I think for a moment about the sermon. I hadn’t paid much attention. I hadn’t much since Preacher Johns was kicked out of the church. There is something about Reverend Wiley, about the way his words seem to sneak out from between his teeth, about how his eyes never move when he speaks, that has always made me question his motives. “I still think I preferred Father Benji.”
“Bah, he was an old man with an outdated view of the world. How can you inspire hope in people when all you can talk about is the way they need to change?” A sad way to think of things, but true. “Who ever wants to accept that the only way to make things better is to change themselves?”
In any case, later that week I go to Reverend Wiley to sign the conscription papers that effectively transfer ownership of my soul to one General Anselmo. Not that my father has inspired anything patriotic in me. In fact, it has been years since my father has inspired anything positive in me. But his words that night do spark something of a solution for me. Recently, I had come to realize that I had no interest in remaining home for any longer than necessary. And doing something one parent thinks is worthwhile might be easier to bring up at the dinner table than something neither of them thinks would be. And as sorry as I am for leaving my mother, something gives me satisfaction about being able to get away from my father based on something he’s said, something he’s suggested in his self-conspiring, offhanded manner. A part of me hopes I might fall off a cliff or be swept away in the waves so he can spend the rest of his life blaming himself for sending me off to die. Vindictive, yes, but I don’t know anyone who’s ever had a vendetta against someone without thinking it’s a well deserved one, and I sure as hell think my father deserves it.
“Where’s Ja-Ja and Robinson?” Pecker asks, sitting on the log opposite the fire from Tens.
We called him Tens because, as the story goes, he shoots his third finger off his left hand his first day, a naï;ve recruit standing in line with the others. The General hands him the rifle and goes on to the next soldier. When he turns to get the next rifle from the hooded woman, the shot goes off and Tens’ finger slaps the General right across the face to leave a dashed smatter of blood on the cheek. The bullet goes clean through the bone and lands in the next recruit’s foot. They joke it is the closest anyone will ever come to slapping the General, a grave man whose sobriety is outmatched only by the gross seepage of his ferocity, the quiet, worst kind of ferocity that only comes out at undeserving times. He, Tens, not the General who for all I know has been here since the dawn of time, has been here for three years by the time I arrive, only two weeks before the snake slither of bowed, hungry heads appears on the ocean horizon. Of the five of us, Tens is the only one not from town, just across the woods. Rather, he is from further down the highway, in the next city. I have seen him a few times when our high school plays his in football or basketball, before the cuts in the school’s budget eliminated our intramurals. He was always a valiant enough opponent, but Pecker tells me that here, he is nothing but a lapdog. He does whatever it is he’s told with a coy and quixotic grin and the hopes of hiding in the background. And now that he has been assigned to the front lines, he finds himself with an ankle snapped by stepping at the wrong angle over a shallow brook. I don’t think I could ever do that. Not that I haven’t thought about it. But knowing with certainty that my bone is about to crack in half seems a worse horror than considering all of the things that might happen. Technically, I wouldn’t even know it was happening. One moment I would be there wondering if I might die, and the next I would be dead. There is no anxiety in war. You don’t have the opportunity for it.
“They went back to the Cannery. Robinson wanted to report our location before we head out onto the beach, Ja-Ja thought we could use some more rations and meds before the shooting starts.” He remains transfixed on the fire. He rolls over a stick and a little tongue of flame licks the air for a moment and then vanishes in a blue twisting stream.
“What are we going to do until they come back?” I ask. I lean against a tree and take out my canteen.
“R and r, Stalls,” Peck answers.
“I’m going to take a nap.” Tens guffaws as though he has never taken one himself, as though he thinks naps are for those lacking discipline. He may think so, though seeing how he manages to get through life sitting on a log while everyone else does his heavy lifting, it’s hard to give much credit to his credos. I go into my tent, a small gray canvas flap draped over half a dozen sticks dug into the earth and supported down the center with a length of twine. I tie the front closed, pull off my jacket, and drape it over my backpack that I have sitting in the corner. I lay on the thermal blanket I have on the ground, ignoring the prick of the pine needles coming through it and the harshness of the rocks, fold my hands behind my head, and try to sleep. It doesn’t come easy. Not with the beach only twenty yards from here. I can hear Tens and Pecker outside talking about tits and whether they think the General’s veiled second-in-command is attractive under her hood, if she is his whore, his wife, or possibly the brains behind everything the General is doing out here. I think of my little sister, back home. It’s odd, but I never much realized that my sister had actually been a part of my life until I see the train doors close on her and see her and my mother disappear in a flurry of steam from the engine.
* * *
As I step up to the platform under a night sky dark and blue as an ocean bottom, all I can make out is the slightly darker form of my family standing in the sand a ways off. The little blob of my sister attaches itself fibrously, tenuously, to the tall and slender form of my weeping mother. I hear the hiccing of her stifled sobs sung in tune to the huffing of the train engine as it prepares to depart. A few paces aside from her is the lumbering hulk of my father, standing for once with his back erect homosapienly in his attempt to show off that yes, he is proud, he is unbearably proud of his son the soldier.
The conductor is a wretchedly fat old man with thinning hair and a slab of what looks like mayonnaise stuck to the corner of his mouth. He punches my ticket and then I find my seat next to the window at the back of the car. I stick my backpack beneath the polyvinyl cushioned booth and sling the airline bag with my uniform in it over the seat in front of me. My family is watching the train pull away; I can see the violet silhouettes fading into the bruised dusk. Behind them there is a hat-shaped silhouette sitting atop a low hill. It must be Preacher Benji, come to wish me safe trip. Most of the people in town think the old man has gone insane after being fired. I believe that he is just as sane as he’s always been, which isn’t to say that he’s always been all that sane. Just that the change after Reverend Wiley’s arrival had been greatly exaggerated. In any case, I know that he isn’t insane. Particularly when you take into consideration the misdirections of the new Reverend. As far as I’ve ever been able to tell, anyone who depends so much on the irrevocable recommendation of a priest must not be worth a single one of the words spoken in his honor. In this case, it is the General whose charitable entrepreneurship has been so highly regarded by the Reverend. And even if there might be a word of truth in all the sermons and speeches spat out every Sunday morning, what substance is there in a priest who speaks more about a military general than a God?
We turn behind the first dune and as far as I am concerned, I have left home forever. I had spent many days going out to those tracks, that lonely little station just a mile out from the edge of town where it’s visible as a little smudge on the horizon. I do it because from the earliest days of memory, what I want most is to see a train. Because the idea that the train represents has always fascinated me. It is a romantic idea; always going, never coming. You would think that anything that is going from someplace must also, by necessity, be coming to someplace. But not trains. From the very moment a train arrives, it is already waiting to disembark. I wanted a sense of that. I wanted to see it with my own eyes so that I could walk away from it, walk back home again, and take a romanticized, ideological piece of it back wit
h me. But for years, no train had ever come. There were times I would show up and find fresh footprints, a chaotic smattering of them in the sand, as though a cadre of commuters had ventured apart from that spot. Once I found a locked suitcase sitting upright just to the side of the tracks. I might wake in the middle of the night, with the wind sweeping a siren’s song into my room only to realize that it was the distant whistle of a train that sang to me. But never in my youth had I managed to actually catch a train with my own eyes. It became myth, folklore, an urban legend, in my own mind. Others would swear they had seen the train go by, but when I would prod them for more information, questions gleaned from the tomes I’d collected and all but memorized on locomotive history, they always grew vague and rambling. And then one day, just as I’d resigned myself to passively accepting the existence of trains because it simply made more sense for them to exist than to not exist, I saw one.
The first time I see the train I am still just a boy. I would often go out into the desert to play; with friends, alone, with my sister after she is born. I pretend that the rusty swath is the border beyond which monsters tread, and I am the captain charged with keeping them at bay. Back then, the desert isn’t quite as pervasive as it is now. The dunes are sparkled with oscillations of tall wheat and low grass, it is a meadowland with a dry base, a dry base that will soon suck down all the roots. On this particular day, my sister, a little girl of six and I a boy of eleven, become separated from each other. I call for her, I am calling for her, when I stumble out of the tall grass. Back then it is still grown past my head—or rather, I am still down below its crown. I stumble out onto the rock-scattered rise crested with those old tracks and I climb to the top so that I can get a better look at the desert and hopefully the displacement of grass as my sister passes through it. No sooner do I begin walking along the rotted wooden slats then, from the corner of my eye, there is the glint of sun off speeding steel. The bellow of the train’s horn throws me off my feet, and then I feel it collide with me. I feel the burn of my body as it is skinned to ribbons between the ground and the meshwork of wires and pipes of the train’s hard underbelly. I feel its steam frothing over me. I even feel the pulpy compression of the impact. Moments later I become conscious of the fact that I am screaming, that my sister is kneeling by my side shaking me and crying, and that I am in no pain except for what will become a soft bruise on the underside of my thigh where I’ve landed. She asks what happened. I tell her, “Did you see it? The train?” She tells me that there was no train, and then she pinches me and runs off into the grass again. It is then that I realize why I had never been able to see the trains before. These tracks, the ones that run along the outskirts of our town, only cater to ghost trains. Finally knowing that, it becomes for some reason somewhat easier for me to sight them. Since that day, I have seen three more. One from a distance, one only yards away, as I would perch myself at various locations—sometimes peering out through the dirtied windows of the station like a rogue, other times atop the neighboring dunes, perched like a sniper overlooking the desert in wait— and the third and final train I see, it is the one that I board to take me away to the coast.
But before this last time, I spend my nights obsessing over the prospect of ghost trains. What will it be like to grab onto the end of a car and pull myself in? Will it be empty? Full of the specters that had once ridden upon those now infertile lines? Or will it transport me back to the time when the train’s body was alive and forcing itself through the world with the power of bulls? Occasionally the more terrifying idea comes to me that boarding the ghost train will mean either my death, utter oblivion, or the eternal entrapment of my soul. It consumes me for years, when all I can think of is the abstract horror I felt when that train had picked my meager body up and then pulled it under. Until the day, standing on my front porch, when my father gives me the sudden revelation that had so long eluded me. If I want to board the train for myself, to touch it and not pass right through it, I will need some reason for it to be so, some place for it to take me. So I go to Reverend Wiley weeping falsely of lost hope and confusion and displacement, and when he suggests the reveries of General Anselmo’s Cannery, “Just through the woods, sitting atop a cliff that overlooks the sea, so close to home you’ll be able to see your mother just by squinting,” I wipe the tears away with my sleeve and eagerly sign the papers. It is mere days later when my uniform arrives pressed and folded in the plastic sheet it is still in now, that I realize how obsessed I had become with those train tracks, and how obstinately I had neglected everything that had previously mattered to me in my search for it.
As I sit here now, watching the rise of dunes pass by us from my window, I expect any moment to be swallowed up into Hell. For the train to suddenly descend, through the ground, through the sand and the hard earth, and into a pool of fire in which I will burn. Partly for boarding a damned train, and partly for betraying so much by giving myself up to the General. Nobody really knows what he is doing out here on the coast, only that so few return, so many die, and there doesn’t seem any real purpose of it at all. Despite my expectation that the ghosts of the world will pass through these walls and descend on me all at once, I fall asleep shortly after boarding, after the conductor waddles past me and into the next car.
I wake later at night from a nightmare I don’t remember but from which I am sweating. The lights have been dimmed. I glance out the window, but with the combination of the tinted Plexiglas, the glare of the lights, and the natural darkness of the night, I can no longer make anything out. There were only two other people in the car when I’d boarded, and they are still sitting where they had been. The only difference is that there is now a woman sitting in the seat just across from me. I try to sum her up without looking directly at her. She is tall, slim, with a petite frame and dark hair, short and bobbed about her round face. She has thick eyebrows, but they don’t seem out of place or unfeminine, small eyes that look the color of rust. Brown, but not quite brown. Her skin is dark, but I can tell that it was once quite pale and has only been tanned from the sun. She isn’t a particularly attractive woman, rather comely in fact, but it is in the bland stereotypicality of her features that she hides her real beauty. In my pomp and unpracticed covertness, she catches my eye before I can turn away from her face.
“Is something wrong?” she asks, dipping her head down to catch my averting eyes.
“No, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to stare.”
I turn to the window again and try to squint through the glare, embarrassed for having been caught even though I know there is no reason to be. A few minutes later, the train passes beneath a stone bridge, evidenced only by the pattern of glowing yellow reflectors pasted to the walls of the tunnel and by the echo of the engine.
“Where are you heading to?” she asks after we come out the other side.
“To the coast,” I tell her. “To General Anselmo’s Cannery. I’ve conscripted. There’s my uniform.” I nod my chin at the bag hanging on the seat next to me, and it seems too much like a braggart parent pointing his child out at a park full of them. She glances at it peremptorily, uninterested.
“Why would you do such a thing?” She must see the cock of my head because she clarifies herself, “Sign on at the Cannery? I’ve heard it’s dangerous out that way.”
“I’m not sure, really. Maybe I just needed something to do. I’ve always wanted to see the inside of this train,” I explain. I say it like a joke, but even hearing it, it doesn’t sound like a joke. It sounds like a poorly concocted rationalization for doing something I had no reason to do.
“Well you’ve seen it now, haven’t you?”
I take a long look around the train car. The walls are red velvet, supplanted occasionally with small squares of glass out of which a dim yellow light will fall at the press of a button. The seats are upholstered with an ugly green and gray plaid plastic that matches the carpet lain down in the center of the aisle.
“Yeah, I suppose I have.”<
br />
“So why don’t you turn back? Get off the train at the next stop, and go home?”
“What would be the point of that?” I ask. “I’ve come all this way.”
“With no goal but to see the inside of the train. You’ve already accomplished more than you set out to.”
I don’t know if it is her tone or the words she speaks, but she has a way of making me feel as though everything I say makes sense but for all the wrong reasons, as though I’m blind to the rationality of my own thoughts. I turn back to the window, unable to think of what to say to her.
“I’m sorry,” she continues. “I didn’t mean to estrange you. What are you going to be doing up there? At the coast? For General Anselmo?”
I look back at her. She is shuffling through her purse for something she either never finds or decides to forget after a minute of searching.
“I don’t know. I don’t even know what he’s doing up there.”
“I hear that’s pretty common. Not knowing what the General’s doing, I mean.”
I nod.
“So why the secrecy, do you think?” she asks me. I shrug, it seems a suitable response. Then she continues, “The way I see it, if something needs to be kept such a secret, it has to mean one of two things. One, that what’s being done is of great good, and it’s being kept secret against those who would rather not see it come to fruition. Or two, what’s being done is of great evil, and it’s being kept secret against those who would not stand for it.”
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