“Call them mountains over there Yonder’s Wall,” he said. “The trains go up into ’em, and we’ve had some folks take a ride out that way. Ain’t a’one come back to see us.” He squinted into the gray distance. “Don’t seem like much of an argument for followin’ ’em.”
We walked along a ridge line for a while, then along a red dirt path that angled down through jungly growth. The dogs trotted ahead and behind us, sniffing at leaves and crawling things, their ears pricking to variations in the fizzing noises—insects, I assumed—that issued from the vegetation. After about five minutes of down, the path leveled off and meandered alongside a rivercourse; I could hear though not see the movement of water close by. Many of the smaller tree trunks were sheathed in a mosaic scale of pale blue and dull green that appeared itself coated in a cracked glaze—glittering wherever the sun struck it. The leaves that dangled down over our heads were tattered and fleshy, like pale green, flabby, boneless hands. Vines were interwoven so thickly above, I couldn’t tell if the leaves belonged to a tree or were part of some parasitic growth. Sunlight fell through chinks in the canopy, painting streaks of gold on the path. You could see only about a dozen feet into the jungle on either side before your eye met with an impenetrable wall of growth, and I couldn’t understand how, with only two, three hundred people living in Yonder, they kept the path so clear. I’d never been in a tropical jungle before, but I had the thought that it should be hotter and smellier than this one. It still felt like a spring day, and though now and again I caught a hint of rot, the predominant scent was a heavy floral sweetness.
After a few minutes more we reached the river’s edge, and I was left slackjawed by what I saw on the opposite shore. It looked as if people were living in chambers that were supported somehow in the crown of an immense tree. I could see them walking about in their separate rooms, which were all framed in sprays of leaves. Then I made out gleams of what appeared to be polished walls and realized that what I’d taken for a tree must be the ruin of an ancient building, seven stories high (an estimate, because the floors were sunk down in places, elevated in others) and occupying several hundred feet of the bank, the entire structure overgrown with moss and vines, its facade crumbled away, leaving dozens of chambers open to the weather. Blankets and other types of cloth hangings were arranged over a number of these openings. Fronting the ruin was a stretch of bare rock on which several people were washing their laundry in the murky green water and then spreading it to dry. It was the Conrad Hilton of hobo jungles, and I wouldn’t have been greatly surprised to see a doorman guarding the entrance, dressed in a stove-in top hat and tails, and smoking the stub of a found cigar.
There were twenty, twenty-five dogs snooting about on the rocks or just lying in the sun, and when our dogs spotted them, they all took to barking excitedly. A couple of the people waved, and I heard somebody call out to Pieczynski.
“Thought you said wasn’t no people born over here,” I said to Pieczynski. “So where’d that fuckin’ ruin come from?”
“The hell you talkin’ about?” he said. “Ain’t no ruins around here.”
“Then what you call that?” I pointed at the opposite bank.
He gave a snort of laughter. “That ain’t no ruin, friend. That there’s a tree.”
About five years ago when I was riding with a female hobo name of Bubblehead, she used to read me from the children’s books I carried in my pack, and there was this one had a tree in it called a monkey-puzzle tree. It had branches that would grow out sideways and then straight down; the whole thing resembled an intricate cage with all these nooks and crannies inside the branches where you could shelter from the elements. Yonder’s tree might have been a giant mutant brother to the monkey-puzzle tree, but there were a few salient differences: the larger horizontal branches flattened out to form floored chambers with walls of interwoven foliage, and various of the branches that grew straight down were hollow and had been tricked out with ladders. There were ladders, too, all up and down the trunk, and elevators that worked on pulleys and could be lowered and raised between levels. I reckon there were in the high hundreds of chambers throughout. Maybe more. Only about 150 were occupied, I was told, so I had my choice. I settled myself in a smallish one close to the main trunk on the third floor; it was open on two sides, but I figured I’d find a way to close it off, and it was just the right size for me and Stupid…though I wasn’t sure he’d be joining me. He’d run off with the other dogs as soon as he’d finished paddling across the river. The sweetish smell of the jungle was even stronger near the trunk, and I supposed it was the tree giving off that odor.
Pieczynski handed me over to a trim, tanned, thirty-something woman name of Annie Ware and went off to see to his own affairs. Annie had a sandy haircut like a boy’s and wore khaki shorts and a loose blouse of stitched-together bandannas. It had been a long time since I’d looked at a woman with anything approaching a clear mind and unclouded eye, and I found myself staring at Annie. There was a calmness to her face illustrated by the fine lines around her gray eyes and mouth, and though she wasn’t what you’d call a raving beauty, she was a damn sight more attractive than the women I’d encountered on the rails. She led me through the dim interior of the tree, passing several occupied chambers lit by candles, and explained how things worked in Yonder.
“We get most of our supplies from back in the world,” she said. “There’s five of us—Pie’s one—who don’t mind traveling back and forth. They scrounge what we need. Rest of us wouldn’t go back for love nor money.”
When I asked how come this was, she shot me a sideways glance and said, “You feel like goin’ back?”
“Not right now,” I told her. “But I ’spect sooner or later I’ll be wantin’ to.”
“I don’t know. You look like a stayer to me.” She guided me around a corner and we came to a place where you could see out through a couple of unoccupied chambers at the jungle. The sunlight made the flattened branch shine like polished mahogany. “Everyone works here. Some people fish, some hunt for edibles in the jungle. Some weave, some cook…”
“I can fish,” I said. “My daddy useta…”
“You’ll be doin’ chores at first. Cleaning and runnin’ errands. Like that.”
“Is that so?” I stopped walking and glared at her. “I been doin’ for myself…”
She cut me off again. “We can’t tolerate no lone wolfs here,” she said. “We all work together or else we’d never survive. New arrivals do chores, and that’s what you’ll be doin’ till you figure out what job suits you.”
“Just who is it lays down the rules?”
“Ain’t no rules. It’s how things are is all.”
“Well, I don’t believe that,” I said. “Even out on the rails, free as that life is, there’s a peckin’ order.”
“You ain’t out on the rails no more.” Annie folded her arms beneath her breasts. Her eyes narrowed, and I had the impression she perceived me as an unsavory article. “Some people been here more’n twenty years. When they came, there was people here who told ’em how things worked. And there was people here even before them.”