“You were on a train, weren’t you?” The full dopey smile reemerges as his gaze returns to her body. “Not a passenger train, that’s not what I mean. They don’t run here. I can smell it, the oil, the ozone of dynamos. You hopped a freight.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“No,” he says. “It’s okay to admit it. I know about the kinds of things that set folks off into this country up here. I even rode a train like that before. It’s a secret, that kind of thing. It’s free.”
“Okay,” Amy says. She leans down to snatch her clothes off the carpet. “I’m leaving.”
With the bathroom door locked behind her, Amy dresses quickly. She slips on her jeans as she sits at the edge of the bathtub, then refastens her bra, its wires bent out of shape after sleeping on the railcar. It’s when she’s holding her shirt that she hears Aaron move, noticing the sound of him walking across the old motel shag, his pressing a hand against the bathroom door. It’s dead quiet in the morning. Amy stands stock-still in the bathroom, listening. The door seems to hum, as if Aaron is sliding his fingertips over its surface, his nails imperceptibly scraping the veneer. She jumps when he speaks because she doesn’t know what’s going to happen.
“Amy,” he says, his voice still earnest and unashamed, a hint of begging in it. “If you’re going to hop another train, I’d like to come.” She stands with her back to the door, a cold shiver running along her spine. She wishes her father had answered when she called him.
“Would you let me go with you?” he asks. Amy hesitates, grips the edge of the sink. “I’m not going to jump a train.”
“You can tell me,” he says. “I’d like to go on one, if you are.”
Their agreement is to jump a southbound.
Amy had left the room, she’d dressed quickly and hurried out the door, slipped around the corner and called her father, misdialing twice because her fingers were shaking. She needed to get out of Valentine and should have kept walking, that was her mistake, because Aaron emerged jogging behind her on the street, wearing only his boxer shorts. He jumped in front of her and Amy had to end the call before anyone answered, cutting off the dial tone as she snapped her phone shut. She stuffed the phone in her pocket because Aaron was standing there, practically naked on this small-town street where they both were strangers.
Somehow he calmed her again and convinced her that they must catch a train together, his voice jumpy trying to make it sound like fun before he rushed upstairs to put his clothes back on. Amy should have run then, but she hadn’t. If she was someplace familiar, Aurora or the Twin Cities, or even Lincoln, where there were crowds of people, or folks she knew nearby, Amy would have run from him. But there wasn’t anywhere she could go here. What would she tell them, these people that lived in Valentine? That she’d hopped a train and was stuck here? That she went down on this man in a motel room? Nothing had happened that she hadn’t allowed to happen. That’s what it would look like — that’s what they would think — that she was seeking this weird man’s attention. She was a stranger too. She couldn’t rely on anyone here to save her. So she agreed to hop a southerly, because at least then she would be headed in the direction of Aurora.
When Aaron falls asleep within the first hour it seems like a real blessing, especially when her phone vibrates in her pocket, when Amy sees that Chadron is calling. He’s still her husband, she remembers, because they never signed the divorce papers. She left them in her car, then jumped the train and now she’s here, wherever this is, somewhere south of Valentine. Amy doesn’t answer the call, though, she presses the button on the side that stops the vibrating.
They’re passing through another town when Amy notices that her phone is going to run out of battery, and it’s this juxtaposition of events that causes her to stand and lean toward the ground rushing by — she’s going through a town, her phone will soon die, Aaron’s asleep behind her. She nearly jumps. But then she pauses to rationalize with herself.
It seems too simple, that she can jump off the train and walk to town, stop at the library and call her father, that she could escape from Aaron’s cloying presence while he’s sleeping. And it’s while she’s thinking these things — remembering the way her father would softly hum, “Oh, Amy, what has happened to you now?”—that she returns the phone to her pocket, sits back inside the boxcar, and decides to hang on a while longer. This is what I’m doing, she thinks. She’ll wait until they’re closer to Aurora before jumping, so she can walk back on her own.
Aaron continues to sleep, curled in a back corner of the near-empty railcar. There’s just scrap metal in the car with them, segments of rusty I-beams. Who is this man? she thinks again, standing over Aaron as he sleeps, his skinny ankles showing out the bottom of his jeans. He’s not particularly attractive, Amy knows this. She’s embarrassed that she went down on him, although embarrassed before whom she couldn’t say. It doesn’t matter. Amy can’t think of anyone she’s slept with whose looks or personality were cause for bragging.
It’s true that Amy hasn’t always made her own decisions, she hasn’t always been in control of the situations she’s found herself in, but, if she could help it, she would never let a man treat her like she’s a victim again.
Because it’s just sitting there unattended, Amy digs in Aaron’s bag and carries it to the edge of the railcar. Inside she finds his wallet and some other personal junk that isn’t interesting, but her fingers jump when she sees his digital camera in the front pocket, wrapped in a small cotton sack. She wants to see who else Aaron has taken pictures of, remembering the way he’d approached her that morning, his obvious ploy to get her in bed.
The first few photos in its history are of Amy herself, a close-up of her face, then one of her leaving the café. She feels something roil in her stomach, before she even realizes what it means, as she finds images of herself walking into the café, and even before then, when she first entered town, long-range shots of her bending over to tie her shoes. It’s as if Aaron had anticipated her coming, standing at his motel window with this camera at first light, waiting for a woman to wander into his frame. Amy thought his line was pitiful but she was wrong. These pictures of her coming into town, nearly a dozen of them, showed that he’d planned for her arrival. He’d been waiting to tell her she’s pretty.
Amy looks over her shoulder at Aaron, still sleeping, this skinny dweeb who somehow convinced her to go along with him. She wants to hit him, to kick his face in while he sleeps, but she merely closes her eyes, shakes her head in disgust, then turns back to his camera.
There are a few more shots of Valentine and other towns, stone-built town halls and decommissioned tanks in municipal parks, then images of a woman lying naked in bed, covering her face in embarrassment, followed by a few of this same woman standing outside a coffee shop; then a different woman tied-up, her breasts squeezed purple in the cinch of a nylon rope, what happened after Aaron snapped her photo outside a shopping mall; others of a woman blindfolded, her ankles and wrists hogtied, her parts exposed; another of Aaron wielding a knife, biting a woman’s nipple as he slices across her belly.
There’s a video Amy plays. A big woman lounges in a dark room, the curtains drawn. Her bottom-heavy breasts rest on her stomach as she lies in bed, drinking from a beer can. Her hair is done up in what looks like an old-fashioned style, even though she can’t be much older than thirty.
The camera’s small speakers distort from the loud music that plays in the room, an undulation of hoary blues music, the big woman singing in chorus between slugs of beer, spread out naked on the bed, her flesh sinking into itself.