a year. But my dad says this used to be the town where people came from everywhere for work. The brass factory was in Ansonia, but we had the Bic Pen factory. He says there were so many jobs that if you got fired on a Friday night, you could find a morning shift on Saturday. And the train had a whistle so loud you could hear it all the way over on Church Street.

Will laughs as I cough, cause he’s got a smooth smoke that comes from years of experience. He sits with his shoulders hunched and the sleeves of his flannel unbuttoned. His hands curl around the steel railing, and I try to picture this town the way it’s told in all the stories. The boys with their hatchet job engines and Timberland work boots light up the night. Lining up their bikes, they rev the engines and laugh as if they hadn’t done it every Friday night since they were fifteen. The race comes alive and echoes in the empty streets where creaking wooden doors are shut from the wind and tin storm shutters are pulled down over the liquor store and tattoo parlor. They fly from the town line, and nothing could ever feel as fast as this. Nothing so free.

“I asked my dad why the train doesn’t come around anymore,” I say towards the dead empty street and he lifts his face to mine. He takes the joint from my lips and inhales.
“Yeah?” He exhales, “and why’s that?”
“A hurricane in the fifties.” I swing my legs between the metal bars. “It wiped out everything—houses, jobs, it drowned it all. It was before route eight was finished, but he said it would’ve flooded the whole highway. There weren’t any factory jobs left because the factories were in pieces. So trains just stopped coming around.” Messing up my hair with a hand that’s permanently stained gray by oil, he hops off the fence and lifts me down with him.

“So that must be why no one ever leaves. Let’s go kid.”
“Quit calling me kid. I’m nineteen.”
“C’mon,” he takes my hand and leads me to the car. “This place is wasted.” He turns the key in the ignition and shifts his shoulder as it struggles to start up.
“You think you could ever write a book or something?”
“I doubt it. I write like a virgin.”
He laughs, checking the rearview mirror and backing out onto the dirt road. He doesn’t need to look at me, he’s been laughing at my existential crises for a long time now.
“Well, are you?” I turn from the open window to give him a sideways glance.
“All the best writers were reckless. I should be reckless.”
“Yeah, ‘were’ being the operative word. I think for now, kid, you might be better off.”

He drives a gentle thirty and as the windows roll down and the wind catches in my hair, it feels like we could’ve existed anywhere. For a moment his hand reaches for mine and drifts just over the shifter. But then he pulls back, resting it on the wheel. He shuts off the radio and there’s only silence as the moon follows us towards the main stretch. He knew all of my secrets because I didn’t have any yet. I didn’t know a single word of his. But as he runs every red light, tonight feels like a kind of secret I’ll always keep.

“Don’t you ever feel like quitting the bakery and going somewhere really far away?” He asks as he takes a swig of whiskey and I lie on his roof, somewhere after midnight, looking up at the trees.

“Yeah I think about it sometimes. I don’t know where I would go.” I sit up and the skin of our knees almost touch.

“I’ve been practicing,” he says with rebellion. “I just need a band and some way to get to California or New York.” The words rush out as if he’d been holding them in like a scream. He takes another swig.

“Do you ever think about not going?” My voice is just above a whisper. His head hangs low and he holds the back of his neck. He looks towards the road holding the glass over his knee.

“I’m not gonna end up like my dad.”

He drinks as much as his father. He started to look like him more and more each night as I helped him to bed after he fell asleep on my shoulder.

He wraps his hands around mine to warm them. I see his dark brown eyes beneath lids that weaken as the rest of him follows. But his hands are as strong as they’ve always been. He opens my hands in his, and as he looks at me, I see only his eyes in the dark. At this time of night there’s nothing alive but the air between us. He rests his forehead on my shoulder and continues to dream about lights brighter than the flickering streetlights and cars that drive faster than any he could build. And I feel him sinking the way he does each night. I slip from his embrace. Down the stairs I start on the empty streets towards home. He won’t remember it in the morning. But I always do.

Sometimes I can see it. There’s this house on the corner of Maple street, between the grammar school and the graveyard. It’s painted light blue with white shutters and dead grass. The one next to it burned down a few years ago so the front yard seems bigger than it actually is. Sometimes I think about what it looks like on the inside. What my bare feet would feel like against a winter morning’s hard wood floor. Or how cold coffee being poured into the sink might sound. The end of a long day, or the final quiet when kids are asleep and our parent’s old cars are in the garage. Swaying to Tom Waits under the kitchen light, my head rested on his shoulder and his warmth so close to mine. Two people, never wanting to run away. I wonder how it all might feel inside my hands. That house with the light blue paint and white shutters is just up the road. But it might as well have burned down too.

In the tunnel underneath the station, there’s a single tungsten light that illuminates us as we cast shadows much larger than ourselves onto the cement walls. I wave my arms and he laughs as I try to balance on the narrow cement curb. He sits on the dying grass with his back to the tunnel wall, a beer hanging in his left hand.

“You know, I used to actually do my homework.”

“It did take a great deal of corrupting to turn you into one of the burnouts.” He laughs as I sit down beside him, resting my head on his shoulder as my smile dies down. He takes a drink and rests his beer on his leg. And all of a sudden, he looks as tired as his father.

“You’re too young.” I look up at him, and his eyes are dead in the water as he stares at the tunnel wall.

“You’ve always been too young. You don’t know anything yet. You still think that all this could be something.”

It’s still August, I think. It could all still change. But summer’s youth had let go of its last dying breath. And I can see it. I’m a stranger by his own hand.

My dad says in town they used to say “going west” when someone was dying. Dying and leaving the valley were sort of the same thing. We knew a few people who left for Massachusetts or New York, one for California. People never came back once they left. But most people never left once they were raised.

The end was just that, an ending. He got older and moved a few towns away. But it might as well have been the whole world. To him, I’ll stay nineteen, coughing whenever I smoke. And he’ll always be driving the car with the windows down. It was nothing violent or obvious. I was just young enough to think it would all last forever. That the boys who race in the empty streets don’t grow up to be broken men. The smoke never burns our lungs, and the streetlights never go out.

Clare Pasley is an undergraduate student at Western Connecticut State University. She is currently attaining her bachelor’s degree in professional writing, and has been featured in poetry journals such as: WomenUp and Sidelines but primarily focuses on creative nonfiction. She’s got dreams of writing novels someday, but for right now she’s happy to be here.