Ashes (12 page)

I don’t get out much, so I don’t know the ways of the world, and I ain’t got a lick of sense for time. Some days it seems I just opened my eyes after the train snipped me in half, when I looked toward the east mouth of the tunnel and saw a couple bits of myself being drug off by the undercarriage of the caboose, dribbling red everywhere. Other days it seems like I been here since the world was born, before these Appalachian hills rose up from the belly of the Earth and then settled down to the long, slow business of erosion. But maybe all days are the same anyway, when you get down to it.

I used to think so. And then she came along.

Pretty little thing, dressed up in her evening gown. You can see right though it, and if I wasn’t old enough to nearly be her grandpap, I’d probably look more often. But you can see right through her as well, so I reckon there’s nothing ungentlemanly in letting my eyes linger now and then. Even dead, a man’s still a man.

She happened during one of the wars, I reckon. The wars all got mixed up for me, because all I remember is the real one, when the Yanks and Rebs went at it and
Virginia
got split up by
Lincoln
. I stayed out of that one, I was out in
Missouri
territory at the time, where the rail was just starting to catch on and Chinamen and Irish were dying by the dozens laying steel and spiking ties. I came back when the B & O line was booming, working the firebox and generally trying not to get tied down with women, card debts, and such, because I figured on heading to the Pacific Coast eventually. And I stayed clear of the women just fine until this latest one.

Well, I didn’t really choose her like you might do a wife. And her gown ain’t rightly a wedding dress, neither. For one thing, it’s not white, it’s sort of green like the leaves of a chestnut tree in April. At least when it has color. In the tunnel, color comes and goes, at least to folks like me and her.

That’s a little peculiar, but you get used to it after awhile . And—

Tarnation. Here she comes now, so I reckon I’d best see what she wants.

“Have you seen my head?” she asks.

It’s in ghost words, ‘cause her lips don’t move but her voice is in my ears. Maybe that’s why normal folk, them still alive, never hear us when they walk through the tunnel. Some of them shiver and hoof it just a little faster, some look around at the slick masonry walls like they expect some secret message to be wrote in the slime.

“I done told you a thousand times, your head’s on top of your shoulders where it belongs.” She has a fine set of shoulders, smooth as rounded marble and the color of cream skimmed right off the top of the butter churn. Her head ain’t no less a marvel, with her hair swooped up in a fancy bundle that only ladies in companion houses wore back in my day. During her time, though, it might have passed for normal ladylike dress-up.

She reaches up to touch her hair, and I can’t really tell where her fingers end and the curly locks begin. Still, it’s fetching as all get out. “I can’t do a thing with it,” she says.

I nod. I know my part so well that I don’t really have to think it through. I’m like a stage actor or maybe the bass in a barbershop quartet, just delivering lines the way I ought. “You look just fine,” I say, though the motion makes me lick my lips. Damned dry lips, what they wouldn’t give for a touch of barrel-mash whiskey.

“They’ll be coming soon,” she says.

“They always do.”

You’d think after all these years I’d know how to dress for the occasion. I never had a worry over it before she came along. I’d just hoof it around in my old wool pants and cotton shirt. The holes in my clothes never troubled me none, because there wasn’t much difference between the hole and what it was supposed to be covering up. But I wouldn’t know where to find clothes even if I wanted them.

There in the early days, before I settled down to this notion of just what “forever” means, I’d go off half-cocked. More rightly, I’d either be floating around three feet off the ground, trailing some see-through innards where my belly got sawed in half by a set of steel wheels, or else my legs would be walking around with nothing to guide them. Not that they got much guidance even back when my brains was attached, considering I spent most of my breathing life balanced in the cab, shoveling like I was feeding the devil.

“What do you suppose it’s like out there?” she says.

She’s looking out the mouth of the tunnel, down to the north fork of the
Hughes
River
. A soft fog rises from the water, seeping into the gold-and-red forest. Beyond the trees, a collection of lights are winking on, one after another, like dead fireflies pinned against the horizon. Over time, the number of lights have doubled and tripled, and I reckon that’s as good a way to mark the years as any, because the stars have pretty much stayed the same. Back in my day,
Cairo
was the glass marble capital of the world, and sometimes I think those marbles are not toys but eyes, looking back from the forgotten past like a mirror.

“Same as always,” I say, as if I possess the wisdom granted by age. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, but try not to dwell on, it’s that foolishness never dies. Otherwise, I’d be in one piece and rotting away quiet in a pine box somewhere.

“Do you think they’ll like me?” She touches her hair again.

You can see how this dance has played out over the years. She’s lost her confidence, and that’s an awful thing in a woman. Sure, I’m a little beyond gentlemanly judgment, and my coarser nature somehow uncoupled when the boxcars between my skull and my private parts jumped the tracks, but, Christ damn it, a man’s still a man. “You’ll be the belle of the ball,” I say.

I reach for my pocket watch. The chain got crushed in the accident, and the watch is stuck on seven minutes before twelve, and I can never figure if that’s noon or midnight. Either way, I reckon I’ll never reach it, so it don’t matter which.

“Almost time?” she asks. She asks a lot of questions. That’s women for you. You can lop off their heads and still they keep yakking.

“Pretty soon now,” I say, which is as safe a bet as any.

And it probably will be soon. The sun still rises and falls regular, just like it did when I was in one piece, and right now it’s settling against the rounded hills, throwing a punkin-colored light across the trees. The horseshoe curve of the tunnel opening, at least on the sundown side, is outlined with light, and out beyond is all the promise of laughter, love, and life. That’s probably the worst trick of this condition, knowing there’s another way. Maybe there are folks like us out yonder cavorting and cutting up around graveyards and such, just drifting to hell and gone, whichever direction the wind blows. But me and her, all we got is Silver Run and time.

The people usually come from the east end, where it’s darkest, but of course a tunnel runs both ways. I used to think life was just one long rail, running on and on, and all I had to worry about was raking chunks of coal from the tender, pushing the boiler gauge to the red, blinking cinders from my eyes. You don’t think much about the end of the line, and when you do, you usually picture it as a nice, easy rolling stop, engine chuffing and wheels creaking as you come up on a comfortable station with lots of friends on the platform to welcome you home. You don’t expect to trip over your big toe at full throttle and go ass-over-teakettle between the cars.

But a fellow gets used to the notion, bye and bye. Leastways, I have. Or so I tell myself. What choice do I got?

“Maybe I should change clothes,” she says, fretting her head for no reason.

“If you was any prettier, you’d run them off faster than a pack of coyotes in a blood fever,” I say. Truth is, she got no other clothes, and if she did change, well, I don’t even like to think what might happen if I saw her in her undergarments. Hell, I might even blush, and I don’t know what color my cheeks would be. Maybe perdition red or mortuary blue.

“I’ll miss you,” she says, just like always.

“Comes a time for parting,” I say, though it stings a little all the same. Funny how you can just babble out any old words when you’re trying to hide what you really feel.

“You’ve meant a lot to me. We’ve been through so much together.”

Well, that ain’t rightly true. We’ve pretty much been through the same thing once, over and over and over again. But try talking sense to a woman and see where it gets you.

“I never expected somebody like you to come along,” I say, which is about as close as I ever brush up against honesty in my current condition.

“Well, you were here first,” she says.

And now we come to it. The only real sore point between us. Now, I pretty much nipped any notion of romance in the bud, me being at least a century older than her, but maybe even us dead folk get a little territorial. I don’t know how it is with others, since I only got this one example, but I figure if I’m going to be stuck in one place until the end of time, it ought to at least belong to me. But there I go again, acting like I’d expect any different from the female gender.

The ones that come here, they call me “The Engineer,” though I was always a fireman and never once laid a hand on the throttle. I figure they forgot the way of the steam locomotive same as they forgot every other way except their own, and so it has been since back to the beginning of time. Plus I kind of like the sound, “The Engineer.” Got more of a ring to it than “fireman” does, like a slow steam whistle on a dewy summer morn.

Trouble is, they don’t call me much of anything anymore. They got this new one they come looking for. Fresh kill. “The Jilted Lady,” they call her, and damned if that don’t got a ring to it, too. I find myself saying it a lot, trying it out on these numb lips. Not that I ever say it aloud, especially to her.

“I have to admit, I had some adjusting to do,” I say. “I never expected somebody like you to come into my life.”

She doesn’t laugh. She’s a little humorless, but I chalk it off to the way she got here. Seems I’m always apologizing for the way she is.

“Maybe things could have been different if we’d met at a different time,” she says.

Sure as shootin’. I been around long enough to know that it don’t matter the reason why it don’t work, just that it don’t. “You never asked to be here,” I say.

Indeed she didn’t. She didn’t ask nothing, and she couldn’t even if she had wanted. That guy wrapped a rag around her mouth tight as a banjo string, and she tried and tried to scream but nary a peep came out. O’ course, considering what the guy did to her, I reckon there’s a blessing in that, and proof that maybe God is a merciful creature after all.

She wipes at her eyes. Maybe she’s crying, or maybe she’s fussing with make-up. Looks the same either way. “We were going to be married,” she says.

That’s plenty enough cause for waterworks, I reckon, and maybe a swift death saved her from a slower, more tortured demise. Then again, her death wasn’t all that swift. The fellow who stole her heart took just a mite too much joy in her pain, and wasn’t in no hurry to end the honeymoon.