This is an English Essay, so reviews are very much appreciated. Thanks!
Edits and reviews are appreciated, style preffered over grammar objective. Thanks!
The day started out like any other, but then there was a first on the door, and before I knew it I was dragged here. I woke up to the sound of a train whistle; the new tracks were just built and finished. Turns out that I’ll fall asleep to it too, as Hudson put it. The horses’ hooves rebounded off the rough stone walls. It sounded like an army marching through the train tunnel, but it was just the two of us.
“The train rolls through here about once an hour. In about ten minutes a steamer’ll plow through this grave, hell bent on see’in daylight again. And do you know what that means?”
I said not a word. I knew very well what it meant, and so did he, but I would not dignify his actions through speech. My knee gave me enough pain to keep me focused. The sway of the horse made the tiny grains of metal and rock feel like dull balls of white pain, pulsating with my blood. The old shrapnel rubbed against bone, I could feel it. The bits the doctor could not remove, slowly grating away my knee. It helped take the edge off the man's words. I instead focused my efforts on singing softly to myself, moving my mouth but making no noise. There’s a whistle in the miles back/ Time to lay just one more track/ C’mon boys one more track, clickity clack, clickity clack…
"Splat!" the man chuckled, "Hehe, squish!"
My heart skipped a beat. The tunnel was about twelve feet high, seven feet wide. There was just about a foot of space between the iron sides of a steam locomotive and stone walls of a mountain. I was not fat, but I was not a foot wide either. Would I feel pain? Would I feel death? What was it like after the end? Was there an after?
"That is, if you choose to."
"I choose to," I said, because I knew what the 'not too' meant. My lips pressed together, hard, and I continued to listen to the walls. We’d now be about halfway through the song, how did it go? A mountain stands no chance/ that train’ll blow’er without no glance/ C’mon boys, throw the blast an’ hold your pants…
"Aw, hell, Iban. You got noth’in left to loose, I don’t know why you’re putting yourself through this, I guess.” I felt the horse stop walking, and my heart started choking me, pressing against my windpipe, which suddenly seemed too small. It seemed to ricochet around in my chest. Were we far enough? I don’t think I was far enough in the song. Old Morrison always sang it to the end twice before we reached the half-way point, and I was two verses away. It wasn’t time! I wanted to take my blindfold off so badly I felt it burn into my face. The ropes binding my hands scratched and kept the blood from flowing. They felt numb and puffy. “All we want is the money.”
“It’s not about the money, it’s about the principle,” I said calmly, more calmly than I felt. The fear seemed to stain my heart, a pall on my mind. I was going to die, for a principle.
“What principle? You grow stupid or someth’in?” I heard him dismount from his own horse, his boots clattering on the stones and steel rails below. His spurs pinged as they stomped over, then I felt him drag me off by my vest to the rough gravel, where tracks and rocks and… bones, made the earth hard to stand on. Probably the leftovers of poor creatures who didn’t know what they were getting into. Was that my story, my ending?
I held a cry of pain inside as my knee seemed to separate from its socket. A groan was all that escaped, and I swayed on the ground, the rocks under my feet uneven and un-predictable.
“Seven minutes. Anything you wanna say Mr. Iban?”
“Anything you want to regret, Mr. Hudson?” I replied smartly. A hand from behind propelled me into the rock wall. A splinter of pain cracked across my face. After a moment, I took a shaky breath, letting the pain dull and run its course. I lifted a hand to my forehead and it came away wet.
“I wouldn’t worry about that.” Hudson sounded like he was laughing, a curious whine entered his voice, “This is always the price a man pays when he messes with my employers.”
“Again, with the anonymity,” I sighed. I turned around until my back was pressed against the roughly tunnel wall, and took some pressure off my knee, “I know who work for. You know I do. I don’t steal from people without knowing who they are,” I paused, “I’m not that stupid, you know. Mr. Rigby and Mr. Rockwell are two men who like to call themselves big and bad when the only real power they have is in the minds of themselves and in the pockets of their partners.”
I felt a cool, small circle press against my brow. A mechanical click, accompanied with a gruff, “I’d be careful what you say, Iban. You’re the one in a train tunnel, with a gun to your head.” This was true. I was going to die this evening, and no one would ever know why. Oh, God, what have I done? I tried to imagine what the sun was doing outside this hell pit. Was it a soft orange, like most mountain sunsets? Was it a violent scarlet, catching the trees on fire? Down the mountain, following the tracks down to the cluster of buildings. The small band of houses and shops, pressed together as if shielding each other from the wind. What was Marissa doing? What was Thomas building? Did they have any idea where I was, who I really was? A gambler, a liar, a schemer, a con-artist, and a runaway. How could they even fathom? They knew me as an unfortunate farmer who fled north from bankers, not innocent, but harmless. It was a good lie, a believable and empathetic one. How could they really know? The small metal circle on my forehead went away, but the fear grew. I wasn’t going to be able to say goodbye. I wasn’t going to be able to say I was sorry.
Hudson snorted, “Can’t say I didn’t try.” He chuckled, almost nervously, as if he hadn’t actually expected to have to leave me here. The voice came from far above me, on a horse, “Three minutes, and that train comes around the bend. You’ll die in the tunnel you’ve helped build. I always heard railroad workers die on the job more often than not…”
Now was my chance. Now or never. If I told Hudson where the money was, I’d be taken back into the scheming world I ran from. I would be taken back to Chicago. I’d be stuffed under wraps, under corrupt layers so deep and tight I’d never see light again. After a small town huddled in Colorado mountains, I can’t go back to that life. Never. That bag of cash is lost, bloody, and resting at the back of my closet. And it wasn’t even that. It was the fact that if I opened up mouth that’d mean I learnt nothing. It’d mean that I was the same man who came to this tiny town six months ago. That’d I’d learned nothing about bravery, or real loss, nothing at I couldn’t do without.
“See you, Iban. Hope it don’t hurt too bad.” Clip-clop, clip-clop, clip-clop, the horses’ hooves shoved off. Slowly at first, as if they didn’t want to leave me behind, but then their tempo picked up as their duty was considered done. Soon, the horses were out of the tunnel, and the stunning silence was all that was left. My knee hurt. My head hurt.
I slowly bent over as if to touch my toes, and stepped over my bound hands so that they were properly in front of me. I removed my blindfold, but even without my eyes covered, the world was pitch black. The tunnel was deep, a mile of limestone in any direction. The work had cost me my leg. I had been a demolition expert until a few months ago when a short fuse blew my leg all to hell. My superior education had helped, along with common sense, which the rest of the rail workers seemed to lack. I had worked on this tunnel myself, the tunnel to link Big Goose with the rest of the world, with its valley’s full of cattle and mines full of coal. But as I heard the horses disappear, to leave me to be ‘squished’ by the train, I knew it could also save my live. In the dark, I stretched out my hands, feeling the wet rock. My mind scrambled to find the proper place in the song.
Sho’ is dark down here in hell/ But till light we’ll listen fo’ the bell/ C’mon boys, it be m’possible to tell. I started forward, running my hand along the wall, limping closer in the direction we had gone. How much time did he say? Three minutes? I could hear my own pulse in my ears, and I tried to walk more quickly, more urgently. Was I even going in the right direction? Should I turn around? There was no way I could make it out of the tunnel in time not to be torn apart by the train. Where was it? It was just so dark, if I could just get a light, for God’s sake. What was the next verse? Keep time for Christ’s sake! Be smart about it! Panic set in, my pulse skyrocketed. “Come on boys just one more track, then we can all join up and head on back, Come on boys, clickity clack, clickity-.”
WHEERR WHEERR!
The train.
WHEEERR WHEERR!
I could hear the screech of wheels; feel the vibrations of their fury on the steel beams. I tried to pick up speed, my hand madly scanning the walls. Where was it?! I had gone through the entire song twice, just like Morrison did when he came down to the half-way point, where I blew my knee. A faint current of air stirred my hair. The pressure of the train was moving wind towards the mouth of the tunnel. I heard the massive wheels heaving the cars, and the hiss of steam, and the hot metal, and coal.
There.
I found the large dimple in the rock, the dent where the dynamite blew my leg to hell, and pressed myself against the shallow scoop. The jagged rock pressed into my back, the damp and the wet soaking my shirt. I found myself praying that it was deep enough. If the dent wasn’t deep enough I’d be sucked out onto the tracks, the vacuum of the train’s airstream sweeping me up and out. The noise of the engine swallowed up everything in the tunnel, getting closer and closer…
Then the train screamed past. The racket of the locomotive drowned out any other conceived sound, any other thought. The wind sucked at my hair, at my face, at my eyes, trying to tug me back onto the rails for a brief shredding. My nails dug into the walls. The noise, the sheer sound of the train was almost too much. It rattled my brain, especially when it blew the horn. Then smoke started to filter in my shelf too. The smoke from the burning coal. I shook my head. Was I going to suffocate to death too? Sparks flew up from the tracks and onto my feet, fizzling out before they could catch anything on fire. How long was this going to last? How long could I stand it? I covered my mouth with my shirt, as the smoke started to itch my lungs. I coughed.
The train seemed to last for ages. Eternities wrapped around each other, before the din and the smoke started to recede. And then the train was past, gone just as suddenly as it was here. The roar faded out of the tunnel, and quickly there was no sound at all. The quiet rang around in my ears for a moment, before I slowly lowered myself to sit against the rock. The silence itself was almost too much. The train, as ominously as it existed, now ominously away. It was like I had gone deaf. I couldn’t hear a thing.
But the price of a good leg and ears for the price of my life, it was a fair trade. The accidental dynamite blast that had supposedly ruined my life now saved it. Providence almost certainly had something to do with that, I’m sure, but sheer dumb luck seemed all the more likely. Would Hudson come back to see me scattered on the tracks? No. He wouldn’t believe in a cripple surviving a train. He wouldn’t want to clean me up either. He would leave town quickly and quietly, deciding his work finished, and I would be home-free. The debtors in Chicago would be satisfied with the dead rogue con-artist. Marissa would be satisfied with cleaning up my pants, which had scorch marks from the sparks cast up from the rails… I better get going before the next train rolled through.
That scam money was going to the bottom of a mine. Perhaps it took a near-death experience, with a train’s roar, to galvanize myself against ever touching a piece of dirty money again. I knew this was an idiotic feeling; the temptation to exercise my talents as a fraud will creep up on me again, but for now, it was completely out of my system. I picked myself up from the ground, and started towards the mouth of the tunnel. The walk back to Big Goose was going to be long and hard, and night was starting to stain the edges of the sky by now. Perhaps… perhaps I could use my skill in a more pointed direction. But how? I grimaced as I limped along, my dragging steps echoing around me in the tunnel. A pinpoint of faint light grew ahead. I didn’t know. I’d figure something out. I have that luxury now.
Holy God, I was going to be fine. I was going to be fine. There were no more lies that mattered or secrets to hide, it’s all been resolved. I was going to live. The sheer relief was something I couldn’t put into words. The feeling that you could be sure that you’d live to see tomorrow, that was something one can’t put into value. I breathed hard. It’s been a long time since I felt safe enough to feel that. I could go home, and not worry anymore. I could go home. A stupid Grin broke across my face, good God, would I start crying? “As that iron horse barrels pass’, an’ we given boss a parting sass, c’mon boys, ‘cause home is the on’y place will breathe our last.”
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