Locomotive Gods

The tracks lead east through the woods. The tracks lead west. They curve slightly, perhaps, but continue to some faraway stations Sue has never seen.

Once, a long time ago, she tried to run away. She followed the tracks, sure they would bring her somewhere. A train must travel them. There were rocks around the tracks, and wood ties, and very little rust. No weeds sprouted between the tracks, or even ventured any closer than a meter or two. And sometimes late at night, under the light of the moon, when Sue might only have been dreaming, she heard the roar of the train’s horn, but nothing more.

She walked alongside the tracks for three cold nights. No train came. When she slept, between the tracks, she challenged the locomotive behemoth to remove her. She woke stiff and achy, but still alive and still on the tracks.

Another time, she tied a puppy to the rail. She gave it enough room to move off the tracks; she was no masochist. But the puppy, Petey, might die, or he might hop off the tracks before the train severed its ropes. She fed Petey for seven days before tiring of the attempt.

That eighth night, she would’ve sworn she heard a distant train.

She dreamed of growing wings, like the buzzards, like the pigeons, and flying so high over the tracks she could see where they went, or from whence they came. She dreamed of running like a cat, a leopard perhaps, something fast and sleek and tireless.

Petey’s an old dog now. He does nothing but lay in the shadows on the porch. When the sun shines in the east, he starts his day in the back. Sometime after noon, he’ll wander to the front and settle and watch the squirrels he once chased and the rabbits that devoured so much of the garden.

Sue writes letters, though she wasn’t quite sure how they went. She puts them in envelopes and drops them in the blue box in town, except no one ever comes to town anymore and she wonders if the letters just sit there. But as many letters as she writes, she’s never filled the box.

What had once been a mighty and thriving town is now only a few faded facades, a mailbox made more of rust than blue, and a telephone booth. The phone gets a dial tone, but Sue has found no quarters to deposit into the slot, and she can’t get any operator except the recorded voice saying, “Please hang up and try again.”

Sue sings. She’s got a voice from heaven. Torch singers from New Orleans dream of having her voice, and hitting the notes she can hit. He breath control is exquisite. She doesn’t know what vibrato is, but she’s mastered it. Melody is her birthright, rhythm her bitch. All the boys in all the faraway countries dream of wooing her, of listening to her sing and watching her walk and sharing her laugh and holding her hand. All the boys in faraway countries dream of living and dying beside a girl so much like Sue, they should dream of her and only her, though some of course may have other loves to taint their fancy.

Sue prays to the moon. She prays to Allah five times a day, facing Mecca, and she prays to Budha and the obi and Confucius and Teddy Roosevelt and the tooth fairy and her daddy. She prays to Zeus and the Great Spirit and Cthulhu. None, so far, have answered her prayers, or she cannot read the signs and omens they send. She doesn’t know who to believe in, so she believes in the train. She’s heard the train. She’s felt its rumblings in the very earth, she’s sure of it, and even the breeze it leaves in its wake, despite that she’s never seen it. There may be foreign countries and distant planets and parallel earths and alternative universes; Sue only knows for certain there is a train, and it barrels over those tracks, and one day she’ll see the train and maybe it’ll stop and the engineer, wearing a black and white hat and a huge coal-dusted smile, will welcome her aboard. She hopes when the day comes, she doesn’t succumb to vertigo.

She doesn’t believe in vertigo, but it’s always the things that aren’t real that frighten you most.

A breeze blows through her house. Petey sits on the porch and doesn’t bark at the squirrels. The tracks lead east. The tracks lead west. Sue sings as she scribbles her latest letter, something she hopes to mail to the President of the United States, something she’ll drop in the blue box in town so it can wait for the postman to retrieve it.

She doesn’t know about stamps.

Clouds streak the sky, shifting speedily from the setting sun to the darkest corners of the sky. There’s no thunder, only heat lightning, merely the echoes of some faraway lightning striking the hearts of other towns and foreign countries. And there’s the sound of a coal engine racing along the tracks, its sustained horn powerfully cleaving the air. Sue drops her pen and races out of the house, through the woods, toward the tracks. She doesn’t hear the horn again. She doesn’t need to. This sound was approaching, not departing. This train’s coming now. The locomotive gods have finally granted her a boon.

Sue runs like her leopard. No tree root or branch can slow her down. It’s a short distance to the train tracks, less than a mile, but it takes forever to break through the night upon the clearing made for the tracks.

And here it comes, a huge, shining light, getting larger and closer. It sounds its horn again. So close, Sue feels it in her bones. Her heart hammers her ribcage. Her voice fails her, though she’d never be heard over the roaring, rumbling, rocketing train. Alongside the tracks now, Sue jumps. Sue waves her arms. Frantically, she tries to flag down the powerful engine, but it moves too fast, the sun’s too low in the sky, the arc of the single headlight doesn’t touch her.

So Sue climbs to the tracks, stands between the rails with her feet apart and her arms flailing. The train moves so impossibly fast, like lightning in a dream, and finally the big shining headlight finds her.

The horn sounds, this time low and unceasingly, merely pausing for a breath as the train comes closer. Sue holds her ground. She will force the metal monster to stop. She will board one of the Pullman cars, perhaps a sleeper, or the caboose, she doesn’t care, even in one of the hay-filled cars for animals. The train will stop.

A face sticks out the side of the engine car. He’s wearing the black and white hat, just as she knew he would. She’s happy now, almost giddy. She’s jumping again, swinging her arms. The sound of the horn is overtaken by squealing air brakes as the iron wheels attempt to stop a hundred tons of metal. The machine barely slows down.

Cars behind the engine hop the tracks at the exact moment the spotlight hits Sue.

The light goes dead. Metal twists. Smoke whirls. Passengers scream. The sun disappears over the horizon. Petey, back on the front porch, howls. A postman, in some faraway foreign country, delivers the last letter of the day. Sue flies, without wings, and lands in the trees. The train continues sliding, crunching, crushing, shattering, and screeching. Coal spills, and luggage, bodies and blood, perhaps hopes and dreams. When the train finally stops moving, when it settles in for the night, the horn is silence and the wailing ceases and the metals stop scraping other metals. Silence strikes. Silence penetrates pores and bones. Somewhere, a whippoorwill mourns. Smoke, gray smoke and black smoke and red smoke, pours into the sky.

Sue believes in the train. She hears it, sometimes in her dreams, sometimes when she’s dropping letters in the blue mailbox, sometimes when she’s sitting on the porch swing with Petey. The sound of the horn hurts her head. She bleeds, sometimes, from the arcing scar across her forehead. There’s a dream she has, where she stops the train, and boards it, the locomotive gods wearing black and white engineer caps; a steward delivers red wine from some faraway foreign country; the other passengers laugh and joke and beg her to sing.

Sue still sings.

But Sue avoids the tracks. They lead to the east. They lead to the west. But a thousand ghosts wander the tracks here and now, never getting where they’re going, no longer remembering where they’ve been. Sometimes she hears them wailing like banshees in the night, sometimes there’s only the crying of a single inconsolable infant. She thinks they’re looking for her. She thinks she’s a ghost, too. She writes her letters, with made-up letters that may or may not mean anything, and addresses the envelope to the locomotive gods.

The only response is, on occasion, is that sustained train horn bleating in the night.