Two Trains Running

“Why’s it always stop where it does? That what you’re askin’?”

“Yeah.”

“Y’know, I still ain’t figured out how to ask the trains any questions,” he said. “Maybe you can figure it out, you ask so many damn questions yourself.”

I apologized for waking him, and, mollified, he said it was no big deal. He grabbed a canteen from his pack, had a swallow, and passed it to me. Warmish water. It tasted good.

“You gon’ tell me your real name?” he asked. “If I’m gonna introduce you ’round, be better if I knew what to call you.”

“Maurice,” I said. “Maurice Showalter.”

He tried it out, frowned and said, “Damn if I don’t believe you be better off stickin’ with Billy Long Gone.”

The train slowed and stopped, coiled around the base of a hill. We jumped out and started up the slope, pushing through dense brush, bushes with big floppy leaves that spilled water on us as we knocked them aside. From the top of the hill you could see eastward across another expanse of plain scattered about with bright blue lakes shaped roughly like the punctuation to an unwritten paragraph—stray periods, semicolons, and question marks strewn across an immense yellowish green page. Farther off was an area of dark mist that spread along the horizon, broken its entire length by a range of forbidding-looking mountains about ten sizes bigger than the ones we had passed through after leaving Klamath Falls, their peaks set so close together, they might have been a graph forecasting the progress of a spectacularly erratic business. When I asked Pieczynski what lay beyond them, he said he didn’t know, he had only traveled a short ways out onto the plain, pointing out an area marked by three small round lakes that formed an elision to an invisible sentence that had no formal ending but simply trailed away…

“Call them mountains over there Yonder’s Wall,” he said. “The trains go up into ’em, and we’ve had some folks take a ride out that way. Ain’t a’one come back to see us.” He squinted into the gray distance. “Don’t seem like much of an argument for followin’ ’em.”

We walked along a ridge line for a while, then along a red dirt path that angled down through jungly growth. The dogs trotted ahead and behind us, sniffing at leaves and crawling things, their ears pricking to variations in the fizzing noises—insects, I assumed—that issued from the vegetation. After about five minutes of down, the path leveled off and meandered alongside a rivercourse; I could hear though not see the movement of water close by. Many of the smaller tree trunks were sheathed in a mosaic scale of pale blue and dull green that appeared itself coated in a cracked glaze—glittering wherever the sun struck it. The leaves that dangled down over our heads were tattered and fleshy, like pale green, flabby, boneless hands. Vines were interwoven so thickly above, I couldn’t tell if the leaves belonged to a tree or were part of some parasitic growth. Sunlight fell through chinks in the canopy, painting streaks of gold on the path. You could see only about a dozen feet into the jungle on either side before your eye met with an impenetrable wall of growth, and I couldn’t understand how, with only two, three hundred people living in Yonder, they kept the path so clear. I’d never been in a tropical jungle before, but I had the thought that it should be hotter and smellier than this one. It still felt like a spring day, and though now and again I caught a hint of rot, the predominant scent was a heavy floral sweetness.

After a few minutes more we reached the river’s edge, and I was left slackjawed by what I saw on the opposite shore. It looked as if people were living in chambers that were supported somehow in the crown of an immense tree. I could see them walking about in their separate rooms, which were all framed in sprays of leaves. Then I made out gleams of what appeared to be polished walls and realized that what I’d taken for a tree must be the ruin of an ancient building, seven stories high (an estimate, because the floors were sunk down in places, elevated in others) and occupying several hundred feet of the bank, the entire structure overgrown with moss and vines, its facade crumbled away, leaving dozens of chambers open to the weather. Blankets and other types of cloth hangings were arranged over a number of these openings. Fronting the ruin was a stretch of bare rock on which several people were washing their laundry in the murky green water and then spreading it to dry. It was the Conrad Hilton of hobo jungles, and I wouldn’t have been greatly surprised to see a doorman guarding the entrance, dressed in a stove-in top hat and tails, and smoking the stub of a found cigar.

There were twenty, twenty-five dogs snooting about on the rocks or just lying in the sun, and when our dogs spotted them, they all took to barking excitedly. A couple of the people waved, and I heard somebody call out to Pieczynski.