The Insane Train Read Free Page B

if one ever came again. But then his plans hadn’t amounted to much since his discharge from Balboa in San Diego. The nightmares had dwindled in the last year, but their intensity could still lock him up like a frozen engine.
    He took a deep breath and rubbed at the stubble on his chin. The scar that ran the length of his face twitched in the cold morning air. A German Mauser bullet had plowed a three-inch furrow across his face. The wound turned septic after he lay three days in a wet foxhole. The scar distorted his jaw and drooped his eye like a broken window shade. That combined with six months of terror on the front lines, and he had spiraled out of control. A year in the hospital at Balboa had healed the wound but not the terror.
    When he’d been discharged, he bummed to Barstow, where some of his buddies from Balboa were. He’d found them living under a bridge, drinking too much, and reliving days that no longer mattered to anyone but them.
    On a Sunday morning while the town slept, he’d walked to the switchyards and hopped a train back to Tulsa. Though his wife had written, she’d not seen the wound, neither the one across his face nor the one in his soul.
    He’d sat on the front porch of the house until the sun broke before picking up his duffle and catching the first freighter out.
    Nearly back to Barstow, his uncertainty had resurfaced. His decisions turned and banked and turned again like the birds above the trestle. Did his judgments any longer make sense? Did he even care?
    A cold wave eased through the canyon, and he slipped on his army fatigue jacket. The sour of his own body had steeped his clothes. Not bathing ranked high on the list of hobo misery. On occasion he’d managed a hot shower in a YMCA or a spit bath in a gas-station bathroom. Once, he’d showered at the Albuquerque rail yards. Without clothes, hobos and section-gang workers looked pretty much alike.
    He dug through his duffle and set his store of goods on a rock, a can of pork and beans, a tin of Spam, and a half pound of coffee. He’d hoped for more fare from that caboose. But for now he opened the beans. Three years in the army had diminished his taste for Spam.
    He gathered up driftwood that had snagged around the trestle pier. A fire would feel good. The cool night had wormed into his bones. Building a fire always invited danger, particularly in the still desert air. A good yard dog could smell smoke ten miles off, and he figured they’d be looking for him now for sure. But he wanted that cup of coffee.
    He kept the fire small and hot to reduce the smoke and moved in close to the flames. The top half of the beans he ate cold and nestled the remainder in the coals to heat.
    He’d just poured his coffee when he heard the putt-putt of a motorcar coming down line. After dumping his coffee onto the fire, he dragged sand over the coals with his foot. He closed his things into his duffle, and he crouched in the pile of driftwood, barely breathing.
    The popcar drew to a stop atop the trestle, and men talked above the clatter of the motor. When the motorcar chugged away, he took a deep breath. He waited until he could no longer hear the clack of wheels, and then he waited some more just to make certain.
    Afterward, he ate the Spam, too afraid for another fire, and listened for the whistle of a steamer. She would be soft and mellow and with a life all her own. First sound of a steam engine, he’d pack his gear and climb the grade, wait there for a grainer or a hopper to come down line. With luck, he’d hike up and settle in for the last leg into Barstow.
    As he waited in the morning sunrise, he thought about home and his wife and the scar that had severed his life. He thought about the dead he’d left behind in Germany and the starkness of battle. Most of all he thought about the coffee spilled on the fire beneath the trestle.

3
    At the Needles depot, Hook picked up his bag and looked down the