24

It wasn’t coming.

Ted’s breath steamed in the fog, and he shoved his hands into his coat to protect them from the cold. The freeway hammered and hissed behind us, and the ground was uneven with decomposing cans and frayed tires. Gray grass whispered at our shoes.

“Anytime,” he said, talking to me, to the fog, to the railway and the gravel.

We had been there for an hour and a half. It was obvious to both of us that it wasn’t coming.

“I had no idea,” he said, “that it would be so cold.”

I felt embarrassed for him, and said that the cold was fine with me. This had been his idea.

“It’s worth a wait,” he said.

Then, to give both of us something to do, he dug into his pocket and brought out a penny.

“What do you think?” he said. “I’ll put it on the track.” He put the coin on the shiny lance of the rail. “Most of the time when you do this, the train just knocks it off and you never find it again.”

When he set the penny on the rail, it made the slightest sound, a faint ping.

He had invited me the day before. Old Jefferson, a locomotive built in 1894, was making its last trip. It was heading down from Los Angeles to a rail museum in Portland. “Wife wouldn’t come along for all the world,” he had said.

We stirred our feet to keep warm along the rust-stained gravel. I kicked a knot of driftwood, and a bird with long, thin wings squeaked away from me. The wet air smelled of sulphur and car exhaust.

A gust shook us, and the sun appeared on the horizon, a white aspirin that dissolved as we watched. Ted sighed, and looked at the gray weeds at his feet. He shook his head.

I flicked a squashed beer can with my foot, trying to flick away Ted’s disappointment. “I don’t mind,” I said. “We can wait all night.”

He shrank a little. He didn’t want to speak. At last he said, “Boiler split, maybe. Anything could have happened.”

The two rails probed south, eaten away by the fog like steel in acid. A new, darker bank of fog took us, and the rails shortened even more as the weeds shivered.

He shrugged. “Well—” he began.

No, don’t say it, I thought. Don’t give up. We have to stay, I shouted in my mind. We have to wait until it comes.

He cleared his throat. “We ought to head on back,” he said.

We didn’t move. We stood there, bent into the breeze that blew the fog through our hair, through our jackets, into our bodies. We leaned into the wind.

And the fog changed. It began to rise, to lift upward into the sky, so that the rails grew longer, and the gravel darkened. The fog lifted and then it began to vibrate. The individual droplets trembled as they suspended before us, and neither of us spoke.

The ground shook. My insides trembled.

It was upon us with a blast of heat and hot sparks. It hammered the air ahead of it with heavy, lung-shaking blows. The hugeness of it thundered and twisted the world for a second. I was waving, despite myself, and an arm hailed us, waving from high above.

And then it was gone. A short train with a fluttering flag. Then, the empty fog. Coal flakes continued to sprinkle us for a few moments, a fine rain of black sand.

“It came!” I cried. Everything was silent now, except for the rattle of the freeway, a cheap noise that was a kind of silence. Ted climbed the gravel bed slowly, and bent to touch the rail. He laughed.

The rail was alive as I touched it, vibrant, and I saw how suddenly a train could kill a person.

“Look,” said Ted. He held open his hand. The penny was there, gold-bright, smeared out of shape like a pat of butter.