It was a black train carried Billy Long Gone away from Klamath Falls and into the east. Away from life itself, some might say. And if you were to hear the stories of those who watched it pass, you'd have to give credence to that possibility … though you'd be wise to temper your judgment, considering the character of the witnesses. Three hobos drunk on fortified wine, violent men with shot livers and enfeebled hearts and leaky imaginations who lived on the wild edge of nothing and were likely half-expecting their own black train to pass. Every car was unlettered, they'd tell you. No corporate logos, no mention of Union Pacific or Burlington Northern, no spray painted graffiti. And the engine wasn't a squatty little unit like they stick on freights front and back nowadays, it was the very image of the old Streamliner engines, but dead black instead of silver. The sort of train rumored to streak through small American towns in the four o'clock dark with a cargo of dead aliens or parts of a wrecked spacecraft, bound for Roswell or points of even more speculative military purpose. But all this particular train carried was Billy and the big man in a wide-brimmed hat who had stolen his dog, Stupid.

You could scarcely ever tell when Billy Long Gone was mad, because he looked mad all the time. If you had caught sight of him that night, stomping along the tracks with his shoulders bowed under his pack, breath steaming in the cold, his eyes burning out from tangles of raggedy graying hair and beard, regular Manson lamps framed by heavy ridges and cheekbones so sharp, they like to punch through the skin, you'd have sworn he was the Badass King of the Hobos come to pay his disrespects. But truth is, Billy was rarely mad. All the glare and tension in his face that people took for anger was just a feverish wattage of weakness and fear. He was an anxious little man. Anxious about everything. About if he had money to buy sufficient wine to keep his head right, or if it was going to rain, or what was that noise out in the weeds, and was the freight schedule he'd gotten off the bull in Dilworth the real thing … or had the bull just been fucking with him? Nights when he got talky high on cheap greasy speed cooked up from starter fluid and sinus remedies, he'd try to explain where all that anxiety came from. He'd tell himself and anybody else within earshot a lie about a girl and a shit job and some money gone missing and him getting blamed for it. A lie, I say. The details simply didn't hang together, and everything that had happened to him was someone else's fault. But his friends knew it was standing in for another story hidden deep in the addled, short-circuited mess he'd made of his brain, something not so dramatic, something he'd juiced up to make himself feel better, something he couldn't help living inside no matter how much wine or crank he buried it under, and that one was probably not a lie.

Now you'd do better coming between a man and his wife than you would stealing a tramp's dog. It's a relationship where the thought of divorce never enters in, a bond sealed in the coldest cracks of winter and the loneliest squats in Godforsakenland. Steal a tramp's dog, you might be stealing the one thing that's keeping him walking and above ground. So while Billy was mad some that night, he was mostly shaken up. He couldn't figure why Stupid, a slobbery none-too-bright black Lab mix with small tolerance for strangers, had gone and trotted off with his abductor, wagging his tail and never a backward glance—that's how the three hobos he'd been jungled up with described what happened while he was off fetching wine from the ShopRite. He had no reason to doubt them, drunks though they were. Neither did he doubt that they had, as they claimed, tried to stop the man, but couldn't handle him because of his size. "Big as goddamn Hulk Hogan" was the phrase that most communicated to Billy. He loosened the ax handle he kept stowed in his pack, but he had no clear idea what he would do if he found the man.

The train was stopped on a siding outside the Klamath Falls switchyard, a stretch of track that ran straight as an avenue between ranks of tall spruce, and as Billy walked alongside it, peering into the open boxcars, he noticed a number of peculiarities. The walls of the cars were cold to the touch, yet not so cold as you'd expect steel to be on a chilly night, and they were unnaturally smooth. Not a scrape, a ding, or a dent. The only imperfection Billy observed was a long ridged mark like an old scar running across the door of one. As for the doors themselves, they had no locks, and while mounted in the usual fashion, they moved soundlessly, easily, and seemed fabricated of a metal considerably lighter and less reflective than steel—a three-quarter moon hanging overhead cast a silvery shine onto the tops of the rails, but the surfaces of the boxcars gave back scarcely a glimmer. Then, too, the damn thing didn't smell like a train. No stink of refried diesel and spilled cargoes and treated wood. Instead, there was a faint musky odor, almost sweet, as if the entire string of cars had been doused with perfume. Ordinarily, Billy would have been spooked by these incongruities, but he was so worked up about his dog, he ignored the beeping of his interior alarm and kept on walking the tracks.

A stiff breeze kicked up, drawing ghostly vowels from the boughs, and the spruce tops wobbled, then tipped all to one side, like huge drunken dark green soldiers with pointy hats, causing Billy to feel alone among the mighty. He knew himself a tiny figure trudging through the ass-end of nothing beside a weird mile-long something that resembled a train but maybe wasn't, far from the boozy coziness of his fire and his friends, spied on by the moon, the stars, and all the mysterious shapes that lived behind them. It minded him of an illustration in a children's book he'd looked at recently—a pale boy with round eyes lost in a forest where the shadows were crookedly, sinisterly different in shape from the limbs and leaf sprays that cast them. It comforted Billy to think of this picture; it gave him a place to go with his fear, letting him pretend he was afraid instead of being afraid. He spent a lot of his time hiding out in the third person this way, objectifying the moments that upset him, especially when he was frightened or when he believed people were talking against him, whispering lies he couldn't quite catch (this is why I'm telling the story like I am now, and not like I will later on when I relate how it was for me after things changed). So when he spotted Stupid poking his head out the door of the next boxcar up, his heart was made suddenly, unreservedly, childishly glad, and he went forward in a shuffling run, hobbled by the weight of his pack. Stupid disappeared back into the car and by the time Billy reached the door, he couldn't make out anything inside. The edge of his fear ripped away the flimsy shield of his imagination. He yanked out his ax handle and swooshed it through the air.

"Stupid!" he called. "Come on, boy!"

Stupid made a happy noise in his throat, but stayed hidden, and—to Billy's surprise—another dog with a deeper bark went woof. Then a man's voice, surprisingly mild, said, "Your dog's comin' with me, friend."

"Hell you say!" Billy swung his ax handle against the door and was startled—the noise was not the expected clang but a dull thwack such as might have resulted from hitting a sofa cushion with a two-by-four.

"You send him on out!" Billy said. "I ain't fuckin' with ya!"

"I got no leash on him," the man said.

Billy peered into the car and thought he spied a shadowy figure against the rear wall. He whistled and Stupid made another throaty response, but this one sounded confused. "Son-of-a-bitch! Fuck you done with my dog?" Billy shouted.

A third dog—part terrier by the sound—let out a high-pitched rip of a growl. Paws clittered on the floor of the car.

"Tell you what, friend," said the man. "Ain't a thing I can do 'bout your dog. Dog's in charge of where he's headed. But I don't mind too much you want to ride along."

These words bred a cold vacancy in Billy's gut and his legs went a little weak. Broke-brained as he was, he knew that taking a train ride with a giant in a pitch-dark boxcar was not the solution to any reasonable problem; but he couldn't figure what else to do. A throbbing, rumbling noise started up. It didn't have the belly-full-of-grinding-bones fullness of a real diesel engine, but an engine's what it must have been, because a shuddery vibration shook the car, and the train jerked forward a couple of feet.

"Best hop on if you comin'," said the man inside the car.

Billy glanced around to see if maybe a bull or somebody else official was nearby. It wasn't in his nature to be running the yard cops in on anyone, especially a fellow tramp, but these were extreme circumstances. No one was in sight, though. Nothing but a bunch of cold dark and lonesome. The train lurched forward again, and this time it started rolling. All the dogs inside the car— Billy thought he could hear a half-dozen separate voices—got to yipping and woofing, as if excited to be going somewhere. The train began to roll faster.

Billy knew he had only seconds before he would no longer be able to keep up, before he'd lose his dog for sure. Desperation spiked in him, driving down his fear. With a shout he shucked his pack, heaved it into the car, then hauled himself in after it. As he lurched to his feet, ready to fight, the train lurched heavily and he went off balance, his arms windmilling, and rammed headfirst into the end wall of the car, knocking himself senseless.

"Welcome aboard, friend," said the man's voice. Billy swiveled his neck around toward him, a movement that caused him to wince.

Flanked by four mongrels, the man was sitting against the far wall. His stretched-out legs seemed to reach halfway across the car, and his shoulders were Frankenstein-sized under the Army surplus poncho he was wearing. He was in better health than any hobos of Billy's acquaintance. His shoulder length hair was dark and shiny, his eyes clear, and his horsy face unmarked by gin blossoms or spider veins or any other sign of ill-use. An ugly face, albeit an amiable one. He had a calmness about him that rankled Billy, who could barely recall what calm was like.

"I ain't your goddamn friend." Billy rubbed his neck, trying to ease a feeling of compression.

"Guess not," said the man. "But I'm bettin' you will be."

The dogs gazed at Billy with the same casual indifference as that displayed by the man, as if they were his familiars. They were a sorry bunch: a scrawny German shepherd; a runty collie with a weepy right eye; a brindled hound with orange eyes and a crooked hind leg; and a stubby-legged gray mutt with a broad chest that, Billy thought, had probably been responsible for the yappy growl. Not a one looked worth the effort it would take to keep them fed and healthy, and Billy speculated that maybe the man suffered from a condition similar to the one that had troubled his old traveling companion Clueless Joe, who had tried to persuade a railroad bull in Yakima to marry him and his dog.

A couple of other things struck Billy as odd. First off, the train had to be traveling forty miles an hour, enough speed so that the sound of their passage should have been deafening; yet they weren't yelling, they were speaking in normal tones of voice. And then there was a faint yellow light inside the car, like the faded illumination that comes during a brown-out. The light had no apparent source.

Spooked, Billy spotted the ax handle lying on the floor and grabbed it up. The collie came to his feet and barked, but the big man gentled him, and the dog curled up with the other three once again. Stupid, who had lifted his head, sighed and rested his muzzle on Billy's knee.

"What sorta train is this?" Billy demanded, and the man said,

"Guess you could say we caught us a hot shot. We'll be goin' straight through. No stops."

"Straight through to where?"

"Over yonder," said the man. "You gon' love it."

The train swung into a bend, and in the strong moonlight Billy saw they were moving among a chain of snow peaks that swept off toward the horizon, all with dark skirts of evergreen. The Canadian Rockies, maybe?

"How long was I out for?" Billy asked. "Where the hell are we?"

"'Bout ten, fifteen minutes." The man shifted and the dogs perked up their ears and cut their eyes toward him. "My name's Pieczynski, by the way. Folks call me Pie."

"Bullshit … ten minutes! Ain't no country like this ten minutes out of Klamath Falls."

"Sure there is," said the man. "You just never rode it before."

Billy noticed another unsettling thing. It was warmish in the car. An October night at altitude, he should be shivering like a wet cat. He'd squeeze himself into his mummy sack, then wedge the sack into the sleeping bag, and he'd still be cold. A terrible thought, the sort he usually dismissed as the result of too much drink, sprouted in his brain and sent out roots into every fissure, replacing his fear of getting thrown out of the car with a deeper, more soul-afflicting fear.

"What's goin' on here?" he said. "What happened to me?"

The man seemed to be assessing Billy, gauging his quality.

"Was it my liver?" Billy said. "My liver give out? Somebody bust my head open? What was it?"

"You ain't dead, that's what you goin' on about," said the man. "Dead's what you almost was. Alive's what's in front of you."

What with the wine he'd consumed and the blow to head, Billy's mind worked even less efficiently than normal, and he was coming to view the man as a spirit guide of some sort, one sent to escort him to his eternal torment.

"Okay," he said. "I hear what you're sayin'. But if I was … if I's back in the yard and I could see myself now, I'd think I was dead, wouldn't I?"

"Who the hell knows what you'd be thinkin', all the wine you got in ya." The man shoved the mutt's behind off his hat brim and jammed the hat onto his head—it was fashioned out of beige leather and shaped cowboy-style, with the brim turned down in front and the crown hand-notched. "Whyn't you get some sleep? It all be a lot clearer come mornin'."

The floor was softer than any floor Billy had ever run across in a boxcar—that and the warmth made the notion of sleep inviting. But he had the idea that if he went to sleep, he would not wake up happy. "Fuck sleep!" he said. "I want you to tell me what's goin' on!"

"You do what ya feel, friend. But I'm gonna close my eyes for a while." The man turned onto his side and went to patting a stuffed cloth sack—one of three he had with him—into a pillow. He glanced over at Billy and said, "What's your name?"

"You know damn well what's my name! You the one sent to bring me."

The man grimaced. "What is it? Ashcan Ike? The Philadelphia Fuck-up … some shit like that?"

Billy told him.

"Billy Long Gone," said the man. "Huh! You sure got the right moniker to be catchin' this particular ride." He settled on his pillow, pushed the hat down over his eyes. "Maybe tomorrow you'll feel good enough to tell me your real name."

The similarity between picture and reality seized hold of him, rerouting his thoughts into a wet brained nostalgia that induced him to stare openmouthed at the landscape as if entranced. Scenes from his life melted up from nowhere like skin showing through a soaked T-shirt, then dried away into nothing. Scenes that were part fantasy, part distorted memory, filled with parental taunts, the complaints of women, and the babble of shadowy unrecognizable figures who went tumbling slowly away, growing so small they seemed characters in another alphabet he had never learned to read. Even when the plain was blotted out by the black rush of another train running alongside them, he barely registered the event, adrift in a sodden unfocused delirium.… A dog barking brought him halfway back. The brindled hound was standing at the edge of the open door, barking so fiercely at the other train, ropy twists of saliva were slung from its muzzle. All the dogs were barking, he realized. He picked out Stupid's angry, bassy note in the chorus. Then he was snatched up, shaken, and that brought him the rest of the way back. He found himself staring into the big man's frowning face, heard him say, "You with me, Billy? Wake up!" The man shook him again, and he put out a hand in a feeble attempt to interrupt the process. "I'm here," he said. "I'm okay, I'm here."

"Stay back from the door," the man said. "Probably nothin's gonna happen. But just you stay away from it."

The dogs were going crazy, barking at the other train, which was running along a track some thirty feet away, going in the same direction they were, and seemed identical to the train they were riding, with a string of boxcars towed behind a Streamliner engine. Laying tracks so far apart didn't make much sense to Billy, and he was all set to ask the big man how come this was, when something wide and dark fluttered down out of the night sky and settled onto one of the cars. It was as if a dirty blanket had come flapping out of nowhere and collected atop the car in a lump.

Billy thought what he'd seen must have been produced by a defect of mind, a rip in his vision; but before he could refine this thought into opinion, the lump atop the car flared like a sail filling with wind, and he recognized it for a creature of sorts—a rippling, leathery sail-like thing that resembled a manta ray without a tail. Twenty feet across if it was an inch and fringed with cruel, hooked claws. There was an irregular gray splotch at the center from which was extruded the debased caricature of a human head, a bald monstrosity with a mottled scalp, sunken eyes, and a leering, fanged mouth. The thing held aloft for a handful of seconds, then folded into the shape that reminded Billy of a taco shell, funneling the wind away, and sank down once again onto the car, which immediately began to twist and shudder beneath it, making Billy think of a train in an old black-and-white Disney cartoon that had danced along the tracks to Dixieland jazz. Rivulets of glowing yellow fluid spilled out from beneath the creature's edges, flowing down the side of the boxcar, and the roof of the car arched upward, bucking convulsively, the way a cat's back twitches when you tickle it. The assaulted train gave a high-pitched shriek that didn't have the sound of any train horn or whistle with which Billy was familiar, and appeared to scoot forward, starting to pull away from Billy's train. And then the creature raised up again, its body belling. It released the last of its hooks, and the wind took it in rippling flight past the open car where Billy stood gaping, passing close enough so it seemed that ugly little head stared at him with a pair of glittering black eyes and a mouth full of golden juice in the instant before it vanished.

Billy hadn't been afraid while the creature was attacking the train. It had been too compelling a sight. But now he was afraid— now he put what had happened together with all the other strange things he had experienced, and the whole made a terrifying shape in his mind. He glanced at the big man, who was in process of fluffing up his pillow sack again. The dogs, quiet now, were watching him attentively.

"Call them things 'beardsleys'," the big man said, when he registered Billy's bewilderment. "Friend of mine name of Ed Rogan was the one started callin' 'em that. They used to call 'em somethin' else, but he changed it. Said they reminded him of his eighth grade math teacher. Fella named Beardsley." He gave the sack a final pat and lay back. "They ain't so bad. Hardly ever take more'n few pints. You'll see worse where you're goin'." He closed his eyes, then cocked one open toward Billy. "Bet you might just know ol' Ed. He useta ride the northern line like you. Called hisself Diamond Dave."

"People been sayin' Diamond Dave's dead. Ain't nobody seen him 'round for years."

"He's doin' right well for a dead guy." The big man shifted about until he got comfortable. "Best thing you can do is get some sleep. I know you got questions, but what I'm gon' tell you's gonna go down a lot easier tomorrow."

If the man hadn't gone right off to sleep, Billy might have told him that he had no questions, he knew he was traveling east through the land of the dead, on his way to whatever hellish corner of it had been prepared for his eternity. No other explanation fit. It would have been nice, he thought, if death had taken away the pain in his lower back and cured his sciatica; but he supposed—like the man said—there would be worse to come.

He shuffled over to where he'd tossed his pack and sat with his back to the end wall. Stupid ambled up, plopped down next to him, and Billy pulled a wadded-up bandanna from his pocket and cleared away some of the saliva from the dog's muzzle. "Dumbass," he said affectionately. "What you think you gon' do, you got at that damn thing? Motherfucker woulda wrapped you up and took you home for a snack." It occurred to him then that if he was dead, Stupid must be dead, too. That pissed him off. The bastards had no right to go tormenting his dog. This so troubled him, his eyes teared and he began feeling sorry for his dead self. He dug into his pack and hauled out a pint of Iron Horse. Unscrewed the cap and sucked down a jolt. Most of the wine went into his stomach before he could taste it, but what he did taste he spat back out.

"Jesus … fuck!" He sniffed the neck of the bottle. It smelled horrible. Something must have gone wrong with the batch. It was his last pint, too. He'd wind up drinking it anyway, but for now he didn't want to put up with having to puke. He was wore down, the borders of his consciousness crumbly and vague, like he was coming down from crank. He scrunched himself up to fit the floor and rolled onto his side. Set the pint by his head. The gentle rocking of the train made it seem that the fire-breathing stallion on the label was charging directly into his eyes.

Maybe I was dead, I thought. I didn't see any other way to explain how I'd felt so bad every single day for the last three, four years, and then, after one night's sleep, it was like I'd never had a drink in my life. And it wasn't only a sense of physical well-being. I felt strong in my head. My thoughts were clear, solid, defined. Even though it had only been seven or eight hours, I was already starting to perceive the Billy Long Gone of the previous night as a different person, the way you might reflect on how you behaved when you were a kid. But I wasn't sure what to think about what I had seen, whether the "beardsley" had been part of an alcoholic fugue or if it had some basis in reality.

I pushed two fingers hard against the wall of the car and felt a slight resilience. Like pushing against stiff leather. I wondered if I was to cut the surface, would glowing yellow blood spurt forth? That could explain the light that illuminated the car. And the warmth. I dug a jackknife out of my jeans pocket, opened the blade, and laid the edge against the black surface; then I thought better of it. I didn't want this particular car to go to twitching and heaving itself around. I folded the knife and put an ear flat to the wall. No pulse I could hear, but I thought I could detect a faint stirring and that caused me to pull by head back in a hurry. The idea of a live train didn't rattle me all that much, though. Hell, I'd always thought of trains as being half-alive, anyway. A spirit locked into the steel.

I went to the door of the boxcar and sat gazing out at the land, wishing I had something to eat. We had left the marshes behind and were rolling through a series of hills with long, gradual western slopes and steep drop-offs on their eastern sides, as if they were ancient access ramps of some long-demolished freeway that had been overgrown with tall grasses. The sky was a clear, deep blue with a continent of massy white cloud bubbling up from the northern horizon. Up ahead were bigger hills, dark green in color, lush-looking. The air was soft and pleasantly cool, the air of a spring morning. I took off my shirt to enjoy it; in doing so, I caught a whiff of my body odor. No wonder Stupid was always licking me—I smelled like something two days dead.

"Hungry?" said Pieczynski—his voice startled me, and I nearly toppled out the door. He was holding out what looked to be a flat gray cake with a faint purplish cast.

"What' is it?" The cake was cold and slimy to the touch.

"Jungleberries." Pieczynski settled beside me, his legs dangling off the edge of the car. "We mush 'em up and press 'em. Go on … give it a try."

I nibbled at the edge of the cake. It was almost tasteless—just a vague fruity tang. I took a bigger bite, then another, then wolfed the whole thing down. It didn't satisfy my hunger, but after a few minutes I felt an appreciable sense of well-being.

"There some kinda dope in this shit?" I asked, taking a second cake from Pieczynski.

He shrugged. "Seein' how they make you feel, I s'pose there must be somethin' in 'em. Couldn't tell you what."

"I don't believe I ever heard of jungleberries." I turned the cake over in my hand, as if expecting to find a list of ingredients.

"There's a whole buncha things you ain't heard of that you're gon' be comin' up against real soon." Pieczynski scrunched around so he could look directly at me. "How you feelin'?"

I gestured with the cake. "Big as you are, I eat another of these damn things, I'm liable to be lookin' down at you."

Pieczinski gave a dismissive flip of his hand. "I ain't talking 'bout if you high. Is your body strong? Your thinkin'? I know they are. Same thing happened to me. Night I crawled onto one of these here trains, I was more messed up than you was. Sicker'n a caught fish from crack. Couldn't keep nothin' on my stomach. Doubt I weighed more'n hunnerd-sixty. I was havin' hallucinations. Truth be told, I was damn near dead. But the next mornn', it was like I was reborn." He took a bite of his cake, chewed it noisily, swallowed. "Same thing happens to ever'body catches out on the black trains."

We had begun climbing a fairly steep grade that would, I supposed, take us up into those dark green hills, and as we passed a defile, I saw at the bottom of it what appeared to be the wreckage of a train like the one we were riding. It was nearly shrouded by huge ferns and other growth, but I made out rips and gouges in the sides of the cars.

"Ever' once in a while comes a flock of beardsleys," Pieczynski said, staring gloomily down at the wreck. "Train ain't gon' survive that."

Despite the cake-and-a-half I'd eaten, the sight of the wreck unsettled me. "What kind of place is this? These things … the trains. They're alive, ain't they?"

"They 'bout the most alive things I ever run across. Though that don't seem real plausible if you think about it in terms of where you useta be." Pieczynski spat a gray wad of jungleberry out the door. "Don't nobody know what kind of place this is. Somewheres else is all I know. People taken to callin' it Yonder."

"Somewhere else," I said thoughtfully. "Yonder. That sure 'nough covers a lot of ground."

"Yeah, well. Maybe if some scientist or somebody was here, maybe they could say it better 'bout where we at. But so far ain't nobody caught the ride 'cept for tramps and some kids and a couple of yuppie riders. One of the kid's got hisself a theory about it all, but what he says sounds harebrained to me." Pieczynski made a noise like a horse blowing out breath. "Me, I love it. Life I'm leadin' now beats hell outa the life I useta have. But there's times it don't seem natural. You got these trains rollin' everywhere on tracks nobody built. Ain't even tracks, really. Some sort of natural formation looks like tracks. That ain't weird enough, you got the beardsleys and other animals just as bad. And then you got no people that was born here. It's like God was building a world and decided he didn't like how it was shapin' up, so he went and left it unfinished. I don't know." He tossed a piece of jungleberry cake to the dogs, who sniffed at it and let it lie. "Why should creation be all one way?" he went on. "Why should this place make sense when you lay it next to the one we put behind us? I just leave it at that."

"I think we're dead," I told him. "And this here's the afterlife."

"An afterlife designed for a few hunnerd train riders? Who knows? Maybe. Most ever'body feels they must be dead when they come. But there's one argument against that notion that's tough to get around."

"Oh, yeah? What is it?"

"You can die here, friend," said Pieczynski. "You can die here quicker'n you'd believe."