Liana Boulles

Railroad

The first time I thought about running away happened when I was six. We lived in Chicago back then, in a tiny condo in Chinatown. My dad bought the place when he was twenty-six years old and ready to be married, but as time went on, he realized that the cheapest place didn’t equate to the best place. There were cracks in the wall and ceiling, as well as a leak in the plumbing beneath the kitchen sink.

The said leak broke through the earlier repairs my dad made, rousing him from bed early in the morning. I eagerly bounced out of bed to investigate the activity. I scampered down the hallway to the kitchen to see Dad’s checkered, pajamaed behind poking out of the cabinet beneath the sink. A plethora of shiny silver tools—wrenches of varying sizes, a pair of pliers—were lined up beside him like a regiment, awaiting their battle with the tiny spray of water escaping its rusty pipe prison.

I didn’t see the water at first, but I noticed the dark stains on Dad’s gray sleep shirt. He’d explained the basics of a pipe leak to me before, and I, being a restless child, wanted to see the little fountain of water. So I crept up to my father, who grunted and twisted a wrench fastening another band of metal around the pipes, tiptoeing around his gigantic form. He didn’t even notice me. I peeked under his arms to see the spray of minuscule drops, catching the little light they could in their flight, squirting right onto his soaked shirt. 

It made me think of a scene from one of those 80’s comedies he watched, where the house malfunctioned, creating every kind of disaster for the inhabitants. I thought of splash parks, broken fire hydrants, and sprinklers in people’s yards, where children in tiny bathing suits leaped through the water, trying to get as wet as possible. Giggling, I dove under his muscular arms to feel that lovely water.

“Damn it Chan!” My father fell backward. The wrench he’d been using clattered to the cabinet floor, and whatever he’d been fastening burst open. A jet of cold liquid slammed my chest, and I screamed, dumbfounded. Instantly, Dad picked me up and dragged me to the dining area, where I was to stand on the rug next to a warm vent until I dried off. The faucet water now pooled on the linoleum floor, covering more and more ground. The lip of the flood inched closer and closer to the brown carpet.

“See what you’ve done!” Dad leaped up and dashed toward the mess. “Damn it, can’t you ever stay out of the way?” He disappeared behind the counter to brave the burst dam.

I felt a wave strike me again—a hot, scalding tidal wave. In the way! Hadn’t he seen me? Was I the one who dropped the wrench? Was it my fault the sink leaked? Heated tears filled my eyes. How could someone who claimed to love me consider me “in the way”? Maybe he’d always felt this way; after all, I hardly remembered him home until recently. He always had something to do at work—a habit of his that regularly pissed Mom off.

“I hate you!” I shouted.

No response at first. I thought he couldn’t hear me above the rushing water. But soon enough his head poked above the counter, twisted in an angry scowl.

“You don’t talk to me like that!” he retorted, waving a finger. “That’s not how you treat your elders!” 

“You’re not my elder, you’re never home!” I crossed my arms, recalling Mom’s latest complaints. Her rants reached their peak at dinnertime, when I helped her put big white plates on the table—three of them, every single time. The phone would ring, Mom would pick it up, she’d say, “Ok, no, I understand,” then hang up. She’d lumber over to the table, sit down where the third plate was, and bury her face in her hands. I’d hold her hand, listening to her quiet tirade about a husband who never got home in time for dinner, wondering why she got upset when this occurred regularly, and we got on just fine without him. I also questioned why she didn’t just skip the third plate and save us the trouble. 

“What did you say?” 

“I said you’re never home, so you can’t boss me!”  A shadow crossed his face, and for a minute I thought he might cry. Instead, he abandoned the plumbing to march over to the rug and slap me on the cheek. 

It was only a light tap, and his twisted expression immediately relaxed into a horrified gasp at what he’d done. I didn’t care, though. I began to cry harder, blubbering as I spoke.

“I hate you! You’re the worst person in the world, and I’m leaving, just like Mom did, so I won’t be in the way.” I stormed to my room, not caring about wading through the flood or tracking water onto the carpet. I put my teddy bear, a blanket, a copy of my favorite book, and the toothbrush—people put such a big emphasis on them—in my green backpack and headed for the door, still in my pajamas.

“Chan! You’re not leaving!” My father intercepted me, blocking the door. “You can’t just walk out! I’m sorry that I hit you—it was very, very wrong of me—and you’re not in the way, I was just upset about the leak, that’s all.”

“Let me out!” I tried to sidestep him, but for such a big man, Dad moved fast. He plucked me up as I bucked and screamed (a pretty impressive feat now that I think about it) and set me on the couch in the living room to talk. I resumed my sobbing, the angry facade too painful to maintain.

“It’s not fair,” I sniffled as he took off my backpack. “How come Mom gets to leave and I don’t?” 

“What Mommy did was very wrong,” he muttered, peeling off my backpack and wet shirt.

“You hit me.”

“Yes, that was very wrong too.” He cast my shirt aside and placed his warm hands on my face. “Chan, I can’t tell you how sorry I am. It was stupid and bad. No one should hit anyone. No one.” His voice had turned syrupy. I spotted the edge of the carpet darkening from water and tried to point. He ignored it completely.

“They do in the movies.”

“Well, movies aren’t right.” He sighed. “I’m so sorry, and I swear to you, it will never happen again. Ever. I promise.” 

I wiped my nose and nodded. I believed him. “Promise” meant something was really going to happen, especially if it came from an adult. “Okay.” I’d drained my energy for anger, anyways. 

“You forgive me?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And I forgive you for going under the sink.” He glanced nervously at the door. “You don’t still want to run away, do you?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Why?”

“Mommy did. She hasn’t come back. When is she coming home?”

“Oh honey.” He rubbed my cheek. “You don’t know where Mommy went.”

“She went to Vacation. You said so.” From what I gathered by magazine photos and television commercials, Vacation was a big, tropical place where people swam in the ocean, wore colorful bathing suits, and basked in the sun. They could go on grand ships with restaurants and water slides, or use little boats with white sails. I’d begged Dad to take Mom and me there, but he always said he hadn’t the time. But Mom went anyway, without either of us, after a big fight with Dad and hadn’t been back for ages. I’d been finishing kindergarten when she left, and now Dad had to take me to the store to buy school supplies for first grade.

“Oh Chan.” He ruffled my hair. “You can’t just go on vacation. You need to get reservations, an itinerary, sometimes a travel agent needs to get involved.” He got a faraway look in his eyes, as if it dawned on him how long Mom must have been planning her trip. “Just because Mommy did it doesn’t mean it’s right.”

“Well, you can come with me, I guess.” He could take care of all those big words that meant nothing to me. I’d focus on Mom. Most of her complaints had been about Dad’s perpetual absence. If I brought him with, she might decide to come home, I figured. Just like this one movie Mom used to watch, with sweeping music, a handsome man who meets a beautiful woman with his son on top of a skyscraper. Mom often wished aloud that Dad would do that with her. “He used to be so romantic when we were dating…” 

“We can’t just—oh, shit. Hold on Chan.” He dashed to the kitchen. The carpet squished under his feet; tiny spurts of water jumped up whenever his foot went down. I giggled and sat on the couch, waiting for him to return. 

 Half an hour later, soaked to the bone, Dad re-entered the living room. “Why not,” he declared, throwing his hands in the air. “Why don’t we just get the heck out of here? Find a place with a sink that doesn’t leak. Somewhere with a yard, where you can stretch your legs.”

“Really?” I sat up, amazed at this burst of energy in my normally sedate father. He was a practical man, always making calculations on the best situation with the least amount of discomfort possible. 

“Yeah, if I can sell this dump.” He led me down the hallway to his room, where he kept the laundry hamper. “Get someone to fix the ceiling, maybe a new carpet, make repairs. Especially with the plumbing.”

That evening he took me out for ice cream. Two weeks later, a crew of handymen arrived to fix up the appliances. The sink was worn out and had to be replaced entirely. Three weeks after that, he sold the condo to a graduate student from Taiwan who decided to stay in Chicago rather than return to the island. We packed everything up and moved to a house in an Indiana suburb, where the chilly, steel atmosphere of the city melted into a more homey, simple mood.

Griffith was a crossroads, a strange blend of opposites. Blue collar workers and commuters to Chicago lived side by side. The houses ranged from pastel-colored boxes to apartment complexes to two-story brick family homes with nice grassy yards and old trees. Dad found us a ranch home with a separate garage that led into the alley, a backyard with maple trees, and a giant oak tree in the front yard. I gasped when we pulled in, amazed by the inky shade the trees cast over our green, weedy lawn. Dad sighed when he saw it. His eyes sagged in muted disappointment, but when he saw how happy I was, clamoring against my seatbelt and the door to be let out to run through our grass, he smiled. 

Nature was everywhere; strips of trees lined the bike trails and adorned neighborhood parks. Squirrels raided gardens and scampered across the street. No one blinked twice at deer tracks in their yard or a dead raccoon on the side of the road. Small prairies and swamps with stands of tall trees resided next to subdivisions.

Yet in the middle of all this natural beauty were the ruins of industry. On the long bike rides I took, not just in Griffith, but to the neighboring towns of Highland and Munster, I saw iron bridges and wailing, crowded highways among the wildflowers and swamp grass. Telephone wires and fast country roads cut through swamps, past drainage culverts where deer came to drink and herons stood majestically, staring at the passersby. If you traveled further, to Whiting and East Chicago, you’d see steel mills and factories from the sandy beaches on the coast of Lake Michigan that you had to hike through a dense forest to get to. Abandoned railroads and steel skeletons of factories slept in the woods, covered by moss and ivy. It was a beautiful juxtaposition of a region that had seen its heyday come and go, yet still carried a heartbeat. It reminded me of my father: a tired man whose firm fired and wife left him, yet still got the strength to raise me alone.

Griffith was of the Region—a local moniker for Northwest Indiana—and the Region was an intersection where the rolling farmland of Indiana and the hectic industry of Chicago met. Neither side really accepted us; Chicagoans laughed at us when we called ourselves their suburb, and Hoosiers, especially from the southern hills, associated us with the crime and violence of Chicago. We had our roots in both yet were accepted by neither. 

If my father was the Region, I was Griffith. Small, confused, split. Over the years, I became two people. When Dad was home, I was his loyal son. I didn’t get into much trouble, made decent grades, did my chores, and always listened to my father. He was a clever man, organized and thoughtful. Unlike the stereotype of Asian parents, he never pushed me to be a whiz kid or sent me to Chinese school. He was a third-generation Chinese American, born and raised in Illinois. But he did like to have control; he wanted me to be successful and safe, to not run off for some dream like my mother had. He didn’t ask for much except that I do what he thought was best for me, and that was pretty reasonable: good grades, time together, etc.  

He never wanted to talk about Mom. I asked a few times, but he got a hard look on his face that said, “Never mind.” When I kept pressing, he changed the subject or told me to quit it. I learned a lot of things as a single dad’s kid: how to take care of myself, how to tread lightly, how to avoid touchy subjects. 

How to fix the sink by myself. While Dad made his living as a real estate agent, selling houses and duplexes that still smelled of cedar and paint, wooing customers by pointing out how lush the lawn was or how airy the rooms were, his talents disappeared with his own home. Cracks grew like tree roots across the ceiling, nourished by years of rain, and the oven walls were caked with charred crumbs that made the fire alarm screech like a terrified cat. But the worst was the sink. I lost track of how many times I had to patch a leak or tighten the gauges. Over time I learned to read the sink the same way I read my father; I learned its moods, its preferences, its subtle sounds of irritation. Through years of experience, of trial and error, I learned how to patch the endless leaks, how to keep the mounting pressure from ripping open the metal and letting the dam break. 

I don’t know why, but the thought of him finding out always devastated me. I knew he would be ashamed that he’d chosen another crappy house for us to live in. As I grew older, he was hardly home, so the secret was easy to keep.

But I was old enough to stay home alone, which became quite often as his work picked up, I was my mother’s son. Practically an adult in middle school. I made my own meals, kept the house sorta clean and in repair, and did my own homework, no questions asked. I read voraciously to keep myself entertained. I constantly daydreamed. And sometimes, when thoughts too abstract and strange to tell my practical father churned in my head, I wrote. 

They started out as poor imitations of what I was reading. As I read more, I found more and more ideas from other books to copy. I mixed them together, a glorious conglomerate of recycled ideas and plot twists applied to my own characters. They ranged from lightsaber battles to war epics, but there was always an adventure. Always the young hero who left home, with or without his parents’ (or evil stepmother’s or uncle’s—hey, you can’t be a classic hero without being an orphan) blessing. That was what made the story, what caused the words on the page to be written: an adventure, the leaving of the mundane for the extraordinary.

In one way, even as a child, I deviated from the likes of Wendy Darling and Harry Potter, who returned to their homes, to lives no longer worth writing about. My heroes never came back. Once they’d run away and got the plot rolling, it never stopped. It was an endless stream of excitement, of meaning. If I had gone to the horizon, to that faraway plane where anything is possible and everything is better, why would I ever want to come back?

I thought of the old factories and steel mills, their skeletal silhouettes against the sunsets. I thought of the Queen Anne’s lace and magenta thistles, the sweet milkweeds that grew at the feet of these rusting structures that had grown out of their prime yet remained stationary, ready to operate the same way they did seventy years ago even if the demand was no longer there. It was possible to love a place and wish to leave it behind at once. 

But what I heard, what I felt when the earth trembled and my breath spiked, were the trains. Countless by day, even more at night. Griffith was surrounded by train tracks that cut through subdivisions and streets before slipping into the woods, usually quiet and subdued, content to be part of the scenery, but trembling and roaring when a train came through. Dad was furious at first; his sleep was constantly disturbed by a train running a couple of blocks away. He told our real estate agent we’d been ripped off, but he didn’t care to move again. He sucked it up, learning to either tune out the rattle of cars or deal with insomnia. He warned me to never, never go near the tracks without him. Later, alone, as I finished repairing the sink and wiping the water, I’d sit up for a moment, to listen for the lonely, sad whistle calling out for someone. 

I didn’t run away when the sink burst for the first time. But once I got the idea, it never truly left my head. The thought of slipping out my window with a suitcase and hitching a ride to a bus station, changing my name, maybe my hair, and roughing it out in the great unknown sent electric tingles down my back. To go where shadows and light dueled while my fears battled my urges to escape, to unearth a deeper definition of life than a small town offered. The great something was out there, in the spring and summer evening sky’s blue mist; all I had to do was ignore my father calling me inside and stay out to find it.

Yet I never did. 

Because I never could come up with a real motive for skipping town, because there was always a reason to stay.

“Don’t run out on me, Chan,” Dad told me as we ate ice cream the night of the sink incident. “I haven’t got anyone but you now.”

Liana Boulles was born in southern China and adopted by American parents when she was a year old. She is currently pursuing her Bachelor's degree at Purdue University in creative writing and film production. She has written articles for Great News Life NWI and The Purdue Exponent. She is currently at work on her first novel, Paper Son.