Two Trains Running

This was no old-fashioned steam-powered locomotive, but a Streamliner, one of those trains named Zephyr or Coronado, an emblem of 1950s Futurism with double-decker lounge cars and a Silver Streak-style engine, only this particular engine was gold with a green windshield, so the effect was of a great sleek golden beast wearing emerald shades. It was speeding straight at him, radiating the sort of holy sunrays that artists usually depict emanating from Buddhas and Krishnas and Christs, and it was taking up every inch of space between the strings of cars. He braced for the impact, squeezing his eyes shut. Yet somehow it missed him and roared on past—he caught sight of Grace’s dreadlocks whipping out the engineer’s window. He thought he was safe once the last car had gone by, but the train’s speed was such that the draft sucked him up like a scrap of paper and he went bouncing along behind it, banging down onto the rails and flipping up, skipping over the ties. It hurt like hellfire. His legs snapped, bones splintered and poked out his flesh. But he had no regrets. He’d known Grace was trouble from the get-go, and maybe that was why he had hooked up with her, maybe he’d been looking for that kind of trouble—things had not been going well, and the best he could have hoped for was a few more bad years, years of drunkenness and headaches and blackouts, before he was knifed or shot or died of life’s own poison. This way, at least, he’d gotten to feel some things he’d forgotten how to feel, because though Grace was, at heart, no-account, she knew how to make it sweet, this farewell ride, this little going away party with the lowlife angel of death.

The train receded down a golden tunnel, dragging with it the bloody fragments of his imaginary corpse, and the headache that followed left Madcat curled up in pain beside the rails, unmindful of everything around him. The pain was so intense, it formed a barrier between the moment and all that had gone before, and when at last it abated, it took him a while to notice that the grain car to which he had lashed F-Trooper was missing—the entire string of cars was missing—and longer yet to comprehend that the grain car had been part of the train put together earlier in the evening, and now, with F-Trooper attached, was gone off on its run. He stared at the patch of gravel where the Indian had fallen, numbed by the terrible character of the death. Moving awkwardly, stiffly, he got to his feet. He found he was still holding the ax handle and let it fall. It wasn’t his fault, he told himself. It was the world. This world of mystical steel and cheap wine and lonesome fuck-ups in which even an act of mercy, and that’s what it had been, no matter how fuzzily motivated it seemed at the time…even an act of mercy could result in blood. But of course it was his fault. He couldn’t escape what he had done, nor could he escape what he might have done in Spokane. The boneyard reality of it all bred a weakness in his limbs; he thought he could feel some feathery, insubstantial thing fluttering behind his brow. He started trudging back toward the thickets, following the remaining string of cars, stopping now and then to lean against them.

Parked about fifty feet from the end of the string was a police cruiser, startlingly white and defined against the bleak topography of black dirt and curving tracks. The sight brought Madcat up short. His instinct was to run, but he had no energy left. The longer he stood there, the more alluring became the prospect of ceding authority over his life to the competency of jailers and the consolation of lawyers, to a controlled environment with hot meals and daytime TV and card games, even if in the end it led to the injection. The police car fascinated him. It was empty and appeared to be talking to itself in angry squawks, as if it had developed the power of human speech and was cursing the desolation amidst which it had been abandoned. When Grace called to him, before he spotted her coming across the yard, he half-believed the car had succeeded in mimicking her voice.

“You crazy?” she said. “The cops is ever’where! They ’rested your friend, but I hid our stuff out so far from the fire, they never seen me.” She tugged at his arm. “C’mon! We gotta get goin’!”

“Think maybe it was me killed your boyfriend?” he asked.

Dumfounded, she peered at him through the raggedy curtain of her dreads. “What?”

“Back in Spokane. Was it me?” He turned his back to her, held his arm up as if brandishing a club. “This look like what you saw?”

Incredulity showed in her face. “Naw, it was that Indian fella…I’m almos’ positive.”

“It coulda been me,” he said. “Coulda been me in one of my blackouts.”

“It was the Indian.” She shot him a dubious look. “F-Troop or whatever. Why you goin’ on this way?”