“My cousin had one of those. He got hit by a semi in Tampa. Ain’t no use saving miles if you end up a pancake.”
I had to look up to see them. He could see down into my car, at my lap.
“What you need all those cell phones for?”
“Talking.”
“Hey, you know Captain Grady? Jim Grady? In Metro?”
“No.”
I had a feeling it had been a trick question. He turned away and talked in low tones to the man beside him. He turned back, with the same unreadable eyes.
“How about Lieutenant Trethewey? You know her?”
“Nope.”
“You some big talker.”
I shrugged and said nothing. It was his play.
“What are you doing here?” he said, not a demand, more curiosity, the music swelling and ebbing, and over the sound of those strings came the high-pitched whistle of a freight locomotive entering or leaving the yard. Opportunity approaching or ending. I did not think I moved my eyes, even changed my attitude. But something must have changed in me enough for the man a few feet away to smile, showing perfect polished teeth. Somehow I’d answered him.
“Oh, you one of them.”
I knew what he meant.
“You want to leave! What you got to trade?” he said.
“I didn’t say I was leaving.”
He snorted. “There’s only a few trains going out every day. They unload and there’s empty cars, see? But you can’t get a ride unless you know how. This our neighborhood. We know how. You want to look at the sky, sit, think, cogitate, masturbate? Or you want out?”
He sat back. He looked like a gang kid, but half the time, he talked like something else. Another car pulled to the curb, across the street. I saw a man and his wife and a couple of kids inside. Somehow that driver had heard that if he wanted to try to leave D.C. on a freight train, he must come here. The man got out of the car, and started walking toward us, changed his mind, and turned around. He looked pale and uncertain, middle aged and out of place, and the faces behind him were pressed to windows. There were suitcases tied to his roof. The family reeked of desperation. Was the man actually stupid enough to think he could carry so many possessions away?
I said, “How do I know you’d really get me out?”
The kid in the car nodded, appreciating the question. “See all these people driving around? They here ’cause someone they know got out already, and told them this is the place. You people our advertising! You and me conversate, and then make a deal and later you tell your friends it worked!”
“You’re not scared of getting sick?”
A shrug. “Chances the same if I stay away or come. What’s the difference, Sam?”
“Why me?”
“My cousin’s car was the same as yours.”
“Uh-huh. What if I want to get to a certain place, not just out of D.C.? What if I have a specific destination?”
“Tell the guys in the yard, and they put the right people in the right cars. Those trains hit Baltimore; cars get divided up, some go to Chicago, some go north, see?”
I considered. His answers came smooth and fast. Too fast? “You set this system up pretty quick,” I said.
“Who says we just set it up? This was all in place, Sam. It’s a highway. Now we use the highway for something new.”
“Why are you calling me Sam?”
“You Uncle Sam, aren’t you? You one of these government chicken shits on the run. Got left behind when the big boys left. Leave your family? What can you pay?”
He’s saying that for a long time they’ve been moving drugs or guns or illegals on these trains. He’s saying they… whoever they are… adapted an existing system to new cargo, if he’s telling the truth.
I’d take the chance. I offered cash and he laughed. Are you kidding? I offered the admiral’s watch, but that was not enough. Maybe nothing was. Maybe he just wanted to find out what I had. Maybe there was no escape through the train yard and the whole thing was a trick.
I told the man that the Glock stayed with me, and he seemed to accept that.
“I want the car,” he said.
“The car?”
“What the fuck you need it for? You leaving!”
He was right.
“Hey! It really get fifty miles a gallon?” he asked.
“Even more on the highway.”
“Hmph! You follow us now. Keep your little gun, but leave the phones and we’ll take the cash, too. The CD work?”
“Yes.”
“Looks like the cassette player is fucked up, though. I like a good sound system,” the kid said, then his window rolled up. I followed them off the main street, and into an alley, then through a lot for wrecked autos, through a fenced-in parking lot, and up to two Army Humvees parked outside a steel chain-link fence barring the expanse of rail yard. Inside, weeds poked through fresh snow. I saw cranes and power lines and idle tank cars and one lean barking brown and white mutt.
A trap!
The Escalade stopped. But it wasn’t a trap. The kid talked with the soldiers. The kid pressed something into the hand of a surgically masked officer, and the officer waved our two-car convoy through.
I bumped through a gap in the fence, past soldiers who were splitting up money, and into the yard, where the train I’d been hoping to catch was rolling off. The freight yard was wide in the middle, filled with tracks and idle cars, then the tracks narrowed into two or three ways out. The departing train was two hundred yards away, going faster every minute; a parade of disappearing tank cars and V-shaped coal cars and rectangular box cars. Through an open door in a departing boxcar, lots of sorry-looking, bundled-up riders stared out. I spotted more gang members near the loading docks, using forklifts to move stolen crates. They loaded the crates onto tow trucks. The black market was thriving in this particular spot.
My favorite quote about military matters comes from Napoleon. It’s “Sure he’s a good field marshal, but is he lucky?” For the moment my luck held. A second train had arrived from West Virginia, bringing coal for Washington’s furnaces and power plants. A new line of refugees, most wearing surgical masks, kept as far apart from each other as possible as we were directed onto freight cars while soldiers watched, a train crew watched, and gang members stood by. All of them clearly paid off.
If ever the world ends, there will be an opportunity in it for commerce. For fire extinguisher manufacturers and gun makers and those who bought stock in insurance companies to sell short. We take pride in those who survive disaster. But cockroaches are good at survival, too.
The train lurched into movement. I sat on the steel floor of a coal car, the open sky above. The temperature was dropping. Long after the car should have been full, more people had climbed in. We were a Washington version of the refugee-filled trains chugging north from Central America, peasants clinging to roofs, undercarriages, sloping tops of cylindrical tank cars.
I looked around, trying to place my fellow travelers. Students trying to get home? Husbands stranded on business trips, trying to reunite with wives? Parents evacuating kids away from an epicenter of outbreak?
Now we all lurched north, in a moving pit filled with strangers, some grateful, others irritated or frightened. Some had envisioned more comfortable quarters, and not considered that riders packed beside them might be sick.
I’d handed over more than thirty thousand dollars, if you figure in jewelry and the Prius. Multiply that by forty, and as much as a million dollars in cash, carry goods, and property had paid for the riders in just one open, creaking car.
A ragged cheer went up when the man hanging up over the side announced in a loud voice that we’d cleared the yard, and a second cheer rose when we passed the line of Maryland National Guard whose vehicles marked the border, and who must have also been paid off.