Two hobos were jungled up in a clearing near the edge of the yard, hunched beside a crackling fire, drinking malt liquor. There was Horizontal Tom, a scrawny old man whose ravaged face peered out from snarls of iron-gray beard and hair like a mad hermit spying from behind a shrub, and F-Trooper, a lanky man in his forties with straight black hair hanging to his shoulders, an adobe complexion, and a chiseled, long-jawed face that might have been handsome if not for its rattled expression. Wearing chinos and a tattered AIM T-shirt. When he caught sight of Madcat he got to his feet, picked up two forty-ouncers, and went to do his drinking elsewhere.
“Fuckin’ Indian motherfucker,” Tom said with some fondness. “He just can’t abide too much company, but otherwise he ain’t so bad.”
“Son of a bitch can’t abide me is what it is,” Madcat said. “I ain’t never said shit to him, couple times we met, but he always acts like I been kicking his dog.”
“Hell, he acts like that with ever’body. Took him five, six years to warm up to me.” Tom bunched his sleeping bag up around his head, fashioning it into a cowl. “Could be he’s just shy.”
“Yeah, uh-huh.” Madcat sank to his knees by the fire, Grace beside him. “Yon and him riding together?”
“Nah. I come out on a hotshot from Dilworth couple days ago. Found him campin’ here. He’s waitin’ for somethin’ headin’ down to Roseville. Me, I’m—”
“Roseville’s in California, ain’t it?” asked Grace.
“If you wanna call Sacramento California.” Tom had a pull from his bottle, and some of the brew dribbled out the side of his mouth, beading up in the tangles of hair, glittering in the firelight—his face shadowed dramatically by the cowl, he might have been an old philosopher-king with jewels woven in his beard. “I’m headin’ for Mexico,” he went on. “Copper Canyon. Ever been down that way?”
Grace allowed that she had not.
“Big as the Grand Canyon and never been exploited, ’cause they ain’t no roads to it. Only way to get there’s by hoppin’ a freight.” Tom grinned, showing eight or nine teeth banded with brown and yellow stains like the stratifications on canyon walls; he pitched his voice low. “They got organ-pipe cactus been there since the conquistadors. Ol’ great-granddaddy iguanas seven foot long.” He reached across the fire and poked Grace’s knee. “Yon oughta ride down with me and see it. It’s amazin’! Like campin’ out in the middle of a goddamn hallucination!”
“I figure we’re gonna lay up in Tucson a while,” Madcat said.
“But we might make it down there eventually.”
Grace excused herself, saying she was going to find a place to camp, and went off into the hushes, dragging Madcat’s pack. Tom tracked her backside out of sight. “That’s a reg’lar little ditch witch you got yourself there. How’d you two hook up?”
Madcat told him. “I don’t know if I believe her ’bout the boy getting killed,” he said. “She exaggerates some.”
“These days there’s always somebody goin’ ’round killin’ out here.” Tom shook his head somberly. “It’s the drugs. They ruint the rest of society, now they ruinin’ things for the hobo.” He spat into the fire, and a tongue of orange flame flickered back at him. “How old you figger she is?”
“Seventeen, eighteen…I don’t know.”
“Eighteen might be pushin’ it,” Tom said, after due consideration. “She looks like jailbait to me. These crusty punk girls, seventeen’s ’bout when they get to feelin’ wore down, they start wantin’ to find themselves a man they can depend on. Sixteen…all they want for you is to take ’em somewhere on a train. But seventeen’s when they go home…if they gotta home. Or they latch onto an older man.” He leaned toward Madcat, intending—it appeared—to give him a friendly nudge, but found he couldn’t reach that far, wobbled, and nearly fell into the fire. “You be a fool not to let her latch onto you,” he said on regaining his balance. “She’s ’bout the best-lookin’ thing I seen out here. You was to take her to Britt, to the hobo convention, she’d be like Raquel fuckin’ Welch compared to them hairy hogs show up there.”
Tom seemed to lose the thread of what he was saying, stared off toward the yard. Glowing pinpricks were visible through the dead twigs—sentry lights at the edge of the yard—and a distant clamor could be heard, a windy mingling of bells and whistles and metallic thuds.
“’Member Jabberjaw? That ol’ girl I was ridin’ with a few years back?” Tom asked. Madcat said, Yeah, he sure did, and then Tom said, “Jesus Lord, I have slept with some scary-lookin’ women.”
He began talking about old girlfriends, then about hobo marriages he’d witnessed, ceremonies variously uniting Misty Rose, Diamond Dan, Dogman Jerry—and Madcat took to imagining a ceremony involving himself and Grace. They were standing on a flatcar that was being pulled by four white locomotives running abreast on four silver tracks, on wheels that were bleeding, and they were passing beneath a sky bigger than a Montana sky ruled by two black suns and a high-flying half moon, a thousand light years of dark wintry blue and a filigree of clouds like feathers, fishbones, lace. Grace had on a T-shirt and jeans and a circlet with a veil behind to cover her hair—a Maid Marian cap—and her face was chalky, dead calm, but the scarlet dreadlocks were seething beneath the veil, and the ring in the palm of her hand was alive, a golden worm eternally swallowing itself…
He coughed, gave his head a shake, and found he was staring through a maze of leafless twigs at one of the sentry lights. Drunk, oblivious to all else, Tom was still chattering away. Rock-and-roll music was playing somewhere nearby, and Madcat could hear Grace’s laughter coming from the same general direction. He heaved up to a knee and peered toward the yard.
“Oh, yeah,” said Tom behind him. “You might want to check on that. That’s been goin’ on a while now.”
Madcat staggered through the bushes, slapping branches aside, and soon emerged onto a black plain that smelled of cinders, and stretched to the limits of his vision. Near at hand the plain was crisscrossed by tracks, with here and there a stray boxcar or two; several hundred yards farther in lay an area of furious activity, blazing spotlights sweeping across shadowy trains, engine units shuttling back and forth, brightly colored repair carts trundling about; and in the farthest reaches was a tumultuous area of white glare and roiling smoke from which the darkly articulated shapes of mechanical cranes surfaced now and again, moving with the jerky imprecision of science fiction insects.
Grace was dancing along a section of outlying track, shaking her ass, lifting her hair up behind her head, and F-Trooper was stumbling after her, holding a forty ouncer and a portable radio. He got right on her butt and thrust awkwardly with his hips, almost dry-humping her, and when she danced away, he said, “Whoa! Awright! Unh-yeah!” and then with a sodden laugh hurried to catch up. Watching them, Madcat felt anger, but anger partially occluded by the vagueness and unease that sometimes preceded a migraine.
“Hi, Jimmy!” Grace caught sight of him and waved cheerfully. “You through talkin’ to your friend?”
F-Trooper weaved to the side and stood with his legs spread, gazing stupidly at him.
Madcat walked over to Grace, the friated soil crunching beneath his boots; he grabbed her arm and said, “Come on.”
She pushed at his chest, tried to break free, and said, “Fuck you! Jus’ who the fuck you think you are?” She tried another break, flung herself away, whipped her head about. Her dreadlocks whacked him in the face, and he let go, reeled backward. Then he heard her yell, “Jimmy! Watch out!”
F-Trooper had dropped the radio and was charging at him, preparing to swing his bottle. Madcat stepped inside the swing, seized two handfuls of the man’s hair, and headbutted him, simultaneously bringing up a knee. The Indian blocked the knee, but Madcat butted him again and that dropped him. He kicked the man hard in the ribs, the stomach, then in the tailbone as he crawled away. F-Trooper flopped onto his back. “Aw shit…Jesus!” he said. Blood slickered his forehead.
“Fuck you try
ing to do?” Madcat turned to Grace, who had taken refuge off along the tracks and was managing to look at once horrified and delighted. “You want to ride to California with this fuckwit? That what this is about?”
“Naw…un-uh!” She hustled over to him, took his face in her hands, and whispered, “I think he’s the one, Jimmy. He’s the one killed Carter.”
“Bullshit!” He shoved her away, took a few unsteady steps back toward the camp. The pressure in his head was building, the migraine about to spike.
“I swear!” she said, coming up beside him, still keeping her voice down. “That’s why I’s bein’ so nice to him. I was tryin’ to find out stuff. He told me he was in Spokane same night we was.”
Madcat made an effort to focus. Her dreadlocks appeared to be quivering, and her eyes gave back hot glints of a sentry light. “You told me you never saw the guy’s face,” he said, and planted a fist against his brow to push back the bad feeling.
“Un-uh! I said he had his back to me. I could see some of his face, I jus’ couldn’t see it all. But I’m pretty sure now he’s the one. What you think we should do?” When he did not answer, she leaned into him, pressing the softness of her breast against his arm. “You don’t have to worry ’bout me goin’ nowhere, Jimmy. I really care ’bout you. Ain’t I proved it?”
She was always working two propositions, he realized, prepared to switch off whenever one or the other proved untenable. Maybe she believed in both—who could say? Whatever, there would always be these tests, one of which he would eventually fail…though, he also realized, thinking back to her shout of warning, it wasn’t clear that she’d leave him even then. It was like they were married already, working behind that fabulous sacramental inertia.
“You havin’ one of your spells? You are, ain’tcha?” She linked arms with him. “C’mon back to camp. I fixed it up real nice. Made us a lean-to and ever’thing. You get some wine in you, you’ll feel better. You kin sleep and I’ll keep watch ’case that asshole tries anything.” She cast a wicked glance back at F-Trooper. “Not that I think he will. ’Pears you busted his little red wagon all to hell.”
As she led him toward camp, from behind came a sound of breaking glass. F-Trooper had thrown his bottle at them, missing by a wide mark. He was sitting slumped forward, his legs spread, like a big bloody baby; the busted radio fizzed and clicked by his side. The skin of his forehead had split open, painting his face a glistening red, and he was so badly lumped up above the eyes, it put Madcat in mind of atomic mutants in movie monster magazines. Witness gave him no pleasure. It was not a good thing to be reminded that a man who had hit rock bottom could always find a deeper place to fall.
“Fuckin’…” F-Trooper’s voice thickened and he had to spit. “Goddamn fuckin’ malt liquor!” The weak force of his glare seemed to be carried by a breath of wind that stirred black motes up from the tracks. “I’d been drinkin’ whiskey,” he said in a piteous tone, “I’d a kicked your ass!”
It must have been a random noise that woke Madcat, an operation of pure chance, unless God or something whispered in his ear, saying, “Man, you better get your scrawny butt up or else you be sleepin’ a long time,” and why would any deity worth a shit bother with the likes of him…? Yet he couldn’t quite reject the notion that some lame-ass train god, an old smoke-colored slob with a dead cigar stuck in his mouth, wearing a patched funeral suit and a top hat with a sprung lid, still had some bitter use for him and had flicked a grungy black finger to send a night bird screeching overhead, sounding the alarm. Whatever the cause, when the roof of the lean-to was ripped away, his eyes were open and he was sufficiently alert to roll off to the side and then went bellycrawling into the bushes.
Grace was screaming, F-Trooper was roaring curses, and all Madcat could see was dark on dark until he got turned around and spotted the sentry lights. He scrambled up, a broken twig scoring his cheek, and made for them, bursting out of the thickets and sprinting some fifty feet out into the yard. There he stopped and called back: “Grace! You all right?”
F-Trooper stepped out from the thickets, more shadow than man, carrying an ax handle at the ready. He was holding his ribs, and his movements were cautious, rickety; but Madcat had no desire to go against that ax handle. He was still half-drunk, uncertain of his own physical capacities, and though the rough ground tore at his bare feet, he set off running, aiming for the center of the yard. If it hadn’t been for Grace, he might have tried to lose F-Trooper among the trains and then headed for the mission in Roseville where he could hustle up a new pair of boots. But as he ran, glancing back at his pursuer, he noticed that the Indian was losing energy with every step, and Madcat soon discovered that he was able to maintain a secure distance by merely jogging. F-Trooper staggered, flailed, stumbled, occasionally fell, and finally began to run in a low crouch, huffing and grunting, arms nearly dragging on the ground, like a man undergoing a transformation into some more primitive form. Madcat slowed his pace further.
They had entered that portion of the yard where earlier there had been tremendous activity. It was quiet now, and dark. No spotlights, no handcars, no repair carts. The train the crews had been putting together was ready to go. Madcat led F-Trooper down a narrow avenue between two long strings of cars. Container cars, flatcars, 48s, grain cars, boxcars. With their great painted monograms—SFR, UP, XTRA, and such—dully agleam in the thick night, and looming so high that only a strip of moonless sky was visible overhead, they had the gravity of sleeping beasts, creatures whose hearts beat once a millennium, their caught breaths hardened into cold iron. Madcat went to walking sideways, watching F-Trooper reel against the cars like a drunk trying to negotiate a narrow hallway. Spittle hung from his jaw, and his eyes were like bullseyes, the pupils completely ringed by white. When it was clear that he had reached the point of exhaustion, his gait reduced to an enfeebled limp, Madcat turned to confront him. F-Trooper’s face displayed a stuporous resolve—he continued his approach without giving the slightest sign of anger or fear, faltering only when his legs betrayed him. Drawing near, he swung the ax handle, but the swing was weak and off balance. Madcat had little difficulty catching his wrist and wresting the club free. He butt-ended the man to the jaw and F-Trooper crumpled without a sound, collapsing onto his side, one arm outflung behind him, half-resting beneath the porch of a grain car.
The violence adrenalized Madcat, washed away the residue of drunkenness. He felt amazingly clear-headed. Clearer than he had felt in a long while. Under ordinary circumstances, muddled with wine, he would have tossed the ax handle aside and set off to find Grace; but now he realized there was an important decision to be made. If he were to walk away, leaving things as they stood, he would likely have cause to regret it. F-Trooper, in his judgment, was too far gone to reason with and obviously not the sort to forgive and forget. The last thing Madcat wanted was to be happily sloshed in a jungle somewhere and have the Indian sneak up behind him. It was bound to happen sooner or later. He and F-Trooper traveled the same roads. This was something that had to be done. Purely a matter of self-defense.
He grabbed F-Trooper by the shirt, pulled him from beneath the car, straddled the body. He tightened his grip on the ax handle. The Indian’s head lolled to the side and he let out a guttering noise, half gargle, half snore. With his bruises and lumps and cuts, fresh blood stringing from the corner of his mouth, a brewery stink rising from his flesh, he was a thoroughly pitiable item. Madcat was terrified by the step he was about to take, in the sight of a judgmental God. A preemptive strike was called for, a threat to his security had to be neutralized. Though the logic of nations would carry no weight in a court of law, such was the basis of ethical action on the rails, where men carried their paltry kingdoms in their packs. He had no choice. But as he lifted the ax handle high, he was struck by a sudden recognition, less than a recollection yet sharper than an instance of déjà vu, and he seemed to remember, almost to see himself standing in this same position with a half moon flying overhead and at h
is feet a teenage boy sitting cross-legged in a patch of weeds. It was only a partial glimpse, as if a flashbulb had popped inside his skull, illuminating a confusion of shadows too complicated to allow certain identification; but the shock of it sent him staggering back. He lost his footing on the uneven ground and sat down hard, scraping his hands on the gravel. The idea that he might have committed a senseless murder during a blackout, and that muscle memory or a faulty circuit in his brain had rewired him to the moment…it roused no great revulsion in him, no shiver of moral dismay. But the knowledge that he must have sunk to some troglodyte level where conscience no longer even registered, where unrepentant viciousness was part of the human circuitry, that knocked away the last flimsy props of his self-respect.
F-Trooper groaned. Soon he would regain consciousness, but Madcat was too addled, too disheartened to act. All his clarity was evaporating. Then a compromise occurred to him. He crawled over to F-Trooper, wrangled off his belt, lashed his hands, and secured the free end to the grain car’s porch, immobilizing him. This done, Madcat fell back and lay gazing up at the sky. Whatever moon ruled, it was hidden behind cloud cover baked to a dusty orange by the reflected glare of Klamath Falls. He tried to deny what he’d imagined he had seen, telling himself that, with his headaches and the drinking, he was liable to see anything—hell, his brain was on the fritz most of the time, buzzing and clicking like F-Trooper’s busted radio. Even now he was having trouble stringing thoughts together. So many feelings and facts and memories were churning inside him, his head was like a room in which too many conversations were going on for him to make sense of any one, and a golden hole was opening in his vision, the way a hole gets burned into a piece of paper by bright sunlight directed through a magnifying glass, and he heard a hosanna shout so vast it might have been braided together out of every shout of joy and tribulation ever uttered, and he realized that all the sound and light causing his confusion was coming from a train.
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