The Sunset Route

by Carrot Quinn

  Intimacy has always felt like a temporary stopover place for me, in between long stretches of being alone. I never hold it too tightly when I have it, and I am never surprised when it goes away. My solitude is a cabin in the woods I come home to again and again. The same pictures on the walls, the same comfortable chair. A small barrel woodstove that puts out a paltry heat. The cabin rocks in the wind, and the winter’s cold seeps through the thin board walls. But it’s mine.

  I curl up as small as I can, willing myself invisible, as my train pulls deep into the heart of the yard. I’m wearing black Carhartts and a dark wool flannel shirt; nothing reflective, nothing white that makes its own light. There are dozens of tracks here, stretching away on either side; there are strings of cars everywhere; there are engines, crouched and spitting. There are workers in bright vests standing on both sides of the tracks; my car draws slowly past them but they do not look at me. I hear the shhhhhht of their radios, the crunch of their boots on the ballast. Overhead, a dozen massive spotlights thrum, banishing the shadows. And there, at a crossing, is the rail cop, parked behind the red-and-white-striped crossing arm in his unmarked SUV, inspecting each car as it passes. I hold my breath, the ding ding ding of the crossing arm overwhelming the air around me and then fading, and at last the heart of the yard is behind me.

  And then my train is crossing the Columbia River, water growing lighter, reflecting the sunrise. The train turns in a great arc along the north side of the river, headed east. There are no more people around. I’m safe now. I let out my breath. Dropping onto my belly, I wriggle out from under the axle and yank my pack out after me. Out on the flatcar, I unroll my foam sleeping pad and sit, watching the great sparkling river. The wind thrashes my hair and face, but I don’t mind. Piggybacks are windy—you’re on a flatcar, which by definition has no walls; there is no protection. But the view is incredible; you’re on a flatcar, being pulled across the surface of the earth.

  I unstuff my sleeping bag and the black sleeping bag liner I use as a cover and arrange my nest in the wind. I scrunch down into it and feel the warmth envelop me. One of the best things about riding trains, for me, is the certainty that, while on the train, I will sleep. For the past several years, insomnia has followed me like a stray dog. At night I lie awake in my bed for hours, my mind full of thoughts, and in the morning I am exhausted, the world gone strange. This continues for months at a time, until my head is full of mud and my nerves are ragged, all light too bright and all sound too loud, and I curl up inside myself, wishing that I could disappear completely, wishing for my own death, anything but this numb, hollow place between existence and despair. On the train, though, I always sleep. The cold nights, the turning stars, the wind—I can sleep for ten hours at a stretch, wake for the morning, and then sleep the afternoon away. Rattling through the open spaces of the North American continent, I am finally soothed. After a few days of sleep, I become a new person, and the world is infused with candy-colored possibility again. Now I scooch farther into my sleeping bag on the flatcar, a wave of pleasure overcoming me at the thought of the rest I’m about to get. I am only halfway hidden, while lying down, by the short lip of the flatcar, and yet I am one hundred percent invisible, because no one is expecting to see me here. I reach down into the pocket of my Carhartts for my earplugs and push them into my ears. I close my eyes, feel the gentle rocking of the train, and let the weariness claim me.

  * * *

  —

  I am woken by an urgent need to pee. Opening my eyes, I remember that I am on a flatcar headed east at sixty miles an hour, with nothing to protect me from the wind. Getting up to pee is easier said than done. I procrastinate for a while in my sleeping bag, sucking air through the small opening in the hood, and then finally I uncinch it and wriggle my way out. I lift my pack and place it carefully on my sleeping bag, so that my bed will not fly away, remembering the first time I rode a train and my sleeping bag was sucked through the hole in the floor, onto the tracks. I’ve learned a thing or two since then. My boots are tied to a metal rod that runs along the underside of the trailer, and I cross my fingers that they too will stay where they are. I crawl on my hands and knees to the far end of the flatcar, drop my pants, clutch the underside of the trailer, and pee. The flatcar is long enough that even if the wind changes directions, the pee will never reach my sleeping spot. After drawing up my Carhartts, I crawl back across the flatcar to my sleeping pad, the wind so strong in my face that it’s difficult to breathe. Then, sitting with my back to the wind, I pull food from my pack, spreading it on the steel floor of the flatcar in front of me. Almond butter, brown rice bread, a package of nori. A head of celery. I work my keychain can opener into a tin of beans and pull a spork from my pocket. Out beyond the train the dun-colored gorge rises up, and the bright Columbia River shines like metal.

  My plan was to ride the mail train all the way to Chicago, but a few hours later, in eastern Washington, I’ve had enough. The wind on this piggyback is too much; I can find another eastbound intermodal, with a rideable car that has more cover. “Fuck a piggyback,” I mutter, as I pack my things away. Then I sit, back against my pack, and wait for the train to side. I don’t know where it will, or when, but it has to eventually—every freight train must stop every eight hours to change crews, and usually it will stop another few times as well, to let other trains pass.

  In the blur of afternoon my train begins to slow, then ceases to rattle, and at last slides to a stop. I climb off. I am dizzy and disoriented from the wind; I stumble away from the tracks. A moment later the train pulls away, growing smaller until it’s gone completely. This is where I’ve ended up: a big open sky, brown dirt, the smell of sagebrush. Ahead a little ways is a highway overpass. And to my right, in a wedge of land next to the tracks, are a pasture and some tumbled buildings, everything hemmed in by a falling-down fence. There is the braying of chickens. In an enclosure, a young Latino man is roping a calf. A horse stands motionless in the shade. Directly next to me is a tree, its branches bending down to touch the grass. I drop to my knees and look under its branches. There is a space under there, shaded and cool, and I crawl in.

  In my secret space, I am happy. I roll out my sleeping pad and stretch onto it, to wait for another train. Dappled shade falls over me.

  I am asleep, I am awake. I am asleep, I am awake. My stomach lurches. The sun moves and my shade disappears; I cover my face with my hat and fidget in the dust. A train whistle blows in the distance and I sit up; the train does not stop. Then another train, going the other way. I shake my water jug; nothing. What the fuck am I doing? My morale plummets as the sun trolls the empty sky. I’ll die here, I think. I’ll either die here or I’ll reach enlightenment. I open my worn copy of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Annie’s at the rain-swollen river, which becomes a metaphor for many things. As I lie under this tree, curled in the dirt, Annie is my only friend. I feel like sobbing.

  A few early crickets go off behind me, like car alarms in a parking lot. I put down the book. The sun is getting low; the blue of the sky is deepening; I can see a few stars. I finger the soft leaves of the tree, which look like boats as seen from underwater. The chickens bray. A door opens and closes; I feel the heat coming off the earth. Clutching my water jug, I stumble upright.

  The embankment of the overpass leads to the road. After a time there is a city park, crowded with families barbecuing in the gathering dusk. Children gripping plastic cups of soda, their faces smeared with barbecue sauce, watch me pass. Their parents call them away, squinting at my tattoos in the half-light. Beneath a drinking fountain is a spigot and I stoop to fill my jug.

  Back at my nest beneath the tree, the crickets are out in full orchestra and a porch light glows yellow on the farm. There are sounds of dinner and visiting. I have just gotten settled again when a train made up of the cars that carry grain—called a grainer—thunders up, headed east. The train slows and then stills. It’s a long one, stretching in both
directions farther than I can see. I quickly pack my things and run along the side of it, looking for a rideable car. The sand is soft and I stumble; the smell of sagebrush is everywhere. The stars are turning on, one by one. I reach the end of the train without finding a rideable car—essentially any car with a floor in which one is also hidden from view—and turn, look at the blinking red light affixed to the last car. I stumble back the way I came, toward the front of the train. Maybe there is something rideable up there. When I am nearly abreast of my tree-nest, the train begins to move; I have missed my opportunity, or the train has no rideable cars. I was slow or it was the wrong train. Parallel possibilities stretching out into the vacant night.

  Some water from my jug consoles me, as does the softness of my nest beneath the tree. Movement keeps the ghosts at bay; my time in Portland allowed them to accumulate. North Carolina seemed like a fresh, clean place with sunshine, but instead I am here, next to these tracks in eastern Washington. Despair marches toward me across the open land; I can feel the reverberations of its many small feet. The crickets are deafening. I am going to die here, I think, again.

  1996

  Barbara is straddling me as I lie on my back in the hallway. Her long fingers are wrapped around my neck. She is strangling me. I came home hungry this afternoon, to an apartment without food. I tried to talk to Barbara but she couldn’t hear me, couldn’t see me. She was far away, in a place where I couldn’t reach her, a place in which she’s been spending more and more time. I screamed at her. Suddenly she leapt up and shoved me onto my back on the dirty carpet and now she is strangling me. Her hair is wild, the stink of her body like a fog. The claws of her fingers dig into the soft skin of my neck. It’s a curious sort of intimacy. Barbara wants to destroy me. She is a strong river current, a howling winter wind. I have to struggle against her in order to live. And yet, part of me thrills at her touch. At her acknowledgment of me.

  Time is slow on the carpet with her hands around my neck. Slow enough for quiet realizations to float across the surface of my mind. Little rafts that I can touch gently as they pass.

  Barbara is a frail woman, weak from the long work of her illness.

  I punch my mother in the face.

  Barbara pulls back, her mouth twisted in horror. Never in my life have I fought back. Now, in this dark afternoon in a hallway clouded with cigarette smoke, the balance of the world has shifted.

  I am fourteen years old, and my mother will never hurt me again.

  And neither, I decide in that moment, will anyone else.

  The next few weeks are a strange blur, a mass of time without shape. Barbara is getting sicker. I try to imagine the other Barbara, who existed in bright flashes when I was younger. Our current situation feels like a winter that has gone on so long that I can no longer recall the warmth of spring. I picture her reading or writing, the things she used to say in the moments that she was lucid. Now, I come and go from the apartment and she doesn’t notice. She doesn’t notice anything. She crouches on the floor of her bedroom in front of the muttering radio, mute. There is not even the loose scaffolding of delusions, anymore, on which to hang the fabric of her world. Gone is the urgency to scrawl prophecies on scraps of paper. She simply…exists. She inhales and exhales, and her body sways a bit. Her bones and skin and heart are all intact. Plastic soda cups surround her. She knocks the ashes from her cigarettes into them. Discarded tea bags litter the carpet like the heads of wilted flowers. Now and then she brings her shaking hand to her mouth and draws slowly from the cigarette clutched in her thin, yellow fingers. Often she forgets the cigarette and it burns down to the filter, dropping a slug of ash onto the floor. Her eyes are blank. Her lips move, but no sound comes out.

  At night I lie on the floor in my empty bedroom, curled against the wall in my dirty comforter, and cry. I feel Barbara’s fear, her despair, her solitude, and I cry. I long for her, for the mother I once had in that murky time before my memory begins. I long for her high, warbling voice. I wonder if, trapped somewhere inside her, is the nineteen-year-old girl who married my father and ran away to Alaska. I lie on my bedroom floor watching the snow stick against the damp windowpane, and I cry. What did that young woman who was my mother do to deserve this horror movie in which she now lives? I don’t have a way to make sense of it; there isn’t a room inside me that is large enough to hold it all. Mostly it washes over me like an ocean wave, and I inhale lungfuls of brackish water.

  With Barbara gone, there is no one to fill out the paperwork for our welfare. We lose the last of our benefits, the money that pays our rent, and in February I come home to an eviction notice taped to our apartment door.

  “I just, I just had no idea,” says Sharon. We’re in the living room of Laura’s house after school. I’m in an armchair, staring at my lap, trying to disappear. “I had no idea how bad it was.” Sharon reaches for Brenda’s hand. Brenda is looking at me with wet, drowning eyes. I drop my head again, hear a rushing in my ears.

  * * *

  —

  I’ve been staying with Laura for a week. When I told her about my situation, I made her promise that she wouldn’t tell her moms. She did, though; she told them that Barbara and I were going to be homeless, and asked them if they would adopt me. Sharon, the social worker, then looked up my file with Child Protective Services.

  “I had no idea,” she says again. Brenda wipes her eyes.

  “Once Sharon told me about your situation this morning, we actually did look into what it would mean to adopt you,” says Brenda. “But then we learned that you have grandparents, who have your brother. It makes the most sense for you to go to them.”

  “We called your grandparents,” continues Sharon. She smiles warmly at me. “They agreed to take you. We bought you a plane ticket to Colorado. You’ll go next week.”

  The room tips. Laura is my one friend. The life I have here is the only one that I know.

  That night, back at our apartment, I pack a few items of clothing, my journals, and a photo album I’ve managed to hold on to over the years, through every one of our moves. The album is covered in green cloth with white flowers, and the pages are yellow with age. There are photos of Barbara as a child, as well as a few pictures of me and Jordan. I open the album and touch a photo of me sitting on Santa’s lap, wearing a dress and pinafore that Barbara had sewn, back when she could still sew. Here’s Jordan in a cable-knit sweater, sitting for picture day in second grade. Barbara, doing a backflip on the trampoline in the bright desert sun as a teenager. Barbara standing against a Camaro with her three sisters, all four of them with long, straight hair. Sitting on the carpeted floor of my bedroom, I study these images, trying to imagine what her family is like.

  Barbara hates her parents with the same fervor she directs at almost everyone. I imagine this is largely a result of her paranoia, which she can’t help. But who are my grandparents, really? What will it be like to live with them, in the desert? Once, when I was eight and Jordan was ten, we were homeless and desperate, having exhausted all of the friends’ couches that we could stay on, and our grandparents offered to buy us plane tickets to come visit in Colorado, and Barbara said yes. For a few months, Jordan and I stayed with these grandparents in their brick house in the desert, among acres of alfalfa and hay. I remember Honey Nut Cheerios and a yellow ceramic cookie jar that was always full of lemon wafer cookies. I remember my grandmother gently brushing my hair, dressing me in a clean denim jumper with a matching pink turtleneck. She gave me a gray-and-pink ten-speed bicycle, and summer storms would roil over the desert, flooding the streets. What will it be like, to live with them now?

  I zip up my backpack and stand in the doorway to Barbara’s room, looking in at her. What will happen to her? Where will she go? It’s February, and the snow falls endlessly. Will she have to sleep on the street? How will she stay alive? A wave of dizziness overcomes me and I remember that I haven’t eaten today, and that L
aura’s moms are expecting me back at their place in time for dinner. “Goodbye, Mom,” I whisper, but she doesn’t look up from the radio. I walk out of the dim apartment and into the bright hallway of the building, closing the door softly behind me.

  2006

  I wake in the night to another train. A grainer, again, sitting still in the moonlight. My cold hands pressed to my face bring me back to where I am. A random siding in eastern Washington, under a tree next to the tracks. I roll up my sleeping pad and strap it to the top of my pack, brush the dirt off my copy of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and stash it away. The ballast crunches as I walk along the train. There are no rideable cars. And then, at the rear, there is the hissing and spitting of engines—slave units! “Slave units” are unmanned engines affixed to the end of a string. For extra power, like battery packs. For Montana, I think. For the mountains.

  Cautiously I approach the units. They are rumbling and ticking, lit as if alive. I climb up the steep steel steps of the rearmost engine and try the door at the nose. It’s locked. On the side of the unit is another small door. It’s open. The moon has clouded over, and just now a little rain begins to fall. I duck through the short door and pull my pack through after me. And then I stand and marvel at what I have found.

  Dark leather captain’s chairs face the narrow windshield. There is a dash covered in blue-lit controls. All around me are switches and dials, panels and doors. The CB radio squawks, and I jump. Am I safe back here? Yes, at least for a little while, I tell myself. It’s a good mile from here to the front of the train. No way is anyone coming back here now, at some random siding in the rain.

  I drop my pack on the floor and check the mini fridge. Cold water in bottles. In the bathroom I flush the toilet, marveling as the water disappears. Where does it go? I pace the small room, anxious for the train to leave. At last it lurches forward, and the high desert slides away beyond the rainy window glass. My sleeping bag comforts me on the floor and I fall asleep, safe in the womb of the beast.