Now you’d do better coming between a man and his wife than you would stealing a tramp’s dog. It’s a relationship where the thought of divorce never enters in, a bond sealed in the coldest cracks of winter and the loneliest squats in Godforsakenland. Steal a tramp’s dog, you might be stealing the one thing that’s keeping him walking and above ground. So while Billy was mad some that night, he was mostly shaken up. He couldn’t figure why Stupid, a slobbery none-too-bright black Lab mix with small tolerance for strangers, had gone and trotted off with his abductor, wagging his tail and never a backward glance—that’s how the three hobos he’d been jungled up with described what happened while he was off fetching wine from the ShopRite. He had no reason to doubt them, drunks though they were. Neither did he doubt that they had, as they claimed, tried to stop the man, but couldn’t handle him because of his size. “Big as goddamn Hulk Hogan” was the phrase that one communicated to Billy. He loosened the ax handle he kept stowed in his pack, but he had no clear idea what he would do if he found the man.
The train was stopped on a siding outside the Klamath Falls switchyard, a stretch of track that ran straight as an avenue between ranks of tall spruce, and as Billy walked alongside it, peering into the open boxcars, he noticed a number of peculiarities. The walls of the cars were cold to the touch, yet not so cold as you’d expect steel to be on a chilly night, and they were unnaturally smooth. Not a scrape, a ding, or a dent. The only imperfection Billy observed was a long ridged mark like an old scar running across the door of one. As for the doors themselves, they had no locks, and while mounted in the usual fashion, they moved soundlessly, easily, and seemed fabricated of a metal considerably lighter and less reflective than steel—a three-quarter moon hanging overhead cast a silvery shine onto the tops of the rails, but the surfaces of the boxcars gave back scarcely a glimmer. Then, too, the damn thing didn’t smell like a train. No stink of refried diesel and spilled cargoes and treated wood. Instead, there was a faint musky odor, almost sweet, as if the entire string of cars had been doused with perfume. Ordinarily, Billy would have been spooked by these incongruities, but he was so worked up about his dog, he ignored the beeping of his interior alarm and kept on walking the tracks.
A stiff breeze kicked up, drawing ghostly vowels from the boughs, and the spruce tops wobbled, then tipped all to one side, like huge drunken dark green soldiers with pointy hats, causing Billy to feel alone among the mighty. He knew himself a tiny figure trudging through the ass-end of nothing beside a weird mile-long something that resembled a train but maybe wasn’t, far from the boozy coziness of his fire and his friends, spied on by the moon, the stars, and all the mysterious shapes that lived behind them. It minded him of an illustration in a children’s book he’d looked at recently—a pale boy with round eyes lost in a forest where the shadows were crookedly, sinisterly different in shape from the limbs and leaf sprays that cast them. It comforted Billy to think of this picture; it gave him a place to go with his fear, letting him pretend he was afraid instead of being afraid. He spent a lot of his time hiding out in the third person this way, objectifying the moments that upset him, especially when he was frightened or when he believed people were talking against him, whispering lies he couldn’t quite catch (this is why I’m telling the story like I am now, and not like I will later on when I relate how it was for me after things changed). So when he spotted Stupid poking his head out the door of the next boxcar, his heart was made suddenly, unreservedly, childishly glad, and he went forward in a shuffling run, hobbled by the weight of his pack. Stupid disappeared back into the car and by the time Billy reached the door, he couldn’t make out anything inside. The edge of his fear ripped away the flimsy shield of his imagination. He yanked out his ax handle and swooshed it through the air.
“Stupid!” he called. “Come on, boy!”
Stupid made a happy noise in his throat, but stayed hidden, and—to Billy’s surprise—another dog with a deeper bark went woof. Then a man’s voice, surprisingly mild, said, “Your dog’s comin’ with me, friend.”
“Hell you say!” Billy swung his ax handle against the door and was startled—the noise was not the expected clang but a dull thwack such as might have resulted from hitting a sofa cushion with a two-by-four.
“You send him on out!” Billy said. “I ain’t fuckin’ with ya!”
“I got no leash on him,” the man said.
Billy peered into the car and thought he spied a shadowy figure against the rear wall. He whistled and Stupid made another throaty response, but this one sounded confused. “Son of a bitch! Fuck you done with my dog?” Billy shouted.
A third dog—part terrier by the sound—let out a high-pitched rip of a growl. Paws clittered on the floor of the car.
“Tell you what, friend,” said the man. “Ain’t a thing I can do ’bout your dog. Dog’s in charge of where he’s headed. But I don’t mind too much you want to ride along.”
These words bred a cold vacancy in Billy’s gut and his legs went a little weak. Broke-brained as he was, he knew that taking a train ride with a giant in a pitch-dark boxcar was not the solution to any reasonable problem; but he couldn’t figure what else to do. A throbbing, rumbling noise started up. It didn’t have the belly-full-of-grinding-bones fullness of a real diesel engine, but an engine’s what it must have been, because a shuddery vibration shook the car, and the train jerked forward a couple of feet.
“Best hop on if you comin’,” said the man inside the car.
Billy glanced around to see if maybe a bull or somebody else official was nearby. It wasn’t in his nature to be running the yard cops in on anyone, especially a fellow tramp, but these were extreme circumstances. No one was in sight, though. Nothing but a bunch of cold dark and lonesome. The train lurched forward again, and this time it started rolling. All the dogs inside the car—Billy thought he could hear a half-dozen separate voices—got to yipping and woofing, as if excited to be going somewhere. The train began to roll faster.
Billy knew he had only seconds before he would no longer be able to keep up, before he’d lose his dog for sure. Desperation spiked in him, driving down his fear. With a shout he shucked his pack, heaved it into the car, then hauled himself in after it. As he lurched to his feet, ready to fight, the train lurched heavily and he went off balance, his arms windmilling, and rammed headfirst into the end wall of the car, knocking himself senseless.
Billy woke to find Stupid licking his face. The drool strings hanging from the dog’s dewlaps flicked across his cheek and chin. He pushed Stupid away and sat up holding his head, which was gonging something fierce.
“Welcome aboard, friend,” said the man’s voice. Billy swiveled his neck around toward him, a movement that caused him to wince.