The Bavarian Gate

3

Discovering Oregon

Near dawn, Roy shook Macurdy awake. "It's time to go," he said quietly, "before it starts to get daylight."

For a moment Macurdy lay there, his dream receding like a wave from a beach, leaving a brief wash of images and impressions. The principal image was of Vulkan, who in the dream had called himself a bodhi sattva. Macurdy had no idea what a bodhi sattva was.

Silently he rolled to hands and knees, got to his feet and looked around. A half moon had risen about midnight and begun its trip across the sky. Roy was rolling his bindle, and Macurdy rolled his. Then, bindles slung on shoulders, they entered the railyard, keeping to the shadows of freight cars. They could hear the chuffing of a yard engine, the clash of couplings in long chain reactions as a train was assembled. In the night it sounded spooky. The yard seemed a maze of tracks, and to move through it inconspicuously required crossing some of them. Often this meant climbing between cars, and a string of them could jerk into deadly motion without warning.

Others from the jungle had preceded the two, and at the far end, Roy and Macurdy waited with three of them in the shadow of a hopper car, watching the main line. Finally a tandem of line engines rolled slowly past, followed by freight cars gradually picking up speed. The men moved out of the shadows, trotting alongside. An empty boxcar pulled even with Roy, and grasping the edge of the open door, the burly Indian pulled himself in, then rolled to hands and knees and helped Macurdy. A moment later they stood in shadowed darkness, their legs braced against the swaying. Macurdy sniffed a familiar aroma. Alfalfa. This car had hauled baled hay recently.

Dawn also traveled west, and soon overtook them. Roy had blocked the door open with a length of dunnage stashed in the car, and part of the time they stood watching the countryside roll by. And feeling their stomachs grumble, for they had eaten only twice in two days. From time to time they drank, barely, from their canteens, swallowing a short mouthful only after swishing it around for a few seconds.

Occasionally, at some high plains village, the train paused. Cars would be shunted onto a siding-empties to be filled or laden cars to be emptied. The men kept out of sight then, grateful when the train began moving once more without their car having been cut from it.

By midmorning, Macurdy had seen his first big mountains, bigger and more abrupt than any he'd seen in Yuulith. By noon they were hemmed in by them, and several large locomotives-"Mallies" Roy called them-had been added to. drag the train over the continental divide. Macurdy got a look at the massive black engines, spouting gritty black smoke as they passed their own freight cars on a hairpin curve.

That evening their car was part of a string cut out in the yard at Missoula. By then they were glad to get out; they were out of water, and their stomachs complained constantly. Other 'boes were disembarking too, and Roy quickened his pace.

"We got to be first," he told Macurdy. "Find a restaurant or grocery store and see what they got in their garbage. You can always find something, but after other guys have picked through it, it's kind of bad." They were in the lead when they saw a cafe ahead. It was closed. "Let's find one open," Macurdy said. "I've got a little cash. We can eat a real meal."

They walked several blocks before they found one. Gilt letters on the window spelled "Sig's Cafe." A middle-aged couple sat at a table, and two working men sat side by side at the counter. The two hoboes went in, filthy with coal soot from locomotive smokestacks. The cafe's owner, a tall, rawboned, blond man, got instantly to his feet, scowling. Two steps took him to the revolver he kept on a shelf beneath the cash register. Macurdy read his aura. "Are you Sig?" he asked. The man nodded. "I've got money," Macurdy told him. "You got a place we can sit?"

He could almost see the man's mind considering. Business was poor, but two bums? They were so dirty he'd have to clean the chairs they sat on. "Let's see the money," he said in accented English.

From a shirt pocket, Macurdy removed a grubby one-dollar bill. The man pointed to a small round table in a back corner, two chairs beside it, and when they'd seated themselves, he brought a menu. Macurdy looked it over. "I'll take a pork chop with mashed potatoes," he said. "And buttermilk."

"The same for me," Roy added. "The buttermilk's extra."

"We'll have it anyway," Macurdy answered. "We only ate twice in two days, and then not much." The man's aura still reflected distrust, so Macurdy handed him the dollar bill. "Take it out of this. Maybe we'll have something else when we're done."

The meal came with bread, butter, and rice pudding with canned milk, but before they were done, they'd each had another serving of potatoes. It used up the whole dollar. In Sig's eyes they were customers now, not bums, and pulling another chair over, he talked with them briefly. There was no work to be found in Missoula. The sawmills that were running at all were down to one shift a day, running on inventory; almost no logging camps were manned. "I heard it ain't no better in Spokane," Sig added. "Maybe on the coast."

Macurdy and Roy went back to the railyard with stomachs and canteens filled. They were not heartened by what they'd heard. Roy said if they needed to, they could stay with his family till something broke for them. But he didn't sound terribly confident; his family would be hard up at best, trawling salmon for a cannery that probably wasn't paying much at all.

Macurdy slept his way across the Idaho panhandle, waking when the train stopped at Spokane, Washington, and again to the clash and jerk of couplings as it started to leave. The next time he awoke, they were rolling across grassy hills and bare rock washes. After they left Pasco, they never stopped at all, rolling down the Columbia River Gorge through scenery that to Macurdy was beautiful almost beyond comprehension.

So this is Oregon, he thought. God, Varia, if you could only see it! As newlyweds, moving to Oregon had been a dream, nothing urgent, but something they'd do someday. Now she was in another world with another man, and he was here alone. That should, he thought, have spoiled it for him, but somehow the beauty overrode such considerations.

They spent a day at Portland, swimming in the river with their clothes on to get out most of the soot, then wearing them dry in the sunshine, eating on Macurdy's money, and walking around. They took the elevator to an upper floor of a bank building, where Macurdy stared in awe at distant snow peaks. The nearer, to the east, was Mount Hood, Roy told him, and the one off north, Mount Saint Helens. They spent that night with one of Roy's aunts, who treated Macurdy as a welcome guest. The next day they hiked to the railyard and caught another freight, this one on a branch line, headed for the sawmill town of Nehtaka, where Roy, not so confident as he'd been fifteen hundred miles east, hoped they'd find work.