Two Trains Running

“One thing I don’t get,” I said, “is the trains. They don’t seem to fit nobody’s theory. And the way you feel after the first night. Healthy and clear-headed. That sure seems like stuff I been told happens when you die.”

“The folks that told you all that stuff hadn’t died, had they? It’s just as likely it’ll purify a man to cross over the border between universes. But the trains…I hate to say you’re right, but you’re right. I come up with a few explanations that fit my theory. They’re pretty goddamned harebrained, but I’m workin’ on somethin’ better.”

He turned onto his stomach. His back was striped with thickly ridged scars, some of the tissue twisted up into knots—I’d seen similar scars on a tramp who’d had a run-in with some barbed wire.

“I’ll figger somethin’ out,” Josiah said. “Somethin’ll come along to fit in there sooner or later.”

Josiah had a lot more confidence that there was going to be a “later” than most. As the rains heavied, lasting longer every day, people grew anxious and kept to their rooms. Annie and I, too, stayed at home more than we once had, but not because of anxiety. We had moved past the getting-to-know-you stage and spent lazy mornings on her grass mattress, listening to raindrops smacking like soft bullets into the canopy, talking and doing what I once would have referred to as “fucking,” but now, as I recognized the mutuality of the act and wasn’t just trying to satisfy myself, I thought of as making love.

We came to talk about the past more often than not—the present just wasn’t that interesting. Annie told me she had run a successful cleaning business in Tucson, and it was stress related to the business that had driven her out of society and onto the rails. One morning, she said, she woke up and simply couldn’t handle the pressure anymore. Though when I’d known her before, she’d been almost as dissolute as me, she held a more romantic view of the life than I did. She recalled it as being a party with friends that had lasted for years, and the terrible things that had happened to her—rape and beatings and such—had been anomalies. She was glad to be away from that life, but she had good memories that superseded all the bad; she would go on about the freedom, the parties, the hobo conventions, the fellowship. Often she talked about how she had gotten married to Chester the Molester in the yard at Spokane, how tramps had come from everywhere, and a couple of trampettes had worked a job in Klamath Falls for nearly a month so they could buy her a ring. I believe it was this romantic side that had caused her to fall for me. She’d contrived an image of me as being a real King of the Road and not the falling-down drunk that I truly was; despite me standing her up in Missoula, she had clung to that image, nourished it like an article of faith. For my part, I was so thankful to be with anyone, at first I couldn’t separate those feelings out from what I felt for her. But with the passage of days, I came to realize I loved everything about her. The way the muscles in her calves bunched when she walked, the expressiveness of her smiles, the variety of her moods. How she’d stare at a piece of cloth that Pie or somebody had brought back from the world until she recognized the shape in it, and the next you know it would be a shirt or a skirt or a pair of trousers. The thing I loved most about Annie was her strength. Not that she was entirely strong. We each had a crack down through the middle of us, the same that had disabled our old lives. Nevertheless she had a strength about her, one built on endurance and tolerance that seemed partner to the strength I had started to see in myself. Maybe that fit was what allowed us to love one another.

One morning we were lying in late, being easy together, when the dogs set up a baying, as they sometimes would, only this was louder and more prolonged than usual. Annie sat up in bed, the sheet falling away from her breasts, and listened. I made a grab for her, but she pushed my hand away and said, “Quiet!” Within a matter of seconds, the barking diminished, but didn’t stop altogether. Soon I heard solitary barks closer at hand, and then the clitter of paws as dogs went running past our room.

“They’re here,” Annie said in a dead voice.

“What?” I sat up beside her and looked at her despairing face.

She didn’t answer, and I said, “You mean the fritters?”

She nodded.

I jumped up from the bed. “Let’s go! Let’s get outa here!” “Don’t do no good,” she said, hanging her head.

“The hell you mean?”

“It don’t do no good,” she said sternly, almost angrily. “Ain’t nowhere to go. Safest place we can be is right here.”

A dog, a black Lab mix like Stupid, only bigger, poked his head in through the curtained doorway, woofed, and then retreated.

“The dogs can protect us here,” Annie said. “There’s not a damn thing else we can do ’cept set right where we are.”

“That’s crazy! We can fight ’em.”