A Near-Halloween Story

It's late October. I had made my way back to Marquette by car. Restless, I'd decided to wander around Prairie du Chien. I spent most of the night before smoking cigar after cigar on the roof outside my motel window, with cheap Scotch frying in my gut. Still, the next morning I woke up with the sun. I wandered along the old main street, stepping into small bookstores and cafes, finding nothing. I spent the day smoking and scribbling among the effigies in Pike's Peak State Park. By dusk, I have talked myself into the Phillips 66 gas station/restaurant near the tracks, obvious with a half gallon of water occupying the space in the booth next to me. My olive-green coat. A thick, dirty duffle bag. Suddenly dark, there was time, still: Time for a walk, maybe.

I move out onto a street that finds itself on the outline of a bluff, that finds itself stranded near the Mississippi. It's practically raining leaves. Parties and gatherings and mutterings spill out onto back porches of a Saturday night. It's cold. I'm underdressed, obvious again. There's a silver quad-cab pickup in the dark back at the gas station when I return; and a man, a woman; a small girl; hugs and kisses. I'm inside, next, back at my booth. The man from the quad-cab pickup is walking past, his eye on me. I can see that the people who work here know him. Painfully, I'm a stranger to them.

Outside a train idles alongside the river near the bridge. Barges rust in the current. The year is pulling itself toward winter. I take glances, then stare at the pickup man, unblinking. I do this because he is stopped near me, drilling holes through me or something just over my shoulder, obvious; framed in the fluorescent light like a fat harvest moon. My face feels long, thin. He comes alongside me. I can feel the floor come up under my feet. Some silence travels between us. He's a heavy man, I observe. Weathered. Unshaven. Stuffed with his years. I can hear him breathe as he regards me. I gather my obvious dufflebag into my lap and push my back upward and into the back of the booth and breathe. Quickly, he lifts his right hand up into the air - an exaggerated gesture - and lowers it. He looks away, and up, and lifts up the sleeve on his left arm, begins slapping the face of his black-banded watch rhythmically, slowly with two fingers.

"Fifteen minutes," he says, the words tumbling sloppily past themselves, tiredly, as though uttered from the mouth of an exasperated teacher. "We'll go west for a while. Then almost a stop. A near full stop." I push myself back into my booth and straighten myself, again. "Then waaaaaay north. I'm meaning way north. Right? Straight hours, not minutes." I look down at the table. I put my hands there and study my fingers. "It's mixed," he says. "But it's going pretty much straight through. Get out there now if you're looking for something that won't shake the shit out of you." He walks away, slowly.

And it's getting later. Colder and colder. Darker and darker.

It's nearly November. I find myself back outside. The ground is vibrating. I am walking, blatantly, next to the idling train.

The light from the gas station; The houses; The picnic pavilion; The bridge over the Mississippi; The moon. All that light, so yellow and thin. Like weathered Scotch tape over a neglected photograph.

The river-sounds nose up against the wind in the trees. For a moment I imagine I'm watched, but the moment passes. My coat is too thin, and I'm clenching my teeth, even shaking, the autumn wind peeling its slight edges away from the warmth of my chest. It's clear. It's late to be catching out. Nothing in me honest is up for can-opening another trip north.

And I'm tired.

But a weird obligation hangs heavy in the darkness over me, and I have thrown chains around thick, unseen poles that launch themselves up from bedrock to Polaris.

And so I am, stolen, and framed in a stupid crosshair on a map of Iowa, mining a string of well-mixed freight for a grain car.

And now the Quad-Cab Man is coming along the dim edge of the track. I recognize his pear shape and the borders of his coat. He seems tired.

"Go home," he says, clearly, bluntly.

I slow, and then stop. I'm not in trouble: There isn't a hint of a threat in his voice. But a firmness lives there. He doesn't break his stride, but keeps trudging up the line toward the engine.

"Come on guy. Get yourself home."

Something fatherly in his words disarms me. His eyes look past mine.

"Forget it." He stretches out the word: "Ferrrrrget it." Both of his arms arc slowly up into the cold air.

"Go home! You want to see Thanksgiving, right?"

He passes by me.

"They're gonna find you dead in that coat, guy."

Suddenly my eyelids, my arms, my legs, my duffle bag all seem unbearably heavy. The cold pushes through my jacket, and cuts past the buttons on my shirt to rest against my bare chest. A part of me that hasn't been afraid for a long time is instantly nervous. This is not the first time someone has said this sort of thing to me. But suddenly it feels as if a filter has been lifted off of the lens: Literally. Visually, physically, everything changes. Everything looks dirty and greasy and raw; and the air is ice-cold; and the train stinks; and my stomach goes queasy.

Something darker than the darkness of the descending night seems to ooze and crawl from around the edges of the still, silent railcars looming now more above me than next to me.

The train feels suddenly and strangely unfamiliar. A kind of hostility bubbles up from underneath it.

The cars tower over me -- black, hulking masses -- as if they might collapse in a heap in their great tonnage upon my frail form.

But there's that weird obligation still hanging in the air. So I keep walking along the line, but move a few paces apart from the staring string of freight.

I feel a slow terror begin to grip me, from somewhere outside of myself. I cannot appropriate this train, and yet I am still searching for my grain car.

And now my head is throbbing, and I feel like I must steady myself. And I am beset with what I can only describe as an abject feeling of pure horror; unmitigated dread, as though at any moment the devil himself might lean out from one of the cars and pull me up.

I stumble away from the train, the line, slowly, unable to make myself run.

As I manage to put more space between myself and the tracks, I feel the black dread ease. I keep glancing over my shoulder to reassure myself that the train isn't actually somehow still occupying the space immediately behind me.

I make it to the city park with its bank of picnic tables, and hurl my bag and my water away from me as if some of that weird blackness still clings to them. I throw myself down on a weathered bench, feeling as though I've just sprinted a mile pursued by a twister.

I'm still catching my breath when I hear the slack action ripple down the line of freight, and the train begins to haul itself away.

The night softens again, and I can hear leaves on the pavement; cars crossing over the bridge.

Nearby, laughter and conversation.

Slowly, saved yet again, I return to myself.