Two Trains Running

by Lucius Shepard

  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.

  “Run!” said Annie, unnecessarily—I was already in motion, not quite running but moving as fast as I could, plunging ahead, my legs going deep into the snow. There was no wonderment in me now, only fear. We thrashed our way through the snow, the wind cutting into our faces, while all around us were shiftings and ugly animal rumbles. We angled toward the left-hand section of forest, a point not far from where the black river sprang from beneath the earth. The trees seemed to inch nearer, and as I glanced behind me to gauge how close pursuit was—if, indeed, something was in pursuit—I tripped and fell. Annie screamed at me to hurry. As I staggered up, fighting for balance, I saw that several of the mounds had risen to their feet. They were heavy-bodied, slothlike, big as delivery vans, with long silky white hair shaggying their thick legs and backs. The hair fell into their faces, which were mushed-in, startlingly human except for their extremely wide mouths. Their eyes, half-hidden, were bright and violet, the same exact shade as the rays that erupted from the cliff faces. One started toward me, waddling slowly, but gaining momentum, and I plunged forward again, my breath steaming out, heart pumping, trying to will myself ahead and into the shadowed avenues among the trees. Even at top speed, apparently, the slothlike creatures were slow, and I thought we were going to make it. But at the edge of the forest, just as I stumbled almost breathless beneath a low-hanging bough, Annie grabbed my jacket and hauled me to a stop.

  “The river!” she said, gasping. “We gotta go for the river!”

  “You’re outa your mind!” I tried to shake her off, but she clung to me.

  “It’s a test!” she said. “Like back in Yonder…the mountains looked like the worst option. But we got through ’em. Now the river looks like the worst. That’s the way out. I know it!”

  The nearest of the sloths was a couple hundred feet away, and about a dozen more were edging up behind him, all grunting as they came, sounding like stalled engines trying to turn over. I started to run again, but Annie kept a hold on me and dragged me down to my knees beside her.

  “Godammit, Billy!” She shook me. “They can follow us into the forest! But the river…maybe they won’t go there!”

  The logic of that penetrated my panic. I dragged her up and we went lurching, half-falling, ploughing toward the bank. But on reaching it, I hesitated. The way it ran straight, like a long black sword laid flat across the land, its point invisible beyond the horizon, dividing everything from nothing. The Styx. Charon. Mythic images of death crowded into my brain. The water was flowing up fast from wherever it came. Snow crusts fallen from the bank floated on it. Cold as it looked, I doubted we’d last more than a minute or so. Beneath the surface were glittering points that reminded me of the beardsleys’ eyes. The slothlike creatures lumbered near. Their mouths were partially obscured behind fringes of hair, but they were wide enough to swallow us both without stretching. The shine of their violet eyes stained the snow in front of them, as if they were nothing but energy inside, no guts, no bones, just a furnace of violet glare. Their footfalls made no sound. Freeze or get chewed. It was not an easy choice.

  “Billy!” Poised on the brink, Annie pleaded with me, but I couldn’t take the step. Then her face seemed to shut down, all her caring switched off, as if it, too, had been a light inside her, and she jumped, disappearing from sight with a sodden splash. She did not resurface, and I knew she must be dead, killed by the shock. When I understood that, I didn’t much care which way I went to hell.

  Behind me, the grunting evolved into a piggish squealing. Two of the animals had begun to fight, batting with their enormous paws, mauling each other, trying to bite with mouths that opened into pink maws the size of loading bays. I watched their incompetent white battle for a second, unconcerned, empty of awe, of fear, of all feeling. I saw the mountains beyond, the sky whirling with sparks, and it seemed I could see all the way back to Yonder, the tree full of hobos, the green river, the jungle, the gorge where Euliss had died. But I could no longer see the world. It was like smoke in my memory, its images dissolving, or already dissolved. Alone and cut off from all I had known, I had little use for life. For no better reason than it was where she had vanished, I jumped into the river after Annie.

  What is it we think when we are born? After the shock, the stunning light, the sudden absence of comfort and warmth, the alarming sense of strange hands, the pain of the umbilical knife…what apprehension comes to stir the first wordless concern, the first recognition? I think it must somehow resemble the thought I had when I woke in a ferny hollow with Annie and three others: I yearned for the vague particulars of the creature inside whom I had been carried to that place, whose knowledge of the place was in me, albeit cloudily realized as yet. A creature whose skin might be a river or the interior of a black boxcar, and whose geography incorporated Yonder and places of even deeper strangeness. A vast, fabulous being whose nature was a mystery to me, but for the fact that it engulfed the world like a cloud, a heretofore unobserved atmosphere, nourishing the earth as an oyster nourishes a pearl, and extracting whomever it might need for its purposes. A great identity whose presence had been unknown to everyone; though certain saints and madmen may have mistaken it—or recognized it—for God, and those who dwelled long years in the solitudes might on occasion have sensed its sly, ineffable movements beyond the sky (old Euliss Brooks might have been one such). A cosmic monstrosity who had strained the stuff of my mind through its own substance, purifying and educating me toward an end I could not yet perceive. Before I opened my eyes and learned that Annie was there, I realized I was as different from the Billy Long Gone who had jumped into the river as he had been from the man who had climbed drunkenly aboard a black train in Klamath Falls. Smarter, calmer, more aware. I had no clear memory of where I’d been, but I understood that Annie had been right—this was a test, a winnowing, a process designed to recruit a force of considerable measure from among those who lived on the edges of things, from loners and outcasts, and develop them into…what? That I was not sure of. Pioneers, explorers, soldiers? Something on that order, I believed. But I did know for certain that those who failed the test became part of it, transformed into beardsleys and worse, and those who survived went on to take part in some enterprise, and I knew this because the creature who brought me to the hollow had imprinted that knowledge and more on my brain.

  The hollow was spanned by the crown of a tree with a thick grayish white trunk and milky green leaves. The sky was overcast, and the air cool like summer air at altitude, carrying an undertone of warmth. I felt no weakness, no fatigue—in fact, I felt strong in all my flesh, as if newly created. I looked at the others. Apart from Annie, who was just beginning to stir, there were two men and a woman. One man, lying on his back, eyes closed, was dark, lean, bearded.
Dressed in a fatigue jacket, blue pin-striped trousers that must have belonged to an old suit and were tucked into boots. Next to his outflung left hand were a small backpack and an automatic rifle. The other two were asleep in an embrace. Brown-skinned; tiny; wearing rags. Mexican, I thought, judging by the man’s Aztec features. I picked myself up, went over to the bearded man, and examined his rifle. Words in the Cyrillic alphabet were incised on the housing. To be on the safe side, I pocketed the clip.

  I checked on Annie—she was still asleep—and then scrambled up the slope of the hollow. When I reached the top I saw a city sprawling across the hills below, surrounded by forest on every side. On the edges of the city were new shacks and cabins carpentered from raw unpainted boards and logs. The buildings farther away were older, weathered, but not many were larger than the buildings on the outskirts, and they were only two- and three-stories tall. It was like a frontier town with dirt streets, but much bigger than any I’d ever heard of. A shanty metropolis. People were moving along the streets, and I made out animals pulling carts…whether oxen or horses or something else, I could not say. But the city was not the dominant feature of the view. Rising from its center, vanishing into the depths of an overcast sky, was an opaque tube that must have been a hundred yards in diameter, and along it were passing charges of violet light. It was half-obscured in mist—perhaps the mist was some sort of exhaust or discharge—and this caused it to appear not quite real, only partially materialized from its actual setting. I knew, in the same way I had known all else, that the violet lights were men and women going off on journeys even more unimaginable than the one I had taken, traveling through the branching structure I had glimpsed back in the valley (the tube was merely a small visible section of the structure); and that the city was the place to which they returned once they accomplished their tasks. Knowing this did not alarm or perturb me, but the implication it bred—that we were still inside the thing that had snatched us from our old lives—was depressing. Understanding had become important to me, and I had believed I would eventually come to an understanding that would satisfy my need for it. Now it was clear that I would always be in the midst of something too big to understand, be it God or cosmic animal or a circumstance that my mind rendered into a comprehensible simplicity…like God or a cosmic animal. I would never be able to climb up top of any situation and say, “Oh, yeah! I got it!” For all I knew, we could be dead.

  I heard a noise, saw Annie scaling the slope toward me. She gave me a hug and took in the view. “Well,” she said. “I was right.”

  “I never doubted it.”

  She put an arm about my waist and squeezed. “You lie.”

  We stood looking across our new home, calm as house buyers checking out a property, and I was actually starting to think where it was we might settle—would it be better on the edge or downtown close to the tube?—when our three companions came to join us atop the rise. The Mexican couple glanced at Annie and me timidly. They stared impassively at the vista; the woman crossed herself. I was surprised that she retained the traditions of her faith after having traveled so far and learned so much. Maybe it was a reflex.

  “English?” the bearded man asked, and Annie said, “American.”

  “I am Azerbaijani.” He squinted at me and scowled. “You take my bullets?”

  I admitted that I had.

  “Very smart.” He smiled, a clever, charming smile accompanied by an amused nod. “But rifle is broken. Bullets no good.”

  He gazed out at the city with its central strangeness of opacity and violet fire. I wanted to ask if he had ridden a black train to some Azerbaijani halfway house and how he had traveled the rest of the way, and what he thought was going on; but none of it was pressing, so I joined him in silent observance. Considering the five of us, the variance of our origins, I thought I was beginning to have a grasp of the mutability of the unknowable, of the complexity and contrariness of the creature god machine or universal dynamic that had snatched us up. And this led me to recognize that the knowable, even the most familiar articles of your life, could be turned on their sides, shifted, examined in new light, and seen in relation to every other thing, and thus were possessed of a universality that made them, ultimately, unknowable. Annie would have scoffed at this, deemed all my speculation impractical woolgathering; but when I looked at the tube I reckoned it might be exactly the kind of thinking we would need wherever we were going.

  The sun, or something like a sun, was trying to break through the clouds, shedding a nickel-colored glare. The Mexican woman peered at each of us, nodded toward the city, and said, “Nos vamos?” Annie said, “Yeah, let’s go check this out.” But the Azerbaijani man sighed and made a comment that in its simplicity and precision of vocal gesture seemed both to reprise my thoughts and to invest them with the pathos common to all those disoriented by the test of life.

  “These places,” he said musingly, then gave a slight, dry laugh as if dismissive of the concern that had inspired him to speak. “I don’t know these places.”

  Jailbait

  IRON HORSE WAS, IN MADCAT’S ESTIMATION, A true thoroughbred among fortified wines and every bit the equal of Night Train. The packaging, which depicted a brazen fire-breathing stallion in full gallop, contrived a perfect visual analog to the charge it had made through his bloodstream. Two pints had trampled his anxieties, flattened out his migraine, and enabled him to view with contentment the sorry particulars of his place in the world: a bridge on the edge of the Spokane freight yard, an abutment spangled with graffiti rising to a vault of discolored concrete that roofed the cardboard pallet where he rested with legs asprawl, head propped against his pack, a wiry, weathered man of thirty whose ragged beard and gaunt features presented an image of Old Testament fortitude. His left eye was bloodshot, the skin around it discolored from a beating, and a less recent scar ridged the cheekbone beneath it. Now and then he would sit up straight and warm his hands at a fire gone to embers, gazing blearily about, while the rush of traffic overhead fell around him like the surging of invisible tides.

  Beyond the bridge lay a muddy, rutted ground dappled with snowy patches and slicks of dead grass. Railroad junk strewn everywhere. Rusting wheels, dismantled brake shoes, and objects less definable nested in the weeds along the tracks. A waste bordered by stacks of railroad ties and dark gatherings of boxcars, all sketched in glints and gleams by the shining of a high-flying half moon, so the place looked to have acquired the cozy, comprehensible geography of a village and an air of romantic isolation it did not possess by day. Somewhere off in the yard two cars coupled with a steely clash. The forlorn voice of a train, as questioning as a whale’s song, sounded the greater distance, and with its fading, a shadow slipped from behind a stack of ties and darted toward the bridge, resolving into a slight, pale girl with unnaturally red hair and dressed in baggy clothing. She stopped about forty feet away and peered at Madcat, trying—he supposed—to make certain he was harmless. Then an engine unit came chugging out onto the section of track behind her, like a huge yellow-and-black mechanical dog sniffing at her heels, and she scooted forward again. She stood hugging herself just beneath the lee of the bridge. Dyed scarlet dreadlocks hung down over a sharp, thin-boned face. Skin so white as to seem nearly translucent. Pretty…but the sort of witchy Appalachian prettiness that never lasts much past twenty. Her sweatshirt and carpenter’s pants rubbed gray with grime. Still hugging herself, she edged a few steps closer, and once the noise of the engine had abated, she asked, “Kin you he’p me, mister?”

  “I kinda doubt it,” Madcat said.

  The girl’s head twitched as if the flatness of his response had touched a nerve.

  “I got no money to spare, that’s what you’re asking,” he said.

  She glanced nervously back toward the yard and when she spoke, her voice had a catch in it. “Kin I set here a minute? Kin you jus’ lemme set here and not bother me?”

  That irritated him. “Set wherever the fuck you want.”

 
; She hesitated, then dropped to her knees beside the fire and stretched her hands out over it—as if conjured by the gesture, a tiny flame sheeted from the bed of embers, brightening the glow on her palms. Madcat caught a whiff of creosote and thought she must have been standing close to the ties for quite some time to pick up that smell.

  He cracked the cap of his third pint, had a swallow, and considered the girl. Her eyes were shut tight, squeezing out tears. Yet for all her apparent helplessness, the tense, forward-thrusting attitude of her neck and the thick scarlet twists of hair caging her white face gave her an uncanny look. He imagined she was casting an evil spell and the tears were the result of concentrated effort. She made a fretful noise in her throat, drew a breath that pulled the sweatshirt taut across her breasts.

  “Want some wine?” he asked, holding out the bottle.

  Her eyes snapped open and went toward it, the way a snake will quicken on spotting a mouse. She shook her head, sat back on her haunches. “There’s somethin’ I should tell you ’bout,” she said.

  “Oh, that’s okay,” he said. “I got enough troubles, I don’t need to be taking yours on.”

  “Naw, I ’spect you gon’ wanna hear this.” She hooked three of the scarlet snakes with her fingers, dragged them back from her face. “Me and Carter…this boy I met. We was smoking a joint—” she gestured toward the yard “—over in there somewheres. I had to go pee and I was comin’ back…I’s ’bout to crawl ’tween two cars to get to where Carter was settin’. And that’s when I seen this shadow rise up behind him. This man.” She made the words “this man” into a question. “He had a club or somethin’,” she went on. “He didn’t say a word, he just stood there a second like he’s thinkin’ things over, then he hit Carter in the head. Carter went flat on his face and he hit him again. He kept on hittin’ him even though there wasn’t no point to it. I could tell Carter was dead.” She stared into the embers. “I don’t reckon he seen me. I sure didn’t see him—he had his back turned the whole time I’s watching.” She looked pleadingly at Madcat. “I didn’t know where to turn. I mus’ been an hour wanderin’ round out there ’fore I run into you.”