The Runaway Boys

SHF_RE_TheRunawayBoys/TheLittleMen - 2004 // 01_initial

Marilyn tells this story. It’s about the time she and some of her family were driving home the beautiful back way, through the old german hill country. As they were passing the old tiny town named for an indian woman, they saw cars backed up on the long upward hill. People were outside their cars. “A traffic jam!” she said. It was the first one she’d ever been in.

At the top of the traffic jam was a truck lying on its side. Something had spilled out of the truck and had flowed down the straight blacktop road like water. It looked like it might even be spilling now — still pouring slowly down the road. Or swarming. It might be some kind of big bugs getting away, coming towards them.

But the people who weren’t in their cars weren’t afraid. They almost looked afraid, but they weren’t. They were having fun. They were watching the things traveling among their feet. Sometimes dancing out of the way. Now Marilyn and her mother and her sisters were out of the car, and they could hear the conversation, and the laughing. “Can we go closer, can we go closer?” And their mother, smiling and interested herself, her mother actually happy and curious about something almost like one of the girls herself, said, “Okay, but don’t run ahead. Stay with me.”

And the Pond girls and their mother walked past half a dozen cars and pickups and got up where all the people were, at the front of the traffic jam, and finally saw what it was coming out of the truck and all the way down the hill. It was little heads. Little metal heads for some kind of toy.

It was the head of a little boy, but a little boy who might be a toy soldier or a toy cowboy, if he had the rest of his parts. He looked like that kind of a boy. Quite a happy looking little head, but something slightly manlike about it. The army of heads all looked exactly the same. Some of them were still rolling. At the point on the hill, the road was beginning to level off, so quite a few of the heads had reached a the point where the nose put a stop to its travels, but others continued to roll. They rolled in curving paths that almost ended again and again.

Sometimes a head that wouldn’t go any further would get hit by another head coming down the hill. The head that was stopped would start traveling again, and the one that hit it might become the one that couldn’t go any further.

Of course everyone picked one up now and then. Marilyn’s mother let the girls pick them up, but she said, “We’re not keeping any. They belong to someone.” One of the other women, a big woman in a flannel shirt, with gray hair but not an old face, said hello to Marilyn’s mother. Marilyn’s mother talked to her, and then everyone told her all about the wreck. And then they all saw the man who had the wreck coming towards them from the little indian town, coming through the field with another man. It was easy to see which one was the driver of the wrecked truck. He looked miserable and sorry. The other man was one of the big local young men who you knew must drive a pickup truck, and would talk like a southern man, friendly and smart, a man who would know what to do next.

The poor, sorry driver joined them and apologized and said he understood people had to get where they were going. There were two country boys there.

They had been listening quietly, not talking like everyone else. One of them hit the other one on the arm with the back of his hand and said, “Come on.”

That’s all they said to one another, but they both went off like they had made a plan ahead of time, or done this exact same thing before. They got a big cloth out of the back of their pickup truck and laid it out on the ground. It was a big green cloth like a soldier tent. The two boys, they had to be brothers, started working together, picking up little heads and throwing them onto the cloth.

“You just stop worrying,” said one of the big country women in her big flannel shirt. “We ain’t so busy around here we can’t change our plans a little.” So everyone started helping, throwing the little heads into the big cloth. “Aim for the tarp,” said one of the brothers. “Anywhere on the cloth if you can,” said the other brother to people working on the other side.

Marily said to her little sister, “We don’t want to scratch them, or no one will buy them.”

So they got the tarp almost covered, then the brothers and some of the other grownups lifted up the edges to make it a bag. Two of the men had swept out the back of a farm truck. The men jumped up and climbed up, and soon the big green bag was up in the truck, and the big men and the strong boys were pouring out the toy heads as gently as if they didn’t want to wake up a baby.

Marilyn was working in the grass, finding the heads that had snuck off the road and down into the high, stiff grass, and it was a wonderland there, bottles, part of a purse, cigarettes, a plastic banana, and every now and then a head. She would put the head in her shirt, which like some of the others she was using now as a basket, by pinching the bottom out in front of herself. And Marilyn stopped bending down and looking in the grass for a minute. She wished she could just stop everything and look for a long time.

There was so much to see, and such a hurry to pick up all the heads. But she had never seen anything this interesting. She saw her mother laughing.

They had worked their way almost halfway up the hill. Every now and then, there was a motion of the heads above. Because now and then a breeze or something else, maybe a grasshopper crossing the road, would set put one head in motion, and that one might put two heads in motion. People would hear the clack-clack starting again and laugh. “They’re getting past us,” a man yelled once. Even those two serious brothers would make a joke sometimes. The younger one said once, “Canada’s the other way.” His brother shook his head about it. The other men laughed like it wasn’t exactly a joke. Marilyn didn’t see how it was a joke, but knew it was, so she laughed to make the boy feel funny, and that made some of the others laugh about it, too. Marily was glad she had done it.

Marilyn could see that everyone was enjoying the truck wreck. Her little sister was working quietly, shy of course, but when one of the big farm men came up to her, she turned around and lifted her arms, and he raised her up to the back of the truck, and handed one head to the boy up on the truck, who said something that Marilyn could see was the kind of nice thing even a teenage boy would say to a little girl sometimes.

Someone new would come up the hill every once in awhile and join in the work, but this time it was a man who looked like a business man, and Marilyn didn’t like the way he sounded. The farm men were nice, but they were mad.

Then the business man went back down the hill, not acting mad. Marilyn said to herself that she was going to figure this out. They man who wrecked the truck was saying to everyone, “It’s fine. Yo can’t really blame him. Look, it could’ve been worse.”

“Marilyn,” her mom said. But Marilyn had to find one or two more in the grass. But her mother came toward her with a certain look on her face, saying, “Now,” and Marily went jumping toward her, careful where she walked, and the Pond girls gathered around their mother, and everyone gathered around everyone else, as the businessman came up the hill in his car. He went slowly, but he drove over one of the heads that had gotten past everyone and no one had gone back down yet to get. The head went pop, like a light bulb burning out.

“Bastard,” said the teenage boy up on the truck. “Steve,” said a man who must be his father. After that pop, the car went faster. Pop, pop, pop.

Marilyn looked at her mother and said, Uh! the way you said it when someone got to do something you didn’t, but she didn’t mean it that way. “How come he’s doing that?” asked her sister Diane, and one of the men said, “I could answer that, but I better not.”

The car went past them, and then it went up the road. Finally it didn’t even try to go slow. Marilyn counted them at first. But then she could only try to guess how many, and then she knew she couldn’t even do that. When so many popped so fast together, it was like people clapping or like raindrops — just something you had to give up thinking about as separate things.

“People, you saved me some money, and you’re just the nicest people I ever met. Now I want you all to just go on with what you have to do. Please. You’ve really done enough.”

“Sweetie, you don’t know what county you’re in,” said the woman in the flannel shirt.

“What county are we in?” asked the teenage boy.

“The one you’ve lived in all your life,” said his father.

“Oh. Okay,” said the boy. People laughed at him, but he looked like he liked it.

“Well, if any of you have to go, I understand,” said the man from the wrecked truck. 

“I do have a car full of groceries.”

“Honey, you get going,” said the big woman. “Those girls of yours are just a joy.”

“We have two brothers,” said Diane.

“How old are they, honey?”

“Ray’s seventeen and Jack is fifteen,” she answered, proud to know the answer. The people were quiet though.

“Canda’s thataway,” said the teenage boy on the truck.

“Steve, if you don’t learn to control you mouth, I’ll be glad to control it for you,” said his father.

“Sorry,” said the boy.

Marilyn and her sisters all pressed to the same side of the car as they went past the people, so they could wave. As they went up the road, her mother said, “Oh! Oh! Oh!” every time. As they passed the truck that was laying on it side, they saw that it was almost empty. Inside were some of the heads that couldn’t roll out.

“What was all that noise?” Marilyn said ruefully, pretending to speak for the heads still safely in the truck. “It sounded like fireworks!”

“Yeah, but the noise gave me a headache,” said Diane, pretending to answer,and they all laughed.

Marilyn’s mother had driven faster and faster, just as the businessman had.

“Let’s hurry and get home now,” said Marilyn.