"Quitting what?" Ned said. "Quitting for what?"
"Just quitting," Otis said. "When I think of all them years I spent over there on a durn farm in Arkansas with Memphis right here across the river and I never even knowed it. How if I had just knowed when I was four or five years old, what I had to wait until just last year to find out about, sometimes I just want to give up and quit. But I reckon I wont. I reckon maybe I can make it up. How much you folks figger on making out of that horse?"
"Never you mind about that horse," Ned said. "And the making up you needs to do is to make back up that street to wherever it is you gonter sleep tonight, and go to bed." He even paused, half turning. "Do you know the way back?"
"There aint nothing there," Otis said. "I already tried it. They watch too close. It aint like over in Arkansas, when Aunt Corrie was still at Aunt Fittie's and I had that peep-hole. If you swapped that automobile for him, you must be figgering on at least two hundred—" This time Ned turned completely around. Otis sprang, leaped away, cursing Ned, calling him nigger—something Father and Grandfather must have been teaching me before I could remember because I dont know when it began, I just knew it was so: that no gentleman ever referred to anyone by his race or religion.
"Go on," I said. "They're leaving us." They were: almost two blocks ahead now and already turning a corner; we ran, trotted, Ned too, to catch up and barely did so: the depot was in front of us and Sam was talking to another man, in greasy overalls, with a lantern—a switchman, a railroad man anyway.
"See what I mean?" Ned said. "Can you imagine police sending out a man with a lantern to show us the way?" And you see what I mean too: all the world (I mean about a stolen race horse); who serves Virtue works alone, unaided, in a chilly vacuum of reserved judgment; where, pledge yourself to Non-virtue and the whole countryside boils with volunteers to help you. It seems that Sam was trying to persuade Miss Corrie to wait in the depot with Otis and me while they located the boxcar and loaded the horse into it, even voluntarily suggesting that Boon attend us with the protection of his size and age and sex: proving that Sam's half anyway of the polyandrous stalemate was amicable and trusting. But Miss Corrie would have no part of it, speaking for all of us. So we turned aside, following the lantern, through a gate into a maze of loading platforms and tracks; now Ned himself had to come forward and take the halter and quiet the horse to where we could move again in the aura now of the horse's hot ammoniac reek (you never smelled a frightened horse, did you?) and the steady murmur of Ned's voice talking to it, both of them—murmur and smell—thickened, dense, concentrated now between the loom of lightless baggage cars and passenger coaches among the green-and-ruby gleams of switch points; on until we were clear of the passenger yard and were now following a cinder path beside a spur track leading to a big dark warehouse with a loading platform in front of it. And there was the boxcar too, with a good twenty-five feet of moonlit (that's right. We were in moonlight now. Free of the street- and depot-lights, we—I —could see it now) vacancy between it and the nearest point of the platform—a good big jump for even a jumping horse, let alone a three-year-old flat racer that (according to Ned) had a little trouble running anyway. Sam cursed quietly the entire depot establishment: switchmen, yard crews, ticket sellers and all.
"I'll go get the goat," the man with the lantern said. "We dont need no goat," Ned said. "No matter how far he can jump. What we needs is to either move that flat-form or that boxcar."
"He means the switch engine," Sam told Ned. "No," he told the man with the lantern. "I expected this. For a switching crew to miss just twenty-five feet is practically zero. That's why I told you to bring the key to the section house. Get the crowbars. Maybe Mr Boon wont mind helping you."
"Why dont you go yourself?" Boon said. "It's your railroad. I'm a stranger here."
"Why dont you take these boys on back home to bed, if you're all that timid around strangers?" Miss Corrie said.
"Why dont you take them back home yourself?" Boon said. "Your old buddy-boy there has already told you once you aint got no business here."
"I'll go with him to get the crowbars," Miss Corrie told Sam. "Will you keep your eye on the boys?"
"All right, all right," Boon said. "Let's do something, for Christ's sake. That train will be along in four or five hours while we're still debating who's first at the lick dog. Where's that tool shed, Jack?" So he and the man with the lantern went on; we had only moonlight now. The horse hardly smelled at all now and I could see it nuzzling at Ned's coat like a pet. And Sam was thinking what I had been thinking ever since I saw the platform.
"There's a ramp around at the back," he said. "Did he ever walk a ramp before? Why dont you take him on now and let him look at it. When we get the car placed, we can all help you carry him up if we have to—"
"Dont you waste your time worrying about us," Ned said. "You just get that boxcar to where we wont have to jump no ten-foot gash into it. This horse wants to get out of Memphis as bad as you does." Only I was afraid Sam would say, Dont you want this boy to go with you? Because I wanted to see that boxcar moved. I didn't believe it. So we waited. It wasn't long; Boon and the man with the lantern came back with two crowbars that looked at least eight feet long and I watched (Miss Corrie and Otis too) while they did it. The man set his lantern down and climbed the ladder onto the roof and released the brake wheel and Sam and Boon jammed the ends of the bars between the back wheels and the rails, pinching and nudging in short strokes like pumping and I still didn't believe it: the car looming black and square and high in the moon, solid and rectangular as a black wall inside the narrow silver frame of the moonlight, one high puny figure wrenching at the brake wheel on top and two more puny figures crouching, creeping, nudging the silver-lanced iron bars behind the back wheels; so huge and so immobile that at first it looked, not like the car was moving forward, but rather Boon and Sam in terrific pantomimic obeisance were pinching infinitesimally rearward past the car's fixed and foundationed mass, the moon-mazed panoramic earth: so delicately balanced now in the massive midst of Motion that Sam and Boon dropped the bars and Boon alone pressed the car gently on with his hands as though it were a child's perambulator, up alongside the platform and into position and Sam said,
"All right," and the man on top set the brake wheel again. So all we had to do now was get the horse into it. Which was like saying, Here we are in Alaska; all we have to do now is find the gold mine. We went around to the back of the warehouse. There was a cleated ramp. But the platform had been built at the right height for the drays to load and unload from it, and the ramp was little more than a track for hand trucks and wheelbarrows, stout enough but only about five feet wide, rail-less. Ned was standing there talking to the horse. "He done seen it," he said. "He know we want him to walk up it but he aint decided yet do he want to. I wish now Mr Boxcar Man had went a little further and borried a whup too."
"You got one," Boon said. He meant me—one of my tricks, graces. I made it with my tongue, against the sounding board of my mouth, throat, gorge—a sound quite sharp and loud, as sharp and loud when done right as the crack of a whip; Mother finally forbade me to do it anywhere inside our yard, let alone in the house. Then it made Grandmother jump once and use a swear word. But just once. That was almost a year ago so I might have forgotten how by this time.