Two Trains Running

“Ruby?” I peered at her, trying to see in her face—a face that radiated soundness—the wild-haired, grimy clot of human misery I’d known long years before.

“It’s Annie now,” she said. “I cleaned up. Same as you. Only difference is, I been living clean seven years, and you been doin’ it for a day.”

I couldn’t believe it was her, but I couldn’t disbelieve it either. Why would she lie? “What’d I do to piss you off?” I asked. “Hell, I rode with you when you’s with Chester the Molester. We had some good times together.”

She gaped at me, as if stunned. “You don’t remember?”

“I don’t know what you got in mind, but there’s a whole lotta things I don’t remember.”

“Well, you gon’ be doin’ some serious rememberin’ the next few weeks. Maybe it’ll pop up.” She spun on her heel and walked away.

“Hey, don’t go!” I called after her. “I don’t know where the fuck I am! How’m I gon’ find my room?”

“Look for it,” she snapped back. “I ain’t about to stand around and hold your dick for ya!”

I did, indeed, do some serious remembering over the next week or thereabouts. Days, I fed fish heads and guts to the dogs—must have been around sixty of them all told—and carried messages and helped dig new latrines. Nights, I sat in my room, closed off from the rest of Yonder by two blankets that Pieczynski had lent me, and stared at a candle flame (candles also courtesy of Pieczynski) as the stuff of my life came bubbling up like black juice through the shell of a stepped-on bug. Not much I remembered gave me pleasure. I saw myself drinking, drugging, thieving, and betraying. And all that before I’d become a tramp. I could scarcely stand to think about it, yet that was all I thought about, and I would fall asleep each night with my head hurting from images of the bedraggled, besotted life I had led.

As the days passed I became familiar with Yonder’s routine. Every morning small groups would head upriver to fish or out into the jungle to pick berries and other edibles, each accompanied by a handful of dogs. The rest took care of their work in and around the tree. On the landward side of the tree, a space had been cleared in the jungle and that’s where the food preparation was done—in long pits dug beneath thatched open structures. There seemed only the loosest possible sense of community among the residents. People were civil to one another, but generally kept to themselves. At times I would wander about the tree, looking for company, and while some would say “Hi” and introduce themselves, nobody invited me to sit and chat until one night I ran into a skinny, intense kid named Bobby Forstadt, who shared a room on the fifth floor with Sharon, a blond punk girl who was decorated all over with self-applied tattoos—black words and crudely drawn flowers and the names of boys.

When Bobby found out I was new to Yonder, he invited me in and started pumping me for information about the world. I proved a major disappointment, because I hadn’t paid a great deal of attention to current events the past few years. I wasn’t even sure who was president, though I told him I thought it was somebody from Texas. The governor, maybe.

“Bush?” Bobby arched an eyebrow and looked at me over the top of his wire-rimmed glasses. He had a narrow, bony face that peeked out from a mass of brown curls like a fox from a hedge. “Hey, I don’t think so,” he said. “What about Gore?”

The name didn’t set off any bells.

“Fuck! Bush?” Bobby appeared deep in thought and after a bit he said, “You musta got it wrong, man.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe. But I was jungled up with Kid Dallas right after the election and he was shouting, ‘Yee-ha!’ and shit, and goin’ on ’bout some Texas guy got elected.”

“Bush,” said Bobby, and shook his head, as if he just couldn’t get his brain around the thought. He was sitting cross-legged on the floor behind a desk he’d made from a tree stump; a spiral-bound notebook was open atop it, and there were stacks of similar notebooks in one corner of the room, separated by a couple of rolled-up sleeping bags from stacks of regular books, mostly dog-eared paperbacks. One wall was dominated by a hand-drawn map constructed of several dozen taped-together sheets of notebook paper. I asked him about it, and he said it was a map of Yonder.

“It’s probably not accurate,” he said. “I just put together everybody’s stories about how they came here and where they’ve traveled since, and that’s what I ended up with.” He cocked an eye toward me. “Where’d you catch out?”

“Klamath Falls,” I told him. “Weirdest thing, ’bout maybe ten minutes out we started goin’ through these mountains. Big ’uns.”

“Everyone sees the same exact stuff,” Bobby said. “First the mountains and the marshes. Then the hills.”

“You sayin’ everyone who comes to Yonder goes through the same country, no matter where they catch out?”