Two Trains Running

“Just go,” she said in a small voice.

I dropped down beside her, but she said, “Don’t! I want you to go if you’re goin’.”

I made to warm her up by rubbing her shoulder. She snapped at me and curled into a fetal position. It felt as if a hundred pounds of wet cement had been poured into my skull, but that wasn’t nearly enough to extinguish the bright point of certainty that was urging me to leave. I got up from the bed and started stuffing clothes into my pack. Several times I stopped packing and tried again to convince Annie to join me, but she wasn’t hearing me. My movements grew slower—I didn’t want to abandon her. But I kept at it until my goods were all tucked away. I shouldered the pack and stood looking down at her.

“This how you want to do it?” I asked.

“It’s how you want it. I’m just lyin’ here.”

I waited a few seconds, thinking she might relent. Finally I said, “I love you, Annie.”

The words caused her to flinch, but she kept silent.

It was a lot harder leaving Annie than it had been to leave Eileen—I had no whiskey to ease my path. Tears cut down my cheeks, and I must have decided a dozen times to turn back. But something kept me going and I climbed down from the tree and walked out onto the stony section of the bank and stood scanning the wall of jungle on the far side of the river. Bobby Forstadt and his punky blond girlfriend were sitting cross-legged on the rocks. They shaded their eyes against the sun, which had broken through the overcast, and stared at me.

“Where you goin’?” Bobby asked.

“East,” I said. I didn’t feel like talking to him, but I knew I’d have to.

“No shit!” He scrambled up to his feet. “How come?”

“Bobby, I don’t feel much like talkin’, all right. Go talk to Annie and she’ll tell you. She’s up in her room.”

“Naw, she ain’t.” His girlfriend pointed back toward the tree. “She’s right there.”

Annie was coming out from under the shadow of the tree, dragging her pack along the ground—she must have stuffed it in record time. She was wearing faded jeans and an old sweatshirt. I grinned at her, but as she approached she dialed down my pleasure by saying, “You better be right about this, you son of a bitch.”

Bobby cupped his hands and shouted, “Annie and Billy Long Gone…catchin’ out over the Wall!” Then he repeated it, except instead of “catchin’ out over the Wall” he said, “…movin’ to the next level.” People filtered out of the jungle, dropped from the tree, and before long we had a crowd of maybe twenty, twenty-five gathered around, asking why we were leaving and what they could do. Annie stood mute, and I fielded the questions as best I could. The news about Euliss sobered the mood, but even so nobody appeared to grasp why we were leaving. Except maybe for Pie. He shouldered his way to me and handed me a packet of dried fish wrapped in leaves and a can of red spray paint.

“I kinda figgered I’d be the one going over the Wall,” he said. “But I guess it ain’t in me. Hope you make it, Billy. When you get where you goin’, paint me a message on the train.”

“I’ll do’er,” I said, and we shook on it.

More people came, bringing so much food, we couldn’t have carried half of it. Annie got to hugging her friends, and some folks started singing, and everybody was sharing food, and I could see it was turning into a party and was afraid if we stayed much longer we’d get caught up in it. I shouted “Hey!” and kept shouting it until I had everyone’s attention. Then I said, “Thank y’all for comin’ down to see us off! We appreciate it! But we’re gon’ be leavin’ now!”

“What’s the hurry?” somebody shouted, and several people laughed.

“I tell you what the hurry is,” I said. “This place kills somethin’ in us. It makes us settle for half a life. Maybe one reason we settle for it is that’s more’n most of us ever had. But there’s somethin’ else goin’ on, though I couldn’t put a name on it. Somethin’ that makes us just set around waitin’ to die. It’d be easy for me’n Annie to hang out and party. Hell, after a good party, we might change our minds. But I ain’t gon’ let that happen.”

Some people broke off from the edge of the crowd and walked away.

“This ain’t nothin’ to celebrate,” I went on. “We ain’t happy to be leavin’. We’re rollin’ the dice. But this way we get to do the rollin’ ourselves. Staying here’s the same as not even pickin’ ’em up. And all that gets you is what you already know. What Euliss Brooks knew. What Josiah Tobin and Nancy Savarese knew. And the rest of ’em who ain’t here to party, what they knew. We’re leavin’ ’cause it’s our only chance of breakin’ through to somethin’ better. Yonder ain’t no place to build a life. It’s a place where you get your shit together ’fore you move on again. It’s a goddamn homeless shelter with a view. We ain’t s’posed to live here, we’re s’posed to stop over for a while and then be gone. That’s why we’re leavin’. We want to find us a home.”