Two Trains Running

by Lucius Shepard

  This was no old-fashioned steam-powered locomotive, but a Streamliner, one of those trains named Zephyr or Coronado, an emblem of 1950s Futurism with double-decker lounge cars and a Silver Streak-style engine, only this particular engine was gold with a green windshield, so the effect was of a great sleek golden beast wearing emerald shades. It was speeding straight at him, radiating the sort of holy sunrays that artists usually depict emanating from Buddhas and Krishnas and Christs, and it was taking up every inch of space between the strings of cars. He braced for the impact, squeezing his eyes shut. Yet somehow it missed him and roared on past—he caught sight of Grace’s dreadlocks whipping out the engineer’s window. He thought he was safe once the last car had gone by, but the train’s speed was such that the draft sucked him up like a scrap of paper and he went bouncing along behind it, banging down onto the rails and flipping up, skipping over the ties. It hurt like hellfire. His legs snapped, bones splintered and poked out his flesh. But he had no regrets. He’d known Grace was trouble from the get-go, and maybe that was why he had hooked up with her, maybe he’d been looking for that kind of trouble—things had not been going well, and the best he could have hoped for was a few more bad years, years of drunkenness and headaches and blackouts, before he was knifed or shot or died of life’s own poison. This way, at least, he’d gotten to feel some things he’d forgotten how to feel, because though Grace was, at heart, no-account, she knew how to make it sweet, this farewell ride, this little going away party with the lowlife angel of death.

  The train receded down a golden tunnel, dragging with it the bloody fragments of his imaginary corpse, and the headache that followed left Madcat curled up in pain beside the rails, unmindful of everything around him. The pain was so intense, it formed a barrier between the moment and all that had gone before, and when at last it abated, it took him a while to notice that the grain car to which he had lashed F-Trooper was missing—the entire string of cars was missing—and longer yet to comprehend that the grain car had been part of the train put together earlier in the evening, and now, with F-Trooper attached, was gone off on its run. He stared at the patch of gravel where the Indian had fallen, numbed by the terrible character of the death. Moving awkwardly, stiffly, he got to his feet. He found he was still holding the ax handle and let it fall. It wasn’t his fault, he told himself. It was the world. This world of mystical steel and cheap wine and lonesome fuck-ups in which even an act of mercy, and that’s what it had been, no matter how fuzzily motivated it seemed at the time…even an act of mercy could result in blood. But of course it was his fault. He couldn’t escape what he had done, nor could he escape what he might have done in Spokane. The boneyard reality of it all bred a weakness in his limbs; he thought he could feel some feathery, insubstantial thing fluttering behind his brow. He started trudging back toward the thickets, following the remaining string of cars, stopping now and then to lean against them.

  Parked about fifty feet from the end of the string was a police cruiser, startlingly white and defined against the bleak topography of black dirt and curving tracks. The sight brought Madcat up short. His instinct was to run, but he had no energy left. The longer he stood there, the more alluring became the prospect of ceding authority over his life to the competency of jailers and the consolation of lawyers, to a controlled environment with hot meals and daytime TV and card games, even if in the end it led to the injection. The police car fascinated him. It was empty and appeared to be talking to itself in angry squawks, as if it had developed the power of human speech and was cursing the desolation amidst which it had been abandoned. When Grace called to him, before he spotted her coming across the yard, he half-believed the car had succeeded in mimicking her voice.

  “You crazy?” she said. “The cops is ever’where! They ’rested your friend, but I hid our stuff out so far from the fire, they never seen me.” She tugged at his arm. “C’mon! We gotta get goin’!”

  “Think maybe it was me killed your boyfriend?” he asked.

  Dumfounded, she peered at him through the raggedy curtain of her dreads. “What?”

  “Back in Spokane. Was it me?” He turned his back to her, held his arm up as if brandishing a club. “This look like what you saw?”

  Incredulity showed in her face. “Naw, it was that Indian fella…I’m almos’ positive.”

  “It coulda been me,” he said. “Coulda been me in one of my blackouts.”

  “It was the Indian.” She shot him a dubious look. “F-Troop or whatever. Why you goin’ on this way?”

  What if it were true? he wondered. What if he’d rid the world of a murderer? What were the odds of that—of anything—being true? He couldn’t be sure that Grace was being straight with him about the dead boy. Could he have convicted himself of a murder that had never been committed? He would have liked to force the truth out of her, but he knew her well enough to understand that once she swore something had happened, she would never forswear it, however improbable the facts made it appear. The things that were truest for her were the lies she relied on, and if one or another accidentally turned out to be true, it would still come out a lie in her head.

  “C’mon, Jimmy! Le’s go!” She pulled harder on his arm, yet her expression gave scant sign of emotion. Her face seemed in its frail angularity the face of a wicked androgynous fairy peeking from among scarlet rushes, not quite hiding a knowing smile. Perhaps he misread her, perhaps that almost imperceptible curvature of the lips merely reflected a degree of strain. But that, in the end, was why he let her drag him away—the intimation that her secret self was peeking out from behind the clownish surface she usually presented to the world, and that she wanted something other than protection on a long train ride, that she signified an ending more intricate than death, and had some sly and delightful, albeit not yet formulated, transmortal purpose for which she now intended to save him.

  Unless you were a runaway child and fell prey to one of the many pedophiles who frequented the area, the Salt Lake City freight yard could be an agreeable place for someone wanting a free train ride. The bulls had little interest in tramps, and the crews were a generally friendly bunch, an attitude that manifested in their habit of leaving a few boxcars open on every train that went out. Madcat and Grace had located such a car and were sitting with their backs against a wall, looking out the door, which was cracked so wide it might have been a picture window offering a view of a fireball sun declining behind snow peaks.

  “What we gon’ do for money in Tucson?” Grace asked out of the blue.

  “The usual. Maybe pick up some day work here’n there.”

  Grace fingered the edge of the sleeping bag. “I waited tables in this fancy cocktail bar one time—made me some serious money. If I had a job like that, maybe we could get us a place. Not for forever, y’know. Jus’ for a coupla months. Be nice to have our own place for a coupla months, wouldn’t it?”

  “Might,” he said. “Long as we stay away from rent hassles. I had enough of that shit.”

  “You don’t need to say nothin’ ’bout that. I’m with you there.” She tucked in her chin and inspected the front of her new sweatshirt, smoothed out the ironed-on decal of a fluffy white kitten. “Y’know, I think we’re startin’ to learn ’bout each other. We’re gettin’ to where we can start workin’ stuff out.”

  A kid with a shaved head, wearing an army jacket and jeans, was angling toward the car, cutting across a weedy patch. Madcat kept an eye on him.

  “It’s like with now,” Grace said. “I’m okay with goin’ to Tucson, ’cause I wanna make you happy. But that don’t mean I’m givin’ up on takin’ you to visit my uncle. I figger it’ll come time when you’ll wanna do that for me.”

  The kid took a stand some twenty-five feet away and stared at Grace. His neck was heavily tattooed, his facial jewelry picked up glints of the dying sun. Grace didn’t appear to notice him. Her mime-pale face wore a distracted expression as she contemplated some fictive future. Madcat vibed a warning at the kid, cauti
oning him to get his Road-Warrior-looking ass the hell and gone.

  “I think you gon’ be surprised,” said Grace. “Two people get together, neither one of ’em knows what’s gon’ happen at first. But after ’while—” she groped at the air, like an artist trying to describe a half-imagined shape “—you can sorta feel how it’s gon’ be.”

  You don’t know what’s in me, Madcat beamed at the kid. Hell, I don’t know myself. But you don’t want to find out.

  A thin ridge of cloud like the coast of a rugged country hovered above the peaks, dark gray hills and cliffs of cloud washed to blood-red underneath.

  “Ain’t like I kin see it or nothin’,” said Grace. “If I could—” she gave a snort of laughter “—we wouldn’t never have no troubles. I’d jus’ draw us a map straight on to wherever it is we’re bound.”

  The kid spun on his heels and set out east along the tracks, head down, hands thrust in his jacket pockets, as if disappointed in life.

  “And where’s that?” Madcat asked. “Where it is you figure we’re bound? Besides Tucson, I’m talking.”

  “I don’t know.” Grace shrugged, the blithe gesture of a child responding to a question that didn’t concern her; then she cut her eyes toward him and for an instant she became visible in the way she had back in Klamath Falls—a clever spirit with unguessable motives. “There’s one thing I do know. You think you-’n’-me’s jus’ about me givin’ you sugar, and you takin’ care of me. But I’m gon’ be doin’ my share of takin’ care of you from here out.”

  The cloudy coast was breaking up into islands and floating castles, and the sky was separating into bands of color—a broad swath of scarlet behind the peaks edged by a narrow strip of paler red, bordered in turn by a still narrower strip of orange, then the thinnest stripe of peach, and above all that a reach of aquamarine, a color with the sort of mineral purity that you can see behind the clouds in museum paintings of old Italian angels.

  Entranced by this evolving masterpiece, Grace said, “You always pokin’ fun at things I say. You like to tell yourself the only reason you ever ask me anything is so’s you kin get a laugh. But you hear what I’m sayin’. I kin tell. People get close, they bound to change one another. They make each other weaker or stronger. That’s why the preacher don’t say for better or worse or in case things stay the same.” She rested her chin on her drawn-up knees, still gazing at the sky which was developing a cinematic symmetry, balconies of gaudily colored cloud arrayed against a backdrop dominated by great blades of sanguine light—a majestic sight that seemed to bear slight relation to the shriveled-up ball of fire that had produced it. “You’n me, we gon’ be strong!” Grace went on. “We gon’ shake things up. Know why? ’Cause I ain’t lettin’ you be weak. You gon’ be my strength, but I’m gon’ be your heart.”

  She continued talking, but the conviction ebbed from her words and her speech grew increasingly fragmented, disconnected. Soon she stopped altogether, and Madcat, who had been lulled and persuaded by her voice, felt that he had been hurled from a place in the sky to a cold boxcar floor. The heavy silence of the yard made him think everything was listening, watching, and uncomfortable in the sight of God, he shifted about, trying to restore his psychic equilibrium. Grace settled back against the wall and let out a sigh that seemed to express the recollection of some sad certainty. Then she pointed to the sky and said, “I reckon it mus’ be California that way.”

  Three thousand copies of this book have been printed by the Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group, Binghamton, NY, for Golden Gryphon Press, Urbana, IL. The typeset is Elante with Swing display, printed on 55# Sebago. Typesetting by The Composing Room, Inc., Kimberly, WI.