Two Trains Running

“Bullshit…ten minutes! Ain’t no country like this ten minutes out of Klamath Falls.”

“Sure there is,” said the man. “You just never rode it before.”

Billy noticed another unsettling thing. It was warmish in the car. An October night at altitude, he should be shivering like a wet cat. He’d squeeze himself into his mummy sack, then wedge the sack into the sleeping bag, and he’d still be cold. A terrible thought, the sort he usually dismissed as the result of too much drink, sprouted in his brain and sent out roots into every fissure, replacing his fear of getting thrown out of the car with a deeper, more soul-afflicting fear.

“What’s goin’ on here?” he said. “What happened to me?”

The man seemed to be assessing Billy, gauging his quality.

“Was it my liver?” Billy said. “My liver give out? Somebody bust my head open? What was it?”

“You ain’t dead, that’s what you goin’ on about,” said the man. “Dead’s what you almost was. Alive’s what’s in front of you.”

What with the wine he’d consumed and the blow to his head, Billy’s mind worked even less efficiently than normal, and he was coming to view the man as a spirit guide of some sort, one sent to escort him to his eternal torment.

“Okay,” he said. “I hear what you’re sayin’. But if I was…if I’s back in the yard and I could see myself now, I’d think I was dead, wouldn’t I?”

“Who the hell knows what you’d be thinkin’, all the wine you got in ya.” The man shoved the mutt’s behind off his hat brim and jammed the hat onto his head—it was fashioned out of beige leather and shaped cowboy-style, with the brim turned down in front and the crown hand-notched. “Whyn’t you get some sleep? It all be a lot clearer come mornin’.”

The floor was softer than any floor Billy had ever run across in a boxcar—that and the warmth made the notion of sleep inviting. But he had the idea that if he went to sleep, he would not wake up happy. “Fuck sleep!” he said. “I want you to tell me what’s goin’ on!”

“You do what ya feel, friend. But I’m gonna close my eyes for a while.” The man turned onto his side and went to patting a stuffed cloth sack—one of three he had with him—into a pillow. He glanced over at Billy and said, “What’s your name?”

“You know damn well what’s my name! You the one sent to bring me.”

The man grimaced. “What is it? Ashcan Ike? The Philadelphia Fuck-up…some shit like that?”

Billy told him.

“Billy Long Gone,” said the man. “Huh! You sure got the right moniker to be catchin’ this particular ride.” He settled on his pillow, pushed the hat down over his eyes. “Maybe tomorrow you’ll feel good enough to tell me your real name.”

An hour or so after the big man started snoring, the train snaked down out of the mountains and onto a marshy plain that put Billy in mind of an illustration in a pop-up dinosaur book he’d found in a Seattle dumpster six months back. It had depicted a marsh that extended from horizon to horizon. Reeds and grass and winding waterways, with here and there a patch of solid ground from which sprung weird-looking trees. Giant dragonflies hovered and flashed in the light, and toothy amphibians poked their wrinkled snouts out of the water. Larger amphibians waded about on their hind legs. There had been over forty different types of dinosaur in the picture—he’d counted every one. Take away the dinosaurs, the dragonflies, and what was left wouldn’t be much different from the moonlit plain then passing before his eyes.

The similarity between picture and reality seized hold of him, rerouting his thoughts into a wet-brained nostalgia that induced him to stare open-mouthed at the landscape as if entranced. Scenes from his life melted up from nowhere like skin showing through a soaked T-shirt, then dried away into nothing. Scenes that were part fantasy, part distorted memory, filled with parental taunts, the complaints of women, and the babble of shadowy unrecognizable figures who went tumbling slowly away, growing so small they seemed characters in another alphabet he had never learned to read. Even when the plain was blotted out by the black rush of another train running alongside them, he barely registered the event, adrift in a sodden unfocused delirium…A dog barking brought him halfway back. The brindled hound was standing at the edge of the open door, barking so fiercely at the other train, ropy twists of saliva were slung from its muzzle. All the dogs were barking, he realized. He picked out Stupid’s angry, bassy note in the chorus. Then he was snatched up, shaken, and that brought him the rest of the way back. He found himself staring into the big man’s frowning face, heard him say, “You with me, Billy? Wake up!” The man shook him again, and he put out a hand in a feeble attempt to interrupt the process.

“I’m here,” Billy said. “I’m okay, I’m here.”

“Stay back from the door,” the man said. “Probably nothin’s gonna happen. But just you stay away from it.”