The hot wind blew perpendicular to the train, booming the side of the stock car where the bay doubtlessly fiddle-footed and tossed its head, trying to crawl out of its hide. My own skin prickled as if I’d fallen into a crock of needles. I was afraid to touch my lips in case they peeled off in paper-thin layers. Every time I stoked the fire I felt like a pig on a spit, my skin turning orange and crackling. Joseph, manning the throttle and leaning out the opening on his side to look ahead for obstructions, showed no reaction other than to take a long draught from the canteen when I handed it to him. A goatskin bag hung inside the cab, pregnant with water, but he told me to resist using it to refill the canteen. He didn’t say why.
I looked out at the pinon and fescue flying past. The green seemed to fade as I watched, the grass blades shriveling like dead petals on a fireplace grate. “What about fires?” I asked.
“I brake as little as possible, but one cannot prevent every spark. The thing is to keep the burning country behind us.”
“What happens when we stop?”
“Oh, the fires stop too. We have an agreement, this place and I.”
They say, the experts back East who know everything, that Indians have no humor in the white man’s understanding of the term. I’ve been the length and breadth of the West looking for one who could answer an honest question with anything but a macabre joke.
When we did stop, to conserve steam for the last run to the water tower, we struck off down the track to confirm his agreement with the wilderness. I carried six pails of sand, strung out three on each side of a yoke across my shoulders, which I used to put out sporadic buds of flame along the cinderbed while Joseph chopped brush with his faithful axe, piled it, and wet it down with water from the goatskin bag to create a firebreak.
“You might have told me what it was for.” I tugged my bandanna back down below my chin. The top half of my face would be black.
“Too much talking dries the throat.”
I watched the wind baking the wetness from the limbs. I could smell wood still burning a mile or so down the rails, hear the whoosh of flame consuming a parched pinon in one gulp. “I can’t claim confidence.”
“You expect too much. These forests have burned to the ground many times. They continue to burn until the rains come, or until they reach woods so dense the flames can find no more air to breathe. It has always been so, a thousand times a thousand years before men came with sand and water to put them out, or there would be no trees left to burn. To slow down the fire is as much victory as we can expect.”
As we turned back toward the train, something rustled in the undergrowth; a deer or an elk, possibly a bear. The woods were too dense for my eyes to penetrate. I remembered the cry of the puma, and Joseph’s constant reference to bandits, and picked up my pace. I’d left the Whitney rifle behind to carry the pails and didn’t like the odds of defending myself with hip guns from an enemy I couldn’t see. I wasn’t sure I could even slow it down.
* * *
The Ghost labored up a long grade, panting like a stove-in horse. For an hour and a half Joseph had been staring at the gauges with an expression I never want to see on a doctor’s face with me as the patient. I had the impression we were running on a teaspoon of water, and asked if what was left in the canteen, the goatskin, and the kegs of fresh drinking water in the parlor car would help.
“A drop in the ocean,” he said. “We have fifty gallons in the boiler, and to expect it to take us beyond this grade would be to tempt God.”
It was my first intimation that he’d been converted; and my first lesson in just how much even a small engine drank.
Nearing the top we slowed to a crawl. Less than that; it seemed the trees were moving forward rather than backward, and slowly enough at that to count the leaves. If any bandits were close at hand, that would be the time to strike. Over and over again I rehearsed in my mind the move toward the Whitney rifle leaning in the corner, wondering if I’d be better served by the shorter distance to one of the revolvers on my hips. The moment required for the decision alone, in the heat of action, might kill us both.
The boiler wheezed; the stack cried for smoke, I fed the box. The drive-rods that turned the wheels strained agonizingly slow, like a milk-maid churning at the edge of fatigue, rotating stubborn steel against the friction of the rails, steel also: What had been designed as a partnership of identical elements was deteriorating into a contest, Philadelphia versus Detroit, or more internally still, the fraction of temperature between one smelting-vat and another. The slightest variance in joints, a spike driven an eighth of an inch off true, or not driven flush, a tiny flaw in the crucible back at the finery, a bubble formed when a piece was removed from the cast; an indifferent laborer a thousand miles away at the end of his shift, who said good was good enough, and fair fair, had sealed the fates of two men in a place whose name on a map he couldn’t pronounce.
What if it wasn’t an illusion, and we were rolling back down the grade? Would the brakes hold, or would the natural law of gravity take over where the efforts of man had failed, plummeting us at breakneck speed toward the level, where a sharp curve I remembered would flip us off the rails like an annoying bug, the whole ludicrous link of cars like a string of sausages sent down the steep flanks of the Mother Range into a pile of scrap iron and crushed flesh at the base?
Was I raised in a trapper’s shack at the top of the Bitterroots to die in a tangle of metal at the bottom of a pimple of a hill in Mexico?
“There it is,” said Joseph.
I started. He’d said it as if we’d come through a light rain into bright sunshine.
It was bright, at that, shining on a squat wooden barrel the size of my furnished room in Helena, mounted on spindly legs of pine bound with thongs with the bark intact. Beads glittered on the staves as on a glass of ice-cold beer.
“I wondered some,” he said. “She was working herself that last half-mile.”
“‘Wondered’?” I wanted to swallow back the word; I knew I’d been had for a fool.
He leaned on the brake, his face grave. “I always worry along this stretch. It asks much of a boiler this size.”
It had been an initiation of some kind. I should have recognized it, army and bunkhouse veteran that I was. All that talk of pumas and bandits and relatives done to violent death had lured me into the oldest game of all. He was leaning out the opening on his side. I waited for him to turn away before I struck him between the eyes. I saw his shoulder stiffen; not at the thought of my assault, but by something he’d seen up ahead. By the time he drew himself back inside, my fist was back down at my side. I don’t know now if it was his dead-blank expression that made me relax my fingers or the stench prickling the hairs in my nostrils. They’d become inured to the smell of burning, but this one came with the sweet tint of roast pork. I’d come across it before, not at communal events behind a ranch house, but in the heat of battle, with dead men shot at such close range the powder-flare set fire to their flesh.
He alighted; but not before tugging his bandanna up around his nose and mouth. I did the same with mine and stepped down behind him.
There was no smoke; the fires that had caused it had gone out long since. Beyond the water tower, which had remained untouched, a briarpatch of blackened timber poked up at random angles from acres of ash; knee-deep, should one want to wade into it. We didn’t. The stench of burnt flesh alone held us back. Such shells of humanity that lay swaddled in those ashes would add nothing to what we already knew.
A white boulder, sunk so far into the earth as to suggest it had tumbled down from the mountains years before, bore a sign, etched likely with a charred stick and pounded pale gray by sporadic rainfall: a reverse crucifix, with the crosspiece at the bottom.
Joseph crossed himself, confirming my suspicions of conversion, and pronounced three syllables that chilled the oven-baked Sierras to the bone:
“Cholera.”
I placed my palm against my bandanna, pressing it to my face. “Not yellow fever? You said there’s plenty of cinchona in these woods.”
“For that, they would not try to burn out the contagion and then flee. There is no medicine for this evil. It kills and kills until it has gorged itself with death.”
“Do we turn back?”
He was silent; thinking. After a moment he shook his head.
“No. They have burned it out, the survivors. Their only hope to survive is to press ahead.”
“And if they haven’t burned it out?”
“Then they carry it with them; or turn back to escape it.” He stared at the ground. “I was wrong. I think they have turned back. There is nothing ahead.”
“What about the water?”
He was motionless; then shook himself and tilted his chin toward the squat tower.
“The Ghost is already dead. No contagion can infect it. We will fill up and move on.”
“You’re sure they turned back? That they haven’t taken the disease into our path?”
Just then something whooshed, a half-mile down track, if that: another stand of trees gone up in flame.
“The fire behind,” he said; “the plague ahead. What have we to lose?”