F-Trooper stepped out from the thickets, more shadow than man, carrying an ax handle at the ready. He was holding his ribs, and his movements were cautious, rickety; but Madcat had no desire to go against that ax handle. He was still half-drunk, uncertain of his own physical capacities, and though the rough ground tore at his bare feet, he set off running, aiming for the center of the yard. If it hadn’t been for Grace, he might have tried to lose F-Trooper among the trains and then headed for the mission in Roseville where he could hustle up a new pair of boots. But as he ran, glancing back at his pursuer, he noticed that the Indian was losing energy with every step, and Madcat soon discovered that he was able to maintain a secure distance by merely jogging. F-Trooper staggered, flailed, stumbled, occasionally fell, and finally began to run in a low crouch, huffing and grunting, arms nearly dragging on the ground, like a man undergoing a transformation into some more primitive form. Madcat slowed his pace further.
They had entered that portion of the yard where earlier there had been tremendous activity. It was quiet now, and dark. No spotlights, no handcars, no repair carts. The train the crews had been putting together was ready to go. Madcat led F-Trooper down a narrow avenue between two long strings of cars. Container cars, flatcars, 48s, grain cars, boxcars. With their great painted monograms—SFR, UP, XTRA, and such—dully agleam in the thick night, and looming so high that only a strip of moonless sky was visible overhead, they had the gravity of sleeping beasts, creatures whose hearts beat once a millennium, their caught breaths hardened into cold iron. Madcat went to walking sideways, watching F-Trooper reel against the cars like a drunk trying to negotiate a narrow hallway. Spittle hung from his jaw, and his eyes were like bullseyes, the pupils completely ringed by white. When it was clear that he had reached the point of exhaustion, his gait reduced to an enfeebled limp, Madcat turned to confront him. F-Trooper’s face displayed a stuporous resolve—he continued his approach without giving the slightest sign of anger or fear, faltering only when his legs betrayed him. Drawing near, he swung the ax handle, but the swing was weak and off balance. Madcat had little difficulty catching his wrist and wresting the club free. He butt-ended the man to the jaw and F-Trooper crumpled without a sound, collapsing onto his side, one arm outflung behind him, half-resting beneath the porch of a grain car.
The violence adrenalized Madcat, washed away the residue of drunkenness. He felt amazingly clear-headed. Clearer than he had felt in a long while. Under ordinary circumstances, muddled with wine, he would have tossed the ax handle aside and set off to find Grace; but now he realized there was an important decision to be made. If he were to walk away, leaving things as they stood, he would likely have cause to regret it. F-Trooper, in his judgment, was too far gone to reason with and obviously not the sort to forgive and forget. The last thing Madcat wanted was to be happily sloshed in a jungle somewhere and have the Indian sneak up behind him. It was bound to happen sooner or later. He and F-Trooper traveled the same roads. This was something that had to be done. Purely a matter of self-defense.
He grabbed F-Trooper by the shirt, pulled him from beneath the car, straddled the body. He tightened his grip on the ax handle. The Indian’s head lolled to the side and he let out a guttering noise, half gargle, half snore. With his bruises and lumps and cuts, fresh blood stringing from the corner of his mouth, a brewery stink rising from his flesh, he was a thoroughly pitiable item. Madcat was terrified by the step he was about to take, in the sight of a judgmental God. A preemptive strike was called for, a threat to his security had to be neutralized. Though the logic of nations would carry no weight in a court of law, such was the basis of ethical action on the rails, where men carried their paltry kingdoms in their packs. He had no choice. But as he lifted the ax handle high, he was struck by a sudden recognition, less than a recollection yet sharper than an instance of déjà vu, and he seemed to remember, almost to see himself standing in this same position with a half moon flying overhead and at his feet a teenage boy sitting cross-legged in a patch of weeds. It was only a partial glimpse, as if a flashbulb had popped inside his skull, illuminating a confusion of shadows too complicated to allow certain identification; but the shock of it sent him staggering back. He lost his footing on the uneven ground and sat down hard, scraping his hands on the gravel. The idea that he might have committed a senseless murder during a blackout, and that muscle memory or a faulty circuit in his brain had rewired him to the moment…it roused no great revulsion in him, no shiver of moral dismay. But the knowledge that he must have sunk to some troglodyte level where conscience no longer even registered, where unrepentant viciousness was part of the human circuitry, that knocked away the last flimsy props of his self-respect.
F-Trooper groaned. Soon he would regain consciousness, but Madcat was too addled, too disheartened to act. All his clarity was evaporating. Then a compromise occurred to him. He crawled over to F-Trooper, wrangled off his belt, lashed his hands, and secured the free end to the grain car’s porch, immobilizing him. This done, Madcat fell back and lay gazing up at the sky. Whatever moon ruled, it was hidden behind cloud cover baked to a dusty orange by the reflected glare of Klamath Falls. He tried to deny what he’d imagined he had seen, telling himself that, with his headaches and the drinking, he was liable to see anything—hell, his brain was on the fritz most of the time, buzzing and clicking like F-Trooper’s busted radio. Even now he was having trouble stringing thoughts together. So many feelings and facts and memories were churning inside him, his head was like a room in which too many conversations were going on for him to make sense of any one, and a golden hole was opening in his vision, the way a hole gets burned into a piece of paper by bright sunlight directed through a magnifying glass, and he heard a hosanna shout so vast it might have been braided together out of every shout of joy and tribulation ever uttered, and he realized that all the sound and light causing his confusion was coming from a train.
This was no old-fashioned steam-powered locomotive, but a Streamliner, one of those trains named Zephyr or Coronado, an emblem of 1950s Futurism with double-decker lounge cars and a Silver Streak-style engine, only this particular engine was gold with a green windshield, so the effect was of a great sleek golden beast wearing emerald shades. It was speeding straight at him, radiating the sort of holy sunrays that artists usually depict emanating from Buddhas and Krishnas and Christs, and it was taking up every inch of space between the strings of cars. He braced for the impact, squeezing his eyes shut. Yet somehow it missed him and roared on past—he caught sight of Grace’s dreadlocks whipping out the engineer’s window. He thought he was safe once the last car had gone by, but the train’s speed was such that the draft sucked him up like a scrap of paper and he went bouncing along behind it, banging down onto the rails and flipping up, skipping over the ties. It hurt like hellfire. His legs snapped, bones splintered and poked out his flesh. But he had no regrets. He’d known Grace was trouble from the get-go, and maybe that was why he had hooked up with her, maybe he’d been looking for that kind of trouble—things had not been going well, and the best he could have hoped for was a few more bad years, years of drunkenness and headaches and blackouts, before he was knifed or shot or died of life’s own poison. This way, at least, he’d gotten to feel some things he’d forgotten how to feel, because though Grace was, at heart, no-account, she knew how to make it sweet, this farewell ride, this little going away party with the lowlife angel of death.