Two Trains Running

by Lucius Shepard

  “I think we’re dead,” I told him. “And this here’s the afterlife.”

  “An afterlife designed for a few hunnerd train riders? Who knows? Maybe. Most ever’body feels they must be dead when they come. But there’s one argument against that notion that’s tough to get around.”

  “Oh, yeah? What is it?”

  “You can die here, friend,” said Pieczynski. “You can die here quicker’n you’d believe.”

  I asked Pieczynski more questions, but he acted as if talking exhausted him and his answers grew even less informative. I did get out of him that we were headed for a settlement up in the hills, also called Yonder, and that dogs weren’t native to this place; he often returned to the world and collected dogs, because they were useful in chasing something he called “fritters” away from the settlement. We fell silent a while and watched the hills build around us, the dark green resolving into dense tropical-looking vegetation. Plants with enormous rain-catching leaves and trees laden with vines and large blue and purple flowers hanging from them in bunches. I spotted dark shapes crossing the sky from time to time, but they were too distant to identify. Every unfamiliar thing I saw disturbed me. Though I still felt good, I couldn’t shake a sense of unease. I was certain there was something Pieczynski wasn’t telling me, or else there was something important he didn’t know. But I’d been considerably more confused about my whereabouts and destination in the past, hopping freights in a state of derangement and winding up in places that it had taken days to locate on my mental map. I had learned to thrive on disorientation. You might say I’d been in training for this kind of ride all my years on the rails.

  Pieczynski nodded off for a bit, and I became concerned that we’d sleep past where we were supposed to detrain, so I woke him.

  “Jesus Christ!” he said, disgruntled, and rubbed his eyes. He yawned. “Don’t worry about it. Train always stops the same places. Always stops in Klamath Falls, always stops in Yonder. That’s why they built the settlement there.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Why’s it always stop where it does? That what you’re askin’?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Y’know, I still ain’t figured out how to ask the trains any questions,” he said. “Maybe you can figure it out, you ask so many damn questions yourself.”

  I apologized for waking him, and, mollified, he said it was no big deal. He grabbed a canteen from his pack, had a swallow, and passed it to me. Warmish water. It tasted good.

  “You gon’ tell me your real name?” he asked. “If I’m gonna introduce you ’round, be better if I knew what to call you.”

  “Maurice,” I said. “Maurice Showalter.”

  He tried it out, frowned and said, “Damn if I don’t believe you be better off stickin’ with Billy Long Gone.”

  The train slowed and stopped, coiled around the base of a hill. We jumped out and started up the slope, pushing through dense brush, bushes with big floppy leaves that spilled water on us as we knocked them aside. From the top of the hill you could see eastward across another expanse of plain scattered about with bright blue lakes shaped roughly like the punctuation to an unwritten paragraph—stray periods, semicolons, and question marks strewn across an immense yellowish green page. Farther off was an area of dark mist that spread along the horizon, broken its entire length by a range of forbidding-looking mountains about ten sizes bigger than the ones we had passed through after leaving Klamath Falls, their peaks set so close together, they might have been a graph forecasting the progress of a spectacularly erratic business. When I asked Pieczynski what lay beyond them, he said he didn’t know, he had only traveled a short ways out onto the plain, pointing out an area marked by three small round lakes that formed an elision to an invisible sentence that had no formal ending but simply trailed away…

  “Call them mountains over there Yonder’s Wall,” he said. “The trains go up into ’em, and we’ve had some folks take a ride out that way. Ain’t a’one come back to see us.” He squinted into the gray distance. “Don’t seem like much of an argument for followin’ ’em.”

  We walked along a ridge line for a while, then along a red dirt path that angled down through jungly growth. The dogs trotted ahead and behind us, sniffing at leaves and crawling things, their ears pricking to variations in the fizzing noises—insects, I assumed—that issued from the vegetation. After about five minutes of down, the path leveled off and meandered alongside a rivercourse; I could hear though not see the movement of water close by. Many of the smaller tree trunks were sheathed in a mosaic scale of pale blue and dull green that appeared itself coated in a cracked glaze—glittering wherever the sun struck it. The leaves that dangled down over our heads were tattered and fleshy, like pale green, flabby, boneless hands. Vines were interwoven so thickly above, I couldn’t tell if the leaves belonged to a tree or were part of some parasitic growth. Sunlight fell through chinks in the canopy, painting streaks of gold on the path. You could see only about a dozen feet into the jungle on either side before your eye met with an impenetrable wall of growth, and I couldn’t understand how, with only two, three hundred people living in Yonder, they kept the path so clear. I’d never been in a tropical jungle before, but I had the thought that it should be hotter and smellier than this one. It still felt like a spring day, and though now and again I caught a hint of rot, the predominant scent was a heavy floral sweetness.

  After a few minutes more we reached the river’s edge, and I was left slackjawed by what I saw on the opposite shore. It looked as if people were living in chambers that were supported somehow in the crown of an immense tree. I could see them walking about in their separate rooms, which were all framed in sprays of leaves. Then I made out gleams of what appeared to be polished walls and realized that what I’d taken for a tree must be the ruin of an ancient building, seven stories high (an estimate, because the floors were sunk down in places, elevated in others) and occupying several hundred feet of the bank, the entire structure overgrown with moss and vines, its facade crumbled away, leaving dozens of chambers open to the weather. Blankets and other types of cloth hangings were arranged over a number of these openings. Fronting the ruin was a stretch of bare rock on which several people were washing their laundry in the murky green water and then spreading it to dry. It was the Conrad Hilton of hobo jungles, and I wouldn’t have been greatly surprised to see a doorman guarding the entrance, dressed in a stove-in top hat and tails, and smoking the stub of a found cigar.

  There were twenty, twenty-five dogs snooting about on the rocks or just lying in the sun, and when our dogs spotted them, they all took to barking excitedly. A couple of the people waved, and I heard somebody call out to Pieczynski.

  “Thought you said wasn’t no people born over here,” I said to Pieczynski. “So where’d that fuckin’ ruin come from?”

  “The hell you talkin’ about?” he said. “Ain’t no ruins around here.”

  “Then what you call that?” I pointed at the opposite bank.

  He gave a snort of laughter. “That ain’t no ruin, friend. That there’s a tree.”

  About five years ago when I was riding with a female hobo name of Bubblehead, she used to read me from the children’s books I carried in my pack, and there was this one had a tree in it called a monkey-puzzle tree. It had branches that would grow out sideways and then straight down; the whole thing resembled an intricate cage with all these nooks and crannies inside the branches where you could shelter from the elements. Yonder’s tree might have been a giant mutant brother to the monkey-puzzle tree, but there were a few salient differences: the larger horizontal branches flattened out to form floored chambers with walls of interwoven foliage, and various of the branches that grew straight down were hollow and had been tricked out with ladders. There were ladders, too, all up and down the trunk, and elevators that worked on pulleys and could be lowered and raised between levels. I reckon there were in the high hundreds of chambers throughout. Maybe more. Only about 150 were occup
ied, I was told, so I had my choice. I settled myself in a smallish one close to the main trunk on the third floor; it was open on two sides, but I figured I’d find a way to close it off, and it was just the right size for me and Stupid…though I wasn’t sure he’d be joining me. He’d run off with the other dogs as soon as he’d finished paddling across the river. The sweetish smell of the jungle was even stronger near the trunk, and I supposed it was the tree giving off that odor.

  Pieczynski handed me over to a trim, tanned, thirty-something woman name of Annie Ware and went off to see to his own affairs. Annie had a sandy haircut like a boy’s and wore khaki shorts and a loose blouse of stitched-together bandannas. It had been a long time since I’d looked at a woman with anything approaching a clear mind and unclouded eye, and I found myself staring at Annie. There was a calmness to her face illustrated by the fine lines around her gray eyes and mouth, and though she wasn’t what you’d call a raving beauty, she was a damn sight more attractive than the women I’d encountered on the rails. She led me through the dim interior of the tree, passing several occupied chambers lit by candles, and explained how things worked in Yonder.

  “We get most of our supplies from back in the world,” she said. “There’s five of us—Pie’s one—who don’t mind traveling back and forth. They scrounge what we need. Rest of us wouldn’t go back for love nor money.”

  When I asked how come this was, she shot me a sideways glance and said, “You feel like goin’ back?”

  “Not right now,” I told her. “But I ’spect sooner or later I’ll be wantin’ to.”

  “I don’t know. You look like a stayer to me.” She guided me around a corner and we came to a place where you could see out through a couple of unoccupied chambers at the jungle. The sunlight made the flattened branch shine like polished mahogany. “Everyone works here. Some people fish, some hunt for edibles in the jungle. Some weave, some cook…”

  “I can fish,” I said. “My daddy useta…”

  “You’ll be doin’ chores at first. Cleaning and runnin’ errands. Like that.”

  “Is that so?” I stopped walking and glared at her. “I been doin’ for myself…”

  She cut me off again. “We can’t tolerate no lone wolfs here,” she said. “We all work together or else we’d never survive. New arrivals do chores, and that’s what you’ll be doin’ till you figure out what job suits you.”

  “Just who is it lays down the rules?”

  “Ain’t no rules. It’s how things are is all.”

  “Well, I don’t believe that,” I said. “Even out on the rails, free as that life is, there’s a peckin’ order.”

  “You ain’t out on the rails no more.” Annie folded her arms beneath her breasts. Her eyes narrowed, and I had the impression she perceived me as an unsavory article. “Some people been here more’n twenty years. When they came, there was people here who told ’em how things worked. And there was people here even before them.”

  “What happened to ’em all?”

  “They died…what do you think? Either they was killed or they just gave out. Then there’s some caught a ride over Yonder’s Wall.”

  “Them mountains, you mean?”

  “Yeah, right. ‘Them mountains’.” She charged the words with disdain.

  “You don’t like me very much, do you?” I said.

  Annie’s mouth thinned. “Let’s say I ain’t disposed to like you.”

  “Why’s that? I ain’t done nothin’ to you.”

  She twitched her head to the side as if she’d been struck and kept silent for four or five seconds. “You don’t have a clue who I am, do you?” she asked finally.

  I studied her for a second or two. “I never seen you before in my life.”

  She fixed me with a mean look. “My train name useta be Ruby Tuesday. I rode the southern line mostly, but there was times I rode up north.”

  “Ruby?” I peered at her, trying to see in her face—a face that radiated soundness—the wild-haired, grimy clot of human misery I’d known long years before.

  “It’s Annie now,” she said. “I cleaned up. Same as you. Only difference is, I been living clean seven years, and you been doin’ it for a day.”

  I couldn’t believe it was her, but I couldn’t disbelieve it either. Why would she lie? “What’d I do to piss you off?” I asked. “Hell, I rode with you when you’s with Chester the Molester. We had some good times together.”

  She gaped at me, as if stunned. “You don’t remember?”

  “I don’t know what you got in mind, but there’s a whole lotta things I don’t remember.”

  “Well, you gon’ be doin’ some serious rememberin’ the next few weeks. Maybe it’ll pop up.” She spun on her heel and walked away.

  “Hey, don’t go!” I called after her. “I don’t know where the fuck I am! How’m I gon’ find my room?”

  “Look for it,” she snapped back. “I ain’t about to stand around and hold your dick for ya!”

  I did, indeed, do some serious remembering over the next week or thereabouts. Days, I fed fish heads and guts to the dogs—must have been around sixty of them all told—and carried messages and helped dig new latrines. Nights, I sat in my room, closed off from the rest of Yonder by two blankets that Pieczynski had lent me, and stared at a candle flame (candles also courtesy of Pieczynski) as the stuff of my life came bubbling up like black juice through the shell of a stepped-on bug. Not much I remembered gave me pleasure. I saw myself drinking, drugging, thieving, and betraying. And all that before I’d become a tramp. I could scarcely stand to think about it, yet that was all I thought about, and I would fall asleep each night with my head hurting from images of the bedraggled, besotted life I had led.

  As the days passed I became familiar with Yonder’s routine. Every morning small groups would head upriver to fish or out into the jungle to pick berries and other edibles, each accompanied by a handful of dogs. The rest took care of their work in and around the tree. On the landward side of the tree, a space had been cleared in the jungle and that’s where the food preparation was done—in long pits dug beneath thatched open structures. There seemed only the loosest possible sense of community among the residents. People were civil to one another, but generally kept to themselves. At times I would wander about the tree, looking for company, and while some would say “Hi” and introduce themselves, nobody invited me to sit and chat until one night I ran into a skinny, intense kid named Bobby Forstadt, who shared a room on the fifth floor with Sharon, a blond punk girl who was decorated all over with self-applied tattoos—black words and crudely drawn flowers and the names of boys.

  When Bobby found out I was new to Yonder, he invited me in and started pumping me for information about the world. I proved a major disappointment, because I hadn’t paid a great deal of attention to current events the past few years. I wasn’t even sure who was president, though I told him I thought it was somebody from Texas. The governor, maybe.

  “Bush?” Bobby arched an eyebrow and looked at me over the top of his wire-rimmed glasses. He had a narrow, bony face that peeked out from a mass of brown curls like a fox from a hedge. “Hey, I don’t think so,” he said. “What about Gore?”

  The name didn’t set off any bells.

  “Fuck! Bush?” Bobby appeared deep in thought and after a bit he said, “You musta got it wrong, man.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe. But I was jungled up with Kid Dallas right after the election and he was shouting, ‘Yee-ha!’ and shit, and goin’ on ’bout some Texas guy got elected.”

  “Bush,” said Bobby, and shook his head, as if he just couldn’t get his brain around the thought. He was sitting cross-legged on the floor behind a desk he’d made from a tree stump; a spiral-bound notebook was open atop it, and there were stacks of similar notebooks in one corner of the room, separated by a couple of rolled-up sleeping bags from stacks of regular books, mostly dog-eared paperbacks. One wall was dominated by a hand-drawn map constructed of several doze
n taped-together sheets of notebook paper. I asked him about it, and he said it was a map of Yonder.

  “It’s probably not accurate,” he said. “I just put together everybody’s stories about how they came here and where they’ve traveled since, and that’s what I ended up with.” He cocked an eye toward me. “Where’d you catch out?”

  “Klamath Falls,” I told him. “Weirdest thing, ’bout maybe ten minutes out we started goin’ through these mountains. Big ’uns.”

  “Everyone sees the same exact stuff,” Bobby said. “First the mountains and the marshes. Then the hills.”

  “You sayin’ everyone who comes to Yonder goes through the same country, no matter where they catch out?”

  “Sounds fucked up, huh?” Bobby scratched at his right knee, which was poking through a hole in his jeans. He also had on a black Monster Magnet T-shirt. Circling his wrist was a bracelet woven of blond hair that I presumed to be Sharon’s. “This whole place is fucked up,” he went on. “I’ve been here going on four years, and I haven’t seen anything yet that made sense.”

  With little prompting, he went off into a brief lecture about how various elements of the ecology of the place didn’t fit together, using terms with which I was mostly unfamiliar. “When I first arrived,” he said, “I thought of Yonder as Hobo Heaven, y’know. A lowball version of ‘The Big Rock Candy Mountain.’ Everything but the cigarette trees and the free beer. But you know what the place reminds me of now? It’s like the terrain some software guy might write for a computer game. The trains and all the bizarre fauna…I was so freaked out when I got here, I didn’t question any of it. But you examine it and you find out it’s really stupid. No logic. Just this insane conglomeration of irrational objects. But it’s a landscape where you could set a cool war or a puzzle game like Myst.”

  “That what you think Yonder is?” I asked. “A computer game?”

  “Yeah, why not? An extremely sophisticated one. And we’re the characters. The algorithms the real players inhabit.” He gave a shrug that seemed to signify cluelessness. “What do you think it is?”