Working up a head of steam, the boiler sent a pulse the length of the train, like a horse bunching its muscles for a long gallop. The delay between the pull of the tender and the reaction by the coach was like a gasp for breath. In the weeks ahead I would come to regard that arrangement of bolts, plates, pistons, and couplers as a living thing, and when I slept—which is how I recommend traveling through most of Utah and Arizona—to fancy that I was an extension of it, my veins and arteries connected with it the way Barnum’s Siamese twins were each physically dependent on the other; the churning of the drive-rods melded with the beating of my heart, the rhythmic wheezing of steam and smoke with the function of my lungs. When Hector Cansado blew the whistle at crossings, I felt its hoarse shrill bellow in my testicles. We were one and the same, the Ghost and I.
From Great Falls to Tucson, we stopped at the same place to take on water and wood: the long low frame station, the loafers holding up its porch roof with their shoulder blades, the slouch-hatted driver handling the reins of the team hitched to a dray carrying its cargo of barrels down a cross street strung together with all the others. I manufactured names for all of them, man and beast, the closest friends I’d had in a long while. I ate chicken and dumplings twenty times in the Bluebell Café, served by a substantially built woman named Martha, drank coffee that had been boiling since dawn. One tree had provided all the apple pies, the crusts burnt in a black crescent. In each place, the talk was of a farmer kicked by a mule, a little girl drowned in a well, a midwife hacked to pieces and distributed alongside a mile of county road. The victims were interchangeable, but the mayhem followed the theme as before. A man named Gus would hang a hundred times.
I don’t know when the engineer slept, or if he did at all; maybe, aware of how little time he had left, he’d decided not to waste any of it insensible, dozing in snatches at the throttle, close enough to the surface to react to sharp bends, steep plunges, and obstacles on the tracks. Apart from that—if even that—he took his rest with me in the private car while Joseph tended the boiler at rest, drinking a hole in Judge Blackthorne’s private stock, sometimes joining me in a hand of poker, playing with matchsticks and swapping biographies.
He was the eldest of eleven, not counting one miscarriage, two stillbirths, and a sister who died of diphtheria at the age of two weeks. His mother took in washing, and his father had spent a total of six hours with his children, leaving their one-room hut before sunup and chipping bits of color out of granite until the coal-oil ran out around midnight.
“We had a good working system,” he said. “Mama would take a turtle from a trap in the river and I would stand on its shell while Felipe applied pliers to its jaw, pulling out its head, Alessandro chopped it off, and Delores snatched it by its tail and threw it into a boiling kettle. You know turtle soup?”
I nodded. “In San Francisco. They called it terrapin in the Bella Union.”
“Snapper, we. I learned to avoid the severed head at an early age, when a hen pecked at it out of curiosity and it locked onto the bird’s throat. They will hold on, you know, until sundown, or until the brain gets the message that it is no longer connected to the body. Pass the bottle, senor, por favor.
“Ah! To have discovered such nectar years ago would have been worth my liver. It was an important moment in my passage when I was declared old enough, first to use the pliers, then to swing the axe. What I would not give to eat turtle soup once again. The river was fished out long ago.”
“And what of Felipe, Delores, and the rest?” I asked.
He set a matchstick to use, igniting a cigarette he rolled himself in brown paper. The smoke from the scorched grain made me lightheaded, an argument in its favor; liquor benefited no one but the drinker.
“Quien sabe? The soldiers came for Alessandro to help them fight for Maximilian; we never heard from him again. Then more soldiers came for Felipe to help them fight for Juarez. We heard he was shot for desertion. Delores became pregnant by the son of a don and was sold to a brothel. I do not know what became of the child. The rurales arrested me when I trespassed upon the don’s ranch. They took away my rifle, which was fifty years old and did not work anyway, and I was sentenced to labor in the same mine that claimed my father’s life when it fell in, along with those of a dozen others.
“I served with the crew that excavated it. I do not know which of the skeletons we uncovered belonged to my father. I would be working there still if a man representing railway interests in Los Estados Unidos hadn’t come looking for a fireman to replace the one he’d lost when a boiler exploded near Chihuahua; he was blasting tunnels for a line to be owned jointly by the Oklahoma, Texas, and Missouri Railroad and the government in Mexico City. I had just started as an engineer when El Presidente Diaz nationalized the railway in the interest of the Republic. Lo mismo, senor, por favor.”
I refilled his glass. He’d drunk half a bottle to two drinks on my part without affecting either his speech or his reflexes.
He sipped, sighed. “When we were grading track not far from my old village I chanced to look in upon the home where I grew up. Strangers were living there, and knew nothing of the former occupants. It is a trial, Senor Deputy, to visit a bordello and not know if one is lying with one’s own niece.”
I had nothing to offer in comparison with his experiences. I’d been shot, almost burned to death, lured into traps by evil women, and spent a season as a slave with Cheyenne renegades, but I had nothing to match his loss.
That is, if he was telling the truth. If I had a cartwheel dollar for every Mexican whose sister had been raped by a Spanish don, I could have spent my life traversing the continent in a private railway car.
Joseph was a puzzle of another sort. I doubt we exchanged more than fifty words total, most of them monosyllabic and unrevealing, but even before we left Montana Territory I was convinced he was some kind of Judas goat, leading us toward a slaughterhouse. He spent all his time in the locomotive when he wasn’t foraging for fuel—not overlooking the merest scrap of driftwood on the shore of the Great Salt Lake or mesquite twig in the Painted Desert—crunched down cracked corn by the handful, chasing it with water from a goatskin bag, and crossed himself before he ate, clutching the carved-stone crucifix suspended from the rosary around his neck. For all his show of Christian conversion, I pictured him more easily offering morsels to a beast-headed god squatting in some undiscovered ruin, praying for our destruction.
The Ghost passed through city and plain, leaving no more evidence of its passage than would its namesake. Most unscheduled journeys by rail fostered a host of gossip, and questions at every stop. The endless chain of Marthas set before me bowl after bowl of chicken and dumplings—scrawny prairie hen, and blobs of mealy flour swimming in grease—with only the usual tinned cheer and no apparent curiosity as to where I was bound and why. There was nothing furtive about it, only a complacency I’d never witnessed before. No one asked me about the news from up north, yet I sensed no hostility, no reticence. I was a piece of furniture, and nothing so interesting as a piano or a new kind of plow.
Out of duty I put in to post offices along the way, in case Blackthorne had wired further instructions or calling for a progress report, only to meet blank faces and shaking heads. Either I’d been forgotten—written off, as a bad debt—or the Judge was laying the groundwork for a plea of ignorance when the mission went sour. I was as much an orphan as Hector Cansado, whose brothers and sisters had been taken from him as by the unfeeling wind.
No, nothing so substantial as an orphan. I was a phantom, like the train I rode, drifting through human bodies, constructions of wood, brick, and adobe, like a mist, only without the chill that came with it. There was no evidence that I existed. Outside Yuma, an antelope grazing next to the cinderbed didn’t raise its head as the train swept past within inches. As the animal dissolved in a wave of heat I put my hand to my mouth and bit hard into the tender flesh between my thumb and forefinger, and waited for the blood to come to the surface. When it did, proving something, I knew not what, I cracked open my Bible and read:
Yet he shall perish forever like his own dung; they which have seen him shall say, Where is he?
He shall fly away as a dream, and shall not be found; yea, he shall be chased away as a vision of the night.
I slammed the book shut. Who wrote this thing, anyway?
I worked my way back to the stock car, bracing myself against the arid wind that struck me like a sheet of superheated iron on the verandah; it stood my skin-cells on end and crackled the hairs in my nose. The wheatgrass stretching to the horizon laid down in the opposite direction the train was headed, making me dizzy. The world was spinning away from me, the ultimate rejection.
The bay lifted its wedge-shaped head when I came through the door, studying me first with one eye, then turning to confirm what it had seen with the left, like a bird on a perch. I strapped on its feedbag and stroked its neck; it lunged, trying to bite me through the canvas. I found that reassuring. Horses still hated me; proof that I was flesh and not air.
I had a strange sensation—a waking dream, like the wisp of unreality that told you you’d been dozing, even when you were struggling with sleeplessness—that I was looking at Lefty Dugan, the friend I’d killed in Butte.
Is that what you thought? he seemed to be saying. It’s the other way around, Page. I killed you.
Nothing had changed: Shoot one old partner to death and he never let you forget it.