Two Trains Running

“Naw, I ’spect you gon’ wanna hear this.” She hooked three of the scarlet snakes with her fingers, dragged them back from her face. “Me and Carter…this boy I met. We was smoking a joint—” she gestured toward the yard “—over in there somewheres. I had to go pee and I was comin’ back…I’s ’bout to crawl ’tween two cars to get to where Carter was settin’. And that’s when I seen this shadow rise up behind him. This man.” She made the words “this man” into a question. “He had a club or somethin’,” she went on. “He didn’t say a word, he just stood there a second like he’s thinkin’ things over, then he hit Carter in the head. Carter went flat on his face and he hit him again. He kept on hittin’ him even though there wasn’t no point to it. I could tell Carter was dead.” She stared into the embers. “I don’t reckon he seen me. I sure didn’t see him—he had his back turned the whole time I’s watching.” She looked pleadingly at Madcat. “I didn’t know where to turn. I mus’ been an hour wanderin’ round out there ’fore I run into you.”

The scattery way she talked out the story made him think she didn’t believe it—or maybe putting it into words had rendered it unbelievable. It rang true enough to him. “You better get on home,” he told her. He struggled to his feet, back-pocketed the pint.

“Home?” She gave a shaky-sounding laugh. “I’m a long way from home, mister.”

He shouldered his pack, settled the straps. She came to one knee, alarmed, and asked what he was doing. “Long as I can catch out on a freight train,” he said, “cops ain’t gon’ find me hanging ’round no fucking crime scene.” He headed out into the yard, trying to shake off his buzz, and she scrambled after him. “But you didn’t do nothin’!” she said. “You got nothin’ to worry ’bout!”

“You think that, then you don’t know shit about cops.” He picked up his pace.

“Kin I come?”

She was standing with knees together, hands clasped, head tipped to one side, the pose of a little girl left behind by older kids. Framed by the cathedral-like sweep of the bridge, she looked—with her strange punky hair—the picture of innocence freshly corrupted. He had the sense she knew the impression she was making.

“I never rode the trains before. Carter, he was gonna teach me…” She brought her clasped hands up to her chest. “I won’t be no burden, I swear. If you want I kin be with you. Y’know?” Meeting his gaze, she seemed to back away from commitment. “For a while, anyways,” she said. “If you want.”

He wasn’t sure he was interested in what she was offering—he’d been a long while without, almost three years, and most of his memories of women had to do with the trouble they landed you in and not the sweetness they brought.

“All right,” he said, after giving the notion a couple of turns. “But don’t go thinking you can count on me. All that’s happening here is we’re taking a train ride together. I’m nobody you want to be counting on.”

Often after one of his spells, and sometimes during them, Madcat would dream about trains—not the Union Pacific freights he was used to, but supernatural beings, mile-long metal snakes coiling around the switchbacks through a snow-peaked mountain range that went on forever, the only alive things in all that noble wilderness. Usually the dreams had a certain sinister quality, and this one started out no differently, with an old-fashioned black steel locomotive powered by an enormous human heart instead of a furnace, but then it changed in character, a variance of degree alone, because there was always an element of the sinister involved, and he thought that Grace—this, the girl told him, was her name, and she was from Ohio and had been living in squats, hanging out, surviving, but she was sick of the life and was heading to California to hook up with a rich uncle…He thought that Grace, then, must be responsible for this change. The locomotive, which was twice normal size, spat scraps of fire from its stack and howled like the ghost of a giant, but as they sped deeper into the night the howling gentled down into music, thunderous at first but growing increasingly easy on the ears, and streams of pink and aqua light mixed with the ebony smoke pluming from the stack, and the scraps of fire turned into glowing ankhs and crescents and all manner of Cabalistic sign, a torrent of bright arcana flowing back along the body of the train, enveloping it, so that the car where he and Grace were sheltering was transformed into a radiant space with the ambiance of a weird night club—like a retro neon sign come to life—where dancing silhouettes followed the elaborate suggestions of artfully dissonant strings and saxophones that sprayed clusters of mathematical symbols from their bells, and he and Grace were dancing too, gliding off to join the other featureless, faceless couples, buoyed up among syncopated martini glasses, tuxedo-wearing stick figures, old dream-blue drifts of jazz and smoke-ring Saturns…