(Continued from the June 2021 issue of Exotic)
As J woke up, the wind came rushing through the boxcar with a roar that sounded like disembodied voices. They were chanting along with the clang and boom of the steel skeleton all around him—the whole operation swaying around turns and groaning through the night. He imagined the voices as ghosts of long-dead suicides by train, their warnings unheeded and unknowable. By the height of the moon flying by between the dark green sheets of trees, he determined it was late. He looked across the car at the corner where the three newcomers snored and scratched themselves in a heap of rags and half-zipped sleeping bags. Earlier that day, he had hauled the trio aboard—sunburned, windswept, and dressed in dust, with a yellow, gauzy aura. They had come trotting out from behind the sage and garbage, struggling to make pace with the train as it slowly pulled out of the yard. The three of them a strange sight, after he had spent most of the morning listening to the distant thunder of cars being picked up and dropped off in that yard—the train jerking forwards and back again in false starts, as the new shipment was built. As they had come running from their hiding spot, he knew that there was a chance they wouldn’t make it. They lumbered forward, holding up their baggy clothes with detritus fleeing from their bags, mouths, and eyes agape, as they also realized they might not make it. He thought about the last three days and nights, alone in this boxcar, that he had made his own. His signature was tagged in red along one soot-smeared wall, and he planned on staying until his destination made itself known. He didn’t generally like company, but as he watched the three struggle, his sense of comradery got the best of him, and he slid on his stomach to the door, reaching one hand out and anchoring himself with the other. One by one, he heaved the three sweaty runners up to safety before curling back away out of sight, eyeing them as they clumsily did the same. He wanted to scold them for their stupidity in trying a train on the run but held his tongue. Desperation can make a person do stupid things.
He watched them sleep for a bit and pulled out his pouch of tobacco, easing himself up against the boxcar door and rolling a cigarette. His zippo stayed strong against the wind as he lit it, then clicked it shut, squinting his eyes out at the passing night, one leg straight and stiff into the floor for better balance. The forest roared by under the waxing moon, and the wind alternately whipped the smoke from his exhale away or threw it back in his face. He pulled the flask of moonshine from his pocket and sipped contemplatively at the stars. He considered his new roommates.
The boy and girl were younger, with a fresh scent about them, virgin to the violations of the road. They wore new holes in the legs and elbows, with a single layer of grime forming what would become a bedrock of cover if they stayed on the streets long enough. The boy had an angry introversion while the girl was wrapped in a more confident silence. They probably hadn’t known each other long. He had a desperate and hungry look in his eye for her, and she was oblivious to it. He called himself something like Rye and was diminutive, small and pale with thin, unruly red hair that wisped about in the wind and would have looked rugged if sickly weren’t the first impression. He wore a plain, gray hoodie and black jeans with Chuck Taylor shoes that wouldn’t last the journey to wherever they were headed. He carried a polyester mountaineering backpack from the eighties, hanging on to life from a hard, aluminum frame. It would have been extremely uncomfortable over long distances, and he seemed the kind of person to slog along in pain rather than speak up. The girl was pretty, though she tried hard to hide it. Large, penetrating eyes dominated a pale face, framed by raven black hair. She wore baggy dungarees and a heavy jacket, carried a small backpack with a sleeping bag attached by a bungee cord. She hadn’t offered a name.
The third one went by Nails and tried to pass himself off as a man. He had the years, but that was about it. He was tall and wiry with greasy, shoulder-length brown hair and a shaky, cornered-animal vibration. Self-inflicted tattoos on his knuckles looked desperate, rather than tough, to J, as if he were emulating some heavy-handed biker father figure from his childhood. He carried an old-fashioned, green army duffel—a burden more than an asset on the rails. Heavy and awkward without easy access. His denim jacket was patched over in band logos no one cared about. He carried himself like he was in charge, and the other two seemed to go along with it. They would come to regret it, and sooner rather than later, J suspected. After they had come aboard, the girl curled up in a corner with her back to them all, while Nails and Rye had shuffled up next to J, Nails producing a swollen-looking six-pack of warm and cheap beer. They all drank the foam and were tolerable to each other before retreating to their separate corners and watching the blurry world pass by, unhindered and apart from this small and autonomous space they rode.
He took a deeper swig of the moonshine and closed his eyes with the white burn. Pure and uninterrupted into the bloodstream, distilled the old way, by men scarred with copper burns, traded for some good or service. J had stocked up back in Virginia and was glad of it, despite the extra weight. Dry was no way to travel. And neither was accompanied by strangers. The constellations dancing above the trees offered no insight, but J focused on them anyway, their shapes familiar and strange at the same time, hovering all about him in names he didn’t know and wouldn’t learn. Hunters, animals, goddesses. Cosmic travelers. Beings too big to comprehend and just wide enough to contain the stories sky gazers filled them with. He rolled another cigarette and took another swig. By the time he finished the flask, the problem of the three newcomers was stagnant rather than malignant, and J was too dizzy to watch the sky. He unzipped, and his piss flowed majestically into the night, sped away by the wind and spattering his pants. He smiled for no reason, clutching the cigarette between his teeth, the sleeping trio formerly strangers and now just strange.
The train squealed to a crawl early the next morning and J didn’t like it. There weren’t supposed to be any crew changes for at least a few days. His head was foggy, and his mouth filled with ash. He sat up and opened a side pocket on his bag, pulling out a plastic canteen and chugging the warm, plastic water. They were passing through a small town. Red lights flashed, and bells clanged above the crossing arms as they crept by intersections filled with frustrated drivers that were going to not only be late but stuck in this part of town. J tried to discern street signs or storefronts, but there wasn’t much to choose from. It was one of those towns whose fringe was delineated by the train tracks. Piles of garbage and countless abandoned cars were interspersed with peeling huts of blanketed windows, tar paper, and dark implications. Smoke drifted from unknown furnaces. He crawled out of his sleeping bag and huddled in a corner, out of sight from the open door. The others stirred in their section of the boxcar, and Nails slowly sat up, yawning and peering out at the world passing by too slowly. J caught his eye and nodded for him to stay put. A train passing at this speed attracted bored eyes. J cringed as the squeal of brakes made its way down from the engine, and the freights boomed into each other one after the other, lurching and groaning into a final, heavy stop. A period at the end of the sentence. Outlook, not so good.
It was now time to focus on staving off panic and not doing anything stupid. They all managed to be still for close to an hour as the train sat in the stifling heat, everyone on high alert for sounds of crunching gravel footsteps or the slow creep of tires making their way down the line. J passed the time watching the mathematical progress of a gigantic, square, yellow crane—two stories tall and almost a city block wide, moving among the cubical forest of boxcars, lifting and lowering, blinking and beeping—arranging the yard in a massive Tetris. He wondered if the machine were manned, and if so, what that person’s life was like, organizing the goods of civilization M-F, trying not to crush anyone.
Finally, the booming started up again, and the train inched forward. Rye and Nails looked about to jump for joy, but J silenced them with a raised palm. The train was little help, as it took its time moving forward and backing up again, building and rebuilding. Hopes raised and hopes dashed until J found himself nodding off from the heat and tedium. He slipped into waking dreams, unfamiliar faces mouthing mute prophecies at him, with a look of disappointment when he couldn’t hear them. There was a moment when he saw through closed eyelids, the interior of the boxcar in dark relief, the silhouettes of the strangers in their corner, and in another, an old man sitting cross-legged with a skeletal white grin on his shadowed face. J vaguely wondered how he hadn’t seen the man get on. He then kicked awake with the train, as it ground, banged, and hissed its way into forward motion, and the strange dream gone like a disengaged eyelash. As the edge of town came rushing by them and the smell of smoke passed through the wind, J had a feeling that there was another train they were on. A train that never left the yard and had dumped them into the arms of authority and jail, or some other, worse, small-town scenario—that this train moving on was a delusion that he was now living by choice, instead. He shivered and pulled out his kit and moonshine, building the fix on auto mode and high, before he knew what happened. He sipped at the booze and lit a pre-rolled cigarette, no longer concerned where he was or why, feeling the wind water his eyes and clean his hair.
