“To go where? Problem with our people, Luther, is they bite into hope and keep their teeth clenched to it the rest of their lives. You think any place is going to be better than here? Just different cages, boy. Some prettier than others but cages just the same.” He sighed. “Fuck it. I’m too old to move and this right here, this right here is as much home as I know.”

They sat in silence and finished their drinks.

Uncle Hollis pushed back his chair and stretched his arms above his head. “Well, I got a room upstairs. We’ll get you situated for a night while I make some calls. In the morning…” He shrugged.

“Boston,” Luther said.

Uncle Hollis nodded. “Boston. Best I can do.”

In the boxcar, with Jessie’s fine coat covered in hay to ward off the cold, Luther promised the Lord he would atone. No more card games. No more whiskey or cocaine. No more associating with gamblers or gangsters or anyone who even thought of doing heroin. No more giving himself over to the thrill of the night. He would keep his head down and call no attention to himself and wait this out. And if word ever came that he could return to Tulsa, then he would return a changed man. A humble penitent.

Luther had never considered himself a religious man, but that had less to do with his feelings about God than it did with his feelings about religion. His grandmother and his mother had both tried to drum the Baptist faith into him, and he had done what he could to please them, to make them believe he believed, but it had taken no more hold of him than any of the other homework he claimed to be doing. In Tulsa he’d grown even less inclined toward Jesus, if only because Aunt Marta and Uncle James and all their friends spent so much time praising Him that Luther figured if Jesus was, in fact, hearing all those voices He’d just as soon prefer silence every now and then, maybe catch Himself up on some sleep.

And Luther had passed many a white church in his day, heard them singing their hymns and chanting their “Amens” and seen them gather on a porch or two afterward with their lemonade and piety, but he knew if he ever showed up on their steps, starving or injured, the only response he’d get to a plea for human kindness would be the amen of a shotgun pointed in his face.

So Luther’s arrangement with the Lord had long stood along the lines of You go Your way and I’ll go mine. But in the boxcar, something took hold of him, a need to make sense of his own life, to give it a meaning lest he pass from the face of the earth having left behind no heavier footprint than that of a dung beetle.

He rode the rails across the Midwest and back through Ohio and then on into the Northeast. Although the companions he met in the boxcars weren’t as hostile or dangerous as he’d often heard and the railway bulls never rousted or hassled them, he couldn’t help but be reminded of the train ride he’d taken to Tulsa with Lila and he grew sad to the point where he felt swollen with it, as if there were no space for anything else in his body. He kept to himself in the corners of the boxcars, and he rarely trusted himself to speak unless one of the other men fairly demanded it of him.