A Little Known Fact About Ducks

Between the Tracks

We always liked the railway tracks when we were young. It made my brother and I feel daring and dangerous playing there, the heart stopping possibility that at any moment a hundred tonnes of speeding steel could leave us as nothing more than a gory smear on moss covered sleepers.

It was fantasy though. The old line had no more than two trains a day that lazily trundled by, heaving heavy wagons brimming with coal. You could hear the straining diesel engine miles away; the screeching metal of rusting axles echoing down the valley. We were never in any danger.

On the day it happened the wind was dust dry. Swallows zigzagged across the ripe wheat fields, the breeze teasing the grain into a rolling golden sea. We capered around the old dilapidated platform, barely recognisable under the weeds and shrubs, now a castle in our children's minds. We fenced extravagantly with broken saplings until my brother paused, looking up the valley.

"Train coming," Ash said, cocking his blond head towards the sound.

At least five more minutes until it reached us.

He turned, face cracked with a grin. "I'm doing it today, Sam," he said, and took off towards the bridge. I ran after him, the adrenalin already starting to seize my body.

The bridge, like everything else, was old. A decaying skeleton of grey metal girders over an equally crumbling farm road. The bet, one that I had never once contemplated winning, was to hang below the bridge as the train passed, making the victor the biggest bad-ass in the world.

Two minutes till the train.

He jumped down between the trusses, sitting there, head at track hight. I watched from half way down the embankment, shaking with fear and excitement. Ash spat on his hands, rubbing his palms together vigorously, eyes focused at the task before him. The tracks began to sing as the creeping engine came into view; a dirty blue and yellow machine belching thick diesel smoke.

Just as it reached the bridge Ash gave me a wide grin, dropping, long arms wrapped around a rusting metal pole. He swung there above the road, the deafening noise of engine and wheels filling the air.

I stared, holding my breath as bridge and ground shook. Ash's young body lurched with every passing wheel trundling above his head; but he held firm, hands locked together in a vice grip. He looked over at me, blue eyes wide, perfect teeth beaming, confirming he was indeed the biggest bad-ass in the world.

We never saw the tractor. Forklift raised high, returning from a days work moving hay bails in the fields. It's three javelin prongs struck his dangling body, impaling him, carrying him off held high like some grotesque winners trophy.

I don't remember much of what happened next; my young mind thankfully suppressing what my eyes witnessed that day but I'm told I was found in the fields over an hour later, curled in a ball. I had ran and ran until exhaustion caught me, overwhelmed by grief.

But Ash didn't die. By some miracle the four foot spikes missed all his vital organs and after months of rehabilitation he came home, seemingly no different than he was before the accident. But I saw the change. It was ever so subtle, no-one else noticing. When the wind was right and the rasping metal of the coal trucks could be heard, Ash would stiffen, imperceivable anxiety showing in his eyes.

When he went missing, gone from his bed early one morning, my parents were frantic. Police, neighbours and friends were called, but they shouldn't have bothered. I knew exactly where he'd be.

I slipped out of the cottage unseen into the frosty dawn. Ankle deep mist hung on the fallow fields as I made my way calmly to the bridge, not yet concerned for my brother. The air was so still, the calm only occasionally broken by the crows calling in the distance, waking from the cold night. And there he was, standing motionless below the rotten structure, staring up.

"Alright," I said, standing next to him, cold hands tucked in my pockets.

"Aye," he replied, giving me a glance.

"So, what you up to?"

"Waiting," he simply replied.

"Oh aye, what for?" I asked.

The shrill of the train horn drifted up from the valley and he turned, smiling.

"To be the biggest bad-ass in the world."