The Sunset Route

by Carrot Quinn

  Every night before I go to sleep…

  Finch turns the volume way up and slides across the hardwood floor of her bare bedroom, her arms in the air.

  “Free money free money free money free money!” she’s punching the air with her fists. The smell of roses wafts in the open window. I sit on the front step, laughing. Finch’s copy of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is there, resting on the warm wood. I flip through the book, stop at a paragraph about the negative shape of the air created by a standing longleaf pine.

  * * *

  —

  Soon it’s summer. We ride our bikes to the Willamette River and crawl through the brambles on its banks, pick blackberries until our hands are purple and bloodied. Finch tells me that she grew up in a small town in rural Utah. Her parents are Mormon, and when she came out to them at age fourteen they locked her out of the house. She lived on the streets for a while, where she discovered heroin. Then she moved to Portland to get away from those friends, those habits. The Willamette is flat and slow, the Hawthorne Bridge vibrating overhead with passing cars. We eat so many blackberries we feel ill.

  * * *

  —

  In September, my best friend, Willow, arrives in Portland, to make good on her promise to teach me to ride the Highline, the fastest train route from Seattle to Chicago. Willow’s black hair is wild and she’s wearing a skirt made from the hide of a roadkill deer. She smells acidic, like coffee, and she talks quickly, waving her hands around as she narrates the kaleidoscopes of information inside her head. She’s been living in the old-growth forest outside Eugene, on a wooden platform in a Douglas fir tree that is hundreds of feet tall. That particular bit of forest was up for sale, and she and other forest defender friends moved into the tree to protect it from being cut down, taking shifts sleeping in its canopy for a week at a time. She hauled her food up in one bucket and lowered her shit in another. Wind rocked her sleeping platform, rainstorms rattled the tarps, and she threw stones to keep the black bears away.

  “Living up in the canopy changes you,” she says, as we sit in the sun on the porch, drawing the word SEATTLE in thick black marker on a piece of cardboard. “I’ve never felt so strongly the vibrations of a huge, living being. Of an entire forest.” She tells me about the seedlings that sprout in the canopy of an old-growth forest, the topsoil that gathers on the uppermost branches. The insects and animals that live their whole lives up there. She tells me about the web of mycelium under the forest floor, the mat of fungal threads that connects the roots of every tree. The way a tree will use the fungus to send nutrients to another tree, or to communicate distress.

  “Everything’s connected,” she says. “The forest, the earth—it’s all one living organism. We’re part of it too.” She fills in the S in SEATTLE with careful, tidy strokes. “I can never go back to the way I saw things before.”

  In the end, they couldn’t save the forest. The Feds used a cherry picker to pluck Willow from the tree. The stand of old growth was cut.

  “My heart is broken now,” says Willow. “I’m riding the train back to North Carolina.”

  Willow is really good at riding freight trains. She’s brilliant with mileage and directions and maps and data and she never falls asleep, like I do when I’m supposed to be watching for a crew change—the brief stop in town when one has a chance to get off the train. Willow requires very little food and water, also, and she can fold all her gear just so, so that it fits in a daypack, and when she’s in a town she passes for a regular person.

  The Highline is the route that runs east from Seattle through Idaho, Montana, and North Dakota, all the way to Chicago, which is where I’ll turn around and return to Portland, and Willow will continue south. I convince Finch to come with us to Chicago, even though she’s never ridden a train before. I like Finch, and I don’t want to be away from her. I’m not sure why I’m even going on this trip, except that the ghosts are following me again and movement is the thing that keeps me just out of their reach. If Finch comes with me on the train, maybe I can prolong this nice thing we have. Maybe I can keep her close to me, if only for a little while longer. Finch gifts me her battered copy of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek so that we can read it on our journey, and I pack it carefully in my backpack, among the warm layers—it’s fall, and Montana will be cold—the cans of beans, the hard corn tortillas, and the bottle of hot sauce.

  * * *

  —

  Willow, Finch, and I are outside Seattle, in a sprawling industrial neighborhood; in the distance we can see the lighted tower of the Starbucks headquarters, and we use it like a beacon as we make our way to the trainyard. None of us have cellphones or any sort of electronics with which to navigate—we have only paper railroad maps and written directions, passed along from friends. Our packs are strapped with empty gallon jugs and we search for a water spigot, finally finding one on the outside of a darkened building. We’ll need to bring all our water with us onto the train, enough to make it to Chicago. There’s a Krispy Kreme donut shop and we rip open the heavy plastic bags mounded in the dumpster and collect the glimmering donuts that spill out. At last we reach the edge of the rumbling, ticking trainyard, and we crouch in the shadows against a low stone wall, eating donuts as the moon rises. We eat until we feel sick and then we throw the remaining donuts at a string of railcars that are sitting silent, watch the little circles of cake break against the grimy steel.

  A train sits on what we think is the correct track, and we climb onto one of the cars. The front of our train is out of sight; we don’t know if they’ve hooked up the engines yet, or how many there will be. Whether this train will ever move, and when, is a mystery. We sleep a little, leaning against our packs, and stir when the train next to us lurches and begins to creep forward. We jump down onto the ballast and climb onto the moving train instead. A moving train is always better than a still train if you’re actually trying to get somewhere. Our new train picks up speed, lumbers east out of Seattle, and dawn begins to break. Out come our bedrolls; we stuff in our earplugs against the sound of screaming steel, and sleep.

  Willow is shaking me awake. It’s dark. But it’s daytime—why is it dark?

  “The tunnel!” says Willow. “We’re in the tunnel!” I sit up. The exhaust is so thick I can hardly see the car behind us. Finch is wetting a bandana and tying it over her mouth. I do the same. East of Seattle, I’d always heard, is a forty-five-minute tunnel, cut through the center of the mountain. The tunnel fills with diesel exhaust while you’re being pulled through it. The exhaust is low-key poison. If the train were to stop moving, we would likely die.

  Every so often there is a light bolted into the wall of the tunnel. We count these as they pass our car. One, two, three. Please don’t stop. Please don’t stop. I feel loopy, sort of sleepy. We don’t speak, just sit in the car with the wet bandanas over our mouths, watching each other’s frightened eyes. Every few minutes Willow leans over the edge of the car, to see what there is ahead. She does this carefully—leaning out of a train in a tunnel is dangerous. A metal pole can behead you. There is only darkness in the distance, and Willow sinks back down into our car. I close my eyes.

  “Light!” shouts Finch. “There’s light!”

  The circle of gold is small, and then it opens like a fist unfurling. The thundering of our train changes pitch and we’re launched into the open air, the world impossibly sharp and clear. We’re being pulled on a narrow track along the mountainside, crisp green trees on one side and bottomless blue on the other, the wind like food. I’m breathing the sweetest oxygen I’ve ever known.

  Glacier National Park, Montana, is cold—the forest dark and empty, the Flathead Lake milky blue with silt. We huddle in our sleeping bags as the train thunders east through the mountains, watch the stars rotate in the sky above us. The whole of me expands, out into the mountains, up into the stars. I let the rocking train hypnotize me until I’m empty inside.

 
The train slows to a crawl when we reach Whitefish. The storefronts glow yellow, the snow sparkles on the ground. The train picks up speed on the edge of town, and civilization recedes in the distance. In the morning the mountains are behind us and the plains are warm and golden—our train stops in Havre for inspection and we sprawl, languid, in the hot sun that pools in our car. Finch kisses me. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is smudged already from our hands, which are black with diesel grease. I read aloud from the chapter called “Intricacy,” about red blood cells streaming in the capillaries of a goldfish. There is no narrative structure—the book is organized by seasons and I am working my way slowly through the wheel of the year. The train is motionless, the day silent save for the beeping of work trucks as they drive up and down the string. I stick my nose over the lip of the car and see that across the street is a convenience store.

  “Hot dogs!” whispers Willow.

  As soon as the trucks are out of sight, I clamber over the edge of the car and onto the ballast. I jog to the store and then back, my arms full of hot dogs and cans of beans and grapefruit. Willow is waving at me, shouting something I can’t hear.

  “The brakes have already released!” she says, laughing, when I reach the ladder on our car. The car jerks a little as the slack in the string is pulled taut, and I yank myself aboard, dropping my armload of bounty onto our unrolled sleeping bags.

  We’re out of Havre, rattling through an endless sea of cornfields, sitting in the warm wind in our underwear playing Hot Dice. We’re keeping score in Sharpie on the chipped paint of the car. Willow falls asleep on the floor, her dirty hands clasped over her stomach, a blue “Lake Tahoe” visor over her eyes. Finch and I sit on the porch of the car and watch the corn turn into North Dakota, the breeze almost as good as a bath.

  The sun sets and the papery grass is an ocean with hills for waves. The moon rises. When a single track splits into two, a train will sometimes pull off onto this second track, or “side”—in order to let higher-priority trains pass or for reasons unknown—and presently our train does this, slowing and then stopping across from a field where a man stands next to his tractor, watching the last of the red bleed from the sky. I don’t know if this man can see us, watching him watch the west; he stands there until the light is gone. The air turns crisp and we move, creep into our sleeping bags, and fall asleep.

  In the morning we’re in an Andrew Wyeth painting. The land is beautiful and iridescent, brown the way grass can be when it catches the light and waves. The trees are low like they’re waiting for thunder; round yellow leaves drift slowly to the ground. I take a shit on a piece of cardboard in the car behind ours as the train rattles through Fargo. The train picks up speed and I fling the cardboard over the side, watching it collide with another track.

  The ceiling drops in Minnesota; the sky is clotted with clouds. Vegetation crowds the stream banks and wetlands appear. Our train hurtles toward Minneapolis. Willow has a bottle of habanero hot sauce, and to entertain ourselves we try to see how much we can pour on the cans of refried beans we’re eating. The three of us are so tired of eating beans, thick masses of salty brown. Like cat food, but for hobos.

  The train slows as evening falls. We’re entering a thunderstorm. We roll for ten minutes and then stop, roll for another ten minutes and stop. Lightning shears the sky; currents of water pour into our car. Willow crawls into her bivy sack, which is waterproof. Finch and I don’t have bivy sacks, so we stuff all our things into the giant plastic bag I swiped from behind the Home Depot in Seattle, put on our rain gear, and sit on the porch, which is the metal lip of the car just big enough for our butts, and watch the storm. To the north is clear sky and stars; to the south is an impenetrable darkness, illuminated by sporadic flashes of light. Eventually the rain lets up, but the lightning keeps on for hours. Our train creeps through road crossings and Finch and I are pinned in the headlights of the waiting cars, sitting on the porch in our dark rain gear, hoods over our heads, as thunder rattles the air.

  In the morning we wake in the trainyard in Minneapolis. The air is humid and warm and flocks of Canada geese pass over us. A worker appears above the edge of our car and stares down at us; we can tell that he doesn’t want to get us in trouble, but he does want us to get off his train. We collect our things and climb from the car, crossing the empty road next to the tracks, stumbling a little on our sea legs. We hitchhike to Chicago, arrive exhausted, and buy a ticket for the commuter train, which will take us to the outskirts of the city. At one a.m. we exit the commuter train and wander through the fog to a large, old cemetery. Next to us are the tracks, with trains rattling by in the dark. We find a hole in the fence and cross over the tracks to a flat, forested area, where we fall asleep in the drizzle against a huge fallen log. In the morning there are Italian men in the woods around us, gathering mushrooms in plastic grocery sacks. We walk back to the Metra stop and there is a woman with a collie; she looks at us and says, “Don’t tell me you slept in those woods last night!” So we say, “Okay, we won’t.”

  “I know what to do now,” says Willow. At the copy shop in town, we buy an X-Acto knife and make some color copies; a little careful cutting and pasting and some lamination later, and we each have a fake Greyhound Ameripass. Willow will use hers to get the rest of the way to North Carolina; Finch’s and mine will take us back to Portland. On the bus, I lay my head on Finch’s shoulder and I sleep or don’t sleep, the air stale and close. I stare out the window at the dull highway, eat french fries at layovers, and dream of North Dakota, the wild place that was everywhere and nowhere all at once, the way the wind would beat me so hard I could barely catch my breath.

  1995

  There’s a pounding on the door that wakes me from sleep. I lie stiff in my bed, listening for my mother, for her bedroom door to open. I wait for her shuffling footsteps in the hall. The pounding ceases, and there is silence. Then it begins again. I pull myself out of bed, feeling confused. Thirteen years old, in the same clothes I wore to school yesterday. The bedroom light is on, the way I like to sleep. The hallway is dark, and when I reach the front door, I find Barbara there, leaning against the wall. The pounding on the other side is rattling the door.

  “Open it!” I shout. Barbara stares at me, then unhooks the chain and cracks the door. Cold air rushes in. I can smell snow. The clean, outside world.

  Two police officers are standing in the dim concrete space in front of our apartment. They look at Barbara, and at me. The radios on their hips crackle.

  It’s Jordan. He’s gotten himself in trouble again. They’ve taken him to McLaughlin, the juvenile detention center.

  Barbara closes the door slowly after the cops leave. She walks down the dark hallway into her bedroom and shuts that door too. I follow her and listen outside the door. The radio plays softly. The door gives to my touch and there she is, crouched on the carpet, digging through a pickle jar lid of cigarette butts, looking for the one that has some tobacco left. There is the ammonia smell of her unwashed body. She’s wearing the same green blouse and dark jeans that she’s had on for weeks. The clothes hang on her loosely, as though there are wire hangers where her flesh and bones should be. Her thick black hair has begun to gray at the temples.

  “What are we going to do?” I say. Barbara looks up at me and her eyes flash like embers, and then go dark again. She says nothing.

  “What are we going to do?” I say again, louder. “Are we going to get Jordan out of juvie?”

  She turns up the volume on the old radio, and classic rock thunders into the room.

  “WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO?” I scream at her, as loud as I can. Barbara leaps up and slams the door in my face. I jump back just before it catches my fingers. I slide down the wall to the floor and wrap my arms around my knees.

  In the morning our apartment is changed. The air feels more still. Jordan disappears a lot, but he always comes back. This time, I know, is different. In his room,
I lie on his bed, look out the window at the dark parking lot and the snowy forest beyond. I pull the Hustler magazines from under his mattress and flip through them. On the carpet next to his bed is a hunk of wood he’s been whittling into the shape of a blue whale. His folded pocketknife rests on the carpet beside it. I pick up the whale. Anchorage sits on a spit of land where the mountains meet the sea, and in the gunmetal-colored water live all kinds of whales. The long tides and sucking mud beaches are a part of me, and I know they’re a part of Jordan too. I wonder how they’ll treat him in juvie. I’ve heard some stories. I wonder if he’s scared, or lonely, or sad. The thought of him trapped in prison makes me feel as though I myself am suffocating. My own brother, and there isn’t anything I can do to rescue him! I think of the time, when we were little, when Jordan wouldn’t stop screaming, and Barbara tied him to the bed with a twisted sheet and extinguished her cigarettes on his chest. Then she ordered a pizza and ate it sitting on the carpet in front of him. She offered me a slice and I devoured it greedily. I start crying, my tears falling onto the pages of Hustler. I shouldn’t have eaten that pizza. Jordan still has the scars of those cigarettes on his chest.

  I remember the times Jordan set my Barbie dolls on fire. When he sat on me and tickled me, even though he knew I wasn’t really laughing because I was happy, that I hated it. I remember how he showed me which dumpsters had food. He taught me to make a flamethrower from a can of hairspray and a lighter, and we burned black spots into the carpet. He showed me the forts he and his friends built in the woods, so that I could hide out there too, when I wanted.

  Jordan isn’t just my brother. He is also my witness. My confidant. The only other one who knows.