“Hungry?” said Pieczynski—his voice startled me, and I nearly toppled out the door. He was holding out what looked to be a flat gray cake with a faint purplish cast.
“What is it?” The cake was cold and slimy to the touch.
“Jungleberries.” Pieczynski settled beside me, his legs dangling off the edge of the car. “We mush ’em up and press ’em. Go on…give it a try.”
nibbled at the edge of the cake. It was almost tasteless—just a vague fruity tang. I took a bigger bite, then another, then wolfed the whole thing down. It didn’t satisfy my hunger, but after a few minutes I felt an appreciable sense of well-being.
“There some kinda dope in this shit?” I asked, taking a second cake from Pieczynski.
He shrugged. “Seein’ how they make you feel, I s’pose there must be somethin’ in ’em. Couldn’t tell you what.”
“I don’t believe I ever heard of jungleberries.” I turned the cake over in my hand, as if expecting to find a list of ingredients.
“There’s a whole buncha things you ain’t heard of that you’re gon’ be comin’ up against real soon.” Pieczynski scrunched around so he could look directly at me. “How you feelin’?”
I gestured with the cake. “Big as you are, I eat another of these damn things, I’m liable to be lookin’ down at you.
Pieczynski gave a dismissive flip of his hand. “I ain’t talking ’bout if you high. Is your body strong? Your thinkin’? I know they are. Same thing happened to me. Night I crawled onto one of these here trains, I was more messed up than you was. Sicker’n a caught fish from crack. Couldn’t keep nothin’ in my stomach. Doubt I weighed more’n hunnerd-sixty. I was havin’ hallucinations. Truth be told, I was damn near dead. But the next mornin’ it was like I was reborn.” He took a bite of his cake, chewed it noisily, swallowed. “Same thing happens to ever’body catches out on the black trains.”
We had begun climbing a fairly steep grade that would, I supposed, take us up into those dark green hills, and as we passed a defile, I saw at the bottom of it what appeared to be the wreckage of a train like the one we were riding. It was nearly shrouded by huge ferns and other growth, but I made out rips and gouges in the sides of the cars.
“Ever’ once in a while comes a flock of beardsleys,” Pieczynski said, staring gloomily down at the wreck. “Train ain’t gon’ survive that.”
Despite the cake-and-a-half I’d eaten, the sight of the wreck unsettled me. “What kind of place is this? These things…the trains. They’re alive, ain’t they?”
“They ’bout the most alive things I ever run across. Though that don’t seem real plausible if you think about it in terms of where you useta be.” Pieczynski spat a gray wad of jungleberry out the door. “Don’t nobody know what kind of place this is. Somewheres else is all I know. People taken to callin’ it Yonder.”
“Somewhere else,” I said thoughtfully. “Yonder. That sure ’nough covers a lot of ground.”
“Yeah, well. Maybe if some scientist or somebody was here, maybe they could say it better ’bout where we at. But so far ain’t nobody caught the ride ’cept for tramps and some kids and a coupla yuppie riders. One of the kid’s got hisself a theory about it all, but what he says sounds harebrained to me.” Pieczynski made a noise like a horse blowing out breath. “Me, I love it. Life I’m leadin’ now beats hell outa the life I useta have. But there’s times it don’t seem natural. You got these trains rollin’ ever’where on tracks nobody built. Ain’t even tracks, really. Some sort of natural formation looks like tracks. That ain’t weird enough, you got the beardsleys and other animals just as bad. And then you got no people that was born here. It’s like God was building a world and decided he didn’t like how it was shapin’ up, so he went and left it unfinished. I don’t know.” He tossed a piece of jungleberry cake to the dogs, who sniffed at it and let it lie. “Why should creation be all one way?” he went on. “Why should this place make sense when you lay it next to the one we put behind us? I just leave it at that.”
“I think we’re dead,” I told him. “And this here’s the afterlife.”
“An afterlife designed for a few hunnerd train riders? Who knows? Maybe. Most ever’body feels they must be dead when they come. But there’s one argument against that notion that’s tough to get around.”
“Oh, yeah? What is it?”
“You can die here, friend,” said Pieczynski. “You can die here quicker’n you’d believe.”
I asked Pieczynski more questions, but he acted as if talking exhausted him and his answers grew even less informative. I did get out of him that we were headed for a settlement up in the hills, also called Yonder, and that dogs weren’t native to this place; he often returned to the world and collected dogs, because they were useful in chasing something he called “fritters” away from the settlement. We fell silent a while and watched the hills build around us, the dark green resolving into dense tropical-looking vegetation. Plants with enormous rain-catching leaves and trees laden with vines and large blue and purple flowers hanging from them in bunches. I spotted dark shapes crossing the sky from time to time, but they were too distant to identify. Every unfamiliar thing I saw disturbed me. Though I still felt good, I couldn’t shake a sense of unease. I was certain there was something Pieczynski wasn’t telling me, or else there was something important he didn’t know. But I’d been considerably more confused about my whereabouts and destination in the past, hopping freights in a state of derangement and winding up in places that it had taken days to locate on my mental map. I had learned to thrive on disorientation. You might say I’d been in training for this kind of ride all my years on the rails.
Pieczynski nodded off for a bit, and I became concerned that we’d sleep past where we were supposed to detrain, so I woke him.
“Jesus Christ!” he said, disgruntled, and rubbed his eyes. He yawned. “Don’t worry about it. Train always stops the same places. Always stops in Klamath Falls, always stops in Yonder. That’s why they built the settlement there.”
“Why’s that?”
“Why’s it always stop where it does? That what you’re askin’?”
“Yeah.”
“Y’know, I still ain’t figured out how to ask the trains any questions,” he said. “Maybe you can figure it out, you ask so many damn questions yourself.”
I apologized for waking him, and, mollified, he said it was no big deal. He grabbed a canteen from his pack, had a swallow, and passed it to me. Warmish water. It tasted good.
“You gon’ tell me your real name?” he asked. “If I’m gonna introduce you ’round, be better if I knew what to call you.”
“Maurice,” I said. “Maurice Showalter.”
He tried it out, frowned and said, “Damn if I don’t believe you be better off stickin’ with Billy Long Gone.”
The train slowed and stopped, coiled around the base of a hill. We jumped out and started up the slope, pushing through dense brush, bushes with big floppy leaves that spilled water on us as we knocked them aside. From the top of the hill you could see eastward across another expanse of plain scattered about with bright blue lakes shaped roughly like the punctuation to an unwritten paragraph—stray periods, semicolons, and question marks strewn across an immense yellowish green page. Farther off was an area of dark mist that spread along the horizon, broken its entire length by a range of forbidding-looking mountains about ten sizes bigger than the ones we had passed through after leaving Klamath Falls, their peaks set so close together, they might have been a graph forecasting the progress of a spectacularly erratic business. When I asked Pieczynski what lay beyond them, he said he didn’t know, he had only traveled a short ways out onto the plain, pointing out an area marked by three small round lakes that formed an elision to an invisible sentence that had no formal ending but simply trailed away…