The train climbed up into the mountains and the track went through tunnels and curved back on itself. On those big bends you could see the whole of Denver in lights all the way up to Boulder and down to Castle Rock. We had just finished our beer when the ticket lady came up to us. An Afro stood eight inches from her short frame and thick neck. Long lacquered nails — painted with the stars and stripes — were pointing at us.
“Where you sitting?” she asked.
“Here,” John said, not trying to be funny.
She took it the wrong way.
“Where are you sitting on the train?” she asked a little more sharply.
“We just got on, we’re not sitting anywhere.”
“Let me see your tickets,” she said, glaring at John.
“We don’t have any tickets,” John said.
“The train was just pulling out and they told us we could buy tickets on board, we’re tourists,” I said quickly and gave her a big smile.
“Who told you that?” she asked me.
“Uh, the man at the station,” I said.
“What man?”
“I don’t know, just the man, he was in a uniform, I don’t know,” I said placatingly.
“Well, I don’t know why he told you that because no one is allowed on the train without a ticket, this isn’t a commuter train, this is a transcontinental Amtrak, you’re going to have to get off at the next stop and buy a ticket at the station and then get back on again.”
“Ok,” I said.
“Ok,” John said.
“The next stop is Fraser, Colorado, get off there and buy your ticket,” the woman said curtly.
“Ok,” we both said again, smiling.
She wandered off down the car.
“Fucking bitch,” John muttered. “Bet she could have sold us a ticket if she’d wanted.”
“Aye, but it won’t make any difference,” I said. “We’ll just get it at the station.”
“Yes,” John agreed.
“No difference,” I said again, and we drank our beers in agreement. Two people who couldn’t have been more wrong, since getting off the train at Fraser, Colorado, was to make all the difference in the world. Our fates weren’t taking us to California, to the Golden Gate Park, to Chinatown, to the airport and a ten-hour flight to Europe. No, the center of gravity in our story, the one dragging us like a black hole, was the one who had cast the first stone, the one who had killed Victoria Patawasti. We were going back to Denver, but we didn’t know it yet.
When Vishnu came to the Earth as a midget, he called himself Vamana. He stopped the demon Bali from destroying the planet. He tricked Bali with his diminutive size and sent him to the Underworld, telling him that appearances can be deceiving and that you should always watch out for the little guy.
I thought of this as John and I stared angrily at the midget. We weren’t upset at him. It wasn’t his fault that the ticket office had been closed, that a sign said “Buy rail tickets at the Continental Divide Saloon,” that the saloon was a quarter of a mile into the town of Fraser, that the Amtrak train was late leaving Denver and had to make up time by departing Fraser earlier than planned, that we had heard the air horn too late, and that the train had left without us.
The next westbound train was coming this time tomorrow but there was a train going to Chicago in half an hour, the man selling the tickets had explained. John and I had decided Chicago would do just fine without, of course, considering that the Chicago train would have to go back through Denver.
The midget had gotten off the train at Fraser too, but he hadn’t gone to the ticket office. Instead, he’d gone to a bar for a while and now he was standing a little down the platform from us. It made me a bit nervous.
Especially since the Chicago train was late.
It hadn’t come in half an hour. It hadn’t come in an hour.
It hadn’t come by midnight.
When you called up Amtrak’s toll-free number, an undead voice told you that the train was just arriving in Fraser. The voice had been claiming this for several hours….
Birds. The air. The moon so bright you could see vapor trails. The cold. Snow on the mountains circling the little half-assed ski town. The steel train tracks going nineteenth-century straight into the mountain.
John waxing philosophicaclass="underline"
“Waiting’s good for you. You notice things. You slow time down into its components. Too often we put our consciousness on cruise control. You autopilot your way through the day, the week, your existence in this world….”
Pop psychology from that motorcycle book, I imagined, but I wasn’t going to rise to the bait. It was very cold. You wouldn’t have thought it was the summer. Much chillier than those mountains behind Boulder.
I looked up the long platform. The midget was smoking. We had no smokes, I considered going up and asking him for one to keep out the cold.
“Look at all those stars,” John said.
He was annoying me and I purposely did not look up.
“I should have done astronomy. I should have gone to Oxford or Cambridge. I didn’t have the A levels. You had, Alex, you should have gone. But I suppose you needed to be near your ma.”
I gave him a look that he didn’t see.
“Terrible business, your ma. I was very close to her too, you know. You know, I agreed with their decision. Your da and ma,” John said.
Never a good time for this topic and especially not when John had bloody killed someone and I’d been shot at and the cops were after us and I hadn’t had a hit of heroin after a long, stressful day that still was not coming to a fucking end.
“What decision was that?” I said coldly.
“You know, not to do the chemotherapy,” John said almost breezily. I could have punched the bastard.
“You supported their embrace of death,” I said incredulously.
“Now, Alex, that’s not fair. Homeopathy could have worked, those alternative treatments are not nonsense, there’s more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy and all that. You’re awful hard on your dad, Alex. It was your ma’s decision too.”
John had no idea how close he was to having the shit beaten out of him. I was seething. This, he well knew, was a subject we did not ever talk about. This and my resignation from the cops, but more so this. Was he trying to provoke me into a fight to forget what had happened? Or was he just being stupid? My blood was boiling, and after all, this was all his fault. I bit my tongue and walked over to the midget.
Maybe, technically, he wasn’t a midget. If he’d been a woman, you would have said she was petite. He stood about five feet tall, with a beard, leather jacket, jeans, Denver Nuggets cap. Forties, I would have guessed.
“Couldn’t bum a smoke, could I?” I said.
“Certainly,” he said and handed over a pack of Marlboro Lights. I took one and lit mine from his.
“I don’t normally smoke, but it’s freezing,” I explained.
“Yeah, we’re nine thousand feet up, it makes a difference,” he said.
“Train’s late,” I said, drawing in the tobacco gratefully.
“Yeah, the California Zephyr’s late. The California Zephyr’s always late. It goes at forty miles an hour and stops anytime the engineer wants to let people off.”
“Really?”
“Uh-huh. Did you know that in Greek zephyr means ‘fast wind’? Amtrak employs a satirist to name its trains.”
I grinned.
“You’re pretty funny,” I said.
“David Redhorse,” he said, and offered me his hand.
I shook it. The name sounded odd and familiar. Though probably Redhorse out here was like Lawson back home. Millions of the buggers.
“Alex, uh, Wilson, Alexander Wilson,” I said. “Did you get stuck too? I noticed you getting on at Denver and then getting off the train a little behind us at Fraser.”