In the Balance

“I don’t know. My shoulder-” Sullivan clutched the injured part. His eyes were wide with fear as well as pain-it was his throwing arm.

“I think maybe we’d better get out of here if we can. Come on.” In the darkness, Yeager walked back toward the rear of the car across what had been window frames. Sullivan didn’t follow. Yeager hardly noticed; he was stepping as carefully as he could. Some of the windows were broken, and he didn’t want to slice his leg on jagged glass.

“That you, Sam?” Mutt Daniels asked as he went by. It took more than a derailment to make him sound anything but slow and relaxed.

“Yeah, it’s me.” Yeager listened to the moans, and to one woman who kept letting out little screams every few seconds. “I think we got some hurt people here, Mutt.”

“Reckon you’re right,” the manager said. “How the hell we supposed to put a team together tomorrow when shit like this happens to us?”

“You’re a baseball man, Mutt,” Yeager said. The crash had driven all thoughts of tomorrow’s game out of his head. He decided not to tell Daniels about Joe Sullivan’s shoulder. Poor Mutt would find out soon enough.

The sliding door to the next car back had sprung off its track when the train went sideways. It gaped open. Yeager pulled himself up into the doorway. He sniffed the outside air, didn’t smell smoke. He didn’t see any fire, either. One thing to be thankful for anyway, he thought, especially when a man at the front of the car yelled, “Somebody here hurt his neck bad!”

“Don’t move him,” three people said at once.

Mutt Daniels scrambled up beside Yeager. The manager had a tougher time of it, being both shorter and rounder than his ballplayer. He said, “Wonder what the hell we hit.”

“If it was that plane, there’d be burning.” Yeager cocked his head. That screaming roar was still in the sky, which meant the plane hadn’t crashed after all. But in that case, where had the explosions come from?

The scream got louder, as if the crazy-sounding airplane was coming back. Just when it made Yeager want to scream, too, a new noise joined it, a deep, rapidly repeated bark. The derailed train shook under Yeager and Daniels as shells slammed into it. Glass tinkled. Screams redoubled.

“Holy Jesus God, it’s the Gerps shootin’ us up!” the manager shouted. He hadn’t known whether to say Germans or Japs, and came out with both at once.

Through the railing of the little platform between cars, Yeager watched the airplane-whosever it was-flash past overhead. It went by so fast, it was just an unidentifiable streak in the sky. The roar of its engines beat at him, faded… then began to grow again.

“It’s coming back,” he said. With all the screaming and yelling up and down the length of the train, that should have come out as a bellow Instead, it was hardly more than a whisper, as if the louder he said it, the more likely it was to be true.

He said it loud enough to convince Mutt Daniels. The manager paused to stick his head back into the passenger car and yell, “Y’all better git out while y’can!” Then he took his own advice and jumped off the train. His shoes scraped on the graveled roadbed, then clumped more quietly as he reached the soft dirt of the fields.

Yeager hesitated a moment more, but the rising shriek in the sky got him moving. He leapt down, landed heavily. For an instant, he thought he was going to take another fall on that ankle of his, but he managed to catch his balance and stay upright. Young corn plants beat against his legs as he ran between the rows. Their sweet, moist smell took him back to his boyhood.

Mutt Daniels tackled him, lay on top of him in the dirt. “What the hell you doin’, Mutt?” he demanded indignantly.

“If he’s comin’ back for another pass, you don’t want to give him no movin’ target to shoot at,” Daniels said. “Learned that in France back in nineteen an’ eighteen. Hadn’t thought about it in twenty-odd years, but the stink of blood and shit in that there car brought it right back up to the top o’ my mind.”

“Oh.” So Yeager wasn’t the only one who’d had an odor jog his memory. His dredged-up piece of past seemed happier than Mutt’s, though.

The plane’s gun cut loose just then, lashing the derailed train with another whip of fire. Yeager buried his face in the cool, damp earth. Beside him, Daniels did the same thing. The enemy airplane streaked away. This time, it did not sound as if it was coming back.

“Jesus,” Mutt said, cautiously getting up on hands and knees. “Never thought I’d be under artillery fire again, though that’s just a squirrel gun if you set it alongside what the Germans threw at us.”

Yeager gaped at his manager. He hadn’t imagined there could be anything worse than what he’d just been through. He tried to pull himself together. “We’ve got to get the people out of there, Mutt,” he said. His legs wobbled under him when he stood up. That made him angry; he’d never been shot at before, and didn’t understand what reaction could do.