“’Member Jabberjaw? That ol’ girl I was ridin’ with a few years back?” Tom asked. Madcat said, Yeah, he sure did, and then Tom said, “Jesus Lord, I have slept with some scary-lookin’ women.”
He began talking about old girlfriends, then about hobo marriages he’d witnessed, ceremonies variously uniting Misty Rose, Diamond Dan, Dogman Jerry—and Madcat took to imagining a ceremony involving himself and Grace. They were standing on a flatcar that was being pulled by four white locomotives running abreast on four silver tracks, on wheels that were bleeding, and they were passing beneath a sky bigger than a Montana sky ruled by two black suns and a high-flying half moon, a thousand light years of dark wintry blue and a filigree of clouds like feathers, fishbones, lace. Grace had on a T-shirt and jeans and a circlet with a veil behind to cover her hair—a Maid Marian cap—and her face was chalky, dead calm, but the scarlet dreadlocks were seething beneath the veil, and the ring in the palm of her hand was alive, a golden worm eternally swallowing itself…
He coughed, gave his head a shake, and found he was staring through a maze of leafless twigs at one of the sentry lights. Drunk, oblivious to all else, Tom was still chattering away. Rock-and-roll music was playing somewhere nearby, and Madcat could hear Grace’s laughter coming from the same general direction. He heaved up to a knee and peered toward the yard.
“Oh, yeah,” said Tom behind him. “You might want to check on that. That’s been goin’ on a while now.”
Madcat staggered through the bushes, slapping branches aside, and soon emerged onto a black plain that smelled of cinders, and stretched to the limits of his vision. Near at hand the plain was crisscrossed by tracks, with here and there a stray boxcar or two; several hundred yards farther in lay an area of furious activity, blazing spotlights sweeping across shadowy trains, engine units shuttling back and forth, brightly colored repair carts trundling about; and in the farthest reaches was a tumultuous area of white glare and roiling smoke from which the darkly articulated shapes of mechanical cranes surfaced now and again, moving with the jerky imprecision of science fiction insects.
Grace was dancing along a section of outlying track, shaking her ass, lifting her hair up behind her head, and F-Trooper was stumbling after her, holding a forty ouncer and a portable radio. He got right on her butt and thrust awkwardly with his hips, almost dry-humping her, and when she danced away, he said, “Whoa! Awright! Unh-yeah!” and then with a sodden laugh hurried to catch up. Watching them, Madcat felt anger, but anger partially occluded by the vagueness and unease that sometimes preceded a migraine.
“Hi, Jimmy!” Grace caught sight of him and waved cheerfully. “You through talkin’ to your friend?”
F-Trooper weaved to the side and stood with his legs spread, gazing stupidly at him.
Madcat walked over to Grace, the friated soil crunching beneath his boots; he grabbed her arm and said, “Come on.”
She pushed at his chest, tried to break free, and said, “Fuck you! Jus’ who the fuck you think you are?” She tried another break, flung herself away, whipped her head about. Her dreadlocks whacked him in the face, and he let go, reeled backward. Then he heard her yell, “Jimmy! Watch out!”
F-Trooper had dropped the radio and was charging at him, preparing to swing his bottle. Madcat stepped inside the swing, seized two handfuls of the man’s hair, and headbutted him, simultaneously bringing up a knee. The Indian blocked the knee, but Madcat butted him again and that dropped him. He kicked the man hard in the ribs, the stomach, then in the tailbone as he crawled away. F-Trooper flopped onto his back. “Aw shit…Jesus!” he said. Blood slickered his forehead.
“Fuck you trying to do?” Madcat turned to Grace, who had taken refuge off along the tracks and was managing to look at once horrified and delighted. “You want to ride to California with this fuckwit? That what this is about?”
“Naw…un-uh!” She hustled over to him, took his face in her hands, and whispered, “I think he’s the one, Jimmy. He’s the one killed Carter.”
“Bullshit!” He shoved her away, took a few unsteady steps back toward the camp. The pressure in his head was building, the migraine about to spike.
“I swear!” she said, coming up beside him, still keeping her voice down. “That’s why I’s bein’ so nice to him. I was tryin’ to find out stuff. He told me he was in Spokane same night we was.”
Madcat made an effort to focus. Her dreadlocks appeared to be quivering, and her eyes gave back hot glints of a sentry light. “You told me you never saw the guy’s face,” he said, and planted a fist against his brow to push back the bad feeling.
“Un-uh! I said he had his back to me. I could see some of his face, I jus’ couldn’t see it all. But I’m pretty sure now he’s the one. What you think we should do?” When he did not answer, she leaned into him, pressing the softness of her breast against his arm. “You don’t have to worry ’bout me goin’ nowhere, Jimmy. I really care ’bout you. Ain’t I proved it?”
She was always working two propositions, he realized, prepared to switch off whenever one or the other proved untenable. Maybe she believed in both—who could say? Whatever, there would always be these tests, one of which he would eventually fail…though, he also realized, thinking back to her shout of warning, it wasn’t clear that she’d leave him even then. It was like they were married already, working behind that fabulous sacramental inertia.
“You havin’ one of your spells? You are, ain’tcha?” She linked arms with him. “C’mon back to camp. I fixed it up real nice. Made us a lean-to and ever’thing. You get some wine in you, you’ll feel better. You kin sleep and I’ll keep watch ’case that asshole tries anything.” She cast a wicked glance back at F-Trooper. “Not that I think he will. ’Pears you busted his little red wagon all to hell.”
As she led him toward camp, from behind came a sound of breaking glass. F-Trooper had thrown his bottle at them, missing by a wide mark. He was sitting slumped forward, his legs spread, like a big bloody baby; the busted radio fizzed and clicked by his side. The skin of his forehead had split open, painting his face a glistening red, and he was so badly lumped up above the eyes, it put Madcat in mind of atomic mutants in movie monster magazines. Witness gave him no pleasure. It was not a good thing to be reminded that a man who had hit rock bottom could always find a deeper place to fall.
“Fuckin’…” F-Trooper’s voice thickened and he had to spit. “Goddamn fuckin’ malt liquor!” The weak force of his glare seemed to be carried by a breath of wind that stirred black motes up from the tracks. “I’d been drinkin’ whiskey,” he said in a piteous tone, “I’d a kicked your ass!”
It must have been a random noise that woke Madcat, an operation of pure chance, unless God or something whispered in his ear, saying, “Man, you better get your scrawny butt up or else you be sleepin’ a long time,” and why would any deity worth a shit bother with the likes of him…? Yet he couldn’t quite reject the notion that some lame-ass train god, an old smoke-colored slob with a dead cigar stuck in his mouth, wearing a patched funeral suit and a top hat with a sprung lid, still had some bitter use for him and had flicked a grungy black finger to send a night bird screeching overhead, sounding the alarm. Whatever the cause, when the roof of the lean-to was ripped away, his eyes were open and he was sufficiently alert to roll off to the side and then went bellycrawling into the bushes.
Grace was screaming, F-Trooper was roaring curses, and all Madcat could see was dark on dark until he got turned around and spotted the sentry lights. He scrambled up, a broken twig scoring his cheek, and made for them, bursting out of the thickets and sprinting some fifty feet out into the yard. There he stopped and called back: “Grace! You all right?”