Two Trains Running

Jailbait

IRON HORSE WAS, IN MADCAT’S ESTIMATION, A true thoroughbred among fortified wines and every bit the equal of Night Train. The packaging, which depicted a brazen fire-breathing stallion in full gallop, contrived a perfect visual analog to the charge it had made through his bloodstream. Two pints had trampled his anxieties, flattened out his migraine, and enabled him to view with contentment the sorry particulars of his place in the world: a bridge on the edge of the Spokane freight yard, an abutment spangled with graffiti rising to a vault of discolored concrete that roofed the cardboard pallet where he rested with legs asprawl, head propped against his pack, a wiry, weathered man of thirty whose ragged beard and gaunt features presented an image of Old Testament fortitude. His left eye was bloodshot, the skin around it discolored from a beating, and a less recent scar ridged the cheekbone beneath it. Now and then he would sit up straight and warm his hands at a fire gone to embers, gazing blearily about, while the rush of traffic overhead fell around him like the surging of invisible tides.

Beyond the bridge lay a muddy, rutted ground dappled with snowy patches and slicks of dead grass. Railroad junk strewn everywhere. Rusting wheels, dismantled brake shoes, and objects less definable nested in the weeds along the tracks. A waste bordered by stacks of railroad ties and dark gatherings of boxcars, all sketched in glints and gleams by the shining of a high-flying half moon, so the place looked to have acquired the cozy, comprehensible geography of a village and an air of romantic isolation it did not possess by day. Somewhere off in the yard two cars coupled with a steely clash. The forlorn voice of a train, as questioning as a whale’s song, sounded the greater distance, and with its fading, a shadow slipped from behind a stack of ties and darted toward the bridge, resolving into a slight, pale girl with unnaturally red hair and dressed in baggy clothing. She stopped about forty feet away and peered at Madcat, trying—he supposed—to make certain he was harmless. Then an engine unit came chugging out onto the section of track behind her, like a huge yellow-and-black mechanical dog sniffing at her heels, and she scooted forward again. She stood hugging herself just beneath the lee of the bridge. Dyed scarlet dreadlocks hung down over a sharp, thin-boned face. Skin so white as to seem nearly translucent. Pretty…but the sort of witchy Appalachian prettiness that never lasts much past twenty. Her sweatshirt and carpenter’s pants rubbed gray with grime. Still hugging herself, she edged a few steps closer, and once the noise of the engine had abated, she asked, “Kin you he’p me, mister?”

“I kinda doubt it,” Madcat said.

The girl’s head twitched as if the flatness of his response had touched a nerve.

“I got no money to spare, that’s what you’re asking,” he said.

She glanced nervously back toward the yard and when she spoke, her voice had a catch in it. “Kin I set here a minute? Kin you jus’ lemme set here and not bother me?”

That irritated him. “Set wherever the fuck you want.”

She hesitated, then dropped to her knees beside the fire and stretched her hands out over it—as if conjured by the gesture, a tiny flame sheeted from the bed of embers, brightening the glow on her palms. Madcat caught a whiff of creosote and thought she must have been standing close to the ties for quite some time to pick up that smell.

He cracked the cap of his third pint, had a swallow, and considered the girl. Her eyes were shut tight, squeezing out tears. Yet for all her apparent helplessness, the tense, forward-thrusting attitude of her neck and the thick scarlet twists of hair caging her white face gave her an uncanny look. He imagined she was casting an evil spell and the tears were the result of concentrated effort. She made a fretful noise in her throat, drew a breath that pulled the sweatshirt taut across her breasts.

“Want some wine?” he asked, holding out the bottle.

Her eyes snapped open and went toward it, the way a snake will quicken on spotting a mouse. She shook her head, sat back on her haunches. “There’s somethin’ I should tell you ’bout,” she said.

“Oh, that’s okay,” he said. “I got enough troubles, I don’t need to be taking yours on.”

“Naw, I ’spect you gon’ wanna hear this.” She hooked three of the scarlet snakes with her fingers, dragged them back from her face. “Me and Carter…this boy I met. We was smoking a joint—” she gestured toward the yard “—over in there somewheres. I had to go pee and I was comin’ back…I’s ’bout to crawl ’tween two cars to get to where Carter was settin’. And that’s when I seen this shadow rise up behind him. This man.” She made the words “this man” into a question. “He had a club or somethin’,” she went on. “He didn’t say a word, he just stood there a second like he’s thinkin’ things over, then he hit Carter in the head. Carter went flat on his face and he hit him again. He kept on hittin’ him even though there wasn’t no point to it. I could tell Carter was dead.” She stared into the embers. “I don’t reckon he seen me. I sure didn’t see him—he had his back turned the whole time I’s watching.” She looked pleadingly at Madcat. “I didn’t know where to turn. I mus’ been an hour wanderin’ round out there ’fore I run into you.”

The scattery way she talked out the story made him think she didn’t believe it—or maybe putting it into words had rendered it unbelievable. It rang true enough to him. “You better get on home,” he told her. He struggled to his feet, back-pocketed the pint.

“Home?” She gave a shaky-sounding laugh. “I’m a long way from home, mister.”

He shouldered his pack, settled the straps. She came to one knee, alarmed, and asked what he was doing. “Long as I can catch out on a freight train,” he said, “cops ain’t gon’ find me hanging ’round no fucking crime scene.” He headed out into the yard, trying to shake off his buzz, and she scrambled after him. “But you didn’t do nothin’!” she said. “You got nothin’ to worry ’bout!”

“You think that, then you don’t know shit about cops.” He picked up his pace.

“Kin I come?”

She was standing with knees together, hands clasped, head tipped to one side, the pose of a little girl left behind by older kids. Framed by the cathedral-like sweep of the bridge, she looked—with her strange punky hair—the picture of innocence freshly corrupted. He had the sense she knew the impression she was making.

“I never rode the trains before. Carter, he was gonna teach me…” She brought her clasped hands up to her chest. “I won’t be no burden, I swear. If you want I kin be with you. Y’know?” Meeting his gaze, she seemed to back away from commitment. “For a while, anyways,” she said. “If you want.”

He wasn’t sure he was interested in what she was offering—he’d been a long while without, almost three years, and most of his memories of women had to do with the trouble they landed you in and not the sweetness they brought.

“All right,” he said, after giving the notion a couple of turns. “But don’t go thinking you can count on me. All that’s happening here is we’re taking a train ride together. I’m nobody you want to be counting on.”

Often after one of his spells, and sometimes during them, Madcat would dream about trains—not the Union Pacific freights he was used to, but supernatural beings, mile-long metal snakes coiling around the switchbacks through a snow-peaked mountain range that went on forever, the only alive things in all that noble wilderness. Usually the dreams had a certain sinister quality, and this one started out no differently, with an old-fashioned black steel locomotive powered by an enormous human heart instead of a furnace, but then it changed in character, a variance of degree alone, because there was always an element of the sinister involved, and he thought that Grace—this, the girl told him, was her name, and she was from Ohio and had been living in squats, hanging out, surviving, but she was sick of the life and was heading to California to hook up with a rich uncle…He thought that Grace, then, must be responsible for this change. The locomotive, which was twice normal size, spat scraps of fire from its stack and howled like the ghost of a giant, but as they sped deeper into the night the howling gentled down into music, thunderous at first but growing increasingly easy on the ears, and streams of pink and aqua light mixed with the ebony smoke pluming from the stack, and the scraps of fire turned into glowing ankhs and crescents and all manner of Cabalistic sign, a torrent of bright arcana flowing back along the body of the train, enveloping it, so that the car where he and Grace were sheltering was transformed into a radiant space with the ambiance of a weird night club—like a retro neon sign come to life—where dancing silhouettes followed the elaborate suggestions of artfully dissonant strings and saxophones that sprayed clusters of mathematical symbols from their bells, and he and Grace were dancing too, gliding off to join the other featureless, faceless couples, buoyed up among syncopated martini glasses, tuxedo-wearing stick figures, old dream-blue drifts of jazz and smoke-ring Saturns…

He woke to find that the freight had pulled off onto a siding. His face was stiff from exposure and a back tooth was throbbing. Winter light shafted through the cracked door of the boxcar, shining upon frozen particles of dust so they looked like silver atoms. He and Grace had wound up spoon-style in the sleeping bag, and his erection was prodding her behind. He tried to shift away, but only succeeded in rubbing up against her.

“I cain’t sleep with you poking me,” she said muzzily. He unzipped his side of the sleeping bag and she protested: “I didn’t mean for you to get up!”

“I gotta piss,” he told her.

The cold floors stung his feet; he went on tiptoes to the door and peeked out to see if anyone was checking the cars. Fresh snow blanketed an expanse of rolling hills, framing rectangles of golden winter wheat. An ugly smear of egg-yolk yellow had leaked up from the eastern horizon; elsewhere the gunmetal blue of the sky had gone pale at the edges. The train was a local, stopping at every shithole, and Madcat figured they were still a ways from Missoula. He let fly and his urine brought up steam from the gravel.

“I hafta pee, too,” Grace said.

He dug a roll of toilet paper from his pack, tossed it to her, and went back to the door. A few seconds later she jittered up beside him, doing a hopping dance to fight the chill. In the sunlight her red hair was even more startling in contrast to her pallor, reminding him of a National Geographic photo he’d seen of African dancers with white clay masks, their hair dreaded up, caked with dried mud. She gave him a nudge, trying to move him aside, and said, “Lemme out.”

“You gotta do it over in the corner,” he said. “You go outside, brakeman or someone’s liable to see you.”

She squinched up her face but otherwise made no complaint.

Up ahead, about a quarter-mile from the tracks, lay a tiny reservation town. Trailers, shanties, rusted pickups. One trailer pitched at a derelict angle, slipped partway off its blocks. Clouds with pewter edges and blue-gray weather heavy in their bellies were pushing in low from the north.

The sound of Grace’s water tightened his neck.

It took him several minutes to stop shivering after he got back into the sleeping bag. He drew up his knees and turned onto his side, facing the wall. Grace propped herself on an elbow, leaned over him. A rope-end of her hair trailed stiff and coarse across his jaw, and he scratched where it tickled.

“You like my hair?” she asked.

“It’s all right. Doesn’t feel much like hair.”

She pretended to dust his nose with the bristly end and giggled. “I’m the same color down below,” she said. “Know that?”

“Guess I do now.”

She was silent a few ticks, then: “Why you so paranoid ’bout the cops? I mean I know what you said about ’em’s true, but you was in an awful hurry last night.”

He started to tell her to fuck off, but decided she was entitled. “My wife had an affair with a cop. I came home one afternoon, and they were going at it in my bed. I jumped on top of ’em and beat the shit out of him. I knew they’re bound to file charges, and with both him and my wife testifying, no way I wasn’t gon’ do some time.”

“So you took off runnin’, huh?”

“Went down to the yard and caught out on my first freight. I was just too sick to deal with all that lawyer crap. I’d been getting these headaches, blackouts and shit, for a couple years, and I couldn’t work. Doctor thought maybe it was job-related. Environmental. But wasn’t no way to prove it.” He eased onto his back and rolled his shoulders, working out a stiffness. “No money coming in, the wife gets unhappy, she goes to humping Dudley Do-right.” He made an embittered noise. “That’s my story. The Making of a Hobo. Reckon I can sell it to the movies?”

She didn’t appear to notice that he had made a joke. “You still sick?” she asked.

“I get spells now and then.”

With a shattering rush, a train stormed past on the adjoining track, and speech became impossible. The shadow of its passage caused the light to flicker like the beam from an old projector. Grace settled beside him.

“You know,” she said after the last car had gone by, “I bet my uncle could he’p you with them charges, I’s to ask him. Man must have a dozen lawyers workin’ for him. Maybe you should come on down to LA with me and see what’s what.”

“’Round Tucson’s where I like to winter,” he said.

She snuggled closer and the warmth of her body seeped into him; soon his erection returned.

“’Pears you gon’ have trouble sleepin’.” Her fingers traipsed across his thigh. “Want me to take care of that for you?”

He felt oddly shy and looked away from her. “Yeah. Sure…whatever.”

“Now that’s what a girl wants to hear.” She removed her hand and mimicked his delivery. “‘Sure…whatever.’ Hey, I can go on back to sleep if you’re not interested. But if you are, it’d be nice to know I’s bein’ ’preciated.”

“I appreciate it,” he said.

“That’s a little better, but still…” She cupped his face in her hands. “C’mon, tell me somethin’. Say.”

Her irises were a deep, dark blue, the same hard color that held at the top of a midafternoon winter sky, edged with bits of topaz and gold like the geometric scraps you find inside a kaleidoscope. “I want…” he said, and then, a little fazed by her closeness, lost track of things.

“Well, there you go,” she said. “I almos’ believed that one.”

The freight rolled eastward. Grace’s arms and legs were tomboyish, lean, the architecture of her ribs plain to see, but her breasts were heavy, the skin soft as crepe and so pale that the veins showed through. Blue highways on the map of a snowy country. She braced on his chest with one hand, straddled his hips and fitted her blood-colored bush to him. The tightness of her took his breath. “I know you like that,” she said, straightening above him. “I can tell jus’ how much you like it.” She reached back and pulled the sleeping bag cover up behind her as if it were a vampire’s cape, shrouded herself in it so that only wintry blue eyes and scarlet hair were visible of the terrible white creature she was pretending to be. Then with a fang-bearing hiss, she sank down atop him, enclosing them in a rattling darkness that lasted all the way to Missoula.

That night they showered up and ate at a mission in Missoula, then skipped out on the preaching and spent much of the next day obtaining emergency food stamps, which they sold for fifty cents on the dollar to a mom-and-pop grocery. They bought supplies, mostly wine, and Grace found herself some clean clothes and a used knapsack at the Goodwill. During rush hour she worked the sign, stood at a busy intersection holding a piece of cardboard upon which she’d written Please Help Me Get Home, and took in close to a hundred dollars—that gave them more than two hundred to travel on, even after spending twenty-six on a motel with In-Room Triple XXX Adult Videos.

“Why cain’t we do like we done in Spokane?” she asked the following morning as they labored up a hill west of town, moving through a stand of old-growth pine, heading for a section of track that climbed a steep grade. “Whyn’t we jus’ go in the freight yard and find us a car?”

“Spokane’s a pussy yard,” Madcat said. “Any damn fool can catch out of Spokane. In Missoula the bulls’ll bust your head open, then run you in for trespassing.”

It was good traveling weather, cold and clear, gusting a bit. Patches of sunstruck needles like complicated golden ideograms trembled on the forest floor, and every so often the dark green pine-tops would lift in a flow of wind and sway all to one side with the ponderous slowness of dancing bears. When they reached the tracks Madcat had Grace tie off the cuffs of her jeans with an extra pair of shoelaces so they wouldn’t catch on anything. “We gon’ be looking for a grain car,” he said. “Got a little porch on the front end where two can ride. Now when it comes it won’t be going real fast, but it’s going faster than it looks, so don’t try and jump on it. You gotta respect the steel. You go throwing yourself at it, you liable to wind up underneath the train. What you do is, you grab hold of the hand rails and let your feet drag along in the gravel till you feel under control. Then you can haul yourself up.”

The side of the hill had been cut away, leaving a cliff of pinkish stone looming above the tracks. They sat with their backs against it, gazing out over the forested slope. Madcat sipped from a jug of Iron Horse and Grace fired up a hand-rolled, then exhaled a glowing cloud of smoke that boiled furiously for an instant in the strong sun.

“Where’s this train taking us?” she asked.

“Klamath Falls, Oregon. Got a big switchyard there. Won’t be hard finding something heading for Tucson.”

“I cain’t understand why you won’t at leas’ consider going to California,” she said querulously.

“’Cause I’m going to Tucson. Cops there don’t give a damn ’bout a few tramps drinking their wine and smoking their dope. And that’s how I like things.”

“Yeah, but if you’s to come to California, my uncle might could he’p you with your legal problems.”

“Your uncle got himself a cement pond?” he asked.

She looked at him askance. “What you talkin’ ’bout?”

“I want to know if he’s got a cement pond, ’cause the only hillbilly bitch I know’s got a rich uncle in LA’s named Ellie Mae Clampett.” He had another swallow of wine and felt a sudden ebullient rush, as if that swallow had enabled him to commune with the group consciousness of drunkards, to tap into their reservoir of well-being. “I guess it’s possible a homeless redneck female talks like you, all ungrammatical and shit, could have herself a doting uncle with a big bank account. And I suppose this uncle could have such a fine liberal sensibility, he’d be inclined to extend himself on behalf of the unemployable alcoholic who’s fucking his niece. But I gotta tell you, it seems like a long shot.”

She flipped away her cigarette and stared at him meanly. “You don’t believe me ’bout my uncle? You sayin’ I’m lyin’?”

“I’m saying I intend to winter in Tucson. You want to go with me…great. If not…” His expansive gesture indicated a world of possibility beyond the horizon.

“I jus’ don’t understand you.” Grace lowered her head so that her face was shrouded in dreadlocks—to Madcat’s eye they resembled the alluring tendrils of an anemone; he imagined tiny fish trapped among them, dissolving in a haze of scarlet toxicity. “Ever’ time I say anything you disagree with,” she went on, “you treat me so cold. I don’t know what I do to deserve it.”

“Cold? I’ll tell you what’s cold! Cold’s a woman watches her boyfriend get his brains bashed in, then a few hours later she’s jammin’ with some tramp.”

“I tol’ you Carter wasn’t my boyfriend! I didn’t know him more’n couple hours, and all we did was smoke a joint, talk a little. It ain’t like we had a relationship.”

“What about us? We got a relationship? I get my brains bashed in, how long you figure it’ll be ’fore you feel up to having consensual sex?”

She looked out toward the cobalt line at the ends of the earth. “I do what I hafta to survive. I’m no differnt ’n you.” She gave him a sideways glance. “Yeah, I think we could have us a relationship. Leas’ we got some ’sperience of one another and it ain’t killed us yet. You might discover you like me a lot, you stop tryin’ so hard to pretend you don’t.”

The burst of energy that had fueled Madcat’s contentiousness faded and he sat nursing his pint, listening to the pour of the wind, trying to hear in it the chunky rhythms of an approaching train.

“What’s your real name?” Grace asked.

“Jimmy.”

“Jimmy what?”

“Jimmy That’s All You Fucking Need To Know. Okay?”

“Okay! Don’t get your panties in a bunch!” Then, after a pause: “How’d you get your train name? You make it up yourself?”

His response was to affect a moronic laugh.

“I should get myself a name, I guess, I’m gon’ be ridin’.” She made a show of thought, tapping her chin with a forefinger and squinting, clicking her teeth with her tongue. “I cain’t come up with nothin’ sounds right. Maybe you should gimme a name.”

A powerful lethargy overcame him and the patch of gravel between his feet seemed to acquire topographical significance, as if it were the surface of an alien planet seen from space—a flat of cracked granite lorded over by a single dusty weed so vast, the minuscule creatures who dwelled in its shadow would perceive it as a pathway to the divine and send forth pilgrims who would die in the process of ascension.

“Jimmy!” Grace spoke with such urgency, it penetrated his fog.

“What?” he said, sitting up straight. “What is it?”

She was tying off her dreads with an elastic band, gathering them into a Medusoid sheaf behind her head, studying him without expression. The shadow cast by her raised elbows was like a mask of gray wings that came down onto her cheeks, and he knew death was in her, that whether sent or by herself commanded, she had come to gather him. He tried not to believe it, though the truth was clear and undeniable, like a letter graven on her brow. He felt a satin pillow beneath his head and saw his eyes reflected by a mirror inside a coffin lid.

“Nothin’,” she said, giving a dry, satisfied-sounding laugh, as if some critical judgment had been borne out. “Never mind.”

Near nightfall of the next day, they jumped off the train outside the Klamath Falls yard and pushed their way through thickets of leafless bushes with candy wrappers, condoms, cigarette cellophane, and toilet tissue stuck to their twigs, so profuse they might have been some sort of unnatural floral productions. A line of dusky orange marked the horizon, dividing darkness from the dark land, and a west wind was blowing with a feverish rhythm, gentle gusts alternating with featherings, then long oceanic swells carrying streaks of unseasonable warmth. As he slogged over the mucky ground, Madcat, coming off an afternoon drunk, broke a light sweat.

Two hobos were jungled up in a clearing near the edge of the yard, hunched beside a crackling fire, drinking malt liquor. There was Horizontal Tom, a scrawny old man whose ravaged face peered out from snarls of iron-gray beard and hair like a mad hermit spying from behind a shrub, and F-Trooper, a lanky man in his forties with straight black hair hanging to his shoulders, an adobe complexion, and a chiseled, long-jawed face that might have been handsome if not for its rattled expression. Wearing chinos and a tattered AIM T-shirt. When he caught sight of Madcat he got to his feet, picked up two forty-ouncers, and went to do his drinking elsewhere.

“Fuckin’ Indian motherfucker,” Tom said with some fondness. “He just can’t abide too much company, but otherwise he ain’t so bad.”

“Son of a bitch can’t abide me is what it is,” Madcat said. “I ain’t never said shit to him, couple times we met, but he always acts like I been kicking his dog.”

“Hell, he acts like that with ever’body. Took him five, six years to warm up to me.” Tom bunched his sleeping bag up around his head, fashioning it into a cowl. “Could be he’s just shy.”

“Yeah, uh-huh.” Madcat sank to his knees by the fire, Grace beside him. “Yon and him riding together?”

“Nah. I come out on a hotshot from Dilworth couple days ago. Found him campin’ here. He’s waitin’ for somethin’ headin’ down to Roseville. Me, I’m—”

“Roseville’s in California, ain’t it?” asked Grace.

“If you wanna call Sacramento California.” Tom had a pull from his bottle, and some of the brew dribbled out the side of his mouth, beading up in the tangles of hair, glittering in the firelight—his face shadowed dramatically by the cowl, he might have been an old philosopher-king with jewels woven in his beard. “I’m headin’ for Mexico,” he went on. “Copper Canyon. Ever been down that way?”

Grace allowed that she had not.

“Big as the Grand Canyon and never been exploited, ’cause they ain’t no roads to it. Only way to get there’s by hoppin’ a freight.” Tom grinned, showing eight or nine teeth banded with brown and yellow stains like the stratifications on canyon walls; he pitched his voice low. “They got organ-pipe cactus been there since the conquistadors. Ol’ great-granddaddy iguanas seven foot long.” He reached across the fire and poked Grace’s knee. “Yon oughta ride down with me and see it. It’s amazin’! Like campin’ out in the middle of a goddamn hallucination!”

“I figure we’re gonna lay up in Tucson a while,” Madcat said.

“But we might make it down there eventually.”

Grace excused herself, saying she was going to find a place to camp, and went off into the hushes, dragging Madcat’s pack. Tom tracked her backside out of sight. “That’s a reg’lar little ditch witch you got yourself there. How’d you two hook up?”

Madcat told him. “I don’t know if I believe her ’bout the boy getting killed,” he said. “She exaggerates some.”

“These days there’s always somebody goin’ ’round killin’ out here.” Tom shook his head somberly. “It’s the drugs. They ruint the rest of society, now they ruinin’ things for the hobo.” He spat into the fire, and a tongue of orange flame flickered back at him. “How old you figger she is?”

“Seventeen, eighteen…I don’t know.”

“Eighteen might be pushin’ it,” Tom said, after due consideration. “She looks like jailbait to me. These crusty punk girls, seventeen’s ’bout when they get to feelin’ wore down, they start wantin’ to find themselves a man they can depend on. Sixteen…all they want for you is to take ’em somewhere on a train. But seventeen’s when they go home…if they gotta home. Or they latch onto an older man.” He leaned toward Madcat, intending—it appeared—to give him a friendly nudge, but found he couldn’t reach that far, wobbled, and nearly fell into the fire. “You be a fool not to let her latch onto you,” he said on regaining his balance. “She’s ’bout the best-lookin’ thing I seen out here. You was to take her to Britt, to the hobo convention, she’d be like Raquel fuckin’ Welch compared to them hairy hogs show up there.”

Tom seemed to lose the thread of what he was saying, stared off toward the yard. Glowing pinpricks were visible through the dead twigs—sentry lights at the edge of the yard—and a distant clamor could be heard, a windy mingling of bells and whistles and metallic thuds.

“’Member Jabberjaw? That ol’ girl I was ridin’ with a few years back?” Tom asked. Madcat said, Yeah, he sure did, and then Tom said, “Jesus Lord, I have slept with some scary-lookin’ women.”

He began talking about old girlfriends, then about hobo marriages he’d witnessed, ceremonies variously uniting Misty Rose, Diamond Dan, Dogman Jerry—and Madcat took to imagining a ceremony involving himself and Grace. They were standing on a flatcar that was being pulled by four white locomotives running abreast on four silver tracks, on wheels that were bleeding, and they were passing beneath a sky bigger than a Montana sky ruled by two black suns and a high-flying half moon, a thousand light years of dark wintry blue and a filigree of clouds like feathers, fishbones, lace. Grace had on a T-shirt and jeans and a circlet with a veil behind to cover her hair—a Maid Marian cap—and her face was chalky, dead calm, but the scarlet dreadlocks were seething beneath the veil, and the ring in the palm of her hand was alive, a golden worm eternally swallowing itself…

He coughed, gave his head a shake, and found he was staring through a maze of leafless twigs at one of the sentry lights. Drunk, oblivious to all else, Tom was still chattering away. Rock-and-roll music was playing somewhere nearby, and Madcat could hear Grace’s laughter coming from the same general direction. He heaved up to a knee and peered toward the yard.

“Oh, yeah,” said Tom behind him. “You might want to check on that. That’s been goin’ on a while now.”

Madcat staggered through the bushes, slapping branches aside, and soon emerged onto a black plain that smelled of cinders, and stretched to the limits of his vision. Near at hand the plain was crisscrossed by tracks, with here and there a stray boxcar or two; several hundred yards farther in lay an area of furious activity, blazing spotlights sweeping across shadowy trains, engine units shuttling back and forth, brightly colored repair carts trundling about; and in the farthest reaches was a tumultuous area of white glare and roiling smoke from which the darkly articulated shapes of mechanical cranes surfaced now and again, moving with the jerky imprecision of science fiction insects.

Grace was dancing along a section of outlying track, shaking her ass, lifting her hair up behind her head, and F-Trooper was stumbling after her, holding a forty ouncer and a portable radio. He got right on her butt and thrust awkwardly with his hips, almost dry-humping her, and when she danced away, he said, “Whoa! Awright! Unh-yeah!” and then with a sodden laugh hurried to catch up. Watching them, Madcat felt anger, but anger partially occluded by the vagueness and unease that sometimes preceded a migraine.

“Hi, Jimmy!” Grace caught sight of him and waved cheerfully. “You through talkin’ to your friend?”

F-Trooper weaved to the side and stood with his legs spread, gazing stupidly at him.

Madcat walked over to Grace, the friated soil crunching beneath his boots; he grabbed her arm and said, “Come on.”

She pushed at his chest, tried to break free, and said, “Fuck you! Jus’ who the fuck you think you are?” She tried another break, flung herself away, whipped her head about. Her dreadlocks whacked him in the face, and he let go, reeled backward. Then he heard her yell, “Jimmy! Watch out!”

F-Trooper had dropped the radio and was charging at him, preparing to swing his bottle. Madcat stepped inside the swing, seized two handfuls of the man’s hair, and headbutted him, simultaneously bringing up a knee. The Indian blocked the knee, but Madcat butted him again and that dropped him. He kicked the man hard in the ribs, the stomach, then in the tailbone as he crawled away. F-Trooper flopped onto his back. “Aw shit…Jesus!” he said. Blood slickered his forehead.

“Fuck you trying to do?” Madcat turned to Grace, who had taken refuge off along the tracks and was managing to look at once horrified and delighted. “You want to ride to California with this fuckwit? That what this is about?”

“Naw…un-uh!” She hustled over to him, took his face in her hands, and whispered, “I think he’s the one, Jimmy. He’s the one killed Carter.”

“Bullshit!” He shoved her away, took a few unsteady steps back toward the camp. The pressure in his head was building, the migraine about to spike.

“I swear!” she said, coming up beside him, still keeping her voice down. “That’s why I’s bein’ so nice to him. I was tryin’ to find out stuff. He told me he was in Spokane same night we was.”

Madcat made an effort to focus. Her dreadlocks appeared to be quivering, and her eyes gave back hot glints of a sentry light. “You told me you never saw the guy’s face,” he said, and planted a fist against his brow to push back the bad feeling.

“Un-uh! I said he had his back to me. I could see some of his face, I jus’ couldn’t see it all. But I’m pretty sure now he’s the one. What you think we should do?” When he did not answer, she leaned into him, pressing the softness of her breast against his arm. “You don’t have to worry ’bout me goin’ nowhere, Jimmy. I really care ’bout you. Ain’t I proved it?”

She was always working two propositions, he realized, prepared to switch off whenever one or the other proved untenable. Maybe she believed in both—who could say? Whatever, there would always be these tests, one of which he would eventually fail…though, he also realized, thinking back to her shout of warning, it wasn’t clear that she’d leave him even then. It was like they were married already, working behind that fabulous sacramental inertia.

“You havin’ one of your spells? You are, ain’tcha?” She linked arms with him. “C’mon back to camp. I fixed it up real nice. Made us a lean-to and ever’thing. You get some wine in you, you’ll feel better. You kin sleep and I’ll keep watch ’case that asshole tries anything.” She cast a wicked glance back at F-Trooper. “Not that I think he will. ’Pears you busted his little red wagon all to hell.”

As she led him toward camp, from behind came a sound of breaking glass. F-Trooper had thrown his bottle at them, missing by a wide mark. He was sitting slumped forward, his legs spread, like a big bloody baby; the busted radio fizzed and clicked by his side. The skin of his forehead had split open, painting his face a glistening red, and he was so badly lumped up above the eyes, it put Madcat in mind of atomic mutants in movie monster magazines. Witness gave him no pleasure. It was not a good thing to be reminded that a man who had hit rock bottom could always find a deeper place to fall.

“Fuckin’…” F-Trooper’s voice thickened and he had to spit. “Goddamn fuckin’ malt liquor!” The weak force of his glare seemed to be carried by a breath of wind that stirred black motes up from the tracks. “I’d been drinkin’ whiskey,” he said in a piteous tone, “I’d a kicked your ass!”

It must have been a random noise that woke Madcat, an operation of pure chance, unless God or something whispered in his ear, saying, “Man, you better get your scrawny butt up or else you be sleepin’ a long time,” and why would any deity worth a shit bother with the likes of him…? Yet he couldn’t quite reject the notion that some lame-ass train god, an old smoke-colored slob with a dead cigar stuck in his mouth, wearing a patched funeral suit and a top hat with a sprung lid, still had some bitter use for him and had flicked a grungy black finger to send a night bird screeching overhead, sounding the alarm. Whatever the cause, when the roof of the lean-to was ripped away, his eyes were open and he was sufficiently alert to roll off to the side and then went bellycrawling into the bushes.

Grace was screaming, F-Trooper was roaring curses, and all Madcat could see was dark on dark until he got turned around and spotted the sentry lights. He scrambled up, a broken twig scoring his cheek, and made for them, bursting out of the thickets and sprinting some fifty feet out into the yard. There he stopped and called back: “Grace! You all right?”

F-Trooper stepped out from the thickets, more shadow than man, carrying an ax handle at the ready. He was holding his ribs, and his movements were cautious, rickety; but Madcat had no desire to go against that ax handle. He was still half-drunk, uncertain of his own physical capacities, and though the rough ground tore at his bare feet, he set off running, aiming for the center of the yard. If it hadn’t been for Grace, he might have tried to lose F-Trooper among the trains and then headed for the mission in Roseville where he could hustle up a new pair of boots. But as he ran, glancing back at his pursuer, he noticed that the Indian was losing energy with every step, and Madcat soon discovered that he was able to maintain a secure distance by merely jogging. F-Trooper staggered, flailed, stumbled, occasionally fell, and finally began to run in a low crouch, huffing and grunting, arms nearly dragging on the ground, like a man undergoing a transformation into some more primitive form. Madcat slowed his pace further.

They had entered that portion of the yard where earlier there had been tremendous activity. It was quiet now, and dark. No spotlights, no handcars, no repair carts. The train the crews had been putting together was ready to go. Madcat led F-Trooper down a narrow avenue between two long strings of cars. Container cars, flatcars, 48s, grain cars, boxcars. With their great painted monograms—SFR, UP, XTRA, and such—dully agleam in the thick night, and looming so high that only a strip of moonless sky was visible overhead, they had the gravity of sleeping beasts, creatures whose hearts beat once a millennium, their caught breaths hardened into cold iron. Madcat went to walking sideways, watching F-Trooper reel against the cars like a drunk trying to negotiate a narrow hallway. Spittle hung from his jaw, and his eyes were like bullseyes, the pupils completely ringed by white. When it was clear that he had reached the point of exhaustion, his gait reduced to an enfeebled limp, Madcat turned to confront him. F-Trooper’s face displayed a stuporous resolve—he continued his approach without giving the slightest sign of anger or fear, faltering only when his legs betrayed him. Drawing near, he swung the ax handle, but the swing was weak and off balance. Madcat had little difficulty catching his wrist and wresting the club free. He butt-ended the man to the jaw and F-Trooper crumpled without a sound, collapsing onto his side, one arm outflung behind him, half-resting beneath the porch of a grain car.

The violence adrenalized Madcat, washed away the residue of drunkenness. He felt amazingly clear-headed. Clearer than he had felt in a long while. Under ordinary circumstances, muddled with wine, he would have tossed the ax handle aside and set off to find Grace; but now he realized there was an important decision to be made. If he were to walk away, leaving things as they stood, he would likely have cause to regret it. F-Trooper, in his judgment, was too far gone to reason with and obviously not the sort to forgive and forget. The last thing Madcat wanted was to be happily sloshed in a jungle somewhere and have the Indian sneak up behind him. It was bound to happen sooner or later. He and F-Trooper traveled the same roads. This was something that had to be done. Purely a matter of self-defense.

He grabbed F-Trooper by the shirt, pulled him from beneath the car, straddled the body. He tightened his grip on the ax handle. The Indian’s head lolled to the side and he let out a guttering noise, half gargle, half snore. With his bruises and lumps and cuts, fresh blood stringing from the corner of his mouth, a brewery stink rising from his flesh, he was a thoroughly pitiable item. Madcat was terrified by the step he was about to take, in the sight of a judgmental God. A preemptive strike was called for, a threat to his security had to be neutralized. Though the logic of nations would carry no weight in a court of law, such was the basis of ethical action on the rails, where men carried their paltry kingdoms in their packs. He had no choice. But as he lifted the ax handle high, he was struck by a sudden recognition, less than a recollection yet sharper than an instance of déjà vu, and he seemed to remember, almost to see himself standing in this same position with a half moon flying overhead and at his feet a teenage boy sitting cross-legged in a patch of weeds. It was only a partial glimpse, as if a flashbulb had popped inside his skull, illuminating a confusion of shadows too complicated to allow certain identification; but the shock of it sent him staggering back. He lost his footing on the uneven ground and sat down hard, scraping his hands on the gravel. The idea that he might have committed a senseless murder during a blackout, and that muscle memory or a faulty circuit in his brain had rewired him to the moment…it roused no great revulsion in him, no shiver of moral dismay. But the knowledge that he must have sunk to some troglodyte level where conscience no longer even registered, where unrepentant viciousness was part of the human circuitry, that knocked away the last flimsy props of his self-respect.

F-Trooper groaned. Soon he would regain consciousness, but Madcat was too addled, too disheartened to act. All his clarity was evaporating. Then a compromise occurred to him. He crawled over to F-Trooper, wrangled off his belt, lashed his hands, and secured the free end to the grain car’s porch, immobilizing him. This done, Madcat fell back and lay gazing up at the sky. Whatever moon ruled, it was hidden behind cloud cover baked to a dusty orange by the reflected glare of Klamath Falls. He tried to deny what he’d imagined he had seen, telling himself that, with his headaches and the drinking, he was liable to see anything—hell, his brain was on the fritz most of the time, buzzing and clicking like F-Trooper’s busted radio. Even now he was having trouble stringing thoughts together. So many feelings and facts and memories were churning inside him, his head was like a room in which too many conversations were going on for him to make sense of any one, and a golden hole was opening in his vision, the way a hole gets burned into a piece of paper by bright sunlight directed through a magnifying glass, and he heard a hosanna shout so vast it might have been braided together out of every shout of joy and tribulation ever uttered, and he realized that all the sound and light causing his confusion was coming from a train.

This was no old-fashioned steam-powered locomotive, but a Streamliner, one of those trains named Zephyr or Coronado, an emblem of 1950s Futurism with double-decker lounge cars and a Silver Streak-style engine, only this particular engine was gold with a green windshield, so the effect was of a great sleek golden beast wearing emerald shades. It was speeding straight at him, radiating the sort of holy sunrays that artists usually depict emanating from Buddhas and Krishnas and Christs, and it was taking up every inch of space between the strings of cars. He braced for the impact, squeezing his eyes shut. Yet somehow it missed him and roared on past—he caught sight of Grace’s dreadlocks whipping out the engineer’s window. He thought he was safe once the last car had gone by, but the train’s speed was such that the draft sucked him up like a scrap of paper and he went bouncing along behind it, banging down onto the rails and flipping up, skipping over the ties. It hurt like hellfire. His legs snapped, bones splintered and poked out his flesh. But he had no regrets. He’d known Grace was trouble from the get-go, and maybe that was why he had hooked up with her, maybe he’d been looking for that kind of trouble—things had not been going well, and the best he could have hoped for was a few more bad years, years of drunkenness and headaches and blackouts, before he was knifed or shot or died of life’s own poison. This way, at least, he’d gotten to feel some things he’d forgotten how to feel, because though Grace was, at heart, no-account, she knew how to make it sweet, this farewell ride, this little going away party with the lowlife angel of death.

The train receded down a golden tunnel, dragging with it the bloody fragments of his imaginary corpse, and the headache that followed left Madcat curled up in pain beside the rails, unmindful of everything around him. The pain was so intense, it formed a barrier between the moment and all that had gone before, and when at last it abated, it took him a while to notice that the grain car to which he had lashed F-Trooper was missing—the entire string of cars was missing—and longer yet to comprehend that the grain car had been part of the train put together earlier in the evening, and now, with F-Trooper attached, was gone off on its run. He stared at the patch of gravel where the Indian had fallen, numbed by the terrible character of the death. Moving awkwardly, stiffly, he got to his feet. He found he was still holding the ax handle and let it fall. It wasn’t his fault, he told himself. It was the world. This world of mystical steel and cheap wine and lonesome fuck-ups in which even an act of mercy, and that’s what it had been, no matter how fuzzily motivated it seemed at the time…even an act of mercy could result in blood. But of course it was his fault. He couldn’t escape what he had done, nor could he escape what he might have done in Spokane. The boneyard reality of it all bred a weakness in his limbs; he thought he could feel some feathery, insubstantial thing fluttering behind his brow. He started trudging back toward the thickets, following the remaining string of cars, stopping now and then to lean against them.

Parked about fifty feet from the end of the string was a police cruiser, startlingly white and defined against the bleak topography of black dirt and curving tracks. The sight brought Madcat up short. His instinct was to run, but he had no energy left. The longer he stood there, the more alluring became the prospect of ceding authority over his life to the competency of jailers and the consolation of lawyers, to a controlled environment with hot meals and daytime TV and card games, even if in the end it led to the injection. The police car fascinated him. It was empty and appeared to be talking to itself in angry squawks, as if it had developed the power of human speech and was cursing the desolation amidst which it had been abandoned. When Grace called to him, before he spotted her coming across the yard, he half-believed the car had succeeded in mimicking her voice.

“You crazy?” she said. “The cops is ever’where! They ’rested your friend, but I hid our stuff out so far from the fire, they never seen me.” She tugged at his arm. “C’mon! We gotta get goin’!”

“Think maybe it was me killed your boyfriend?” he asked.

Dumfounded, she peered at him through the raggedy curtain of her dreads. “What?”

“Back in Spokane. Was it me?” He turned his back to her, held his arm up as if brandishing a club. “This look like what you saw?”

Incredulity showed in her face. “Naw, it was that Indian fella…I’m almos’ positive.”

“It coulda been me,” he said. “Coulda been me in one of my blackouts.”

“It was the Indian.” She shot him a dubious look. “F-Troop or whatever. Why you goin’ on this way?”

What if it were true? he wondered. What if he’d rid the world of a murderer? What were the odds of that—of anything—being true? He couldn’t be sure that Grace was being straight with him about the dead boy. Could he have convicted himself of a murder that had never been committed? He would have liked to force the truth out of her, but he knew her well enough to understand that once she swore something had happened, she would never forswear it, however improbable the facts made it appear. The things that were truest for her were the lies she relied on, and if one or another accidentally turned out to be true, it would still come out a lie in her head.

“C’mon, Jimmy! Le’s go!” She pulled harder on his arm, yet her expression gave scant sign of emotion. Her face seemed in its frail angularity the face of a wicked androgynous fairy peeking from among scarlet rushes, not quite hiding a knowing smile. Perhaps he misread her, perhaps that almost imperceptible curvature of the lips merely reflected a degree of strain. But that, in the end, was why he let her drag him away—the intimation that her secret self was peeking out from behind the clownish surface she usually presented to the world, and that she wanted something other than protection on a long train ride, that she signified an ending more intricate than death, and had some sly and delightful, albeit not yet formulated, transmortal purpose for which she now intended to save him.

Unless you were a runaway child and fell prey to one of the many pedophiles who frequented the area, the Salt Lake City freight yard could be an agreeable place for someone wanting a free train ride. The bulls had little interest in tramps, and the crews were a generally friendly bunch, an attitude that manifested in their habit of leaving a few boxcars open on every train that went out. Madcat and Grace had located such a car and were sitting with their backs against a wall, looking out the door, which was cracked so wide it might have been a picture window offering a view of a fireball sun declining behind snow peaks.

“What we gon’ do for money in Tucson?” Grace asked out of the blue.

“The usual. Maybe pick up some day work here’n there.”

Grace fingered the edge of the sleeping bag. “I waited tables in this fancy cocktail bar one time—made me some serious money. If I had a job like that, maybe we could get us a place. Not for forever, y’know. Jus’ for a coupla months. Be nice to have our own place for a coupla months, wouldn’t it?”

“Might,” he said. “Long as we stay away from rent hassles. I had enough of that shit.”

“You don’t need to say nothin’ ’bout that. I’m with you there.” She tucked in her chin and inspected the front of her new sweatshirt, smoothed out the ironed-on decal of a fluffy white kitten. “Y’know, I think we’re startin’ to learn ’bout each other. We’re gettin’ to where we can start workin’ stuff out.”

A kid with a shaved head, wearing an army jacket and jeans, was angling toward the car, cutting across a weedy patch. Madcat kept an eye on him.

“It’s like with now,” Grace said. “I’m okay with goin’ to Tucson, ’cause I wanna make you happy. But that don’t mean I’m givin’ up on takin’ you to visit my uncle. I figger it’ll come time when you’ll wanna do that for me.”

The kid took a stand some twenty-five feet away and stared at Grace. His neck was heavily tattooed, his facial jewelry picked up glints of the dying sun. Grace didn’t appear to notice him. Her mime-pale face wore a distracted expression as she contemplated some fictive future. Madcat vibed a warning at the kid, cautioning him to get his Road-Warrior-looking ass the hell and gone.

“I think you gon’ be surprised,” said Grace. “Two people get together, neither one of ’em knows what’s gon’ happen at first. But after ’while—” she groped at the air, like an artist trying to describe a half-imagined shape “—you can sorta feel how it’s gon’ be.”

You don’t know what’s in me, Madcat beamed at the kid. Hell, I don’t know myself. But you don’t want to find out.

A thin ridge of cloud like the coast of a rugged country hovered above the peaks, dark gray hills and cliffs of cloud washed to blood-red underneath.

“Ain’t like I kin see it or nothin’,” said Grace. “If I could—” she gave a snort of laughter “—we wouldn’t never have no troubles. I’d jus’ draw us a map straight on to wherever it is we’re bound.”

The kid spun on his heels and set out east along the tracks, head down, hands thrust in his jacket pockets, as if disappointed in life.

“And where’s that?” Madcat asked. “Where it is you figure we’re bound? Besides Tucson, I’m talking.”

“I don’t know.” Grace shrugged, the blithe gesture of a child responding to a question that didn’t concern her; then she cut her eyes toward him and for an instant she became visible in the way she had back in Klamath Falls—a clever spirit with unguessable motives. “There’s one thing I do know. You think you-’n’-me’s jus’ about me givin’ you sugar, and you takin’ care of me. But I’m gon’ be doin’ my share of takin’ care of you from here out.”

The cloudy coast was breaking up into islands and floating castles, and the sky was separating into bands of color—a broad swath of scarlet behind the peaks edged by a narrow strip of paler red, bordered in turn by a still narrower strip of orange, then the thinnest stripe of peach, and above all that a reach of aquamarine, a color with the sort of mineral purity that you can see behind the clouds in museum paintings of old Italian angels.

Entranced by this evolving masterpiece, Grace said, “You always pokin’ fun at things I say. You like to tell yourself the only reason you ever ask me anything is so’s you kin get a laugh. But you hear what I’m sayin’. I kin tell. People get close, they bound to change one another. They make each other weaker or stronger. That’s why the preacher don’t say for better or worse or in case things stay the same.” She rested her chin on her drawn-up knees, still gazing at the sky which was developing a cinematic symmetry, balconies of gaudily colored cloud arrayed against a backdrop dominated by great blades of sanguine light—a majestic sight that seemed to bear slight relation to the shriveled-up ball of fire that had produced it. “You’n me, we gon’ be strong!” Grace went on. “We gon’ shake things up. Know why? ’Cause I ain’t lettin’ you be weak. You gon’ be my strength, but I’m gon’ be your heart.”

She continued talking, but the conviction ebbed from her words and her speech grew increasingly fragmented, disconnected. Soon she stopped altogether, and Madcat, who had been lulled and persuaded by her voice, felt that he had been hurled from a place in the sky to a cold boxcar floor. The heavy silence of the yard made him think everything was listening, watching, and uncomfortable in the sight of God, he shifted about, trying to restore his psychic equilibrium. Grace settled back against the wall and let out a sigh that seemed to express the recollection of some sad certainty. Then she pointed to the sky and said, “I reckon it mus’ be California that way.”