Flanked by four mongrels, the man was sitting against the far wall. His stretched-out legs seemed to reach halfway across the car, and his shoulders were Frankenstein-sized under the Army surplus poncho he was wearing. He was in better health than any hobos of Billy’s acquaintance. His shoulder length hair was dark and shiny, his eyes clear, and his horsy face unmarked by gin blossoms or spider veins or any other sign of ill-use. An ugly face, albeit an amiable one. He had a calmness about him that rankled Billy, who could barely recall what calm was like.
“I ain’t your goddamn friend.” Billy rubbed his neck, trying to ease a feeling of compression.
“Guess not,” said the man. “But I’m bettin’ you will be.”
The dogs gazed at Billy with the same casual indifference as that displayed by the man, as if they were his familiars. They were a sorry bunch: a scrawny German shepherd; a runty collie with a weepy right eye; a brindled hound with orange eyes and a crooked hind leg; and a stubby-legged gray mutt with a broad chest that, Billy thought, had probably been responsible for the yappy growl. Not a one looked worth the effort it would take to keep them fed and healthy, and Billy speculated that maybe the man suffered from a condition similar to the one that had troubled his old traveling companion Clueless Joe, who had tried to persuade a railroad bull in Yakima to marry him and his dog.
A couple of other things struck Billy as odd. First off, the train had to be traveling forty miles an hour, enough speed so that the sound of their passage should have been deafening; yet they weren’t yelling, they were speaking in normal tones of voice. And then there was a faint yellow light inside the car, like the faded illumination that comes during a brownout. The light had no apparent source.
Spooked, Billy spotted the ax handle lying on the floor and grabbed it up. The collie came to his feet and barked, but the big man gentled him, and the dog curled up with the other three once again. Stupid, who had lifted his head, sighed and rested his muzzle on Billy’s knee.
“What sorta train is this?” Billy demanded, and the man said:
“Guess you could say we caught us a hot shot. We’ll be goin’ straight through. No stops.”
“Straight through to where?”
“Over yonder,” said the man. “You gon’ love it.”
The train swung into a bend, and in the strong moonlight Billy saw they were moving among a chain of snow peaks that swept off toward the horizon, all with dark skirts of evergreen. The Canadian Rockies, maybe?
“How long was I out for?” Billy asked. “Where the hell are we?”
“’Bout ten, fifteen minutes.” The man shifted and the dogs perked up their ears and cut their eyes toward him. “My name’s Pieczynski, by the way. Folks call me Pie.”
“Bullshit…ten minutes! Ain’t no country like this ten minutes out of Klamath Falls.”
“Sure there is,” said the man. “You just never rode it before.”
Billy noticed another unsettling thing. It was warmish in the car. An October night at altitude, he should be shivering like a wet cat. He’d squeeze himself into his mummy sack, then wedge the sack into the sleeping bag, and he’d still be cold. A terrible thought, the sort he usually dismissed as the result of too much drink, sprouted in his brain and sent out roots into every fissure, replacing his fear of getting thrown out of the car with a deeper, more soul-afflicting fear.
“What’s goin’ on here?” he said. “What happened to me?”
The man seemed to be assessing Billy, gauging his quality.
“Was it my liver?” Billy said. “My liver give out? Somebody bust my head open? What was it?”
“You ain’t dead, that’s what you goin’ on about,” said the man. “Dead’s what you almost was. Alive’s what’s in front of you.”
What with the wine he’d consumed and the blow to his head, Billy’s mind worked even less efficiently than normal, and he was coming to view the man as a spirit guide of some sort, one sent to escort him to his eternal torment.
“Okay,” he said. “I hear what you’re sayin’. But if I was…if I’s back in the yard and I could see myself now, I’d think I was dead, wouldn’t I?”
“Who the hell knows what you’d be thinkin’, all the wine you got in ya.” The man shoved the mutt’s behind off his hat brim and jammed the hat onto his head—it was fashioned out of beige leather and shaped cowboy-style, with the brim turned down in front and the crown hand-notched. “Whyn’t you get some sleep? It all be a lot clearer come mornin’.”
The floor was softer than any floor Billy had ever run across in a boxcar—that and the warmth made the notion of sleep inviting. But he had the idea that if he went to sleep, he would not wake up happy. “Fuck sleep!” he said. “I want you to tell me what’s goin’ on!”
“You do what ya feel, friend. But I’m gonna close my eyes for a while.” The man turned onto his side and went to patting a stuffed cloth sack—one of three he had with him—into a pillow. He glanced over at Billy and said, “What’s your name?”
“You know damn well what’s my name! You the one sent to bring me.”
The man grimaced. “What is it? Ashcan Ike? The Philadelphia Fuck-up…some shit like that?”
Billy told him.
“Billy Long Gone,” said the man. “Huh! You sure got the right moniker to be catchin’ this particular ride.” He settled on his pillow, pushed the hat down over his eyes. “Maybe tomorrow you’ll feel good enough to tell me your real name.”
An hour or so after the big man started snoring, the train snaked down out of the mountains and onto a marshy plain that put Billy in mind of an illustration in a pop-up dinosaur book he’d found in a Seattle dumpster six months back. It had depicted a marsh that extended from horizon to horizon. Reeds and grass and winding waterways, with here and there a patch of solid ground from which sprung weird-looking trees. Giant dragonflies hovered and flashed in the light, and toothy amphibians poked their wrinkled snouts out of the water. Larger amphibians waded about on their hind legs. There had been over forty different types of dinosaur in the picture—he’d counted every one. Take away the dinosaurs, the dragonflies, and what was left wouldn’t be much different from the moonlit plain then passing before his eyes.
The similarity between picture and reality seized hold of him, rerouting his thoughts into a wet-brained nostalgia that induced him to stare open-mouthed at the landscape as if entranced. Scenes from his life melted up from nowhere like skin showing through a soaked T-shirt, then dried away into nothing. Scenes that were part fantasy, part distorted memory, filled with parental taunts, the complaints of women, and the babble of shadowy unrecognizable figures who went tumbling slowly away, growing so small they seemed characters in another alphabet he had never learned to read. Even when the plain was blotted out by the black rush of another train running alongside them, he barely registered the event, adrift in a sodden unfocused delirium…A dog barking brought him halfway back. The brindled hound was standing at the edge of the open door, barking so fiercely at the other train, ropy twists of saliva were slung from its muzzle. All the dogs were barking, he realized. He picked out Stupid’s angry, bassy note in the chorus. Then he was snatched up, shaken, and that brought him the rest of the way back. He found himself staring into the big man’s frowning face, heard him say, “You with me, Billy? Wake up!” The man shook him again, and he put out a hand in a feeble attempt to interrupt the process.
“I’m here,” Billy said. “I’m okay, I’m here.”
“Stay back from the door,” the man said. “Probably nothin’s gonna happen. But just you stay away from it.”
The dogs were going crazy, barking at the other train, which was running along a track some thirty feet away, going in the same direction they were, and seemed identical to the train they were riding, with a string of boxcars towed behind a Streamliner engine. Laying tracks so far apart didn’t make much sense to Billy, and he was all set to ask the big man how come this was, when something wide and dark fluttered down out of the night sky and settled onto one of the cars. It was as if a dirty blanket had come flapping out of nowhere and collected atop the car in a lump.