‘Shit.’
‘It’s no problem,’ said Walker. ‘I can hitch.’ There was little traffic but anyone who passed by would pick him up.
‘I’ve got a better idea,’ said Ray.
They continued for ten minutes and then turned down an unsurfaced road, little more than a track, the kind of road you drove down when you wanted to dispose of a body. After a couple of miles he stopped and they both got out of the car.
Warm, blue skies, only a breeze moving. Ray pointed off into the distance and said, ‘Walk due south, where I’m pointing. After an hour, hour and a half, you’ll come to some railroad tracks. I’d take you myself but the terrain’s too rough for the pick-up. Follow the track west and you’ll see it start climbing. After about half an hour the gradient is enough to slow the freights right down. You can hop one no problem. It’s a busy piece of track. Anything going west will be heading to Eagle City.’
Walker nodded and looked in the direction indicated. Ray hunted around in the back of the pick-up and handed him a gallon container of water, a bottle of Pepsi, bread, fruit, biscuits. Walker stuffed everything except the water into his rucksack and slipped his arms through the straps. He was touched by Ray’s efficient concern and when they shook hands and said goodbye he felt like he was parting from a friend he had known for ten years.
‘Don’t forget,’ said Ray as he climbed back in the car. ‘Head straight south. It won’t matter if you veer a bit to one side — it’ll just mean a longer or shorter walk once you hit the rails.’
With that he twisted the key in the ignition and turned the pick-up round. Waved and headed back up the road, leaving Walker in the dust-settling emptiness.
After walking for half an hour the landscape became fertile and wild, twitching with butterflies. He passed through knee-length grass and a field so dense with strawberries that their juice stained his shoes. Buffalo clouds roamed the sky. Then, in the distance, he saw the river-glint of the railroad tracks and quickened his pace, smiling.
When he got to the railroad he looked back at the wavering track he had cut through the grass and began following the rails west, the gradient steepening all the time. After a couple of miles he stretched out by them and waited for the train, drowsy from the walk and heat. He shaded his face with a shirt and dozed.
He woke and gulped some water, ate the last of the strawberries he had picked on the way. The light was softening, his shadow reaching out along the track. Three geese angled towards the horizon: everything straining into the distance.
Waiting.
It was almost sundown when the rails began to sing. The noise got louder and soon he could see the train pulling slowly towards him.
The train was so long that three minutes after the engine had passed there was still no sign of the rear coach. Then, seeing an open boxcar approaching, he ran alongside, tossing in his bag. The length of the train made its speed deceptive. He had to sprint to keep up with the boxcar and when he reached up to haul himself aboard the momentum jolted his arms and tugged him off his feet. Dangling from the train he touched the ground again before swinging his feet up and into the car.
Once it had pulled up the incline the train began moving faster. Hanging slightly from the door he could see the long line of freights stretching away in both directions as the rails began curving slightly to the south. Mostly, he lay on the jolting floor, head propped on his rucksack, watching the sun smoulder over the horizon and the fields blazing fire-red. For a while the sky was streaked with purple and then, as the blue blackened, the first stars blinked on.
It was a warm night. He sipped water and chewed hunks of bread, wished he had saved some of the strawberries. Later the momentum of the train lulled him to sleep. He dreamed of Rachel doing ordinary things, things he had never seen: cleaning her teeth, deciding which clothes to wear, reading, drying herself after a bath. He dreamed of her sleeping, dreaming of him.
Throughout the night he woke uncomfortably on the hard boards, looked out at the star-clogged sky until the clack of wheels tugged him asleep again.
CHAPTER TEN
By morning the train was passing through a silent expanse of wheat. When the sun moved over the roof and slid in through the open door Walker retreated to the back of the car, into the cool. From here, with the golden fields and blue sky framed by the black doors, the view was exactly like the projected image of a movie screen, an endless panning shot of prairie.
Then, slowly, the view began to shrink. Houses began to appear, roads; in the distance, factories. By late afternoon the train was heaving into the outskirts of Eagle City. The number of tracks visible from the freight increased until they stretched away like a wide river.
Walker’s train clanked and squealed over points, drawing parallel to other trains and then sliding away again. Beyond the railroad tracks was an actual river. A bridge squatted iron-heavy in the distance. Cranes, warehouses, water towers and brooding clouds. Faded signs with speed limits and warnings that no longer mattered. Old stock that had been plundered for spares and left to rust in sidings. The broken windows of an abandoned signal house. Littered with gulls, even the sky looked old, run-down.
The train slowed almost to a crawl. Walker jumped down and waited for it to pass, guessing that the centre of the town was on the other side, away from the river. Some way off a gang of workers in orange bibs walked across the tracks, shovels and picks over their shoulders.
When the train had passed, Walker began making his way across the expanse of tracks, ducking under the bumpers of stationary coaches, stepping ahead of departing freights. Beyond the station rose the office blocks of the city’s business district, high glass buildings made from cubes of sky.
Next to the railroad was a car park, cordoned off by a high perimeter fence. Walker waited behind a stationary shunter until there was no one in sight and then tossed over his bag and hauled himself up, the fence sagging and bulging with his weight. He dropped to the other side and walked out of the car park and into the town.
Eagle City had grown up as a crossing-point and small port on the Eagle River; with the coming of the railroads it became the commercial centre of the region and was now a large, depressed town on the edge of the prairie. Walker spent two days asking after Malory or Carver without success. He had lost track of them both. Which meant that he himself was lost. He thought about leaving and going on to Despond, a couple of hundred miles away, but did not have the confidence to rationalize this in his usual way: if he felt like leaving, then the chances were that Malory had felt the same. Besides, what would he find there? Sitting on the steps of an abandoned building, drinking milk from a bottle, he glanced up and saw, on the wall opposite, a torn poster for a Western. In films cowboys spoke of the trail going cold, but he had no way of knowing if the trail had gone cold or had actually frozen over. And what trail was there except the one that he left in his wake? What else was there to guide him?
He tossed the empty milk bottle into a bin and began walking. Soon after embarking on the search he had given up trying to guess the real significance of what Rachel had asked him to do. He had concentrated instead on the smallest things, on a trail of imagined footprints. He had given no thought to where they might ultimately lead because the question overwhelmed him, dwarfed his efforts and made them seem futile, absurd — whatever that meant. Now that he was pondering the larger purpose of the search he felt, for the first time, like giving up, abandoning it. And then what? Abandoning things was all very well but what did you do once you had abandoned them? Something else. It was impossible to walk out on one thing without walking into another. . What Rachel had asked him to do. Perhaps it was as simple as that. He had left so that he could return. All this shit just so he could fuck her. Like a story he’d heard in prison, using up the nothing days.