Loco-Motive
My best buddy Alan got killed yesterday, demolished by a hit-and-run train. They found Alan’s car smashed to pieces, scattered all up and down the embankment like wrapping paper on a Christmas morning.
The Locust Road intersection is well marked. I know that, drunk or not, Alan would never have driven into a goddamn freight train. According to the railroad company’s schedules, no real train was even close to the crossing at that time of night.
Imagine, coming back from college to be pall bearer for a closed coffin—that’s the part that really sucks. Goddamn it, Alan—you were supposed to be best man at my wedding if I ever got married.
But it gives me an excuse to come back home. To see for myself if that awful train has returned for one last run. How visible would an all-black locomotive be if it shut off its one-eyed headlight, slavering oil and grinding red-hot coal in its belly, waiting to pounce on Alan’s car as he drove home?
Alan and I were kids together. We did all that stuff like running across the fields, hiding between the rows of corn, daring each other to climb just one rung closer to the top of old man Pickman’s silo.
Alan collected wheat pennies; I collected silver Mercury dimes. I’ve still got my heavy ceramic mug half-full of those dimes, up in my room at home somewhere. We used to spend hours and hours each summer on our bikes, riding down the country roads to the bank in Tucker’s Grove, where we’d exchange one roll of coins for another and then eagerly scavenge in the new rolls for our individual treasures: my dimes, his pennies.
We watched superhero cartoons together on Saturday mornings, usually at my house because we had a big color TV; my parents would get crabby when we’d wake them up so early in the morning. Then it was outside in the snow or the sun, talking about how much we preferred Lost in Space and “Voyage to See What’s on the Bottom” to Star Trek because those shows had better monsters (though we both got heavily into Star Trek in high school).
There’s usually one day every summer, somewhere in the middle, when you get so bored you almost wish it was time for school to start again. Of course, I never said anything like that to Alan because he probably would have punched me in the stomach even for saying such a stupid thing. That was when we decided to head off for the railroad tracks.
The tracks were about a mile away, but you could see them across the fields, riding high on their isolated embankment and cut off from the world by rickety barbed-wire fences. The fences didn’t prove to be any obstacle at all for us, aside from the occasional sissy fear of getting lockjaw if you scratched yourself on one of the rusty barbs.
Out on the tracks we felt away from everything, kings of the mountain, just Alan and me. The twin steel tracks stretched away for the longest distance before they curved sharply toward Bartonville, which we couldn’t even see on account of the low hills in between.
Aimlessly, I walked along, stretching my legs to step on one crosstie, then the next. Alan tried to balance on the thin steel rail, but he kept falling off after four steps or so. Once, we placed a couple of Alan’s wheat pennies on the rails just before a train came, and afterward we had looked in awe at the shiny, squashed copper disk—you could barely see the ghost of Lincoln’s face smeared long and flat from the thunderous passage of the train.
The spaces between the ties were filled with gravel, cinders, and other junk. Two tall, silver-painted towers stood on either side of the tracks, one facing each way down the line, with dead green and red lights that would shine a warning when trains came.
Off in the distance, in the opposite direction from Bartonville and the big curve of the tracks, we could see old man Pickman and his ancient tractor pulling the disks across the field and chewing up dirt. The firing of the tractor sounded like toy gunshots in the empty air; apart from that, we could only hear a couple of birds, and the wind. Pickman pulled his muddy tractor up on Locust Road, trying to cross from one field to the next, but the tractor sounded like it couldn’t go on with life anymore. It popped and backfired before it gave up completely, right near where the tracks crossed the road. We could barely hear the sound of Pickman’s shouts as he got off the tractor, jumped up and down, and kicked one of the machine’s huge back tires. Alan and I both giggled and watched for a long time as he stomped off down the road to his big white farmhouse.
The old farmer got boring after a while, though, and Alan changed the subject. “Where do you suppose all this junk comes from?”
He indicated the embankment by the tracks, and I noticed all the debris scattered up and down the fence line. A refrigerator door, a broken and rusted plow, an automobile fender, some hubcaps, the top of a stove, and more—it was the oddest assortment of ruined things you could imagine. I had never really paid much attention before, thinking it as natural as the long grass and the wild roses along the fence line. But Alan was right—there wasn’t a logical explanation for why that kind of junk would all be there, a mile away from the nearest farmhouse.
I shrugged, but Alan kept thinking aloud. “Do you suppose a train put it there?”
“You mean hobos? Why would they want to throw junk like that?”
“No, I mean a train! Like, a live train that comes out after dark and attacks cars and things. What if there’s a big, black locomotive, you know, and it grabs stuff, tears it apart, and throws the pieces all up and down the tracks.” Alan’s eyes were glistening with his own imagination.
“That’s dumb, Alan.” It was one of the only times I made fun of his ideas. “Why would it do that?”
But he seemed emphatic, and I could see he really wasn’t kidding. “Maybe it’s angry, really angry because … well, because it’s a train—it’s stuck on the rails, and it can’t go anywhere else. It’s trapped. A car can drive wherever it wants, you know, and so can a tractor. But not a train.”
It made sense to me, and Alan didn’t pull my leg often. I found my mind wandering, imagining, seriously considering the idea—and it was just exotic enough to capture my imagination. While lying in bed, trying to sleep at nights, I did hear trains all the time, some of them with odd whistles, and it seemed to me I heard too many crashing and rattling sounds to be explained by the clatter of a simple passing train.
On hot summer nights when the sheets were sticky from the humidity, I slept in my underwear and left my window open to listen to the crickets and the grasshoppers … but just when I was finally dozing off, I could sometimes hear that one special train, the vengeful locomotive that was angry because it could never get off the tracks. It was a really spooky idea, just the type of thing we needed to improve a boring summer day. “But where does it come from?” I asked.
Solemnly, Alan turned to point at where the curve of the tracks swung behind the hills and vanished from our sight. “There.”
“Where? In Bartonville?”
“No, stupid. See where the tracks disappear? It doesn’t just go around the curve to Bartonville—maybe sometimes that curve is something else. Like a doorway into another dimension. You know, like the Twilight Zone.” Alan said this with great seriousness, and to us—after years of watching fantastic TV shows—the idea was eminently reasonable.
I couldn’t argue with that. Enchanted, I stared down the tracks, and then slowly, trying to appear nonchalant, I stepped off the crossties and onto the cinder bed at the edge of the embankment. I didn’t want Alan to think I was chicken. But I saw that he was anxious to get away from the rails, too.
Of course, we had to see if it was all true. We double-promised to come back that night, sneaking out after dark and after our parents had gone to sleep. Since it was summer, it didn’t get dark until late, so I set my alarm clock for 11:15 and put it under my pillow.
I didn’t plan to go to sleep, but with two hours of lying there in the humid summer heat, I ended up having the most vivid nightmare: the giant black locomotive, murderous and wanting to destroy machines and people, waiting for me, burning not coal but human bones. Luckily, the muffled alarm brought me out of it before I could wake up yelling for my parents. I was shaking in the darkness, and I almost didn’t dare to get up. I lay there looking up at the ceiling. The sluggish breeze moved the curtains so that they sounded like slithering ghosts against the windowsill. But I knew what Alan would think if I didn’t show up, so I got dressed and sneaked out of the quiet house, being careful not to let the screen door slam shut.
Alan was waiting for me at the end of our driveway, and we walked down Locust Road without saying anything until we were out of earshot of the houses. The road stood out plain in the moonlight, but we didn’t want to cut across the fields in the dark. Raccoons and skunks and possums come out into the fields at night, and other things you don’t even want to imagine. The moon was full and high up in the sky, and we would get to the tracks around midnight—it was going to be so perfect.
“I dreamed of the train,” I told Alan.
“So did I.” We didn’t say anything else until we reached the railroad crossing. Old man Pickman’s tractor looked like a sick mechanical cow standing half in the ditch and half on the road where it had stalled.
“Let’s walk down a-ways.”
I followed Alan out onto the tracks, stepping from crosstie to crosstie, as we walked farther from the road. The bugs in the grass seemed very loud that night, and the noise hung in the air. We kept walking, oddly silent but neither of us willing to admit we were scared.
The insect buzzing stopped abruptly, as if someone had switched off a radio. We heard a distant grating sound as one of the tall signal towers swung its colored glass lens into place. A red light stabbed at us like a bloodshot eye. A train was coming! Then, a moment later, the other signal tower, the one facing the opposite direction, swung its light into place and shone the red light the other way.
I couldn’t say anything. Alan gasped, “This is it! This is it!”
We heard a sound like a muffled roar, and then, emerging from around the Bartonville curve, crawling out of another dimension where it could sit and brood on its vengeance day after day, we both saw a gleaming yellow headlight. The light was like a spear pointing at us, charging down at us, and all we could do was stand there, hypnotized.
I jerked on Alan’s arm. “Come on! Get off the tracks!”
We both tumbled down the embankment and scrambled for cover in the thick wild rose bushes. We would have a bad time explaining all our scratches to our moms the next day, but I was too scared to care right then. The black locomotive came on, relentlessly charging down the tracks that chained it to its never-changing route. Dark smoke belched from its smokestack and was swallowed up by the night and the stars. The locomotive’s one-eyed headlight, a searchlight, poked ahead, looking for victims. The thing wasn’t like a passenger train, or even a freight train, but like something out of a cowboy movie, an old coal-burning locomotive—just exactly the way I had pictured it. Two large wheels under the empty engineer’s compartment clattered powerfully, heaving a gleaming brass piston back and forth, driving the entire train. The wide, triangular cowcatcher in the front of the locomotive looked like a guillotine blade. Seven cars, all black, trailed behind the locomotive—it reminded me of a giant metal caterpillar, with each black car one of its segments.
I wanted to blink my eyes and make it go away. It’s not real! We just made it up! But how can you deny a couple million tons of hot, angry steel charging down the tracks in front of your very eyes?
The black train chugged and clattered past our hiding place, and we could feel the heat of its big coal-burning furnace. I wanted to cry then, even in front of Alan. But the big yellow eye of the locomotive didn’t see us—instead it focused on new prey. It paused, hissing steam like a fighting cat, seemed to tense and coil its mechanical muscles, and then lunged forward—toward old man Pickman’s stalled tractor.
The tractor didn’t move, of course—it was just a tractor. But the locomotive reared up off the tracks, and it struck. Its shining pistons detached themselves and reached forward like steel mantis arms to grasp the heavy old tractor and pull it onto the tracks. The steam hissed and built up; black smoke poured out of the smokestack, and the wheels churned backward. The locomotive took its mechanical victim, dragging it along the tracks like a spider returning to its lair.
The locomotive stopped right in front of us and proceeded to tear Pickman’s tractor apart. Wheel guards, the two small headlights, parts of the engine, the rusty and uncomfortable seat on its thick spring—all were shredded by invisible steel jaws under the locomotive itself. We could feel the heat, smell the oil and the hot steel of an overworked engine.
As it destroyed the tractor, the black train tossed the scrap metal along the embankment, like you would throw chicken bones after a barbecue. One of the huge black tractor tires crashed down right by us, almost smashing me, and I yelled out loud. In a second, I was up and running toward the barbed wire fence, not caring at all about skunks or possums or raccoons in the soybeans. Alan shouted at me to get down.
The locomotive let out the most horrible roaring explosion I’ve ever heard in my life, like it was really angry at us for having discovered it. I dove over the fence, bouncing on the wires, not thinking about scratches or cuts or even lockjaw. Alan was right on my heels. Behind me, the locomotive reared up off the tracks again, keeping its back seven cars firmly on the rails. It was like a snake, a big black cobra maybe, trying to strike, trying to smash us. It came down hard on the embankment, and the bladelike cowcatcher made a deep smoking impression in the dirt.
But it missed us, and we were out in Pickman’s soybean field running like hell, not even trying to dodge the rows. The locomotive bellowed in anger, trapped on the rails but promising to get us both someday. We ran and ran, and after a while the locomotive turned back to destroying the poor old tractor.
Neither Alan nor I went back to the railroad tracks again all summer, no way. That autumn my dad had us pack up and move back into town, since he’d grown tired of the country life by then. Alan and I drifted apart, now that we weren’t constantly in touch with each other; sure, we were still friends, but it wasn’t the same.
Then in high school we rediscovered our friendship, falling back into the best-buddies bit. Since Alan was almost a year older than I, he got his driver’s license first and took me all over the place, and because he turned eighteen first, he could get me all the beer I wanted. I remember spending many a weekend afternoon on his back porch, shootin’ the breeze with the stereo turned up, and looking across the fields at the distant railroad tracks.
After graduation, I went off to college; Alan went instead to a local technical college where he picked up a something-or-other degree in electronics. He ended up working as a manager for a chain restaurant in Bartonville and partying a lot.
Meanwhile, I was doing the typical college stunt of waiting until Friday night to start a term paper that was due on the following Monday. Last week, I had planned on doing an all-nighter, but spent most of my time feeling stupid and miserable because the girl I’d been chasing all semester still wouldn’t go out with me. I finally gave up on the term paper an hour or so past midnight and flopped on my unmade dorm bed, going to sleep with all my clothes on.…
Even after so many years, I dreamed of the black locomotive again, slavering thick oil from its mechanical jaws, searching for us with its one yellow eye. It charged at me and I ran, but I couldn’t get off the tracks—I was trapped, and the train was gaining on me, wanting to grind me to a pulp beneath its crushing wheels and scatter my limbs all up and down the embankment. I woke up drowning in sweat.
And that was the night Alan got killed in his car by the Locust Road crossing. Demolished—parts of his car thrown gleefully all along the tracks.…
When I heard, and when I figured it out, I went into the bathroom for almost an hour, bent over the John, trying to be sick, sick at myself. I think it might have hardened me up inside, so I could face going back home.
Alan’s funeral was like a regular class reunion. Everybody was there, all the people who ever knew him. Even the freaks and the jocks came, the ones who would never sign your yearbook or bother to talk to you in the halls. Now they couldn’t even look Alan in the face because of the closed coffin. I think I held up pretty well, even though I was distracted. What kind of jerk gets distracted at the funeral of his best buddy?
Afterward, back home, I went alone to my old room and closed the door. Mom and Dad seemed willing to let me work it out for myself. I found the old ceramic mug half-filled with my silver Mercury dimes; it had been buried in the junk on one of my closet shelves. I sat down on the neatly made single bed that had been mine for so many years, but my bedroom became a guest room when I moved out. I looked out the window and waited for sunset to come.
I had to drive to the Locust Road tracks this time, telling my parents I wanted to go cruising for a little bit, to clear my head. Dad warned me not to drink too much—he spoke out of habit, I think, from all the times I had gone out cruising with Alan. But partying wasn’t what I had in mind at all.
I pulled my car over on the shallow, rutted ditch next to the railroad crossing, shut off the headlights, and got out. I had some time yet before midnight, and the moon shone full again. I walked out into the brisk autumn night. I could see my breath, like the smoke coming out of a black locomotive.
I stared at the tracks a long while before I got up the courage to step between the iron rails. In the moonlight down the embankment I saw something glint, and when I looked closer, I realized it was the broken rearview mirror from Alan’s car.
The vengeful black locomotive wasn’t real—it was all made up, just a fantasy shared between us two kids. There’s a certain power in naïveté, I think, and if you believe in something with all your heart, all your terror … well, who knows? Maybe there really is a Santa Claus or an Easter Bunny or a Boogey Man, from all the children in the world believing in it with pure unquestioning faith that only a kid can have. Alan and I had believed in the killer train, and we had challenged its reality by going to see, to prove it was only imaginary—and the nightmare had called our bluff.
Now, I had to believe I could destroy it. But I was a lot older and a lot more cynical this time.
I started to walk down the tracks again, all alone, listening to the coins jingle together in my pocket. I headed toward the Bartonville curve, away from the road and all hope of rescue.
The darkness made the ground hard to see, and I stumbled more than once on a broken crosstie. But I walked until I got between the two skeletal signal towers on either side of the tracks, then I put my hands on my hips, trying to look defiant, and shouted into the night.
“Come on, you son of a bitch! Come get me!” The words echoed out, and the insect noises paused a moment before starting up again; when nothing happened, I felt belittled and stupid. “What’s the matter? Are you chicken?”
A loud, unearthly bellow exploded from the darkness far ahead. The furnace in the black locomotive was stoked up with a little bit of Hell itself, and a blast of heat forced the steam to surge upward and scream through its whistle. I thought everyone in all of Rutherford County must have heard that noise.
Then its eye suddenly appeared, a round yellow bullet coming straight at me from around the curve and out of its unreal dimension. I was flooded with light, transfixed. I heard the rattling rhythm of the locomotive’s wheels, the clatter against the tracks, the chug of its pistons. Smoke spurted from its stack as the train charged toward me, thinking only of murder.
My hands were shaking as I dug around in my pockets. Trying to keep cool, I pulled out two of my special dimes, my silver Mercury dimes, and stooped down to lay them on the tracks, one on each steel rail. I stepped back, remaining between the tracks, not even thinking about trying to run. Silver dimes … everyone knew that silver was deadly to supernatural things. What would the horror movies be without silver bullets, silver crosses, silvered mirrors? I tried not to think about it too much because I had to believe this game would work. And these silver dimes were special, cherished from childhood. I cursed myself over and over again for having majored in science, for insisting that things had to make sense before I could believe in them.
But this would work. I knew it would work. I knew it would work. How come you can remember all sorts of stupid things from your childhood, but you can’t remember what it was like to believe in something? I crossed my fingers, and then I double-crossed them. That might help.
The locomotive’s cowcatcher looked like a spearhead as it came at me. I could see the engine’s brass pistons grabbing forward and back, reaching out to stab me. Its eye never blinked, but I could see the slavering oil dripping from its mechanical jaws, and I definitely felt the heat pouring off of it. The base of its smokestack had begun to turn a cherry red from its exertion. And in the engineer’s compartment, I could see a figure. Alan. Riding the train, unable to get off. I knew he saw me waiting for him. The train blasted its steam whistle.
The black locomotive came down the tracks at me like a cannonball. I stood there petrified, looking at the pitifully small coins resting on the tracks as if they were really supposed to protect me. The train didn’t pause—I knew it wouldn’t; it didn’t want to give me a chance to jump off the tracks. But I felt calm inside—at least I knew what was going to hit me; Alan hadn’t even had that much warning. I had a terrible urge to shut my eyes, but I couldn’t. The nightmare was real now, and I couldn’t hide under the covers.
Then the black locomotive struck the little circles of silver, but it seemed to impact an invisible wall of concrete. The locomotive smashed together, splitting into ribbons of iron. The boiler burst, and orange flames erupted from splits in its iron-plated side. The wheels ground to a screaming halt as the other seven cars piled up; and then the whole train exploded again, blasting up into the silent starry sky in a rain of hot shreds of metal. I never saw what happened to the shadow of Alan on the train—maybe he was never there in the first place.
I felt the heat and the push of the shockwave. I stood unmoving, waiting for a big chunk of shrapnel to come down and kill me after all. But nothing did, and I stared at the wreckage for a few minutes, listening to the patter and thunk of broken iron falling to the ground.
After a pause, the insects started singing again.
I bent to pick up my dimes and found that both had been flattened by the locomotive’s momentum, smeared out into gleaming silver ovals. I pocketed them with reverence, as if I were holding talismans, splinters of the cross—they would always be special, a part of unreality that would ruin my chances of a career in science.
I barely remembered walking back to my car, but as I drove back to town, I got the shakes really bad. Nobody noticed the difference later, though I found I could face Alan’s death, now that I had done something about it. Later on, I realized how you selectively learn to forget the things you can’t explain.
There’s always junk scattered along the railroad tracks—discarded bits of twisted metal, rusted pieces of machinery—but nobody knows what it is or how it got there. Someday I’m probably going to come back to the Locust Road crossing, and I’ll look for a piece of that black locomotive, to keep with my souvenirs of Alan.