Incident, August 1995 by David Means

We grew up on rusted tracks, walking down lonely stretches with nothing ahead of us.  We walked and walked for miles, bullshitting and tossing around a few cans of beer that Eddie stole from his old man.  We would start off at the same spot every Saturday night and then end up on the same old bridge that spanned the highway.

We would sit on the edge of that bridge, our legs dangling above the lights of the cars below us.  We were all afraid of heights, but that didn't matter because we were all trying to be brave show-offs.  We'd keep drinking and get a little drunk and then throw the cans at the cars below us.

Eventually some poor old man running the train yard a few miles down the tracks would send some bored cops after us.  We'd run into the woods and get away.  Sometimes we got caught.  When we did, they told us to stay off the goddamned tracks.  We always came back next weekend.

As we got older we started getting a bad reputation, and I hated what we'd become, but I went along with it anyways because that was the cool thing to do.  We used to beat the shit out of kids.  We'd steal purses from old ladies and we'd fuck up any man who looked like a loser.  I guess we thought we were a gang of some kind, and I suppose to an extent we were.

One night we were hanging out on the tracks like we always did.  It was a particularly odd night, and the air smelled like iron, like blood and the sea.  A train had passed an hour or so earlier, and their power always amazed me.  As we stood on the tracks, tossing punches and sharing some beer that we had stolen from a liquor store, a curious sight came upon us.

There was a creature coming from the south end of the tracks.  For a few seconds we were all scared shitless because we couldn't tell what it was.  Eventually we concluded it was a man.  He looked real hurt, like a doe that had just gotten shot and was taking her final steps.  We could only see the outline of this frail human being, and as he got closer, we saw the man's hollow eyes.

I don't even know how it started, but Eddie kicked the man and knocked him down.  Everything happened so fast.  I grabbed his wallet and took out all the bills.  Before I knew it we were dragging him down to the tunnel, and I took a final look in his eyes and I knew that he had already died.

He was dead before he got to us.