Engine Zero-Zero: Chapter 22

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22

A man comes to his senses. That was what Miller told himself, was that a man goes awry sometimes, but inevitably he comes to his senses. Dendri was only a matter of waiting. If they could get off the damned track, get him to a real doctor and give him a chance to rest, then everything would sort itself out. A man comes to his senses.

Miller’d only just gotten to sleep when the train stopping woke him up again. He searched around for his gun, remembered it was gone, and ran up to the engine with a butcher knife. He found Dendri calmly pouring over the map.

“What’s happening?” He looked out the window into the dark. “Why’d we stop?”

Dendri cleared his throat and brought the map where Miller could see. “Fog. Boy from Bonneville—”

‘The Boy from Bonneville’ was one of their radio contacts.

“Boy from Bonneville just called and told me the canyon up ahead is all full of fog. There’s a switch a couple miles back. Takes us a little out of the way, but we can switch here, and then here, and still get where we’re going.”

The first thing Miller did was try radioing The Boy from Bonneville. “Why not wait until it clears?” he asked in between hails.

“Boy from Bonneville says the canyon’s real narrow and might not clear for days. Could wait it out, but who knows how long we’d have to?” Dendri gestured to the map again. “This way only puts us out a few hours.”

He sounded like he was supposed to. He sounded sober and methodical. Miller tried the radio again but got no reply. He contemplated the map a moment, nodded.

“Go ahead and do it,” he said. “I don’t want to be out here any longer than we have to.”

And so the train retraced a few miles until arriving at the switch, then started forward again, out of the canyons, back across the flatter desert. In the morning when Miller woke up and went to take his shift he found Dendri sitting at the controls with his Bible open in his lap.

“Why don’t I stay on?” said Dendri. “I’d like to stay and finish John.”

“Need your sleep,” said Miller.

“John keeps a man awake. It’s best to read in the full light of day. Go ahead and spend time with your boy. We’ll be making that second switch in just a few hours.”

Miller’d seen other men in similar conditions, men who’d come abruptly out the other side of hell and into a state like beatification, whom pain could no longer touch, and who lived like that from then on. He chose to believe that was what was going on with Dendri, because then again he’d seen other men for whom the condition was just the prologue to something worse, signaling a worse hell and a worse madness. Miller left the man to his engine and his Bible, returned to the sleeping car where the boys were back to work on the kite.

“We going backwards?” asked Junior.

“No,” said Miller. “We’re on a bit of a detour is all.”

He turned and went into the kitchen and once he was well enough away Junior and David started whispering to one another, which he dismissed as the everyday conspiring of boys. The one continued lording over the other, with the new protocol being never to speak unless he said so. David wore a fresh bruise above his left eye.

“Looks like it’s coming along,” Miller said about the kite.

“Be ready to fly soon,” said Junior, to which David cowered as if that was a bad thing.

“Hold it up so I can see.”

Sweat stains carried over from the bedsheets mottled the kite yellow and brown. It was shaped like an arrowhead with a tail like a pig.

“You and me can fly it,” Junior told his father. “Remember you said—you said you and me can fly one together.”

Miller nodded. “You bet.”

Junior was so exuberant about the kite and all the fun he and his father would have that for a while David’s trembling and soft weeping went unnoticed. Then—

“What’s the matter, boy?” Miller was startled. He didn’t think the boy could get more lowly.

David lifted his head, rubbed his eyes. Before he could speak, before he could think of speaking, Junior went to beating him over the head with the underside of his fist.

“Quit it!” Junior told the other boy. “Quit it, quit it, quit it!”

Miller pulled Junior off of David and held him by the wrists while he squirmed and made noises like a wild animal. He made the boy go sit in the corner and forbade him any lunch, but the way he took his punishment, as if it was another slight from David rather than coming down from his own father, only frustrated the situation even more. In a little while they stopped. Dendri went out to throw the second switch then started them on again, and the boy—Junior—turned away from watching him out the window, grinning.

“What are you smiling about?” asked Miller.

The boy shook his head and once he started couldn’t seem to stop. “We’re headed into the sun.” He pulled his goggles back down over his eyes, which seemed to contain his shaking, and turned back toward the window.

Chapter 23