Tarot Sour (10 page)

The first time I see the train I am still just a boy. I would often go out into the desert to play; with friends, alone, with my sister after she is born. I pretend that the rusty swath is the border beyond which monsters tread, and I am the captain charged with keeping them at bay. Back then, the desert isn't quite as pervasive as it is now. The dunes are sparkled with oscillations of tall wheat and low grass, it is a meadowland with a dry base, a dry base that will soon suck down all the roots. On this particular day, my sister, a little girl of six and I a boy of eleven, become separated from each other. I call for her, I
am
calling for her, when I stumble out of the tall grass. Back then it is still grown past my head—or rather, I am still down below its crown. I stumble out onto the rock-scattered rise crested with those old tracks and I climb to the top so that I can get a better look at the desert and hopefully the displacement of grass as my sister passes through it. No sooner do I begin walking along the rotted wooden slats then, from the corner of my eye, there is the glint of sun off speeding steel. The bellow of the train's horn throws me off my feet, and then I feel it collide with me. I feel the burn of my body as it is skinned to ribbons between the ground and the meshwork of wires and pipes of the train's hard underbelly. I feel its steam frothing over me. I even feel the pulpy compression of the impact. Moments later I become conscious of the fact that I am screaming, that my sister is kneeling by my side shaking me and crying, and that I am in no pain except for what will become a soft bruise on the underside of my thigh where I've landed. She asks what happened. I tell her, “Did you see it? The train?” She tells me that there was no train, and then she pinches me and runs off into the grass again. It is then that I realize why I had never been able to see the trains before. These tracks, the ones that run along the outskirts of our town, only cater to ghost trains. Finally knowing that, it becomes for some reason somewhat easier for me to sight them. Since that day, I have seen three more. One from a distance, one only yards away, as I would perch myself at various locations—sometimes peering out through the dirtied windows of the station like a rogue, other times atop the neighboring dunes, perched like a sniper overlooking the desert in wait— and the third and final train I see, it is the one that I board to take me away to the coast.

But before this last time, I spend my nights obsessing over the prospect of ghost trains. What will it be like to grab onto the end of a car and pull myself in? Will it be empty? Full of the specters that had once ridden upon those now infertile lines? Or will it transport me back to the time when the train's body was alive and forcing itself through the world with the power of bulls? Occasionally the more terrifying idea comes to me that boarding the ghost train will mean either my death, utter oblivion, or the eternal entrapment of my soul. It consumes me for years, when all I can think of is the abstract horror I felt when that train had picked my meager body up and then pulled it under. Until the day, standing on my front porch, when my father gives me the sudden revelation that had so long eluded me. If I want to board the train for myself, to touch it and not pass right through it, I will need some reason for it to be so, some place for it to take me. So I go to Reverend Wiley weeping falsely of lost hope and confusion and displacement, and when he suggests the reveries of General Anselmo's Cannery, “Just through the woods, sitting atop a cliff that overlooks the sea, so close to home you'll be able to see your mother just by squinting,” I wipe the tears away with my sleeve and eagerly sign the papers. It is mere days later when my uniform arrives pressed and folded in the plastic sheet it is still in now, that I realize how obsessed I had become with those train tracks, and how obstinately I had neglected everything that had previously mattered to me in my search for it.

As I sit here now, watching the rise of dunes pass by us from my window, I expect any moment to be swallowed up into Hell. For the train to suddenly descend, through the ground, through the sand and the hard earth, and into a pool of fire in which I will burn. Partly for boarding a damned train, and partly for betraying so much by giving myself up to the General. Nobody really knows what he is doing out here on the coast, only that so few return, so many die, and there doesn't seem any real purpose of it at all. Despite my expectation that the ghosts of the world will pass through these walls and descend on me all at once, I fall asleep shortly after boarding, after the conductor waddles past me and into the next car.

I wake later at night from a nightmare I don't remember but from which I am sweating. The lights have been dimmed. I glance out the window, but with the combination of the tinted Plexiglas, the glare of the lights, and the natural darkness of the night, I can no longer make anything out. There were only two other people in the car when I'd boarded, and they are still sitting where they had been. The only difference is that there is now a woman sitting in the seat just across from me. I try to sum her up without looking directly at her. She is tall, slim, with a petite frame and dark hair, short and bobbed about her round face. She has thick eyebrows, but they don't seem out of place or unfeminine, small eyes that look the color of rust. Brown, but not quite brown. Her skin is dark, but I can tell that it was once quite pale and has only been tanned from the sun. She isn't a particularly attractive woman, rather comely in fact, but it is in the bland stereotypicality of her features that she hides her real beauty. In my pomp and unpracticed covertness, she catches my eye before I can turn away from her face.

“Is something wrong?” she asks, dipping her head down to catch my averting eyes.

“No, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to stare.”

I turn to the window again and try to squint through the glare, embarrassed for having been caught even though I know there is no reason to be. A few minutes later, the train passes beneath a stone bridge, evidenced only by the pattern of glowing yellow reflectors pasted to the walls of the tunnel and by the echo of the engine.

“Where are you heading to?” she asks after we come out the other side.

“To the coast,” I tell her. “To General Anselmo's Cannery. I've conscripted. There's my uniform.” I nod my chin at the bag hanging on the seat next to me, and it seems too much like a braggart parent pointing his child out at a park full of them. She glances at it peremptorily, uninterested.

“Why would you do such a thing?” She must see the cock of my head because she clarifies herself, “Sign on at the Cannery? I've heard it's dangerous out that way.”

“I'm not sure, really. Maybe I just needed something to do. I've always wanted to see the inside of this train,” I explain. I say it like a joke, but even hearing it, it doesn't sound like a joke. It sounds like a poorly concocted rationalization for doing something I had no reason to do.

“Well you've seen it now, haven't you?”

I take a long look around the train car. The walls are red velvet, supplanted occasionally with small squares of glass out of which a dim yellow light will fall at the press of a button. The seats are upholstered with an ugly green and gray plaid plastic that matches the carpet lain down in the center of the aisle.

“Yeah, I suppose I have.”

“So why don't you turn back? Get off the train at the next stop, and go home?”

“What would be the point of that?” I ask. “I've come all this way.”

“With no goal but to see the inside of the train. You've already accomplished more than you set out to.”

I don't know if it is her tone or the words she speaks, but she has a way of making me feel as though everything I say makes sense but for all the wrong reasons, as though I'm blind to the rationality of my own thoughts. I turn back to the window, unable to think of what to say to her.

“I'm sorry,” she continues. “I didn't mean to estrange you. What are you going to be doing up there? At the coast? For General Anselmo?”

I look back at her. She is shuffling through her purse for something she either never finds or decides to forget after a minute of searching.

“I don't know. I don't even know what
he
's doing up there.”

“I hear that's pretty common. Not knowing what the General's doing, I mean.”

I nod.

“So why the secrecy, do you think?” she asks me. I shrug, it seems a suitable response. Then she continues, “The way I see it, if something needs to be kept such a secret, it has to mean one of two things. One, that what's being done is of great good, and it's being kept secret against those who would rather not see it come to fruition. Or two, what's being done is of great evil, and it's being kept secret against those who would not stand for it.”

“Is that so? So which do you think it is that he's doing, something of great good or great evil?”

“
You're
the soldier. I've had no reason to spend my time thinking it over.”

“My name's Emery, by the way.” I hold out my hand, we shake, but she doesn't offer anything back to me. I press her, “And yours?”

“I didn't ask for your name, Emery. If I'd had any intention of giving you mine, I would have.”

I tell her about my home, about my family. My little sister Ingot, who I think I might miss most of all even though I'd barely noticed she'd been around most of the time. I tell her about how I hope that I might die so that my father will blame himself. I tell her, for some reason, about losing my virginity to the receptionist at the hospital where my mother works, Kate I think her name was, or at least something with a K or a hard C, though I could be completely wrong, right there in the supply room on an out-of-commission gurney. She, the woman on the train, only asks questions or asks me to elaborate on what I've said, and about herself she tells me only that she has come from South America. I ask what she was doing there and she tells me, “Waiting.” Waiting for what? I pursue.

“Waiting to come here.”

Late into the night, as the conversation pauses, she takes it as an opportunity to bring it right back to where it had begun. “So tell me, Emery. Suppose that what General Anselmo is doing out there on the beach is something evil. Or, supposing that it might be something good, but that it will require you to do something that, in other contexts, could be seen as evil.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“What do I mean? Well we all know that the General uses his Cannery to produce low cost food that he then distributes across the country to help low-income families and the homeless. If that is his one and only aim, then we can probably agree that he's doing something of great good. But what if he assigns you to be the night guard, and he gives you the explicit instruction to shoot upon sight any intruder in the case that they might be a saboteur? Do you do it?”

“I don't know,” I tell her. “I haven't thought much about any of it.”

“Well, Emery, I get the sense that, whatever your reasons for being here are, they aren't strong enough to convince you that this is where you need to be, is it?
Is it
, where you want to be?”

I take a long look around the train, at least it seems long to me, hoping futilely that my answer will be printed on some wall. But there is no answer. And there are no ghosts to be seen here. There is no mouth of hell swallowing me down. There is only me, this woman from South America in front of me, and two tired men minding themselves patiently, and occasionally the fat conductor passing through. Certainly, there is nothing here worth the years of curiosity I had reserved solely for it. “No,” I say, letting my eyes loose around the train car like a pair of wild aimless dogs. “No, I don't want to be here.”

“Well then, Emery, my suggestion would be for you to take your bag, wait for this train to pull into the next station, and get off.”

“And what about—”

“No, don't ask what about. Don't ask about your father, don't ask about your mother or sister. Don't ask about what the General will do when he finds your name on his list but he can't find you. Just go, if that's where your heart is, then that's what you should do.”

She gets up and steals my eyes as she passes into the next car, squeezing past the bulbous midsection of the conductor as he makes another round through. I put my forehead on the thick glass of the window after she is gone and try to bore through the glare but can't quite discern anything other than a faint orange line on the distant horizon. I think about what she had said and try to elucidate it to myself in one simple line, am I willing to die to prove a point? Was there even a point that I was trying to prove? To leave home, to find my ghost train, to torture my father's conscience. They are such paltry rewards for a lifetime of servitude to a general whose cause I don't even know, let alone believe in. So when the sway of deceleration pulls my back off my seat before we re-collide with softness, I grab my backpack and my uniform and I hurry to the doors.

I step down onto the sand and look around. It is not quite morning yet. Back home I often woke at this hour to go and sit on our front porch, when the world feels empty and abandoned. Just last night, the night before I was to leave, I had done so for the last time. Neither the sun nor the moon is risen and the sky is fallen into an odd state of gangrene. Only the fireflies, blinking buoys, transform the low fog into a smooth mauve gauze. As a boy I would pinch my thumbs to my forefingers, and then pinch those pairs together to create a diamond pinhole that I pretend is a telescope. And through it I would watch the fireflies as though they were angels darting about millions of miles from me. Now, they seem so small and insignificant, and no matter how I try I can't help but see them for what they are, just meters away. Far from me a car passes on the street. Cars at this hour always seem to run on a quieter engine than those during other hours of the day. As though the sheer presence of others makes them roar the louder, makes them fight to have their voice heard. It is a strange feeling to watch someone, as they walk or, in this case, drive by, and know that you have gone completely unseen by them. You feel invisible, you feel dead. You feel horizons away.