The Insane Train

by Sheldon Russell

  Hook gathered up his pillow and listened to the coyotes. He didn’t know what awaited him at Baldwin Insane Asylum. But he did know that when Eddie called on an assignment, it would be neither good nor easy.

  2

  Hook sat straight up. The blackness of the early morning hours filled the caboose like a still pool. No more than a sliver of moonlight cast through the cupola window and onto the floor. He’d heard something, something that had brought him out of a deep sleep. He turned his ear into the silence. Perhaps his imagination had gone wild, the foreboding that could rise up unbidden in the night hours. Perhaps Mixer had sought out the water dish, as he sometimes did, or perhaps the wind had swept in from the desert.

  He lay back and closed his eyes. Mixer’s soft snore came from the back corner of the caboose where Hook kept the throw rug. Hook wondered if he’d latched the door, taken the basic precaution against intruders. He’d been known to forget, particularly when he’d had a drink or two or had become too comfortable with his surroundings, a foolish mistake for someone well schooled in the depravity of man. Who knew better than a railroad yard dog that crime respected neither time nor place, that evil thrived on complacency and overconfidence and sought out weakness like a pack wolf?

  He turned on his side and stared into the darkness. In that moment he sensed the cool of the night air entering the caboose. He could just make out the shadow of someone standing in the doorway. His heart tripped in his ears as he searched the blackness for his sidearm. The crash of the ashtray onto the floor brought Mixer out of his slumber. His yaps resounded in the confines of the caboose, and Hook’s adrenaline rushed through him like hot wax. He groped for the kerosene lantern, nearly spilling the chimney onto the floor with the back of his hand.

  By the time he’d managed to light the lantern, Mixer’s barking had turned frantic. He stood yelping at the closed door, his ears laid back, his tail swishing to and fro. Hook grabbed his shoes and slipped them on.

  “Some guard dog,” he said. “Come on. He can’t be far.”

  He stepped into the cool desert air. A thumbnail moon hung low in the western sky as it made way for sunrise. Hook eased down onto the track and checked under the caboose. He’d caught many a hobo hiding under cars and had picked up more than his share of body parts because of it. Escaping from under a moving boxcar could be deceptively difficult. Even a steamer could bump forward fast enough to trap a man before he could roll out.

  He spotted something lying in the bedrock, and he bent to examine it.

  “Lug wrench,” he said to Mixer, who waited at his side. “A goddang bo.”

  Hobos used lug wrenches to break the seals on boxcars or for a number of other things, including cracking someone’s skull. Hobos were opportunists, half-starved coyotes who would steal the brakeman’s lunch right out of his caboose if the opportunity presented itself.

  “Go find him,” Hook said.

  Mixer spun off into the morning to work out the myriad smells that occupied his world. And when a yelp went up down line, Hook knew that Mixer had picked up the scent. Hook moved as fast as he dared in the dawn light. Ahead, the track curved off for its run into the desert. Mixer barked a series of hot yelps.

  As Hook made the bend, he could see a shunting boiler with a short load sitting on the siding. The engine purred like a gigantic cat, and heat waves rose out of her stack in the morning air. The cab was empty, the engineer probably having gone to the yard office to wait clearance.

  At that moment, both Hook and Mixer spotted the bo peeking from around the open door of the last boxcar. Mixer yelped and bawled and spun in a circle. Hook waited for the man’s face to disappear back into the darkness of the car. He leaped across the tracks and ran along the right of way out of view of the bo. With a little luck, he could come in from behind without being spotted.

  Gasping for breath, he crawled under the boxcar, and his stomach tightened. He could smell the heat of the engine drifting down line and the pungent odor of creosote. When it came to boxcar wheels and iron rails, bodies lost with some regularity.

  Sunrise lit the sky in a blaze. Just then the pitched whistle of a diesel engine rose up in the distance. The shunting boiler responded with two short blasts, and sweat broke on Hook’s forehead. The engineer must have been asleep in the cab while he waited on the east-bound to clear.

  Hook knew that he didn’t have long to make his move. As soon as the diesel cleared, the shunting boiler would pull out and drag him down line. They’d have to mail him back to Division in an envelope.

  He reached for his weapon to make his move. “Damn it!” he said. He’d forgotten his weapon, and his prosthesis, and his pants.

  Too late now. He reached up, grabbed the door handle, and swung his leg into the car just as the east-bound made the bend. The shunting boiler lay in on her whistle and released her brakes. Unable to pull himself up without his prosthesis, Hook hung from the doorway like a opossum in a tree.

  The freighter screamed by Hook just as the shunting boiler took up slack, lurching forward. Exhausted, Hook struggled to pull himself the rest of the way in. As they gathered up speed, the bo rushed from the darkness of the boxcar and leaped over Hook’s head.

  Hook managed to roll in, and he turned to look back. Mixer had the bo by the sleeve, and they were locked in tug of war between the two trains. Hook considered jumping, but by then the clack of the wheels had turned to a hum. He’d just have to wait until they reached the wigwag crossing, where the train would slow.

  He leaned back against the door of the boxcar to catch his breath. No man should start his day like this, but then it could have been worse. That bo had plenty of opportunity to do him in, but he hadn’t. Hook hoped Mixer granted the bo the same reprieve.

  The morning sun shot through the beams of the railroad trestle overhead, and birds winged through the blue as Seth Durand examined the torn sleeve of his shirt.

  He had planned to be in Barstow by now, but when that unlocked caboose presented itself, he couldn’t resist. He’d barely escaped with his life from that madman and his wild dog. After that, he’d waited at the edge of Needles for the next west-bound, but it turned out to be a diesel that blasted through at breakneck speed, leaving him with a face full of dirt. He hated the diesel, the way she whined and moaned, the way her whistle shot through a man like a knife. She was hard to board and even harder to ride.

  So he’d camped in to wait for a hog, an old steamer with a load of freight pulling the grade, if one ever came again. But then his plans hadn’t amounted to much since his discharge from Balboa in San Diego. The nightmares had dwindled in the last year, but their intensity could still lock him up like a frozen engine.

  He took a deep breath and rubbed at the stubble on his chin. The scar that ran the length of his face twitched in the cold morning air. A German Mauser bullet had plowed a three-inch furrow across his face. The wound turned septic after he lay three days in a wet foxhole. The scar distorted his jaw and drooped his eye like a broken window shade. That combined with six months of terror on the front lines, and he had spiraled out of control. A year in the hospital at Balboa had healed the wound but not the terror.

  When he’d been discharged, he bummed to Barstow, where some of his buddies from Balboa were. He’d found them living under a bridge, drinking too much, and reliving days that no longer mattered to anyone but them.

  On a Sunday morning while the town slept, he’d walked to the switchyards and hopped a train back to Tulsa. Though his wife had written, she’d not seen the wound, neither the one across his face nor the one in his soul.

  He’d sat on the front porch of the house until the sun broke before picking up his duffle and catching the first freighter out.

  Nearly back to Barstow, his uncertainty had resurfaced. His decisions turned and banked and turned again like the birds above the trestle. Did his judgments any longer make sense? Did he even care?

  A cold wave eased through the canyon, and he slipped on his army fatigue
jacket. The sour of his own body had steeped his clothes. Not bathing ranked high on the list of hobo misery. On occasion he’d managed a hot shower in a YMCA or a spit bath in a gas-station bathroom. Once, he’d showered at the Albuquerque rail yards. Without clothes, hobos and section-gang workers looked pretty much alike.

  He dug through his duffle and set his store of goods on a rock, a can of pork and beans, a tin of Spam, and a half pound of coffee. He’d hoped for more fare from that caboose. But for now he opened the beans. Three years in the army had diminished his taste for Spam.

  He gathered up driftwood that had snagged around the trestle pier. A fire would feel good. The cool night had wormed into his bones. Building a fire always invited danger, particularly in the still desert air. A good yard dog could smell smoke ten miles off, and he figured they’d be looking for him now for sure. But he wanted that cup of coffee.

  He kept the fire small and hot to reduce the smoke and moved in close to the flames. The top half of the beans he ate cold and nestled the remainder in the coals to heat.

  He’d just poured his coffee when he heard the putt-putt of a motorcar coming down line. After dumping his coffee onto the fire, he dragged sand over the coals with his foot. He closed his things into his duffle, and he crouched in the pile of driftwood, barely breathing.

  The popcar drew to a stop atop the trestle, and men talked above the clatter of the motor. When the motorcar chugged away, he took a deep breath. He waited until he could no longer hear the clack of wheels, and then he waited some more just to make certain.

  Afterward, he ate the Spam, too afraid for another fire, and listened for the whistle of a steamer. She would be soft and mellow and with a life all her own. First sound of a steam engine, he’d pack his gear and climb the grade, wait there for a grainer or a hopper to come down line. With luck, he’d hike up and settle in for the last leg into Barstow.

  As he waited in the morning sunrise, he thought about home and his wife and the scar that had severed his life. He thought about the dead he’d left behind in Germany and the starkness of battle. Most of all he thought about the coffee spilled on the fire beneath the trestle.

  3

  At the Needles depot, Hook picked up his bag and looked down the tracks. Pap lifted Mixer onto the motorcar.

  “How long you going to be gone, Hook?” he asked.

  “Eddie Preston didn’t give out a hell of a lot of information,” Hook said.

  “I can’t be taking care of this mutt forever,” Pap said. “Son of a bitch fights everything that comes along.”

  “That’s what guard dogs do, Pap.”

  Pap lit a cigarette. “And eat,” he said. “He ate Jess Wilson’s hat the other day.”

  “He thought it died,” Hook said. “It sure as hell smelled like it.”

  Pap flipped his cigarette onto the gravel. “I better get back,” he said. “Section gang thinks a shovel handle is for leaning on when the boss is gone.”

  Hook could hear the Chief coming down the stretch, her diesel engines howling.

  “Keep an eye on my caboose, Pap. That hobo under the trestle might take a notion to help himself.”

  “How do you know it was a hobo? Could have been a raccoon.”

  “Raccoons don’t cook coffee, least none that I ever encountered. I would have run him in had I the time. But Eddie’s in an uproar over this deal, and he’s just itching to can me.

  “Tell the car toad to keep a watch out, especially when he’s inspecting the boxcars. Tramps favor the boxcars when they are crossing the Mojave. Call security out of Winslow if you need to. They owe me one.”

  “Can’t be too careful,” Pap said. “Never know when a looney will pop up. The east-bound hot footer told the depot agent he saw a man hanging from a boxcar door early this morning.”

  “That so?” Hook said.

  “Said he was wearing nothing but his boxer shorts.”

  Hook glanced over at Pap. “Engineers would lie to their own sweet mothers.”

  “Thing is, he said this feller only had one arm. Now there’s a rarity for you, ain’t it?”

  Pap grinned, cranked the popcar, and rolled off down the track. Mixer, his ears flapping in the wind, watched Hook until he disappeared round the bend.

  The Chief’s whistle blew, and black diesel smoke boiled onto the horizon. Her red and yellow war bonnet shone in the sun. She sported a blackout shield over her light, and her silver passenger cars rolled into the station as quietly and softly as a Cadillac.

  The conductor stepped out onto the platform, his uniform spotless and his shoes polished like obsidian glass.

  Hook showed the conductor his pass and then his badge.

  “We got no trouble on the Chief, Mr. Runyon, unless you count crying babies.”

  “Just hitching to Barstow,” Hook said. “Maybe take a nap along the way.”

  The conductor smiled and touched his hat bill. “Better make it a quick one, Mr. Runyon. This here train tops a hundred miles an hour on the straightaway. Sometimes she don’t touch the track at all. We ran over a cat’s tail coming out of Tucumcari, and he didn’t even squall.”

  “Thanks,” Hook said. “Let me know if those babies get out of hand.”

  Hook made his way down the aisle and slid into an inside seat. The passenger car smelled of wood and upholstery. The Chief also had a Cochiti galley car that served up the best gourmet meals in the country and an observation car for viewing the scenery.

  She blew her whistle and eased out of the yards, gathering speed up the alley. Getting on the Chief had the feel of luxury, like stepping into a sumptuous hotel. Her passengers, many of them celebrities out of Los Angeles, were known for favoring her extravagances. For a yard dog who lived in a caboose, the experience defied explanation.

  An hour out of Needles and he snored quietly on his bleached-white pillow. He awoke to the dinner chime and rubbed the sleep from his face. Hook always ate on the Chief, hungry or not, a meal with linen napkins, Mimbreno china, and crystal glass, all while the countryside whizzed by like a silent movie.

  He ordered rare steak, asparagus tips, baked potato, and caramelized carrots. A black man in a uniform as white as a cloud served it up. For dessert, Hook ordered apple pie, which arrived floating in butter and cinnamon, topped with a dipper of vanilla ice cream that melted down the sides like an avalanche.

  After that, he went to the observation car, where he drank a cup of black coffee and smoked a cigarette. The whole meal cost him a week’s pay, but he didn’t care. To ride on the Chief and not go to the diner might well send a man straight to hell.

  When Barstow came into view, the Chief throttled down and slid in alongside the depot deck. From his window, Hook could see the domed turrets and archways of Casa del Desierto, which looked like a gleaming castle against the setting sun.

  Once inside the depot, he showed the operator his badge. The operator studied it and then looked at Hook’s prosthesis.

  “What’s the trouble, Mr. Runyon?” he asked.

  “I need to go to the Baldwin Insane Asylum in the morning,” Hook said.

  “Me, too,” he said. “The goddang yard master’s driving me crazy.”

  “Is it far?”

  “It ain’t never far to the nutty if you work for the railroad,” he said.

  “It’s company business. I’ll need a vehicle, something you can spare for a few days.”

  “Getting there ain’t a problem,” he said. “It’s getting out.”

  “When you’re through having your little joke…” Hook said.

  The operator rolled his shoulders. “Well, I don’t know. There’s the yard truck down at the supply shed. You’ll have to check with them.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I hear tell that fire about wiped Baldwin out.”

  “Don’t know much about it yet,” Hook said. “Is there a spare in the sleeping rooms?”

  The operator checked his crew change schedule. “Will be at six. Linens won’t be changed
out until seven, though.”

  “Works for me,” Hook said. “How far to the supply shed?”

  “Just down the track about a block.”

  “I’ll tell them out to Baldwin to be expecting you,” Hook said.

  The operator grinned. “Least I get paid in this looney,” he said.

  Hook left his luggage behind the counter and hiked down line to supply. The desert evening chilled about him, and he stretched out his legs.

  He wondered what the Baldwin Insane Asylum had in store. Trains drew troubled people like flies, so he’d dealt with his share of mentals over the years, but never an entire insane asylum.

  The supply clerk grumbled something about having no vehicle when he needed it and asked Hook for his badge.

  “Sign here,” the clerk said, turning around his clipboard. “And don’t push that old truck. There’s a goddang rod knocking.”

  The yard lights had blinked on by the time Hook located the truck. He walked around it and shook his head. The latch had been jimmied, and someone had drilled a hole in the frame and secured the door shut with a piece of wire. Empty boxes had been left in the back, along with an old journal jack the size of a blacksmith anvil.

  As he climbed in, a west-bound steamer rolled into the yards for a drink and fuel. Hook could smell the heat from her firebox. She bumped and rattled as a dozen empty boxcars gathered up slack. Behind them, a line of flatcars carried Sherman tanks and army jeeps. The old steamer hissed and sighed as she settled in.

  Just then he spotted a shadow slipping along on the far side of a flatcar. Might have been the switchman, but he hadn’t seen a lantern. He eased the door open and knelt down to wait and watch.

  When he saw it again, someone dashing from car to car, he slipped through the darkness and dropped down close to the wheel journal, the heat from the brake warm against his arm. The engine blew off pressure, and a steam cloud boiled about the yard light.

  First, he heard footsteps in the gravel, and then he heard someone grunting as they hoisted up on the grab iron. Hook waited for him to drop down before stepping in and clipping him hard across the ear.