When she finished, Cris was again swept by a sense of his own inadequacy. "Stacy, I'm not sure I have what it takes. I'm not a hundred percent. Things have changed for me. I'm not like I used to be. I'm just not sure I can do it."
She looked at him, and wished Max were here. Max would take the challenge no matter the outcome. The ex-Marine kneeling beside her was no substitute for her dead husband, but with Buddy gone he was all she had. She couldn't let him quit. She finally reached out, took his hand, and squeezed it. "I know," she said softly. "I feel the same way, but we have to try. Too much is at stake."
"I'm still shaky," he confided. "And I still crave alcohol. Sometimes it's all I can think about. I'm not sure I can even stay sober. Buddy took the guns, and we're outnumbered thirty or forty to one. We need a plan, and I haven't a clue"
When she looked over at him, for the first time she could see the Marine in the picture behind his father's bar. Cris's youthful intensity burned in blue eyes that reflected moonlight. Then, just as quickly as the vision materialized, it was gone.
Suddenly, a light appeared against a line of trees in the distance. Then the wide yellow-and-red nose of a five-thousand-horsepower MK5 engine came around the curve 150 yards away. The headlights now turned toward them and zigzagged figure eights across the rails as it rumbled slowly in their direction. The night birds and the distant hobos fell silent as the creaking, groaning monster moved up the tracks, straining to pull a hundred loaded stack cars up the 2.3 percent grade.
The engine moved past, followed by two B-unit power packs and a second MK5 hooked backward. As the four-piece multiple unit locomotive lumbered by, they felt the ground shaking. The hot wind from the blower duct that cooled the traction motor rippled their clothes like a desert wind. Then, for as far as they could see, there were car carriers. Three decks high, the multicolored Japanese, German, and American cars creaked and rocked on their chained-down axles. Shimmering acrylic rainbow colors glistened in the moonlight like endless iron necklaces.
"Now!" Cris shouted, as he grabbed Stacy's hand. They ran up alongside one of the car carriers. The train was moving only five miles an hour up the two-mile grade, and it was easy to get alongside the car Cris had chosen.
"Grab the front handle. Watch your feet!" Cris yelled, as he sprinted alongside the car. Then he jumped for the foot stirrup, caught hold of the side grab-iron on the car, and swung aboard. Once he cleared the space, she also lunged for the handle, catching it and jumping up onto the slow-moving foot stirrup.
The car they were on rumbled past a second group of hobos, who were now also running beside the train, trying to catch a ride a few cars back. The rattling, rocking freight now swayed energetically under their feet.
"Where do we sit?" she asked, her heart beating with exhilaration.
"Follow me," he said.
They began to climb a small red ladder, the metal wheels rumbling and growling on the steel rails below them.
"Be careful-don't slip. It's a Cuisinart under there," he warned.
They climbed up to the top of the train, where a line of new Mercedes were rocking on their axle chains. He edged along from car to car until he was at the front of the carrier. Then Cris took a pocketknife out of his pants, popped the chrome strip off the door of a white Mercedes sedan, reached through the crack, and released the lock. He opened the door and got in, sliding across the German leather to make room for Stacy behind the wheel. She joined him in the front seat and closed the door. He opened the ashtray and pulled out the keys.
"Let's get it going," he said, handing her the keys. She turned on the engine. He leaned over and checked the gas gauge. "Half a tank." He nodded in satisfaction, then turned on the climate control, setting it at seventy-two degrees. "Welcome to the hobo Dome Liner. What kinda music do you like?"
"Pop… or R and B," she smiled.
He found a station and set the volume low. Then he reclined the seat.
"And I thought this was gonna be a grim, dirty ride," she said.
"Every occupation has its points of craft, even hoboing, but there's also a practical side to this. We've got a three-mile tunnel up ahead, which would asphyxiate us if we were outside. In here we'll be fine."
They sat back and listened to the music, as the East Texas landscape floated past under a cloudless, moonlit sky. Half an horn-later they flashed into the blackness of the long tunnel, and, as Cris had promised, they rode through the deadly diesel fumes breathing cool air-conditioning.
After they came out of the tunnel they rode in comfortable silence. Stacy glanced at Cris, who was pensively looking out the window at the passing scenery. "It must have been horrible losing your daughter like that," she suddenly said, reading his thoughts as accurately as Max used to read hers. "I can imagine how much you must miss her." She waited for his reply.
He bit his lip but didn't answer. Words couldn't possibly express Cris's true feelings.
Chapter 37
Robert Vail and the Texas Madman rarely spoke; they had completely different agendas. R. V. saw Fannon Kincaid as a savior, a godlike Messiah who had divine direction. The Texas Madman saw Fannon Kincaid as a savior of a different sort. Fannon provided the Texas Madman with permission to kill, his acts of murderous "cleansing" easing the terrible ache inside him.
Now, R. V. and the Madman sat behind the Yardmaster's tower in Shreveport, Louisiana, waiting for the Engine Foreman to deposit the unused carbon sheets in the trash. The yard was huge; almost a thousand parked railcars cooked in the humid heat. Shreveport had been a scrap metal center and had grown from that into a "railhead," where train line-ups and track warrants for the East Coast originated.
The two men didn't speak, nor did they look at one another, as if even accidental eye contact would stir the contempt they naturally had for each other.
They had been sent ahead to get consist sheets on the milk trains coming out of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Harrisburg was a dairy center where the huge funnel-flow refrigerated tank cars were loaded with milk for major cities in the eastern United States. Fannon had carefully chosen the two cities he intended to attack. Detroit, he proclaimed, was the capital city of the mud races. New York, he declared, was the home of the Jew, an infested conclave of Hasidic corruption. All Fannon needed now was the consist sheets to tell him which milk tankers were going where. This was the mission he had assigned to R. V. and the Texas Madman.
They hid in the shade behind the Yardmaster's office while flies buzzed around their heads and landed in their hair.
At a little past ten in the morning the door opened and a skinny man in jeans and a T-shirt carried a cardboard box down a wooden flight of stairs and upended it into the trash. Then he turned and moved slowly in the summer heat back up to the air-conditioned coolness of the Yardmaster's office.
"Let's go," R. V. said, and the two of them moved out of a magnolia tree's shade over to the trash can. They quickly retrieved around twenty carbon sheets, then moved away from the tower.
"Hey!" a deep voice shouted.
"Huh?" R. V. answered as he turned, slack-jawed and indolent in the oppressive heat.
A heavy-set yard bull in a Southern Pacific uniform was in a doorway twenty yards away with a doughnut in his right hand. "Whatta you two fuckheads think you're doin'?" the yard bull growled, closing the door and moving toward them ominously, his leather gun belt and Sam Browne harness creaking loudly as he walked.