___
After the stop in Salt Lake City, Cadence plumped her pillow, reclined the seat, and settled in for the moving picture show of cross-country rail travel. October rain splattered the window, soon to beget snow in the high country—that same day, in fact. The train labored up Soldier Summit, passing tight side valleys, some desecrated by mining waste. She watched one roll by, complete with a leaning wooden mill and tailings pile. New gingham curtains in the windows of a cabin were a poignant touch, though barely noticeable among the yard cars and wrecked pickups and a garden that had gone to yellow and droop with the first hard freeze. A trail of smoke cut sideways off the stovepipe chimney in the dank cold, as if it couldn’t leave this godforsaken place fast enough.
She turned to a page from the valise, all spidery scrawls. She got the feel of it and read:
My Dearest Amon,
The harvest moon begins to fill and we have not seen each other. Remember the glade?
Your wizard came today, and he sat me down with my father and my mother. He said you will be going— leaving! And that I must simply wait for your return. I remained quiet, though he looked very directly at me. I did not tell him of our plans, or of my knowledge of your precious, the gift from your cuz.
I will see you by the waxing moonlight at the Catpaw Bridge. I will not fail you, and we shall be together.
My love, Ara
P.S. My father draws forth a group of the most stalwart of our village. “Trouble in the south,” he says.
So, Cadence thought as she shook the page in delight, Ara had a lover!
For the next few hours the mystery of Ara kept unspooling. The tale slowly assembled itself from the brittle scrolls and battered pages. One historical account revealed a chilling secret:
Horse and Rider
The father of Aragranessa, Achen, was keen to instill in his daughter the wisdom and lore of the wild places. “Wild”, of course, being a term reserved for the relatively close and relatively safe woodlands surrounding their home village of Frighten.
True, in those woods known locally as Portic-wud, the Sanctuary Wood, vagabond creatures might wander down from the North, and travelers on errands untold were known to camp. Even elves were whispered to pass beneath their boughs. Yet her skills were competent to detect and avoid trouble.
Ara’s vision was renowned as particularly keen. Her father’s early test of this was to direct her gaze to a special point in the vast starsprent vault of the night sky. “Look for the Horse,” he said, “for its yellow color like the steeds of legend.” As she saw the yellow point of light and described the arrangement of other nearby stars, he said, “and what, if anything, does the Horse bear?” She stared hard at the twinkling sky. “A Rider,” she said, “it bears on its back a most faint and tiny star!”
Thus Ara passed the most acute test of eyesight known to halflings.
One last question she had for her father that night, and she made him proud in the asking. “Will my sight give me the vision to see truth and honor as keenly as you?”
To this tale must be added another. The very year in which she spied the Rider, she came late to an edge of the Sanctuary Wood. The most subtle of movements caught her eye. With worthy stealth she approached, and saw what at first appeared to be a gathering of animals. Creatures roughly her own size, upright standing, but with faces akin to badgers and ferrets and wolves. Even as she watched their faces shifted into a common pattern of dark, acute eyes over long noses. All held up by pointed ears. She knew she was seeing what few, perhaps no, halfling had ever seen—a gathering of elves. Perhaps even Dark Elves.
They seemed unaware of her presence. She crept even closer and heard the indecipherable music of their native speech, punctuated by high, sharp whistles. Their conversation grew more intense, as if arguments were brewing. She thought she heard one of them say “an-ginn”, an old world, used by elder halflings to mean “source”.
Then she froze as all the elves grew quiet and turned their heads toward her at once. They regarded her as if she were sitting in the village square on a dunce high chair with a ridiculous dunce hat.
One spoke to her in her tongue:
“For your subtle woodcraft, a reward. You may tell of this secret, for none will believe your wild boast and every retelling will filch more of the good name of your house. For your uninvited presence, though your understood none of what you overheard, a price. All things have consequence. This is your tithe: every unselfish step you take hence, every worthy deed you undertake, shall each draw your fate closer and more certain. Your good acts will only dim the memory of your passing. Put all others before you, unsparingly risk your life, and your tale will all the more certainly be erased and forgotten for all time. Go now!”
Ara fled in fear and confusion and never told a living soul, save her Mum.
Cadence found herself leaning forward, clutching the last page. She took a breath and eased back. So, she thought, Ara and I each have a burden. Hers was a secret curse that doomed her for heroism. I’m lucky. I’m just chasing a question mark. No one’s out to de-res me …
“I don’t think,” she started to say out loud.
The connection of long journeys now seemed almost palpable. She reached over and got her grandfather’s journal and opened it, picking out a passage that seemed to be notes from another east-to-west-coast hopping of freight trains. It described pure old- time hobo-style travel:
Grand Junction. June 14, 1980
Worked at a diner next to the rail yard. It was called, simply enough, “EAT.” The sign stuck up on the roof in flashing red neon. So I think now that “the Eat” or “Eat at the EAT” must be a national chain targeting the raunchy and low-down spots. A kind of niche. Anyway, this one had only six counter stools. No tables. One person running the grill, waiting tables, busing, doing dishes—the whole thing. Got my standard job. It always works. He paid me to clean up the garbage out back, cut up some boxes. Got five dollars and eggs, taters, toast and coffee.
It’s hot. Laid up in the cool of some big abandoned icehouses next to the rail yards. They’re basically big wooden boxes, five stories tall, made up of foot thick timbers. No windows. You could fit a basketball court inside each one of them.
The man at the EAT said these things used to hold ice for the fruit transport. This valley is world-famous for its peaches. It got that way cause of the icehouses. The railroads and the orchard people figured out that you could get big, fresh, ripe, sweet peaches to streets in New York or Philadelphia in three days if they were iced down.
So, before air-conditioned boxcars came along in the fifties, those icehouses, made of foot-thick wooden beams laid tight into big boxes fifty feet tall and a hundred feet on each side. No windows, one little door. They were the way they stored up ice supplies for the late summer harvest. That’s all over now. They’re just sitting there. There’s still plenty of ice in them at the bottom and the corners. 15-20 feet thick. Ice maybe 50 years old. Just outside the open door its 108 degrees, easy.
Anyway, I lay up all day watching them make train. They use a hump yard. That’s a little hill the tracks go up and over. The switch engine pushes cars up the incline, they unloose the coupling, and the car goes careening down the other side.
The rolling cars are switched to different tracks. You can hear them shunt over. Then they crash into the couplings of the cars waiting there. That’s makin’ train, and that’s my custom ride. All day, all night. Cu-Chang. Each noise echoed 10 or 20 times by the cars jamming together down the line. Kind of like music.
Course I got my own music. Right here in my teeth fillings. Only I can hear it. Although once I had little Arnie put his ear next to my open mouth and he could hear it too. Tonight its playing K-O-M-A Oklahoma City! 50,000 Watts Serving the Heartland! (“Playing tonight at the National Guard Armory in Elk City, Spider and the Crabs! And at the Fairgrounds Pavilion in Olathe, it’s Ray Ruff and the Checkmates!”) The other day it was K-E-E-L Shreveport dishing up southern fried top 40.
I’m thinking about Helen and Arnie. What am I doing here? I keep dreaming I’m outside looking in at them. A dream that I can’t shake. That’s my fate. Always outside looking in. So I succumb. I’m here and they’re there.
Hell, maybe I’ll try a new name today. Keep even myself guessing.
Cadence sat, stunned, holding the man’s confession in her hands. So I succumb … The crime scene—a remnant family. The confession—a note from the road …
Before she could get too angry the man across the aisle rustled, saw her awake. “You know the sounds?”
“What?”
“My name’s Julian. I was asking if you know the train sounds.”
“Nice to meet you. I’m Cadence. Yes, I’m hearing them, if that’s what you mean.”
“But if you know them like I do, there are subtleties. There are actually three signature sounds of trains.”
“OK, tell me.”
“Well, there’s the sing-song click-clack of the junctions in the rails. But listen. Listen. No song, right? Now it’s more like a delay, maybe ten seconds, then just one click-clack. Hear?”
The train rumbled, and then the isolated double-note came and went. It seemed like a rare passing comma in a jargon of flat and unintelligible steel on steel.
“Yeah, there,” she said.
“That’s not the way it used to be. Used to be every second or two, an almost constant beat. Up-tempo, sort of. You know, Chattanooga Choo-Choo, Pennsylvania Six Five Thousand, Orange Blossom Special. That’s all gone now, cause they changed the rails. They put in longer rails so there’s only a tenth of the junctions there used to be. So it’s a backbeat now, is all.”
“The other sounds are still there. It’s kinda like the Doppler effect. Another train whistle or clanging crossing signal, depending on where you are. It comes and jams together and then fades away. And there’s that long, lonely whistle going away in the night. The stuff of country songs—Hank Williams and Johnny Cash. Of all the ways people get around—cars, boats, planes—there’s only one, railroads, that has the music, the joy and the sorrow. So, what do you think?”
“I think I don’t know. To me it’s just trains. Nothing magical about it.”
“Don’t dismiss it. Magic sometimes comes in little packages.”
Cadence listened.
“Well, what’s your story?” he said.
“I’m going to New York to find out about my grandfather.”
“That’s great. That’s where he’s from?”
“No, it’s where he met someone famous. I have some documents from there.”
“Was he famous?”
“No, he’s … was kind of a bum. A drifter. He left my grandmother and my dad.”
“So why are you looking?”
“I don’t know. Just to find something true about myself, I guess. How come he left. How come my dad was the way he was. You know, that family thing.”
“At least you got something worth looking for. Me, I got nobody much to worry about. They know I’m here, wherever that is, but it’s here. On the train.”
“How’s that?”
“You know, like the Kingston Trio song about the guy on the Boston Metro Transit Authority. ‘Did he ever return? No, he never returned. And his fate is still unlearned.’ Only I’m here by choice.”
“You live on trains?”
He scooted over to the aisle seat. “Since 9/11.”
She scooted over to hear better. “OK, let’s hear your 9/11 story.”
“I was in D.C. I watched it, or rather felt it, hit the Pentagon. I felt the boom, the ground shaking, the big mushroom and then the plume of smoke. Suddenly everyone was in the street. Traffic stopped everywhere. The whole city stunned. I was outside the Willard Hotel, a couple of blocks from the White House.”
“Pretty scary, I bet.”
“Yeah, unreal. Strangers all stopped to talk to each other. We heard that more planes were headed to D.C. to blow up the White House and the Capitol. Then I heard it coming.”
“What?”
“Jet engines coming in full bore. I looked over toward the White House and the guy next to me. They were coming in to blow up the President. We all started to hunker down. I said to the guy next to me, ‘Shit, watch this.’”
He took off his watch, holding it in his open hand like a wounded butterfly, like it had been traumatized by the same experience he was describing. He massaged his wrist nervously.
“We were all crouching, some on their hands and knees, helpless, hearing it coming. Then it came, right flat overhead maybe two hundred feet, twin F-16s roaring over us wing to wing. They topped right over the White House, like they were saying, ‘This is ours and we are ready!’ The sound crushed all of us. I think I ended up curled up like a baby.”
“Then what?”
“I went to a packed outdoor restaurant with a TV wheeled out front and watched the towers fall. The traffic was jammed. I just wanted to get out of there. So did everybody else. There were a thousand people trying to get into a single Hertz office. Fools waving their Gold Cards—it was a joke! Cell phones were jammed. So I left my bag and briefcase in a conference room. I never went back. I walked to a highway that had some traffic moving. A guy in a convertible signaled for me to get in. I ran and hopped in as he was moving along. He said hang on and we cut traffic, onto the median, on the side lanes, heading, it turned out for Barksdale, Maryland. He took me to his house, we got on the computer and snagged the last reservation on a west-bound Amtrak leaving in six hours. It had been turned around before getting to D.C. He got through to his wife and kids by landline. We had beers and leftover fried chicken and he drove me thirty miles to the little train station. I got on. And I never got off.”
“You mean you live here?”
“I’ve been living on Amtrak ever since then. The first three days after I got on, I slept on the floor. I bought this little polyester blanket—you know, with the official blue Amtrak logo. This one here.” He held up a worn and travel-stained once-white blanket, limp with use, its edges frayed, folded carefully like an heirloom quilt.
“I slept on the floor, like I said, ‘cause there weren’t any seats. We all gathered in the bar car the next night. Maybe a hundred, two hundred people. Told our stories. Shared news. Got raucously drunk, sang songs, you know. Felt the kinship of disaster.
“So, when I got to Denver, I just kept going. Never even called in to my job. Then on to Portland, then Seattle, then back across to Minneapolis, then south to New Orleans. I had a long leash on my credit card, so I just kept on buying tickets. Until a ticket agent clued me into the MegaPass. Unlimited travel, one annual fee. I picked up bits and pieces of life in the railroad stations or a few blocks surrounding them. Toiletries, clothes, stuff to write letters with, books … It’s simple.”
“You’re still afraid?”
“It’s … deeper than that. I just can’t really get off. I scuttle to those stores to get things, then come running back. Literally, running. I’m safe here I guess. Sort of hiding while moving. Funny, I travel hundreds of miles every day …”
He left the sentence unfinished, his voice trailing away as he turned to the window. She noticed his watch. The sweep hand didn’t move.
Around dawn she awoke briefly and watched the gray world relentlessly trip by her window. She wondered how the man across the aisle felt. They were all strangers here, thrown into this long, shunting tube of aluminum, speeding on wheels of steel. She was grateful that, at some point, she would get off the train.
The next day, Cadence felt the change, the long, slow descent into the Mississippi drainage. They passed the continental cleavage, and she felt the easy strings of the West loosen and the verdant tugs of the East take hold. She was coming to pick up a trail, even if it turned out to be a cold and fruitless one. The fact of going and standing on the trail itself was enough for now. It was doing something.
And what was this train ride, this meandering stumble in the dark? She recalled the odd phrase used by the stranger at her doorstep three days ago. Need-fare. A journey that must be taken.
Her thoughts ran to Ara. Of course she’s not real, Just a story.
Then she paused.
Hell, then I’ll take the story.
Cadence pulled out her sketchpad and pencils. She remembered a line from one of her instructors. Our artists’ conceit is that, ultimately, nothing is real unless it can be rendered—described, named, painted, photographed, drawn.
Well, so be it.
A muse was flitting about, ready to land on her shoulder, whispering a sketched composition with pounding horses and the waning moon that was a clock running on Ara’s fate.
She sketched for an hour and dozed and looked out the window. The countryside rolled along, telephone lines arcing from pole to pole, looping the land together like big stitches. Fields with crop rows whipped by, hypnotizing her to sleep. She awakened to the first reds and yellows of fall, flashing by in the boughs of trees. As darkness again settled in, she sped past decaying bridges thickened with vines that seemed to harbor small, leering faces beneath. For the next few miles, a gauzy, grey twilight hugged the world and was punctuated by a series of bonfires that burned merry hell in open trackside fields. They belched up smoke and flame, as if they were signals for some invading night army. To Cadence they were especially disturbing because they were wild and untended and uncontrolled.
Four years she had spent at Colorado State, pledged Tri-Delts, did the events scene, went out with football players, and never once went to the big pregame bonfires. She would get sick just thinking about it. She turned away from the window and nestled and closed her eyes to dream of more pleasant things.
She awoke to the sound of thunder and angry spanks of sheet rain punishing the train window. She looked around. It was still night. Her heart was pounding. Somewhere, somehow, the change she at once coveted and feared was coming closer. Drum beats rumbled in her mind and mixed with the noises of moving steel and wind.
She put her face to the window and cupped her hands around her eyes. She peered out into the flickering nightmare of a Class V thunderstorm. Lightning rippled across the sky and gave substance to the silvery veils of rain. Passing pools of water glinted in the flashes and watched her like the eyes of passing strangers. Then, as a core of ragged bolts created a kind of flickering openness to all the unpeopled night, she passed a country crossroads where five cloaked horsemen circled inward in council, their mounts pluming nostril smoke and strange blue light. One rose in the stirrups and pointed a finger at her, his outstretched arm moving, keeping dead aim on her as she sped past.
Then, as if it never existed, the scene passed.
She abruptly pushed back from the window. Just black glass now, complete with smeary hand and nose smudges on it. She stared at her reflection.
There would be no more sleep this night.
The train outraced the storm, streaking toward a new dawn of breaking purple and yellow light. After awhile, she heard the clink of rails followed by a highball wail mimicking those tones of sadness and regret. “ You know the sounds?” the man had asked. Now she knew.
She listened and heard a wheel-click, suddenly tripping into that rare short-rail click-clack, click-clack for a minute or two.
She was approaching something that had been kept from her. Maybe it was just some factoid about the Tolkien documents; maybe it was another puzzle-piece about Ara. She hoped it was some truth about her family. Not magic, not a fairy tale. Just gimme truth, she prayed.