Tracy and I had boarded at White Eagle, which is the next-to-last stop before the train enters the Bad Patch, and we had bought tickets clear through to Glory, where I had some friends who still trusted me enough—or so I hoped—to front me a loan. I had screwed things up proper in White Eagle, running my business into the ground and skating a thin line between plain failure and out-and-out fraud. And I had known that Tracy was getting ready to make a move, that she was fed up with our life. I expect that was why I had risked the ride to Glory—the prospect of losing his only support has driven many a man to desperation. The wonder of it was, I realized, that Tracy must have felt equally as desperate about her own prospects, otherwise she wouldn’t have joined me. And I could not decide if this was a good thing or bad, that we were each other’s last, best hope.

Somehow we had managed to convince ourselves that the trip was a golden opportunity, but seeing the drawn faces of our fellow passengers brought home what a starve-out proposition it really was. Neither of us wanted to let on we felt this way, however, so we smiled and held hands and pretended to be full of spit and determination. That was easy to do at first. The sun hung high in a notch between two mountains, gilding the snow and throwing indigo shadows from the firs, making a rare beauty out of the decline of day, and since there was plenty of time before we would reach the Patch, before the changes would begin, we were able to relax somewhat and enjoy the scenery.

Following behind the conductor as he collected tickets was Roy Cole, who was an institution on the line. He was in his late forties, rawboned, with salt-and-pepper hair and a seamed, tanned face whose dour expression was accentuated by a ridged scar that ran from the corner of his mouth along his jaw. He wore jeans and a loose black shirt, and cradled in his arms was a shotgun with silver filigree embellishing the stock. He stared at us hard as if searching for evidence of guilt. Which was more or less the case. The train made the trip only when Cole felt conditions were right, and since he knew better than anyone the changes that could occur and the signs to look for, no one objected to his scrutiny. If you were going to change, your best chance for survival was that Cole could protect you. But when he fixed those black eyes on mine, the pupils as oddly configured as chess pieces, it felt like my skeleton was getting ready to jump out of my flesh and run for the door at the end of the car. I wanted to ask whether or not I was going to undergo a change; but before I could work up the courage he had moved on and was examining yet another passenger.

For the first hour the ride was uneventful. Sunset was a sweep of burnt orange above the western peaks, with lavender and a sprinkle of stars higher up; the snow crystals in the air were fired and flurrying like swarms of live jewels, and the glow shined up the tumble of Tracy’s black hair, put a gloss on the beauty of her face, which was something special under even ordinary light—with its fine bones and sad eyes, like the face of a troubled angel. And as we passed into the flat country I felt that we had left the bad times behind and were only alive to the good parts of what had been. We talked some about our plans, but mostly we reminisced about our days in White Eagle. From the way we laughed and hugged each other, you might have thought we were newlyweds and not two losers on the run from fate.

“’Member Gordon?” I asked Tracy at one point. “That ol’ boy rode a sorrel mare…you used to say he looked like he was always poutin’? Well, back ’fore we got together, this tent show come to town.”

“Doctor Teague’s Medicine Show,” Tracy said, and I replied, Yes, yes, now I thought of it, I believe that had been its name.

“Anyway,” I went on, “they had these monkeys. Chimpanzees. And the word was, the owner would pay fifty bucks to anyone who could whup one of ’em. Wellsir, ol’ Gordon considered himself a helluva fighter. It wasn’t just he thought he was good at it, he thought it was a noble pursuit. Once I ’member we were drunk, and he got this faraway look and says to me, “Ed,” he says, “y’know, fightin’ ain’t just rollin’ ’round in the dirt and gettin’ bloody. It’s the purest form of physical ’spression there is.”

Tracy giggled.

“So the thing was, when Gordon heard ’bout the monkeys, ’bout how they could whup any man, he was first in line to give ’er a try. He felt he was upholdin’ the pride of all mankind against the animal kingdom.” I chuckled. “Lemme tell ya, it was pitiful. There was this little pen with a dirt floor they fought in, and Gordon he’s bouncin’ up and down on the balls of his feet, throwin’ left jabs at the air, and the monkey he’s just squattin’ in the dirt, starin’ at Gordon like he never seen such a fool. Finally Gordon gets frustrated ’bout the monkey not doin’ nothin’, so he steps up and wings a roundhouse right”—I demonstrated—“aimin’ for the monkey’s head. That’s all it took to get the monkey goin’, ’cause the next thing y’know it’s all over Gordon. I mean it happened so damn fast, it was a blur. One second the monkey’s windmillin’ its arms at Gordon’s chest, and a second later Gordon’s lyin’ on his belly and the monkey’s jumpin’ up and down on his back and snatchin’ out handfuls of his hair.”

“Oh, my God!” said Tracy, laughing so hard that she started to cough.

“Gordon just wouldn’t accept defeat,” I went on. “After we’d got him patched up and he had a few drinks in him, he starts talkin’ ’bout it ain’t fair a man’s gotta fight a beast without there bein’ some kinda handicap imposed. A human bein’s bone structure, he said, wasn’t as strong as a monkey’s, and if he’d had some protection, it wouldn’ta been no contest, he woulda kicked the monkey’s butt ’cause his manner of fightin’ was scientifically superior. So next day he goes to see Ben Krantz and gets him to carpenter up a helmet out of wood and leather that’s got bars across the face and paddin’ inside. Then he heads back down to the tent show and demands another crack at the monkey.” I shook my head in dismay. “They started out the same, with Gordon bouncin’ ’round and the monkey squattin’ and givin’ him this look that says, Fool. Then, ’fore Gordon can even think about throwin’ a punch, the monkey jumps up and rips the helmet off Gordon’s head and goes to poundin’ him with it. He smashed the goddamn thing to pieces on Gordon’s skull and laid him out worse’n before.”

We collapsed against one another, laughing. I don’t guess the story was all that amusing, but we needed laughter and so we milked the moment for every ounce. I was glad Tracy could manage it, because even under the best of circumstances she was not a happy woman. She had been raped by her daddy when she was just out of pigtails, and that had set her up for a string of disastrous relationships. She had told me more than once that I was the first man she’d been with who hadn’t beat her, and I thought her feelings for me were less genuine attachment than relief. She had come to depend on men in an unhealthy way, to use their mastery as an excuse for not striving to better herself. I expect she figured it was easier to let a man keep her down than to face up to what she was becoming. Or maybe it was just that men had made her feel like that. Though I liked to see myself as being a step up in class for her, I knew that I was only the latest in a line of masters, that my uses for her—disguised as love—were crueler than bruises in their deceit, and would likely cause her more grief in the long run. Yet knowing this hadn’t persuaded me to let her go; I kept telling myself that if I did, she would just find someone else to misuse her. And, too, I enjoyed dominating her. While I had my charitable moments, I was at heart a taker, a wielder of power—the problem was that I had no power to wield except where Tracy was concerned. I believe the most compelling reason that I clung to her, however, was fear. I was expert at denying that knowledge, but I had to work at it. And my most successful form of denial was holding out the hope that beneath the layers of our falsity there was something real, an ember of love, or at least honest emotion, that—given some kindling and a little wind to puff it alight—would warm us for the rest of our lives.

“Maybe,” said Tracy, coming up for air, “maybe the monkey’s how come Gordon was always poutin’.”

“Could be,” I said. “It’s for sure he never did get over it. He’d talk ’bout that monkey like it was some sorta legendary hero…a great man whose like’d never come our way again. He was a funny ol’ boy, that Gordon.”

The train was pulling into Lorraine, a collection of shacks gathered around a couple of larger frame buildings, a hotel and one that housed an assay office and a general store. Beyond the town the terrain was rolling, snow-covered, with a few golden rectangles of winter wheat glowing in the decaying light, and beyond the wheat, beyond the Spring Hills, whose sheer granite faces showed slate-blue, lay a dark haze that signaled the beginning of the Patch. Seeing it sobered us, and we sat for a minute or two in silence.

“Maybe we should get off,” Tracy said dully. “Lorraine seems ’bout far enough away from White Eagle.”

“You know that ain’t so,” I told her. “’Sides, won’t nobody here lend me money.”

“I can always go back to whorin’.”

I was startled by the defeated tone in her voice. “The hell you say!”

“It ain’t much different’n what I do with you.”

That angered me, and I refused to respond.

“What’s the point?” she said. “We go here, we go there…we still the same people.”

I started to speak, but she cut me off.

“And don’t go sayin’ you gonna turn over a new leaf! I can’t ’member how many times you promised…”

“I ain’t the only one who’s got bad habits they can’t cure.”

That stopped her a moment. Like me, though she might not admit it, she knew our union was a comfortable trap, that its comforts were a guarantee nothing better would come along for either of us.

“I still don’t see the point,” she said. “If we ain’t gonna do nothin’ different, what’s it matter where we end up?”

“Well, go on then,” I said. “Paint yourself up and be a whore if that’s what you think’s right. But I don’t wanna watch ya at it.”

She bowed her head, watched her hands clasping and unclasping in her lap. I could tell the crisis had passed.

“Why’d you’d come with me?” I asked. “You knew there’d be risk.”

“I reckon I thought takin’ a chance might be like magic or somethin’, and we might come through it better off than we was. I know that sounds stupid…”

“Naw, it don’t.”

She looked up at me. “Why’d you wanna risk it?”

“Pretty much the same reason,” I lied.

I pulled her into an embrace. Her hair smelled of lavender, and her breasts crushed against me. I touched them on the sly. They were firm and full, and just the thought of them could make me steamy. I felt the heat stirring in her by the way she arched against my hand. Then she drew back and pushed my hand away. Her eyes were filling.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

She shook her head, but I suspected she was thinking how pitiful it was that the good thing we made with our bodies had so little vital truth behind it, as if it were just a clever trick we could perform.

The whistle sounded high and forlorn, and as the train lurched forward, a fat woman in a black cloth coat with a fur collar half-staggered, half-dropped into the seat across the aisle.

“Goodness!” she said, and beamed at us. “That ’un almost threw me back into Culver County, it did.” She flounced about, settling the folds of her coat; she was wearing white gloves that made her hands appear tiny by contrast to the voluminous sleeves from which they emerged. And her feet, too, appeared tiny, like a child’s feet stuck onto swollen ankles and bloated black-stockinged calves. Her pasty chins trembled with the motion of the train. Eyes like currants stuck in the dough of her cheeks, and a Cupid’s bow of a mouth painted cherry red. Looking at her, I imagined that she was an immense pastry come to life, her veins filled not with blood but with custard cream. She leaned toward us, bringing with her a wave of cloying perfume, and said, “This your first trip, ain’t it? I always can tell. Now don’t worry…it ain’t so bad as you heered. I mean it’s bad, I won’t deny that. But it’s tolerable.” She heaved a sigh, causing the wrinkles in her coat to expand like a balloon plumping with gas. “Know how many times I crossed?”

“Naw, how many?” asked Tracy. By the edge in her voice I knew she was put off by the fat woman.

“Thirty-two,” said the woman proudly. “This un’ll make thirty-three. I ’spect you might find that curious, but when you get my age”—she tittered—“and you love good cookin’ much as I do, and ain’t no man in your life, you gotta find somethin’ to take your mind off the lonelies. Guess you might say travelin’ the Patch is my hobby. When I first started I was feelin’ kinda low, and I didn’t much care whether I made it to the far side or not. But it ’pears I’m immune to the changes like Roy Cole.” She hauled a leather-bound diary out of her purse. “I keep a record of the trips. I figger someday it might be valuable to some explorer or somebody like that.” She shook her head in wonderment. “The things I seen, you just wouldn’t believe it.”

I was a touch dismayed by the idea of someone traveling through the sickness and dark of the Patch for fun, but the look on Tracy’s face was one of pure disgust. She turned to the window, wanting no part of the conversation. A fellow in striped overalls came along the aisle, lighting the gas lamps in the car, bathing us in a sickly yellow glow.

“It’s a horrid place,” the woman said. “I won’t try and deny that. But it’s a mystery, and things that’s mysterious, they gotta beauty all their own. ’Course”—she adopted a haughty expression—“it ain’t the mystery to me it once was. I ’spect I know more ’bout it than anybody ’cept Roy Cole.”

I couldn’t help being curious about her experiences; it would have been unnatural not to be after having lived near the Patch for all those years. Like everybody else, I’d heard stories about how it had come to be, how Indian wizards had been warring and stray magic had transformed a stretch of land that cut straight across the country. And how it had been fiery stuff falling from a comet that had done the trick, and how it was a section of hell surfaced from under the earth. But though the stories all differed as to its origins, they were unanimous concerning its nature: it was a place where everything changed, where things out of nightmares could appear, where time and possibility converged.

I asked the woman what she knew concerning the beginnings of the Patch, and she said, “This fella I know claims the Patch is like that place out East where you can see seven states from the top of a peak…’cept it ain’t states you see from the Patch, it’s worlds. Hundreds of ’em, all packed in together. He claims that what with all the pressures on the Patch, y’know, from them hundreds of worlds crowdin’ into each other, the place just plumb give way like a dam will in a flood, and the worlds got all mixed together.”

I favored the story about Indian wizards, but I said, “Uh-huh.”

“It don’t really matter, though,” said the woman. “Things is how they is, and knowin’ why they got that way don’t change diddley.”

Tracy was looking strained, and I decided to change the subject. “You been livin’ in Lorraine awhile, have you?” I asked the woman.

“I moved there once’t I started ridin’ the train. ’Fore that, I was over in Steadley for a number of years.”

Steadley was a large silver-mining community on the other side of the Patch, and if I’d had a proper stake, that would have been my destination and not Glory. “S’posed to be a world of opportunity in Steadley,” I said.

“Yes, indeed! A body can make hisself a fortune…if he’s got the will and the wherewithal. That where you headin’?”

“I got plenty of will,” I told her. “But I’m a bit shy of the wherewithal. We’re bound for Glory. I’m hopin’ I can get a stake there.”

She clucked her tongue in sympathy. “Ain’t that the way of it…when you get a bushel of ’taters, that’s when you run outta stew meat.” She shot me a coy look. “Y’know, I bet there’s folks in Steadley who’d be willin’ to help out a young fella like yourself. God knows, they do enough for the refugees.”

“Refugees from the Patch, you talkin’ ’bout?”

She nodded. “They pitiful devils, the ones that make it out.”

“I hear there’s a lotta trouble with refugees…on the train, I mean.”

“Lord, yes! Ain’t a trip when some don’t try and board.”

“I don’t wanna hear ’bout none of it,” said Tracy, but the woman made a gesture of dismissal.

“Your man’ll protect you, hon,” she said. “Don’t you fret. But them refugees, Lord, they can be fearsome! More’n fearsome. They can purely freeze your heart.”

“I told you I don’t wanna hear about it,” said Tracy, her voice tight.

“Yes, Jesus”—the woman’s tone became exultant—“when they come aboilin’ through the doors, bringin’ all that foul air and magic with ’em, and it ’pears they grinnin’, ’cause their lips is drawed back to show their teeth, they so desperate, and you can feel the power clawin’ at ’em…”

“Stop it!” Tracy shrilled. “You just stop, y’hear?”

She was gaping at the woman. Shivering, transfixed by some sight or feeling. Her cheeks were hollowed, and her eyes were aswarm with crazy lights; they looked like broken glass scattered on black velvet, like the eyes of a woman I’d known once who’d just gotten out of the looney bin. It was those eyes as much as anything that made me realize we had entered the Patch and that the changes had begun.

“Tracy?” I said, confused, reluctant to touch her for fear I’d disrupt the tension that seemed to be holding her together.

“You can’t help but feel it,” the woman went on, showing her teeth in a manner redolent of the poor souls she’d just finished describing. “It comes off ’em like the stink from an open grave. Sometimes their flesh just goes to saggin’ off their bones.”

“Hey,” I said to her. “Leave it be, will ya?”

“Won’t be long now ’fore we see ’em,” she said, pointing out at the smoky blue twilight and the snow. “Sometimes their faces gets to glowin’ like dead fish bellies, their teeth turn black and drop out, and they grow old right ’fore your eyes. They feel the strength ebbin’ from ’em, and they go to their knees and pluck at ya with hands shrunk to skin and bones, and they beg for help in languages you can’t understand. Devil languages. Their cheeks bulge, and the gut-strings come out of their mouths.”

Tracy began shouting, and the woman’s face reddened and looked to be crimping in on itself like a rotten apple; her white-gloved hands gripped the armrest, and she spat out the words as if they were poisoned daggers. I pushed Tracy back and told the woman to shut up, but she only got louder, her imagery more vile. The pictures she conjured made me shrivel inside, and I was tempted to hit her. I think I might have, but then the door of the car opened and Cole stepped in. He walked slowly down the aisle and stopped beside us, letting his shotgun angle down to cover the woman’s breast. She stared wide-eyed at the double barrels and fell silent.

“’Pears you havin’ some trouble, Marie,” he said in a voice like iron.

“Naw,” she said weakly, “naw, I just…”

“Way you gettin’ all puffed up and red-faced,” he said, “looks to me like you ’bout to change. How you feel? Little shaky inside…like maybe somethin’s shiftin’ ’round in there?”

He cocked one barrel, burning her with those otherworldly black eyes, and she froze with her pouty red mouth open and one hand to her throat; a whistly guttering of breath came from her throat.

“Please, Cole,” she said, putting real effort into sounding out the words. “I’m all right, I swear. You must can see that.”

“You fuckin’ sow,” Cole said. “I’m ’bout sick to death of you searin’ my passengers. You don’t shut your hole, I’m just gon’ assume you changin’ and blow your heart out through your damn spine. Ain’t a soul here who’d blame me for it.” He pushed the shotgun into the pillowy softness of her breast and worked it about as if fitting it to a socket. “How ’bout it, Marie? Don’t you reckon I can get away with murder?”

“Naw, Cole,” she whispered. “Please don’t.”

“You gon’ leave these good people ’lone?”

Her eyelids fluttered down, and she nodded.

Cole made a disgusted noise, but he lowered the hammer. His eyes swung toward me; the scar along his jaw bunched like a sidewinder. “Keep your gun in reach, son,” he said. “There’s gon’ be trouble in this car. Do the best you able, and if I can get back to you, I will.”

He set out along the aisle, but I went after him and caught up as he was about to enter the next car.

“I think you just better lemme in on what’s goin’ on!” I said, grabbing his arm.

He nailed me with a fierce stare. “Take it easy, friend.”

“You don’t go tellin’ a man to keep his gun handy and then walk away without sayin’ why.”

“I figgered it wasn’t no mystery why,” he said. “But awright. Let’s you’n me have a talk.”

He pulled me toward the door, away from the others. The window beside us was sectioned into four narrow panes, each enclosing a rectangle of blue darkness with a single star low in the right-hand corner, like a block of mystical postage stamps. It was such a symmetrical configuration, so subtly improbable, it made me realize how at sea I was.

“This here’s gon’ be a bad trip,” Cole said. “I can’t cover all the cars, so I’m leavin’ you in charge of this ’un.”

I was not eager for responsibility. “Why the hell you let ’em start out when you knew things was gonna be bad?”

“Son, I do the best I can makin’ them judgments, but I ain’t never claimed to be a hunnerd percent right. Now last time things was this bad, I lost me nine passengers. I’ll leave it up to you. You wanna help out, or you just wanna stand around and watch it happen?”

“Tracy,” I said, “the woman with me, is she gonna be…bad off?”

Cole kicked at the iron bar that attached one of the seats to the floorboards.

“Sometimes the changes ain’t so bad, and you can get ’em through,” he said. “Other times you gotta stop ’em. That’s why I want you in charge here. Be better for everybody, you make that decision.”

“You are talkin’ ’bout Tracy, ain’tcha?”

“’Fraid I am.”

I touched my holstered pistol; it felt as snug and dry as a snake in a skull. “Naw,” I said, “naw, I couldn’t do nothin’ to her. And I ain’t no good with a gun, anyhow.”

“I’m gon’ be busy,” Cole said. “Whatever happens here, it’s gotta be your call.”

I studied his weathered face, his strange eyes, wondering if he was telling me everything. He met my stare without any sign of dodginess. The rattle of the train seemed to be sounding out the tension between us, giving a voice to all the violent acceleration of our lives. I had a strong sense of his character then, and I understood that while the job had tied a few black twists in his soul, he was not especially good or evil, not wonderfully courageous, not mad with fear or a stone killer; he was just a man who had reached a difficult pass that was half his own making and half the sorry luck that comes with being born. He was simply doing what he could to get along. Knowing that he was like me, someone with no special magic or destiny, gave me confidence in him. And in myself. I’d never had to use my gun against another man. Now I believed I could.

“What I gotta do?” I asked him.

“There’ll be refugees,” he said. “Always is. They’ll try and board a coupla hours from now, this place where the train slows on a steep grade. Don’t ask no questions if they get inside. Just do for ’em quick. And don’t waste no bullets.” He inspected my gunbelt. “Y’see that squarehead back in the corner?”

He indicated a middle-aged blond man in a gray suit with a brooding Scandinavian face and told me to keep an eye on him. And on Tracy. The remaining seven were Marie, an elderly woman in a green print dress, and five dirt farmers—gloomy, roughly dressed men who had lost their holdings in a land grab and were, like me, aiming for a new start.

“Anything else happens,” Cole said, “chances are you’ll see it comin’. The Patch changes some for the worse and some hardly at all. Others like me and that fat bitch Marie—and you, maybe—it lets ’em see clear how bad things are for the rest. I don’t know which way’s more merciful. I come to see so damn much, I wish I was blind sometimes.”

“You said ‘maybe’ I’d see things clear…I don’t get it. Either I will or I won’t, right?”

“That’s the best I can do,” he said. “’Pears to me you ’bout a hair away from changin’ yourself, so it’s hard for me to read you. Tell ya one thing, though. If I was you I wouldn’t be makin’ this run too often. Sooner or later the Patch’ll take you. I can see that much.”

He squared his shoulders and settled his shotgun under his arm. He slapped my shoulder and flashed me a grin that didn’t have much juice to it.

“Luck to you,” he said.

I paced along the aisle, dismayed by Tracy, who was gone into some kind of fugue. And what I glimpsed out the train window dismayed me even more and made me fear for what I might see later inside the car. Once we passed a way station, an island of brilliance in the dark where sat a wooden building with a peaked roof and a peculiar bright white light stuck on a pole above a loading platform; ranked alongside the platform were rows of what appeared to be human figures wrapped in gray cloth, like rows of mummies. Then we hurtled past a snowy street lined with round stone buildings with glowing signs floating above them, spelling out words in a script I could not read. Then there came a time when all I could make out were thousands of lights ranging the darkness; we were traversing a smooth section of rail, and the noise of the wheels had diminished to a rushing sound, and it was as if I were traveling on a schooner under full canvas in a brisk wind, sailing just offshore from a jeweled coast.

More and more I came to regret my decision of risking the ride to Glory. All my life I had made the wrong or the too-hasty decision, and while I had always chalked this up to bad luck, now I understood it was a matter of weak character…or rather, of a strong character half-formed, one whose strength was sufficient to use the power it had, but not strong enough to seize power for itself. As a result I had constantly leaped from one fix to another, reacting to trouble like a scalded cat, and it struck me as odd that I hadn’t seen this until now. Maybe, I thought, this was an instance of the clarity that Cole had said came to some who traveled through the Patch; but most likely it was just that I’d reached the bottom of my possibilities, and all that was left for me was to look back up and observe how I’d managed to fall so far.

At first I kept a close eye on Tracy and the Swede; soon, though, I began to relax, thinking that Cole must have overstated the danger just to make me stay alert. But as we passed into the Spring Hills, the Swede came to his feet, clasping his hands to his head and moaning, a hideous noise that issued from the black O of his mouth like a dozen voices all sounding the same tormented bass note. His fingers appeared unnaturally long, and to my astonishment, I realized they were growing longer yet, curving to encase the sides of his head like the bars of a birdcage. I could hear the skin and bone stretching, cartilage popping. His head, too, was elongating, becoming a caricature of Swedish despondency. Glints in his eyes flickered like lantern flames turned low, his fingernails were sprouting into talons, and his skin had pebbled like that of a lizard. Seeing this, I felt my guts clench, and for an instant I was too stunned to move.

Screams, and the passengers went crawling over the seats away from the Swede, scrambling along the aisle, blocking my line of fire. One farmer—a red-faced, round-bellied fool—made a grab for the Swede as he staggered past, and the Swede raked him with his hooked fingers, tearing away his cheek. I shoved somebody aside—the elderly lady in the bonnet, I think—and squeezed off a shot. The gun felt alive in my hand, its kick like a natural muscular reaction and not the uncontrollable spasm that usually resulted when I took target practice. The explosion cracked the inside of my skull, and the bullet painted the Swede’s coat with blood. A twig of red sprouted from the corner of his mouth, and he stopped, but he didn’t fall. He just came forward again, howling in that demon voice. My second bullet shattered his jaw. That dropped him to his knees, nuggets of scored bone showing through the gore. He stared daggers at me for a second, then his eyes rolled up and he keeled over onto his side. His chest lifted and fell. The blood was too dark for human blood, almost purplish in color, and was already congealing.

I spotted some coils of rope in the luggage, and I beckoned to a couple of farmers crowded behind me. “Tie him up,” I told them, and gesturing at Tracy: “Her, too.”

“I ain’t gettin’ near the son of a bitch,” said one farmer, a skinny redhead peppered with freckles. “Seems to me, you oughta just finish him.”

“Amen!” said Marie, pushing her way to the front of the bunched passengers. “Somebody’s talkin’ sense at last.”

It wasn’t so much compassion as curiosity as to how the Swede might continue to change that made me want to keep him alive. Curiosity wasn’t that strong in me, but I would be judged, damned, and fried to a turn before I’d let this little redheaded puke tell me what to do. I aimed my gun at him and cocked it. “Tie ’em up,” I said. “Then get rid of that.” I gestured at the man the Swede had clawed; he was lying facedown, and it was obvious that his act of foolhardy courage had been the final signature of his life.

Gunfire sounded from the adjoining car, and the passengers surged forward, bumping and tussling, knocking one another off their feet. I forced them back and stood guard while two farmers tied up the Swede, dumping him into a seat, and then did the same for Tracy. She made no objection to being treated so roughly, just gazed out the window, refusing to answer when I asked how she felt—or maybe she didn’t hear. Her eyes were black as bullet holes, muscles twitched in her jaw. It hit me hard to see her all trussed up, but I was terrified that she would end like the Swede, staggering along the aisle, spitting blood and fury. Marie caught my eye, triumph in her expression, and went to scribbling in her little book. In the panic she had popped most of the buttons from her blouse, and her breasts bulged from their lace armor, quivering like sick pudgy animals.

The train had slowed, chuffing up a steep grade. I peered out the window, searching for refugees, but all I could see were snow-laden pines and darkness and stars aligned into unfamiliar constellations. Most of the passengers sat staring at the seats in front of them, and a few were praying for some mercy of the world to rain down. Looking at Tracy, netted in rope, I couldn’t tell if the pain I felt was for her or for myself at the prospect of losing her. The whole time we’d been together I’d been able to persuade myself that I must love her a little bit anyway. All my life, it seemed, I’d been trying to exert control, to do something for love, to create a miracle of being, one clean act, and yet all it had come to was a sense of spoilage and shame, a thickness clotting the flow of my thoughts. I was still certain that love was in me, buried beneath the topsoil of my character. Pools of it, dark reservoirs of crude compassion and caring. But now I knew that what I’d been calling “love” was merely the comforts of sex, the security of having a shoulder to cry on, childish dependencies, strident needs, and none of the generous emotions of a man. I could swear then I felt my life blow past me, like a train blowing past somebody standing on a weedy embankment, just that—life—just a fast freight with a roaring cargo, a streak of darkness with a hot wind behind; and you barely saw what it was before it was by, and only too late did you understand how you could have fleshed it out, all the things you could have noticed and savored. And at the end, if you were lucky, you might know the measure of your failure. I overheard one of the farmers mutter, “Oh, God, I’d do anything…” So would I have given anything, but in exchange for what? A fiercer determination, or something to blot out my conscience, something that would weaken my desires? Those weren’t the sort of things a good man is supposed to want, and even if I could escape the moral rule, the things I wanted were things weighed out from the dross of experience, not something you could pick up in a trade like you could with a gun or a pair of boots. I wondered if you decide to love, if love wasn’t just an act of will, one I’d never chosen to make. Well, I chose to make it now, and although I was more wishing than choosing, crossing my fingers and whistling in the dark, I swore I would try to protect Tracy beyond the limits with which I’d fenced in my heart.

About halfway up the grade I forced myself to examine the Swede and Tracy once again. The Swede was still alive and had not undergone further changes. This gave me hope for Tracy, but when I checked on her, I found that she was smiling—a fixed, irrational smile—and as I watched, a black trickle leaked from the corner of her mouth. She flicked out a long slender tongue, crimson and rough, and licked it clean. Her skin had grown white, pulpy-looking, and was rippling under her dress. When she flexed her fingers, straining at her bonds, they appeared to be either boneless or many-jointed.

“Jesus!” I said, edging away, and Marie, who had come to peer over my shoulder, squealed, “You gotta kill ’er!”

I eased my gun out, half-convinced she was right, and held it with the muzzle up. The skin on my face thrummed as if covering hot wires instead of muscle and bone. But I had no heart for shooting Tracy.

“She’s gon’ be all right,” I said.

A heavyset man with a thick shock of gray hair, wearing a threadbare corduroy jacket, shuffled forward and said, “I sympathize, friend. But this ain’t no time to be takin’ chances.”

I kept my eyes on Tracy, recalling her fire and stubbornness, the wild look she got whenever she wanted me. I didn’t care about any man.

“You can die for her, mister,” I told the heavyset farmer. “It sure don’t matter to me.”

Another one came sneaking up on my left. I whirled and took aim at his face. “Take another step,” I said. “Just one more’ll do.”

My frustration turned to anger, and I yelled at the rest. “C’mon and see what I got for ya! What you waitin’ for?”

“Calm down, friend,” said the heavyset farmer.

I laughed at that and gestured toward the rear of the car. “Get on back there, all of ya. And don’t even think about tryin’ me.”

I herded them into the back, then sat down next to Tracy. Her eyes had gone a blazing yellow; membranes slid back and forth across them. The delicate lines bracketing her mouth had deepened, blackened. It looked as if her face were a white mask that was about to crack into pieces.

“Tracy?” I said. “Can y’hear me?”

She made a growly noise in her throat. Her torso rippled as if the muscles were sliding free beneath the skin, and as a result, the ropes were loosening. Her fingernails had turned dark blue. Like death, death’s color, dark blue. I remembered the sight of her body naked in the light of a red dawn, rumpled sheets banked snowy around her, her breasts pinked with gleam, and the soft curve of her belly—as pure a shape as the sweep of a spring meadow—planing down to the dark swatch of her secret hair. I was dead inside, my thoughts like bitter smoke from a damped fire. I could feel the brimstone emptiness through which the train was tunneling, grinding along up the grade, and I wanted to throw back my head and howl.

“Tracy?” I had the urge to touch her, but couldn’t bring myself to do it. Her skin would be moist, her flesh a cold tumescence like the flesh of a tomato worm. The ropes were getting slacker by the second, and though it was an agony to me, I knew it would be more merciful to shoot her now than to wait and watch her grow monstrous.

I caught movement out of the corner of my eye. Another goddamn farmer creeping up on me. The bastards were getting to be like mice. I half-turned to him, but said nothing, and after a moment’s hesitation he scuttled back to the others. The elderly lady stretched out her hands to me.

“Don’t let her hurt us…please!” she said.

“Y’gotta do it!” shrilled Marie. “Long as she’s alive, she’s a danger to us all.”

The others murmured their assent.

With their skins all pasty and yellowed by the light, their gawping mouths and bugged eyes, they looked to have changed in some pitiful fashion. And maybe they had, I thought; maybe there’s changes and then there’s changes. There was a metallic taste in my mouth. I could feel a killing rage bubbling up inside me, and my head was full of terrible noises, a screech of metal being torn, of a hungry hawk screaming in frustration. I wanted the world to end, I hated these people so. I felt sick, dizzy, hot. The corners of the coach seemed to be pulling apart, as if the yellow ugly light had grown solid and was forcing back the walls. My eyes skidded across faces and shiny boards and gold lockets and glass—like everything had gone slippery and insubstantial. No place for my vision to catch on. It must be a change, I thought, a bad one. I fought against it, squinting, reducing the car to a fierce rippled brightness and a dark surround. That made things easier, and after a bit my vision steadied.

I got to my feet, rested a hand on the grip of my pistol, and told the passengers to stay back and stop their whimpering. “I don’t give a frog’s ass what you people want,” I said. “You don’t mean a thing to me, none of ya. So you might as well swallow that bullshit you’re gettin’ set to spout.”

Saying this, I felt a swell of cold satisfaction, like a charge working inside me—it seemed not a change, but rather the expression of an attitude that I should have expressed long before, one that had been restrained in some way.

“Nobody’s goin’ to do nothin’ to this woman here,” I said, nodding at Tracy. “Not so long as I’m kickin’.”

I was about to tell them what would happen if they challenged me when the rear door of the car blew open, a bitter wind gusted along the aisle, and the refugees came in. Three men—or almost-men—wearing crudely sewn skins and furs. Everything was frozen. The refugees grouped by the door; the suddenly intensified noise of the wheels; the passengers standing in their seats, their eyes round with fright—all these things seemed elements of a vast tension that, I thought, must spread far beyond the car and the train, throughout the entire Patch. Apart from the raw cold, I felt a crawly sensation along my spine, and I recalled what Marie had said about how you could sense the magical power that enlivened the refugees.

The three of them eased forward, their shadows kinking over the warped floorboards, sliding flat as black silk over the smooth places. The passengers—ranged between me and the rear door—cowered in their seats. One of the refugees was a hunchback with a brutish heavy-jawed face, bulging prominences above his eyes, tufted eyebrows, and yellow teeth like an ape’s. A second hid behind him. The third was a big man with grayish skin and a strangely unfinished face—a gash of a mouth and black eyes that were almost perfect circles, like holes cut in a dirty bed sheet. His domed skull was bald, ringed with maybe half a dozen bony knots, each the size of a baby’s fist, as if he were growing a king’s crown under his scalp. There was a hunting knife slung at his hip. I felt I knew something about his character—I couldn’t define it, but if I could have made a stab at definition, I would have done so in terms of strength and intelligence and tenacity.

He spoke to me in a language whose words had the sound of a horse munching an apple. It might have been a question.

I wasn’t sure why I didn’t follow Cole’s advice and shoot straightaway. Could be I had some hope for the big man, or at the bottom of my soul I felt he had the right to live, that I wasn’t the one to be his executioner. And also I wondered if his question signaled a willingness to negotiate, if he wanted to bargain or trade. But I couldn’t think how to communicate with him.

“Get on outta here!” I waved at the door. “Just go on, and there won’t be no trouble.”

He spoke again—the same words, I believe, but with a touch more intensity. He gave me a searching look…or so I took it. Meeting his eyes, I felt I had made a connection, that what lay behind those black surfaces was not inhuman.

The gray-haired heavyset farmer made a threatening move, and the big man held up a hand by way of warning. He spoke to me a third time. I eased my hand toward my gun and said, “Get on out! I ain’t gon’ be tellin’ ya again.”

I think the big man smiled, though he might just have been trying to frighten me by showing his filed teeth. But I do believe it was a smile, for when the hunchback scuttled toward me, moving with a peculiar crabwise gait, he made a grab for him, trying to haul him back. Then three of the idiot farmers went at him, and my options dwindled to one.

My heart was empty of caring, of fear, and the gun leaped easily in my hand. I punched out the hunchback’s left eye with one round, opened up his belly with a second, and still he staggered toward me. My last shot, squeezed off at a range of no more than a couple of feet, cracked his chest. His shirt caught fire from the muzzle flash, and the flames danced merrily, so pale in the glare, they were almost invisible. I turned the gun on the big man, who was about to finish off the last of three farmers—half-conscious in his grasp—with a fist the size of a cannonball.

“Hold it!” I yelled, but he did not let the farmer fall. He stared at me, grave and unflustered, as if measuring the distance between himself and death. I was still reluctant to shoot him.

“Aim at his throat!” somebody shouted. “Or the eye! You shoot him anywhere’s else, and y’can’t kill him! There’s too much bone.”

I couldn’t see the man who had shouted, but I didn’t think it had been a passenger—they were crouched down behind the seats, those who were still capable of crouching, and not a one of them was displaying the poise of an expert. I lowered my aim to the throat as the voice had instructed, and the big man let go of the farmer and backed toward the door.

I put a bullet into the floorboards at his feet. “Go on!” I said. “You got the idea.”

He kept on edging backward, but as he reached the door he stopped and roared at me. That was how it seemed—a roar, but one with words embedded in it—and I couldn’t help but admire the purity of his rage. I had thought he was going to leave us to heaven and go back to his wilderness, but I had underestimated his desperation. He half-turned as if to jump from the car, but then plucked the hunting knife from its sheath and hurled it at me. It sang past my ear as I fired. The bullet took him in the Adam’s apple and spun him down onto the floor. He flopped about, clutching at the wound, but still fixed me with his eyes, which remained bright with regard. He tried to talk, but blood was all that came from his mouth. Words of blood, trickles of lost meanings. Then he went all unstrung. Nothing violent or spasmodic. Just like he was laying down his head for a little nap. I holstered my gun. Outside, the snow and dark looked clean and inviting, and the idea of taking a long walk in it seemed for an instant to offer a more hopeful prospect than completing the ride to Glory.

Smoke hung on the air in the car, like misty trails winding through invisible mountains; the rattle of the wheels had acquired the rhythm of an enormous telegraph. I noticed that the Swede’s head had slumped forward, and I could tell from the blood on his mouth and chest that something had busted inside him and he was dead. My head ached, and in my heart I felt the sick weight of killing. I searched around for the third refugee. Marie peeked over the top of a seat, staring dazedly at the blood rivering the floor. She had a lump coming beneath one eye. The others had started picking themselves up. Then a man called out, the same voice that had instructed me to aim for the throat.

“Don’t shoot!” he said. “I won’t hurt nobody, I swear!”

The voice was issuing from behind a rear seat. I aimed at it. “Stand up and lemme see ya,” I said.

“I promise I won’t hurt nobody! Didn’t I help you? Don’t that prove I’m on your side?”

“I hear ya,” I told him. “Let’s see your hands. Right now, or I’m gon’ put a bullet right through that seat you’re hidin’ behind.”

“For the love of God!” he said, his words rushing forth in a torrent. “Don’t you unnerstand? The others, they were crazy. This is their home, this goddamn hole. They just wanted to kill you. But me, I’m hardly changed at all. I never wanted to kill nobody. I went along with the rest of ’em so’s I could get on the train. I tried to help you, didn’t I? I ain’t after nothin’, I just wanna live.”

Though I had been listening to him, during his spiel I had become entranced by the bodies, the stink of gunpowder, the blood and the smoky yellow air. I was amazed to recollect my lack of fear, the ease with which I’d killed…all entirely out of character. I wondered if I looked in the mirror whether I’d see black eyes like Cole’s, pupils in the shape of pentagrams or coiled serpents. And I wished I was my old, flawed, cowardly self once again.

“Last chance,” I told the refugee. “Get your hands high, and then let’s have a look at ya.”

After a second he complied. He was a puny thing, several inches short of five feet, with a shaggy head of graying black hair. He had a pinched face the color of an old pumpkin, all seamed and wrinkled. I assumed him to be an old-timer, but then I noticed that his hands were those of a young man, that his neck wasn’t crepey, but firmly fleshed. And I realized that what I had taken for wrinkles was actually ropy veins darker than the rest of his skin, and that his features were those of somebody my own age. What would he do out in the world, I wondered, looking like that?

“Don’t trust him,” said a farmer; and Marie chimed in, “That’s right! Even the innocent-lookin’ ones can be terrors.”

What she had said had no influence upon me, but I wasn’t about to trust the refugee; he had turned on his companions, and monstrous though they had been, it was nonetheless a betrayal. Besides, I wasn’t certain that the big man had intended to hurt anybody.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“God, it’s been so long since anybody asked me my name,” he said. “I been livin’ with them animals, pretendin’ to be one of ’em…” He gave himself a shake. “Name’s Jimmy Crisp. I was a farmer over in Glory till this no-good son of bitchin’ wife-stealer tied me up and put me on a handcar and set me rollin’ into the Patch. It’s been six years…six goddamn years.”

A couple of the farmers urged me to shoot Crisp, and I told them to stuff their holes, that I was more likely to be shooting them if they gave me any more grief. Then I noticed Marie, her jaw dropped, staring at something behind me. I turned around just in time to see something whippet-thin and blue-black in color leaping across the aisle and down in back of a seat. In reflex, without thinking what it might be, I blew a hole in the seat and heard a pining cry, birdlike, yet more piercing than that of any bird I knew. And from that cry I realized that I had fired at Tracy—it was the perfect, pained expression of the trapped thing she had mostly been. I fired a second time at the seat, not wanting to know how she had changed. The next moment, as the cry sounded again, drilling through me, Jimmy Crisp grabbed my arm and prevented a third shot. The others yelled for me to shoot, but Crisp, his wizened face looking up close even more like a rotted vegetable, shouted them down.

“She ain’t gon’ hurt you!” he said. “She’s changin’ into this kinda animal what lives ’round here in the forests. They peaceful, they just wanna be left alone!”

I thought it strange that he would forget his own peril and go to the defense of a mere animal; I had the idea that he was trying to compensate for something.

The others kept on yammering, and Crisp screeched at them, waving his arms. “You stupid bastards! You wanna kill everything comin’ outta the Patch, don’tcha? Y’wanna stomp ’em like bugs! But know who you killin’? Your friends, your sisters, your cousins. Folks who’s cither foolish or sinned against. It ain’t no life out there, not for a man. But it’s a life all the same, and you got no call to deny it to somethin’s got only that much life left.”

Some of the passengers appeared mortified, but then the thing behind the seat—I couldn’t think of it as Tracy—set up a mewling, and they started in on me again.

“You don’t finish ’er,” Marie said, “then Cole will.”

I made no response.

“Hell,” she said, patting her dress into a semblance of order, “I think I’ll go get him right now.”

She came toward me, went sideways in order to scoot by, and when she did that, I caught her by the neck, forced her back over one of the seats, and shoved the barrel of the gun up under her chin. In the sickly light her doughy face with its bruises and dimples resembled something I might have dreamed after a heavy meal and too much brandy, even less human in its revolting stamp than Crisp’s face. I cocked the gun, and her eyes swiveled down, trying to see my hand.

“Help me!” she said weakly; then she screamed it. “Help! Help me, Cole! He’s killin’ me!”

There was a scrabbling noise behind me, and I pushed Marie away. The animal was jumping about, moving with the sinuous speed of a ferret, clawing the windows, apparently terrified by Marie’s screams. Through rips in Tracy’s underclothes, which still clung to it, I saw that its body was all whipcord muscle. The skin had darkened to a midnight blue. The face, too, had darkened, though not so much as the rest, and it had simplified, the features acquiring a cast that was somehow both feline and reptilian, the mouth thinner, wider, and the nose a pair of curved slits. But the eyes, huge and yellow, with translucent membranes like crystal lenses—they carried the sadness I’d heard in that cry. And in the lineaments of the face, minimal though they were, I could still make out the remnant of Tracy’s troubled beauty. It was awful to detect her essence in that creature. Weakness flooded me. I wanted to work some magic and call her back to the human. Yet at the same time I wanted to release her, and I had the thought that this might be the best she could hope for, not to have failed with me again, but to have changed utterly, to have gone beyond herself into a world where failure and success was a simple affair, something wholly of her own making.

Marie had stopped her squawling. She had slumped into one of the seats, holding her dumpling gut, and Crisp was standing over her, muttering curses. The farmers were keeping their distance. The animal was tearing away the remains of Tracy’s clothing, letting out feral hisses, and I figured that if it couldn’t escape soon, it might decide that attacking us was its only hope for survival. Having reached the steepest section of the grade, the train was barely moving, and I went to a window, intending to bust it out with my gun butt, thinking I might be able to persuade the animal to jump through. But as I took hold of the barrel, and prepared to swing, Cole came back into the car. I reversed my grip and threw down on him before he could bring his shotgun up to fire at the animal.

“Use that hogleg, and you’re a dead man!” I told him.

He looked haggard, his black shirt was ripped. “Don’t be foolin’ with me, son,” he said. “She ain’t nothin’ to you no more. Just you stand aside and lemme do my job.”

“I mean it,” I said, seeing that he was bracing himself in front of the open door.

“I should clean your plow for ya, boy,” he said, his tone even and easy, “but I’m gon’ give you a chance to reconsider ’cause you done me a service. Now you stop with this here bullshit. All you doin’ is makin’ things worse for ever’body…your woman included.”

Cole was blind—I understood that now. He had been too long on the line, he was operating on the basis of judgments made years before and was incapable of weighing the case now before him. In the seams of his worn face was written a language of unyielding principle. He had, as he had said, seen too much, and so he came to disregard anything that demanded his attention. But my vision was new and clear. I could see his eerie pupils contracting, appearing to change like the spots on a magical deck of cards, going hearts to clubs to spades, each design more ominous than the last. I saw the muscles tense in his neck, his shoulders. I knew what he intended.

“I guess you’re right,” I said, letting my voice falter, my words thick with resignation. “I don’t know what to do.”

I dropped my eyes a mite, waited until I saw him relax, then I shot him in the hip, sending him spinning down against the wall. His shotgun discharged into the ceiling, and leaving a few last shreds of Tracy’s petticoat on the floor, the animal bolted for the door, flowed through it and was gone. I jumped over Cole, who was twisting about, saying, “Shit! Oh, Jesus!” and went to stand between the cars. As I’ve mentioned, the train had slowed to a crawl, and so I had a good long look at what I’d learned to love too late running away from me.

The land sloped sharply down from the tracks, a decline of moonlit hummocky snow that gave out into evergreen forest, and beyond the base of the hill, beyond the edge of the trees, lay a plain that stretched to the horizon. It was the heart of the Patch. I’d never seen it before, but I could tell that’s what it was. It was such a place, that plain, as you might envision after chewing some of those cactus buds that Indians sell in the Mexican marketplaces, and yet strangely enough, it was familiar too, comfortably familiar in the way of those cool rotten-leaf smells that drift up from shady rivers and the taste of larrup syrup and the sight of deer hiding in among some post oaks with their white flags raised. Wild stars and pale enormities of cloud overhead, a sky of such complex immensity that it seemed an entity unto itself, the embodiment of a profound emotion. Darkly iridescent points of land hooked out into water that had the gleam of tarnished silver, a great river feeding a country of virgin timber and solitary cabins—nodes of inconstant fire lodged in the vast gloomy sweep. There were fountains of light, gouts of indigo and crimson and viridian, spraying up from secret places like the souls of magicians taking flight, and areas where witchy glows flickered. Islands of phosphorescence effloresced and faded in the farthest reaches like universes being born, and shadows with no apparent source passed across the face of the water. Lightnings touched the earth and spread glittering tides. The place was lovely and evil, serene and fulminant, intimate and infinite. Impossible to characterize or judge. There was no end to its mysterious detail. And running over the snow toward all that majestic confusion and silent tumult was Tracy…I had accepted that weird lithe creature as being her, because I had finally given up on her, finally let her go, and because I knew just from seeing it that the Patch wasn’t the hell I had imagined, that while it might seem inimical to me, for others it was the only home possible, and that it held out the opportunity for rewards that my world couldn’t offer. Good and evil were more sharply defined within its perimeters, and there was a grandeur to its freedom and wildness, in the endless reach of the solitudes, in the feeling that whatever fate was to be yours, it was something worked out from your deeds and not a weakness bred into you and reinforced by lies. I had felt something of that freedom and wildness in the big gray-skinned man, though at the time I couldn’t have put it into words. For certain I had known that he needed something other than our lives, something he had not been able to say and hadn’t trusted me to understand. In truth, I could not have understood under the circumstances. But now, seeing more clearly than I had, I believed we might have made a compact, established a bond that would have prevented the deaths. And what about Crisp? What about all the pitiful refugees who came wandering back to the world? Half-changed men, unsuited for life in either place. That, I realized, had to be the case. Crisp had hinted of it in his defense of Tracy, and I thought I must be like that myself—born too much for one world, too little for the other. Wrong by an inch for happiness. Or not happiness. I could no longer accept that true happiness existed. For strength, for constancy.

As I contemplated this, I watched Tracy receding, growing smaller and smaller, darkening against the snowfield. Sort of like watching a hole being burned in white paper by a match held behind it, only in reverse, the hole dwindling and ultimately vanishing. It was not until after she had gone into the shadows of the trees that I felt her loss, and it wasn’t the tearing pain I might have expected; it was softer, a sweet fall of darkness over the heart, a luminous ache that seemed to light the gloom it created. I realized that I had lost Tracy long ago, and that only this minute had I begun to miss her.

At last, shivering with cold, I went back into the car. My bullet had ripped a furrow in Cole’s hip, yet had done him no serious damage. Someone had bandaged him, and he was sitting with his legs straight out on the floor; his color was off, but otherwise he appeared to be sound. He had a quart of Emerson’s Bourbon in hand. He gazed up at me sorrowfully.

“You a damn fool, y’know that?” he said without malice, just making an observation.

I flopped down next to him. “You were wrong to wanna shoot her, man. Dead wrong.”

He was not interested in the topic. “I should lock you up,” he said. “Maybe that’d improve your judgment.”

“I’ll testify for ya, Cole,” Marie said. “You can count on that.”

She was back in her seat. They were all sitting, the battered and bloodied farmers, the elderly lady, all displaying the same self-absorbed attitudes that they had at the start of the trip. Only Crisp, who was rocking back and forth, his face buried in his hands, showed any sign of having endured a rough passage. He was talking to himself, agitated words that I could not make out, and now and again slamming a fist into his thigh. I had neither the energy nor the right pitch to console him.

“You don’t bring charges,” Marie said to Cole, primping in a hand mirror, dabbing powder onto her bruises, “then I will. I ain’t about to have my person assaulted way it’s been this trip.”

“Shut your hole, Marie,” Cole said wearily; he shifted and winced.

“Sorry ’bout that.” I nodded at his hip.

“I’ve had worse.”

“Well, I’m amazed,” I told him. “If I’d known people took gettin’ shot as good as you, I’d have shot a sight more of ’em in my time.”

He grunted with amusement.

Marie stared at him, dumbfounded. “You ain’t just gon’ forget about this, are ya? He’s committed a blood crime!”

“Puttin’ this boy away ain’t gon’ cure nothin’,” Cole said. “Hell, I could use him on the line if he…”

“I doubt I’m up to it,” I cut in. “’Sides, that’s your bad fortune, and not mine.”

“You didn’t let me finish,” he said. “It’s like I told you—you come into the Patch again, I doubt you’ll be so lucky with the changes.”

“I ain’t been that damn lucky this time,” I said.

We had reached the top of the grade and started down, picking up speed with every second. I gazed out the window at the sweep of the plain, the shining waters and dark curves of land—it seemed that the whole expanse formed a single fabulous image like a character in some ancient script or a symbol on a treasure map. And there must be treasure out there, I thought. There must be a million sights worth seeing, a million things worth having. I imagined Tracy somewhere, asleep in its shadows, her old life receded to a dream.

“I don’t believe this!” Marie said. “Man puts a bullet in you, and you sayin’ you’d offer him a job?”

“You can pick your nose,” Cole said with a grin that spread a net of wrinkles across his face. “But you can’t pick your friends.”

“He almost got us killed!” Marie heaved up from her seat, hands on hips. “You do what you want, but I ain’t gon’ stand by and see him get off scot-free! I’m goin’ straight to the sheriff in Steadley and have him swear out papers on this hellion! And if you think I’m…”

With an inarticulate yell, Crisp sprang to his feet. He turned this way and that as if unsure of whom he wanted to address. “There’s this place in the Patch,” he said, emoting like a preacher, “this place so bad can’t nothin’ but the worst of ’em stand to be there. The ones who’s monsters, the ones who sleep on what they kill and shit their babies. It makes hell look like Sunday school. Fire don’t warm you, it just hurts your eyes. The snow’s white insects, the rain cuts like razors.” He hustled over to Marie, whipped a knife out from his ragged sleeve; he put the edge to her throat. “I’m takin’ you there, bitch! I’m takin’ you right to there, ’cause that’s where you fuckin’ belong!” He hauled Marie into the aisle. “Don’t nobody try and stop me! I’ll bleed ’er here’n now!”

I regarded him wearily. Much as I would have liked to see Marie dragged out into the Patch, I couldn’t let him do it. Maybe there was more of Cole in me than I’d figured. I came to my feet, and Crisp nicked her, bringing a rill of blood out from Marie’s saggy jowl; she squeaked and went stiff.

“I ain’t gon’ interfere with ya, man,” I said. “I just wanna ask you a coupla questions…all right?”

That didn’t sit too well with him, but he said, “Yeah, I guess.”

“Those men you come aboard with, you say they wanted to kill us, but that big fella was askin’ me somethin’? What was he askin’?”

“I don’t know.”

“You said you was pretendin’ to be one of ’em, you must know their language.”

He opened his mouth slowly, reminding me of a fish trying to get its lips around a pebble it had mistaken for food; but he did not reply.

“I was thinkin’ ’bout this woman y’got here,” I said. “’Bout why she’s so damn nasty. Way I figger, she’s just scared of who she is, hatin’ herself ’cause she’s so fat and useless and don’t belong nowhere. She ain’t got nothin’ better to do than ride this stinkin’ train back and forth. She can’t hate herself enough to satisfy, so she takes it out on other people. She don’t really wanna hurt ’em, she just ain’t got the guts to hurt herself.”

“What you talkin’ about? You talkin’ crazy!” Crisp looked to the others as if for confirmation.

“You come aboard with these other two, and you turn on ’em. Then you tell us you was always plannin’ to turn on ’em, that you was just playin’ along till you had a chance to switch sides. They was gonna hurt us, you say. But be that as it may, you wasn’t square with ’em…and not ’cause you cared ’bout us, but ’cause you was afraid.”

“What’d you want me to do? Let ’em kill you?”

“You would have done anything to get outta the Patch. You weren’t like them others. Don’t matter what they were, you just wasn’t one of ’em. You didn’t belong with ’em, and you was too scared to think about anything except that. But once you was shut of ’em, alone with us, it was the exact same situation. You was scared of us, you felt you didn’t belong. You could feel that this wasn’t your answer either, that you was as wrong here as you was in the Patch. Still, you had to make us believe you was one of us, so you went on ’bout how you betrayed your companions to save our lives. Like you said…just playin’ along.”

“Naw,” Crisp said, “naw, that ain’t how it was.”

“’Course, then you started hatin’ yourself ’cause you betrayed ’em, and ’cause you couldn’t hate yourself enough to satisfy, you picked out ol’ Marie here to hate. Now I admit she’s easy to hate. But when you get right down to it, what she been doin’ ain’t no different than what you doin’, now is it?”

The tension had drained from Crisp. He looked hopeless, beaten, and I knew I had him. I was full of truth and clear-seeing, as sure and righteous in my stance as a preacher with all the weight of scripture behind him. I had him given up and gone—all I had to do was to keep on talking, wearing him out with the dismal truth.

“Don’t you see?” I asked him. “There ain’t nowhere in this world you ever gon’ feel at home. And stickin’ some pathetic woman what’s the same as you just gon’ make things worse.”

“Lemme be!” Crisp shouted. “Just lemme be!”

“What was the big man askin’?”

“Nothin’! I don’t know!”

“What was he askin’?”

“I tell you, I don’t know!”

“What’d he want? Food…is that it? Medicine? Fuel?”

It appeared that Crisp couldn’t decide whether to smile at me, to try and win me over, or to snarl. That rotted jack-o’-lantern head wobbled like it was about to fall off his neck.

“You don’t have to answer,” I said. “’Cause I don’t know what exactly he wanted, but I do know it wasn’t blood.”

Crisp let out a terrible moan, a sound so full of pain it seemed the result of an actual blow.

“Our help’s what he wanted,” I said. “He wasn’t hopin’ for it too much, but he was willin’ to chance askin’ me a question just in case I was smart enough to understand.”

The little man shoved Marie aside, facing me with the knife, swaying with the erratic motion of the train, his face working.

“That ain’t gon’ do nothin’ for ya,” I said calmly.

He jabbed with the knife, but in his face was the rumpled, unsteady look of death. As I’d been earlier, he was past caring, past even the limits of wanting to care.

“Whatever you done,” I said, “it ain’t no worse’n things we everyone of us done. Maybe you did wrong with your companions, but you saved a life once you got on board. Nobody here can fault ya. But y’can’t go ’round hurtin’ people to make yourself feel better. You think about that, now.”

He appeared to be obeying my instructions, to be thinking things over, but I guess there was just too much wrongness in his head, too much trouble in his past for thought to make any sense. I had relaxed a bit, expecting him to see reason, and when he came at me, quicker than I would have believed possible, I wasn’t prepared and took a slice on my arm. I gritted my teeth against the pain and tried to grab him, but he ducked and darted past me and out the door. He stood between the cars, a shadowy figure hanging on to the safety railing. The train was rocketing along now, and I understood what he intended and that he had no chance. But he was no longer my responsibility, and so I only watched and waited. He glanced back into the car, and I could feel his yearning, the weight of his anguish, all the shattering displacement of what he’d hoped being overwhelmed by what he knew. Then he swung out over the rail and vanished into the black rush of night. If he gave a cry, it was lost in the thunder of our passage.

Dispirited, wondering why I had bothered to save Marie, wishing I could have done more for Crisp, I sat back down beside Cole, ignoring the gabble from the rear of the car. Marie was sobbing, the farmers all talking at once.

Cole passed me the bourbon. “You didn’t handle that real good.”

“’Bout as good as you handled me.” I had a slug of bourbon and began wrapping a bandanna about my arm.

We were moving down into the deep forest, and all I could make out of the great plain through the ragged silhouettes of the evergreens was intermittent glints of silvery water and unearthly fire. I finished wrapping my arm, had some more bourbon, and leaned back.

“Are we all right?” I asked Cole. “We past havin’ more trouble?”

Cole said, “Most likely,” and reclaimed his bourbon. After a while he asked what I planned to do now…now that everything had changed for me.

I gave a bitter laugh. “Guess I’m still bound for Glory.”

He made a noncommittal noise and drank.

“That’s sure one hell of a ride,” I said.

I gazed off along the car, at the dried blood and the farmers, at Marie, huge and depressed, muffled in her coat. Despite everything, I couldn’t work up hatred for her. All my emotions had been fired, leaving me with empty chambers and the stink of cordite. A shudder went through me, not of cold, but some last residue voiding itself, a dry heave of the spirit.

Tracy, I thought, and then even that was gone.

“What’s there to do after you done this?” I asked, feeling hopeless and cold. “What’s left?”

Cole had another swig of bourbon; he rinsed it around in his mouth before he swallowed, then looked out the window at the dark world rushing past. He was wearing a distant expression, and his pupils appeared to have shrunk into tiny black keyholes. Finally he shrugged and spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness.

“Turn around and go back the other way was all I could ever figger,” he said.

I took a room in Glory. It was a tiny, crooked room with a slanted ceiling and leaning walls, dirty, cold as a penny. From the window I could see ramshackle buildings and rutted dirt streets marbled with crusts of snow. By day, buckboards slotted along the ruts while women in wool shawls and long skirts hustled past. Men loaded and unloaded kegs of nails and grain sacks and bales of straw, and stopped into the saloons for a drink or three. Their children chased one another, ducking under horses and wagons, pelting each other with snowballs. Nights, there was some wildness—tinny piano music, gunshots, shrieks—but not so much as there had been in White Eagle. As far as I could tell from living there a week, every town I’d ever known ought to have been called Glory, because they were all pretty damn much the same.

There were refugees, of course. They slept in alleys and doorways, wherever it was dark and there was a chance of making it through the night without being beaten. None of the citizens wanted them around, what with their peculiar habits and deformities, but they were tolerated due to some Christian twitch. I would sit by my window and watch them slink about and wonder if I wasn’t one of them myself. I hadn’t bothered looking up my friends to borrow money. That was a plan I’d concocted with Tracy, and even if she had been there, I doubt I could have stuck to it. I had changed, and few of my old obsessions had any meaning. Instead, I got a job swamping out a saloon, which paid enough for food and shelter and—on occasion—for a woman to share my crooked room. The women made me happy, but not for long. Once they were gone, I would go to stand in the dark and spy on life. I saw a thousand things I wanted, but none I wanted enough to seize, nothing that inspired me to grab and take a bite and laugh with the joy of fulfilled desire. I was as empty as I’d been at the beginning of the ride from White Eagle, and whenever I looked into mirrors I saw a man on the run from himself, a man who was growing sick and weak again.

Spring faded, summer died, fall ebbed. I won a horse in a poker game, a shit-brown, sore-kneed, mean-tempered animal that I kept only because I was in no position to throw anything away. I hated that horse, and I would have sooner gotten cozy with a skunk than put a saddle on him. But one morning I realized I had become so sick of myself that I couldn’t stand the room any longer. It reeked of my hangovers, my sodden incapacities. I packed a bedroll, mounted up, and headed east for Steadley, again thinking that what I needed was a new place, a new start. But the ride came to be a remedy in itself. The air so crisp it flowed into my lungs like cool fire, and the sky that potent blue you only find on the backside of creation, with high scribbled lines of birds and snow peaks in the distance. I had intended to do some soul-searching, to try and gain a perspective on things. But it appeared that merely by leaving Glory I had gained sufficient perspective, and I experienced sweeps of emotion that in their purity seemed to embody the perfection of the sky, the shining mountains, and the momentum of the land, the great flow of it eastward, rising and declining with the smoothness of ocean swells. My body felt clean, my head free of worries. Even the horse’s temper had improved.

A day and a half later when Steadley hove into view, a gaggle of weathered frame buildings that differed from Glory only by its greater size and the profusion of its squalor, I was not yet ready to end my ride, and I figured I would keep going awhile and pitch camp in the hills east of town. Weather closed in, the sky grayed, and fat white flakes started to fall. But when I reached the hills, I was still eager to continue, and as the light faded toward dusk, I told myself I’d ride a few miles more, close—yet not too close—to the edge of the Patch. I moved into evergreen forest, following the railroad tracks, which were banked high with snow that had fallen the previous week, finding peace among the dark trees. Tiny birds with white bellies and black caps were hopping thick as fleas beneath them; in their nervous agitation, they reminded me of how my thoughts had been working recently. Wind whirled up fresh powder from the snow crust, stretched it out into veils that went flowing across the banks and glittered for a moment before dissipating; the heavy snow-laden boughs of the firs barely trembled.

I was preparing to scout about for a campsite when I heard the train from Steadley coming and spotted its smoke unwinding above the treetops; a minute later I saw the locomotive round a bend, sparks fluming from its smokestack, a gigantic black beast out of hell, its brass cowcatcher looking like golden needle teeth in the decaying light. It was on an upgrade, moving at a relatively slow pace, and I urged the horse into a trot alongside, looking in the windows, studying the frightened faces of the passengers. As the end of a car passed, a man with a shotgun leaned out between cars and shouted for me to keep away. Cole. Even at that distance I had a strong impression of his eyes, a sense of their bizarre black configurations.

“Hey, Cole!” I called out. “Don’t you recognize me?”

He peered at me, leaning farther out, hanging on to the safety rail. “Ain’t you the ol’ boy put a hole in my hip?”

I waved. “How you been?”

“Tolerable…and you?”

“Shit, I’m doin’ fine as a man can do!” Strangely enough, I believed it.

“Where the hell you think you goin’?” Cole shouted as the train began to pick up speed. “We ’bout into the Patch!”

“Well, that’s where I’m goin’!” His warning didn’t affect me…or not the way I would have expected, anyway. I felt challenged, excited, alive. I urged the horse into a gallop, plunging through the snow, and was astounded by the ease with which he responded.

“You’re crazy! Don’t you ’member what I said? Ain’t gon’ be the same for ya this time! There’s gon’ be changes!”

I laughed. “Don’t tell me you ain’t never wanted to go out into it, to find what’s there. You can’t see it without feelin’ that way.”

He nodded. “Oh, yeah! I’ve had me that feelin’ a time or two.”

“Then c’mon with me!” I spurred the horse faster. “We’d make a pair, we would! We’d scare all the monsters into hidin’!”

He just grinned.

“C’mon!” I yelled. “What’ve you got to lose? We’ll be the kings of the goddamn place! C’mon with me!”

And I believed that, too—that we could see all of the wonders and intricacies of the Patch, all its violent lights and darks, and come through victorious. I was heady with that knowledge.

A plume of smoke from the engine swirled between us, and after it had passed, he called, “Naw, that’s your bad fortune, not mine!”

The train was pulling away from me, heading for another curve, and as it began to angle around it, Cole yelled, “Luck to you!”

“I don’t need luck!” I told him. “I gotta special moon watches over me, I’m part of an infinite design. I got more fire in me than that ol’ engine of yours. What do I need with luck?”

“Take it anyhow!” he cried, waving with his shotgun, and then the car jolted around the bend, and I saw him no more.

I had thought all my brave words were merely bluster, that once he had gone out of sight, I would rein in the horse and find myself a campsite, but I kept urging the horse to run faster. And it was not just my urging that commanded us, because I noticed then that the horse had changed, become a force of its own, a great dark engine with a steaming heart that pulled me along and helped me abide by a decision that I realized I had already made, that I’d made long before I left Glory. I recalled watching Tracy run for the cover of the woods, how I’d thought of her as running away from danger; but seeing her in my mind’s eye, I knew that she had been running for joy, for life, fueled by all the brilliant thoughtlessness that was empowering me now. That was it, you see. There was no logic to my act, no sense, no plan. I was free of all that, free of fetters I’d never known existed, of impediments so subtle in their hold that I couldn’t even name them, and I was running as I had not since I had been a boy, for the pure muscular exhilaration of the act, with the wind a fire at my back, and the snow blowing up into phantoms, and the dark trees like fortress towers, and the whole world ahead of me a richness of absolutes. The things I knew just from breathing in that snow-crystaled, stinging air! Philosophies were squeezed into shape by the clenching of my fist, principles bred like tears in the corners of my eyes. My mind was white with knowing.

To my amazement, we were beginning to catch up with the train. That horse of mine was a marvel, each of his strides carrying us an improbable distance. I could not see his face, but I knew the measure of his change, his eyes aglow like miners’ lanterns, his teeth sharp and capable of tearing, his hooves driving sparks from the stones. And I felt as well the measure of my own change. It wasn’t what I might have picked had I had a choice, but it was true to myself in a way that I would never have admitted before. My heart was a furious cell, my brain flocked with outlaw desires, my hands fit for loving and killing and little in between. For evil…though I didn’t look at it that way, not anymore. Evil had ceased to be an abstraction to me. It was as plain and comprehensible as a lump of coal, a black fist that could burn and give off flame, a tool that enabled me to survive, and being no longer mysterious, it no longer deserved a fancy word like evil to describe it—it was merely a part of what I was, a talent, a quality as indistinguishable from my whole self as a single sparkle of a gemstone.

I spurred my horse and went coursing past the last car. I matched the train’s pace and looked in through the window at a pretty woman in a blue dress. I stared at the plump swell of her breasts and wanted her with a blaze of dizzy passion that came near to unseating me. She drew back, pale and alarmed, a hand to her mouth. God only knew what face I presented to the world…or maybe I did have some idea, for when I swept off my hat, intending to salute her with a bow, I felt several bony projections rising from my cranium, like the knobs of a primitive crown, and I laughed at the thought that a gray demon king might be rising from the ashes of my faint heart. There was a vicious glee in my laughter that—had I heard it at any other time—would have made my spit dry and my balls shrivel into seeds. But now I loved to hear it, knowing it for the signal music of a new life. I considered swinging up onto the car and taking the woman, but she offered nothing I would not find in more vital form out upon the vast glowing plain that lay to the north. The other passengers pressed close to the window, peering out at me, and I wondered what they were thinking. Was I simply the personification of their fears, or did they see in me a man who had lost everything? Did they sense the sweetness of my release? Could they guess at the years of dismal self-deception that lay behind me? Did they realize that I was like themselves, someone who had come to the end of his dodges and been forced to travel a road that he had tried for years to avoid, only to discover that it was life itself he had been avoiding?

I rode alongside them awhile, engaging their eyes soberly, trying to convey the tragedy of my long decline and the good news of my escape. I would have shouted out to them, but I knew they would not understand me. We were separated not merely by a quarter-inch of glass and a few feet of snowy ground, but by the potent enchantment of the Patch and the lesser enchantment of my choice. Or perhaps the fact that they had yet to make their own choices was the greatest barrier between us. Then, giving up forever on the world, I reined my horse northward, swerving down through the evergreens, smashing aside the boughs with my strong right hand and sending up clouds of snow behind, bound at last for glory, the only kind accessible to those who have failed at ordinary grace, bound for heat and pleasure, for the end of limits and the final places of love and power, bound for death by dreaming, for the joys of hell and the pains of paradise and all the pretty mysteries beyond.