Two Trains Running

We gazed at the scene until the cold drove us back inside the car, and then we sat huddled together without speaking. I can’t say what was in Annie’s mind, but I was more awestruck than afraid. The scale of the mountains, the strangeness of all else—it was too grand to breed true fear, too foreign to inspire other than wonder, and too startling to allow the formation of any plan. Hobos, for all their degenerate failings, have an aesthetic. They’re scenery junkies, they take pride in traveling through parts of their country few have ever seen, and they memorialize those sights, whether storing them in their memories or creating more tangible mementos, like SLC with his wall of Polaroids. Sitting around campfires or in squats, they’ll swap stories about the natural beauty of the world with the enthusiasm of kids trading baseball cards. Now Annie and I had a story to top anybody’s, and though we had no one to tell it to, as if by reflex, I polished the details and dressed up the special effects so if I ever did get the chance, I’d be ready to let the story rip. I was kept so busy doing this—and maybe Annie was, too—I didn’t notice the train was slowing until we had dropped more than half our speed. We went to the door, cracked it, and peered out. We were still in the valley, the mountains still lifted on either side, the spark birds were still wheeling in the sky. But the opaline blackness that had posed a horizon to the valley was gone. In place of it was a snow-covered forest beneath an overcast sky and, dividing the forest into two distinct sections, a black river that sprung up out of nowhere and flowed between those sections, as straight in its course as that of the valley between the ranked mountains. It was clear the train was going to stop. We got our packs together and bundled up—despite the freakishness of the forest and river, we figured this was our destination, and were relieved to be alive. When the train came to a full stop, we jumped down from the car and set off across the snow, ducking our heads to avoid the wind, which was still blowing fiercely, our feet punching through the frozen crust and sinking calf-deep.

The train had pulled up at the end of the line; the tracks gave out beyond the last mountain, about a mile and a half, I judged, from the edge of the forest. The ground ahead of us was gently rolling, the snow mounded into the shape of ocean swells, and the forest, which looked to be dominated by oaklike trees with dark trunks and heavy iced crowns, had a forbidding aspect, resembling those enchanted and often perilous forests illustrated in the children’s books that the old Billy Long Gone had turned to now and then, wanting to read something but unable to do more than sound out a few of the words. When we reached the engine I took the can of spray paint Pie had given me and wrote on the side:

PIE—

WE COME TO A FOREST THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAINS IT’S THE END OF THE LINE WE’RE WALKING FROM HERE ON LUCK TO YOU

BILLY LONG GONE

“Wanna add somethin’?” I asked Annie.

She studied on it, then took the can and wrote:

IT’S ALL A TEST

SO FAR WE’VE PASSED

ANNIE

“A test, huh?” I took back the can and stowed it.

“I been thinkin’ about it,” she said. “And that’s what I figure it is. It just feels that way.”

“Here you always talkin’ ’bout you can’t stand theories, and now you got one of your own.”

“It ain’t a theory if you’re livin’ it,” she said. “It’s a tool for making decisions. And from now on I’m lookin’ at all this like it’s a test.” She helped me rebuckle the straps of my pack. “Let’s go.”

We had walked about two-thirds of the distance between the end of the tracks and the forest when one of the mounds of snow on our left shifted and made a low grumbling noise, like something very large waking with mean things on its mind. It was so sudden an interruption to the winded silence, we froze. Almost immediately, another mound shifted and grumbled…and then another.