Eldorado (6 page)

“How do you know when a car is empty?”

“The sound,” answered Keller, pointing at his left ear. “An empty car makes a sort of hollow echo sound. The full ones are more muffled and solid sounding. It's easy to tell once you've done it a few times.”

Richard nodded. Somehow he hadn't expected jumping the train to be this complicated.

Keller continued, “Once I pick out a car, I'll look at you and point to it. We won't be able to talk, ‘cause that train is loud! Once I'm sure you've gotten my signal, we'll both run flat out for that car. Now, this is the tricky part. You listening?”

Richard nodded, more nervous with each new instruction.

“We're going to run for the BACK of the car I point out. At the back of each car is a ladder they use to get onto the roof. You'll go first.”

Richard swallowed.

“You'll run ahead of me,” continued Keller, “and you'll grab onto that ladder. As soon as you've got a proper grip, you'll climb up as fast as you can until your feet are on the FOURTH rung from the top. Got that?”

Richard nodded.

“The FOURTH rung. That's important. You’ve got to be high enough that I can climb up after you. Once you’re up there, just hold on for dear life until I tell you different. Remember, all this is going to happen real fast, so make sure you memorize what you have to do. When we're running I'll be right behind you. Once you're in position, I'll climb the ladder and open the door for us.”

“Open the door? How?”

“With my handy-dandy 'universal persuader', that's how,” laughed Keller, and he brought a small crowbar from his pack.

They went over the jumping procedure several times, then relaxed and waited. Within minutes they felt the vibration and then heard the rumble of the Food Train approaching. Richard peered through a gap in the branches and caught his first glimpse. It was ironic that, as important as the Food Train loomed in his and everybody else’s lives, he’d never actually seen it. The blotch in the distance grew in size, and its shadow swept across the plain in front of them, tracking over their position long before the train itself and colouring the landscape a shade darker. They crouched behind the stand of brush, ready to run.

The huge, slab-like engine finally loomed into view, clawing its way uphill against the steel rails below, straining under the weight of the hundred or so cars it towed behind. The train pushed a column of air ahead of it stinking of diesel, dust, and rotting vegetables. The roar was deafening as the engine passed them by, and the earth shook under their feet.

One or two cars behind the engine, a grim-faced guard, holding an automatic rifle at the ready against his chest, stood in a caged metal pedestal welded to the frame. The guard scanned the area intently, but didn’t see them. The gun-metal gray engine, then the guard, shrank into the distance, curving around and behind one of the surrounding hills.

When Keller first began talking about the jump, Richard was confident, but with each new instruction and warning his confidence ratcheted down a notch.

Now, with the monstrous steel behemoth thundering along the track in front of them, a wave of panic washed over him. He wasn't prepared for the size, the noise, the bone shaking vibration, the grinding of the massive steel wheels on the tracks. He fought to keep his attention on Keller and forget the train. Finally, at a moment that only he somehow knew, Keller threw his arm forward and pointed to a boxcar, motioning for Richard to start his run.

Richard straightened up and started running. He pushed with every iota of his strength, producing explosions of rising dust with each footfall. He gasped frantically for air. His heart pounded until he thought it would burst. After what seemed an eternity he was a couple of yards from the precious ladder.

He was so fixated on the ladder that just as he got close enough to touch it, his foot caught a clump of grass and he stumbled forward. He staggered, half-falling, half-running, plunging headfirst toward the razor-sharp rims of the closest wheels.

Suddenly his body lifted up as he was grabbed by the collar from behind and held steady for a fraction of a second, just long enough to regain his balance. He glanced behind him.

“Do it!” Keller yelled.

Richard was now less than a yard from the ladder. After one last stride he sprang with both feet. He caught hold and his chest slammed against the metal rungs. He battled for a foothold and lost, his feet dragging in the dust, inches from the spinning blade-like wheels. With a frantic kick at the ground he finally caught a rung, hauled himself up, and began to climb.

“The FOURTH rung!” He shouted over the deafening roar of the train. He made it to the next level. “The FOURTH rung!” He repeated, climbing arm over arm, one rung at a time, to the final position.

Keller grabbed the ladder as soon as he was out of the way. Though he was an old man, Keller seemed to possess almost super-human abilities. He propelled himself effortlessly up the ladder with one hand, leaned out toward the sliding door of the rail-car, again on one arm, and pulled out his 'persuader'.

Hanging by his right arm, Keller jammed the persuader into the lock on the door, and with a mighty sweep of his left arm swiftly and silently broke the lock and slid the door open. With a practiced movement he swung himself into the opening.

Richard glanced down the track and saw a man stagger toward the ladder two cars away. The man was middle aged. His clothes were worn and his face unshaven. He had waited too long – or run too slowly. Now he was struggling to overtake the accelerating train. His stumbling gait revealed his exhaustion.

He jumped for the ladder much as Richard had done and caught hold, though his grip looked shaky. He began to climb, apparently headed for the roof. At first it looked like he was going to make it; he reached the roof and grabbed for the thin gutter around the edge. He strained to haul his body up and over.

Richard couldn't tell exactly what went wrong, but he suspected that the man's strength simply gave out. He lost his hold on the gutter and plummeted toward the ground. His left foot somehow caught in the bottom rung of the ladder and his body swung under the wheels of the train. The poor soul was cut almost exactly in half, his legs crumpling on the ground beside the tracks, the rest disappearing under the grinding wheels.

What was left of the mutilated corpse shrank into the distance. Richard felt faint and his knuckles whitened on the rung of the ladder. He desperately fought the urge to vomit. Shouts from below distracted him from the horror. Keller was gesturing nervously for Richard to climb down and join him.

“Hurry!” Keller mouthed the words.

Again Richard was terrified. The train had accelerated since they first climbed on. He peered down at the rail ties swiftly flying away below, knowing that a fall from the ladder now would mean almost certain death, the image of the mutilated jumper seared into his brain.

Somehow he found the strength to climb back down, and prepared to copy Keller's swinging motion into the open door. Somewhere in mid-swing, his right arm gave way. He plunged toward the steel rails below. Again a miraculous force caught him by the collar and hauled him into the opening. The door slid shut and he collapsed on the floor, gasping for breath.

A few minutes later his strength began to return, and his eyes adapted to the dim light inside the railway car. Outside, the dawn was breaking, and the cracks and holes in the metal rail-car allowed some amount of light inside. The car reeked of rotting vegetables, even though it appeared to be empty. Richard screwed up his nose in disgust.

“That was the other advantage of getting an empty rail-car I said I'd tell you about when we got on,” said Keller, over the rumble of the wheels outside. “The empty ones don't stink near as much as the full ones. You okay?”

“You…You saved my life,” croaked Richard.

“Bet your ass I did!” laughed Keller. “Twice! You break anything?”

Richard tried to move various parts of his body.

“I'm tired and sore, but unbroken,” he finally said. “That was a lot harder than I expected.”

“Well, there's a trick to everything, as my old dad used to say. It's not that hard once you get the hang of it.”

“Did you see the guy behind us thrown under the wheels?”

“Yeah, I saw it,” Keller said matter-of-factly. “That was Gordy – tough break – guess the road finally caught up with him.”

Richard was shocked. “You know him? Doesn’t it bother you?”

Keller glared at him. “Sure it bothers me. Look, you’re not in the schoolroom now. You jump trains long enough – get old enough – you make mistakes. Gordy knew that.”

Richard closed his eyes and shook his head, trying to banish the horrific image from his mind. Finally he said, “So now what?”

“Now…we wait. I'm pretty sure nobody saw us get on. It'll take an hour or so to get to Surrey. You better concentrate on resting. When we get there, we'll have to get off.”

Richard groaned.

“Don't sweat it,” said Keller. “Getting off 's a lot easier than getting on.”

“Thank God for that.”

Richard finally worked up the strength to sit, and found a place against the back wall of the rail-car. Exhausted as he was, he still didn't feel like sleeping.

“Jim, you said you used to live in Surrey,” he said. “You’ve never talked about it. What did you do there?”

“I was a diesel mechanic,” said Keller, settling his back against the wall beside him. “Worked on the Big Rigs – that's what they called the big trucks they used for hauling freight – seems hard to believe now.” As he spoke, vibrating slivers of light from the rising sun marched across his face like the flickering of an old movie. “Back then, even with fuel prices the way they were, that was a pretty good job. There were still Rigs around.

“Then trucking got too expensive and they set up the Food Train to run from the local farms. The Big Rigs are almost all gone now. Nowadays a diesel mechanic's about as useless a profession as you could come up with. Funny – back then the cliché for a useless job was 'manufacturing buggy whips'. Ironic, isn't it,” said Keller, staring at the floor. “You'd be way better off now making buggy whips than being a diesel mechanic.”

Neither of them spoke for several seconds.

Finally Richard broke the silence. “What a mess we’ve made.”

“Yeah,” said Keller, shaking his head slowly. “Thing is, we cheated – gorged ourselves on stuff it took nature millions of years to create. What people didn’t get was that the energy we were squandering like drunken sailors was a one-time bargain. We were so arrogant we started thinking we’d created it ourselves.

“Now all the cars, trucks, tractors, cranes, ships, airplanes, factories, electrical power plants, etcetera that used to run on fossil fuels have to run on something else. That something else can never match the bang for the buck we used to get out of diesel and gasoline.”

“Like you said before, I guess I’m out of touch,” said Richard.

“You hear about it in school,” said Keller, “you read about it in books – it doesn’t hit home. One of the blessings – or maybe it’s more like a curse – of getting older is that you can see how things got to be the way they are. You can see it because you lived through it.”

Richard’s exhaustion caught up to him. He felt his eyelids falling shut, and finally gave in to fatigue and lay down on the floor. He thought that with the adrenaline rush of jumping the train he'd have trouble sleeping, but as soon as he laid his head down and closed his eyes, he was gone.

He drifted into a dream. At a student picnic when he was still in University, he and his then girlfriend Laura strolled away from the crowd and off into the woods. A golden glow permeated the entire world, as if it had been drenched in honey, and an electric energy crackled through the air – birds hummed from branch to branch in trees vibrating with life.

That electricity was infused into every part of their bodies. He felt Laura shudder faintly as he touched her cheek. The trees, the grass, the sky, the very earth underneath them disappeared as they were lost in each other, each obsessed with the other's pleasure. They made love for the first time, wrapped in the electric hum of their own senses.

Suddenly the golden world fell away and was crowded out by the horrifying image of the mutilated jumper, his severed legs spurting blood beneath the roar of the thundering train. Richard flinched and began to shake and he was awake. Keller was shaking him.

“You okay, son?” Keller said.

It took a few seconds to remember where he was.

“Yeah,” he said, “I’m fine.”

Keller said, “Sorry to have to wake you, but we're going to have to make the jump pretty soon. I’ve got to make sure you're ready.”

Richard rubbed the sleep from his eyes. He’d regained some of his strength, but every muscle in his body hurt like hell.

“In fifteen or twenty minutes,” said Keller, “we'll hit a stretch that's perfect for getting off.”

Richard nodded.

Keller continued, “When we get to the right spot, I'll let you know. The method for getting off is sort of the reverse of the one for getting on. The jumping point is on a steep grade, so the train will slow down. When the time is right, I'll slide the door open just enough for you to get out.”