The train was doing barely ten miles an hour, and was very easily stopped. But where was here? An empty stretch flanked by jungle growth, near a level crossing for an abandoned road.
“Last stop,” the older one said. “Everybody off.”
The engineer, the fireman, the Army officer, and the older white man all climbed down to the ground, where the older man yelled up, “Don’t fuck up this train now! It’s the only one we got!”
“I’ve always wanted my own train,” the younger one said, grinning out of the cab at them.
The other soldier, the one they’d called Charlie, was running along the tops of the cars, leaping the spaces like a deranged impala. The engineer and the fireman looked around, wide-eyed, and here was more astonishment. Just up ahead, the track had been moved! While the rest of the line continued on as before, curving slowly away to the right, this one section had been curved sharply to the left, through a gap in the encroaching shrubbery and out of sight.
“Stand clear, now,” the older white man said. “We got an amateur up there at the throttle.”
46
Lew couldn’t stop grinning. The train seemed to breathe under him, a huge panting powerful tame beast, waiting for his command. The throttle bar had to be held down to make the beast move; a safety measure, the dead-man’s bar, so that if the engineer had a heart attack the train wouldn’t continue on with nobody at the throttle.
It had been decided that Lew would drive this part, just in case they had to deal with an engineer of heroic cast, who might try to sabotage the train before it was well hidden. Now Lew touched the bar and felt the beast’s vibration against his palm. He pressed, and the vibration multiplied a hundred times, and through a great rasping roar he heard somebody down there yell, “Easy! Easy! Not so fast!”
Not so fast? The train wasn’t moving, so he must be spinning the wheels. He released the throttle, and the noise died away, and he settled down to learn this beast, which maybe wasn’t as tame as he’d thought. He hadn’t known he was going fast. He touched the bar again, and this time depressed it very very gently.
The roar started, but not so angrily. The vibration increased, but not so dramatically. The train moved! Startled, Lew released the throttle, and the train stopped.
“Will you quit fucking around up there?”
“Shut up, Frank,” Lew yelled out the window, and put his hand again on the bar.
The roar. The increasing vibration. A jolt, and once again the train inched forward.
Lew kept his hand exactly where it was, and the train slowly gathered speed, and from behind him came the diminishing crashes of the couplers losing slack.
The train was doing at most five miles an hour, with the diverted track just ahead. As he looked down on it from way up in the cab, it seemed to Lew that what they had built was too flimsy, the logs too uncertain a replacement for metal sleepers, the bed too soft, the rails insufficiently spiked into place. It’s a child’s toy, he thought, and I’m bringing a life-size locomotive onto it.
If it fell over, should he stay with the engine or try to jump clear?
“Take it slow, Lew! Slow and easy!”
“Shut up, Frank!”
The locomotive sagged to the left as they moved down off the regular roadbed. The observers on that side scattered, and the locomotive hesitantly rolled down over a track that had suddenly become all hills and valleys.
“Don’t stop! Keep moving!”
“Blow it out your ass, Frank,” Lew muttered. Out ahead, as the locomotive slowly curved through the gap in the wall of shrubbery, he could see the ex-railwaymen and the workers, all expectant and excited, watching this huge black metal monster nose down into their world.
It was such a short distance from the solid main line to the solid spur line, but now it seemed a million miles long. The entire locomotive was on the temporary track, weaving from side to side as wood and metal groaned and cracked beneath the wheels. The tender followed like an obedient child, much more docile than its parent on the new line. The cars came along like sheep, one after the other, clanking, grinding, wheels screeching where the rails were too close together.
The locomotive dropped, on the right side, about an inch, lurching as though it had been shot. Lew lost control of the throttle, and when he grabbed to regain it he pressed down too hard. The wheels spun with that grating roaring sound, but then the right side lurched up again and the locomotive lunged forward onto the old spur track like a bear hurling itself away from thin ice.
That sound was a cheer! Lew looked out of the cab, and on both sides of the locomotive the men were yelling and grinning and clapping and jumping up and down. Even Frank was cheering instead of giving advice, and the former engineer and fireman were surreptitiously grinning at one another. Leaning far out of the cab and looking back and up, Lew could see Charlie about eight cars back, capering on the roof like a mannequin whose strings are pulled by a child.
Isaac, grinning like a Halloween pumpkin and carrying a walkie-talkie, climbed up into the cab. Pointing at Lew’s own grin, he said, “You’ll crack your face.”
“So will you.”
Now it was easy. While the men surged forward to grab for the ladders on the freight cars, climbing aboard for the ride, some going up top to the roofs, some hanging on the sides, Lew eased the locomotive on down the spur track. Smoothly and neatly, it rode the switch that diverted it from the engine shed toward the turntable. Clack went the wheels when they hit the minutely off turntable, and clack again on the other side.
Isaac said, “You know, that’s a gorge just ahead.”
“Oh, I know it.”
At the end of the regular spur was more temporary track; again the locomotive sagged and hesitated. Lew took his hand off the throttle, and for an agonizing instant the train kept rolling toward the end of the track and the lip of the gorge. But then it faltered, and then it stopped.
Isaac’s walkie-talkie cleared its throat with scratchy static sounds, then squawked in a parrot’s version of Frank’s voice saying, “Take it on down.”
Isaac said, “It is on down.”
“Repeat?”
“We’re here, Frank, at the end of the track.”
The walkie-talkie made indignant sounds: “I still got cars up here! I gotta get ’em off this track! Run the fucking engine into the gorge!”
Lew said, “Ask him if he wants to ride shotgun.”
Another Americanism to confuse Isaac. “What?”
“Never mind. Tell them out there to unhook the cars from the tender. We don’t want the whole train in the gorge.”
“Right.”
As Isaac started down out of the cab, Lew said, “And send somebody up with one of those little pieces of rail.”
“Right.”
That happened first; a grinning workman clambered aboard, toting a two-foot piece of rail from the dismantled buffer. He stood in the cab, grinning, looking around at everything, and Lew said, “Wanna ride over the cliff in it?” But the man had no English, and after a minute he left.
Down below, Lew could hear the walkie-talkie skreeking Frank’s impatience, and Isaac calmly answering. Frank wanted the workmen, so Isaac called to them to hurry back up to the main line. Reluctantly they left, looking back, wishing they could watch the locomotive go over the cliff.
Meanwhile, two of the ex-railwaymen worked at unhooking the lead car from the tender. The other two had climbed to the top of the first two cars to turn the big flat wheels of the hand brakes.
“All set!”