“Always damn weird shit around here,” but he wouldn’t look at Sol. “You should ask DJ, up near Brule. Right, Claude?”
Claude wasn’t saying anything, and Sol noticed his hands were shaking. Sparky came and circled to a rest at his feet.
Tomson rubbed a spot on his knee, over and over. “Bad stuff happened in Brule, or just west of there. Some bad stuff.”
Sol had a fair bit of patience; he could wait out Claude’s fear. “What’s the story, Claude?” he asked, pronouncing the name just right, and that brought the man’s eyes into focus, probably had a parent who had spoken French, Sol thought. Sol passed him a rolled cigarette, lit one of his own with the ember end of a fire stick.
Claude shook his head. “I’m a peaceful man, son. So’s Tomson here. We don’t hurt no one. But you ask DJ if he’s seen anything, he’s down that way.” He halted, wandering hands shaking. “DJ’s too young, he wasn’t around back then, but used to be…” His voice trailed away, lost like smoke on the wind. Then, he shuddered. “Used to be harder, back in the day. We don’t talk about it, us old-timers.”
Tomson took out a label-less can, punctured it and set it on the flames, balanced on a piece of broken cinderblock. Sol was glad for the fire, because it was getting damn cold, Arctic wind coming straight off the prairie, no mitigating foothills to temper it.
Claude continued. “Don’t know why they picked fire, those assholes. That’s a nasty way to go. You don’t light a man’s home on fire. They blamed us. Check my record, spent time inside. But it weren’t our fault. Well, weren’t my fault.” He shifted, uncomfortable. “All of ’em are dead now, anyway. The guys that did it.”
Tomson shifted on his crate. “All of ’em?” Unsure.
Claude spat to the side. “Yeah. Old Leaky died down in Mexico right around Halloween, not two months ago. Cancer finally caught up with him. Died in a bed.” Like that was a crime in and of itself. “Blame him, I say. Weren’t my fault.”
Sol gave his cigarette stub to Tomson, patted Sparky, who had looked up at the motion. “It wasn’t your fault,” he agreed, wondering if Claude would tell him more, or if he’d have to look elsewhere. “Before my time, and before DJ’s time, too. When was that?” The light was starting to fail, and the temperature dropped some more.
Claude shook his head. “Thirty, thirty-five years ago. Worked in Bailey Yard, the big asshole, but lived up there.” He jerked his thumb to the west, closed his eyes. “We don’t talk about it.”
Sol let it lie for a few minutes, didn’t push. If he pushed, Claude would never tell him. Thirty years was a long time, and it was yesterday. “The weird shit you guys been seeing, it had to do with that fire.” A statement for them to agree with, or ignore.
“You’re from down south, ain’t ya?” Claude changed the subject.
Sol persevered. “Mais, hard to disguise, that.”
“So you know weird shit.”
“I do.”
“There’s something been killing folks along here, mostly us tramps. Never see it, never hear it, but there’s a lot of busted heads. That’s how Lewis used to do it, way long ago. That bull’s paying back, but all those who deserve it are already dead.” Claude poked the fire with a stick. “You make it up to Brule, you look for DJ. He weren’t around then, but he’s closest to where it happened. He might know more.”
Two names now: DJ and Lewis. That was something. The whole trip was worth it, just for that. A railroad cop named Lewis, dead for thirty or more years. A possible witness or informant, DJ.
Claude didn’t precisely excuse himself, but he got up then, bent double to get into his shack, and Sol eyed Tomson, who shrugged. “Thanks for the smoke, man. You gotta home to go to, you should get there.”
Sol thought about that as he walked back to the Wagoneer, considered the idea of home as he drove back to his Ogallala motel room, where he stared at the telephone like it might bark at him. He was a goddamn master at fucking relationships up, he knew that. But there were a few things he did well and this was one of them, following a ghost trail, putting things to rest that had no business upsetting the peace. Too bad none of that extended to his own personal life.
Mais, you can’t have everything.
He had something to go on, now. Lewis. The former Bailey Yard bull had died somewhere near Brule, burned alive in his house by a bunch of vagrants. The last of his murderers had died in October, right around when the spate of rail deaths had started. An asshole ghost bent on vengeance haunting the tracks between where he’d worked and where he’d died.
The only thing Sol didn’t know was how a devil fit into it.
Outside the motel room, Sol smoked a last cigarette, considered the moon hanging in the bowl of prairie sky, begging to be followed. He couldn’t stop thinking about the nearby tracks, could hear a train even now, the clang of the warning at the crossing, thought about trains going slow enough that you could run alongside them, jump for an iron bar, swing up and into an empty car, just get the hell out town and catch out.
The lunch had lasted at least seventeen hours and Baz thought that Armageddon might have come and gone in the time it took to receive all the thanks after the service, to walk back to the McGregors’ house on Sapper Avenue, and listen to the young gunner, Corporal Fortier, tell him one more time what it meant to have heard that song today. Inviting Corporal Fortier to lunch had been Lutie’s idea, surprisingly, and Baz wondered if Lutie had a crush on him.
Only for a moment, though, because Baz had the immediate sense that Lutie was playing this whole lunch event like an orchestra—she had the gunner there to keep Baz talking in broken French, keep him pleasantly distracted while she minnowed between parents and foster siblings, a little word here, a chat there. An additional outsider cut the tension, everyone on good behavior.
In the kitchen, while the Major talked to Marshall about recent trades and standings and Fortier listened in, offering his considered assessment of the World Junior team, and Karen and Bree gently argued about how much cocoa to add for hot chocolate, Lutie brushed up against Baz, who didn’t know the first thing about hockey, and asked, quietly, “So where do you go from here?”
He didn’t know if he understood the question, and then he thought he did. A private conversation, right in the middle of everything, an easy way to get out if the talk got too weird or personal. She was a smart one, this sister. “Minneapolis. Dad kept some things there. I should collect them. I’ll phone Sol, see if he’s got a few days off. He might help.”
Or might not, it was hard to tell with him especially in matters concerning their father. Jesus, Baz thought, not for the first time, how was he going to tell Sol about any of this?
Lutie passed him a plate of sandwiches, and he took one, handed it to Fortier. “I could give you a drive. I have to get back to Toronto for the second week of January.”
Just like that. He noticed Lutie wasn’t telling her parents about this plan.
The sun was setting when Lutie said she’d drop Baz back at the motel, and Karen gave them a solid smile. This is going to be okay, Baz thought. Maybe he’d ended up doing the right thing after all.
Baz flipped through her radio stations on the way back until Lutie told him to leave it, so he did.
“You were great, you know that,” she said, about halfway to town.
Baz, looking out the window, glanced back at her. The sun sliced diagonally in their eyes, and he’d pulled down the visor to block it. Her white coat was blinding, even compared to the snow. He shrugged. “I don’t sing much.”
“You should,” she replied, keeping her eyes on the road.
Baz laughed. “Dad gave me a fiddle so I’d stop singing.”
“He was wrong,” and she slowed the car. Baz wondered if she was going to stop, then realized that they were at the place where a roadside cross poked up through the thin covering of windswept snow, faded flowers sagging under ice.
She stared through the passenger window and Baz knew that stare, ha
d grown up with it. “You pass by this place,” he interrupted softly, not following her gaze. “You keep going, chère, there’s nothing good here for you.”
It was freezing in the car, ghostcold, and Baz knew he was right. But she had put the car into park on the empty highway and now her gaze searched him out, sunlight sloping into her eyes. “You don’t see them.” But it was a question.
Slowly, he shook his head. “I don’t.” It was dangerous, talking about this with a stranger, forbidden. Even with her, maybe especially with her. “Can we keep going?”
“Here’s the deal,” Lutie said, eyes tracking movement that Baz couldn’t see, and his hair rose along his arm inside his coat. Dad had known how to keep safe in this kind of situation, and Sol knew too, in his own contrary and bull-headed way.
He didn’t know about Lutie, though. Dragged around by a crazy mother who could not only see ghosts, but who had kept one surely as a Rottweiler on a chain. A mother who had left her sons for reasons Baz had never understood. Mireille had taken Lutie with her, though, had done that deliberately. Again, for reasons that Baz couldn’t fathom and maybe he didn’t want to know.
Lutie licked her lips, and Baz felt every year lost between them like steps down to a dark basement. “I’ll drive you to Minneapolis. You tell me more about this,” and she waved her hand vaguely to whatever was outside, whichever ghost was associated with that cross and this cold. “You help me with this.”
It was Sol she needed, not him. Baz wasn’t going to be able to keep these two realities separate. Sol was going to kill him.
He cleared his throat, and she eased the car out of park and into drive. A long moment of silence followed, and Baz watched his sister as she checked the rearview mirror several times until they rounded a long slow corner and that stretch of highway was lost in the gloom.
Sol made good time for a country road, the eight miles between his Ogallala motel room and the tiny village of Brule. He followed the South Platte River, a runnel of standing water too wet to plant, too dry to fish. On its way to nowhere. Signs for country auctions and abandoned farm houses, people leaving all over, this was the sort of place you passed through, that you wanted to see in your rearview mirror.
A hundred and fifty years of European occupation hadn’t made much of a dent: the road was as empty as the sky. Nothing came through here except the trains. Nowadays, traffic took the interstate, not the tiny strand of the old 30 highway, a filament of cracked asphalt sporadic as Morse code. Running between the two—the dying river and the crumbling highway—bright open sky, thin dry earth, blocky black cattle destined for the dinner plate, and iron rails. These were the constants, cardinal points in this limbo.
The village came up fast: one minute sky and faded brown grass, the next, civilization. To the south side stood the tall silos of the granary, and to the north, a huddle of old wood frame houses and post-war pre-fabs overseen by a faded blue water tower, rolling beige hills beyond void of vegetation like God couldn’t be bothered. Landing in Brule, Nebraska was like stepping back fifty years. More.
He drove through the village before he realized that’s all there was to it. He pulled the Wagoneer in a U-turn, slowed down on the return pass. DJ could be anywhere along the tracks, could be holed up in any abandoned house or vehicle, would take some time to locate. It was close to noon already; he had maybe an hour before he’d have to turn around and head back to Denver. It was a double shift, too, if he remembered correctly, time off traded like glass beads for land. Double shift for a weekend and this was what he’d done with it, spent it talking to tramps, sleeping badly at the Ogallala Super 8, spending a fruitless hour at the local library. Nothing left but to try to find DJ. The things he chose to do off the clock, because Brule was a flyspeck, a nothing, literally two churches and the water tower.
There, by the empty grain silos and the track, he made out a sign: coffee. Please dear God, let it be open. He turned into the hard dirt parking lot. It was a tiny place, an old caboose with a barrel for a garbage bin outside, competing signs executed in burned wood advertising The Coffee Caboose Museum, souvenirs, and a meeting place for the Platte River Historical Society.
“Perfect,” Sol sighed. One-stop information shopping at its best, research combined with caffeine.
The guy behind the counter was tall and young, blond as a Viking, looked as though he ate a dozen eggs for breakfast every morning. As Sol came in, the boy put down the book he’d been reading, looked up expectantly, pink face just past the ravages of teen acne. There was a moment’s silence, and then the kid, dressed in a red Nebraska Husker sweatshirt, motioned with his hand: take your freakin’ pick of tables, his bland features seemed to suggest, it’s a morgue in here.
Sol slid in to the counter, scouted for a newspaper, found none. He ordered coffee immediately and was handed a menu. The kid leaned against the counter, not even pretending to give Sol room to decide.
“The steak and eggs are a good bet. The muffins just came out of the freezer this morning. I can microwave you a bowl of mac and cheese, but we’re out of most everything else.”
Sol set the menu down. “Steak and eggs, then,” he said. The kid didn’t ask him how he liked his steak, instead moved into the servery area and Sol heard the slam of a fridge and the beep of a microwave. Sol wondered how awful the rest of the menu was for this to be the best bet. He looked over at the dog-eared book lying face down on the counter. Hesse’s Siddhartha. Of course. The kid was the right age for it.
Surprisingly, the steak wasn’t tough, and Sol ate methodically, the timing of the next meal always in question, his line of work. As he ate, the farmer’s kid in the college football sweater came back out, ignored the book, inquired about the steak, and introduced himself as Bart.
“You from here, Bart,” Sol asked around the eggs. Scrambled, no choice when it came to a microwave.
Bart nodded, happy to be engaged. “From Paxton, just east of here. Born and raised.”
Sol gestured to the sweatshirt with his knife. Bart seemed to understand. “Finishing up a graduate degree in history.”
Bart laughed at whatever expression Sol had on his face. Sol had been hoping for an old-timer, but maybe this budding historian would do. “You part of the historical society, too?”
Bart was still pink, looked as though someone had held him down and scrubbed him with a potato brush. He ducked his head, eased onto the stool by the cash register. “Nah, I think you have to be over seventy for that. They let me type up the minutes.”
“No shit,” Sol said. “So, what kind of history does a town like Brule have?”
Bart shrugged. “Homesteaders. Indians. You know. The regular prairie stuff.” He leaned in. “I’m more of a Germanic studies type.” He gestured to the book. “Still, you can’t really avoid it, here.”
“Railroad history?” Sol led, using a piece of toast to mop up the steak juice.
Bart choked a sigh. “Well, yeah.” Like Sol was stupid. Sol held the stare. He wasn’t stupid. He wasn’t making small talk. He didn’t have enough time to be charming, enough energy. Charm wasn’t what was needed anyhow.
“I’m looking into railroad history around here,” he said firmly.
“Writing an article?” Bart sounded dubious.
“Maybe.” Sol folded his cutlery across his plate. “If there’s anything interesting to report. This place,” his eyes slid out the narrow window where nothing but gray fencing and the abandoned silos signaled civilization, “anything interesting ever happen here?”
Bart reddened some more, crossed his arms. Education was not the only thing that separated them. Not a farmer’s kid, Sol revised his original assessment. A railroad executive’s, maybe. Finally, Bart shrugged. “Not much. During the Depression, there used to be a squatter’s village here.”
“Any drifters still around?”
“Rail riders?” Bart’s eyebrows shot up. “There were a few in the summer, I think. Had a little camp to west, between here and the o
ld Megeath crossing. But now there’s only DJ.”
Sol waited expectantly.
Bart sighed, maybe annoyed. “DJ’s been here a few months. He’s not going anywhere. He’s settled right in. Are you writing an article about rail riders? Because you’d be better off at Bailey Yard for that sort of thing.”
Sol gave the kid a break, sighed. “I’ve been there already. I talked to the guys in Ogallala, down by the tracks. Those tramps are all scared. There’s been some trouble, a couple of deaths.”
“Ah, I shoulda known it. You reporters are all the same.” His blue eyes flashed a little. “Like vultures.”
Sol held up both hands. “It bleeds, it leads.” As a paramedic, he knew all about reporters and blood. “Blame the editors, man. I’m just looking for the story.”
They were quiet for a moment. Sol was aware he didn’t look much like a reporter, but Bart didn’t seem to notice, or care. “Listen,” Bart finally said. “The guys who work for the railroad get pretty jumpy about any deaths. Honest, there hasn’t been anything like that around here. I’d have heard about it.”
Not as far as Brule, then. The ghost was working its way to where it had died—if the ghost was indeed that of Lewis—and Sol wondered if Bart had heard about the most recent murder in Ogallala, the Nepal-bound lawyer. Probably not, especially as the police had ruled it a suicide. Sol sighed. He only had time for direct shots and this kid would probably spill whatever he knew anyway. “The guys living by the tracks in Ogallala, they told me about some guy called Lewis. A railway cop, a bull. Might have died around here in the 70s?”
Bart shrugged. “Before I was born.” But he was thinking about it, Sol could tell. The kid licked his lips, thoughtful. “Was there a fire?”
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