I went around the front of the engine and then walked down-train between the side of the engine and the hill. Just above the engine’s rear wheel someone had spray-painted a red message, faded, but still legible:
SANTA CLAUS RODE THIS
BLACK BASTARD INTO THE EAST
HEADING OVER YONDER’S WALL
I’d never met Santa Claus, but I’d heard old hobos talk about him, much of the talk regarding what a devious piece of crap he had been, this coming from men who themselves were notable for being devious pieces of crap. They did testify that Santa Claus had been a balls-out rider, how when he was determined to catch out on a train, nothing, not the bulls, not security devices, would stop him. What interested me was why he had signed his moniker and not his birth name. Maybe, I thought, his parents had stuck him with something as unappetizing as Maurice Showalter.
I went back around to the other side of the train and sat myself down on the grade. The trains, the tree, the beardsleys, the elders, the placid, disinterested inhabitants of Yonder treading water in their lives, and Yonder’s Wall—they still seemed to be pieces belonging to different puzzles. But now I wondered if Santa Claus hadn’t hit on the only solution there was to all of them. What was the point in sticking around the tree and eating jungleberries and fishing and thinking about the past? Might as well see what lay beyond the mountains. Could be you’d die…but maybe you were already dead. For certain sure, according to everything I’d heard, you eventually were going to die from sitting on your butt. And if Bobby was right, then moving to the next level was your one chance to win.
I was going round and round with this in my head, when I spied somebody walking toward me from the curve. Soon I saw that it was Annie Ware. She had on an orange T-shirt and her khaki shorts. She looked like ice cream to the Devil. “What you doin’ out here?” I asked as she came up, and she shrugged and said, “I like the trains, y’know.” She stood over me for a few beats, staring off along the tracks, shifting her feet, as if feeling betwixt and between. Then, with an abrupt movement, she dropped down beside me. “Sometimes when I’m huntin’ for berries, I come back this way so I can look at ’em. There’s always a train waitin’.”
That startled me. “Always?”
She nodded. “Yeah…’least I can’t recall a time when there wasn’t one.”
Video game, I decided. The zombies are always in the parking lot, the hamburger with the message under the bun is always served at the same café. Then I thought, Why couldn’t death have that sort of predictability? All every new piece of the puzzle did was add another confusing color.
We sat without speaking for the better part of a minute, and then, for want of anything better, I said, “I know I done something to you, but I swear I can’t remember it. I been tryin’, too.”
Her mouth thinned, but she didn’t say anything.
I lifted my eyes to the sky, to the dark unidentifiable creatures that were ever circling there, gliding among scatters of cloud. “If you want me to know what I done, you probably gon’ have to tell me.”
A breeze ruffled the weeds alongside the grade, drifting up a flurry of whitish seed pods.
“You broke my heart, you sorry son of a bitch.” Annie’s eyes fixed straight ahead. “You’d been romancin’ me for a long time, and finally I told you I was gonna leave Chester. We’re s’posed to meet at Mother Love’s in Missoula. I waited for you almost a week.” She turned a steely look on me. “It was bad enough thinkin’ you run out on me, but I know you fuckin’ forgot! You was probably so damn stoned, you didn’t even know you were hittin’ on me!”
Here I’d been thinking I must have raped her, and now finding out I’d stood her up…well, if I’d been back in my old life that would have pissed me off good and proper. I might have laughed drunkenly and said something like, Broke your heart? Who the fuck you think you are? A goddamn princess? But I’d become a wiser man. “I’m real sorry,” I said. “Chances are I was so messed up behind…”
“I realize I wasn’t much back then,” she went on, a quaver in her voice, “but goddammit, I think I deserved better’n to get left alone in a mission in fuckin’ Missoula fightin’ off a buncha ol’ animals day and night for a week! I know I deserved better!”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I truly am. I wouldn’t do it now.”
“The hell’s that mean?”
“Means now all the shit’s been scraped off my soul, I still like you. It means that me likin’ you must run deep.”
She shifted like she was about to stand up, but she stayed put. “I don’t…” she began; she drew a breath and held it for couple of seconds before letting it out. “You’re just horny.”
“Well, that don’t mean I don’t like you.”
This brought a slight softening of her expression, but then she said, “Shit, I ain’t listenin’ to this,” and got to her feet.
“C’mon, Annie. You ’member how it was back in the world.” I stood up behind her. “We were fuckin’ wrecks, the both of us. We’d likely have killed each other.”
“That’s still an option, far as I’m concerned.”
It’s funny sometimes how you enter into an involvement. You’re not even thinking about it with the front of your mind, you’re dealing with some stupid bullshit, then all of a sudden it’s standing right there, and you say, Oh yeah, that’s what I been wanting, that’s what the back of my mind’s been occupied with, and now you can’t do without it. Watching the featherings of whitish blond hair beside Annie’s left ear was the thing that did it for me. I put a hand on her shoulder, lightly, ready to jerk it back if she complained or took a swing at me. She flinched, but let the hand stay where it was. Then she said, “Yon ain’t gettin’ laid anytime soon, I can promise you that.”
“What can I get?” I asked, trying to put a laugh in the words.
“You keep pushin’, you’ll find out.” She stepped away, turned to me, and I could see our old trouble in her worn, still-pretty face. “Just take it slow, okay? I ain’t too good at forgive and forget.”
I held up my hands, surrendering.
She pinned me with another hard look, as if searching for signs of falsity. Then she gave a rueful shake of her head. “Let’s go on home,” she said.
“Don’t you want to hang out here with the train?”
“I’m gonna hunt up some decent food and fix you dinner,” she said. “I wanna find out if we can spend an evening together without makin’ each other crazy.” She ran her eye along the sleek curve of the engine. “This ol’ train be ’long here any time I want it.”
Back when I opted out of society, choosing to live free, as I perceived it then, I could have wound up on the streets in some homeless-friendly city like Portland, but I don’t believe I would have made the choice I did if I hadn’t loved trains. Loved their idea and their reality. Hobos were to my mind the knight templars of the homeless, carrying on a brave tradition of anti-establishment activity, like bikers and other such noble outcasts. Five years later I doubt I could have pronounced the word “anti-establishment,” and the true reasons for my checking out—laziness, stubbornness, residual anger, and damn foolishness—had been wiped away by countless pints of fortified wine and enough speed to make every racehorse in America run fast. But I never lost my love for the trains, and neither had Annie.