Back when I opted out of society, choosing to live free, as I perceived it then, I could have wound up on the streets in some homeless-friendly city like Portland, but I don't believe I would have made the choice I did if I hadn't loved trains. Loved their idea and their reality. Hobos were to my mind the knight templars of the homeless, carrying on a brave tradition of anti-establishment activity, like bikers and other such noble outcasts. Five years later I doubt I could have pronounced the word "anti-establishment", and the true reasons for my checking out, laziness, stubbornness, residual anger, and damn foolishness, had been wiped away by countless pints of fortified wine and enough speed to make every racehorse in America run fast. But I never lost my love for the trains, and neither had Annie.

"I 'member the first time I rode," she said. "It was the best damn feelin'! I caught me a local out of Tucson with this guy I met in Albuquerque. We found us a flatcar loaded with pipe. Right in the middle of the pipe there was this little square area that was clear. Like a nest. We got ourselves down in there and partied all the way to Denver."

This took me by surprise, because it was the first time I'd heard anyone in Yonder reminisce about their life back in the world. We were sitting in Annie's room, which was half again as big as mine. Her ceiling was contrived of interwoven leaves and vines and a branch thick as a man's waist that cut across on the diagonal, and her walls were curtains made of sewn-together remnants, pieces of old skirts and sleeping bags and towels and such. She'd fashioned a mattress by stuffing a hand-sewn cover with grass—it looked a damn sight more comfortable than my old fart-sack resting on a hardwood floor. Candles fired the curtain colors with their flickering. It was a nice cozy little space.

"My first time wasn't all that great," I said. "But I know what you talkin' about."

"Tell me," she said, and this, too, surprised me. I'd grown used to people not caring about my particulars.

I drew my legs up so I was sitting cross-legged and looked down at my hands. "I was one pitiful motherfucker back then. Couldn't hold a job. Not 'cause I didn't do the work. I'd always get pissed off at somebody in authority and cuss 'em out, and that'd be that. But then I met this woman. Jesus, she was somethin'. She knew what kinda trouble she was gettin' with me, but she loved me anyway. I don't understand why to this day. She didn't try to straighten me out; she made me want to straighten myself out. But I just couldn't handle bein' happy. Least that's the way it seems to me now. I went to a shrink, and he told me I was always tryin' to punish myself 'cause of all the crap my daddy put me through. I told him, 'Hell, I know that. What I do about it?' And he says, 'What do you want to do about it?' I thought that was bullshit, so I got mad and walked out of his office." I picked at the cuticle on my thumbnail. "I understand now he'd seen through me. I didn't want to do anything about it. It was easier to go on bein' miserable than it was to work at bein' happy. That's what made me mad. Him knowin' that about me. I was so upset by what he'd said, I found me an ATM and took all the money out of my account. Our account. I was livin' with her and we'd merged our finances, such as they were. I took over seven hunnerd dollars, most of it hers. Then I went to the liquor store and bought myself a bottle of expensive whiskey. Gentleman Jack. And I headed down to the Oregon City freight yard to drink it. I wasn't plannin' on goin' nowhere, but it started to rain and I crawled into an open boxcar to finish my bottle. Next I know, train's pullin' into the switchyard at Roseville. I run into a couple hobos jungled up outside the yard. They was happy drunk, on their way to the hobo convention at Brill. Come along with us, they said. All they wanted was the crank and the booze my seven hunnerd could buy. But I figured I'd found my true companions. In a way I s'pose I had."

Saying it out loud seemed to lighten me by half, and thinking I could let go of it all just that easy, it made me wish I could unsay it, gather it back inside me. It wasn't something I felt I should ever be free of, even for a few seconds.

"What was her name?" Annie asked.

"Eileen," I said.

The name lay like a puddle that had formed between us, but when Annie spoke again, it seemed to evaporate.

"Damn near everyone here got a past needs livin' down," she said. "Only option we got is to make the best of what is."

"That don't hardly seem like enough."

We sat for a while without speaking. It started to rain—I could hear it coming down heavy through the curtains, but we were so deep inside the tree, none of the drops penetrated the canopy. It felt like we were in a bubble of light submerged in a rushing river.

"Somethin' else I better tell you," I said. "I been thinkin' 'bout catchin' out again."

Her face appeared to sharpen, but she remained silent.

"Maybe headin' out east," I said. "Takin' a trip through the mountains."

"That's crazy," she said quietly. "Don't nobody come back from there."

"You sayin' you never thought about it? I don't believe that. I know why you hangin' 'round the trains."

"Sure, I thought about it." Annie's voice was hard the way your voice becomes when you're suppressing emotion. "Life here … It' ain't livin', it's just bein'. There's times I considered takin' that trip. But that ain't what I call it."

"What do you call it?" I asked.

"Checkin' out," she said.

"Maybe there's somethin' there."

"Yeah, right!"

"Seriously," I said. "What's the point of all this bullshit if there ain't somethin' out there?"

Annie gave a sarcastic laugh. "Oh, I see. There's gotta be a point. Worst thing about this place is havin' to listen to a buncha tramps settin' 'round philosophizin'!" She affected a crotchety voice. "Yonder's the borderland between life and death. It's a computer game, it's new world a'buildin'. It's a little scrap of reality left over from creation, like the scraps get left over from a cookie cutter."

"I never run across that last 'un," I said.

Annie snorted in disgust. "Stick around! You'll hear crazier'n that. I realize most people here just got their brains back, but ain't none of 'em geniuses. They'd be better off tryin' to figger out what to do 'bout the fritters, or somethin' practical, 'steada studyin' on what's to come and why."

"Tell me 'bout the fritters," I said. "Nobody ever wants to talk about 'em. They just say they're dangerous."

"I don't really know what they are. They look like apple fritters and they float around in the air. They got some kinda poison'll kill you quick."

I gave a chuckle. "Must be all that deep fat fryin' it takes to make 'em."

"You think they're funny?" Annie soured on the conversation. "Now the rains come, won't be long 'fore you find out exactly how funny they are."

One of the strangest and certainly the most explicit of these theories came to me from Josiah Tobin, a fiftyish man who still had the nasty-looking gray Moses beard he'd worn when he'd been a hobo known as Froot Loop, and was a member of the FTRA (Freight Train Riders of America), a group of tramps, a gang of sorts, who'd thought of themselves as bigtime macho badasses, but were mainly dead-on-their-feet drunks. The irony of this where Froot Loop was concerned is that he was gay. The FTRA would never have initiated him if they'd been aware of his homosexuality. Once they found out, they chose to ignore the fact rather than beat the crap out of him and drum him from the ranks, which establishes to my mind how badass they actually were. Anyway, I was doing my laundry one afternoon, letting my clothes dry and sunning myself, lying shirtless with my hands behind my head, watching the clouds, while Josiah was doing the same. He'd pushed his beard aside to expose his scrawny chest, and the untanned portion resembled a permanent pale bib. We fell to conversing about this and that, and eventually he told me what he thought had happened to us.

"Way I figger," he said, "there's more universes than they got zeros to count 'em. Trillions and trillions of 'em, and they all 'bout a hair apart, so it's easy to slip over into the ones is close to your own. I'm talkin' real easy. Like you know how it is when you lose your keys or somepin'—you know you just a second ago set 'em down on the coffee table, but they ain't there. Well, you ain't wrong. That's where you did set 'em. What happened is you slipped over into a universe where you set 'em somewheres else. Hell, you might stay there the rest of your life. You with me so far?"

"Oh, yeah," I said. "Keep it comin'."

"Now the universes close by," Josiah went on, "they're a whole lot like the one you in. Might just be one or two things differnt, like where you put your keys or what time your favorite show comes on the TV. But the farther away the universes get from your universe, the weirder they are. One a billion universes away, it might be so differnt you wouldn't be able to understan' nothing what's goin' on.

"Still hangin' in there?"

"Yep," I said.

"Okay. Every once in while there's a crack opens. I ain't talkin' 'bout a crack 'tween universes. I'm talkin' 'bout a crack in the whole damn structure. Things fall through them cracks, where you think they go?"

"Yonder," I said.

"Or someplace like Yonder. I figger there's bound to be more'n one of 'em. How them places start up … I don't know. I'm studyin' on it, though." Josiah lifted his head to look at me. "Whatcha think?"

"I like it. Makes more sense than Bobby Forstadt's theory."

Josiah snorted. "That computer game horseshit! All that goes to show is how Bobby spent his time back in the world."

"One thing I don't get," I said, "is the trains. They don't seem to fit nobody's theory. And the way you feel after the first night. Healthy and clear-headed. That sure seems like stuff I been told happens when you die."

"The folks that told you all that stuff hadn't died, had they? It's just as likely it'll purify a man to cross over the border between universes. But the trains … I hate to say you're right, but you're right. I come up with a few explanations that fit my theory. They're pretty goddamned harebrained, but I'm workin' on somepin' better."

He turned onto his stomach. His back was striped with thickly ridged scars, some of the tissue twisted up into knots—I'd seen similar scars on a tramp who'd had a run-in with some barbed wire.

"I'll figger somethin' out," Josiah said. "Somepin'll come along to fit in there sooner or later."

We came to talk about the past more often than not—the present just wasn't that interesting. Annie told me she had run a succcessful cleaning business in Tucson, and it was stress related to the business that had driven her out of society and onto the rails. One morning, she said, she woke up and simply couldn't handle the pressure anymore. Though when I'd known her before, she'd been almost as dissolute as me, she held a more romantic view of the life than I did. She recalled it as being a party with friends that had lasted for years, and the terrible things that had happened to her—rape and beatings and such—had been anomalies. She was glad to be away from that life, but she had good memories that superseded all the bad; she would go on about the freedom, the parties, the hobo conventions, the fellowship. Often she talked about how she had gotten married to Chester the Molester in the yard at Spokane, how tramps had come from everywhere, and a couple of trampettes had worked a job in Klamath Falls for nearly a month so they could buy her a ring. I believe it was this romantic side that had caused her to fall for me. She'd contrived an image of me as being a real King of the Road and not the falling-down drunk that I truly was; despite me standing her up in Missoula, she had clung to that image, nourished it like an article of faith. For my part, I was so thankful to be with anyone, at first I couldn't separate those feelings out from what I felt for her. But with the passage of days, I came to realize I loved everything about her. The way the muscles in her calves bunched when she walked, the expressiveness of her smiles, the variety of her moods. How she'd stare at a piece of cloth that Pie or somebody had brought back from the world until she recognized the shape in it, and the next you know it would be a shirt or a skirt or a pair of trousers. The thing I loved most about Annie was her strength. Not that she was entirely strong. We each had a crack down through the middle of us, the same that had disabled our old lives. Nevertheless she had a strength about her, one built on endurance and tolerance that seemed partner to the strength I had started to see in myself. Maybe that fit was what allowed us to love one another.

One morning we were lying in late, being easy together, when the dogs set up a baying, as they sometimes would, only this was louder and more prolonged than usual. Annie sat up in bed, the sheet falling away from her breasts, and listened. I made a grab for her, but she pushed my hand away and said, "Quiet!" Within a matter of seconds, the barking diminished, but didn't stop altogether. Soon I heard solitary barks closer at hand, and then the clitter of paws as dogs went running past our room.

"They're here," Annie said in a dead voice.

"What?" I sat up beside her and looked at her despairing face.

She didn't answer, and I said, "You mean the fritters?"

She nodded.

I jumped up from the bed. "Let's go! Let's get outa here!"

"Don't do no good," she said, hanging her head.

"The hell you mean?"

"It don't do no good," she said sternly, almost angrily. "Ain't nowhere to go. Safest place we can be is right here."

A dog, a black lab mix like Stupid, only bigger, poked his head in through the curtained doorway, woofed, and then retreated.

"The dogs can protect us here," Annie said. "There's not a damn thing else we can do 'cept set right where we are."

"That's crazy! We can fight 'em."

"You can't fight 'em. Try and hit 'em with a stick, a machete, they just slip away. It's like they know it's comin'. And if they touch you, you're a goner."

I couldn't accept this. "There's gotta be somethin' we can do!"

"Come back to bed, Billy," she said, giving me a steady look. "If there was anything to do, don'tcha think I'd be doin' it?"

I ducked back under the covers and we lay there most of the day, listening to dogs snarling and barking, to distant screams, and to some less distant that caused me to squeeze Annie so hard I was worried afterward that I had hurt her. We comforted each other, said things were going to work out all right, but I could tell Annie didn't buy it, so I couldn't believe it myself. Being afraid is an awful thing, but being helpless and afraid is like being buried alive. I felt I was suffocating, every second stretching out and wrapping me in a freezing fist, with my heart sounding huge and thudding in my ears. Even after darkness fell and Annie told me that the fritters weren't aggressive at night, I couldn't completely escape that feeling. I had to do something, and when Annie fell asleep I sneaked out of the room and went to see what was up. Dogs were roaming throughout the tree, their eyes glowing yellow in the dimness, and other people were having a look-see, holding up lanterns, speaking in soft bewildered voices. I ran into Pie. The lines in his homely face appeared to have sunk deeper, and he had nothing good to tell me.

"Nearly thirty's dead," he said. "Josiah Tobin and Bo Myers. Nancy Savarese. They ain't never come at us this bad. Must be thousands of 'em this year."

"You saw 'em?" I asked.

"Naw, not all of 'em." He rubbed his chin. "I seen 'em coming for Yonder once couple years after I crossed. I don't need to see it again."

But I needed to see it. I followed the weave of limbs up high in the tree until I was forced to climb, not walk, and found a spot where I could sit astraddle of one of the branches close to the edge of the canopy, and there I waited until first light. Then I eased forward so I could see out between the leaves. They did resemble fritters. Pale brown and round and lumpy, sort of like misshapen dinner plates, thick through the middle of the body, with thin rippling edges. All floating above the river between the walls of vegetation. Pie had been right in his estimate. There must have been thousands of them. Singly, they didn't seem much of a threat, but glimpsed altogether, drifting aimlessly, many in sharp silhouette against the gray sky—they had the look of an impossible armada, an invasion of pale brown jellyfish, utterly evil and strange. I say they were drifting aimlessly, but as I watched they began a general movement toward the tree as if borne on the breeze; yet there was no breeze I could feel, and I realized they were launching a leisurely attack, gradually closing the distance between themselves and the edge of the canopy. I scrambled back along the branch and began my descent, hurrying along, less fearing a misstep than seeing a wave of fritters pushing their way through the leaves. On reaching the lower branches, I began to run, becoming lost at one point and having to retrace my steps. I was cotton-mouthed, and my pulse raced. I imagined myself surrounded by stinging, burning, flimsy scraps of death. At length I came to a populated level, saw curtains hanging over doors, and believed I was safe. I stood a moment to calm my heart. Dogs were barking down below, but I heard nothing near to hand. I set out again, passing along a stretch of limb that was tightly enclosed by walls of leaves so thick, no light could penetrate. As I came to a bend, a dog snarled up ahead of me, a violent engine of a sound that made my breath catch.

With a cautious step, I rounded the bend. I should, I suppose, have backed away, but things would doubtless have gone the same had I done so. Stupid was standing between me and two fritters floating head-high in the passage, trembling as if responding to some impalpable current. I spoke his name. His tail wagged, but his ears were laid flat, and before I could speak again, he leaped twisting in the air and snagged one of the fritters by its edge, dragged it down and began worrying it, holding it between his paws and tearing. The thing emitted a faint squeal, like air leaking from a balloon, and as Stupid continued to kill it, the second fritter slid downward, edge first, like a falling Frisbee, and plastered itself to the side of his head. Stupid yelped, rolled onto his side, trying to pry the thing loose, and succeeded in dislodging it; but it settled on him once again, on his flank. He struggled to his feet, snapping at it, his body bent almost double. Annie had told me that dogs were less sensitive to the fritters than people—they could withstand quite a bit of poison, whereas a touch would kill a man. But apparently Stupid had absorbed close to his limit. When the fritter lifted from him, he staggered to the side, his lips drawn up in a silent snarl, wobbled, then toppled off the limb and down through the leaves without a sound. I had no time to grieve, for I found myself confronting the fritter that had killed him. It was not, as I'd thought, a uniform color, but mottled with whitish patches, and it had the aspect not of an entire creature, but instead seemed a piece of one, a slimy organ that might have been removed from the body of some diseased monstrosity. Its edges rippled, the way the edges of a crepe will ripple from the heat of the griddle beneath, and I took the trembling it displayed for agitation. Full of dread, I eased a pace backward, and then, recognizing I was done for any way it shook out, not wanting it to touch me, I jumped through the leafy wall on my left and fell.

If I had jumped to my right, the direction in which Stupid had vanished, I would have fallen to my death. But instinct or luck directed me the opposite way, and I fell only about ten feet, crashing through the leafy ceiling of the room belonging to an elderly hobo with hair and beard gone almost totally white, whom I knew as SLC, which stood for Salt Lake City, his home—I hadn't spoken to him since my arrival and had not bothered to learn his real name. I landed half on his mattress, my head bonking on the floor, but though I took a pretty good whack, I didn't lose consciousness. SLC was sitting on some pillows in the corner of the room, calm as you please, eating a bowl of soup. When I managed to shake off the dizziness and sat up, he said, "Thanks for dropping in," and chuckled.

I noticed he was wearing a threadbare gray suit, a dingy white shirt, and a wide silk foulard tie of a style that I'd only seen in old black-and-white movies. He saw me registering this, apparently, because he said, "Thought I'd put on my buryin' suit … just in case. Them fritters gonna get me, I'll be prepared." He peered at me and blinked rapidly. "Reckon they almost got you. Was there a bunch of 'em?"

"Just one." My head started throbbing. I thought about Stupid and all the bad good times we'd shared, and felt sadness wadding up in my chest. I glanced at the hole I'd put in SLC's ceiling, expecting to see the fritter that had killed Stupid and maybe some of his pals. Nothing but leaves and shadow.

"Might as well get comfortable," SLC said. "Gonna be a long day." In his shabby finery, with stiffened hanks of white hair hanging to his shoulders, his foodstained beard, and his bony wrists and ankles, he looked like an elf gone to seed.

"I ain't stayin' here," I told him, and made to stand; but the effort got me dizzy again.

"Wouldn't be surprised you had yourself a concussion," SLC said. He slurped up another spoonful of soup. "I took a knock on the head once left me confused for a week."

"I'll be all right in a minute," I said.

I had a look around SLC's room. Taped to one wall, almost entirely covering it, were dozens of dog-eared and faded Polaroids, most photographs of natural scenery. Probably places he'd traveled. There were a few books and magazines scattered on the floor beside his mattress. Some clothes neatly piled. Two old pipe tobacco tins that likely contained sewing materials and such. Tins of sterno and a stack of canned tomato soup. The whole place smelled like ripe hobo.

Taking stock of SLC's meager possessions steadied me, and I gave standing another try, but I was still too dizzy. I was scared and pissed off—I wanted to get back to Annie—and I said, "I don't know why the fuck you just sittin' round waitin' to die, man."

"That's all I'd be doin' things was normal," said SLC. "Sit or stand, don't make much difference."

"What I can't figure is, how come people don't move outa the way of these things."

"Where you suggest we move to? Ain't nothin' out there 'cept more jungle, and you can't live on the plain 'cause the beardsleys is all over."

"Have you looked?" I asked. "You hunted around for a better place?"

"Much as I'm goin' to look." SLC set down his soup, sucked on his teeth. "You wanta look, you go on ahead."

"Maybe I will." I heaved myself up and this time I managed to make it to my feet.

"Well, that's fine. But I recommend you stay where you are for now. Goin' out in the passageways is a damn sight more dangerous."

The room did a half spin, and I leaned against the wall.

"Got yourself a concussion … oh yeah!" SLC said brightly. "Best thing for you is to sit on back down. I'll heat you some soup."

In my dazed condition, the prospect of sitting down for a bowl of hot soup was appealing for the moment, but the next minute, the thought of slurping tomato soup while thousands of poisonous pancakes fluttered about killing dogs and people seemed like the peak of insanity. Still unsteady, I started for the door.

"Hang on, boy!" SLC set his bowl on the floor and stood—it took him a couple of tries before he made it upright. "If you ain't got sense enough to stay put, I best go with you. Way you're staggerin', you ain't gon' get very far by yourself."

I'm not sure what was on SLC's mind. He might have been so senile, he'd forgotten the reason he had for keeping to his room. Or maybe he was so old, he figured he wasn't risking all that much. He latched onto my elbow and we started off. We passed a couple of bodies, their faces branded with empurpled blazes where they had been touched by fritters, but luck was with us and we didn't meet up with any ourselves. Once I thought I saw some floating off from us a ways on a branch two levels down, but I was seeing lots of floating things and I couldn't be sure if any of them were real. As for SLC, he hobbled along, muttering to himself, acting no different than he usually did, except every so often he would glance up at me and flash a snaggletoothed grin.

When we pushed through the curtained door into Annie's room, I thought she was going to throw us back out. She yelled at me, said how she thought I was dead, and what was I … Crazy? Didn't I know any better than to go sniffing around after something that would kill me. She cried, she yelled some more, called me names. Finally I put my arm around her, agreed with everything she said for about ten or fifteen minutes, and she calmed down enough to sit with me on the mattress.

"I thought you was dead," she said. "You didn't come back, and I just knew they'd got you."

"I shouldn't have gone," I told her. "It was dumb."

"It was way more'n dumb! It was …" She couldn't find the words and so I chimed in, saying, "It was irresponsible."

"You make it sound like you was late for work or somethin'. You coulda been killed." She looked gloomily down at my hand, which was resting on the blanket next to hers, as if she saw in it a bad sign she'd not noticed before. "I thought you'd changed."

"Hey!" said SLC. He had settled in the corner and was sitting with his knees drawn up, looking worried. "Ain't y'all got anything to eat in here?"