by George Wier
I keyed the mic. “Just burned out. Here goes nothing.”
“It’s a piece of cake,” she said, and silence ensued.
“I now officially miss ‘over’,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“Will you two can the chatter?” Corky’s voice came over the radio. “We’re losing pressure fast.”
“I know. I know,” JoJo said. “Give us a minute.”
“Or five,” I said.
“You’ve got about four, and then this thing is coming to a stop and we’ll have to bank the fire.”
“What’s that mean?” I asked.
“Starve it of oxygen,” Leo’s voice stated.
“Just aim and jump,” JoJo said.
“Okay,” I said. “Everybody shut up. Here I come.”
I turned the radio off, put it in my pocket, stepped to the side to let the dim light through.
Behind me, Frank shouted, “Just jump!”
“All right, already. Everybody’s a critic.”
I studied the rung I was going to grasp, and where I would have to put my feet. I counted from ten to one, then decided to start all over.
It came unbidden into my mind at that moment. One time Jessica and I were playing one-on-one basketball in the driveway and she was standing her ground from well past the free-throw line, and I couldn’t get past her. I dribbled, held the ball, dribbled and stepped, held it again, and then a feeling came over me. It was a sense of rightness. Why was I trying to get closer to the basket when all I needed was that feeling? I had height on Jessica, and I knew there was really nothing she could do. I dribbled once more, made as if I were going to step again, but instead leapt straight up and threw. The ball sailed up in a beautiful slow motion arc, as if what I had done was the laziest thing in the world, then went through the net without touching the hoop. It was game point. Jessica’s shoulders slumped and she said, “How am I supposed to defend against that?” to which I replied, “You don’t. There’s no defense against that.” “What do you call that?” “It’s a thing wonderful and rare. It’s called a sense of rightness.” The next morning I was awakened by the sound of a basketball banging off of the backboard. I looked out the window, and there was Jessica, practicing from past the freethrow line. She would jump straight up and throw, miss, try again and miss. Finally, as I watched, she got it. Then she stood there and I watched as the implication sunk in. And that was my gift that day to her.
I stood there in the night and waited. When it came, I recognized it and didn’t hesitate. I jumped forward and my overly large shadow in front of me shrank. The rung of the ladder came into my hands at the same moment that my feet came down exactly where they were supposed to land. I started up without a second thought. There’s something to be said for rightness.
*****
I went over the refrigeration car without a flashlight and with extreme care, realizing I had left the lantern in the caboose. Not that I knew how to turn the lantern on or off in the first place. About halfway across, my cell phone rang. I fished it out and looked at it. Perry.
“This is not a good time,” I answered.
“Why? What’s going on?”
“I’m on top of a damned train in the night.”
“Wow. You get all the fun gigs.”
“Perry, this is not my idea of fun. I’m hanging up now.”
“Wait. I’m in Temple. There’s about a dozen cop cars alongside the track.”
“Thank you, Patrick.”
“I’m not Patrick. Bill, are you feeling all right?”
“Never better. I’m going now, Perry.”
“Before you do, I passed some guys who are parked beside the tracks. I think...”
“You think what?”
“I think they’re moving something...big onto the railroad track.”
“What is it?”
“It looks like a propane tank or something.”
“Crap. Tell the state troopers by the tracks what is happening and where it is. And do it fast.”
“I’m not talking to the cops! This is me being covert!”
“I need you to be overt, Perry. I need you to be way out there overt. And right now!”
I hung up on him, then noted that I was at a sixty-three percent charge. In the next moment, as the light on my phone went out, I realized I was standing atop a moving train. I was tired—it was way past my bed time—I was hungry and couldn’t recall when I had last eaten, and time was of the essence.
I dug out the radio and turned it on. The instant I did, I heard, “Bill! Bill, are you there?” It was JoJo’s voice.
“I’m here. Coming forward. On top of the refrigerator car now. We’ve got trouble.”
“Bill, this is Corky. Stop and flatten yourself on top of that car right now.”
A shadow raced forward at me in the night.
I dropped flat on the car and the shadow passed—no, whistled—over me. And then it was past.
I got to my feet, shakily, and was amazed to note that I still had the radio in my hand in a death grip.
“What the hell was that?” I asked.
“That was a low overpass,” JoJo said.
“It could have taken my head off!”
“Maybe so, but probably not. Better to be safe than sorry.”
“Thanks.”
“What’s the trouble?” Corky asked.
At that moment, Charlie, with flashlight in hand, came up to me. “Never turn off your radio,” he shouted at me in the night.
“Yeah,” I told him. “Thanks. Can I have your flashlight?”
“Get your own. There’s a whole bank of them from where JoJo got the med kit.”
“Good to know.”
“What trouble?” Corky’s voice came back at us over the radio.
“About the trouble,” I said, to Charlie, then keyed the mic, telling everybody at once: “The trouble is that our friends are putting a propane tank on the track ahead of us.”
“Shit,” I heard.
“Damn the torpedoes,” I said.
“What was that?” Leo asked.
“I said ‘Damn the torpedoes!’”
I got laughter back, then. “That’s right, damn the torpedoes!” I wasn’t sure of the voice, but that didn’t matter.
“From this moment forward,” I said, keying the mic, “this train is The Lone Star Express. We’re going to Midland. And don’t anybody forget that. Come hell, come high water, come propane tanks, overpasses and death in the night, we’re going for broke.”
There was a whoop over the radio and then it went silent.
Charlie reached out his hand and squeezed my shoulder, then leaned forward so he didn’t have to shout. “I sure hope you know what the hell you’re doing.”
“I haven’t a clue,” I said.
“That’s what I was afraid of. Listen, take care up there. She needs somebody taller and twenty years younger than me for what she needs done.”
“That doesn’t sound good. What does...?” I said, but he was gone into the night.
CHAPTER NINE
Whoever it was, whatever their agenda, they couldn’t have had time to stop and get a propane tank from somewhere and move it onto the tracks after having passed us by no more than fifteen or twenty minutes before. These were my thoughts as I moved through both of the passenger cars, retrieved my own flashlight, then went around the base of the water car. Halfway around, I heard a shout and looked up. It was JoJo, atop the water car.
She motioned for me to back up and climb on top of the car. I could see what the issue was, and was already imaging what she had in mind. The water feed line, which emerged from a pump at the center of the car, had been hit by some of the rifle or shotgun fire from the previous encounter, and was spewing water. Beside JoJo, atop the cylindrical car, was the pump engine, which I took from the high volume of racket it produced to be a gasoline-powered pump. It would have to be on a train that had at best limited electricity.
In one of JoJo’s han
ds was the last thing I hoped ever to see: a huge roll of silver duct tape and a pair of tin-snip shears.
I went around back, climbed the ladder to the top and moved towards her. As I did, the train lurched, slowing down, and I had to compensate quickly with a little dance-like step to keep from falling forward. Stepping past the pump engine, which had cycled up to a high whine, JoJo motioned for me to get down on my knees.
Hunkering down beside her, I knew what she was going to say, judging from the distance from the top of the water car to the five-inch diameter house.
“You’ll have to hold my legs while I fix the water line.”
“Isn’t there another way?”
“No.”
At that moment, our radios squawked. I couldn’t tell whose voice it was, but it was probably Corky’s, seeing as how Charlie was back in the caboose: “It’s a mile ahead. The propane tack. I can see it.”
JoJo got down on her belly and put her hand and wrist through the roll of tape while the shears were clinched in her other hand.
“I’m gonna scoot slowly off this thing. Grab my legs as I go by you. And don’t let go!”
“I would never let go,” I said, but she didn’t acknowledge me. Her scoot was more of a slow launch. I grabbed her right leg below the calf muscle, then as she continued over, her left. I felt myself starting to slide that way and foresaw the inevitable. To compensate, I kicked out my own legs until I was draped belly down across the narrow walkway.
JoJo was slim and wiry, but she weighed more than a couple of sacks of concrete. My wrists and fingers lodged a protest, which I did my best to ignore.
The train continued to slow. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed that the landscape ahead of us flashed red and blue. The cavalry was coming from a mile or more away.
The gasoline pump two feet away from my right ear gave a cough, like a backfire, and continued to sputter and whine, which told me that the pump was overworking itself in an attempt to maintain a certain water pressure in the line itself. If we lost the pump, then the train was going to be stopped until a replacement was found.
The lights from the state troopers closed the gap in the night as the train slowed. From the trees and telephone poles going by, it appeared we were at less than half of our top speed, somewhat less than twenty miles per hour, as if the train no more than sauntered along. My arm, wrist and finger muscles began to burn and shake, and my shoulder musculature began its own little protest march.
JoJo slapped the side of the steel tank hard with either the shears or the roll of tape at the same instant that the whine from the pump engine began to abate. I pulled at JoJo, slowly bending my arms, and began alternating my hands up her little body until I had her by the waist. She reached back with the hand that had the tape roll around the wrist, grabbed the back of my shirt collar and tugged. The shirt pulled out of my pants and I nearly lost both my grip and JoJo, but she released the collar and boxed my left ear with her palm. I nearly shrieked, but bit down on my tongue.
And then she was up.
“You okay?” She asked. She was on her toes, kneeling beside me.
I released my tongue from my teeth.
“Never better.”
“Let me help you up,” she said.
As I got to my feet, the train lurched again and she fell into me. JoJo came down atop me and her breath whooshed from her lungs into my face. I had my knee in her diaphragm.
“You okay?” I asked. I couldn’t see her face at all. I thought of my flashlight and wondered where it was, and then realized that it was what was digging hard into my back.
“O—kay,” she said.
As we slowly got to our feet again, I noted that the train had slowed to less then ten miles per hour. A few hundred yards ahead of us, a line of cars with red and blue lights came to a stop. A car shot away and passed us, gaining speed, while yet another state trooper vehicle passed the intersection and gave chase.
The radio squawked again, “One more slow-down, then I’m going to nudge that tank off the tracks.”
I pulled my radio out of my pocket and said, “Any chance you’ll blow it up?”
“Yeah?” Corky said. “But I like the chances. They put it at an angle. I don’t think they had time to do it right.”
“Nudge it, then,” I said.
Another look ahead revealed two men raising their hands in the headlights of the state troopers. I would have bet my last dollar that there were guns trained on them with itchy trigger fingers back of those headlights.
“Corky, I think this is under control. Go ahead and stop.”
“Hold on, then.”
“Shit,” JoJo said.
We both dropped back to the top of the car an instant before the brakes went on. There was shriek from the steel rails and big lurch—JoJo and I scooted a few feet forward—and then the train stopped in the night.
*****
We all came down from the train like the shell-shocked survivors of a World War II air raid, and merged towards the dance of lights along the road. As Corky came down from the engine, followed by Leo, who was covered from head to toe in a caul of black coal-soot, I noted that he had stopped the train less than a foot from the huge propane tank astraddle the tracks.
Two men were down on the ground and being handcuffed.
Perry Reilly emerged from between two state vehicles.
“Thanks, Perry,” I said. “I think you may have saved our bacon.”
“Well, I—”
“What the hell is this about?” a state trooper came up to me and asked. I don’t know why it is that people assume that I’m in charge. I’ve never understood it.
I noticed the two bars on his collar, “Lieutenant, this is the Lone Star Express. I’m Special Ranger Bill Travis.” I removed my wallet and held up my badge. It’s not often that I get to use or show it. “We have the body of former Governor, Richard Sawyer, on this train, and we’re taking him to West Texas to bury him. This is the second attempt to stop us.”
“So I’ve heard.” He reached out his hand to shake mine, and I did so. “I’m Casper Inkslater, Regions VI, District C.”
“Good to meet you.”
“Do you have any orders for me, sir?”
“Yes,” I said, without thinking about it. “I want at least one escort vehicle dogging our trail for the remainder of this trip. I want to know who your prisoners are and what they’re after. We may need some help getting the propane tank off the tracks. After that, there’s a switch a few miles ahead where you fellahs were when my partner, Perry Reilly,” I pointed him out, “got you to come help us.”
“He didn’t warn us. I’m of a mind to put him under arrest, but you say he’s with you?”
“Yeah. Oh God, what has he done?” I asked.
Lieutenant Inkslater laughed. “Maybe it’s better he did it that way. I see that time was of the essence.” He turned toward Perry and gestured. “This guy comes up to us, sits down on his horn and starts doing doughnuts in the middle of the highway. We chased him all the way here and saw there was something going on. I guess I saw the train coming, that big gas tank on the tracks, those idiots over there,” he gestured to the two men being placed into the rear seats of two different patrol vehicles, “with guns in their hands, and decided that Mario Andretti over there,” he hooked a thumb again at Perry, “wasn’t trying to commit suicide by cop.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “Come over here, Perry.”
Perry stepped forward.
I introduced Perry and the train crew to everyone.
“We’ve got a wounded guy in the caboose,” I said.
At that moment, Charlie and Frank walked up.
“I’m fine. I’m fine,” Frank said. Let’s get this railroad rolling.
“Mr. Travis,” Cap Inkslater said, “I’ll ride point for you. How are we to stay in contact?”
“I’ve got a cell phone, but it’s down to probably about half power, and I don’t think I have a way to charge it.�
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Cap turned. “One of you guys, toss me your cell phone. I’m gonna loan it to Ranger Travis for the next day or so.”
One of the state troopers walked over and handed me his phone.
“Thanks,” I said.
“What do you want me to do, Bill?” Perry asked.
“I think we’ve got this thing covered now. You can go home and get a good nights sleep.” Before he could say ‘no’ I reached out and shook his hand. He took it, pulled me to him and hugged me. It was an awkward moment and Cap raised one of his eyebrows. Perry released me.
“It’s okay,” I said to Cap. “I’m his older brother. Uh, half-brother.”
CHAPTER TEN
While Corky, Charlie, and JoJo helped the state troopers lever the propane storage tank off the tracks with the abandoned tow-truck that had placed it there—one of the three vehicles for which the license and registration was busily being run-down by Department of Public Safety dispatcher for the owner’s name—I conferred with Cap, explaining the route we were taking and the nature of driving a steam train across multiple railroads. Explaining, that is, to the best of my limited knowledge. As we spoke, I watched Leo doing something at the front of the train engine. After a moment, he unfurled a Texas flag, pinned it to a metal pole, and affixed it so as to drape from the front and side of the engine. He then went around and started work on the other side. In the meantime, Cap had asked me kindly to refer to him as ‘Cap’ instead of ‘Lieutenant.’
“—he, or maybe she,” he continued to explain, and I realized I hadn’t been listening all too well, “apparently went through a fence and into a corn field. Trooper Cooper followed and when the vehicle went into a creek, he stopped in time. The vehicle was empty.”
I had to restrain myself from laughing at the prospect of ‘Trooper Cooper.’
“How is that possible?”
“The driver had to have leapt clear into the corn during the chase and let the car drive on. Cooper followed the car, not knowing it was empty. So, our other guy—or girl—is somewhere miles away by now.”
