“I ’member the first time I rode,” she said. “It was the best damn feelin’! I caught me a local out of Tucson with this guy I met in Albuquerque. We found us a flatcar loaded with pipe. Right in the middle of the pipe there was this little square area that was clear. Like a nest. We got ourselves down in there and partied all the way to Denver.”
This took me by surprise because it was the first time I’d heard anyone in Yonder reminisce about their life back in the world. We were sitting in Annie’s room, which was half again as big as mine. Her ceiling was contrived of interwoven leaves and vines and a branch thick as a man’s waist that cut across on the diagonal, and her walls were curtains made of sewn-together remnants, pieces of old skirts and sleeping bags and towels and such. She’d fashioned a mattress by stuffing a hand-sewn cover with grass—it looked a damn sight more comfortable than my old fart-sack resting on a hardwood floor. Candles fired the curtain colors with their flickering. It was a nice cozy little space.
“My first time wasn’t all that great,” I said. “But I know what you talkin’ about.”
“Tell me,” she said, and this, too, surprised me. I’d grown used to people not caring about my particulars.
I drew my legs up so I was sitting cross-legged and looked down at my hands. “I was one pitiful motherfucker back then. Couldn’t hold a job. Not ’cause I didn’t do the work. I’d always get pissed off at somebody in authority and cuss ’em out, and that’d be that. But then I met this woman. Jesus, she was somethin’. She knew what kinda trouble she was gettin’ with me, but she loved me anyway. I don’t understand why to this day. She didn’t try to straighten me out; she made me want to straighten myself out. But I just couldn’t handle bein’ happy. ’Least that’s the way it seems to me now. I went to a shrink, and he told me I was always tryin’ to punish myself ’cause of all the crap my daddy put me through. I told him, ‘Hell, I know that. What I do about it?’ And he says, ‘What do you want to do about it?’ I thought that was bullshit, so I got mad and walked out of his office.” I picked at the cuticle on my thumbnail. “I understand now he’d seen through me. I didn’t want to do anything about it. It was easier to go on bein’ miserable than it was to work at bein’ happy. That’s what made me mad. Him knowin’ that about me. I was so upset by what he’d said, I found me an ATM and took all the money out of my account. Our account. I was livin’ with her and we’d merged our finances, such as they were. I took over seven hunnerd dollars, most of it hers. Then I went to the liquor store and bought myself a bottle of expensive whiskey. Gentleman Jack. And I headed down to the Oregon City freight yard to drink it. I wasn’t plannin’ on goin’ nowhere, but it started to rain and I crawled into an open boxcar to finish my bottle. Next I know, train’s pullin’ into the switchyard at Roseville. I run into a couple hobos jungled up outside the yard. They was happy drunk, on their way to the hobo convention at Brill. Come along with us, they said. All they wanted was the crank and the booze my seven hunnerd could buy. But I figured I’d found my true companions. In a way I s’pose I had.”
Saying it out loud seemed to lighten me by half, and thinking I could let go of it all just that easy, it made me wish I could unsay it, gather it back inside me. It wasn’t something I felt I should ever be free of, even for a few seconds.
“What was her name?” Annie asked.
“Eileen,” I said.
The name lay like a puddle that had formed between us, but when Annie spoke again, it seemed to evaporate.
“Damn near everyone here got a past needs livin’ down,” she said. “Only option we got is to make the best of what is.”
“That don’t hardly seem like enough.”
We sat for a while without speaking. It started to rain—I could hear it coming down heavy through the curtains, but we were so deep inside the tree, none of the drops penetrated the canopy. It felt like we were in a bubble of light submerged in a rushing river.
“Somethin’ else I better tell you,” I said. “I been thinkin’ ’bout catchin’ out again.”
Her face appeared to sharpen, but she remained silent.
“Maybe headin’ out east,” I said. “Takin’ a trip through the mountains.”
“That’s crazy,” she said quietly. “Don’t nobody come back from there.”
“You sayin’ you never thought about it? I don’t believe that. I know why you hangin’ ’round the trains.”
“Sure, I thought about it.” Annie’s voice was hard the way your voice becomes when you’re suppressing emotion. “Life here…It ain’t livin’, it’s just bein’. There’s times I considered takin’ that trip. But that ain’t what I call it.”
“What do you call it?” I asked.
“Checkin’ out,” she said.
“Maybe there’s somethin’ there.”
“Yeah, right!”
“Seriously,” I said. “What’s the point of all this bullshit if there ain’t somethin’ out there?”
Annie gave a sarcastic laugh. “Oh, I see. There’s gotta be a point. Worst thing about this place is havin’ to listen to a buncha tramps settin’ ’round philosophizin’!” She affected a crotchety voice. “Yonder’s the borderland between life and death. It’s a computer game, it’s new world a’buildin’. It’s a little scrap of reality left over from creation, like the scraps get left over from a cookie cutter.”
“I never run across that last ’un,” I said.
Annie snorted in disgust. “Stick around! You’ll hear crazier’n that. I realize most people here just got their brains back, but ain’t none of ’em geniuses. They’d be better off tryin’ to figger out what to do ’bout the fritters, or somethin’ practical, ’steada studyin’ on what’s to come and why.”
“Tell me ’bout the fritters,” I said. “Nobody ever wants to talk about ’em. They just say they’re dangerous.”
“I don’t really know what they are. They look like apple fritters and they float around in the air. They got some kinda poison’ll kill you quick.”
I gave a chuckle. “Must be all that deep fat fryin’ it takes to make ’em.”
“You think they’re funny?” Annie soured on the conversation. “Now the rains come, won’t be long ’fore you find out exactly how funny they are.”
I had to admit Annie was right—listening to a bunch of hobos philosophize, the majority of them with less than high school educations, wasn’t all that entertaining. But philosophizing was a natural outgrowth of life over Yonder. Most people spent six or seven hours a day working, and most had a relationship of some type that served to pass the time; but there was usually idle time, and even though everybody’s curiosity—like my own—seemed to have been diminished, the question of where-the-hell-are-we was bound to pop up whenever you let your thoughts drift. Talk to a person more than once, and they’d tell you how they stood on the matter. My informal poll showed that about a third of the residents believed we had passed over into some borderland of death and were being tested to determine where we would end up. Maybe a quarter believed that railroad yards back in the world were areas where the borders between dimensions blurred, and that we had switched tracks, so to speak, and no test was involved. About twenty percent adhered to Bobby’s computer game theory, but I think this number was skewed because Bobby was evangelical about the theory and had influenced a sizable portion of the punk riders to buy into it. The rest of the people had more individualized theories, although they generally played off one of the three main ideas.