Two Trains Running

“Hell, he acts like that with ever’body. Took him five, six years to warm up to me.” Tom bunched his sleeping bag up around his head, fashioning it into a cowl. “Could be he’s just shy.”

“Yeah, uh-huh.” Madcat sank to his knees by the fire, Grace beside him. “Yon and him riding together?”

“Nah. I come out on a hotshot from Dilworth couple days ago. Found him campin’ here. He’s waitin’ for somethin’ headin’ down to Roseville. Me, I’m—”

“Roseville’s in California, ain’t it?” asked Grace.

“If you wanna call Sacramento California.” Tom had a pull from his bottle, and some of the brew dribbled out the side of his mouth, beading up in the tangles of hair, glittering in the firelight—his face shadowed dramatically by the cowl, he might have been an old philosopher-king with jewels woven in his beard. “I’m headin’ for Mexico,” he went on. “Copper Canyon. Ever been down that way?”

Grace allowed that she had not.

“Big as the Grand Canyon and never been exploited, ’cause they ain’t no roads to it. Only way to get there’s by hoppin’ a freight.” Tom grinned, showing eight or nine teeth banded with brown and yellow stains like the stratifications on canyon walls; he pitched his voice low. “They got organ-pipe cactus been there since the conquistadors. Ol’ great-granddaddy iguanas seven foot long.” He reached across the fire and poked Grace’s knee. “Yon oughta ride down with me and see it. It’s amazin’! Like campin’ out in the middle of a goddamn hallucination!”

“I figure we’re gonna lay up in Tucson a while,” Madcat said.

“But we might make it down there eventually.”

Grace excused herself, saying she was going to find a place to camp, and went off into the hushes, dragging Madcat’s pack. Tom tracked her backside out of sight. “That’s a reg’lar little ditch witch you got yourself there. How’d you two hook up?”

Madcat told him. “I don’t know if I believe her ’bout the boy getting killed,” he said. “She exaggerates some.”

“These days there’s always somebody goin’ ’round killin’ out here.” Tom shook his head somberly. “It’s the drugs. They ruint the rest of society, now they ruinin’ things for the hobo.” He spat into the fire, and a tongue of orange flame flickered back at him. “How old you figger she is?”

“Seventeen, eighteen…I don’t know.”

“Eighteen might be pushin’ it,” Tom said, after due consideration. “She looks like jailbait to me. These crusty punk girls, seventeen’s ’bout when they get to feelin’ wore down, they start wantin’ to find themselves a man they can depend on. Sixteen…all they want for you is to take ’em somewhere on a train. But seventeen’s when they go home…if they gotta home. Or they latch onto an older man.” He leaned toward Madcat, intending—it appeared—to give him a friendly nudge, but found he couldn’t reach that far, wobbled, and nearly fell into the fire. “You be a fool not to let her latch onto you,” he said on regaining his balance. “She’s ’bout the best-lookin’ thing I seen out here. You was to take her to Britt, to the hobo convention, she’d be like Raquel fuckin’ Welch compared to them hairy hogs show up there.”

Tom seemed to lose the thread of what he was saying, stared off toward the yard. Glowing pinpricks were visible through the dead twigs—sentry lights at the edge of the yard—and a distant clamor could be heard, a windy mingling of bells and whistles and metallic thuds.

“’Member Jabberjaw? That ol’ girl I was ridin’ with a few years back?” Tom asked. Madcat said, Yeah, he sure did, and then Tom said, “Jesus Lord, I have slept with some scary-lookin’ women.”

He began talking about old girlfriends, then about hobo marriages he’d witnessed, ceremonies variously uniting Misty Rose, Diamond Dan, Dogman Jerry—and Madcat took to imagining a ceremony involving himself and Grace. They were standing on a flatcar that was being pulled by four white locomotives running abreast on four silver tracks, on wheels that were bleeding, and they were passing beneath a sky bigger than a Montana sky ruled by two black suns and a high-flying half moon, a thousand light years of dark wintry blue and a filigree of clouds like feathers, fishbones, lace. Grace had on a T-shirt and jeans and a circlet with a veil behind to cover her hair—a Maid Marian cap—and her face was chalky, dead calm, but the scarlet dreadlocks were seething beneath the veil, and the ring in the palm of her hand was alive, a golden worm eternally swallowing itself…

He coughed, gave his head a shake, and found he was staring through a maze of leafless twigs at one of the sentry lights. Drunk, oblivious to all else, Tom was still chattering away. Rock-and-roll music was playing somewhere nearby, and Madcat could hear Grace’s laughter coming from the same general direction. He heaved up to a knee and peered toward the yard.

“Oh, yeah,” said Tom behind him. “You might want to check on that. That’s been goin’ on a while now.”