There was nothing else out here, but the switch.
And us.
Irvin looked down at his glow-in-the-dark wristwatch.
"We got eight minutes," He said. "Let's get to it."
I did my best to let Tyree down gently onto the track, but Irvin shoved me and him down as hard as he could.
"Asshole," Irvin said. "You fellows couldn't tie your shoes together without a detailed set of paint-by-number instructions. Stop dicking around and get his hand jammed down into that switch."
A railroad switch is a pretty simple device, designed to join two ends of track together, when a train is leaving one track and traveling onto another. Basically, there's a big swing bar of steel that levers back and forth. The train follows the swing bar, either straight on, or onto another track. There's a gap in between the swing bar and the rail that closes tight when the swing bar moves. A fellow had best be careful about where he sets his boot when he's crossing the tracks. If he gets his foot jammed in a swinging switch, he's apt to bust an ankle, or worse.
"This is sure going to hurt," Donny said.
"No worse than proctologically poking your arm up a bear's butt," Irvin pointed out. "This bastard deserves it."
Donny and I just stared at each other. We'd been beat and broken and damn near bear-bitten. The fact was we were just too tired and broke down to argue the point. We'd do whatever Irvin told us to.
Soldiers get that way in battle. The sergeant says get up over that hill and face down the machine gun, and up over the hill they go. It works the same way on section gangs and track crews. Whatever the foreman says, sooner or later goes.
Donny and I forced Tyree's left hand down into the switch, between the swinging bar and the rail. The switch was set electronically and a computer timing device three hundred miles away would shift the switch over, bringing the two pieces of metal together, so that the CPR train could successfully switch onto the CNR track.
By Irvin's watch this entire process would take place in about six minutes time.
Tyree tried to kick free, but the two of us had a firm grip on him now. There didn't seem to be much fight left in him. I guess he was tired too.
"Tyree," Irvin said. "You've been found guilty of setting a match and gasoline to the Hammer Abbey Railroad Hotel and smoking six men to death, as well as Henry Tompkins, the night clerk, and a perfectly good tomcat named One-Eye. One of those men was my brother, Gilbert. For burning him and those six other fellows, you're going to have to die."
Tyree just lay there and stared up at the three of us. That made it worse. It might have been easy if he'd kept on fighting. That would have given us something to do while we were holding his hand down, waiting for the switch to swing shut.
"Do you got anything to say in your defence?"
"What the fuck good would it do if I did?" Tyree asked. "I've got nothing to say that you want to hear."
"Irvin, I don't think he did it," Donny said.
"What?" Irvin asked.
"I said I don't think he did it."
Irvin stared at Donny. I could feel the strength of his gaze even in the darkness, shining out at us like the blind beam of a flashlight.
"You got something to say?"
"I don't think he did it," Donny repeated for the third time.
"Donny, I truly like you," Irvin said. "You're a good boy, and there's damn few men would have jammed their arm where you did, but sometimes you act dumb enough to dig fence postholes in a snow bank."
Donny opened his mouth to speak, and the switch closed shut. I was holding Tyree's arm at the wrist when the steel closed. I felt the chill of the cold steel rail kiss the side of my pinkie and the sensation damn near leaped up and burned me. It didn't make much of a noise coming together on Tyree's hand, just a sort of a crackling quiet like someone crumpling up a potato chip bag in the dark.
Tyree yelled loud enough to out-deafen those three bear-killing Luger shots and Donny's beagle-humping Whitney Houston serenade. He screamed all of the breath out of his lungs, and a few molecules of oxygen that he'd sucked in from his mama's umbilical, back when he was floating around in her belly-tank. The scream lasted a good minute, and then bled off to a rasping sort of sigh. All the color left Tyree's face and ran out onto the dirt of the trackside. I could see Tyree's face pale and glowing, like he'd grown a moon atop his shoulders and then everything went calm.
Tyree lay there staring up at me. I wondered if he was bleeding or if maybe the switch had closed tightly enough to cut off his arterial flow. I wondered about the band-aid qualities of a CNR rail, not having much faith in a cauterization by steel. I had the feeling that maybe the metal was drinking Tyree's blood. I could picture that, the blood flowing through the steel rail, like a fat rusty vein running right across this continent. All of the men who'd given their lives to building this rail line, one dead man for every foot of steel some folks said, their blood was still pumping in the piston of the diesel and the scream of the train.
I saw the bear looking one-eyed out from both of Tyree's eyes. It was trying to tell me something and for the life of me I couldn't understand what.
"He's as guilty as Iscariot," Irvin pronounced. "And now he's fucked."
Irvin looked down at his wristwatch. I saw his face shining in the soft electronic glow.
"How much time?" I asked.
"That train will be here in five minutes," Irvin said. "The switch will hold him fast enough until the train rolls out the guilt in him. When that comes we'd best make ourselves scarce."
I stood up, half expecting Tyree to start kicking, but all of the fight had gone out of him. He lay there on the tracks with his left hand vanished between those two bars of iron rail like it had been cut clean off. He kind of looked a little like Donny, with his arm jammed inside the bear's pooper.
"The train'll roll over him, the switch'll click back, and they'll think he was out here drinking." Irvin said. "Some folks will say accident and others will whisper suicide and everybody will privately figure that Tyree finally got just what was coming to him.
"What if they CSI his body?" Donny asked. "We got our fingerprints all over him."
"You watch too damn much television," Irvin said. "This is the town police we're talking about. On the first account there won't be any body left, once that train rolls over it. They'll be picking Tyree up in a bushel basket, assuming the bears and raccoons and crows don't get him, assuming there are any bears left after Daniel bear-fucker Boone here gets done with fist-fucking them all to death."
Irvin kept on hammering on that bear-fucking crack. I figured it had to hurt, but Donny didn't say anything. He just stood there, hanging onto whatever he'd dragged out of that bear, looking down at Tyree.
I placed the sole of my boot flat out onto the rail. I felt the vibration of the distant train, humming through the steel. It was coming soon.
"Can you feel it coming?" Irvin asked.
I nodded.
Tyree just lay there.
"Right on time," Irvin nodded. He was pleased with how it was all going down, like he'd finished a job on schedule.
"Irvin," Donny said. "He didn't do it."
"What?"
"I'm telling you he didn't do it."
I could hear the train in the distance now. I could hear something even stronger in Donny's voice.
"How do you know he didn't?" Irvin asked, laying his words out slow.
"I just know."
I could see the light in the distance, the headlamp shining out like a long bright knife into the wooded darkness. I bet you God sees the world that way, with one good eye staring out into the lying shadows.
"I just know," Donny repeated, and that's all I let him get out. The train was close enough to see us, if we didn't move fast.
"Jump," I shouted, catching the two of them by their necks and pushing us all three down into the darkness of the surrounding bushes as the train rolled on by.
We lay there in the darkness listen to the chunk-chunk-c
hunk as the cars rolled over the track.
"Stay down," I whispered to Donny.
Right about then I was telling him a whole lot more than just stay down in the dirt. I was begging him to keep whatever he wanted to say to himself. We'd just killed Tyree. He needed to die, on account of Irvin said so. I couldn't live with any other kind of reality, right now.
That train was coming fast. I could hear it in the distance, even smell it coming, singing out in the hum of the steel rail, and the chunking sound as it rolled over each hard-buried iron spike. I heard the roar of the bear mauling through the thunder of the diesel and the steel.
And then it was on us. The train rolled and roared past, and then it was thunder all around us, the steady chunk-chunk-chunk sound as each truck wheel rolled over the properly closed switch.
I thought about Tyree, under those wheels. There was no way he could have escaped. I wondered how long he'd feel the steel rolling across each nerve. How long does a memory scream?
I pictured him caught up underneath the steel wheels, dragged and broken and torn and flung. I kept expecting to hear a scream. I don't know how I'd figure I'd hear it over the hungry roar of the train. Death would travel far faster than any scream could ever hope to run. Tyree's throat would be torn out and pulped, and the memory of last night's song in the shower and the "Get fucked," he'd thrown at a co-worker and the half-assed joke he'd cracked to the cute Tim Horton's waitress would all be flattened out onto the steel rails, to couple with the lonely working dreams of all of the navvies and the chinks and the working men who had died laying these tracks down across our wide impassive country over the last century making a scar that wouldn't stick.
If a scream had worked its way up through Tyree's trachea and harped through the plucking vocal chords it would have been whisked away in the slipstream of the rushing steel wheels.
I couldn't deal with that thought. I pushed my face down into the dirt and the dead pine needles, smelling the ash of the long forgotten bushfire hiding deep in the dirt, a last track and trace of that long ago fire and in the silence of the roaring steel tracks behind me I heard Donny saying over and over to Irvin, "He didn't do it, he didn't do it." in tune with the song of the rail and I wondered who did.
There was only one way to find out.
I rolled over and I caught Donny in a neck hold. I had grown up watching Jean Carpentier and Killer Kowalski and Mad Dog Vachon going at it in the Grand Prix wrestling ring. I knew the flying mare and the arm bar and the incapacitating eye gouge. I could even fake a pretty good drop kick, although it usually resulted in inflicting more injury upon me than upon the inflictee.
The only problem with this reasoning was that Donny had watched all of those matches with me, and he knew just as many tricks. He eeled out of my neck hold and pistoned an elbow back into the side of my head. I felt that elbow greasing off of the bear brains, and I wondered if the black bear's brains would have anything to say to Donny's elbow bone.
We rolled up against the roots of a jack pine and Donny pulled loose and kicked back at me. I felt Donny's mule-kicking work boots working over my ribs, and I reached up blindly past his boot and followed the trail of denim up to the crotch. I caught hold of what counted and I squeezed.
Tyree had taught me a trick or two, too.
Donny howled like a gut shot wolf, making a face that only a necrophiliac could love, sucking in his cheeks and owling out his eyes and rolling them back until I was certain he was staring directly at his long lost childhood memories. I kept on squeezing, going for broke.
"Who did it, Donny?" I asked, hanging onto his denimed testicles. "Who burned the hotel down?"
"I didn't mean to," Donny said, weeping real tears. "I didn't mean to start the fire."
"What?" I asked.
He was crying, the snot rolling and slithering out of his nose, the sobs hitching along like boxcars loaded full of guilt.
"I didn't mean to start the fire," Donny repeated.
And then Irvin was on him, throwing me aside like I was a discarded beer can, catching hold of Donny by the throat and shaking him like he expected a money back refund.
"What'd you say?" Irvin asked. "What the fuck did you say?"
Donny was back to making those trout faces again. Irvin kept throttling and shaking him, not letting up for a minute, looking for an answer but not letting one escape.
"What'd you say?" Irvin repeated.
I tried to catch hold of Irvin and pull him off of Donny, but I would have had better luck trying to pull an unshot-up black bear from off of a honey-packed beehive. Irvin was tensed steel, shot through with a white hot line of blue lightning, strung with hatred and an undeniable need for vengeance.
"What the fuck did you say?"
By now his voice was so hoarse I could hear the bear growling in his throat, like it had climbed down inside of him and taken over his existence.
Donny didn't stand a chance. Irvin had his hands around Donny's throat and was squeezing the breath out of him. It takes a lot to kill a man by bare-handed strangulation. It isn't as easy as they show on the television. There's muscle in your neck and your shoulders, especially when you've worked for a living like we had.
Still, Donny wasn't looking that good. Irvin was pretty determined to get his fair share of mayhem in. If assault and battery were a pinball game Irvin had just racked up a score that tallied way past the free game mark.
I tried wrapping my arms around Irvin's waist, hoping to bear-hug him away from Donny. That didn't work nearly as well as it did on television either. Big John of the roller derby Thunderbirds always made it look damn easy, but I might as well have been trying to throttle an oak tree.
"Irvin," I tried shouting at him. "He didn't fucking do it, Irvin."
But Irvin wasn't listening.
I kept reaching around, and then I felt the butt of the Luger. I drew it out of Irvin's belt and jammed it into his ear canal as hard as I could.
"If you don't let go of him, Irvin," I said, shouting loud enough for him to hear me through the pistol barrel. "I'm going to have to blow your skull out."
I didn't know how to cock the fucking gun, so I settled for making a click sound with my tongue and teeth, hoping I sounded dangerous.
He seemed to hear that click loud and clear or maybe the barrel was talking through the grip of my fist.
I'd never fired a Luger before. I'd only seen them in World War II movies. I hadn't fired any hand guns at all, now that I thought of it. The closest I'd come was my six-shooter Lone Ranger cap gun when I was a kid, and even that misfired as often as not. I had absolutely no way of knowing if the Luger would go off in my hands or not. I didn't know if I wanted to shoot Irvin, even by accident. I didn't know anything for certain.
Donny kept opening his mouth and closing it, catching a few random mosquitoes in the process. That wasn't doing any good to anyone as far as I could see.
"For Christ sake, Donny, say something."
He opened and closed his mouth one more time before finding a half a dozen useless words.
"I didn't mean to do it," Donny croaked.
I felt Irvin tense, like he was going to jump. I screwed the barrel a little tighter into his ear canal, breaking some of the soft pucker flesh. I hoped it was intimidating him, but he didn't look all that intimidated to me. I might as well have been squeegeeing a pussy willow Q-tip in his ear for all of the good it seemed to be doing me.
"Say something besides that, Donny," I begged. "Say something he'll listen to."
Donny started talking. "The woods. I was blueberry picking and burning ants with my magnifying glass. I didn't mean to start a fire. I didn't mean to burn it all down."
Holy Christ. He wasn't talking about the hotel fire, he was talking about the bush fire, way back when we were kids. He'd reached back into his memory and dredged up the ancient past.
"For shit's sake, Donny, that was years ago," I said. "What about the hotel fire?"
"Huh?" Donny asked.
"You mean you didn't start the Railroad Hotel fire?" Irvin asked.
"I burned down all the trees," Donny said. "I didn't mean to. I was just playing."
"But what about the hotel?" Irvin kept digging.
"He didn't do it, Irvin." I said. "It was a misunderstanding. He's talking about burning down Jack Pine Stretch, for Christ sake. We only guessed he was talking about the hotel."
Irvin looked like the lights were going in his brain, one by one.
"We were guessing, do you get it? We were guessing about Donny and we were guessing about Tyree. We were wrong about Donny. That means maybe we were wrong about Tyree too."
It took a lot to get through to Irvin.
"Could be," He said.
I kept working at it.
"Focus, Donny. We are here for the hotel fire," I said. "How did it get started?"
"I don't know how it happened," Donny said. "I just don't know."
"Do you see?" I asked Irvin.
Irvin kept looking like he was chewing over it. I figured I'd better be safe.
"I'm keeping this," I said, pointing the Luger straight at Irvin. "I don't know if I'm going to use it or not. Don't fuck me with me Irvin. I'm just not in the mood for it right now."
"So what the hell are we going to do?" He asked.
"Same thing we set out to do," I said. "We're going up to that switch and we're going to scrape up whatever is left of Tyree and we're going to bury it. Isn't that right, Donny?"
Donny looked agreeable. If he'd had a tail he would have wagged it.
Irvin didn't look half so happy. He looked as if he'd love to tell me to go fuck a splintery knothole, just as soon as I let go of the Luger.
So I hung onto the Luger.
We walked up to the tracks; only by the time we got there Tyree was long gone.
* 9 *
It's easy to lose things. You can lose your car in a parking lot if you're not careful how much you drink at the party you were driving to. You can lose the remote beneath the couch cushions if you're not careful with how much you eat between commercials. You can lose your girlfriend and your wife, sometimes even at the same time. You can lose your dog, hell, you can even lose your mind if you think too hard about it, but losing a body is something else entirely.
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