“I’ll have to go down there,” Joe said, putting down the field glasses.
“Wait,” she said. “It’s not quite midnight yet.” For the twentieth time she looked at Sigmund’s timetable. “Bridgeport arrive 12:15, depart 12:25.” She was just about to agree that he go down when a car pulled into the yard, passed behind the shadowy bulk of a switching shed, and stopped, its headlights illuminating the side of the depot. Through the glasses they could just make out a figure disappearing through the door. The light inside went on, and a few moments later the whole yard was suddenly bathed in a yellow glow from the yard lamps. The car, they could now see, belonged to the state police. Two men came out of the office and stood by the car. Both lit cigarettes. One roared with laughter at something the other said.
A whistle sounded in the distance, and both men looked east down the tracks. Another man got out of the car and hitched up his belt. He took two rifles out of the backseat, walked over to the others, and gave one to his partner. They could now hear the train.
A couple of minutes later it drew smoothly into the depot and stopped, letting off steam, where Joe had predicted, alongside the wooden water tower. The train looked exactly like the one in Matson’s photographs: the black engine and tender, the single long boxcar, and the caboose. The brake-man jumped down from the caboose and joined the state troopers while the engineer and fireman manhandled the hose into the tender. Four more men emerged from behind the train, having presumably come from the boxcar. The engineer left the fireman to turn off the water and joined the others. There were nine of them now in a circle, the low murmur of their conversation barely audible above the hiss of the locomotive.
The fireman, his task finished, walked out of sight of the others and urinated against the wall of the depot. He then moved down to join them, and for several minutes they stood together some twenty yards from the rear of the train. Then the gathering broke up. The two state troopers joined the pair in the boxcar, the crew returned to the engine, the brake-man to the caboose. The car swept out of the yard; the train, blasting smoke, began to move. The depot lights went out, followed by those in the office. Amy and Joe looked at each other.
“Couldn’t be better,” he said.
Next morning Amy and Joe checked out of the hotel and drove another thirty miles down the valley to the larger town of Scottsboro. The realtor’s office was in the center of town and Amy stayed in the car while Joe conducted their business inside. She could see him through the window talking to a gray-haired man, who then disappeared and returned with a set of keys. The two men shook hands. The agent mimed the shooting of a rifle, and laughed. Boys will be boys, she thought.
“No problem,” Joe said as he climbed back into his seat. “They’re glad to have us. We’re the first this year. Probably be the only ones this year. The war’s not helping the hunting business.”
“It is now,” she murmured.
He laughed.
They took the Guntersville road along the banks of the newly created lake, another New Deal creation which Joe found unfortunate in principle but probably useful in practice. “Technology needs power,” he told her.
After ten miles or so they found their turnoff, a dirt road leading up the side of a steep ridge. They passed through two shanty towns, seemingly empty save for staring groups of children in ragged clothes. Scottsboro was only an hour behind them, but it seemed to belong to a different century.
Another hour and they’d left all signs of civilization behind. The road wound up and over the highest ridge, presenting them with a panoramic view of mountains stretching into the distance. A sign pointing drunkenly into the ground bore the legend “Jefferson Lodge.”
“Nice name,” Joe said, bumping the Buick onto a dirt track that made the one they’d left seem smooth as Pennsylvania Avenue. A quarter of a mile farther and they reached the lodge, a sprawling wooden cabin built against the ridge slope, flanked by enormous hickory trees. Above the door the skull of a deer gazed sourly down.
“It was built by some Birmingham big shot who went bust in ’29,” Joe told her. “He shot himself here. With a derringer, would you believe?”
There were six rooms and a kitchen. The furniture was minimal but clean, the kitchen adequately equipped. A large pile of logs was waiting by the stove.
“It’ll do,” Amy said, sitting down on one of the bunk beds. “But that rough road worries me. There won’t be any time for changing tyres if we run into a problem.”
“Not much we can do about that. We have a couple of spares for the car and I’ll check out the road for sharp stones.” He walked to the window, pushed back the shutters, and looked out. “Now that’s America,” he said.
She joined him. Far to the west the lower Tennessee Valley could be seen, a yellow-green swath framed by the dark green slopes of the forested hills. To the north there were only mountains, ridge after ridge fading into the blue haze of the horizon. In front of the cabin the dust-coated Buick looked like a bedraggled alien spacecraft.
“Yes,” she murmured, turning away. That was one America. She didn’t understand him and didn’t want to. Though she loathed his opinions, there was something about him she found disturbingly likable, some boyish innocence that seemed far removed from the evil he represented. She took a conscious grip on herself. They were enemies, enemies at war, only that. In a few weeks he would be dead.
He went out to check the road, and she did another tour of the cabin, wondering which room the unfortunate “big shot” had killed himself in.
“Okay,” he shouted from the door. “Let’s move.”
The Buick bounced its way back to the main road, where they turned north, motoring gently downhill across the plateau. A solitary peak — McCoy Mountain, the map said — loomed in front of them, but as they approached its base the road plunged down to the right, and before the pines engulfed them Amy could see road, river, and railroad tracks sharing the narrow valley below.
They hit bottom at the small town of Lim Rock, another group of shacks seemingly devoid of inhabitants, though rather more modern than those on the mountain. Following the valley westward, they reached their destination in less than a mile. Here the road and the main railroad line pushed on toward a gap in the ridge ahead, while the stream, a spur line, and another dirt track veered north up a narrow valley.
Joe stopped the car at the point closest to where the tracks diverged and they both got out. “Keep your eyes peeled,” he told her, and she leaned back against the hood watching the road while he took the large iron key from the boot and carried it across the tracks. She heard a click, a grunt, and a metallic thud. “No problem,” he shouted.
“Nothing coming,” she shouted back.
The noises repeated and he returned to replace the key in the boot.
“A truck,” Amy said, and they watched it approach and thunder past. The driver acknowledged Joe’s cheerful wave.
He turned the car and drove it up the dirt road and into the narrow valley. It ran straight for half a mile, then took a bend that brought them out of sight of the main road. Joe drove slowly forward as they both surveyed the area.
“This’ll do,” he said.
“The bridge will do for a marker,” she added, pointing forward to where both road and rails crossed the stream on a wooden trestle.