Corn. An endless sea of corn. Maize, the Indians called it. By any name, still a fucking lot of it. The tracks ran perfectly perpendicular to the rows of yellow-green stalks on either side, forming a great schism in the ceaseless corn planes outside the city. Due to a prevalent Nor-easterly and the regular transit of raw sugar in open-topped rail cars to refineries in the west, the corn was always sweeter on the south side.

Rommel had his Ferris Bueller sunglasses pressed tight against his face to keep the rushing wind from sneaking in behind them. His leopard skin vest was blown straight back. He'd never liked trains. Granted, he'd never actually been inside one, but he seemed to end up on their roofs with startling regularity.

He stood facing the engine on a 5' by 5' piece of cardboard duct taped along the edges so it wouldn't blow away. A faded Frigidaire logo peaked out from beneath the tape. THIS SIDE UP faced corn to the north, more reliable than any compass on the impossibly straight tracks. Next to the cardboard had been taped a jambox, belting out Tribe above the sounds of the train.

Pushing his beret back, Rommel crouched, glaring through dark glasses at the man opposite him, on a similar stretch of cardboard, by a similar jambox tuned to the same radio station. They'd been waiting 10 minutes for the commercials to end.

Said the other man, “Keep and eye out for tunnels. The average clearance for tunnels is two feet above the top of the train, so we'll have to duck.”

“We're in the middle of the fucking plains.”

“Oh, right.”

If that wasn't some jive-ass Bleacher Street shit, then nothing was. They didn't know anything on Bleacher, least of all how to dance. The music from the radio merged with the sounds associated with the tops of moving trains.

Rommel shot out of the gates with a Solar Eclipse into a Rubberband into a 1-Handed V-Kick rebounding up through a Fly and Roll, paused in a Hollowback for two beats of train on track then took off into a double-time Eggbeater which rose into a furious Flare bisected by two full turns of Turtle before he flipped over his head, halting abruptly in the most authentic Suicide mankind has ever witnessed without an actual suicide occurring. It was even better than some real ones, gunshots and hangings in particular. Nowhere near enough verve.

Sitting up, he adjusted his beret though it needed no adjustment, and looked over the top of his glasses at the other man, eyes unaffected by the wind.

Tears poured down the other man's face. Beauty unbeholden to any street corner as measly as Bleacher. He knew immediately that it could never be brought to the tired looking kids doing the Worm to Muzak pumped mercilessly from speakers outside the neighborhood Walgreen's. No one there would understand.

“Whoa! Look out! Tunnel!” said Rommel.

The other man dove belly-down onto his corrugated mat. With that one natural reaction, he realized the inadequacy of his own dance. For all the power of the human spirit, nothing can defeat knack. He had a knack for dodging fatal head trauma. Similarly, he realized they were still well within the bounds of the endless corn plains, and that no tunnel was behind him. The tears dried quickly in the brisk wind as he stood back up. Evening was settling in with its 10-degrees-cooler temperatures.

“There's no tunnel,” he said.

So you can teach something new even to Bleacher Street. Still, it was pretty jive.

Suddenly channeling James Dean, the Fonz, Jim Morrison, Tommy Lee Jones, Miles Davis, and anyone ever associated with the word cool, Rommel said, “Man. Get off my train.”

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