As I hobbled around the car, I remembered the clutch of the beardsley’s sail and thought how lucky I’d been. Annie kept by my side, supporting me. I told her about how I’d felt a human vibe off the beardsley in the moments before I killed it, and what I thought that meant.
“It probably didn’t mean nothin’,” she said. “You were scared to death. You liable to think almost anything, a time like that.”
“Yeah,” I said. “But this was real strong.”
“So what?” she said. “So it was human, so what? Who cares what it means? You ain’t never gon’ figure it out. Ain’t no point in tryin’. Hell, that’s one reason I come with you. I couldn’t listen to people’s harebrained theories no more. I wanted to go where there’s somethin’ more constructive to do than sit around and contemplate my goddamn navel.”
“You didn’t see what I saw,” I told her. “You had, you’d be curious, too.”
“Fine,” she said. “It’s a stunnin’ development. The beardsleys are human. What’s it all fuckin’ mean? I won’t rest till I get to the bottom of it.”
“Jesus, Annie,” I said. “I was just speculatin’.”
“Well, save it! If we survive this ride, maybe I’ll be interested. But right now I got more and better to think about.”
I said, “All right.”
She peeked at my shoulders and said, “Oh, God! You’re bleedin’ again. Come on. Sit back down, lemme see what I can do.”
In the morning I pushed open the door and had a look round. The mountains loomed above us. Granite flanks rising into fangs of snow and ice that themselves vanished into fuming dark clouds, fans of windblown ice blasted into semipermanent plumes from the scarps. Back in Yonder, the mountains had seemed huge, but viewed up close they were the roots of a world, the bottom of a place boundless and terrible, a border between trouble and emptiness. Their names, if they had names, would be violent hatcheting sounds followed by a blast of wind. They offered no hint of happy promise. A chill bloomed inside me from a recognition of my folly, of having given up on Yonder and put Annie and myself in the way of far worse. But when Annie came to stand beside me, all I said was, “Looks like it’s gon’ get cold.”
She stood gazing up at the mountains and said, “Yeah, looks like.” She went over to the sleeping bags and dug a down jacket out of her pack.
On the outside of the car, next to the door, were several gouges that appeared to be scabbing over with filmy black stuff, the golden congealed blood showing through. I glanced at the mountains again and thought I saw a flash of lightning in the clouds.
“Close the door,” Annie said. “We’ll be there soon enough. Ain’t no use in starin’ at it.”
I slid the door shut and sat beside her. “It’s just mountains,” I said.
She gave a sniff of laughter. “Yeah, and Godzilla’s just tall.”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry if this turns out wrong. I didn’t…It felt right to leave.”
“I ain’t gon’ blame you. I coulda stayed.” Then after a pause, she said, “I’m glad I didn’t stay. I couldn’t tolerate Yonder no more.”
That surprised me a little, though I’d expected she would come around to admitting it eventually. “We probably don’t go way high up in ’em,” I said. “Tracks wouldn’t get built that high.”
“They ain’t real tracks and nobody built ’em.”
“Well, yeah. There’s that.” I tried to think of something comforting to say. “’Member the Wizard of Oz? How he had this fearsome voice, but he turned out to be a little fat guy and the voice was fake? The mountains are probably like that.”
“Dorothy and the Scarecrow,” she said dispiritedly. “That’s us, all right.” She worked a hand in down among the clothes in her pack and pulled out a deck of cards. “Wanna play some gin?”
So we ate jungleberries to calm our nerves and played cards as the train ascended into the mountains, going over the Wall. We played for a dollar a point, double for gin, and after a while we began to joke and laugh, and for the most part forgot about the wind, which had started howling around the car, and the cold that was gradually seeping inside. Annie kicked my butt for the first hour, but then I had a run of luck and went up several hundred dollars. I dumped the next game to bring us closer to even, and as I shuffled and dealt the cards, I thought of other rides we’d taken both separately and together, beat up and fucked up, drunk and stoned, sick and afraid, and how it seemed all that had been preparation for this ride up into wherever. Maybe it had been a form of preparation, maybe the world was so painstaking and intricate in its wisdom that part of its process was to prepare those who failed it for a wild ride into an unknown land. But Annie was right. True or not, it was useless knowledge. It was the kind of thing you did not need to live. The arguments of doctrine and the study of philosophy, they might or might not have validity, but the only functions they served were either to exercise the mind or, if pursued to excess, to blind you to the bitterness of life and keep you from the more joyful practices necessary to withstand it.
“Hey,” said Annie, beaming. “Guess what?”
“What?” I said.
She spread out her hand for me to see. “Gin!”
Midway through the game I had to piss, and when I cracked the door to do so, I found we were rolling slowly through a whitish fog so thick I could barely make out the wheels of the train. Apparently we were down in some sort of declivity, shielded from the wind, because it was howling louder than ever. I thought it must have been breaking off enormous ledges of snow—audible above the howling were explosive noises such as accompany avalanches. Half-frozen, I finished my business and ducked back inside.
“What’s it like out there?” Annie asked.
“Like a whole buncha nothin’. Got some serious fog.” I sat back down, watched her deal. “We must be down in a pocket.”
Done with dealing, Annie studied her cards, glanced at me, and said, “Your turn.”
I picked up my hand, made a stab at arranging it. “Fog’s not even driftin’. You’d think with all the wind, it’d find some way to blow a little bit down where we are.”
“Got any threes?” she asked, and laid down a three.
I started to pick up the card, changed my mind, and drew from the deck. “Maybe it ain’t all wind. Maybe it’s somethin’ else goin’ on that sounds like wind.”
“C’mon, Billy,” she said. “Play a card. Even if it’s the last thing I do, I’m gonna beat you silly.”
There came a noise, then. A shriek…except it didn’t come from any throat. It was more an electronic note edged with bursts of static, and it was loud—loud as a police siren suddenly switched on behind you. We dropped the cards, scrambled farther away from the door, and as we did, the shriek sounded again and a brilliant white flash cut a diagonal seam across the door, like someone was outside and swinging a magnesium torch at the car. The heat that came with it had that kind of intensity. The walls of the car rippled, the floor humped beneath us. For a fraction of a second, the seam glowed too brightly to look at, but it faded quickly, and we saw that a rip had been sliced in the door, leaving an aperture about six inches wide and three feet long. I heard distant shrieks, identical to the one I’d initially heard, and thereafter a tremendous explosion that reminded me, in its magnitude, of dynamite charges I’d set when working highway construction the summer after high school. Whatever the car was made of—skin, metal, plastic, a combination of things—its torn substance had been somehow sealed, cauterized, and there was not the slightest seepage of golden blood. We heard more explosions and shrieks, but when after a few minutes nothing else struck the car, we went over to the rip and peered through it. Annie gasped, and I said, “Jesus…” Then, both inspired to act at the same time, we slid the door wide open so we could get a better look at where we were bound.