"What the fuck?" he screamed at the twenty-two-year-old. "I'm your friend, dammit. Whatta you doing?"
Mike couldn't respond.
Exhausted, Lucky finally stood up with shaking legs on the rocking platform, then dragged his friend across the ledge and laid him down. Lucky took Mike's pulse. It was uneven. He sat back and tried to clear his lungs of diesel smoke. He prayed he hadn't crushed Hollywood Mike's larynx. Then he saw the first bug. It was crawling up his arm, under his shirt. "Get the hell off me!" Lucky wailed, beating at the hallucinatory insect. They were coming now. He could feel them crawling up his neck. They were in his scalp, going for his eyes.
Mike was regaining consciousness, but he seemed unable to talk and was having difficulty swallowing. He was lying flat on the ledge of the grain car, with spit drooling out of his mouth. Lucky was beginning to think he had done some life-threatening damage.
"What the fuck's wrong with you, man?" Lucky asked. He tried to tell himself the bugs were imaginary but was, nonetheless, raking stiff fingers through his hair, trying to clear his scalp of the crawling bastards.
Hollywood Mike still couldn't answer. Worse still, his gaze was unfocused, and when he looked at Lucky it was with vacant, glassy eyes.
The sun had not appeared above the horizon, but already it was lighting the eastern sky. Lucky could see the ribbon of cars stretching out before him as the train, still heading down the slope, made a long gradual turn. Off in the distance Lucky could see a ravine with a big metal trellis. The rumbling diesel engine was a quarter of a mile ahead, just crossing the ravine. Then Lucky sat down with his back to the car and began to whimper. He felt bugs crawling on his face. He saw them moving under his T-shirt. "Nooo…" he wailed. "Go away, I can't take this." He began slapping at himself, trying to get them off, while Mike lay close to death on the ledge beside him.
Unexpectedly, Mike went into a huge spastic convulsion. Lucky jumped back, startled, and watched in horror as his friend spasmed uncontrollably on the narrow ledge.
"Fuck, man!" Lucky screamed, "Fuck… oh fuck. We're getting off!" he yelled.
Lucky needed to slow the train in order to jump. To do this, he knew he had to cut the air on the car. Once the air line was cut, the brakes on the center section of the train would automatically come on, slowing the entire train.
Lucky pulled out an old pocketknife and crouched down with his feet on the uncoupling lever, one arm holding on to the coupler, as the track strobed by beneath him. With his life hanging suspended above the tracks and his heart beating wildly, the bugs disappeared. Lucky didn't know what part of his subconscious was driving him, but at least the D. T. S had been washed away by his pumping adrenaline. He quickly grabbed the rubber air line with his right hand and slashed it. It whipped all around the uncoupling lever where he was precariously perched, slapping his face like an unattended garden hose. As he crawled back onto the grainer's narrow ledge, he heard the brakes come on under the car. The train slowed slightly.
They were now crossing the trestle. He looked down at a thousand-foot drop below the tracks through the open metal rails. When Lucky pulled Mike up into a sitting position, more spit drooled out of his mouth and down his shirt. Mike coughed, but said nothing. His eyes seemed cloudy and distant now, almost as if he had already passed on.
The train was going only ten miles an hour as they came off the trestle. Lucky knew the engineer would stop somewhere down the line and check the cars for the broken air hose, but he needed to get Mike off now.
He stood Mike up and grabbed him in a fireman's carry. Then Lucky took a deep breath and two running steps, leaping off the grainer with Mike over his shoulder. He was trying to get as far out from the wheels as possible, sacrificing himself by landing on his feet instead of taking his patented bone-saving roll. He hopped once, feeling his knees jam. The pain shot up his thighs. He went down, still holding Mike over his shoulder, trying to keep Mike's head from banging into the hard ground. He rolled once and came to a stop.
Mike's eyes were open, but were now like no eyes Lucky had ever seen on a living person. He was conscious, but it was as if nobody was in there, as if Mike's soul had disappeared.
Lucky sat up and saw that he was in a small switching yard. The sun was peeking up over the horizon. Off to his right was a very small town, only a couple of buildings and a store. The town probably supplied the switching station.
Lucky hoped there was a doctor nearby, and a bottle. Christ, I need a bottle, he thought. He couldn't deal with the bugs, not now, not with Mike dying.
Chapter 14
Roscoe Moss had crashed on an old sofa in the back of his brother's feed and grain store. He'd been up half the night helping deliver Shep Holworth's new Appaloosa foal. The animal had not been right; one eye on the colt was missing and his reflexes were shot. The poor animal couldn't stand, no matter how hard they tried to get him up. Then his lungs collapsed. Roscoe had done everything he could, but he had learned his rudimentary medical knowledge as a Marine Corps ambulance driver, and he didn't have the veterinary skill to save the animal. In the end, Shep had decided it was easier, and cheaper, to just put the foal down.
It had bummed Roscoe out, and he had come back to Moss Feed and Grain, pulled down the bottle of Scotch, and while watching the late late movie on the old black-and-white, gotten completely hammered. Sometime before sun-up he'd fallen asleep on the couch.
Roscoe's main job was to guard the switching station for the old Southern Pacific and Union Pacific Railroad. Often, long lines of loaded boxcars were parked on the Badwater siding for several days, waiting for one of the high-hood switchers to connect the line and pull it north to the switching yard in Pueblo, Colorado. Roscoe was the "yard bull." He had been deputized by the County Sheriff and could make arrests if thieves tried to steal radios out of the Japanese automobiles left on his siding waiting for the Pueblo hookup. Roscoe had made over twenty arrests, mostly Native Americans off the nearby Ute Reservation. Unless they were repeat offenders, he usually ended up just holding them in the Feed and Grain for a few hours before turning them loose. He was half black, half Ute himself and didn't have the heart to call the Sheriff on the poverty-stricken Indians.
It was six A. M. when he was brought out of a deep sleep by a racket at the store's back window. It was an incessant pounding, and he could hear someone shouting, "Hey you!" Roscoe sat up and rubbed his eyes, then he ran a hand through his tight black Afro hair. He looked out at the source of the noise and saw a very scruffy, long-haired blond man with wild eyes pounding on the windows with dirt-scarred knuckles. Roscoe's head was still thick with whiskey, as the bum continued pounding on the glass. Finally he stood. "He ain't open till nine!" Roscoe shouted at the man through the glass.
"I need a doctor. Where's the doctor?" the bum shouted.
"Ain't got a doctor here. There's six people live in this place. You want a doctor, gotta go t' Government Camp, 'bout sixty miles yonder, toward the mountains." Roscoe turned and moved back to the couch, but the man started hammering on the window again.
Roscoe spun around, and this time anger flared. "Hey, listen, you," he shouted. "There ain't no doctor. Stop yer bangin' or I'm gonna come out there an' fold ya over."
An ex-Marine and bull-riding champion, Roscoe Moss, Jr., was generally up to that task. He was forty-eight years old, but there was not an inch of fat on him. His brown skin was rippled with slabs of muscle.