On the Wrong Track (26 page)

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Authors: Steve Hockensmith

BOOK: On the Wrong Track
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DIE
Or, Gustav and I Take a Tumble and Nearly Crap Out
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
I fell just long
enough to think,
Lord, if you’re gonna kill me, could you do me a favor and make it quick?
Then I hit—hard.
My left side slammed into grass and gravel and clods of dirt. Then it was my right side smacking into the sod. Then my back. Then my left side came down again. And so on.
I was tumbling like dice, and there was nothing I could do but ride the roll through. As I spun along, it was my head I worried about, mostly: While I might have brains to spare compared to some folks, I don’t have so much that I could leave half dashed out against a rock without it slowing me down a mite.
Fortunately, when I finally came to a stop, my brains (as well as my bones and other vital innards) remained where I prefer them—inside my body. I was lying on my side on a gently sloping embankment, my face pointed at the tracks winding down the mountain. For all of two seconds, I could see the Pacific Express hurtling away. Then it dipped out of sight, and soon even the sound of it was gone.
“Otto? Otto!”
“Hey, Brother,” I croaked. “You alright?”
“Nope … but I’m breathin’.”
I gave myself one more roll, wincing as pebbles and turf mashed into my tenderized flesh. Gustav was stretched out about twenty yards away, his head pointed down the slope, his boots toward the tracks.
“How
you
doin’?” he asked.
“Remarkably well for a dead man. I am dead, ain’t I?”
Old Red grunted. “You’re alive.”
“Oh … that’s a relief.”
I heaved out a big sigh—and quickly resolved not to do it again anytime soon. My ribs were so sore I would’ve avoided breathing altogether if I could’ve gotten away with it. The thing to do was just lie there till I felt well enough to get up. A week or two would probably suffice.
But then suddenly I was sitting bolt upright, and as much as the movement pained me, it was blotted out by an entirely different kind of hurt.
“Diana!”
“I know, Otto.”
“That crazy kid … Sweet Jesus, who knows what he’ll do?”
“I know, Otto.”
“And here we are stranded in the middle of nowhere!”
“Otto!” My brother was still lying flat, but he craned his head up so I could see into his eyes.
“I
…
know.”
He wasn’t just telling me to stop my squawking. He was making me a promise:
We ain’t gonna take this lying down.
And to show he meant it, he started to hoist himself off his back. By the time he took his first step up the slope, I was heading up, too, having somehow convinced my body that it was capable of the climb no matter what those whiny, goldbricking legs might be saying about turned ankles and busted kneecaps and such.
Old Red and I joined up at the top of the hill and made a survey of our surroundings. What we saw was a whole lot of big, beautiful nothing. On the other side of the tracks was a short stretch of plateau ending in a drop-off so sudden you could go from walking on rock to
plummeting through cloud with a single step. Beyond that was emptiness and, in the distance, pine-studded peaks identical to the one we were stranded on. In between must have been a mighty deep gorge, but we weren’t close enough to the edge to see it.
Up the tracks, back toward Summit, were craggy bluffs and trees. Down the tracks, toward the Sacramento Valley, were more craggy bluffs and more trees—and, snaking through them somewhere, the Pacific Express.
“We got two choices,” Gustav said. “Climb up to Summit, send a telegraph ahead of the Express, and hope we ain’t too late. Or make our way down to God knows where and do God knows what.”
I turned to get another look up the mountainside. The incline was so steep the tracks almost looked like a ladder into the sky. The way the train had come charging down from Summit, we must have covered at least twenty miles by the time Old Red and I made our unofficial whistle-stop. I tried calculating how long it would take my aching legs to get the rest of me back up to town, but gave up when the answer pushed over from hours into days.
“No,” I said. “We ain’t got no choice at all.”
And down we went.
We stuck close to the tracks so as to be within easy hailing range of any other trains that might pass by. But the only things we had the opportunity to hail were rocks, pine trees, and the occasional slow-circling hawk. Other than that, it was just us.
“I can’t stop thinkin’ about Miss Caveo,” I said as I limped along like a ranch hand fresh-tossed from a bronco’s back.
“Me, too,” Old Red replied. But it wasn’t concern I saw on his face so much as confusion.
“You’re just tryin’ to figure how you missed it for so long,” I said, the words coming out with more edge than I’d intended. “Her bein’ on the S.P. payroll like us.”
“It’s … disappointin’, I don’t deny it. I had a hunch she was an S.P. agent after Summit, but I should’ve put it together sooner.” Gustav turned his face toward me, and looking into his eyes straight on I could
see a weight dragging on him I hadn’t noticed before. “But don’t think it’s just wounded pride that’s on my mind. I’m worried for her, same as you. Only consolation is the lady’s got smarts and backbone both.”
“I’d feel better if it was a
gun
she had.”
“Yeah. But don’t forget how she hauled your ass outta the fire back in Carlin. That wasn’t gunplay—just quick thinkin’.”
“I guess she was tippin’ her hand a tad there, wasn’t she?” A little smile almost flickered to life on my face, but I snuffed it out fast. There’d be no smiling till I knew Miss Caveo was safe. “So what other clues were there?”
Old Red looked away and shook his head, clearly wondering how his brother Helen Keller could fail to see so many clues. But he managed to swallow his usual vinegar and just spit out the facts.
“When we saw her watchin’ Horner and Mrs. Kier playin’ rummy in the observation car, you noticed the old lady stackin’ the deck, right? Dealin’ seconds and all that cardsharp stuff?”
Actually, I hadn’t, but I was in no mood to admit it.
“It was plain as day,” I said.
“Well, once the ‘points’ started turnin’ into big dollars, Miss Caveo stepped in with a wink and a grin and whisked that chucklehead Horner away. When we came bargin’ in, I’m sure she was tellin’ him, ‘Mister, you’re gettin’ yourself rooked.’”
I felt that little tickle of a grin again, though my expression remained grim. It was gratifying to learn that Miss Caveo and Horner’s powwowing had been business, not pleasure, but now was hardly the time to jump up and click my heels.
“Then not ten minutes later we pull into Summit,” Old Red went on, “and there’s Jeff Powless at the station—and the lady bolts on us. Obviously, the man knew her, and she didn’t want him lettin’ it slip. She’d been keepin’ an eye on us, I’ll wager, and she was supposed to keep at it a bit longer.”
“Keepin’ an eye on
us
?”
“Sure. We’re new fellers, hired out of the blue. First train we step on gets stuck up? Of course, the S.P.’s gonna be suspicious. Back in
Carlin, Miss Caveo said she was sending a wire to her family, remember? I reckon that message went to Crowe and Powless. They probably told her to ride herd on us, quietlike. Only, I figure Miss Caveo don’t think we’re crooked herself. When we left Summit, Powless seemed to almost trust us, and Wiltrout griped about our ‘friends in high places.’”
“Yeah, I see it now. Miss Caveo must’ve talked to Powless after we got shuffled off on that fool’s errand. She put in a good word for us.”
Gustav nodded. “There was other clues, too. Colonel Crowe made the arrangements for Lockhart and Chan’s berths as well as ours, and she was right in between us … in the perfect spot to keep tabs on all of us. And then there’s that S.P. manual you—”
My brother staggered to a stop like he had brakes and someone had just yanked the bell cord.
“Look,” he said, pointing at a large, blocky, gray rock at the bottom of a butte about a quarter mile down the track.
“Yeah?” I said.
Old Red sighed. “
Look,
dammit. You know—with your eyes?”
I looked again—and realized that the boulder wasn’t just blocky but perfectly square. And it wasn’t the steel gray of stone but the drab, dusty gray of sun-bleached boards.
It was, in other words, not a boulder at all. It was a shack.
“Come on!” I shouted, and off I went, pounding down the hillside despite my knees’ pleas for mercy.
It didn’t take long for the clomping footfalls behind me to fade away, and I knew I’d pulled ahead of my brother a good distance. I didn’t slow down or look back, though. Something told me that shack was our only hope, and I had to know
now
if it offered deliverance or our final defeat.
“Hey! Hey, anyone there?” I hollered. “We got us an emergency!
Hey!
”
But no one answered, and as I came huffing and puffing up to the shack, it was easy to see why: There was a bolt and padlock on the door. No one was there.
I gave the door such a kick the thin, rotted-out wood splintered around my foot.
“Goddamn it!”
“Tool shed … for linemen … I reckon,” Gustav panted as he hop-skipped his last few steps down the hill.
I gave the door another taste of boot leather.
“God
damn
!”
The Lord rewarded my blasphemy by steering my toe to a stronger board in the door, and this time the wood held firm while it was my foot that seemed to shatter.
“Goddamn son-of-a-bitch piece-of-shit bastard!”
“Yeah,” Gustav said, “that just about sums it up.” And he spat out a curse of his own and started around toward the back of the shack.
“We should finish bustin’ through that door,” I said as I hobbled after him.
“A w w w , you’re just mad at it.”
“
No
. There might be something in that shed that could help us.”
“Like what? A spare train?”
For the second time within the span of five minutes, Old Red slammed to a halt as sudden as the one you’d get walking smack into the side of a barn. Only this time I was hustling along behind him, so I walked smack into
him
. After some stumbling and (on my part) grumbling, I noticed what had my brother so frozen up—only it had the opposite effect on me.
“Well, would you look at that?” I cried, whooping and jumping straight up in the air. “A spare train!”
THE AMLINGMEYER EXPRESS
Or, Things Truly Start to Go Downhill Fast
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Of course, there was
no mighty locomotive awaiting us amidst the scrubby knots of grass and loose shale behind the shack. What we actually found looked more like a stable door on wheels with a couple bent-up shovels stuck on top.
A handcar, the railroad men call it. To judge by the rust on the wheels, gears, and arms, this one hadn’t seen service since around the time Noah started loading his ark.
I hurried over and got a grip underneath it, and after some grunting and sweating, I managed to heft the wheels on one side a good half foot off the ground. The thing was heavy, but not immovable.
“Probably easiest to push it over to the tracks,” I said. “We don’t want to lift it till we have to.”
I hunkered down, ready to start shoving, and waited for Old Red to join me.
And waited.
And waited.
Finally, I looked back at my brother. He was standing where I’d
left him, staring, stiff and still. In my excitement, I’d forgotten what rail travel did to him.
He looked like
he
wanted to forget, too … only he couldn’t.
“Gustav—”
“No.” Old Red closed his eyes tight, as though there was something behind them he was trying to keep from clawing out.
“No.”
Then his eyes popped open and he stomped over to join me.
It hadn’t been me he’d been speaking to at all—it was the fear he was carrying around inside him. He was telling it to go to hell.
It took us less than two minutes to get the handcar over to the tracks—and five times as long and ten times the effort to place it upon the rails. But at last there it sat, and though we’d thoroughly herniated ourselves, we didn’t waste any time on rest. We just climbed aboard—me in front, Old Red in the rear—and grabbed hold of the pump handles that powered the car.
I looked across the seesaw arms at my brother, and he locked eyes on me. He was bruised, scratched, perspiring, pale, and trembling so hard I could practically hear his bones shaking like maracas.
“You ready to do this?” I asked him.
“Hell, no,” he growled back.
And he pushed down on the pump.
The section of track that arced by the linemen’s shack was on a fairly level stretch of ground, so it took a lot of pumping to get us going. The rust-choked wheels squealed like pigs at first, but the squeaking died down as we picked up speed. It became easier to push down the pump, too, and once the car was back on a decent incline it was no effort at all.
When we were moving downhill fast enough to let gravity do all the work, I belted out a huzzah.
“The Amlingmeyer Express is under way!
Yeeehaa!
”
My brother didn’t join in, of course.
“Just hang on, Gustav! I bet it won’t be thirty minutes before we hit a station!”
I was trying to sound comforting, but it’s hard to comfort with a bellow. I had to shout to be heard above the rattling of the car and the metal-on-metal drone of the wheels and the wind whipping past our ears.
“Us movin’ along so easy’s got me wonderin’!” Old Red yelled back, his knuckles white on the handles of his pump arm. “What’s wrong with this thing?”
“What do you mean?”
“Linemen wouldn’t throw it out for no good reason! There’s gotta be
something
on it that don’t work right!”
A huge pillar of rock loomed up before us. The track coiled around it so tight the whole handcar tilted, the wheels on one side lifting off the rails for several nerve-fraying seconds. There was nothing to keep us atop the car’s spare wooden platform but our grips on the pump and the grace of God, and I didn’t have much faith in either. So I stretched out a foot toward the brake—a T-shaped metal pedal on the right-hand side of the car—and pushed down.
Nothing happened.
I tried again, with the same result. The pedal went up and down in its slot, yet if anything we were moving
faster
. Which answered my brother’s question about the handcar, albeit a little late: The brake was broke.
I looked up at Gustav, about to suggest that we hurl ourselves from the car before it hurled itself over a cliff. Yet Old Red wasn’t looking at me or the brake. He was staring past me, gaping openmouthed at something I
knew
I didn’t want to see, whatever it might be. All the same, I forced myself to swivel around and peek over my shoulder. By the time I got turned, there was nothing there but a yawning black mouth that quickly swallowed us whole.
We’d entered yet another snowshed. Heavy timber planks streaked past on both sides, so close it would take but a hop, skip, and a jump (or, in our case, a bump, bounce, and a splat) to reach them.
Seconds before, it had merely been a possibility that a leap from the
handcar would snap our spines. Now it was a certainty. We had no choice but to ride through to the end.
Looking my brother square in the eye, I offered my assessment of the situation: “Aaaaaaaaaaaaaa!”
To which he replied, “Eeeeeeeeeeeeee!”
And then even the car itself seemed to be shrieking, its whirring hum jumping up an octave. The tracks had arced into a sudden, tilting curve, and glancing down I saw in a serendipitous burst of light from a loose side board that one set of wheels had again lifted off the rails—and was staying lifted.
“Lean left! Lean left!” I screeched.
Fortunately, Old Red had noticed, too, and he leaned to his
right
while I leaned to
my
left. (I’d lacked the presence of mind to switch the directions for his benefit.)
The car settled back down with a clank, and when the track straightened itself a few seconds later, Gustav and I straightened up, as well. The ground around us grew flatter, and we finally coasted onto a more-or-less level stretch of rail.
I sucked in a breath—my first in quite some time, it seemed like—while my brother went up on his toes, trying to peer over me at whatever lay ahead.
“We’re slowin’ already,” I said, relieved. “Won’t be long before we can just step off and—”
“Lean right!” Gustav hollered.”
“
My
right?” I asked uselessly.”
Old Red was already leaning to his left, so I had my answer. I put all my weight to my right just as the handcar jerked into a turn so sharp it felt more like we were going in a circle than rounding a bend. Once again, I heard the drone of the car kick higher, and the platform tilted like a drawbridge going up.
“Lean! Lean! Lean!” my brother screamed.
I just screamed.
But the tipping point never came, and when the tracks uncurled,
the car righted itself. The wheels slammed back into place with such force Gustav and I were almost bucked off the car, and both of us ended up on our knees inches from the side.
As we hunched there, panting, a glow was quickly growing all around us: the literal light at the end of the tunnel. Only when I turned to face it, I saw something else there, too—a dark, hazy hole in its center, large and growing larger.
By the time I realized it was a train, it was almost too late to jump.

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