I heard a noise, saw Annie scaling the slope toward me. She gave me a hug and took in the view. “Well,” she said. “I was right.”
“I never doubted it.”
She put an arm about my waist and squeezed. “You lie.”
We stood looking across our new home, calm as house buyers checking out a property, and I was actually starting to think where it was we might settle—would it be better on the edge or downtown close to the tube?—when our three companions came to join us atop the rise. The Mexican couple glanced at Annie and me timidly. They stared impassively at the vista; the woman crossed herself. I was surprised that she retained the traditions of her faith after having traveled so far and learned so much. Maybe it was a reflex.
“English?” the bearded man asked, and Annie said, “American.”
“I am Azerbaijani.” He squinted at me and scowled. “You take my bullets?”
I admitted that I had.
“Very smart.” He smiled, a clever, charming smile accompanied by an amused nod. “But rifle is broken. Bullets no good.”
He gazed out at the city with its central strangeness of opacity and violet fire. I wanted to ask if he had ridden a black train to some Azerbaijani halfway house and how he had traveled the rest of the way, and what he thought was going on; but none of it was pressing, so I joined him in silent observance. Considering the five of us, the variance of our origins, I thought I was beginning to have a grasp of the mutability of the unknowable, of the complexity and contrariness of the creature god machine or universal dynamic that had snatched us up. And this led me to recognize that the knowable, even the most familiar articles of your life, could be turned on their sides, shifted, examined in new light, and seen in relation to every other thing, and thus were possessed of a universality that made them, ultimately, unknowable. Annie would have scoffed at this, deemed all my speculation impractical woolgathering; but when I looked at the tube I reckoned it might be exactly the kind of thinking we would need wherever we were going.
The sun, or something like a sun, was trying to break through the clouds, shedding a nickel-colored glare. The Mexican woman peered at each of us, nodded toward the city, and said, “Nos vamos?” Annie said, “Yeah, let’s go check this out.” But the Azerbaijani man sighed and made a comment that in its simplicity and precision of vocal gesture seemed both to reprise my thoughts and to invest them with the pathos common to all those disoriented by the test of life.
“These places,” he said musingly, then gave a slight, dry laugh as if dismissive of the concern that had inspired him to speak. “I don’t know these places.”
Jailbait
IRON HORSE WAS, IN MADCAT’S ESTIMATION, A true thoroughbred among fortified wines and every bit the equal of Night Train. The packaging, which depicted a brazen fire-breathing stallion in full gallop, contrived a perfect visual analog to the charge it had made through his bloodstream. Two pints had trampled his anxieties, flattened out his migraine, and enabled him to view with contentment the sorry particulars of his place in the world: a bridge on the edge of the Spokane freight yard, an abutment spangled with graffiti rising to a vault of discolored concrete that roofed the cardboard pallet where he rested with legs asprawl, head propped against his pack, a wiry, weathered man of thirty whose ragged beard and gaunt features presented an image of Old Testament fortitude. His left eye was bloodshot, the skin around it discolored from a beating, and a less recent scar ridged the cheekbone beneath it. Now and then he would sit up straight and warm his hands at a fire gone to embers, gazing blearily about, while the rush of traffic overhead fell around him like the surging of invisible tides.
Beyond the bridge lay a muddy, rutted ground dappled with snowy patches and slicks of dead grass. Railroad junk strewn everywhere. Rusting wheels, dismantled brake shoes, and objects less definable nested in the weeds along the tracks. A waste bordered by stacks of railroad ties and dark gatherings of boxcars, all sketched in glints and gleams by the shining of a high-flying half moon, so the place looked to have acquired the cozy, comprehensible geography of a village and an air of romantic isolation it did not possess by day. Somewhere off in the yard two cars coupled with a steely clash. The forlorn voice of a train, as questioning as a whale’s song, sounded the greater distance, and with its fading, a shadow slipped from behind a stack of ties and darted toward the bridge, resolving into a slight, pale girl with unnaturally red hair and dressed in baggy clothing. She stopped about forty feet away and peered at Madcat, trying—he supposed—to make certain he was harmless. Then an engine unit came chugging out onto the section of track behind her, like a huge yellow-and-black mechanical dog sniffing at her heels, and she scooted forward again. She stood hugging herself just beneath the lee of the bridge. Dyed scarlet dreadlocks hung down over a sharp, thin-boned face. Skin so white as to seem nearly translucent. Pretty…but the sort of witchy Appalachian prettiness that never lasts much past twenty. Her sweatshirt and carpenter’s pants rubbed gray with grime. Still hugging herself, she edged a few steps closer, and once the noise of the engine had abated, she asked, “Kin you he’p me, mister?”
“I kinda doubt it,” Madcat said.
The girl’s head twitched as if the flatness of his response had touched a nerve.
“I got no money to spare, that’s what you’re asking,” he said.
She glanced nervously back toward the yard and when she spoke, her voice had a catch in it. “Kin I set here a minute? Kin you jus’ lemme set here and not bother me?”
That irritated him. “Set wherever the fuck you want.”
She hesitated, then dropped to her knees beside the fire and stretched her hands out over it—as if conjured by the gesture, a tiny flame sheeted from the bed of embers, brightening the glow on her palms. Madcat caught a whiff of creosote and thought she must have been standing close to the ties for quite some time to pick up that smell.
He cracked the cap of his third pint, had a swallow, and considered the girl. Her eyes were shut tight, squeezing out tears. Yet for all her apparent helplessness, the tense, forward-thrusting attitude of her neck and the thick scarlet twists of hair caging her white face gave her an uncanny look. He imagined she was casting an evil spell and the tears were the result of concentrated effort. She made a fretful noise in her throat, drew a breath that pulled the sweatshirt taut across her breasts.
“Want some wine?” he asked, holding out the bottle.
Her eyes snapped open and went toward it, the way a snake will quicken on spotting a mouse. She shook her head, sat back on her haunches. “There’s somethin’ I should tell you ’bout,” she said.
“Oh, that’s okay,” he said. “I got enough troubles, I don’t need to be taking yours on.”
“Naw, I ’spect you gon’ wanna hear this.” She hooked three of the scarlet snakes with her fingers, dragged them back from her face. “Me and Carter…this boy I met. We was smoking a joint—” she gestured toward the yard “—over in there somewheres. I had to go pee and I was comin’ back…I’s ’bout to crawl ’tween two cars to get to where Carter was settin’. And that’s when I seen this shadow rise up behind him. This man.” She made the words “this man” into a question. “He had a club or somethin’,” she went on. “He didn’t say a word, he just stood there a second like he’s thinkin’ things over, then he hit Carter in the head. Carter went flat on his face and he hit him again. He kept on hittin’ him even though there wasn’t no point to it. I could tell Carter was dead.” She stared into the embers. “I don’t reckon he seen me. I sure didn’t see him—he had his back turned the whole time I’s watching.” She looked pleadingly at Madcat. “I didn’t know where to turn. I mus’ been an hour wanderin’ round out there ’fore I run into you.”