A String of Beads (7 page)

They trotted along the hillside, staying among the trees but heading for the spot
where the tracks turned and disappeared into thick woods. It took them a few minutes
to run from their hill to the one where the tracks were. When they arrived they could
look down above the tracks to see a place where the rails bisected the town. On one
side they could see four church steeples, a row of long, flat-topped buildings that
were probably stores and offices, and farther out, dozens of small houses with pitched
gray roofs. On the other side of the tracks were a number of old brick buildings with
rows of dirty, barely translucent windows, smokestacks, and railroad sidings. Beyond
them there were metal Quonset huts that were either warehouses or garages.

A train snaked around the hill on the far side of the valley and sounded its horn
as it came into town at the first intersection—two short, one long, one short blare,
still somewhat faint. At each spot where the tracks crossed a road, they could see
red lights begin to flash, and then a black-and-white barrier came down, and the train
came through. Now they could see that the train had a big yellow engine in front and
one right behind, and more and more freight cars appeared behind them from around
the hill.

“It’s a big train,” said Jimmy. “I’ll bet it’s a hundred cars.”

“That’s got to be good for us,” Jane said. “Let’s get closer.”

They came down through the trees just as the front of the train passed, moving along
at a slow, steady rate. There were hoppers, tank cars, boxcars, flatbeds laden with
big loads of pipes or thick packs of flat material like wallboard or plywood, all
strapped down tightly. There were gondolas full of coal or slag. The names blazoned
on the cars were familiar from their childhood—Canadian National, Georgia Central,
Chicago and North Western, Erie Lackawanna.

Jane stopped beside the tracks. The engines were at least twenty-five cars ahead of
them now. Jane looked ahead toward the place where the tracks turned and climbed upward,
and looked back to the curve where the next part of the train was still to appear,
rolling toward them. She looked back up the hillside through the trees. She said,
“I’m ready. Are you up to this?”

“Yep,” he said.

“Stay low. When we see the one we want, we’ll run for it. You get aboard, and then
I will.”

He looked at her. “Are you sure you don’t want to go first?”

“I’m being sensible. If you get up there first, you’ll be able to pull me up. If I’m
there first, I won’t be strong enough to pull you up.”

“What you’re really afraid of is that you’ll make it and I won’t,” he said. “But that’s
okay. We’d better get going before that cop catches up and sees us.”

They watched the cars coming past, and then Jane said, “I see one coming. It’s a hopper
with an open top. Black. See it?”

“I see it.” Jimmy began to trot, then sped up a little to match the speed of the car,
jumped to grasp a vertical bar at the back that formed part of a ladder, and then
stepped onto the small level space just before the rear coupling.

Jane ran in right behind him, grasped the bar, and pulled herself up. She clung there
for a few seconds, and then they looked at each other and smiled as the engines pulled
them around the first curve into deeper woods. “Let’s see if we can get up there on
top,” Jane said, and sidestepped to the ladder. She climbed up, stepped over the rim
of the hopper, and disappeared.

Jimmy climbed up after her, looked over the rim into the hopper, and climbed in beside
her. The hopper was loaded with tiny, coarse stones like the gravel under the railroad
ties. It was mounded in the center and shallower along the sides, so if they stayed
near the outer areas, they were well hidden. Jimmy gave her a high five, and then
lay back to look up at the sky. There were a few wispy white clouds very high up,
each like a single brushstroke, but most of the sky was a pure blue.

The train stopped. A moment later, it began to back up. It went about twenty feet,
and then stopped with a jolt, as though something had collided with the rear of the
train. “They must be adding more cars,” said Jimmy. In a moment, the train started
moving ahead again, very slowly overcoming its inertia and immense weight, and making
its way up the first hill.

Jimmy started to sit up, but Jane put her hand on his chest. “Please don’t sit up
yet. Let’s wait until we’re at least a few miles farther on, where there’s zero chance
Tech Sergeant Isaac Lloyd will see us.”

Jimmy smiled. “You certainly have gotten cautious as a grown-up.”

Jane didn’t smile. “Sometimes the difference between sort of safe and absolutely safe
is pretty unpleasant, so I lean toward absolutely safe.”

The train climbed the hill slowly, tugging its long string of cars up the gradual
incline until it reached a gap in the hillside and sped up to twenty-five, then about
thirty-five miles an hour.

Jane and Jimmy both unrolled their bedrolls and spread them on the gravel, their heads
slightly inclined toward the mound. They used their packs as pillows and rested from
their long, hard run. They passed through areas where the tall trees and the cuts
through the hillsides kept them in shade much of the time, and then through rolling
farmland. After a half hour they were both asleep, rocked gently in their hopper,
hearing only the constant clacking of the wheels and feeling the fresh breeze passing
over them.

They woke when the train blew its whistle to signal its approach to the first crossing
at the next town, and they remained alert but out of sight until it regained its full
speed on the way out of town.

As Jane lay on the gravel bed she decided riding the train was like lying in a boat.
The hopper was open to the sky, and traveled at a nearly uniform slow speed, almost
never stopping. Even twenty miles an hour felt like a huge luxury after so many days
of traveling on foot.

Jane had been trying to keep herself persuaded that her wounded leg had recovered
completely from the gunshot. She had certainly proven that it was strong enough to
do what she had needed to do. Over a year of hard, steady training had brought back
enough strength to travel on foot for two hundred miles or more in hilly country.
But she wasn’t so sure the injuries nobody could see had healed.

The four men who had captured her in California had wanted desperately to find out
where she had sent James Shelby, the man she had rescued from the courthouse. She
would not tell them. For years, whenever she had taken on a new runner, she had promised,
“I will die before I reveal where you are to anyone.” To make sure her promise would
never be a lie, she had always carried in her purse a cut-glass perfume bottle containing
the distilled and concentrated juice of the roots of
Cicuta maculata
, the water hemlock plant. Swallowing two bites of hemlock root was the traditional
Seneca method of committing suicide. The common name for water hemlock in Western
New York was cowbane, because now and then a foraging cow would try some. A single
root would kill a fifteen-hundred-pound Holstein. But Jane had lost her purse in the
fight before she’d been captured.

She’d had no way to kill herself, and so they had gotten the chance to torment her,
to inflict enough suffering to make her want to trade James Shelby’s life, not for
hers—she’d known they would kill her anyway—but for simple relief, the chance to make
the pain stop. She had not told them. She had been preparing for death when her captors
realized that Jane had helped victims to escape many times before, and so she had
enemies who would pay millions to interrogate her themselves.

The four men who held her were all dead now. But in her dreams sometimes they would
come back, and she would have to kill them again. It was as though she hadn’t yet
been able to make their deaths final. She knew that the dream meant something. It
meant that what had happened to her was not over. This afternoon, if she stretched
and ran her own hand up her back from the waist to the shoulder blade, she could still
feel the rows of horizontal scars. They had heated steel barbecue skewers with a propane
torch and laid them on her back. She knew that in a few years the scars might be level
with the rest of her skin, or even be hard to see, but they would never be gone. The
puckered scar on her thigh from the bullet would never be smooth again.

She was not able to forget any of it, and that was the part that she felt most. From
the time she was a child she had been strong, physically confident, and occasionally
even reckless. She had gotten hurt, even hurt badly, but she had always known that
bruises would fade, pain would go away, and she would be fit and strong again. She
didn’t know that anymore.

Jane was feeling something that she had never felt before her capture, the suspicion
that she was harboring an inner weakness, like a virus, that had begun to attack her
during those awful days and nights. Now that she had felt the sensation of being utterly
powerless, and the knowledge that somebody had really hurt her—not just caused her
pain, but disfigured her, changed her so she would never be the same—she was sure
she was the worse for it internally too. Would she be able to face the risk of going
through such pain again?

Jane had learned to accept death fifteen years ago, when she started carrying poison
with her every day. She had become accustomed to rising from her bed with the knowledge
that she might have to die that day—die quickly, a few minutes of sharp pain and then
darkness. This new condition was worse, a threat that she could not control by thinking
about it. It was a reflex. She had been hurt once, so would she flinch each time after
that? If Jimmy needed her, would she be quick and decisive, or would she hesitate?

When the clan mothers came to her she had not felt ready to take on Jimmy Sanders
and his problems. She had wanted to agree with Carey and stay home. But having all
eight clan mothers waiting on her doorstep had simply not permitted her to make excuses
or even tell them that she was not the person they thought she was. They were modern
American women like her, but they were something else too. They had inherited the
powers of eight women who had lived somewhere deep in prehistory, in the times when
the names of matrilineal families were first represented by wolves or bears or herons.
In those days the world was a deep, endless forest, and being a lone person was always
fatal.

Jane glanced at Jimmy. He was asleep again. Maybe things would be all right. Maybe
she had completed this errand without having to test her courage or her confidence.
She watched the utility poles going by. Thirty miles an hour, she thought. As long
as the train kept going, they might get through this without trouble.

After a time, her own exhaustion caught up with her again. She had been on the trail,
moving at high speed, for nearly a week. Her energy was depleted. She remembered there
was a bottle of water and a protein bar or two in her pack. When she opened it and
looked, she saw there were two of each. She set aside some for Jimmy, and opened hers.
She ate and drank, and then slept again.

Next time she awoke, it was dark. The train was slowing down, and when she looked
up she could see tall buildings with hundreds of tiny windows in rows. She crouched
to look out over the side of the hopper. They were on tracks that had been joined
by others, so there were at least five sets in a row. She gave Jimmy’s foot a kick.

He sat up, and then knelt beside Jane to see what she saw. “Do you know where we are?”
he asked.

“No idea,” she said. “I’m looking for some sign, or something I recognize.”

“If you’ve been here, you probably didn’t ride in on a load of gravel.”

“No. But it occurs to me that what we’re doing is illegal, and we’re coming to a place
where there will be more people to catch us at it. There seems to be a big train yard
up ahead. Let’s collect our belongings and get ready to bail out.” She knelt, rolled
up her bedroll, arranged everything in her pack, and craned her neck to look ahead
while Jimmy packed up his gear.

The train began to slow markedly. Jimmy said, “Ready to go?”

“Yes,” Jane said. She put on her baseball cap, hid her hair under it, hoisted herself
up on the back rim of the hopper, found the first rung of the ladder with her foot,
and climbed down. The train was slowing more and more. Jimmy was beside her now, so
she dropped her pack, jumped, and ran for a stretch to slow her momentum. Jimmy jumped
a few yards on, and then they both went back and retrieved their backpacks. Jane slung
her backpack over one shoulder. “Carry it this way, so you look like a worker with
a tool bag, and not a train jumper.” Jimmy imitated her, and they looked ahead. The
train was moving into a huge freight yard, with fences and buildings and lots of lights,
so they walked briskly away from it, toward the back of the train. They didn’t walk
so briskly that they seemed to be running from something.

When they were in a darker, more deserted area, they crossed several sets of tracks,
walked across a weedy plot of land that had been paved once but now had plants thriving
in each crack, and came to a street. It was dark, and the old brick buildings seemed
to be abandoned with the doors and windows boarded. The next street had a few neon
lights, and cars passed now and then.

Jane stopped and said, “Let’s dust ourselves off and straighten up before we get into
the light. That gravel wasn’t exactly clean.” They spent a few minutes getting themselves
freed of dust, buttoned up, and looking a bit better. The evening was cool, so Jane
took her jacket out of her pack and put it on, and then turned around so Jimmy could
see. “What do you think?”

“Very respectable, and dust-free. How about me?”

“Much better.”

Jimmy put on a light jacket too. “Are you hungry?”

“Sure,” she said. “Maybe there will be a restaurant on one of the next streets, where
there are lights.” She looked at her watch. “It’s only eight.”