Lucky sat with his feet dangling, looking at the back of Mike's head. "You okay?" he asked.
Mike spun his head around. "Stop askin'. You're not in charge a' me," he snapped.
Now Lucky could see a shiny menacing glare in Mike's eyes that he had never seen before. "Calm down," he said. "I was just-"
"Screw you," Mike said, and then without warning the train went into a tunnel, and they were both in diesel-choking, inky blackness.
"Been through this tunnel before," Lucky screamed over the echoed racket. "Only a mile long. Hold yer breath."
"Shut the fuck up," Mike screamed back.
Suddenly and strangely, Lucky could feel Mike's hands clawing at him in the dark.
"Whatta you doin'?" Lucky yelled, knocking Mike's hands away. "Don't screw around. Dangerous back here." There was no light at all, and worse still, the tunnel was becoming thick with throat-closing exhaust.
"Fuck you!" Mike screamed. Then Mike's hands were back up by Lucky's throat. Before Lucky could defend himself, Mike had him in a strangulation grip, and was squeezing hard, shutting off Lucky's air supply.
"The fuck you doin'?" Lucky croaked, letting go of valuable air. He could hear Mike's teeth snapping close by his ear. His friend was actually trying to bite him! "Leggo! Leggo me!" Lucky protested, inhaling heavy diesel smoke that was closing his constricted windpipe.
Lucky did not want to hit Mike, but he was beginning to feel his consciousness dimming. He couldn't see anything in the black tunnel. Finally, in desperation, he swung a short-chopping right hand in the general direction of where he thought Mike's busted ribs were. He landed the blow and heard Mike scream in pain. Mike's grip on his neck loosened slightly, and Lucky inhaled another quick breath of lung-choking smoke. They were struggling in the pitch black, fighting each other on the narrow ledge. Lucky was trying to save his own life without throwing Mike off the grainer and under the steel wheels.
He couldn't fathom why Mike was attacking him. The noise of the train was magnified in the tunnel, but over the racket Lucky could hear Mike screaming, "You're dead, fucker!"
Once Lucky had pried Mike's hands off his neck, he instinctively fell back on his old Marine Special Forces Recon training. Instead of pushing Mike away, he pulled him closer, encircling Mike's trunk with both arms. Fueled by adrenaline from the unexpected attack, Lucky began to squeeze Mike hard, using as much force as he could. Mike screamed as his broken ribs shot pain through his torso, then Lucky head-butted him.
They flashed back out of the tunnel into pale moonlight. Overhead lights attached to a parallel trestle strobed over them. Lucky now spun Mike away from him and quickly looped an arm around Mike's throat. As he struggled and fought, Lucky choked him out, compressing his carotid arteries until Mike was unconscious. Then Lucky held his slumped friend tight, so he wouldn't fall off the narrow platform.
"What the fuck?" he screamed at the twenty-two-year-old. "I'm your friend, dammit. Whatta you doing?"
Mike couldn't respond.
Exhausted, Lucky finally stood up with shaking legs on the rocking platform, then dragged his friend across the ledge and laid him down. Lucky took Mike's pulse. It was uneven. He sat back and tried to clear his lungs of diesel smoke. He prayed he hadn't crushed Hollywood Mike's larynx. Then he saw the first bug. It was crawling up his arm, under his shirt. "Get the hell off me!" Lucky wailed, beating at the hallucinatory insect. They were coming now. He could feel them crawling up his neck. They were in his scalp, going for his eyes.
Mike was regaining consciousness, but he seemed unable to talk and was having difficulty swallowing. He was lying flat on the ledge of the grain car, with spit drooling out of his mouth. Lucky was beginning to think he had done some life-threatening damage.
"What the fuck's wrong with you, man?" Lucky asked. He tried to tell himself the bugs were imaginary but was, nonetheless, raking stiff fingers through his hair, trying to clear his scalp of the crawling bastards.
Hollywood Mike still couldn't answer. Worse still, his gaze was unfocused, and when he looked at Lucky it was with vacant, glassy eyes.
The sun had not appeared above the horizon, but already it was lighting the eastern sky. Lucky could see the ribbon of cars stretching out before him as the train, still heading down the slope, made a long gradual turn. Off in the distance Lucky could see a ravine with a big metal trellis. The rumbling diesel engine was a quarter of a mile ahead, just crossing the ravine. Then Lucky sat down with his back to the car and began to whimper. He felt bugs crawling on his face. He saw them moving under his T-shirt. "Nooo…" he wailed. "Go away, I can't take this." He began slapping at himself, trying to get them off, while Mike lay close to death on the ledge beside him.
Unexpectedly, Mike went into a huge spastic convulsion. Lucky jumped back, startled, and watched in horror as his friend spasmed uncontrollably on the narrow ledge.
"Fuck, man!" Lucky screamed, "Fuck… oh fuck. We're getting off!" he yelled.
Lucky needed to slow the train in order to jump. To do this, he knew he had to cut the air on the car. Once the air line was cut, the brakes on the center section of the train would automatically come on, slowing the entire train.
Lucky pulled out an old pocketknife and crouched down with his feet on the uncoupling lever, one arm holding on to the coupler, as the track strobed by beneath him. With his life hanging suspended above the tracks and his heart beating wildly, the bugs disappeared. Lucky didn't know what part of his subconscious was driving him, but at least the D. T. S had been washed away by his pumping adrenaline. He quickly grabbed the rubber air line with his right hand and slashed it. It whipped all around the uncoupling lever where he was precariously perched, slapping his face like an unattended garden hose. As he crawled back onto the grainer's narrow ledge, he heard the brakes come on under the car. The train slowed slightly.
They were now crossing the trestle. He looked down at a thousand-foot drop below the tracks through the open metal rails. When Lucky pulled Mike up into a sitting position, more spit drooled out of his mouth and down his shirt. Mike coughed, but said nothing. His eyes seemed cloudy and distant now, almost as if he had already passed on.
The train was going only ten miles an hour as they came off the trestle. Lucky knew the engineer would stop somewhere down the line and check the cars for the broken air hose, but he needed to get Mike off now.
He stood Mike up and grabbed him in a fireman's carry. Then Lucky took a deep breath and two running steps, leaping off the grainer with Mike over his shoulder. He was trying to get as far out from the wheels as possible, sacrificing himself by landing on his feet instead of taking his patented bone-saving roll. He hopped once, feeling his knees jam. The pain shot up his thighs. He went down, still holding Mike over his shoulder, trying to keep Mike's head from banging into the hard ground. He rolled once and came to a stop.
Mike's eyes were open, but were now like no eyes Lucky had ever seen on a living person. He was conscious, but it was as if nobody was in there, as if Mike's soul had disappeared.
Lucky sat up and saw that he was in a small switching yard. The sun was peeking up over the horizon. Off to his right was a very small town, only a couple of buildings and a store. The town probably supplied the switching station.
Lucky hoped there was a doctor nearby, and a bottle. Christ, I need a bottle, he thought. He couldn't deal with the bugs, not now, not with Mike dying.
Chapter 14
ROSCOE MOSS, JR
Roscoe Moss had crashed on an old sofa in the back of his brother's feed and grain store. He'd been up half the night helping deliver Shep Holworth's new Appaloosa foal. The animal had not been right; one eye on the colt was missing and his reflexes were shot. The poor animal couldn't stand, no matter how hard they tried to get him up. Then his lungs collapsed. Roscoe had done everything he could, but he had learned his rudimentary medical knowledge as a Marine Corps ambulance driver, and he didn't have the veterinary skill to save the animal. In the end, Shep had de
cided it was easier, and cheaper, to just put the foal down.
It had bummed Roscoe out, and he had come back to Moss Feed and Grain, pulled down the bottle of Scotch, and while watching the late late movie on the old black-and-white, gotten completely hammered. Sometime before sun-up he'd fallen asleep on the couch.
Roscoe's main job was to guard the switching station for the old Southern Pacific and Union Pacific Railroad. Often, long lines of loaded boxcars were parked on the Badwater siding for several days, waiting for one of the high-hood switchers to connect the line and pull it north to the switching yard in Pueblo, Colorado. Roscoe was the "yard bull." He had been deputized by the County Sheriff and could make arrests if thieves tried to steal radios out of the Japanese automobiles left on his siding waiting for the Pueblo hookup. Roscoe had made over twenty arrests, mostly Native Americans off the nearby Ute Reservation. Unless they were repeat offenders, he usually ended up just holding them in the Feed and Grain for a few hours before turning them loose. He was half black, half Ute himself and didn't have the heart to call the Sheriff on the poverty-stricken Indians.
It was six A. M. when he was brought out of a deep sleep by a racket at the store's back window. It was an incessant pounding, and he could hear someone shouting, "Hey you!" Roscoe sat up and rubbed his eyes, then he ran a hand through his tight black Afro hair. He looked out at the source of the noise and saw a very scruffy, long-haired blond man with wild eyes pounding on the windows with dirt-scarred knuckles. Roscoe's head was still thick with whiskey, as the bum continued pounding on the glass. Finally he stood. "He ain't open till nine!" Roscoe shouted at the man through the glass.
"I need a doctor. Where's the doctor?" the bum shouted.
"Ain't got a doctor here. There's six people live in this place. You want a doctor, gotta go t' Government Camp, 'bout sixty miles yonder, toward the mountains." Roscoe turned and moved back to the couch, but the man started hammering on the window again.
Roscoe spun around, and this time anger flared. "Hey, listen, you," he shouted. "There ain't no doctor. Stop yer bangin' or I'm gonna come out there an' fold ya over."
An ex-Marine and bull-riding champion, Roscoe Moss, Jr., was generally up to that task. He was forty-eight years old, but there was not an inch of fat on him. His brown skin was rippled with slabs of muscle.
"Open the fucking door. I need a phone," the bum yelled and continued his incessant, brain-jarring racket.
Roscoe moved angrily across the floor. He snapped the lock and, in one motion, pulled the door open, grabbed the scruffy man by the shirt, and yanked him forward.
Without exactly knowing how it happened, Roscoe Moss was suddenly spinning half off balance, half in the air. He pirouetted out of the door and, in a matter of seconds, was flat on his back in the dirt behind the Feed and Grain. The bum was somehow miraculously sitting on his chest, holding a cocked fist a few feet from his nose.
"I said I need a phone," he snarled.
Roscoe was not used to being tossed around like a rag doll, but he was still groggy and hungover, he reasoned. As he looked up at the threatening hobo astride him, he saw the rage in the man's blue eyes suddenly change to pleading desperation.
"You gotta help me. Please," the bum said. "I'm in trouble. My friend's dying! I got the shakes… I need a drink."
"Just get the fuck off me," Roscoe demanded.
The bum got off and the embarrassed yard bull got up, brushed himself off, then looked around in the dirt for his dignity. "For a guy with the shakes, you move pretty good."
"My friend's dying," Lucky repeated.
Roscoe looked closely at the bum. The man had moved so quickly he had been just a blur in that moment before Roscoe felt himself flying through the door, landing helplessly on his back. The 'bo was a mess, his feet wrapped in garbage bags.
"Need a doctor," Lucky said.
"Gonna take 'em more'n half an hour to get here from Government Camp."
"We can't wait that long. He's choking to death!"
"I'm kinda a veterinarian. I'll get my doctoring bag. Maybe I can help."
"Come on then," the bum said, and moved away from him at a run. He turned to look back at Roscoe, who still hadn't moved. "Come on/" the bum shouted.
When they got back to the tracks, the train Lucky and Mike had been riding on had stopped and there were two brakemen looking down at Mike. One of them was kneeling, taking the gold ring off Mike's finger.
"Hey, whatta you doing?" Lucky said. "Leave that alone! His dad gave him that." He snatched the ring away.
"He ain't gonna need it. This piece a' shit already caught the westbound," the kneeling brakeman said.
Lucky pushed him away in frustration, got down on his knees, and put his head over his friend's heart. "Can't hear anything," he said fearfully.
Roscoe pulled the stethoscope he had used on Shep's Appaloosa out of his bag, opened Mike's shirt, and placed it on the young hobo's chest. He also could hear no heartbeat. He checked from several places, then put his hand on the young man's forehead. The body already seemed cold.
"I'm sorry," he said softly.
"You two're the ones that cut the brake hose, aren't ya?" said the brakeman who had been trying to steal Mike's ring.
Lucky was still looking down helplessly at his friend.
Suddenly, the other brakeman standing behind Lucky moved up and hit him as hard as he could in the back of the head with a long metal spanner. Lucky's knees buckled and he collapsed right on top of Mike. The blow opened a nasty cut in the back of Lucky's head, and blood immediately ran down onto his T-shirt collar.
"What'd ya do that for?" Roscoe screamed at the brakeman.
"These motherfuckers cut our air just so they could jump off the train. Fuckin' hobos. They do it all the time. We're gonna be stuck here for half a day. Gonna get reamed. The Trainmaster'll be up here from Sierra Blanca fuckin' us over, screamin' about his shitty timetables. I'm callin' the Sheriff; at least this bum's gonna do his thirty days."
"Ain't no need ta call 'em," Roscoe said. "I'm the yard bull here. I'll call the Government Camp substation." Roscoe dug around in his pocket for his deputy's star to show them, but it wasn't in his pocket. Maybe he'd left it back in his motor home, which was parked behind his brother's house. Or maybe it was still in the glove compartment of his pickup. He wasn't sure.
When Lucky regained consciousness the bugs were all over him. They were crawling in his eye sockets, eating his eyelids. He sat straight up, screaming, trying to get them off his face, but for some reason he couldn't move his hands.
"Fuck, fuck… fuck!" he screamed.
"Shut up!" Roscoe commanded, his own headache from the whiskey nearly unbearable.
"On me. They're on me, Oh no, oh no, get 'em off!" Lucky was in the back office of the Feed and Grain, handcuffed to the heavy wooden bench there.
"Ain't nothing on you. What the hell you talking about?" Roscoe Moss, Jr., said, stepping back, startled.
Lucky was completely lost in the D. T. S and was no longer able to separate the dementia from reality. He felt the bugs nibbling on his face, and what made it worse, he couldn't move his hands to knock them off.
"Shheeeiiiittt!" he screeched. "They're eating my eyes, they're eating my fucking eyes! Help me, fer Chrissake!" He was thrashing on the bench, desperately yanking against the handcuffs. When he opened his eyes he saw Roscoe's shocked face, but he also saw a giant tarantula on his left wrist. It moved slowly up his arm, until it wiggled under his T-shirt, crawling in through the armhole. He could see it writhing under the cotton, and was helpless to fight it. His mind started to spin out of control, his vision blurred.
"They're all over me! Get 'em off, please!" he wailed.
Roscoe was knocked back by the ferocity of the hobo's scream and the violence of his actions. Lucky was yanking his handcuffed wrists so hard that blood was squirting from cuts where the metal shackles dug into him.
"Shit!" Roscoe said. "Stop it!"
Roscoe was pa
nicked; he didn't know what to do. He grabbed a phone off the counter and dialed. "Gimme Doc Fletcher," he said to the nurse. " 'Mergency!" After a minute the doctor came on the line.
"What can I do for you, Roscoe?"
Roscoe explained the problem, and when he was finished, Lucky was pulling his handcuffs so violently he was deeply scarring the wooden arm of the bench.
"OHHHHHH, GOD… PLEEEASE," he wailed.
"Go to the liquor cabinet, get some liquor, and pour it in him till it stops. That's all I can tell ya t'do for now," the doctor said. "Other than leave him be till he comes out of it."
Roscoe hung up and ran and got his bottle of Scotch off the store shelf. He opened it and poured four shots into Lucky, who swallowed them like a man parched on the desert. The effect was like cold water going into an overheated engine. Lucky started to calm down as the whiskey hit his bloodstream and sedated his rioting nervous system.
"Shit," Roscoe said. "You got a problem, Mister. You better go get yerself straightened out." Lucky slowly leaned back on the bench. His wrists were soaked with blood, but he was grinning, showing Roscoe the gap in his smile as the warm circle of Scotch expanded in his stomach, taking away the pain and delusion as it spread. "Man, that feels better," he finally said, then blissfully closed his eyes. He was so tired he could barely sit up.
An hour later when Lucky woke up, he was still handcuffed to the bench inside the Feed and Grain. The heavily muscled ex-Marine was sitting on a wood-backed chair nearby, looking at him studiously. "How'd you learn t'throw a man 'round like that?" Roscoe finally asked.
"Marines," said Lucky.
"Me too, I was a jarhead. In for four years."
"My head's killing me," Lucky groaned.
"That fella opened it up fer ya pretty good. Hit ya with a foundation brake spanner. I cleaned the wound off, taped it up, but you oughta get stitches."
Lucky was trying to sit up, but he felt dizzy, so he slumped back again.
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