Two Trains Running

by Lucius Shepard

  The scattery way she talked out the story made him think she didn’t believe it—or maybe putting it into words had rendered it unbelievable. It rang true enough to him. “You better get on home,” he told her. He struggled to his feet, back-pocketed the pint.

  “Home?” She gave a shaky-sounding laugh. “I’m a long way from home, mister.”

  He shouldered his pack, settled the straps. She came to one knee, alarmed, and asked what he was doing. “Long as I can catch out on a freight train,” he said, “cops ain’t gon’ find me hanging ’round no fucking crime scene.” He headed out into the yard, trying to shake off his buzz, and she scrambled after him. “But you didn’t do nothin’!” she said. “You got nothin’ to worry ’bout!”

  “You think that, then you don’t know shit about cops.” He picked up his pace.

  “Kin I come?”

  She was standing with knees together, hands clasped, head tipped to one side, the pose of a little girl left behind by older kids. Framed by the cathedral-like sweep of the bridge, she looked—with her strange punky hair—the picture of innocence freshly corrupted. He had the sense she knew the impression she was making.

  “I never rode the trains before. Carter, he was gonna teach me…” She brought her clasped hands up to her chest. “I won’t be no burden, I swear. If you want I kin be with you. Y’know?” Meeting his gaze, she seemed to back away from commitment. “For a while, anyways,” she said. “If you want.”

  He wasn’t sure he was interested in what she was offering—he’d been a long while without, almost three years, and most of his memories of women had to do with the trouble they landed you in and not the sweetness they brought.

  “All right,” he said, after giving the notion a couple of turns. “But don’t go thinking you can count on me. All that’s happening here is we’re taking a train ride together. I’m nobody you want to be counting on.”

  Often after one of his spells, and sometimes during them, Madcat would dream about trains—not the Union Pacific freights he was used to, but supernatural beings, mile-long metal snakes coiling around the switchbacks through a snow-peaked mountain range that went on forever, the only alive things in all that noble wilderness. Usually the dreams had a certain sinister quality, and this one started out no differently, with an old-fashioned black steel locomotive powered by an enormous human heart instead of a furnace, but then it changed in character, a variance of degree alone, because there was always an element of the sinister involved, and he thought that Grace—this, the girl told him, was her name, and she was from Ohio and had been living in squats, hanging out, surviving, but she was sick of the life and was heading to California to hook up with a rich uncle…He thought that Grace, then, must be responsible for this change. The locomotive, which was twice normal size, spat scraps of fire from its stack and howled like the ghost of a giant, but as they sped deeper into the night the howling gentled down into music, thunderous at first but growing increasingly easy on the ears, and streams of pink and aqua light mixed with the ebony smoke pluming from the stack, and the scraps of fire turned into glowing ankhs and crescents and all manner of Cabalistic sign, a torrent of bright arcana flowing back along the body of the train, enveloping it, so that the car where he and Grace were sheltering was transformed into a radiant space with the ambiance of a weird night club—like a retro neon sign come to life—where dancing silhouettes followed the elaborate suggestions of artfully dissonant strings and saxophones that sprayed clusters of mathematical symbols from their bells, and he and Grace were dancing too, gliding off to join the other featureless, faceless couples, buoyed up among syncopated martini glasses, tuxedo-wearing stick figures, old dream-blue drifts of jazz and smoke-ring Saturns…

  He woke to find that the freight had pulled off onto a siding. His face was stiff from exposure and a back tooth was throbbing. Winter light shafted through the cracked door of the boxcar, shining upon frozen particles of dust so they looked like silver atoms. He and Grace had wound up spoon-style in the sleeping bag, and his erection was prodding her behind. He tried to shift away, but only succeeded in rubbing up against her.

  “I cain’t sleep with you poking me,” she said muzzily. He unzipped his side of the sleeping bag and she protested: “I didn’t mean for you to get up!”

  “I gotta piss,” he told her.

  The cold floors stung his feet; he went on tiptoes to the door and peeked out to see if anyone was checking the cars. Fresh snow blanketed an expanse of rolling hills, framing rectangles of golden winter wheat. An ugly smear of egg-yolk yellow had leaked up from the eastern horizon; elsewhere the gunmetal blue of the sky had gone pale at the edges. The train was a local, stopping at every shithole, and Madcat figured they were still a ways from Missoula. He let fly and his urine brought up steam from the gravel.

  “I hafta pee, too,” Grace said.

  He dug a roll of toilet paper from his pack, tossed it to her, and went back to the door. A few seconds later she jittered up beside him, doing a hopping dance to fight the chill. In the sunlight her red hair was even more startling in contrast to her pallor, reminding him of a National Geographic photo he’d seen of African dancers with white clay masks, their hair dreaded up, caked with dried mud. She gave him a nudge, trying to move him aside, and said, “Lemme out.”

  “You gotta do it over in the corner,” he said. “You go outside, brakeman or someone’s liable to see you.”

  She squinched up her face but otherwise made no complaint.

  Up ahead, about a quarter-mile from the tracks, lay a tiny reservation town. Trailers, shanties, rusted pickups. One trailer pitched at a derelict angle, slipped partway off its blocks. Clouds with pewter edges and blue-gray weather heavy in their bellies were pushing in low from the north.

  The sound of Grace’s water tightened his neck.

  It took him several minutes to stop shivering after he got back into the sleeping bag. He drew up his knees and turned onto his side, facing the wall. Grace propped herself on an elbow, leaned over him. A rope-end of her hair trailed stiff and coarse across his jaw, and he scratched where it tickled.

  “You like my hair?” she asked.

  “It’s all right. Doesn’t feel much like hair.”

  She pretended to dust his nose with the bristly end and giggled. “I’m the same color down below,” she said. “Know that?”

  “Guess I do now.”

  She was silent a few ticks, then: “Why you so paranoid ’bout the cops? I mean I know what you said about ’em’s true, but you was in an awful hurry last night.”

  He started to tell her to fuck off, but decided she was entitled. “My wife had an affair with a cop. I came home one afternoon, and they were going at it in my bed. I jumped on top of ’em and beat the shit out of him. I knew they’re bound to file charges, and with both him and my wife testifying, no way I wasn’t gon’ do some time.”

  “So you took off runnin’, huh?”

  “Went down to the yard and caught out on my first freight. I was just too sick to deal with all that lawyer crap. I’d been getting these headaches, blackouts and shit, for a couple years, and I couldn’t work. Doctor thought maybe it was job-related. Environmental. But wasn’t no way to prove it.” He eased onto his back and rolled his shoulders, working out a stiffness. “No money coming in, the wife gets unhappy, she goes to humping Dudley Do-right.” He made an embittered noise. “That’s my story. The Making of a Hobo. Reckon I can sell it to the movies?”

  She didn’t appear to notice that he had made a joke. “You still sick?” she asked.

  “I get spells now and then.”

  With a shattering rush, a train stormed past on the adjoining track, and speech became impossible. The shadow of its passage caused the light to flicker like the beam from an old projector. Grace settled beside him.

  “You know,” she said after the last car had gone by, “I bet my uncle could he’p you with them charges, I’s to ask him. Man must have a dozen lawyers workin’ for hi
m. Maybe you should come on down to LA with me and see what’s what.”

  “’Round Tucson’s where I like to winter,” he said.

  She snuggled closer and the warmth of her body seeped into him; soon his erection returned.

  “’Pears you gon’ have trouble sleepin’.” Her fingers traipsed across his thigh. “Want me to take care of that for you?”

  He felt oddly shy and looked away from her. “Yeah. Sure…whatever.”

  “Now that’s what a girl wants to hear.” She removed her hand and mimicked his delivery. “‘Sure…whatever.’ Hey, I can go on back to sleep if you’re not interested. But if you are, it’d be nice to know I’s bein’ ’preciated.”

  “I appreciate it,” he said.

  “That’s a little better, but still…” She cupped his face in her hands. “C’mon, tell me somethin’. Say.”

  Her irises were a deep, dark blue, the same hard color that held at the top of a midafternoon winter sky, edged with bits of topaz and gold like the geometric scraps you find inside a kaleidoscope. “I want…” he said, and then, a little fazed by her closeness, lost track of things.

  “Well, there you go,” she said. “I almos’ believed that one.”

  The freight rolled eastward. Grace’s arms and legs were tomboyish, lean, the architecture of her ribs plain to see, but her breasts were heavy, the skin soft as crepe and so pale that the veins showed through. Blue highways on the map of a snowy country. She braced on his chest with one hand, straddled his hips and fitted her blood-colored bush to him. The tightness of her took his breath. “I know you like that,” she said, straightening above him. “I can tell jus’ how much you like it.” She reached back and pulled the sleeping bag cover up behind her as if it were a vampire’s cape, shrouded herself in it so that only wintry blue eyes and scarlet hair were visible of the terrible white creature she was pretending to be. Then with a fang-bearing hiss, she sank down atop him, enclosing them in a rattling darkness that lasted all the way to Missoula.

  That night they showered up and ate at a mission in Missoula, then skipped out on the preaching and spent much of the next day obtaining emergency food stamps, which they sold for fifty cents on the dollar to a mom-and-pop grocery. They bought supplies, mostly wine, and Grace found herself some clean clothes and a used knapsack at the Goodwill. During rush hour she worked the sign, stood at a busy intersection holding a piece of cardboard upon which she’d written Please Help Me Get Home, and took in close to a hundred dollars—that gave them more than two hundred to travel on, even after spending twenty-six on a motel with In-Room Triple XXX Adult Videos.

  “Why cain’t we do like we done in Spokane?” she asked the following morning as they labored up a hill west of town, moving through a stand of old-growth pine, heading for a section of track that climbed a steep grade. “Whyn’t we jus’ go in the freight yard and find us a car?”

  “Spokane’s a pussy yard,” Madcat said. “Any damn fool can catch out of Spokane. In Missoula the bulls’ll bust your head open, then run you in for trespassing.”

  It was good traveling weather, cold and clear, gusting a bit. Patches of sunstruck needles like complicated golden ideograms trembled on the forest floor, and every so often the dark green pine-tops would lift in a flow of wind and sway all to one side with the ponderous slowness of dancing bears. When they reached the tracks Madcat had Grace tie off the cuffs of her jeans with an extra pair of shoelaces so they wouldn’t catch on anything. “We gon’ be looking for a grain car,” he said. “Got a little porch on the front end where two can ride. Now when it comes it won’t be going real fast, but it’s going faster than it looks, so don’t try and jump on it. You gotta respect the steel. You go throwing yourself at it, you liable to wind up underneath the train. What you do is, you grab hold of the hand rails and let your feet drag along in the gravel till you feel under control. Then you can haul yourself up.”

  The side of the hill had been cut away, leaving a cliff of pinkish stone looming above the tracks. They sat with their backs against it, gazing out over the forested slope. Madcat sipped from a jug of Iron Horse and Grace fired up a hand-rolled, then exhaled a glowing cloud of smoke that boiled furiously for an instant in the strong sun.

  “Where’s this train taking us?” she asked.

  “Klamath Falls, Oregon. Got a big switchyard there. Won’t be hard finding something heading for Tucson.”

  “I cain’t understand why you won’t at leas’ consider going to California,” she said querulously.

  “’Cause I’m going to Tucson. Cops there don’t give a damn ’bout a few tramps drinking their wine and smoking their dope. And that’s how I like things.”

  “Yeah, but if you’s to come to California, my uncle might could he’p you with your legal problems.”

  “Your uncle got himself a cement pond?” he asked.

  She looked at him askance. “What you talkin’ ’bout?”

  “I want to know if he’s got a cement pond, ’cause the only hillbilly bitch I know’s got a rich uncle in LA’s named Ellie Mae Clampett.” He had another swallow of wine and felt a sudden ebullient rush, as if that swallow had enabled him to commune with the group consciousness of drunkards, to tap into their reservoir of well-being. “I guess it’s possible a homeless redneck female talks like you, all ungrammatical and shit, could have herself a doting uncle with a big bank account. And I suppose this uncle could have such a fine liberal sensibility, he’d be inclined to extend himself on behalf of the unemployable alcoholic who’s fucking his niece. But I gotta tell you, it seems like a long shot.”

  She flipped away her cigarette and stared at him meanly. “You don’t believe me ’bout my uncle? You sayin’ I’m lyin’?”

  “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 betwee
n 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.