D: L&L - Part 28 | Narrator: The Big & Smalls of it All

“Damn hu-mountainous corn, Smalls. When I get back, I’m cutting it all down. All of it. Every ear! Let the Unnamed God strike me down iffn I’m lying.”

Cob looked at Smalls and frowned. There was no answer, no “right”. There was no nothing. Just the sound of the corn shifting in the warm afternoon breeze.

Smalls wasn’t moving, and he hadn’t moved since Cob had thrown the brakes and the whole train had shuddered to a thunderous stop. He wanted to reach down and shake him awake, to help him up, to get him down from the engineer car and walking down the track to check on the rest of the train, but he knew already that wasn’t going to happen. Smalls hadn’t been able to hold on with one hand on his spade, and the sudden braking had sent him shooting across the car into the metal door of the coal furnace. His head was bent back now in an unnatural way, but his hand was still on his shovel.

Cob took a deep breath. This kind of thing, he knew, never happened in the pictures. The villain was always foiled, the hero rescuing his gal in the nick of time, the train never hitting anyone, and certainly the trainmen never dead or bleeding. Cob let the breath out and looked to his right. All he could see was pieces of train scattered behind him, most of it broken apart, some cars on their sides, coal everywhere.

“You’ll be shoveling for days, Smalls. Gotta get all that black bric back in the bric car so we can start steaming the line again.”

Smalls didn’t answer. Smalls didn’t move, but his spade was clean and polished and ready for action. Smalls was serious about moving bric. Moving bric moved the YBE, and the YBE moved almost everything from Far Applerue to Qhoyre to Emerald City. It was a grand job for a pair of not-so-grand nobodies from Rush Margins, one they’d coveted from the first day they’d gone ‘sploring and come outta the corn on the edge of the tracks just as the black and red engine had motored by with its long line of cars.

Smalls had hooted and jumped up and down and pointed. Cob had merely stared at the beauty as it went by – engine car, bric car, box car after box car, passenger car for the right-sized folk from up north, then a short-sized car, for the Munchkins. Finally, pulling up the rear, there’d been the matching black and red bumper car, the caboose some had called it, but it had looked like a bumper car as cause it was all round on the end like the bumper cars some of the Munchkins drove. It was right then, when they’d finally seen the ‘iron dragon’ that motored through the corn, that he knew he wanted to drive it. The men who did – not Munchkins, but big north men – had waved at the two boys on the side of the tracks that day, and they’d blown their whistle as they disappeared round a bend in the corn.

Cob giggled to himself. His pappy had done the same some nights when he’d had too much of the hooch from the barrel, after his moms had gone on to meet the Unnamed God. He could still remember it, and that made Cob giggle even more. He leaned his head back, unable to help himself, and the laughter flowed, rocking his entire body until the tears rolled down his cheeks and his hands came up over his eyes to stop the wet works, as if he could just turn it off with a gesture. His pappy had laughed til he cried, too, and now he knew why.

A moment later there was a scrape on the side of the car, and Cob turned and saw them, eyes burning, mouths like great black holes. His hand inched back and wrapped around the handle of the well-polished spade. “Every ear, Smalls,” he muttered. “Every ear.”