Two Trains Running

“I’m saying I intend to winter in Tucson. You want to go with me…great. If not…” His expansive gesture indicated a world of possibility beyond the horizon.

“I jus’ don’t understand you.” Grace lowered her head so that her face was shrouded in dreadlocks—to Madcat’s eye they resembled the alluring tendrils of an anemone; he imagined tiny fish trapped among them, dissolving in a haze of scarlet toxicity. “Ever’ time I say anything you disagree with,” she went on, “you treat me so cold. I don’t know what I do to deserve it.”

“Cold? I’ll tell you what’s cold! Cold’s a woman watches her boyfriend get his brains bashed in, then a few hours later she’s jammin’ with some tramp.”

“I tol’ you Carter wasn’t my boyfriend! I didn’t know him more’n couple hours, and all we did was smoke a joint, talk a little. It ain’t like we had a relationship.”

“What about us? We got a relationship? I get my brains bashed in, how long you figure it’ll be ’fore you feel up to having consensual sex?”

She looked out toward the cobalt line at the ends of the earth. “I do what I hafta to survive. I’m no differnt ’n you.” She gave him a sideways glance. “Yeah, I think we could have us a relationship. Leas’ we got some ’sperience of one another and it ain’t killed us yet. You might discover you like me a lot, you stop tryin’ so hard to pretend you don’t.”

The burst of energy that had fueled Madcat’s contentiousness faded and he sat nursing his pint, listening to the pour of the wind, trying to hear in it the chunky rhythms of an approaching train.

“What’s your real name?” Grace asked.

“Jimmy.”

“Jimmy what?”

“Jimmy That’s All You Fucking Need To Know. Okay?”

“Okay! Don’t get your panties in a bunch!” Then, after a pause: “How’d you get your train name? You make it up yourself?”

His response was to affect a moronic laugh.

“I should get myself a name, I guess, I’m gon’ be ridin’.” She made a show of thought, tapping her chin with a forefinger and squinting, clicking her teeth with her tongue. “I cain’t come up with nothin’ sounds right. Maybe you should gimme a name.”

A powerful lethargy overcame him and the patch of gravel between his feet seemed to acquire topographical significance, as if it were the surface of an alien planet seen from space—a flat of cracked granite lorded over by a single dusty weed so vast, the minuscule creatures who dwelled in its shadow would perceive it as a pathway to the divine and send forth pilgrims who would die in the process of ascension.

“Jimmy!” Grace spoke with such urgency, it penetrated his fog.

“What?” he said, sitting up straight. “What is it?”

She was tying off her dreads with an elastic band, gathering them into a Medusoid sheaf behind her head, studying him without expression. The shadow cast by her raised elbows was like a mask of gray wings that came down onto her cheeks, and he knew death was in her, that whether sent or by herself commanded, she had come to gather him. He tried not to believe it, though the truth was clear and undeniable, like a letter graven on her brow. He felt a satin pillow beneath his head and saw his eyes reflected by a mirror inside a coffin lid.

“Nothin’,” she said, giving a dry, satisfied-sounding laugh, as if some critical judgment had been borne out. “Never mind.”

Near nightfall of the next day, they jumped off the train outside the Klamath Falls yard and pushed their way through thickets of leafless bushes with candy wrappers, condoms, cigarette cellophane, and toilet tissue stuck to their twigs, so profuse they might have been some sort of unnatural floral productions. A line of dusky orange marked the horizon, dividing darkness from the dark land, and a west wind was blowing with a feverish rhythm, gentle gusts alternating with featherings, then long oceanic swells carrying streaks of unseasonable warmth. As he slogged over the mucky ground, Madcat, coming off an afternoon drunk, broke a light sweat.

Two hobos were jungled up in a clearing near the edge of the yard, hunched beside a crackling fire, drinking malt liquor. There was Horizontal Tom, a scrawny old man whose ravaged face peered out from snarls of iron-gray beard and hair like a mad hermit spying from behind a shrub, and F-Trooper, a lanky man in his forties with straight black hair hanging to his shoulders, an adobe complexion, and a chiseled, long-jawed face that might have been handsome if not for its rattled expression. Wearing chinos and a tattered AIM T-shirt. When he caught sight of Madcat he got to his feet, picked up two forty-ouncers, and went to do his drinking elsewhere.

“Fuckin’ Indian motherfucker,” Tom said with some fondness. “He just can’t abide too much company, but otherwise he ain’t so bad.”

“Son of a bitch can’t abide me is what it is,” Madcat said. “I ain’t never said shit to him, couple times we met, but he always acts like I been kicking his dog.”