Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Short Story Anthology

  "You broke my heart, you sorry son-of-a-bitch." Annie's eyes fixed straight ahead. "You'd been romancin' me for a long time, and finally I told you I was gonna leave Chester. We're s'posed to meet at Mother Love's in Missoula. I waited for you almost a week." She turned a steely look on me. "It was bad enough thinkin' you run out on me, but I know you fuckin' forgot! You was probably so damn stoned, you didn't even know you were hittin' on me!"

  Here I'd been thinking I must have raped her, and now finding out I'd stood her up … well, if I'd been back in my old life that would have pissed me off good and proper. I might have laughed drunkenly and said something like, "Broke your heart? Who the fuck you think you are? A goddamn princess?" But I'd become a wiser man. "I'm real sorry," I said. "Chances are I was so messed-up behind … "

  "I realize I wasn't much back then," she went on, a quaver in her voice, "but goddammit, I think I deserved better'n to get left alone in a mission in fuckin' Missoula fightin' off a buncha ol' animals day and night for a week! I know I deserved better!"

  "I'm sorry," I said. "I truly am. I wouldn't do it now."

  "The hell's that mean?"

  "Means now all the shit's been scraped off my soul, I still like you. It means that me likin' you must run deep."

  She shifted like she was about to stand up, but she stayed put. "I don't … " she began; she drew a breath and held it for couple of seconds before letting it out. "You're just horny."

  "Well, that don't mean I don't like you."

  This brought a slight softening of her expression, but then she said, "Shit, I ain't listenin' to this," and got to her feet.

  "C'mon, Annie. You 'member how it was back in the world." I stood up behind her. "We were fuckin' wrecks, the both of us. We'd likely have killed each other."

  "That's still an option, far as I'm concerned."

  It's funny sometimes how you enter into an involvement. You're not even thinking about it with the front of your mind, you're dealing with some stupid bullshit, then all of a sudden it's standing right there, and you say, Oh yeah, that's what I been wanting, that's what the back of my mind's been occupied with, and now you can't do without it. Watching the featherings of whitish blond hair beside Annie's left ear was the thing that did it for me. I put a hand on her shoulder, lightly, ready to jerk it back if she complained or took a swing at me. She flinched, but let the hand stay where it was. Then she said, "You ain't gettin' laid anytime soon, I can promise you that."

  "What can I get?" I asked, trying to put a laugh in the words.

  "You keep pushin', you'll find out." She stepped away, turned to me, and I could see our old trouble in her worn, still-pretty face. "Just take it slow, okay? I ain't too good at forgive and forget."

  I held up my hands, surrendering.

  She pinned me with another hard look, as if searching for signs of falsity. Then she gave a rueful shake of her head. "Let's go on home," she said.

  "Don't you want to hang out here with the train?"

  "I'm gonna hunt up some decent food and fix you dinner," she said. "I wanna find out if we can spend an evening together without makin' each other crazy." She ran her eye along the sleek curve of the engine. "This ol' train be 'long here any time I want it."

  Back when I opted out of society, choosing to live free, as I perceived it then, I could have wound up on the streets in some homeless-friendly city like Portland, but I don't believe I would have made the choice I did if I hadn't loved trains. Loved their idea and their reality. Hobos were to my mind the knight templars of the homeless, carrying on a brave tradition of anti-establishment activity, like bikers and other such noble outcasts. Five years later I doubt I could have pronounced the word "anti-establishment", and the true reasons for my checking out, laziness, stubbornness, residual anger, and damn foolishness, had been wiped away by countless pints of fortified wine and enough speed to make every racehorse in America run fast. But I never lost my love for the trains, and neither had Annie.

  "I 'member the first time I rode," she said. "It was the best damn feelin'! I caught me a local out of Tucson with this guy I met in Albuquerque. We found us a flatcar loaded with pipe. Right in the middle of the pipe there was this little square area that was clear. Like a nest. We got ourselves down in there and partied all the way to Denver."

  This took me by surprise, because it was the first time I'd heard anyone in Yonder reminisce about their life back in the world. We were sitting in Annie's room, which was half again as big as mine. Her ceiling was contrived of interwoven leaves and vines and a branch thick as a man's waist that cut across on the diagonal, and her walls were curtains made of sewn-together remnants, pieces of old skirts and sleeping bags and towels and such. She'd fashioned a mattress by stuffing a hand-sewn cover with grass—it looked a damn sight more comfortable than my old fart-sack resting on a hardwood floor. Candles fired the curtain colors with their flickering. It was a nice cozy little space.

  "My first time wasn't all that great," I said. "But I know what you talkin' about."

  "Tell me," she said, and this, too, surprised me. I'd grown used to people not caring about my particulars.

  I drew my legs up so I was sitting cross-legged and looked down at my hands. "I was one pitiful motherfucker back then. Couldn't hold a job. Not 'cause I didn't do the work. I'd always get pissed off at somebody in authority and cuss 'em out, and that'd be that. But then I met this woman. Jesus, she was somethin'. She knew what kinda trouble she was gettin' with me, but she loved me anyway. I don't understand why to this day. She didn't try to straighten me out; she made me want to straighten myself out. But I just couldn't handle bein' happy. Least that's the way it seems to me now. I went to a shrink, and he told me I was always tryin' to punish myself 'cause of all the crap my daddy put me through. I told him, 'Hell, I know that. What I do about it?' And he says, 'What do you want to do about it?' I thought that was bullshit, so I got mad and walked out of his office." I picked at the cuticle on my thumbnail. "I understand now he'd seen through me. I didn't want to do anything about it. It was easier to go on bein' miserable than it was to work at bein' happy. That's what made me mad. Him knowin' that about me. I was so upset by what he'd said, I found me an ATM and took all the money out of my account. Our account. I was livin' with her and we'd merged our finances, such as they were. I took over seven hunnerd dollars, most of it hers. Then I went to the liquor store and bought myself a bottle of expensive whiskey. Gentleman Jack. And I headed down to the Oregon City freight yard to drink it. I wasn't plannin' on goin' nowhere, but it started to rain and I crawled into an open boxcar to finish my bottle. Next I know, train's pullin' into the switchyard at Roseville. I run into a couple hobos jungled up outside the yard. They was happy drunk, on their way to the hobo convention at Brill. Come along with us, they said. All they wanted was the crank and the booze my seven hunnerd could buy. But I figured I'd found my true companions. In a way I s'pose I had."

  Saying it out loud seemed to lighten me by half, and thinking I could let go of it all just that easy, it made me wish I could unsay it, gather it back inside me. It wasn't something I felt I should ever be free of, even for a few seconds.

  "What was her name?" Annie asked.

  "Eileen," I said.

  The name lay like a puddle that had formed between us, but when Annie spoke again, it seemed to evaporate.

  "Damn near everyone here got a past needs livin' down," she said. "Only option we got is to make the best of what is."

  "That don't hardly seem like enough."

  We sat for a while without speaking. It started to rain—I could hear it coming down heavy through the curtains, but we were so deep inside the tree, none of the drops penetrated the canopy. It felt like we were in a bubble of light submerged in a rushing river.

  "Somethin' else I better tell you," I said. "I been thinkin' 'bout catchin' out again."

  Her face appeared to sharpen, but she remained silent.

  "Maybe headin' out east," I said. "Takin' a trip throu
gh the mountains."

  "That's crazy," she said quietly. "Don't nobody come back from there."

  "You sayin' you never thought about it? I don't believe that. I know why you hangin' 'round the trains."

  "Sure, I thought about it." Annie's voice was hard the way your voice becomes when you're suppressing emotion. "Life here … It' ain't livin', it's just bein'. There's times I considered takin' that trip. But that ain't what I call it."

  "What do you call it?" I asked.

  "Checkin' out," she said.

  "Maybe there's somethin' there."

  "Yeah, right!"

  "Seriously," I said. "What's the point of all this bullshit if there ain't somethin' out there?"

  Annie gave a sarcastic laugh. "Oh, I see. There's gotta be a point. Worst thing about this place is havin' to listen to a buncha tramps settin' 'round philosophizin'!" She affected a crotchety voice. "Yonder's the borderland between life and death. It's a computer game, it's new world a'buildin'. It's a little scrap of reality left over from creation, like the scraps get left over from a cookie cutter."

  "I never run across that last 'un," I said.

  Annie snorted in disgust. "Stick around! You'll hear crazier'n that. I realize most people here just got their brains back, but ain't none of 'em geniuses. They'd be better off tryin' to figger out what to do 'bout the fritters, or somethin' practical, 'steada studyin' on what's to come and why."

  "Tell me 'bout the fritters," I said. "Nobody ever wants to talk about 'em. They just say they're dangerous."

  "I don't really know what they are. They look like apple fritters and they float around in the air. They got some kinda poison'll kill you quick."

  I gave a chuckle. "Must be all that deep fat fryin' it takes to make 'em."

  "You think they're funny?" Annie soured on the conversation. "Now the rains come, won't be long 'fore you find out exactly how funny they are."

  · · · · ·

  I had to admit Annie was right—listening to a bunch of hobos philosophize, the majority of them with less than high school educations, wasn't all that entertaining. But philosophizing was a natural outgrowth of life over Yonder. Most people spent six or seven hours a day working, and most had a relationship of some type that served to pass the time; but there was usually idle time, and even though everybody's curiosity—like my own—seemed to have been diminished, the question of where-the-hell-are-we was bound to pop up whenever you let your thoughts drift. Talk to a person more than once, and they'd tell you how they stood on the matter. My informal poll showed that about a third of the residents believed we had passed over into some borderland of death and were being tested to determine where we would end up. Maybe a quarter believed that railroad yards back in the world were areas where the borders between dimensions blurred, and that we had switched tracks, so to speak, and no test was involved. About twenty percent adhered to Bobby's computer game theory, but I think this number was skewed because Bobby was evangelical about the theory and had influenced a sizable portion of the punk riders to buy into it. The rest of the people had more individualized theories, although they generally played off one of the three main ideas.

  One of the strangest and certainly the most explicit of these theories came to me from Josiah Tobin, a fiftyish man who still had the nasty-looking gray Moses beard he'd worn when he'd been a hobo known as Froot Loop, and was a member of the FTRA (Freight Train Riders of America), a group of tramps, a gang of sorts, who'd thought of themselves as bigtime macho badasses, but were mainly dead-on-their-feet drunks. The irony of this where Froot Loop was concerned is that he was gay. The FTRA would never have initiated him if they'd been aware of his homosexuality. Once they found out, they chose to ignore the fact rather than beat the crap out of him and drum him from the ranks, which establishes to my mind how badass they actually were. Anyway, I was doing my laundry one afternoon, letting my clothes dry and sunning myself, lying shirtless with my hands behind my head, watching the clouds, while Josiah was doing the same. He'd pushed his beard aside to expose his scrawny chest, and the untanned portion resembled a permanent pale bib. We fell to conversing about this and that, and eventually he told me what he thought had happened to us.

  "Way I figger," he said, "there's more universes than they got zeros to count 'em. Trillions and trillions of 'em, and they all 'bout a hair apart, so it's easy to slip over into the ones is close to your own. I'm talkin' real easy. Like you know how it is when you lose your keys or somepin'—you know you just a second ago set 'em down on the coffee table, but they ain't there. Well, you ain't wrong. That's where you did set 'em. What happened is you slipped over into a universe where you set 'em somewheres else. Hell, you might stay there the rest of your life. You with me so far?"

  "Oh, yeah," I said. "Keep it comin'."

  "Now the universes close by," Josiah went on, "they're a whole lot like the one you in. Might just be one or two things differnt, like where you put your keys or what time your favorite show comes on the TV. But the farther away the universes get from your universe, the weirder they are. One a billion universes away, it might be so differnt you wouldn't be able to understan' nothing what's goin' on.

  "Still hangin' in there?"

  "Yep," I said.

  "Okay. Every once in while there's a crack opens. I ain't talkin' 'bout a crack 'tween universes. I'm talkin' 'bout a crack in the whole damn structure. Things fall through them cracks, where you think they go?"

  "Yonder," I said.

  "Or someplace like Yonder. I figger there's bound to be more'n one of 'em. How them places start up … I don't know. I'm studyin' on it, though." Josiah lifted his head to look at me. "Whatcha think?"

  "I like it. Makes more sense than Bobby Forstadt's theory."

  Josiah snorted. "That computer game horseshit! All that goes to show is how Bobby spent his time back in the world."

  "One thing I don't get," I said, "is the trains. They don't seem to fit nobody's theory. And the way you feel after the first night. Healthy and clear-headed. That sure seems like stuff I been told happens when you die."

  "The folks that told you all that stuff hadn't died, had they? It's just as likely it'll purify a man to cross over the border between universes. But the trains … I hate to say you're right, but you're right. I come up with a few explanations that fit my theory. They're pretty goddamned harebrained, but I'm workin' on somepin' better."

  He turned onto his stomach. His back was striped with thickly ridged scars, some of the tissue twisted up into knots—I'd seen similar scars on a tramp who'd had a run-in with some barbed wire.

  "I'll figger somethin' out," Josiah said. "Somepin'll come along to fit in there sooner or later."

  · · · · ·

  Josiah had a lot more confidence that there was going to be a "later" than most. As the rains heavied, lasting longer every day, people grew anxious and kept to their rooms. Annie and I, too, stayed at home more than we once had, but not because of anxiety. We had moved past the getting-to-know-you stage and spent lazy mornings on her grass mattress, listening to raindrops smacking like soft bullets into the canopy, talking and doing what I once would have referred to as "fucking", but now I recognized the mutuality of the act and wasn't just trying to satisfy myself, I thought of as making love.

  We came to talk about the past more often than not—the present just wasn't that interesting. Annie told me she had run a succcessful cleaning business in Tucson, and it was stress related to the business that had driven her out of society and onto the rails. One morning, she said, she woke up and simply couldn't handle the pressure anymore. Though when I'd known her before, she'd been almost as dissolute as me, she held a more romantic view of the life than I did. She recalled it as being a party with friends that had lasted for years, and the terrible things that had happened to her—rape and beatings and such—had been anomalies. She was glad to be away from that life, but she had good memories that superseded all the bad; she would go on about the freedom, the parties, the ho
bo conventions, the fellowship. Often she talked about how she had gotten married to Chester the Molester in the yard at Spokane, how tramps had come from everywhere, and a couple of trampettes had worked a job in Klamath Falls for nearly a month so they could buy her a ring. I believe it was this romantic side that had caused her to fall for me. She'd contrived an image of me as being a real King of the Road and not the falling-down drunk that I truly was; despite me standing her up in Missoula, she had clung to that image, nourished it like an article of faith. For my part, I was so thankful to be with anyone, at first I couldn't separate those feelings out from what I felt for her. But with the passage of days, I came to realize I loved everything about her. The way the muscles in her calves bunched when she walked, the expressiveness of her smiles, the variety of her moods. How she'd stare at a piece of cloth that Pie or somebody had brought back from the world until she recognized the shape in it, and the next you know it would be a shirt or a skirt or a pair of trousers. The thing I loved most about Annie was her strength. Not that she was entirely strong. We each had a crack down through the middle of us, the same that had disabled our old lives. Nevertheless she had a strength about her, one built on endurance and tolerance that seemed partner to the strength I had started to see in myself. Maybe that fit was what allowed us to love one another.

  One morning we were lying in late, being easy together, when the dogs set up a baying, as they sometimes would, only this was louder and more prolonged than usual. Annie sat up in bed, the sheet falling away from her breasts, and listened. I made a grab for her, but she pushed my hand away and said, "Quiet!" Within a matter of seconds, the barking diminished, but didn't stop altogether. Soon I heard solitary barks closer at hand, and then the clitter of paws as dogs went running past our room.

  "They're here," Annie said in a dead voice.

  "What?" I sat up beside her and looked at her despairing face.