Maybe it had and maybe it hadn't. He didn't want to think about that right now. All he knew at this moment was that out here at Promontory Point it was finished. And it looked like the good guys had won.
His mind was already concocting cover stories, bland explanations that would mollify the press and satisfy the public. A train crash, he was thinking. An accident involving two locomotives. Once he and his men conducted a few queries, took some photos and video and got a handle on what had happened, he would report back to Horn and the president.
He smiled to himself.
This time he wouldn't be pushed back into the closet.
This time he would get his promotion.
Epilogue
Canyonlands National Park, Utah
The seasons changed, the crowds returned, and it was easy to forget sometimes that any of it had ever happened.
Henry gave ranger talks, guided visitors to some of the more popular sites, narrated occasional evening slide shows in the campground, caught up on paperwork in the back office of the visitors' center. In short, he went back to his normal life.
For the most part.
But the nights were long, and on cold late evenings he sometimes found himself glancing nervously around his cabin, unnerved by the number of shadows gathered in the corners of the primitive space, half expecting one of them to move. And whenever he looked west, past Ray's cabin, and remembered the train they had seen there, it was as if it had happened just yesterday. The feelings returned full force, and he was engulfed by a fear so profound that he could not stop shaking.
Raul and Stuart were gone. Raul had transferred to Bandolier, while Stuart had quit the park service entirely. Healey had taken an early retirement, and while Henry couldn't say he was sad to see the supervisor go, he had to admit that he missed the freedom | he'd had under the man. The new guy was far more efficient and much better qualified, but he was also a stickler for procedure and kept a far tighter rein on the rangers than they were used to. Healey had always acted like a hard-ass, but he was so incompetent that his orders could be safely ignored. Not so with the new guy. But maybe time would change that.
If he'd expected to become more spiritual after what he'd experienced-or even more Indian-well, that hadn't happened. He was too old and set in his ways, Henry supposed. He was what he was, and events that no doubt would have been life altering had he been twenty or thirty years younger now left him battered and bruised but essentially unchanged.
Life went on.
In February, before the start of the spring rush, when one could travel for days through the park without encountering another soul even on the most popular roads and trails, Henry found himself alone in a secluded canyon while patrolling the northeast quadrant. A box canyon. It bore no resemblance really to the canyon with the petroglyphs where he'd encountered the twins, but he stopped his Jeep nevertheless and got out, searching the rock walls and the narrowing expanse of
sand before him. It was late afternoon, the sky hidden behind shifting layers of dark overlapping clouds, small traces of sunlight penetrating periodically from the west. He hadn't expected to find anything, but on the cliff face to the side of the Jeep, he saw what looked like the shadow of a voluptuous woman. It was a random confluende of shapes that together happened to resemble a persons and he could even spot the individual sources that contributed to the head, the breasts, the legs, but he pulled his pants down anyway and tried to masturbate.
He stroked slow, then fast, but it wasn't happening. He couldn't get even the slightest bit hard, and after a minute or two, he began to feel ridiculous.
He pulled his pants back up.
It really was over.
After work, he headed into Moab, to the Boy Howdy. Ector was supposed to meet him at the bar, but his friend hadn't shown up yet, so Henry ordered a beer and staked out a small table along the east wall. At the end of the counter next to him, two men, one overweight, one underweight, both wearing painter's overalls, were talking loudly enough to be heard over the television.
"I was at that Indian powwow a few months back," the fat guy said. "You know the one up at Promontory Point that was all over the news?"
"Really? Did you see the accident?"
"Front-row seats," the man bragged. "Those trains came at each other like two bulls out for blood. People were tryin' to get out of the way, but it was a mob scene. Reporters were gettin' trampled. Indians were runnin' in all directions, tryin' to get away from the tracks. ..."
Ector arrived, squinting into the dimness.
Henry waved him over.
"Yeah," the man said, "it was like those engineers had it in for each other. They just kept acceleratin' until-bam!-the trains hit. Shit was flyin' every which way. ..."
Henry couldn't help smiling to himself.
Ector walked up, slapped a hand on the table. "Hey."
"Hey, yourself," Henry replied.
"... and those two trains were ..."
He was still smiling. "Have a seat," he said. "Have a beer."
Seal Beach, California
Dennis stood at the end of the pier, looking not out at the ocean but back toward the shore and the solid row of contiguous houses that faced the beach. Within the past week, dump trucks, bulldozers and a cadre of uniformed men from the Army Corps of Engineers had built a sand berm in front of the houses in order to protect them from the waves of winter storms, but today's weather was nice, and mothers with their preschool children were walking, running and playing atop the giant hill of sand. Inland a few blocks, his mother and sister were, against his wishes, cleaning his apartment. They were out here only for a short vacation, in order to see for themselves where and how he was living, but Cathy had already told him she wanted to move out West, and he knew that with both of her children living here, his mother would follow.
As he had every day since his arrival, Dennis marveled at California's amazing weather. In Pennsylvania right now, the temperature was well below freezing and dirty snowdrifts were piled high along the roads like walls. Here it might as well be summer. On both sides of the pier, young men in wet suits were waiting on surfboards for waves to catch, and on the beach several couples as well as one very hot teenage girl were lying on blankets, catching some rays, while a tourist family ate lunch out of a picnic basket. Two small children ran up and down the shoreline, chasing seagulls and screaming.
It was a world away from Pennsylvania and a universe away from what he now thought of as his road trip through hell.
Unlike the other people at Promontory Point, he and his fellow passengers had been stranded by the destruction of the trains, left on that plain in Utah with no transportation and no way to return to their starting locations. His own car was way back in Milner, Wyoming, and if it hadn't been for a Sioux man with an old Pacer heading back home to Montana who offered him a ride, he had no idea what he would have done.
They hadn't spoken on the return trip, he and the Sioux man. There might have been a couple of exchanged sentences along the lines of "Let's get something to eat" or "I'll drive if you're getting tired," but for the most part there were hours and hours of silence as they drove north through plains and past mountains. It wasn't an uncomfortable silence, but it wasn't exactly comfortable either, and to Dennis the trip seemed very, very long.
He arrived in Milner midmorning, after a long nap, and he was grateful for that. He didn't want to see Carl Fong or his buddies, wanted only to escape cleanly and quietly, and he settled his bill at the motel, packed his stuff, got in his car and drove away, heading toward the coast.
He had a lot of time to think on the road.
But he avoided that.