Whichever summer it was, she’d moved in a few years before the town started to grow in earnest, before so much surrounding acreage fell to saws and bulldozers, to be replaced by strip malls and new houses. Austin remembered it as a place of boredom, but a hard ten-minute bicycle ride in any direction could put them into less tamed territory, where there was at least the possibility of adventure.
Gabrielle knew how to swim; would dive into the river from any cliff that he would. She never flinched at scaling the huge-timbered framework of railroad trestles while trains went rumbling directly overhead. She feared no snakes.
But if there was anyplace that defined their partnership, it was the old train tunnel in the hills past the west side of town. It predated the Civil War but hadn’t been used for decades. The tracks had been gone nearly as long, rails and ties removed like stitches out of the rocky channel leading into the tunnel’s mouth, where it plunged through the next half-mile of hillside. No one passing by on the new tracks thirty yards over would have a clue it was even there. The kudzu and vines and trees between were dense enough to screen it from view. The tunnel was all but forgotten by the town, a discovery waiting fresh for each new generation of young local explorers and adult transients seeking shelter along the tracks.
The place invoked an irresistible dread. No degree of familiarity could do away with its delicious threat, less tunnel now than primordial cave exhaling cold earthy breath and housing a thin perpetual layer of mist. No light shone from its other end because years before the center had been walled up to thwart bikers after one had wrecked and died alone in the middle.
Austin and Gabrielle claimed it for their very own that first summer. It was a place for pacts, for secrets too vital to share anywhere less secure. They’d walk in until the last of the daylight faded on their backs, then keep going. Hearts pounding harder than either would admit to, and skin crawling each time it was hit with a chilly splat of water, gravid with minerals and dripping from the roof. They never lit candles until they’d reached the center wall. The flames threw alien shadows across the spray-painted boasts of earlier comers — dead now, must be, eaten by bears and it served them right.
Even today Austin would catch himself opting to recall things differently than they’d really been. Not the what so much as the why. Some kids never want to come home because they don’t have a care in the world; others, just the opposite. He still found it tempting to exchange one for the other.
He always told Gabrielle that the bruises across the backs of his hands were from the kitchen cabinets, shutting before he got clear of the doors. Made him out a klutz but it was a good lie; the door edges would cause long thin marks same as dowel rods. Gabrielle seemed to suspect otherwise after a few weeks but they never went near the truth — his father, an insistent man when it came to memorizing Bible verses. Just one generation out of the hills. Nobody would speak about it but evidently Austin’s grandfather had lived and died a snake-handler.
He saved that revelation for the tunnel, feeling giddiness and guilt on the way out. Walking toward daylight now, the entrance was so far ahead that all they could make out was the color of vegetation beyond. The archway, seen through a quarter-mile of mist, turned it into a luminescent green egg, something from which a dragon might hatch. Draw closer and this illusion fell apart, only to be replaced by a new one. Now they were the hatchlings, about to emerge into a new world.
On the day it all began, they could hear a train, on the tracks running parallel to this forgotten quarter.
“Let’s hop it,” Austin said, because there was still a lot of walking before they got back to where they’d hidden their bikes, and because neither of them had hopped a train before.
They broke into a run, out of the tunnel and up the path back to the tracks, ferns slapping at arms and legs. They paced the train as it chugged along, stumbling over cinders and the squared ends of the ties.
He still had a clear image of Gabrielle, first to reach the ladder clinging at the front of a boxcar. She might have been the taller one that summer, longer limbed, with a gazelle’s grace. Her hand grasped the steel rung and she pulled, and so did the train; she was swept up and off her feet as cleanly as if scooped by a vast hand. Austin poured on the speed when he saw her carried farther ahead, Gabrielle’s face radiant with the thrill, and she shouted something he couldn’t hear over the clashing wheels.
Next boxcar for sure.
It began to roll past him, and he saw another ladder, lunged for it. Closed one hand on the rung, then the other, same as doing a chin-up in gym class. His shoetips skimmed over cinders as he dangled, until his palm hit grease on the way up.
He always thought there’d been a silent scream on Gabrielle’s face as he fell and got yanked toward those steel wheels, never entirely convinced he hadn’t added that detail later.
But really, what else would she have done — laughed?
*
Austin let her leave the shack and scuff outside in the dust awhile. Better she come to terms with this in her own time.
Kids cope better than adults with witnessing the impossible because their valves are still open on what can and cannot be. The impossible may become instead the improbable, the rare. But it had been a long time since they were kids. Long enough for Gabrielle to have rewritten everything as dreams and runaway imagination.
He watched from the window as she found the water pump out back and levered up a bucketful to rinse her face. Most of the makeup came away and that was a good thing. Her breezy coif wilted around her face and that helped too. She was almost looking like someone he actually remembered, fresh, with wide-spaced eyes and a small nose that used to freckle easily.
Austin rejoined her on the narrow excuse for a porch, in the meager shade of its overhang. Came up behind her as she sat on the edge refusing to look at him in the doorway.
“I spent a lot of years telling myself that you weren’t just weird. That you were a lunatic,” she said to the desert.
“I’m not saying you were wrong.”
Gabrielle hung her head, then with a sigh patted the planking beside her. He sat.
“Back inside, he … it … that’s not just some man,” she said, clarifying for herself. “Not a yogi, or fakir, levitating. That’s not what I saw.”
“It’s male. But a man? No.”
“And not an … an angel. You said that yourself. Right?”
“Not as you and I used to think we understood the term.”
She let that digest. “You’re telling me there’s some basis for calling it — him — one anyway?”
“Let’s say you did. You wouldn’t be the first to make that mistake.”
“Here in this part of Utah, you mean?”
Austin patted her arm. Thinking so small. “Or anywhere else over the last ten thousand years. Maybe more.”
“Well. There’s some perspective.” She lowered her head into her hands and laughed into them. “Once you get past the levitation he didn’t look very … powerful, impressive, omnipotent, I guess those are the words I’m looking for.”
“Hottest part of the day, it tends to make them sluggish. Or this one it does.”
It took her awhile longer, but Austin knew she’d get around to it eventually, and did, piecing her composure back together and asking what she was doing here. Why he’d called. Why bring her all this way. Why she’d agreed to it, even.
That he had a being floating in an oven-hot room and that it looked human but wasn’t, that he claimed its pedigree reached beyond history … all well and good and properly astounding, even if only half true.
But what use was it to her, ultimately? Her jaw might drop today, but tomorrow there would still be bills to pay, an employer to satisfy, family to whom she was still accountable. Were these things now disposable while she moved to the desert and worshipped something in a torpor that allowed itself to be jabbed in the side with a stick?