Two Trains Running

I woke up one day feeling poorly, and instead of going to the gorge, I slept in. Around noon, moved by restlessness, I forded the river and set off walking the path along which I had come to Yonder. Three dogs—one, the little collie that had ridden with me and Pie—fell in at my heels. I followed the path up through the jungle, then ascended the ridge line until I reached a point where I could see the tracks curling around the base of a hill. A train was standing on it, most of the cars out of sight beyond the curve. The engine and the visible cars all bore ridged scars left by beardsley attacks, and that led me to believe it was an old train. As I’ve said, my curiosity had been at low ebb ever since my arrival, but now I was suddenly overcome with curiosity, wondering how the trains got born and how long they lived or if those questions were even relevant. Once I had scrambled down the slope, I walked alongside the cars, examining them closely. Nowhere did I see a bolt or a seam. The entire train was of a piece—couplings and wheels and doors all seemingly grown into shape. The wheels appeared to be made of the same stuff as the cars, only thickened and harder, and the tracks they rode on weren’t metal but grooved black rock that sprung from the earth. I scraped away dirt from the grade and saw that the rock was embedded to a depth of at least two feet—that was how far down I excavated. The engine had no windshield, no doors, no lights—it was just a dead black streamlined shape. How could it watch ahead? I wondered. How did it take sustenance…fuel? I had a hundred questions and no answers. It was like Bobby Forstadt said, nothing made any sense.

I went around the front of the engine and then walked down-train between the side of the engine and the hill. Just above the engine’s rear wheel someone had spray-painted a red message, faded, but still legible:

SANTA CLAUS RODE THIS

BLACK BASTARD INTO THE EAST

HEADING OVER YONDER’S WALL

I’d never met Santa Claus, but I’d heard old hobos talk about him, much of the talk regarding what a devious piece of crap he had been, this coming from men who themselves were notable for being devious pieces of crap. They did testify that Santa Claus had been a balls-out rider, how when he was determined to catch out on a train, nothing, not the bulls, not security devices, would stop him. What interested me was why he had signed his moniker and not his birth name. Maybe, I thought, his parents had stuck him with something as unappetizing as Maurice Showalter.

I went back around to the other side of the train and sat myself down on the grade. The trains, the tree, the beardsleys, the elders, the placid, disinterested inhabitants of Yonder treading water in their lives, and Yonder’s Wall—they still seemed to be pieces belonging to different puzzles. But now I wondered if Santa Claus hadn’t hit on the only solution there was to all of them. What was the point in sticking around the tree and eating jungleberries and fishing and thinking about the past? Might as well see what lay beyond the mountains. Could be you’d die…but maybe you were already dead. For certain sure, according to everything I’d heard, you eventually were going to die from sitting on your butt. And if Bobby was right, then moving to the next level was your one chance to win.

I was going round and round with this in my head, when I spied somebody walking toward me from the curve. Soon I saw that it was Annie Ware. She had on an orange T-shirt and her khaki shorts. She looked like ice cream to the Devil. “What you doin’ out here?” I asked as she came up, and she shrugged and said, “I like the trains, y’know.” She stood over me for a few beats, staring off along the tracks, shifting her feet, as if feeling betwixt and between. Then, with an abrupt movement, she dropped down beside me. “Sometimes when I’m huntin’ for berries, I come back this way so I can look at ’em. There’s always a train waitin’.”

That startled me. “Always?”

She nodded. “Yeah…’least I can’t recall a time when there wasn’t one.”

Video game, I decided. The zombies are always in the parking lot, the hamburger with the message under the bun is always served at the same café. Then I thought, Why couldn’t death have that sort of predictability? All every new piece of the puzzle did was add another confusing color.

We sat without speaking for the better part of a minute, and then, for want of anything better, I said, “I know I done something to you, but I swear I can’t remember it. I been tryin’, too.”

Her mouth thinned, but she didn’t say anything.

I lifted my eyes to the sky, to the dark unidentifiable creatures that were ever circling there, gliding among scatters of cloud. “If you want me to know what I done, you probably gon’ have to tell me.”

A breeze ruffled the weeds alongside the grade, drifting up a flurry of whitish seed pods.