Two Trains Running

“Where you suggest we move to? Ain’t nothin’ out there ’cept more jungle, and you can’t live on the plain ’cause the beardsleys is all over.”

“Have you looked?” I asked. “You hunted around for a better place?”

“Much as I’m goin’ to look.” SLC set down his soup, sucked on his teeth. “You wanta look, you go on ahead.”

“Maybe I will.” I heaved myself up and this time I managed to make it to my feet.

“Well, that’s fine. But I recommend you stay where you are for now. Goin’ out in the passageways is a damn sight more dangerous.”

The room did a half spin, and I leaned against the wall.

“Got yourself a concussion…oh yeah!” SLC said brightly. “Best thing for you is to sit on back down. I’ll heat you some soup.”

In my dazed condition, the prospect of sitting down for a bowl of hot soup was appealing for the moment, but the next minute, the thought of slurping tomato soup while thousands of poisonous pancakes fluttered about killing dogs and people seemed like the peak of insanity. Still unsteady, I started for the door.

“Hang on, boy!” SLC set his bowl on the floor and stood—it took him a couple of tries before he made it upright. “If you ain’t got sense enough to stay put, I best go with you. Way you’re staggerin’, you ain’t gon’ get very far by yourself.”

I’m not sure what was on SLC’s mind. He might have been so senile, he’d forgotten the reason he had for keeping to his room. Or maybe he was so old, he figured he wasn’t risking all that much. He latched onto my elbow and we started off. We passed a couple of bodies, their faces branded with empurpled blazes where they had been touched by fritters, but luck was with us and we didn’t meet up with any ourselves. Once I thought I saw some floating off from us a ways on a branch two levels down, but I was seeing lots of floating things and I couldn’t be sure if any of them were real. As for SLC, he hobbled along, muttering to himself, acting no different than he usually did, except every so often he would glance up at me and flash a snaggletoothed grin.

When we pushed through the curtained door into Annie’s room, I thought she was going to throw us back out. She yelled at me, said how she thought I was dead, and what was I…Crazy? Didn’t I know any better than to go sniffing around after something that would kill me? She cried, she yelled some more, called me names. Finally I put my arm around her, agreed with everything she said for about ten or fifteen minutes, and she calmed down enough to sit with me on the mattress.

“I thought you was dead,” she said. “You didn’t come back, and I just knew they’d got you.”

“I shouldn’t have gone,” I told her. “It was dumb.”

“It was way more’n dumb! It was…” She couldn’t find the words and so I chimed in, saying, “It was irresponsible.”

“You make it sound like you was late for work or somethin’. You coulda been killed.” She looked gloomily down at my hand, which was resting on the blanket next to hers, as if she saw in it a bad sign she’d not noticed before. “I thought you’d changed.”

“Hey!” said SLC. He had settled in the corner and was sitting with his knees drawn up, looking worried. “Ain’t y’all got anything to eat in here?”

In the morning the fritters were gone. They took sixty-three souls with them, about a quarter of Yonder’s population. We burned the bodies on the stones where usually the laundry was stretched to dry, and scattered the ashes in the river. I went to Josiah Tobin’s wake, which consisted of eight old hobos sitting in his room, chewing jungleberries, and reminiscing about Josiah, telling lies about what a great rider he was and how he’d foxed the bulls in Yakima that one time, and didn’t he fry up the best hobo hash you’d ever tried? I felt like a young heathen among them. I wanted to say that stories about how Josiah had pissed his life away didn’t tell nothing of the man, and that to my mind he was the smartest son of a bitch I’d ever met on the rails, and the thing we should study on was not the mess he’d made of himself, but what he could have been if he’d given life more than half-a-try. But when it came my turn to speak, I told a story about drinking out in a desert squat east of Phoenix with him and Ragbone Sally. I guess I figured saying what I had thought wouldn’t mean much to anyone except Josiah.