The rail yard was not a safe place for kids, but try telling that to the kids. The moment something is off limits, there they are, riding their bikes around and competing to see who can throw glass bottles the highest. Where the train cars were parked in chains they hid baubles and notes, poked through cargo and climbed stacked timber. The principal and parents worked to keep the kids away, to lure them to the park or the shopping mall, which not without their own problems. The stubborn boys were threatened with after school participation, which broke them away. They would find other places to smoke pilfered cigarettes and smash pop caps, and besides, part of the fun of a new place comes from finding it.
After the teenagers were grubbed out of the rail yard, teenage boys drove their cars there after dark. The symmetry of the rails drew them, like parallel racing lines; they wanted to thunder over the steel and wood and wrestle steering pinions while their tires drummed in locomotive cadence. Neighbors called the police on them, their headlights glaring on the river, engines stoked to their limit in the quiet rural evening. At least they weren’t racing on the street or the highway, folks said at town meetings, all of them vilifying and covering for their teens at once. Still, the routine railwayman finds were red taillight glass and paint scraped into the train cars from light collisions. The summer before one boy drove his father’s car into the river, and that fear still lingered. Curfews and high fences rose to keep them out.
And then, after all the effort to keep the boys out of the rail yard, the railwaymen themselves came. Worring over the kids made the married ones anxious and tired of arguments at home, and the single working men were fed up with being overcharged at Rudy’s sports bar. They opened the rail house after hours to drink by campfires, which glared on the black night river. Sometimes the police came, and they opened the gates for the cruiser and parked it on the hill so the headlights could shine on the Cracker Barrel billboard. They drank together in their solitude of grease and smoke.
It continued for a year or so, until the seasons changed the town. People had new things on their minds, different worries. Plenty of them moved on to new places — the boys knew that part already. After so long it comes time for finding a new place and the rail yard went quiet in the evenings again.
