There were two of them, Paxson and Gus. They threw things off the Muleshoe Bridge into an old coal car. Beer bottles, a broken dishwasher, a lawnmower, and, once, many years before, a bag with a boy’s toe in it. The coal car was part of a long line that stretched to the shops, a quarter mile up the track. The line had never moved. The things they threw off the bridge were souvenirs of something. They didn’t know what.
A storm was coming the night they came to the bridge with a motorcycle in the truck bed. They’d stolen it from the parking lot of the Inclined Plane. It was a bar they had once frequented, a bar that was not much of a place to drink anymore. The people there were not real. They were projections with layers of makeup, hair spray. They had golf clubs in their trunks, hundred-thousand dollar credit limits. The motorcycle belonged to one of these people.
Paxson and Gus pulled the motorcycle off the truck bed. They heaved it up. They were strong. They let it drop off the bridge. They looked over the edge, down at the tracks. The coal car was gone, the whole line of cars was gone. The motorcycle lay on its side. The front wheel spun.
“Where in hell’s the train?” Paxson said. He was thirty-nine. He’d played varsity football at Windfall High, offensive tackle. Once again, the rain, slightly, the tree-bark smell. He held his hand out to feel for drops.
Gus climbed up on the ledge of the bridge. He looked down. “Fuckers,” he said. “I was planning to go down and get some of that shit back.”
Paxson had thought to do the same. “Like what?”
“Pictures,” Gus said.
“Of her?”
“Yep. And letters.”
Gus seemed to be trying not to cry. He was drunk. It wasn’t fun drinking with him. Let him get more than a six pack and he turned into a crybaby.
“Well, it’s gone now,” Paxson said, and thought it was the wrong thing to say. The woman Gus referred to was someone Paxson knew. She had left Windfall years before. She’d written Gus and told him she had a new boyfriend, and a baby, and she hated Gus, hated him, hated everything and everybody in Windfall, in fact she even hated love. Her last letter was to inform him that she had AIDS, that she missed him, that she might come back home. She never did. Now all Gus’s pictures of her were gone, and letters she’d written him. “It was just a bunch of junk, Gus,” Paxson said. He didn’t like standing in the rain. He wanted to get in the truck.
The two of them were employed by a man named Farquhar, and Gus was the one who, at Farquhar’s command, had cut off the boy’s toe. Like Gus and Paxson, the kid was from Windfall. His name was Henry Orly. He was not even twenty, he had unpaid debts. Paxson had held the boy down, gotten his shoe and sock off. “Please,” the boy had said. He was calm, stoned. Gus had been nervous. His hand shook as he clipped the toe off with wire cutters. He threw up. Later they showed the toe to Farquhar and he gave them four hundred dollars to split. There’s a place at the end of the turnpike where you can get whores. They spent the money there and on drinks. They threw the toe off the bridge.
Now they got in the truck, Gus in the passenger seat, Paxson at the wheel. The rain was heavy and cold. They looked down into the valley. There were lights from a new restaurant.
“Where that Denny’s is is where the drive-in theater used to be,” Gus said. “I helped knock the mother down. Do you remember the drive-in?”
“How many times are you going to ask me that?”
“All Denny’s waitresses are lezzies,” Gus said. He started to light a cigarette, then stopped. “Oops,” he said.
“Don’t worry about me,” Paxson said. He scratched his upper arm. He was still getting used to the nicotine patch.
Gus put his cigarettes back in his shirt pocket. “Was there anything you were planning to get back from the coal car?”
“Yeah,” Paxson said. “Actually that lawnmower. I could have fixed it and gave it to my dad.” There were other things he had discarded: informational brochures from art schools he’d wanted to attend. And letters of rejection from those schools. And notebooks filled with his miserable sketches. He’d spent hundreds of dollars in application fees. He didn’t tell any of this to Gus. “Would you sleep with her if she came back?”
“Yep.”
“With a rubber?”
He believed Gus’s girl was probably dead. Her name was Melanie Grassmier. She had a small-town stripper’s body. Her face was ugly, her head full of dreams. Paxson himself had dated her years before.
He put the key in the ignition. Gus looked out the window. They stayed like this for a while. The rain was steady. They listened to it. Paxson imagined the moving train and imagined him and Gus on the train. “Where to?” he finally asked.
“We could leave Windfall,” Gus said.
Paxson started the truck. “I think Windfall’s about left us, Gus. Give me a cigarette.”
Gus gave him one. They drove. Farquhar had another job for them. He wanted them to kill somebody in Pittsburgh. They hadn’t killed anyone before. They would try it. They had tried many things and none of it felt like much.