BACKSTORY: Johnny Cash’s prison songs often deal with the aftermath of unforgivable crimes. The most famous of these, “Folsom Prison Blues,” deals with a murderer who will never again know the world outside prison, and who must bear the nightly passage of the trains that symbolize a freedom he will never know. But is that torment limited to this world, alone? Are there prisoners, down below, who also hear distant trains pursue a journey forever denied to those who have lost their own chances of redemption? This one’s for the Man in Black!
THE TRACKS CARVED A PATH THROUGH the most populous regions of Hell.
They rose from the starless murk, passed through a tunnel torn through the mountains of Dis, then crossed over the valley of pain itself, in a pair of parallel lines so direct that the trains that ran upon them barely seemed touched by the suffering of all the souls enduring Eternity here.
And then, unlike anything else in this loveless place, they moved on, their whistles trailing behind them like cold apologies.
There is a station, just across from the wall of Murderers, but the trains themselves rarely stop.
Ed Johnson waited.
It was all they’d left him.
In life he had been an impatient man, who had hoarded time more jealously than any of his handful of other blessings. Everything he’d ever wanted, he’d wanted now: not thirty minutes from now, not five. Now. Waiting had made dark clouds pass over eyes already the color of slate.
He had never spoken any words that anybody would ever want to quote in a book—his greatest source of contempt, in life, being anybody who cottoned to those mysterious artifacts of print and paper—but some of the things he’d said had defined him as well as anything possibly could.
Can you hurry it up awready?
And
Get a move on, will ya?
And his favorite:
I ain’t got all day!
He had hoarded the seconds and resented anybody who had stolen them from him and he made his displeasure known in ways ranging from irritation to rage, all on the pretext, obvious to him, that he was being kept from better things he had to do.
All of this made him an asshole, not necessarily a sinner.
But a sinner he was, and for his punishment he had nothing to do but wait.
His cell was a tiny box, to his senses about the size of a phone booth, except too short to stand up in and too narrow to lie down in. The walls were sometimes so cold he was wracked with shivers, and sometimes so hot that his flesh blackened and peeled, but never for long in either case. Neither was allowed to become routine, the bursts of extreme cold or heat being merely cruel punctuation to an existence that was otherwise a long dull imprisonment. There was no door, as he would never be allowed out. There was no guard, as there was nothing he could do to escape. There was one narrow slit of a window, at eye-level, perfectly positioned for a man who from now until the end of eternity would never have anything to do but look . . . but most of the time there was nothing to see but darkness.
Except when the trains passed, carrying their light with them.
He hated the trains.
He cursed them and he screamed at them and he begged them to stop and take him with them, and when the last of the sound they made trailed off in the distance he slumped against the pitiless wall again, hating himself as much as he hated them.
Hating the stupid face of the boy in the checkered shirt.
Ed still didn’t know what color the boy had been. It didn’t matter, of course, the penalties were the same, but as long as you have to be sent to Death Row for killing a man you might as well know whether the bastard’s black or not. The kid had a complexion like light coffee that might have been just the result of too much time in the sun or might have been the Mexican footprint of someone in his immediate family history. The family might have provided a clue, but only the mother showed up in court, and while she looked white enough, the absent father could have been any shade on the spectrum. Ed had never settled the matter to his satisfaction because nobody had ever brought it up and he wasn’t about to ask, being just smart enough to know that asking might have added a bullshit hate-crimes charge to all the sixteen other species of shit being dumped on his ass. Ed didn’t need to deal with that on top of everything else. Not that he was entirely a stranger to that aspect of things; he’d had a lot of time to contemplate what he’d done, during his seventeen years waiting for the appeals to run out, and the more he thunk on it the more he figured the kid’s precise shade of mocha might have had a large part of what made seeing him die so appealing. But that hadn’t been it, not really. The fact was that, whatever color he’d been, the kid had just annoyed the shit out of him. He’d opened the register as ordered and he’d gotten down on the floor as ordered and he’d pressed his stupid nose against the floor tile as ordered and he’d cooperated with Ed in every way as ordered, and he’d done every candyass thing he possibly could do to save himself, but he’d also cried, trying his best to suck it up but not quite managing, that moist sniveling sniff of his escaping despite all of Ed’s stern warnings to shut the hell up. And maybe, okay, maybe it made sense for the kid to be so scared, him eighteen and already a father, and Ed standing there pressing a barrel to the back of his head, blowing a gasket because there was only $22.50 in the cash drawer. But he could have said “please” without whimpering like that. He could have been a man and said, “I’m sorry, mister, but that’s all there is.” That would have been reasonable. He didn’t have to make like a girl and be such a pain in the ass that, for the duration of one nerve impulse, Ed would be willing to pull the trigger, just to watch him die.
It was all the kid’s fault, is what it was. It was the kid’s fault that Ed had found himself a murderer instead of a robber, a most-wanted fugitive instead of a criminal who could blow town and be forgotten about, a death-penalty defendant instead of a piece-of-shit case that got bargained down to manslaughter. It was the kid’s fault that Ed’s parents had needed to mortgage the house to pay for his defense, and the kid’s fault that Ed’s brother stopped talking to him midway through the trial, and the kid’s fault Ed had needed to put on an ugly tie every day and sit there listening to the cops and the forensic guys and the kid’s family talk their shit for hours on end. It was the kid’s fault that Ed had spent seventeen years rotting in a cell far removed from Gen Pop, waiting for everybody to stop discussing whether he should be put out of his misery or not.
It was the kid’s fault that by the time they finally strapped Ed down, and started dabbing his arm with the cotton swab, Ed was so bored and depressed and ready to get on with the next thing that when they asked him if he had any last words to offer, he knew exactly what he wanted to say.
He said, Can you hurry it up awready?
And
Get a move on, will ya?
And his favorite:
I ain’t got all day!
After all, he didn’t know what was coming next, but was sure it had to be more interesting than this.
Most of the time the trains went right on by, providing vivid reminder that there were people who did not have to stay in this place, and a brief shining lift that left purple after-images burned into Ed’s retinas. He had no way to tell time, so he had no way of knowing how often they came. As far as he could tell, the intervals between them ranged between hours and years, but they might have been running like clockwork for all he knew, the subjective time between them varying only according to how heavily his imprisonment weighed upon his back.
Less often, one stopped.
Moments like that were the only thing to look forward to, and he always drew close to his narrow window, his sensation-starved mind eager to take in anything his eyes could feed it. At such moments the train, idling at its platform, was less a streak of light than an artifact with heft and weight and detail. He saw the long narrow cars, each glimmering with a soft inner radiance, each giving off an ethereal vapor that might have been steam and might have been the fumes released by the burning of a fuel he could not even begin to imagine. He saw the rows of windows, streaming even more light into the surrounding darkness, and he saw the shapes of people, mingling inside. At this distance he couldn’t make out anything but their outlines, which were most of the time just ovals cast by what must have been the heads of travelers peering out at the landscape that included him. The first few times trains stopped, Ed had screamed at them, in a hoarse voice he had trouble recognizing as his own. Hey! he’d cried. I’m over here! Can you hear me? Don’t just sit there! Help me! But those oval blobs never gave any sign that they heard him, or, if they heard him, that they cared. Behind them, the shapes of other people sharing the cars with them moved to and fro, on their own mysterious errands. He didn’t know if the insides of these trains were anything like the trains he’d been on in life, but in his mind they were better: the seats all lush and luxurious, the people all at peace, the music rich and coming from every direction at once. He knew nobody riding the train could possibly want for anything. The powers running the line would see to it that their every need was met, from cups of coffee to exotic cigars.
Sometimes women passed by those windows, their shapes just distinct enough to imply how beautiful they must have been, and at such times Ed slammed his fist against the walls of his cell and cursed them, just for being there while he was over here. It wouldn’t have been so bad if he could just see their faces. Even that much would have been a comfort. Even a glimpse would have given him something to hold on to, in the long dark time between the passage of trains.
He no longer wondered why some trains stopped. He had, in the beginning. But he had made up his mind that wondering was a waste of time. He was sure he would never get any answers.
In this, as in most things, he happened to be dead wrong.
He hadn’t slept since his arrival, but his mind went where it wanted to, and sometimes he dreamed.
Mostly he dreamed of that moment he’d wanted to see that stupid kid die, watching it again and again the same way he’d once watched his favorite movies, seeing it play out again and again, with every detail unchanged.
Sometimes he dreamed of other things.
He dreamed of the two or three women who had been kind to him, and who had loved him, and who had been driven away less with his cruelty than with his dulled, dissatisfied apathy. He dreamed of sunny days on the highway, that year he’d worked on the road crew, his muscles aching and the sweat pouring down his back in sheets. He dreamed of being able to go into any store any time he wanted and being able to walk out with a newspaper, or a sandwich, or a beer. He dreamed of the fights he had won and the fights he had lost, each one leaving him bloodied and scarred but able to stagger home at the end of the day. He dreamed of once thinking he’d be famous someday, which had more or less come to pass, even if he’d imagined himself fronting a platinum-record band instead. That had been as close as he’d ever come to an ambition, though (typically enough). He’d lost patience and hurled the damn thing in a corner the first time anybody tried to show him how to use a guitar.
Once in a great while he dreamed of that cool lake, behind the house where his family had lived the two years things had gone well: the way the water had felt so good splashing against his skin on a steaming August day, and the way his mother had laughed when he and his brother Mike took turns dunking each other’s heads beneath the surface. It was a good memory, but even that didn’t make him feel all that much better, as it always came with the realization that those moments had been the happiest he’d ever know, and that everything else had been a study in just how much wreckage he could make of every chance he’d ever been handed. Still, it was the closest thing he had to a comfort, and he held on to those memories with ferocity that dwarfed any anger he had shown in life. You can’t take this away from me, bastards.
But as much as he tried to remain in that moment, all his dreams became litanies of the things that had been said about him, both leading up to and following the terrible thing he had done.
In cold blood.
No damn good.
Broke your mother’s heart.
Murdering trash.
Malice aforethought.
And in all these dreams he was the invisible presence who floated above the drama and ached to say that he hadn’t ever planned to hurt anybody at all, not for a moment. He had just needed some money, that’s all. He was sick and tired of having to wait always wait for all the things he wanted, and had found himself a little behind, and he had nobody willing to help him and he had never considered hurting anybody, not even once, and had the bad luck to look down on the back of a stupid kid’s head and just for one moment wanted to see him die.
That’s all it was, his dream-self kept saying.
That’s all.
That’s all it was.
He was allowed to continue imagining that this was as bad as things were ever going to be allowed to be, until the time the train stopped for him.
He had been standing at the window, as always, peering out into the darkness, as always, trying to perceive detail in that blackness, as always. And then he heard a whistle blowing, somewhere in the far distance, and pressed himself closer to that narrow opening, already straining to make out detail in the shape about to coalesce out of the murk. Then the train pulled up to the station, as bustling as ever, the forms silhouetted in its windows still moving amongst themselves with a freedom that made him long for some other sight, any other sight, that would give him something else to look at if he allowed the pain to make him turn away. As always, he ached to join them, and as always, he hated them more than he’d ever hated anything before.
But this time was different. This time he was able to see one of the cars come into focus, its doors opening and a single bent figure stepping down onto the platform. He was able to see that figure, backlit by the radiance enveloping the train, look up, hesitate, descend three more steps to a ground Ed could not see, and then, after another moment of palpable reluctance, start making his way toward Ed’s cell.
Ed had not felt his own heartbeat since his arrival in this place. He had assumed that he no longer had one. But the sudden shift in his routine hit him like an invisible fist, clenching tight around whatever he still had in his chest. He wanted to scream at his shadowy visitor, curse him, tell him that there was nothing he could say that Ed would ever want to hear. But either the dark forces that ruled this prison, or the paralysis born of fear, robbed him of voice, and left him unable to do anything but watch as the figure made its way across the plain that separated the tracks from the places where people like Ed were kept.
Ed would have thought it took forever, for the figure to arrive, had he not already had a taste of forever. But it was still a long time, rendered worse by all the times the figure seemed to disappear into one patch of darkness or another. At times, the figure emerged into a patch of relative light, no longer coming straight at him but instead detouring to the right or left, as if avoiding obstacles that only he could see.
Ed was in agony. He thought
Can you hurry it up awready?
And
Get a move on, will ya?
And his favorite:
I ain’t got all day!
Then the figure appeared again, this time only a few arm-lengths away.
It was a man unfamiliar to him, tall and wiry, his skin pale, head topped with wisps of thin white hair, his eyes sad but shining. He was bent in the way that so many are bent by age, but he moved without pain. When he grimaced with apparent distaste at something spotted on the ground before him, he revealed a perfect set of teeth, that to Ed’s eyes seemed to possess the same radiance as the train he had left.
He was dressed the way he must have dressed in life, in jeans and a red flannel shirt, a set of black bifocals hanging from his neck on chains.
Ed still didn’t know him. Still following the path visible only to him, the man turned right and passed out of Ed’s line of vision.
For one terrible moment, maybe the single worst in all the bad moments Ed had known since the poison stopped his heart, Ed thought he was sure who the man was. It was the stupid kid, the one from the store. Yes, he didn’t look anything like the kid, wasn’t even the same color as the kid, and looked about six decades older than the kid had ever lived to be. But he was here, clearly pursuing some kind of unfinished business, and nobody Ed could think of had any unfinished business with him except for that stupid kid he had killed.
Then the man came around. His ancient face, framed by the slit in Ed’s wall, was lined with the furrows life leaves in everybody who makes it to an age neither Ed nor his victim had ever known.
Ed thought he recognized the man now, even if there was no earthly, or unearthly, reason for him to be here. “Grandpa?”
The visitor shook his head. “Try again.”
For a second Ed was fresh out of ideas. And then the answer hit him, sharp as a knife in a chest, bringing neither relief nor understanding. “Mikey?”
The old man nodded, looking away, this one moment of recognition apparently too much for him. Maybe he was ashamed, though there was no way of knowing whether it was of himself, or his brother.
Between that last fight during the trial, and that day seventeen years later when Ed finally walked the fifty yards he’d been waiting so long to walk, there had not been a word.
But Mikey was here now, looking chastened and a whole lot older, his eyes downcast, his face drawn, his chin trembling as he fought for something, anything, worth saying. “Is it bad, Eddie? Is it really as bad as they say?”
Ed’s throat felt like a sack lined with razors. “What do you think?”
“—I don’t—”
“It’s Hell, you stupid asshole. It’s every bit as bad as they say. And I’m not about to lie to you and say it isn’t, and you’re not about to give me a ride out of here. So why are you wasting my time?”
The old man nodded without surprise, that probably being the only answer he’d expected or thought he deserved. He swallowed, looked away, seemed to come to a decision, and faced Ed again, his eyes hard and cold. “You weren’t the only one who had to live with it, Eddie. Dad became an old man overnight. Mom never smiled again. Neither one of them ever looked at me again without seeing you. I lost fifteen years to drink, and went through a coming attraction of this place just dragging myself out of the hole. And that’s without once mentioning the poor man’s family. Did you ever think of them, even once? Were you ever sorry? Or even here, have you been too busy thinking of this as something the world just did to you out of meanness?”
Ed had long hungered for the sound of another human voice, but this was more than he could take: insult to injury, he thought. He had wanted a kind word, not this. And though he knew he should have backed down, and said anything that could have persuaded the decrepit old bastard to turn to talk of happier things, the assault on his character, combined with the weight of all his tormented years, made him angrier than he’d ever been. “That the point of this visit? Telling me off?”
The old man looked wounded. “No, Eddie. I just needed to see you one last time.”
The silence grew heavy, and the eye contact more labored, until the old man averted his eyes, murmured a soft platitude about praying for him, and turned away, threatening to skip the final goodbye.
Were Ed able to force his body through the slit, and wrap his hands around the sanctimonious old man’s throat, he would have—but for the first time, in their brief conversation, he also felt something else mixed in with all the resentment and hurt: a sense of all the empty eons to come, pressing down on top of him. For the first time he didn’t want it to be over. And so his tone became pleading: “No, wait! I’m sorry! I don’t want that to be all of it! Tell me you’ll come back!”
The old man, who had only taken a couple of steps, now turned around and regarded his brother with the kind of pity that cuts deeper than any knife. “I can’t tell you that, Eddie. One visit is all I get.”
Forever loomed. “And y-you’re . . . okay with that?”
There was no triumph in the old man’s voice. “I won’t have to be okay with that. I’m not the first person who ever had to leave somebody he loved in this place. And the conductor’s already told me the same thing he must have told Mom and Dad, years ago . . . that the first blessing I’ll receive, when I get to where I’m going, is being able to forget you were ever born.”
Then he turned around and walked away, responding to none of the screams Ed hurled at his receding back.
The trains kept coming, of course. They changed designs, from the locomotives that had lit up the sky in the time after Ed’s arrival, to the sleek bullets of the years that followed, to shapes that grew more and more unfamiliar to him, including some that his eyes insisted on seeing as starships. They all roared as they passed by, rendering themselves fully audible to each and every one of the Damned. The imprisoned had nothing else to do but note the light carving a path through the darkness.
Some screamed. Some wept. Some begged. Some hurled curses. Others closed their eyes, shutting out the light as they could not shut out the sound.
But the trains kept coming.
And they remained the cruelest torment, for those imprisoned along the way.
A Johnny Cash LP was the first album ADAM-TROY CASTRO ever owned, to go along with a portable turntable significantly smaller than the diameter of the record. He played Cash’s renditions of “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” and “The Long Black Veil” on an almost daily basis till both record and turntable were worn out. Adam went on to become a writer of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, whose career output to date includes eighty short stories and four novels. His work has been nominated once for the Stoker Award, twice for the Hugo, and five times for the Nebula. His work for BenBella includes previous essays for the King Kong, Superman, Harry Potter, and Alias volumes. His other media criticism includes regular DVD and movie reviews for www.scifiweekly.com, and bi-monthly book reviews for SCIFI magazine. His most current career info, along with a regular assortment of rants and artwork, appears on his Web site, www.sff.net/people/adam-troy. His latest book, also for BenBella, is “My Ox is Broken!”: Detours, Roadblocks, Fast Forwards, and Other Great Moments from TV’s The Amazing Race. Adam Troy lives in Miami with his long-suffering wife, Judi, and a rotating collection of cats that includes Uma Furman and Meow Farrow.