Two Trains Running

The violence adrenalized Madcat, washed away the residue of drunkenness. He felt amazingly clear-headed. Clearer than he had felt in a long while. Under ordinary circumstances, muddled with wine, he would have tossed the ax handle aside and set off to find Grace; but now he realized there was an important decision to be made. If he were to walk away, leaving things as they stood, he would likely have cause to regret it. F-Trooper, in his judgment, was too far gone to reason with and obviously not the sort to forgive and forget. The last thing Madcat wanted was to be happily sloshed in a jungle somewhere and have the Indian sneak up behind him. It was bound to happen sooner or later. He and F-Trooper traveled the same roads. This was something that had to be done. Purely a matter of self-defense.

He grabbed F-Trooper by the shirt, pulled him from beneath the car, straddled the body. He tightened his grip on the ax handle. The Indian’s head lolled to the side and he let out a guttering noise, half gargle, half snore. With his bruises and lumps and cuts, fresh blood stringing from the corner of his mouth, a brewery stink rising from his flesh, he was a thoroughly pitiable item. Madcat was terrified by the step he was about to take, in the sight of a judgmental God. A preemptive strike was called for, a threat to his security had to be neutralized. Though the logic of nations would carry no weight in a court of law, such was the basis of ethical action on the rails, where men carried their paltry kingdoms in their packs. He had no choice. But as he lifted the ax handle high, he was struck by a sudden recognition, less than a recollection yet sharper than an instance of déjà vu, and he seemed to remember, almost to see himself standing in this same position with a half moon flying overhead and at his feet a teenage boy sitting cross-legged in a patch of weeds. It was only a partial glimpse, as if a flashbulb had popped inside his skull, illuminating a confusion of shadows too complicated to allow certain identification; but the shock of it sent him staggering back. He lost his footing on the uneven ground and sat down hard, scraping his hands on the gravel. The idea that he might have committed a senseless murder during a blackout, and that muscle memory or a faulty circuit in his brain had rewired him to the moment…it roused no great revulsion in him, no shiver of moral dismay. But the knowledge that he must have sunk to some troglodyte level where conscience no longer even registered, where unrepentant viciousness was part of the human circuitry, that knocked away the last flimsy props of his self-respect.

F-Trooper groaned. Soon he would regain consciousness, but Madcat was too addled, too disheartened to act. All his clarity was evaporating. Then a compromise occurred to him. He crawled over to F-Trooper, wrangled off his belt, lashed his hands, and secured the free end to the grain car’s porch, immobilizing him. This done, Madcat fell back and lay gazing up at the sky. Whatever moon ruled, it was hidden behind cloud cover baked to a dusty orange by the reflected glare of Klamath Falls. He tried to deny what he’d imagined he had seen, telling himself that, with his headaches and the drinking, he was liable to see anything—hell, his brain was on the fritz most of the time, buzzing and clicking like F-Trooper’s busted radio. Even now he was having trouble stringing thoughts together. So many feelings and facts and memories were churning inside him, his head was like a room in which too many conversations were going on for him to make sense of any one, and a golden hole was opening in his vision, the way a hole gets burned into a piece of paper by bright sunlight directed through a magnifying glass, and he heard a hosanna shout so vast it might have been braided together out of every shout of joy and tribulation ever uttered, and he realized that all the sound and light causing his confusion was coming from a train.