“I tol’ you Carter wasn’t my boyfriend! I didn’t know him more’n couple hours, and all we did was smoke a joint, talk a little. It ain’t like we had a relationship.”
“What about us? We got a relationship? I get my brains bashed in, how long you figure it’ll be ’fore you feel up to having consensual sex?”
She looked out toward the cobalt line at the ends of the earth. “I do what I hafta to survive. I’m no differnt ’n you.” She gave him a sideways glance. “Yeah, I think we could have us a relationship. Leas’ we got some ’sperience of one another and it ain’t killed us yet. You might discover you like me a lot, you stop tryin’ so hard to pretend you don’t.”
The burst of energy that had fueled Madcat’s contentiousness faded and he sat nursing his pint, listening to the pour of the wind, trying to hear in it the chunky rhythms of an approaching train.
“What’s your real name?” Grace asked.
“Jimmy.”
“Jimmy what?”
“Jimmy That’s All You Fucking Need To Know. Okay?”
“Okay! Don’t get your panties in a bunch!” Then, after a pause: “How’d you get your train name? You make it up yourself?”
His response was to affect a moronic laugh.
“I should get myself a name, I guess, I’m gon’ be ridin’.” She made a show of thought, tapping her chin with a forefinger and squinting, clicking her teeth with her tongue. “I cain’t come up with nothin’ sounds right. Maybe you should gimme a name.”
A powerful lethargy overcame him and the patch of gravel between his feet seemed to acquire topographical significance, as if it were the surface of an alien planet seen from space—a flat of cracked granite lorded over by a single dusty weed so vast, the minuscule creatures who dwelled in its shadow would perceive it as a pathway to the divine and send forth pilgrims who would die in the process of ascension.
“Jimmy!” Grace spoke with such urgency, it penetrated his fog.
“What?” he said, sitting up straight. “What is it?”
She was tying off her dreads with an elastic band, gathering them into a Medusoid sheaf behind her head, studying him without expression. The shadow cast by her raised elbows was like a mask of gray wings that came down onto her cheeks, and he knew death was in her, that whether sent or by herself commanded, she had come to gather him. He tried not to believe it, though the truth was clear and undeniable, like a letter graven on her brow. He felt a satin pillow beneath his head and saw his eyes reflected by a mirror inside a coffin lid.
“Nothin’,” she said, giving a dry, satisfied-sounding laugh, as if some critical judgment had been borne out. “Never mind.”
Near nightfall of the next day, they jumped off the train outside the Klamath Falls yard and pushed their way through thickets of leafless bushes with candy wrappers, condoms, cigarette cellophane, and toilet tissue stuck to their twigs, so profuse they might have been some sort of unnatural floral productions. A line of dusky orange marked the horizon, dividing darkness from the dark land, and a west wind was blowing with a feverish rhythm, gentle gusts alternating with featherings, then long oceanic swells carrying streaks of unseasonable warmth. As he slogged over the mucky ground, Madcat, coming off an afternoon drunk, broke a light sweat.
Two hobos were jungled up in a clearing near the edge of the yard, hunched beside a crackling fire, drinking malt liquor. There was Horizontal Tom, a scrawny old man whose ravaged face peered out from snarls of iron-gray beard and hair like a mad hermit spying from behind a shrub, and F-Trooper, a lanky man in his forties with straight black hair hanging to his shoulders, an adobe complexion, and a chiseled, long-jawed face that might have been handsome if not for its rattled expression. Wearing chinos and a tattered AIM T-shirt. When he caught sight of Madcat he got to his feet, picked up two forty-ouncers, and went to do his drinking elsewhere.
“Fuckin’ Indian motherfucker,” Tom said with some fondness. “He just can’t abide too much company, but otherwise he ain’t so bad.”
“Son of a bitch can’t abide me is what it is,” Madcat said. “I ain’t never said shit to him, couple times we met, but he always acts like I been kicking his dog.”
“Hell, he acts like that with ever’body. Took him five, six years to warm up to me.” Tom bunched his sleeping bag up around his head, fashioning it into a cowl. “Could be he’s just shy.”
“Yeah, uh-huh.” Madcat sank to his knees by the fire, Grace beside him. “Yon and him riding together?”
“Nah. I come out on a hotshot from Dilworth couple days ago. Found him campin’ here. He’s waitin’ for somethin’ headin’ down to Roseville. Me, I’m—”
“Roseville’s in California, ain’t it?” asked Grace.
“If you wanna call Sacramento California.” Tom had a pull from his bottle, and some of the brew dribbled out the side of his mouth, beading up in the tangles of hair, glittering in the firelight—his face shadowed dramatically by the cowl, he might have been an old philosopher-king with jewels woven in his beard. “I’m headin’ for Mexico,” he went on. “Copper Canyon. Ever been down that way?”
Grace allowed that she had not.
“Big as the Grand Canyon and never been exploited, ’cause they ain’t no roads to it. Only way to get there’s by hoppin’ a freight.” Tom grinned, showing eight or nine teeth banded with brown and yellow stains like the stratifications on canyon walls; he pitched his voice low. “They got organ-pipe cactus been there since the conquistadors. Ol’ great-granddaddy iguanas seven foot long.” He reached across the fire and poked Grace’s knee. “Yon oughta ride down with me and see it. It’s amazin’! Like campin’ out in the middle of a goddamn hallucination!”
“I figure we’re gonna lay up in Tucson a while,” Madcat said.
“But we might make it down there eventually.”
Grace excused herself, saying she was going to find a place to camp, and went off into the hushes, dragging Madcat’s pack. Tom tracked her backside out of sight. “That’s a reg’lar little ditch witch you got yourself there. How’d you two hook up?”
Madcat told him. “I don’t know if I believe her ’bout the boy getting killed,” he said. “She exaggerates some.”
“These days there’s always somebody goin’ ’round killin’ out here.” Tom shook his head somberly. “It’s the drugs. They ruint the rest of society, now they ruinin’ things for the hobo.” He spat into the fire, and a tongue of orange flame flickered back at him. “How old you figger she is?”
“Seventeen, eighteen…I don’t know.”
“Eighteen might be pushin’ it,” Tom said, after due consideration. “She looks like jailbait to me. These crusty punk girls, seventeen’s ’bout when they get to feelin’ wore down, they start wantin’ to find themselves a man they can depend on. Sixteen…all they want for you is to take ’em somewhere on a train. But seventeen’s when they go home…if they gotta home. Or they latch onto an older man.” He leaned toward Madcat, intending—it appeared—to give him a friendly nudge, but found he couldn’t reach that far, wobbled, and nearly fell into the fire. “You be a fool not to let her latch onto you,” he said on regaining his balance. “She’s ’bout the best-lookin’ thing I seen out here. You was to take her to Britt, to the hobo convention, she’d be like Raquel fuckin’ Welch compared to them hairy hogs show up there.”
Tom seemed to lose the thread of what he was saying, stared off toward the yard. Glowing pinpricks were visible through the dead twigs—sentry lights at the edge of the yard—and a distant clamor could be heard, a windy mingling of bells and whistles and metallic thuds.