“I’ll take the chance. I don’t wanna be trapped inside.”
“Oh, and I ain’t got no say. That it?” She got right up into my face. “You think I come on this ride just so you can boss me around? You better think twice!” She hauled off and punched at me, her fist glancing off my cheekbone, and I fell back a couple of steps, stunned by her ferocity.
“I ain’t scared of you!” she said, her shoulders hunched. “I ain’t taking no shit off you or anybody!”
Her eyes darted to the side, the muscles in her cheeks were bunched. Seeing how frightened she was acted to muffle my own fear, and I said, “You want it closed, then close it. All I’m sayin’ is, if the car starts gettin’ tore up, maybe we oughta know what’s goin’ on so we can make a reasonable decision.”
“Reasonable? What the fuck are you talkin’ about? If we was reasonable, we’d be back over Yonder and not fixin’ to die out here in the middle of nowhere!”
The car gave a heave, a kind of twitching movement, and then gave another, more pronounced heave, and I knew a beardsley had settled on the roof and was tearing at it. An instant later the door was shoved open a foot or so, and another beardsley began squeezing through the gap, like a towel drawn through a wringer, its mottled, bald old man’s head pushing in first. Annie shrieked, and I ran to my pack and plucked out my ax handle. When I turned, I saw the beardsley was halfway inside the car, its leathery black sail flapping feebly, the hooks on the underside proving to be talons three and four inches long, a dirty yellow in color. It was such a horrible sight, that parody of an ancient human face, utterly savage with its glittery black eyes and fanged snapping mouth, I froze for a second. Annie was plastered up against the edge of the door, her eyes big, and as the sail flapped at her, the talons whipping past her face, she screamed again.
I didn’t have a strategy in mind when I charged the beardsley; I simply reacted to the scream and lunged forward, swinging the ax handle. I took a whack at the head, but the sail got in the way, folding about the ax handle and nearly ripping it from my grasp. I started to take another swing, but the sail gloved me and yanked me toward the creature’s head with such force that my feet were lifted off the floor. The thing smelled like a century of rotten socks. Talons ripped my shoulders, my buttocks, and I saw the end of reason in those strange light-stung black eyes…and then I saw something else, a recognition that jolted me. But almost instantly it was gone, and I was back fighting for life. I had no way to swing at the beardsley, being almost immobilized by the grip of the sail; but I poked the end of the ax handle at it as it hauled me hard forward again, and by chance, the handle jammed into its mouth. My fear changed to fury, and I pushed the handle deeper until I felt a crunching, the giving way of some internal structure. I rammed the handle in and out, as if rooting out a post hole, trying to punch through to the other side, and suddenly the head sagged, the sail relaxed, and I fell to the floor.
I was fully conscious, but focused in an odd way. I heard Annie’s voice distantly, and saw the roof of the car bulging inward, but I was mostly recalling the beardsley’s eyes, like caves full of black moonlit water, and the fleeting sense I’d had as I’d been snatched close that it was somehow a man, or maybe that it once had been a man. And if that were so, if I could trust the feeling, how did it fit into all the theories of this place, this world. What determined that some men were punished in this way and others sent over Yonder? Maybe if you died in Yonder you became a beardsley, or maybe that’s what happened if you died out on the plain. My suppositions grew wilder and wilder, and somewhere in the midst of it all, I did lose consciousness. But even then I had the idea that I was looking into those eyes, that I was falling into them, joining another flock under some mental sky and becoming a flapping, dirty animal without grace or virtue, sheltering from the sun in the cool shadows of the reeds, and by night rousing myself to take the wind and go hunting for golden blood.
I came to with a start and found Annie sitting beside me. I tried to speak and made a cawing sound—my mouth was dry as dust, and I felt a throbbing pain in my lower back and shoulders. She stared at me with, I thought, a degree of fondness, but the first thing she said was, “’Pears I was right about the door.”
I tried to sit up, and the throbbing intensified.
“I got the bleeding stopped,” she said. “But you’re pretty tore up. I cleaned you best I could. Used up all my Bactine. But that was a damn dirty thing what sliced you. Could be the wounds are goin’ to get infected.”
I raised my head—the beardsley was gone, and the door shut tight. “Where are we?” I asked.
“Same as before,” she said. “’Cept the mountains look bigger. The beardsleys flew off somewhere. Guess they drank their fill.”
“Help me get up, will ya?”
“You oughta lie down.”
“I don’t wanna stiffen up,” I said. “Gimme a hand.”
As I hobbled around the car, I remembered the clutch of the beardsley’s sail and thought how lucky I’d been. Annie kept by my side, supporting me. I told her about how I’d felt a human vibe off the beardsley in the moments before I killed it, and what I thought that meant.
“It probably didn’t mean nothin’,” she said. “You were scared to death. You liable to think almost anything, a time like that.”
“Yeah,” I said. “But this was real strong.”
“So what?” she said. “So it was human, so what? Who cares what it means? You ain’t never gon’ figure it out. Ain’t no point in tryin’. Hell, that’s one reason I come with you. I couldn’t listen to people’s harebrained theories no more. I wanted to go where there’s somethin’ more constructive to do than sit around and contemplate my goddamn navel.”
“You didn’t see what I saw,” I told her. “You had, you’d be curious, too.”
“Fine,” she said. “It’s a stunnin’ development. The beardsleys are human. What’s it all fuckin’ mean? I won’t rest till I get to the bottom of it.”
“Jesus, Annie,” I said. “I was just speculatin’.”
“Well, save it! If we survive this ride, maybe I’ll be interested. But right now I got more and better to think about.”
I said, “All right.”
She peeked at my shoulders and said, “Oh, God! You’re bleedin’ again. Come on. Sit back down, lemme see what I can do.”
In the morning I pushed open the door and had a look round. The mountains loomed above us. Granite flanks rising into fangs of snow and ice that themselves vanished into fuming dark clouds, fans of windblown ice blasted into semipermanent plumes from the scarps. Back in Yonder, the mountains had seemed huge, but viewed up close they were the roots of a world, the bottom of a place boundless and terrible, a border between trouble and emptiness. Their names, if they had names, would be violent hatcheting sounds followed by a blast of wind. They offered no hint of happy promise. A chill bloomed inside me from a recognition of my folly, of having given up on Yonder and put Annie and myself in the way of far worse. But when Annie came to stand beside me, all I said was, “Looks like it’s gon’ get cold.”
She stood gazing up at the mountains and said, “Yeah, looks like.” She went over to the sleeping bags and dug a down jacket out of her pack.
On the outside of the car, next to the door, were several gouges that appeared to be scabbing over with filmy black stuff, the golden congealed blood showing through. I glanced at the mountains again and thought I saw a flash of lightning in the clouds.
“Close the door,” Annie said. “We’ll be there soon enough. Ain’t no use in starin’ at it.”
I slid the door shut and sat beside her. “It’s just mountains,” I said.
She gave a sniff of laughter. “Yeah, and Godzilla’s just tall.”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry if this turns out wrong. I didn’t…It felt right to leave.”
“I ain’t gon’ blame you. I coulda stayed.” Then after a pause, she said, “I’m glad I didn’t stay. I couldn’t tolerate Yonder no mo
re.”
That surprised me a little, though I’d expected she would come around to admitting it eventually. “We probably don’t go way high up in ’em,” I said. “Tracks wouldn’t get built that high.”
“They ain’t real tracks and nobody built ’em.”
“Well, yeah. There’s that.” I tried to think of something comforting to say. “’Member the Wizard of Oz? How he had this fearsome voice, but he turned out to be a little fat guy and the voice was fake? The mountains are probably like that.”
“Dorothy and the Scarecrow,” she said dispiritedly. “That’s us, all right.” She worked a hand in down among the clothes in her pack and pulled out a deck of cards. “Wanna play some gin?”
So we ate jungleberries to calm our nerves and played cards as the train ascended into the mountains, going over the Wall. We played for a dollar a point, double for gin, and after a while we began to joke and laugh, and for the most part forgot about the wind, which had started howling around the car, and the cold that was gradually seeping inside. Annie kicked my butt for the first hour, but then I had a run of luck and went up several hundred dollars. I dumped the next game to bring us closer to even, and as I shuffled and dealt the cards, I thought of other rides we’d taken both separately and together, beat up and fucked up, drunk and stoned, sick and afraid, and how it seemed all that had been preparation for this ride up into wherever. Maybe it had been a form of preparation, maybe the world was so painstaking and intricate in its wisdom that part of its process was to prepare those who failed it for a wild ride into an unknown land. But Annie was right. True or not, it was useless knowledge. It was the kind of thing you did not need to live. The arguments of doctrine and the study of philosophy, they might or might not have validity, but the only functions they served were either to exercise the mind or, if pursued to excess, to blind you to the bitterness of life and keep you from the more joyful practices necessary to withstand it.
“Hey,” said Annie, beaming. “Guess what?”
“What?” I said.
She spread out her hand for me to see. “Gin!”
Midway through the game I had to piss, and when I cracked the door to do so, I found we were rolling slowly through a whitish fog so thick I could barely make out the wheels of the train. Apparently we were down in some sort of declivity, shielded from the wind, because it was howling louder than ever. I thought it must have been breaking off enormous ledges of snow—audible above the howling were explosive noises such as accompany avalanches. Half-frozen, I finished my business and ducked back inside.
“What’s it like out there?” Annie asked.
“Like a whole buncha nothin’. Got some serious fog.” I sat back down, watched her deal. “We must be down in a pocket.”
Done with dealing, Annie studied her cards, glanced at me, and said, “Your turn.”
I picked up my hand, made a stab at arranging it. “Fog’s not even driftin’. You’d think with all the wind, it’d find some way to blow a little bit down where we are.”
“Got any threes?” she asked, and laid down a three.
I started to pick up the card, changed my mind, and drew from the deck. “Maybe it ain’t all wind. Maybe it’s somethin’ else goin’ on that sounds like wind.”
“C’mon, Billy,” she said. “Play a card. Even if it’s the last thing I do, I’m gonna beat you silly.”
There came a noise, then. A shriek…except it didn’t come from any throat. It was more an electronic note edged with bursts of static, and it was loud—loud as a police siren suddenly switched on behind you. We dropped the cards, scrambled farther away from the door, and as we did, the shriek sounded again and a brilliant white flash cut a diagonal seam across the door, like someone was outside and swinging a magnesium torch at the car. The heat that came with it had that kind of intensity. The walls of the car rippled, the floor humped beneath us. For a fraction of a second, the seam glowed too brightly to look at, but it faded quickly, and we saw that a rip had been sliced in the door, leaving an aperture about six inches wide and three feet long. I heard distant shrieks, identical to the one I’d initially heard, and thereafter a tremendous explosion that reminded me, in its magnitude, of dynamite charges I’d set when working highway construction the summer after high school. Whatever the car was made of—skin, metal, plastic, a combination of things—its torn substance had been somehow sealed, cauterized, and there was not the slightest seepage of golden blood. We heard more explosions and shrieks, but when after a few minutes nothing else struck the car, we went over to the rip and peered through it. Annie gasped, and I said, “Jesus…” Then, both inspired to act at the same time, we slid the door wide open so we could get a better look at where we were bound.
What I saw I need to describe carefully, slowly, though I seemed to see and absorb it all at once. We were barreling along a snow-covered valley, featureless except for boulders that jutted up here and there, a rift that ran straight as a highway between rows of mountains, a diminishing perspective of giants, brothers to the ones ranged along the plain. They were set close together, without any linkage between them, no ridges or shoulders that merged one into another, and this placement made them seem artificial, a landscape that had been created without the restraints of inorganic logic. Cliff faces of black rock broke from their icy slopes. Beneath the smoky clouds that shrouded the peaks, the sky was alive with bright flying things—blazing golden-white, they might have been sparks shaped into the raggedy images of birds. They wheeled and whirled and curvetted everywhere, sounding their electric voices. There were so many, it amazed me that they did not constantly collide. Every now and then a group of several hundred would form into a flock and arrow down to strike the cliff faces, disappearing like a beam of light into a void, and thereafter, following the briefest of intervals, an explosion would occur, producing not fragments of rock and gouts of fire, but violet rays that streamed off toward the end of the valley in the direction we were headed. I had the feeling that I was watching the operation of a vast engine designed to create those rays, but what the rays were fueling—if that’s what they were doing—was so far outside the scope of my experience, I had no way to interpret it.
Once when I was drunk in Kalispell, flush from the sale of some copper wire I’d stolen from the freight yard there, I wandered into a souvenir shop and became interested in the mineral samples they sold. What especially caught my eye was a vial of black opals immersed in water, and after studying them for a while, glossy black stones that each contained a micro-universe of many-colored flecks of fire, I bought them for fifteen dollars—I would have stolen them, but the clerk had his eye on me. At the far end of the valley the land gave out into a place similar to those depths embedded in the stones, a blackness that appeared one second to be bulging toward us, and the next appeared to be caving in. Countless opalescent flecks trembled within it, and whenever the violet rays penetrated the blackness, it would flicker as with heat lightning and for an instant I would have a glimpse of something that had been obscured. The glimpses were too brief for me to identify the thing, but I had a sense it was a complicated branching structure, and that it went a long way in…Another explosion, and I realized what had happened to the door of our car. As the explosion occurred and a violet ray spat forth, the spark birds closest to it went swerving out of control and tumbled from the sky. Several came swerving low above the train before righting themselves and rejoining the others.
We gazed at the scene until the cold drove us back inside the car, and then we sat huddled together without speaking. I can’t say what was in Annie’s mind, but I was more awestruck than afraid. The scale of the mountains, the strangeness of all else—it was too grand to breed true fear, too foreign to inspire other than wonder, and too startling to allow the formation of any plan. Hobos, for all their degenerate failings, have an aesthetic. They’re scenery junkies, they take pride in traveling through parts of their country few have ever seen, and they memorialize those sights, whether stori
ng them in their memories or creating more tangible mementos, like SLC with his wall of Polaroids. Sitting around campfires or in squats, they’ll swap stories about the natural beauty of the world with the enthusiasm of kids trading baseball cards. Now Annie and I had a story to top anybody’s, and though we had no one to tell it to, as if by reflex, I polished the details and dressed up the special effects so if I ever did get the chance, I’d be ready to let the story rip. I was kept so busy doing this—and maybe Annie was, too—I didn’t notice the train was slowing until we had dropped more than half our speed. We went to the door, cracked it, and peered out. We were still in the valley, the mountains still lifted on either side, the spark birds were still wheeling in the sky. But the opaline blackness that had posed a horizon to the valley was gone. In place of it was a snow-covered forest beneath an overcast sky and, dividing the forest into two distinct sections, a black river that sprung up out of nowhere and flowed between those sections, as straight in its course as that of the valley between the ranked mountains. It was clear the train was going to stop. We got our packs together and bundled up—despite the freakishness of the forest and river, we figured this was our destination, and were relieved to be alive. When the train came to a full stop, we jumped down from the car and set off across the snow, ducking our heads to avoid the wind, which was still blowing fiercely, our feet punching through the frozen crust and sinking calf-deep.
The train had pulled up at the end of the line; the tracks gave out beyond the last mountain, about a mile and a half, I judged, from the edge of the forest. The ground ahead of us was gently rolling, the snow mounded into the shape of ocean swells, and the forest, which looked to be dominated by oaklike trees with dark trunks and heavy iced crowns, had a forbidding aspect, resembling those enchanted and often perilous forests illustrated in the children’s books that the old Billy Long Gone had turned to now and then, wanting to read something but unable to do more than sound out a few of the words. When we reached the engine I took the can of spray paint Pie had given me and wrote on the side:
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