Two Trains Running

“Thought you said wasn’t no people born over here,” I said to Pieczynski. “So where’d that fuckin’ ruin come from?”

“The hell you talkin’ about?” he said. “Ain’t no ruins around here.”

“Then what you call that?” I pointed at the opposite bank.

He gave a snort of laughter. “That ain’t no ruin, friend. That there’s a tree.”

About five years ago when I was riding with a female hobo name of Bubblehead, she used to read me from the children’s books I carried in my pack, and there was this one had a tree in it called a monkey-puzzle tree. It had branches that would grow out sideways and then straight down; the whole thing resembled an intricate cage with all these nooks and crannies inside the branches where you could shelter from the elements. Yonder’s tree might have been a giant mutant brother to the monkey-puzzle tree, but there were a few salient differences: the larger horizontal branches flattened out to form floored chambers with walls of interwoven foliage, and various of the branches that grew straight down were hollow and had been tricked out with ladders. There were ladders, too, all up and down the trunk, and elevators that worked on pulleys and could be lowered and raised between levels. I reckon there were in the high hundreds of chambers throughout. Maybe more. Only about 150 were occupied, I was told, so I had my choice. I settled myself in a smallish one close to the main trunk on the third floor; it was open on two sides, but I figured I’d find a way to close it off, and it was just the right size for me and Stupid…though I wasn’t sure he’d be joining me. He’d run off with the other dogs as soon as he’d finished paddling across the river. The sweetish smell of the jungle was even stronger near the trunk, and I supposed it was the tree giving off that odor.

Pieczynski handed me over to a trim, tanned, thirty-something woman name of Annie Ware and went off to see to his own affairs. Annie had a sandy haircut like a boy’s and wore khaki shorts and a loose blouse of stitched-together bandannas. It had been a long time since I’d looked at a woman with anything approaching a clear mind and unclouded eye, and I found myself staring at Annie. There was a calmness to her face illustrated by the fine lines around her gray eyes and mouth, and though she wasn’t what you’d call a raving beauty, she was a damn sight more attractive than the women I’d encountered on the rails. She led me through the dim interior of the tree, passing several occupied chambers lit by candles, and explained how things worked in Yonder.

“We get most of our supplies from back in the world,” she said. “There’s five of us—Pie’s one—who don’t mind traveling back and forth. They scrounge what we need. Rest of us wouldn’t go back for love nor money.”

When I asked how come this was, she shot me a sideways glance and said, “You feel like goin’ back?”

“Not right now,” I told her. “But I ’spect sooner or later I’ll be wantin’ to.”

“I don’t know. You look like a stayer to me.” She guided me around a corner and we came to a place where you could see out through a couple of unoccupied chambers at the jungle. The sunlight made the flattened branch shine like polished mahogany. “Everyone works here. Some people fish, some hunt for edibles in the jungle. Some weave, some cook…”

“I can fish,” I said. “My daddy useta…”

“You’ll be doin’ chores at first. Cleaning and runnin’ errands. Like that.”

“Is that so?” I stopped walking and glared at her. “I been doin’ for myself…”

She cut me off again. “We can’t tolerate no lone wolfs here,” she said. “We all work together or else we’d never survive. New arrivals do chores, and that’s what you’ll be doin’ till you figure out what job suits you.”

“Just who is it lays down the rules?”

“Ain’t no rules. It’s how things are is all.”

“Well, I don’t believe that,” I said. “Even out on the rails, free as that life is, there’s a peckin’ order.”

“You ain’t out on the rails no more.” Annie folded her arms beneath her breasts. Her eyes narrowed, and I had the impression she perceived me as an unsavory article. “Some people been here more’n twenty years. When they came, there was people here who told ’em how things worked. And there was people here even before them.”

“What happened to ’em all?”

“They died…what do you think? Either they was killed or they just gave out. Then there’s some caught a ride over Yonder’s Wall.”

“Them mountains, you mean?”

“Yeah, right. ‘Them mountains’.” She charged the words with disdain.

“You don’t like me very much, do you?” I said.

Annie’s mouth thinned. “Let’s say I ain’t disposed to like you.”

“Why’s that? I ain’t done nothin’ to you.”

She twitched her head to the side as if she’d been struck and kept silent for four or five seconds. “You don’t have a clue who I am, do you?” she asked finally.

I studied her for a second or two. “I never seen you before in my life.”

She fixed me with a mean look. “My train name useta be Ruby Tuesday. I rode the southern line mostly, but there was times I rode up north.”