by Carrot Quinn
Unlike what we see in old movies, it’s not a good idea to get on or off a moving train. That’s called “catching on the fly,” and it’s dangerous as hell. Train riders in the twenties did it so that they could catch the train once it was past the yard—back then, the rail cops carried batons and would beat you if they found you, so the yards were scary places to get on a train. Getting on and off on the fly is dangerous because the momentum of the train pulls you down toward the tracks, so if you slip and fall, that’s where you’ll end up. Nowadays, the worst that can happen if you get caught in a trainyard is a trespassing ticket or a night in jail, which is not worth losing your legs to avoid, so the safe thing to do is wait for the train to stop before you get on or off, which you can do without much difficulty as long as you know the crew-change stops. Some people still catch on the fly, of course, but they do it for the thrill, and because they’re idiots.
I am terrified of catching on the fly. I’ve been told that if I absolutely must, as in this situation, where I’m in danger of being left behind, I should pay attention to the three lug nuts on the wheels of the train—if I can make out each individual nut, the train is still going slowly enough for me to get on safely. I glance at the lug nuts as I jog down the string—still in the safe zone. Then I see our car—yellow, like I thought—and I grab the ladder and pull myself up, struggling against gravity. The cold metal of the ladder rung bites into my hands and I heave myself into the car like a fish flopping into a boat. The inside of the car is in shadow, and through the huge holes in the floor I can see moonlight glinting on the tracks. I wriggle back under the truck and sit on the gritty steel, clutching my pack, heart hammering against my ribs. At least I’m warm now, from the physical exertion and the adrenaline. At least there is that. I feel the trees overhead, all around; I watch them drag slowly past in the moonlight, and my breathing begins to calm. The clean air smells of sharp pinesap. I remember the stillness and quiet of the stopped train sitting in the forest, a quiet so thick it made a rushing in my ears. The train picks up speed, and the wind pulls the heat from me. I wrap the tarp around my body again. I am cold and awake in a magical world, struggling for my survival. I am cold and awake and filled with awe. I feel so alive this strange long night. In the city, I often carry fear and shame like a lead weight; I curl up inside myself like a sprout inside a seed. Out here, I am huge. Expansive. Pieces of me unfurl in all directions, into the open wilderness, up toward the sky. The stillness holds me.
But the cold also reminds me of another time. I haven’t been cold like this since I was a child, in Alaska. Being out here, exposed and scared, a little thirsty and a little hungry, takes me back to those days.
I clutch the tarp around me and sit on the vibrating floor of the car, watching the stars. The steady thrumming of the tracks becomes a song that melds with the rhythm of my heart.
1988
I am six years old and the phone is ringing. “Don’t pick it up,” says Barbara, my mother. She takes a long drag on her Pall Mall cigarette and hisses the words a second time. We are in Anchorage, Alaska, in our small, dim apartment. The blinds are drawn against the outside world and I am sitting on the carpet, picking cheese from an empty pizza box. “Don’t you ever pick up the phone,” my mother says again.
“I know,” I say. “I know.”
When I was a baby, we lived in the Chugach Mountains outside of town, in a half-built house. My father worked for the Alaska Railroad and my mother stayed home, singing Dolly Parton songs off-key as she painted the empty rooms. Your beauty is beyond compare, with flaming locks of auburn hair, with ivory skin and eyes of emerald green. My brother screamed in the other room with colic but, Barbara later told me, I was always quiet in my bassinet.
“You just watched me,” she says to me in the dark apartment. “With your big eyes. You watched everything I did.” She lifts her cigarette from the pickle-jar-lid ashtray and inhales again. Her hand is shaking. Barbara is beautiful, a trembling willow tree with shining black hair. She met my father, Bill, in Grand Junction, the dusty town in western Colorado where she was raised. She was nineteen then, living with her parents and five siblings in a brick house that sat on several acres of alfalfa and hay. Her father was a mechanic; her brothers would be mechanics too. Before that, the men in her family had been cowboys, going back five generations in the high desert. Bill wore thick aviator glasses and had a wild, unkempt beard. He told her that he was studying the Bible so that he could live to be three hundred years old, the way that Moses had. He wanted to go to Alaska “before the Russians came.” They were married at the courthouse, and she was pregnant soon after.
The house in the Chugach Mountains didn’t have siding when I was born, and there were empty holes where the windows should’ve been. When my parents had first arrived in Alaska, they’d bought a piece of land in a bog that you had to cross a frozen river to reach. A few years later, they were on the mountainside. They moved in fall, the soft early edge of winter, and the poplar trees were flame yellow. The nights began to freeze, and the heat from the woodstove escaped from the empty window frames. Eventually, there wasn’t much wood left on the woodpile, and the only food in the house was a box of saltines that Barbara had been using to feed the squirrels.
“That’s when the Virgin Mary first spoke to me,” says Barbara, returning her cigarette to the pickle jar lid. The cherry of the cigarette flares, and a tendril of smoke reaches up toward the ceiling and dissolves into the haze there. The blinds in our apartment are yellow from smoke. My clothes reek of it. All winter I cough, spitting green phlegm into the bathroom sinks at school.
“I always felt close to the Virgin Mary, but that was the first time I heard her voice,” Barbara says, rubbing her palms together. They make a sound like paper rustling. I pick the last of the cheese from the pizza box and lick the grease from my fingers. “I’d stopped sleeping,” she continues. “My dreams bled into my waking hours, my waking hours blurring into one long, endless day, a day that grew darker and more brittle by the minute. The Virgin Mary, though, really helped me through that difficult time. I began to hear her voice as clearly as I heard my own. Sometimes I would see her, standing in the shadows of the room. She gave me instructions. Special instructions. Secret information I would have no way of knowing otherwise. I just had to listen and try to obey.”
Barbara shakes another cigarette from the pack of Pall Malls and lights it off the dying ember of the last. “We never did finish that house,” she says.
The divorce, when it came, was drawn out and terrible. I have few memories of it. I do remember the foster home where I lived for two years, where it was warm and clean, and there were regular meals. Although I have no memory of the separation, I learned later that my brother, Jordan, was in a different foster home. Barbara was eventually awarded custody of us—our father, Bill, had occasional supervised visits, and then he faded completely, leaving only photographs, and then Barbara tore up the photographs and those were gone too. I don’t know why Bill left, or where he went. Eventually it became as though he had never existed at all.
I close the pizza box and open it again, trying to make more pizza appear. I am wearing the same clothes I’ve worn for a week, and I didn’t go to school today. I’m not sure where our next meal will come from.
The phone rings again. Is it social services calling? Barbara paces the room, her cigarette twitching in her fingers. Barbara spends most of each day pacing. I can hear her at night, the creak of the floor in her room as she crosses the small space again and again. My teacher has been asking questions: Why are Jordan and I so dirty? Why don’t we have any food for lunch? Why are we always falling asleep at our desks? And so Barbara has started keeping us home. She’ll keep us home until she finds another school to enroll us in, one where no one knows us. The new school will be a farther walk in the dark winter morning, probably, but we’ll manage it—we walk to school alone already, we can do it som
ewhere else. I like the school where we’ve been for the past six months, though. I like the black and white tile of the big, open hallway and the carpeted floor of my classroom. I’ve been stealing food from the other kids’ lunches—I can smell the lunch boxes on their metal cart in the coat closet, the turkey sandwiches and Ho Hos wrapped in foil. I’ve been sneaking into the coat closet and eating the other kids’ food when no one is watching. Maybe the teacher found out, and that’s why she was asking questions.
Jordan emerges from our room and I follow him around the apartment, parroting his movements as he opens and closes the cupboards. Jordan is eight, and he’s clever and resourceful—good at finding food. Before the pizza came a few days ago, I was hungry—my stomach burning and clawing. In the back of one of the cupboards, we found a bag of sugar and a raw potato. We sat on the kitchen floor and ate the potato, as well as spoonfuls of the sugar. Now, Jordan is looking in the cupboards again, but they are even emptier than they were a few days ago. I peek at Barbara in the living room, talking quietly to herself as she paces. Sometimes she is a bright whirlwind, scrubbing the filth from the kitchen counters and entering the apartment in a gust of cold air with paper sacks full of groceries. She’ll pick up housekeeping gigs for cash and talk rapidly about how we are going to dig ourselves out of the hole we’re in, about how everything is going to change. She is lovely during these periods—her eyes flash, she showers and brushes her long black hair until it shines. She’ll put on a clean blouse and some mascara. The apartment sparkles with her laughter. She doesn’t eat—she doesn’t need to, and there is too much to do besides! Jordan and I are buoyed during these times, transported like two small boats on the river of her joy. After a few weeks, though, her ideas begin to take on a ragged edge. Her thoughts become darker and more fantastical, until they unravel and even we can’t make sense of them, no matter how hard we try. And then, one morning, Barbara will be on the couch, face pressed into the cushions, unmoving. If you look carefully, you can see the blanket rising and falling just a little with her breaths. She’ll stay on the couch this way for weeks, until her long hair is full of mats that will have to be cut out with the orange pair of sewing scissors that lives in the kitchen drawer.
Welfare pays the rent in our low-income apartment complex in Anchorage on a quiet street next to the forest, at the base of the mountains, and food stamps should help buy our food—but Barbara is always forgetting to keep up with the paperwork for the food stamps and I can’t remember the last time we had them.
I sit on the floor and poke at the detritus there, the things that have been ground into the carpet since we moved into this apartment. Barbara shakes her pack of cigarettes. Empty. The windows are shut tight against the winter air. The muscles in my legs are cramping, and I cry.
“Shut up!” yells Barbara. In four large strides she is across the living room. She slaps me and whap! my head hits the wall. I am wailing now, my world exploding in pain.
“Let’s go to our room,” says Jordan, pulling my hand. “Come on.” Up a flight of stairs, a bare mattress rests on the floor. The carpet is littered with plastic McDonald’s toys, headless Barbies, and Taco Bell wrappers. I curl on the mattress and Jordan pushes a stained comforter over me. I cry into the mattress until I am all worn out and the leg cramps are far away. Jordan sits on the edge of the mattress and uses a screwdriver to work apart the pieces of a remote-control car that he found in the dumpster of our apartment building. The baseboard heaters tick-tick-tick. Condensation runs down the window glass, and outside, snow is falling. I walk to the window and press my face to it. The drifting snowflakes are heavy and white in the light from the streetlamp. They heap themselves onto the boughs of the spruce trees. I hear the door across the hall close as Barbara shuts herself in her room. She’ll be in there for a long time. Maybe forever.
1989
Barbara wrenches open the heavy wooden door of the church and we duck inside, out of the biting wind. I stamp snow from my boots and pull the gloves from my numb hands. Outside is gunmetal gray with bitter cold, but here is warmth and beams of light from the stained glass in the high stone walls. Outside is the howling storm, but here is such peace that the air barely moves, and dust motes dance languidly in the light. The church smells of frankincense and rose petals and the sulfur of matches and this innocent, unmolested dust. Barbara mutters to herself and twists her hands together. Her long black hair is loose in the light from the stained glass and her eyes are glazed and her body is gaunt beneath her long winter coat. She walks toward the front of the church and looks up at Jesus, hanging gory on the cross, and then ducks into a small room off to the side of the pulpit. I climb the steps to the stage below Jesus. I lift the cloth on the small square table there, searching for something secret, candy or maybe a quarter that somebody dropped. I look at the saints in the stained glass, surrounded by animals and birds and colored light.
In the small room, I find Barbara kneeling on the carpet in front of a metal rack of candles in red glass. She is speaking in tongues while rocking back and forth. “Shagga-habba-shagga-badda.” It is a language only God can understand.
I find an unlit candle and strike a match. You’re supposed to put money in a metal box before you light a candle, but I don’t have any money. My lit candle is pretty in its red glass, and I watch the little yellow flame dance for a while. I wonder if, after she is finished here, Barbara will take me to the church gift shop across the street and buy me a new rosary. A wooden one or one made of turquoise plastic. Of course I know she probably won’t buy me one, but at least, if we go there, I can look as much as I want. My favorite rosary in the shop is the one made of silver with red crystal beads—it’s far too much money for me to ever own. I feel faint, so I leave the small room and sit in one of the pews. I haven’t eaten yet today.
I pretend to be praying. I dig through the pamphlets and songbooks. When the dizzy spell passes, I walk around the church in a circle, trying all of the locked doors. Barbara emerges from the small room with the candles and buttons the toggles on her long pink coat. She pulls me out the door, back into the storm. She walks fast, and I struggle to keep from slipping on the ice. At the station where we can catch the city bus back to our apartment, there is a little shop that sells hot dogs and souvenirs, and I fill my pockets with ketchup packets. I surreptitiously squeeze these into my mouth on the bus as we bump along the icy streets. Barbara’s face is still shining, her eyes fixed on something far away. I look out the window at the dirty piles of slush—it is the end of winter, and everything is tired.
Barbara has begun to tell Jordan and me that she doesn’t just speak to the Virgin Mary, she is the Virgin Mary, reincarnated. The Virgin Mary has been reincarnated into a woman who chain-smokes and drinks Mountain Dew from plastic gas station cups. I believe Barbara because this world with my mother is the only one I know. What is the Virgin Mary? What is God? The incense, the wooden pews, the speaking in tongues. My mother’s visions. She is strong beyond belief—she can open pickle jars and carry gallons of milk and buy us Jolly Ranchers from the corner store. She is stronger than the sun. And she is so sure. Why would she lie?
I look at Barbara’s face, her eyes resting on something beyond this world. I imagine the Virgin Mary with her pale blue eyes and sandaled feet. The complicated drapery of her clothing and her plump, open palms. I wonder if Barbara is the Virgin Mary right now. If she is floating on a cloud of God’s grace high above the city, where no pain can touch her.
2003
In the morning my tongue is swollen in my mouth. Fuck, seriously, why didn’t I bring more water? Sami is thirsty as well, and together we watch the sun rise over the pine forest on the dry side of the Cascade Mountains from our narrow metal ledges on the train, feel the sun’s light on our ruddy cheeks. I uncurl my stiff body, try to stretch a little, wipe the salt from my eyes. I may have slept a bit after all, or I simply forgot whole hours of the night. I never did reach the u
nits at the front of the train, although I tried two more times after the first attempt, each time turning around and racing back to our car when I heard the hiss of the brakes releasing. As the morning lengthens, the wind becomes warm and dry, but each time the train stops and we hop out to pee or stretch our legs, we are still in the mountains, still in the forest, still far from the desert. I pick my nose as I watch the gold sky fade to blue. My boogers are black—being on a train means breathing diesel exhaust, so much heavy diesel exhaust. Is that why I feel loopy this morning? Or is it the nonstop thundering and rhythmic shaking of the train, which lulls me into a sort of hypnosis? I’m hungry, but I’m more thirsty than hungry, and the thought of putting food into my dry, sandy mouth makes me nauseated. The jar of peanut butter I pull from my pack is unappealing, and I put it away again. I’ve never been thirsty like this, and I feel alarmed. But also high, and delirious from the long night waiting for morning to come. My heart soars on the horizon with the sun.