“Hey!” Theo pointed with his beer bottle toward the boat. Then he finished, zipped up, and sat heavily down in his chair like a sack of potatoes thrown from the back of a truck. Simultaneously the motor went silent with a clunk and a puff of smoke. Their ascent came to a stop, and their descent commenced.
“Piece of blistering crap!” Theo broke into an awful fit of coughing. Randall reached over and activated a brake, and they stopped in front of the view again.
The dog, facing toward the tracks in front, started barking.
“I know, Edward, I know. But what can you do?” Theo said.
Edward turned toward Randall and barked twice more.
“Too much weight, Eddie,” Randall said, and rose up to a towering stand on the platform.
Theo jammed his empty beer bottle back into the case, pulled out a fresh one, and counted how many remained. Edward whined and lay down.
“Shoot,” Thom said. “We’re really sorry. I . . . obviously we’ll walk. I didn’t think we’d . . .” The little engine that couldn’t, brain thought.
“We’ll all be shit walking now!” Theo waved his hands in the air. “Afternoon train!” He let out a gust of air, his eyes opening to the size of golf balls. “Cigarette.”
Erik dutifully got out a cigarette and handed it to Theo.
“Light.”
“You’ve, uh, got that already.”
Theo gave him a skeptical look and went through his many pockets, finally finding the lighter with a measure of delight. “So I have, so I have.”
Randall pulled the outer casing from the motor.
Tree stood next to him, and Thom was struck by the drastic differences in size. They seemed two different species entirely. And then Tree began speaking the language of electric motors, first with Randall and then with the motor itself, his and Randall’s hands slipping into the casing.
Thom went to stand with Erik and Theo, who were smoking in front of the view. He saw that Erik had managed to wrest a beer from Theo’s stash and was working the bottle into his gestures. In deference, Thom supposed.
“So you boys are on a quest. That’s good, real good. You’ve got to have quests. The world has too few quests these days. We could all get off our asses and quest about some more.” He nodded vigorously. “But do you know what the quest is for?”
“We might be on the radio.”
“Well, that’s dandy, but what are you going to tell the radio? That you used to carry a couch, that you’re three guys in search of a couch, some kind of Holy Couch of Grails?” He made a sweeping motion with his beer bottle. The freighter slipped slowly from view. “You look a little lost without your couch, not that I saw you with it. You may all just generally have lost looks. Now most likely we’ll come across this couch of yours, provided we manage to get rescued from this shipwreck. It might be a bit shredded then, might be a bit destroyed. Might be a mile from here, a hundred miles. But that doesn’t give you a reason to do what you’re doing. You need some grandness of purpose. If you have the chance, always risk the great failure over the small success. Look at me! Ha ha ha.” He gestured wildly with the beer bottle in one hand and the cigarette in the other, and Thom and Erik, on either side, leaned away so as not to be hit by the implements. “You need something big, really big! I mean not something like you’re out to find out what the meaning of life is. We all know what that is.” Theo winked at Erik, who nodded. “But something like that.”
Thom watched Theo take a pull off of his cigarette. He held it too far up, Thom noticed, cradled deep between his first and second fingers with his fingers straight out. We all know what what is?
From behind them came raucous laughter, and they turned to see Randall and Tree gripping the sides of the cart and laughing.
“What the hell is so funny?” Theo hollered.
Tree and Randall shrugged simultaneously, like something out of synchronized swimming.
“How about you, big fellow?” Theo turned to Thom.
Thom felt clumsy. For an instant he stifled the impulse to run, imagined himself like an overly fat bear ambling off on two legs, trying to climb over logs and failing, falling on his back like an upside down turtle, like a turtle on two feet, with a bear’s head, duck’s feet. “Truthfully,” he said, and not quite sure what the truth was or what to do with his hands while he thought up the truth, he jammed them into his pockets. “Truthfully,” he said, “I’m scientifically intrigued. The couch is . . . heavy and not heavy.”
“So you believe that too, do you?” Theo looked back at Tree to make sure he was out of earshot. “I was beginning to think your friend was a little ding-dong.” He clocked his head back and forth like a bell.
“He is,” Erik said.
“Hey,” Theo said severely, frowning. “You’ve got to have solidarity now. Solidarity!” He raised his beer bottle into the air in salute. “Got to have it if you’re on a quest. I suspect you’re all a little”—Theo clocked his head again—“and we’ll just have to see about this couch thing. But I do like the idea of couch movement. Couches and movement are antithetical by nature, and that’s good, that’s real good. You’ve got antithetical working for you. So you’re uprooting the sedentary, restationing the stationary, mobilizing the immobile. There’s something to that, but you’ll need to develop it more. Want a beer, big fellow?”
“Okay,” Thom said.
Theo reached into a pocket on the inside of his bathrobe and pulled out a beer bottle, clinking it against several others stashed there. Thom couldn’t figure out how to open it. It wasn’t a twist off, and the beer was labelless. He realized it was probably home brew. He put on a quick show of pulling at the top feeling stupider by the moment. Erik grabbed the bottle, placed the cap against the neck of his, and gave it a swift whack with his palm. The cap popped off, and he handed the foaming bottle back to Thom—who felt absurdly grateful.
“Good man.” Theo nodded. “Solidarity, that’s what it’s all about. You’ve got to have your skills, that’s important.” He patted Erik on the back. “Specialize. Except when you shouldn’t, of course. Get over here and stop moping, Edward.” Edward reluctantly got up and walked with composure to the edge of the view and sat at a distance of ten feet. Theo nodded. “He’s a proud sonofabitch,” he whispered to Thom. He looked back toward the cart and hollered, “You geniuses think you’re going to make that thing run again?”
Tree pulled his wire and needle-nose pliers from a coat pocket, began to twist and work the wire, pulling bits out of the motor and putting bits back in. Randall watched over his shoulder with his hand on his chin, nodded once or twice, added a word of caution or advice, nodded.
“Let me tell you gentlemen a story.” Theo dropped his cigarette to the ground and crushed it thoroughly under his heel. He stared down at the river and lapsed into a sudden sobriety. “Round about a thousand years ago, there was a young, fiery lad with flaming red hair by the name of Leif Ericson. Leif came from a long line of criminals, not the least of which was his father, Eric the Red, who was kicked out of Norway, and then out of Iceland, both times for murder. Eric headed west and found Greenland, a not-altogether-hospitable place with a heart of solid ice, and started the first European colony there. He tussled with the locals, the Tuniit, and likely gave them a pretty hard time, as they aren’t around anymore, as Europeans are often wont to do to the brown-skinned type. Somewhere along the way, Eric the Red had himself a couple of kids with an equally mercurial lass, among which was a boy named Leif. Leif had his father’s temperament—a combustible temper and a belief that there was more out there to be found. When Leif saw geese flying overhead to winter on continents his kind had not yet discovered, he yearned to follow, death be damned. Many a time his father’s men had dragged him off makeshift rafts he’d cobbled together to sail the Atlantic on—and this when he was only a yearling. He carried with him a constant itching for the unknown. Downright horrible fellow to be around, I imagine. At the age of twenty-four he up and sailed west in
search of what he wasn’t entirely certain, where he ran smack dab into a little wooded island that later came to be known as North America. You might remember another fellow who ended up there claiming the discovery five hundred years later.” Theo nodded repeatedly to himself as if he were discovering this history in a new light. “What is most interesting about Leif is that he sensed what others could not. He paid attention to the signs, even if they were self-made, and was brave enough to bring these to their conclusion. I don’t mean to imply that you’ve created your own story here, but I have no doubt that if Leif were here, he too would notice an oddity with the couch and would carry it westward, against all logic, to where he believed it wanted to go. Or where he wanted to go. Was it an object he followed or did he invent the justification for his own questing? It’s often difficult to distinguish among the things that motivate us. Even as we attribute them to external factors, they may be our own.”
The motor whirred to life. Everyone turned toward the mechanics, on the verge of applause, until smoke started twisting up from the motor again and they switched it off.
Edward whined, and Theo gestured palm outward toward the dog. “Hey, none of that. Optimism! Look here, Randall and the kid will get it running in nothing flat.” He turned back to Thom and Erik. “So that’s my story about quests and their purpose.”
“Hmm,” said Erik. He shuffled his feet in the gravel. “Cool. Didn’t Columbus . . .”
“Five hundred years later.”
“Wow, so what happened to them?”
“Most were killed by the Native Americans,” Thom said, who knew the story.
“Oh.” Erik took a sip from his beer and sighed. “So . . . what are you guys up to?” he said to Theo.
“Hate cars.” He adjusted his glasses from one skewed angle to another. “Hate ’em.”
Erik nodded, not sure whether to pursue it further or not.
“Cigarette,” Theo said. And Erik went through the ritual. Theo still had the lighter but Erik had to tell him which pocket it was in. “But I like movement. Randall and I make a bunch of different things that move but that don’t use combustion engines. I think them up, Randall thinks up how to build them. Edward does what Edward does. I’m Theo, Doctor Theo,” he announced loudly, and then shook Erik’s and Thom’s hands again. “What do you gentlemen call yourselves?”
“Erik,” Erik said.
“Full name, please.”
“Erik Glakowsky.
“Polish boy, always like to meet a Polish boy. I’m a quarter Polish myself. Been there?”
“No, sir.”
“Better get over there. What’s your name, big fellow?”
“Thom Bakker.”
“Doctor?”
“What? No, no.”
“Why does that name sound familiar? Were you on some kind of cooking show? Wait a second, you’re that one guy, aren’t you?”
“I don’t think so,” Thom said.
“Sure you are. You’re that guy who, come on now, refresh my memory. The computer-computer guy, right?”
“Oh.”
“The monkeys guy?”
Thom smiled shyly. “Yes, I guess I am that guy.”
Theo let off something between a cough and a hurrah and socked Thom on the back. “We’re practically related,” he yelled. “We’re kinsman!”
“Heh heh.” Thom feeling just slightly less like the nine-hundred-pound bear.
“What about your mechanic, Pine or whatever.”
“Tree,” said Thom.
“Could use a kid like that.”
“Yeah,” Erik said. “He’s not so bad.”
They watched Tree and Randall toil in silence. Thom, despite himself, felt a new courage for being recognized by Theo. That was something that he’d done—he hadn’t always been such a wreck. Once he’d been a whipsmart and devious computer hacker before he’d spiraled down to becoming a computer hack at a grocery store.
The motor burst to life. They held their breaths, and then Edward leapt onto the cart with a joyous round of barking.
“Onward!”
“Probably we shouldn’t put much weight on it,” Tree said.
Randall nodded. “You three walk to the top of the hill.”
Theo looked crushed and gave the enterprising dog a withering glare. He handed fresh beers to Thom and Erik and gave Randall a quick salute.
Tree climbed on board, Edward took up position and the brake was released.
They watched the cart go up and out of sight around a curve.
Theo sighed. “Don’t care much for walking either,” he said, and to emphasize his point stumbled across a couple of railroad ties, started into a fall, and with his body pitched forward he ran tripping and stumbling over more ties, his arms out and ass in the air, things tumbling from his pockets, beer bottles clanking together while he tried to keep his legs under him, then came to a stop off the tracks and up the side of a bank thirty feet down the way, holding his now mostly empty beer up triumphantly.
They continued their slog up the tracks, and Thom began to worry about sleeping situations again. Nightfall wasn’t more than a couple hours away.
“So where are you and Randall going?”
“Longview, Washington. We can take you as far as that. After that, you’re on your own.”
At the top of the hill they saw the couch. Randall and Tree had loaded it onto the Railmobile and sat atop it sharing the comfortable, companionable silence of two people who rarely felt the need to speak. Thom saw that there was indeed something different about it. Like a three-dimensional object on a flat surface, or color in a black-and-white picture, it stood out, seemed larger than it ought to, held your eye.
The couch hung over the sides of the cart, and Edward sat in the small space in front of the couch, staring intently down the tracks.
“Now I’m not saying that I didn’t believe you boys,” Theo marveled, “but look at that. That’s a hell of a nice couch. Nice to see the old hummer in person.”
“Just found it here,” Tree said, and Randall nodded.
Thom shook his head, not sure how to feel about having the couch back. He ran his hands over the armrest, looking for damage and finding none. It seemed to be weathering the trip better than he was.
The Railmobile was exceedingly full now, backpacks and gear crammed into the space at the front of the couch with Edward. The three roommates sat on the couch, shaking each other to stay awake. Were they so tired already? Randall and Theo sat in their chairs.
They made good progress, whipping through several towns, citizens gripping their children and pointing at the living room passing by on railroad tracks. They looked like a group of men situated in front of the television for Sunday football, their dog at their feet, hoisting bottles of beer, the man in back smoking like a chimney. Thom felt sure Theo and Erik and Edward loved every minute of it. He grinned shyly and mostly wished he were hiding at the bottom of a well.
Behind them was the active volcano Mount St. Helens and the dormant Mount Hood. To their right the Columbia meandered along, all that remained of the great flood that had shaped the region thousands of years prior. When they wound away from the highway, the territory felt prehistoric to Thom and as if they were the sole occupants for many hundreds of miles. About an hour before nightfall they arrived at the small industrial area across the river from Longview, Washington. The roommates pulled their couch sadly off of the Railmobile 1-4-7. Randall stood and smiled and Theo gave a round of hugs, weaving between them like a drugged tap dancer.
“Careful,” Theo said. “Afternoon train will come anytime now. Don’t be leaving this precious couch on the tracks, ding-ding.”
The couch carriers nodded dutifully. Edward gave a last bark and Randall headed the contraption across the rail bridge connecting one state to another.
“Well, that feels sad,” said Tree.
Erik nodded. “That’s one hell of a fun life. I hate cars too,” he volunteered, and thought guiltily of his
broken car parked in front of the diner.
The tracks wound between companies and residential areas for a short way and, with the threat of dogs and security guards, they felt exposed. Erik and Thom picked up the couch and tried to make good time. They quickly remembered the toil of carrying the couch, their blisters resurfacing, ankles sore and twisting on the ties. Then the tracks led into the forest again, following along the bank of the Columbia, the river just twenty feet down a sharp bank. Giant ships loomed over them. Ships with Arabic, Chinese, and Japanese names. English ships and American ships. The engines of commerce importing electronics, exporting grain. Massive holds full of the stuff people never tired of. The highway followed the crest of a hill to their left, far above them.
“We’ve got to find a place to sleep.”
“I wish we could sleep at Sheilene’s again.” Tree adjusted the knit cap she’d given him.
Erik checked his new compass reflexively.
They came to a wooded area and decided to camp. Exhausted, they ate only a little and spent the twilight and the first hour of dark sitting on the couch watching the river go by. Tree fell asleep immediately. The freighters were lit like carnival rides, gliding by in the darkness, their giant waves crashing onto the banks followed by silence when they’d passed. A drizzle started.
“At least we can discount the I Ching reading about the no-rain part,” Erik said.
Thom grimaced.
Erik slept on the couch, Tree on the ground at its front, rolled in blankets, and Thom at the back in his sleeping bag. Over the top of them they unfurled a tarp, which was only partially effective in protecting them from the night-long rain.
The rain filtered into Tree’s dreams. He saw them surrounded by water, spinning in some kind of current, a hazy threat behind them.
Thom and Tree woke up miserable. The rain had been intense and they’d spent the night thrashing around to avoid the rivulets of water that soaked their bedding.
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