The scattery way she talked out the story made him think she didn’t believe it—or maybe putting it into words had rendered it unbelievable. It rang true enough to him. “You better get on home,” he told her. He struggled to his feet, back-pocketed the pint.
“Home?” She gave a shaky-sounding laugh. “I’m a long way from home, mister.”
He shouldered his pack, settled the straps. She came to one knee, alarmed, and asked what he was doing. “Long as I can catch out on a freight train,” he said, “cops ain’t gon’ find me hanging ’round no fucking crime scene.” He headed out into the yard, trying to shake off his buzz, and she scrambled after him. “But you didn’t do nothin’!” she said. “You got nothin’ to worry ’bout!”
“You think that, then you don’t know shit about cops.” He picked up his pace.
“Kin I come?”
She was standing with knees together, hands clasped, head tipped to one side, the pose of a little girl left behind by older kids. Framed by the cathedral-like sweep of the bridge, she looked—with her strange punky hair—the picture of innocence freshly corrupted. He had the sense she knew the impression she was making.
“I never rode the trains before. Carter, he was gonna teach me…” She brought her clasped hands up to her chest. “I won’t be no burden, I swear. If you want I kin be with you. Y’know?” Meeting his gaze, she seemed to back away from commitment. “For a while, anyways,” she said. “If you want.”
He wasn’t sure he was interested in what she was offering—he’d been a long while without, almost three years, and most of his memories of women had to do with the trouble they landed you in and not the sweetness they brought.
“All right,” he said, after giving the notion a couple of turns. “But don’t go thinking you can count on me. All that’s happening here is we’re taking a train ride together. I’m nobody you want to be counting on.”
Often after one of his spells, and sometimes during them, Madcat would dream about trains—not the Union Pacific freights he was used to, but supernatural beings, mile-long metal snakes coiling around the switchbacks through a snow-peaked mountain range that went on forever, the only alive things in all that noble wilderness. Usually the dreams had a certain sinister quality, and this one started out no differently, with an old-fashioned black steel locomotive powered by an enormous human heart instead of a furnace, but then it changed in character, a variance of degree alone, because there was always an element of the sinister involved, and he thought that Grace—this, the girl told him, was her name, and she was from Ohio and had been living in squats, hanging out, surviving, but she was sick of the life and was heading to California to hook up with a rich uncle…He thought that Grace, then, must be responsible for this change. The locomotive, which was twice normal size, spat scraps of fire from its stack and howled like the ghost of a giant, but as they sped deeper into the night the howling gentled down into music, thunderous at first but growing increasingly easy on the ears, and streams of pink and aqua light mixed with the ebony smoke pluming from the stack, and the scraps of fire turned into glowing ankhs and crescents and all manner of Cabalistic sign, a torrent of bright arcana flowing back along the body of the train, enveloping it, so that the car where he and Grace were sheltering was transformed into a radiant space with the ambiance of a weird night club—like a retro neon sign come to life—where dancing silhouettes followed the elaborate suggestions of artfully dissonant strings and saxophones that sprayed clusters of mathematical symbols from their bells, and he and Grace were dancing too, gliding off to join the other featureless, faceless couples, buoyed up among syncopated martini glasses, tuxedo-wearing stick figures, old dream-blue drifts of jazz and smoke-ring Saturns…
He woke to find that the freight had pulled off onto a siding. His face was stiff from exposure and a back tooth was throbbing. Winter light shafted through the cracked door of the boxcar, shining upon frozen particles of dust so they looked like silver atoms. He and Grace had wound up spoon-style in the sleeping bag, and his erection was prodding her behind. He tried to shift away, but only succeeded in rubbing up against her.
“I cain’t sleep with you poking me,” she said muzzily. He unzipped his side of the sleeping bag and she protested: “I didn’t mean for you to get up!”
“I gotta piss,” he told her.
The cold floors stung his feet; he went on tiptoes to the door and peeked out to see if anyone was checking the cars. Fresh snow blanketed an expanse of rolling hills, framing rectangles of golden winter wheat. An ugly smear of egg-yolk yellow had leaked up from the eastern horizon; elsewhere the gunmetal blue of the sky had gone pale at the edges. The train was a local, stopping at every shithole, and Madcat figured they were still a ways from Missoula. He let fly and his urine brought up steam from the gravel.
“I hafta pee, too,” Grace said.
He dug a roll of toilet paper from his pack, tossed it to her, and went back to the door. A few seconds later she jittered up beside him, doing a hopping dance to fight the chill. In the sunlight her red hair was even more startling in contrast to her pallor, reminding him of a National Geographic photo he’d seen of African dancers with white clay masks, their hair dreaded up, caked with dried mud. She gave him a nudge, trying to move him aside, and said, “Lemme out.”
“You gotta do it over in the corner,” he said. “You go outside, brakeman or someone’s liable to see you.”
She squinched up her face but otherwise made no complaint.
Up ahead, about a quarter-mile from the tracks, lay a tiny reservation town. Trailers, shanties, rusted pickups. One trailer pitched at a derelict angle, slipped partway off its blocks. Clouds with pewter edges and blue-gray weather heavy in their bellies were pushing in low from the north.
The sound of Grace’s water tightened his neck.
It took him several minutes to stop shivering after he got back into the sleeping bag. He drew up his knees and turned onto his side, facing the wall. Grace propped herself on an elbow, leaned over him. A rope-end of her hair trailed stiff and coarse across his jaw, and he scratched where it tickled.
“You like my hair?” she asked.
“It’s all right. Doesn’t feel much like hair.”
She pretended to dust his nose with the bristly end and giggled. “I’m the same color down below,” she said. “Know that?”
“Guess I do now.”
She was silent a few ticks, then: “Why you so paranoid ’bout the cops? I mean I know what you said about ’em’s true, but you was in an awful hurry last night.”
He started to tell her to fuck off, but decided she was entitled. “My wife had an affair with a cop. I came home one afternoon, and they were going at it in my bed. I jumped on top of ’em and beat the shit out of him. I knew they’re bound to file charges, and with both him and my wife testifying, no way I wasn’t gon’ do some time.”