Two Trains Running

“Jesus…fuck!” He sniffed the neck of the bottle. It smelled horrible. Something must have gone wrong with the batch. It was his last pint, too. He’d wind up drinking it anyway, but for now he didn’t want to put up with having to puke. He was wore down, the borders of his consciousness crumbly and vague, like he was coming down from crank. He scrunched himself up to fit the floor and rolled onto his side. Set the pint by his head. The gentle rocking of the train made it seem that the fire-breathing stallion on the label was charging directly into his eyes.

When I woke the next morning, my eyes fell to that same label, but instead of reaching for the bottle in desperate need as I would have the day before, I had a flashback to my last mouthful of Iron Horse and turned away, coming face to face with Stupid, who licked my lips and nose. I got to my feet, feeling less achy than I might have expected. And hungry. That was odd. It had been ten years easy since I woke up wanting breakfast. Pieczynski was still asleep, encircled by the other dogs. I supposed now that he had stolen them all. He was one butt-ugly son of a bitch. That long nose had been flattened and spread, probably by bottles and fists, until it resembled a nose guard on an ancient gladiator’s helmet; and his mouth, thick-lipped and wide, bracketed by chiseled lines, made me think of the time my dad had taken me bass fishing, the part before he’d gotten drunk and decided it would be funny to use me as the target for his casts.

Maybe I was dead, I thought. I didn’t see any other way to explain how I’d felt so bad every single day for the last three, four years, and then, after one night’s sleep, it was like I’d never had a drink in my life. And it wasn’t only a sense of physical well-being. I felt strong in my head. My thoughts were clear, solid, defined. Even though it had only been seven or eight hours, I was already starting to perceive the Billy Long Gone of the previous night as a different person, the way you might reflect on how you behaved when you were a kid. But I wasn’t sure what to think about what I had seen, whether the “beardsley” had been part of an alcoholic fugue or if it had some basis in reality.

I pushed two fingers hard against the wall of the car and felt a slight resilience. Like pushing against stiff leather. I wondered if I was to cut the surface, would glowing yellow blood spurt forth? That could explain the light that illuminated the car. And the warmth. I dug a jackknife out of my jeans pocket, opened the blade, and laid the edge against the black surface; then I thought better of it. I didn’t want this particular car to go to twitching and heaving itself around. I folded the knife and put an ear flat to the wall. No pulse I could hear, but I thought I could detect a faint stirring and that caused me to pull my head back in a hurry. The idea of a live train didn’t rattle me all that much, though. Hell, I’d always thought of trains as being half-alive anyway. A spirit locked into the steel.

I went to the door of the boxcar and sat gazing out at the land, wishing I had something to eat. We had left the marshes behind and were rolling through a series of hills with long, gradual western slopes and steep drop-offs on their eastern sides, as if they were ancient access ramps of some long-demolished freeway that had been overgrown with tall grasses. The sky was a clear, deep blue with a continent of massy white cloud bubbling up from the northern horizon. Up ahead were bigger hills, dark green in color, lush-looking. The air was soft and pleasantly cool, the air of a spring morning. I took off my shirt to enjoy it; in doing so, I caught a whiff of my body odor. No wonder Stupid was always licking me—I smelled like something two days dead.

“Hungry?” said Pieczynski—his voice startled me, and I nearly toppled out the door. He was holding out what looked to be a flat gray cake with a faint purplish cast.

“What is it?” The cake was cold and slimy to the touch.

“Jungleberries.” Pieczynski settled beside me, his legs dangling off the edge of the car. “We mush ’em up and press ’em. Go on…give it a try.”

 nibbled at the edge of the cake. It was almost tasteless—just a vague fruity tang. I took a bigger bite, then another, then wolfed the whole thing down. It didn’t satisfy my hunger, but after a few minutes I felt an appreciable sense of well-being.

“There some kinda dope in this shit?” I asked, taking a second cake from Pieczynski.

He shrugged. “Seein’ how they make you feel, I s’pose there must be somethin’ in ’em. Couldn’t tell you what.”

“I don’t believe I ever heard of jungleberries.” I turned the cake over in my hand, as if expecting to find a list of ingredients.

“There’s a whole buncha things you ain’t heard of that you’re gon’ be comin’ up against real soon.” Pieczynski scrunched around so he could look directly at me. “How you feelin’?”