Steven Bryan Bieler fiction short Two Tickets to Gumstump

Two Tickets to Gumstump

by Steven Bryan Bieler


There was a moving train across my path, a yellow engine and a conga line of boxcars. The crossing gate was down, the red lights were flashing, the safety bell was banging. I was laughing. My husband has a girlfriend, and this helpful little railroad was telling me to watch out. It was a short train and it ended with a black box hung on the coupler of the last car, the computer in the box murmuring to the computer in the engine, both of them agreeing, this is the end.

The crossing gate levered itself skyward. The lights and the bell gave up. We warned you. The driver behind me rapped his horn. 

I hit the accelerator and the car lurched across the empty tracks. I made the first turn I could, into the takeout line of a drive-through coffee place built like a windmill. I asked the sullen teenage girl in the window for a latte. Though she never said a word, she made it clear that she was doing me a favor.

I parked in a corner of the lot and stared across a stubbly field at an unmanned construction crane on its spindly tower. There were herons perched on the horizontal arm, staring at me. After a while, I opened the car door and poured the coffee onto the asphalt. I replaced the plastic cap and dropped the empty cup on the ground. I shut the door and started the engine. I turned the engine off, opened the door, grabbed the cup, and walked it to the trash can. Then I drove away.

Barry has a girlfriend. Who, what, when, where. Why?

There was a man in a blue suit waiting for me in the reception area of our compact office. My father kept a blue suit in the back of his closet—a jacket with gold buttons, a blue tie folded into a side pocket, and two pairs of pants: the pants he wore, and the spares on standby. The man was sitting 10 feet from Ollie, sunk deep in the overstuffed vinyl chair that Ollie and his boyfriend had dragged in here years ago. The two men were trying not to look at each other, which is what two men alone in a small room do, even when one of them likes to look at men.

My brain produced nothing. This had to be an appointment. I’m a salvage broker. I don’t get walk-ins like Hairsplitters on the first floor. I didn’t dress for this. I was wearing the jeans I had worn yesterday when I yanked some dead lavender out of the garden and a blue Hawaiian shirt decorated with scarlet macaws. I had probably brushed my hair.

Ollie stood and said to our guest, “Mervin, this is Vienna David. Vee,” he said to me, “this is Mervin Rettenmund. From Delta Lines? The railroad? Your nine o’clocker.” Ollie was trying to be helpful, but he’s also a natural nanny. And this month I was late, again, in paying him. Ollie’s usual cologne, a scent of mountain meadows, bugged me this morning, like almost everything else.

Mervin Rettenmund hauled himself out of his chair, his spine uncurling one vertebrae at a time as the vinyl tried to haul him back. He was built like a beer keg on stilts, wide, solid, and practical, his collar button undone to ease the pressure on his neck. He was trying not to show his surprise. They never expect a woman. What they do expect is a man in a windbreaker and a gimme cap from a company that makes ball bearings or pneumatic fluid.

I handed my backpack to Ollie and shook hands with Mervin. Mervin and I were exactly the same height. He had big hands that naturally held and used tools, the kind of man who should have a scratched pair of safety goggles hanging from a strap around his neck. His fingernails were surprisingly well-kept. Mervin had not used anything fragrant on his face after shaving this morning or in his brown, precisely clipped hair. 

“Good morning, Mervin,” I said. “Really sorry to keep you waiting. I’d offer you the office coffee, but I wouldn’t do that to you.” I was stalling, waiting for a brainwave.

“I’ll go get some,” Ollie volunteered. He handed me back my pack. I hired Ollie to handle contracts, not people. He barely knew how to handle me.

“How about you?” he asked Mervin.

“I’m good,” Mervin said. He had nothing else to say, so he stopped. 

Ollie slammed the door as he escaped. 

“This way, please,” I said, and gestured Mervin into my office. He settled cautiously into the chair by my desk, as if he expected another battle with our furniture. He was probably asking himself if he should’ve kept going with his googling and found somebody else to sell his train junk to. I slumped into my chair, corrected my posture, and tapped my computer into the alertness I had hoped for my brain by now. 

The dark screen was replaced by our Irish setter, Bobbin, sitting patiently beside the towering wheel of a steam locomotive. The dog was red, the wheel was black with a white stripe circling the edge. I felt a sudden surge of cold because “our” dog, the collie that we had brought home when she was a ball of fluff riding on a towel on my lap while Barry drove, was about to become “my” dog or “his” dog. Would we fight? Could I get him to sit still and say something? The husband, not the dog. 

I tilted the screen so Mervin could see it, but he didn’t react to Bobbin, so I graded him down and moved on. It was bubbling up now, who this guy was and why he was here. I had an email from Mervin with a video and an inventory attached. I had scrolled the inventory when it arrived and I had planned to watch the video by now, but I hadn’t because, after weeks of not talking about anything besides where to walk Bobbin or what to make for dinner, after weeks of me begging him to tell me what was wrong, Barry had broken his silence. He wanted to live by himself for a while. Live by himself, but with his girlfriend? I didn’t know about her yet.

After making this decision for both us, Barry walked out with the silver-striped bag we bought in New York rolling behind him, which I knew he hadn’t packed with enough socks and underwear because I’ve known him for 25 years. 

In the appalling quiet after Barry was gone, I had streamed the first season of a British police procedural about improbable people I would never meet and straight away forgot. I fell asleep in my clothes on the floor where I’d been playing with Bobbin, only to wake up an hour later with the dog sprawled on the couch, guarding her flock on the floor. 

I shifted gears and switched to Mervin’s email. Time to get my game face on.

“Delta Lines has 200 miles of track, but you can’t use half of it because you have a bridge in the middle that’s unsafe,” I said. I knew this not because I had done my homework, but because my family once lived in a dilapidated white house with Delta Lines trains running right behind our rows of tomato plants. 

“You move freight between the big railroads,” I said. “You also serve local customers. A cement plant, a pipe maker, a furniture importer, and somebody digging up and selling”—I was perplexed—“rocks?”

“For landscaping,” Mervin said. “Gray, green, purple. They drain good.”

I looked at his signature in the email and reminded myself that Mervin was Delta Lines’ master mechanic. I usually deal with an exec from a distant office who wouldn’t know a multiple-unit lash-up of locomotive pool power from a hole in the ground. I wondered why I had a burly machinist fidgeting in a chair in my office. I wondered if I still had a husband. How did I not see this train coming? 

“I should’ve asked you, do you go by Mervin or Merv?”

“Merv. Miss—Mrs.—David?”

“Vee,” I said. “Nobody calls me Vienna.” I never liked “Mrs.” Especially not today. 

“Vienna,” Merv ventured. “That’s…different.”

“It’s not as cool as Mervin,” I said. Merv’s solid face broke slightly. It was the first smile I had seen since I stumbled out of bed this morning and fell on my butt in the tangled sheets.

“I understand you have some old trains,” I said.

Merv pointed at the email on my screen.

I clicked the attached video file. The Circle of Anticipation whirled in the center of my screen and then the video opened. We were about 20 feet above a railroad yard in central Washington. I could see in the distance the low profile of the town of Fillmore, some brick hotels from a more prosperous era, and beyond them the Cascades, which meant we were looking west. Seattle, where we were conducting this conversation, was on the other side of the pass. There wasn’t much snowpack on the summits.

“It was a dry winter,” I said.

Merv nodded.

The drone they used for this video flew slowly down a line of gondolas that had been rusting in the sun while the wind deposited dirt and berry-eating birds deposited seeds. Each car supported a crop of green shoots and wild flowers and a few ambitious saplings. 

The gondolas were followed by ranks of covered hoppers like prairie schooners. They had been tagged and retagged, a collaboration between kids with spray cans and locals with handguns. The sprawling names and splashes of color were punctuated by bullet holes. 

There were many flat cars, all of them sagging in the middle as if they needed a chiropractor.

“Merv,” I said, “this is the biggest bunch of junk I’ve seen since my father got bumped off the Burlington.” I knew it must be obvious to him that I had had sufficient time to watch his video and I hadn’t. All I could do was be my usual self, whoever she was today.

Merv smiled again, that twitch at the corner of his mouth that seemed to cost him something. “What did your father do?” he asked.

“Freight agent,” I said. “He rode trains for fun. And he built model trains, which my sisters and I were not allowed to touch.”

“Your father still right on the rails?”

“No,” I said, and though my father’s train had left the station a very long time ago, I was suddenly choked with loss. I made a gesture as if I were sweeping it all away.

Merv nodded and said, “Keep watching.”

We flew past a string of faded brown boxcars with heralds from long-gone railroads painted on their sides. One car sported a map of its ancestral territory, Topeka at one end, Tulsa at the other. I thought as I often did of opening a gallery of railroad graffiti. Also of chopping off my hair and hanging with a cast of fascinating, creative people. I was suddenly angry at myself for wasting perfectly bad coffee from the drive-thru and at Ollie for not arriving with my fresh cup this minute.

Get a grip, I ordered myself, as if I were commanding Bobbin to heel, as if she ever did. What was I going to do with this jumble? There are many short lines in this country, like Delta Lines, that work in the cracks between the Class One railroads. Their equipment rosters are full of hand-me-downs, bargains, and upcycles. That’s my bread and butter, but so far nothing was buttered here. Almost everything I had seen was scrap. Scrap doesn’t pay. I needed a payday.

Merv said, “Here they come.”

In the video, an army of locomotives approached. Promising. I remembered, as a little girl, standing with my father on a pedestrian bridge that straddled the tracks while a freight train passed below us. The thunder of the locomotives and the hot desert smell of their exhaust. The surprising quiet once the train had fled.

Some of the diesels we passed had been robbed for parts to keep other elderly machines moving. We watched as purple martins darted sideways from an empty engine cavity, snatched insects in mid-air, tilted their wings and returned to the nest. The birds danced past the drone without missing their allotment of bugs.

“I lined these engines up together, ’cause they’re all the same,” Merv said. He leaned forward in his chair, which creaked, and prepared to launch himself into the world of horsepower ratings and catalog numbers. But I didn’t have the patience this morning for the male mania to explain, and I was angry that Mervin Rettenmund, Master Mechanic, was at this moment the only man in my life with that urge. 

“Essex class,” I said. “Six-axle road engines. These are the final Essex series, the 900s, with the roomier crew cabins. Much more comfortable for longer runs.”

“Yes,” he said, startled.

Ollie entered and placed my latte on my desk. The fragrance and heat from the thick paper cup were almost enough on their own.

“The frames look good,” I said. 

“You reinstall the power and they’ll go.”

“The bird shit can be destructive, but I’d have to inspect them to be sure.” I took my first scalding sip.

“My boys will hose ’em out first thing,” Merv said. He was happy to have a specific task to keep himself busy. I knew how he felt.

“You haven’t told me why you’re selling this equipment,” I said. “I mean, why now? It’s been sitting a long time. Some of those cars are growing their own forests.”

Merv gathered his resources. “The committee sent me. We became worker-owned in February,” he began. “No more absentee owners. We need the money to fix that bridge and use the whole line. And I want to clear all these broke-down cars out of my yard.” His lips reset and he subsided in his chair.

“Yards are where trains go to die, Merv,” I said. It was an old train joke, probably coined the day after they invented trains. 

Merv smiled. He said, “You got that right, Mrs. David.”

“Vee,” I automatically said. The drone sailed past an olive green passenger coach, the paint faded with time, lettered in gold for a railroad I had never heard of. There were more coaches like it, all coupled together as if they were waiting for men in linen suits and women in wide straw hats and a conductor to punch their tickets. They were followed by a baggage car where clerks had sorted mail as the train clicked over the rails. 

The baggage car gave way to a chorus line of cabooses, some with bay windows, some with cupolas where the conductor perched as if in a crow’s nest and watched his train. They were made from steel and had been painted years ago in brown, silver, and dull red, except for the car at the end. That one was made from wood and looked as if it had run away from home to join the circus. It had once been painted in fiery, orangey colors. The cupola was high and narrow. A white horse galloped beneath the side windows. 

I paused the video.

It was hard to believe I could be surprised by anything after Barry decided to light our marriage on fire, but I was.

I had dreamed about this caboose and that horse many times in childhood. I had ridden that caboose to visit my friends, friends I only had in that dream. The dreams had ended when I was 10 or 11. I had written them down in the flowing script I used in my diary.

Merv must’ve wondered why I had stopped the video. 

“Those passenger cars are from the 1920s,” I finally said. “They’re steel. Riveted. Not aluminum.”

Merv said something that sounded like “Urm.” 

“What’s their condition?”

It was plain that to Merv this neolithic rolling stock was useless. Amtrak hauls human beings, real railroads haul freight, and a 50-pound package of electronics brings up the rear of every train, not a caboose.

Merv shrugged.

“You haven’t inspected them?”

“The passenger cars have been locked up behind the roundhouse,” he said. “The cabooses were on a siding way back in the hills. Except the orange one with the horse. I found that one in a shed I thought we had torn down. Maintenance of Way was using it as a smoking lounge. If you know what I mean.”

It occurred to me that some tourist line or museum, here in the Pacific Northwest or somewhere in North America, would love to have a vintage passenger car in original condition. If they couldn’t afford to restore and run such a contraption, they could use it as a gift shop or a place for tourists to eat pizza. Or maybe an entrepreneur would transform the coaches into a restaurant or a shelter for shell-shocked middle-aged women.

But the caboose with the horse?

I didn’t sense a tidal wave of money in this Delta Lines clearance sale, but now I had hope. The big railroads had recently cleared out their attics and closets, and the market was still flooded with orphaned trains. You had to shout to be heard. A set of antique passenger cars gave us something to shout about. I definitely felt like shouting.

“I’ll have to do a walk-through.” I was going to Fillmore? Better than going home. “I’ll get a better idea if I can walk the trains.” 

“OK,” Merv said. 

“It’s Wednesday. I can be there on Saturday. Two o’clock?”

“OK,” Merv said.

I stood and Merv stood. I handed him a brochure detailing our services and a sample contract. We shook hands and he still stood, unsure how to end a meeting that didn’t involve welding. “I’ll show you out,” I said, and “Drive safe,” as Merv walked down the hall.

Ollie was scowling at something on his screen. He had gathered his hair in a tight knot topping his head. Everything seemed unreal, as if I were staring into an aquarium, or out of one. I sat at my desk, pulled my phone from my purse, and texted two words to my friend Rosalie, with an exclamation I didn’t feel: “Road trip!”

***

Minny—not Rosalie—had not stopped talking since she had thrown her bag into the back and plopped herself in the front. Even after I missed a turn, a stop sign, and a mailbox and she insisted on driving, the talking surged on. Her life had been a whirlwind in the year since she and Teddy had divorced. When she wasn’t grading freshman English papers, she was podcasting and ballroom dancing. She brewed beer and played the ukulele and those ventures turned out better than the disastrous dates she went on. She also walked dogs. Did she sleep? I had lost the hang of it. 

Barry had called to say he was coming over for more clothes. When he arrived at the door he acted as if everything was fine. God, that annoyed me. Bobbin jumped all over him. That annoyed me, too. I went to the market while he was in the house and rolled a cart up and down the aisles. I read the messages in a dozen greeting cards but they were no help. I filled my cart, left it in the dairy aisle, walked out, walked back in, put everything back on the shelves, and went home. I was relieved not to see Barry’s car in the driveway.

It wasn’t hard for Minny to wheedle it out of me that I had invited several other women on this trip before turning to her.

“Rosalie!” she whooped. Her black curls shook. “Rosalie should’ve been a snobby clerk in a wine shop. Either that or a nun. Who else did you ask?”

“Rosalie is my friend!” Rosy wasn’t prim. She was well-behaved. Some people were raised by wolves; Rosy was raised by drill sergeants. This morning she was driving to Portland to visit her sister.

“She’s my friend, too. Next!”

“Brenda. Her daughters have marching-band practice today.”

“That’ll teach her to reproduce. Brenda and I once spent a week hiking the Canadian Rockies up in Banff. We hiked all day and danced all night. All those railroad men. Did she ever tell you that story?”

“What? No,” I said. I pictured the mom I knew from yoga class who sprang up from her mat and raced out the door to the next item on her domestic agenda the moment we were released from savasana. Dancing with railroad men? “Why do you want to know this?”

“It’s for my art!” 

So I told her that Charlotte and her husband were going backpacking on Rainier (“Sleeping on the ground? On dirt?”), Rachel was doing something for work (“What is that woman hiding from?”), and Shelley, as always, couldn’t get together this week but let’s talk next week (“If you’re not right in front of her, you don’t exist”).

“People have schedules,” I said, when Minny asked if I had run out of friends already. “They have lives. Families. They get sick. They’re not feeling it.”

“Who wouldn’t drop everything for the chance to spend the day in Gumstump?”

“Fillmore,” I said. I knew she was teasing me. “Gumstump is where I was a little kid.”

“Gumstump. Just a look and a half down the road from Fillmore,” she said. “The back of be-yawned.” 

“Barry has a girlfriend,” I said, as if I were reading a road sign or commenting on the weather.

“Bastard!” Minny crunched the accelerator and we raced past a truck hauling for Amazon. 

“Do you know Jackie Rivkin?” I asked.

“Who doesn’t?”

“Jackie knows someone who works with Barry, and she says this woman she knows says Barry is involved with a woman who also works there, and she’s young. I mean really young, like larval-stage young. He’s not helping her with her homework, either.”

Merv hadn’t expected a woman and neither had I.

“Jackie missed her calling as a yenta,” Minny said. “That’s not an insult. She has some serious skills.”

“Something’s wrong with me,” I said.

“Like what?”

“Like I must be in shock. Like I’m not feeling anything. Except I’m—what? Angry? Barry showed up at the house because he wanted his underwear. Everything’s fine, he says, how are you? See you around. Does he think I’m one more guy on his fucking softball team?”

Minny stared at the road. She took a quick stare at me. “Pack the rest of his shit in a garbage bag and leave it on the front porch,” she said. “Fire his ass.”

We would’ve made it to Fillmore in two hours except for the half hour we spent at the rest area at Snoqualmie Pass because I wanted to throw up. Turns out I was just car sick. I’m not used to riding as a passenger. Barry and I were always in our own cars. I walked around the parking lot in the high mountain air, then went to the women’s room to splash water on my face. 

Minny brought me a paper cup of whiskey. 

“Where did you get this?” I asked. I gagged down a gulp.

“I made a trade with a trucker,” she said. “You have plenty of junk in your backseat.”

I wanted to laugh, but if I did I probably wouldn’t stop.

“What would happen if Teddy came back?” I asked. “What would you do?”

Minny took the paper cup from my hand and finished the drink. She tossed the empty cup into the trash and pushed her round red glasses back up her nose.

“I would take him to bed,” she said. “Oh yeah, bed! That’s where he’s at his finest. But only if I could confine him to the bed. I don’t want to see him anywhere else.”

“Amen to that,” a woman two sinks down said.

“Come on,” Minny said. “Let’s make you presentable. I don’t want to walk into Gumstump with you looking like this.”

“Fillmore,” I said. 

***

We stopped at Mom’s on Railroad Avenue because Minny couldn’t resist the name. She ordered the Caesar salad. I asked for coffee. Minny flirted with the shy college boy with bangs and a body like a whippet who was covering all the tables and forgetting everyone’s order. He was puzzled when he brought us two chicken-fried steaks with french fries like birthday ribbons until we pointed at the two hungry men in the corner. By the time he returned with Minny’s salad and some kind of meatloaf-and-gravy concoction for me, I was so tired that I said, “Thanks.” 

“Good. Eat,” Minny said. “Build up your strength. We’re going out tonight.”

“Tonight? We’re going home.”

“Call your dog-sitter,” Minny said as she forked into her salad. “There’s gotta be a tavern in town with a band. I brought a change and I saw laundry in the backseat. Do you live in that car? It’s not Barry’s stuff, is it? All you really need is a fun blouse. Just keep in mind that we’re too old to wear fringe as actual clothing.”

“I’m too old to stay up late. Or deal with strangers.”

“Strangers are exactly what you want to deal with. They’re not commitments, they’re snacks. You need some distraction and I’m on vacation. I have essays to grade at home. Earnest young women in black writing about Sylvia Plath. You bet we’re going out tonight.”

I suddenly realized I was hungry, but before I could take a bite, our adorable waiter rushed up and claimed my dish for somebody else. He brought me a Caesar salad on the house. A woman who might have been Mom, or our waiter’s mom, refilled my coffee mug and kept it filled. When we stepped into the warm sunshine and blue sky of the wide street, my head was ringing but at least I was upright and ambulatory. I called a neighbor who loved Bonnie and confirmed she could handle some unexpected dog care. 

I pointed down the street toward the antique shops that were the town’s calling card. “There’s plenty to do here,” I said. “Coffee, books, shopping. There’s a park, too.”

“A park? So I can run around and chase a ball? No no no, we have a client to call on.”

“Minny, this is my job!”

“Yeah, and I can see that you’re not going to handle your job without some help because today is not your day. That’s why I’m here! I studied improv all winter. Just give me some nouns, verbs, and scenarios. We’re going to buy some trains, right? I’ll help you pick out something that matches your curtains.”

I blinked in the cloudless blue sunshine. Call on a client with Minny? It couldn’t go worse than calling on a client with Ollie.

“Today we’re looking at a lot of older locomotives with plenty of miles left in them,” I told her. Shunted aside for newer, sleeker models with more pulling power. “Maybe some of the freight cars. Most of what they have will end up in a scrap heap. We’re looking for machines we can resell to other railroads.”

“It’s a scavenger hunt,” Minny said. “And we’re the hunters. I didn’t realize your job was so much fun. Now give me the insider language.”

We parked in the Delta Lines’ employee parking lot. I took two yellow zip-up vests and two white helmets out of the supply in the back and handed one of each to Minny. Then we changed into our hiking boots. We walked across three sets of tracks embedded in the asphalt, heading for a steel-sided building with a row of windows high up in the wall. A diesel switcher engine, a miniature version of the engines that pull trains across the country, rolled toward us with a tank car in tow. They’re loud up close, and imposing, even little guys like this one, but gone soon enough. The driver high up in his cab waved and we waved back. People are conditioned to wave at trains. When this one passed us in a shimmer of heated air and a whiff of exhaust, Minny said, “That’s not a steam engine. Where are the steam engines?”

“If they want a steam engine they write a letter to the 20th century,” I told her. “Nobody uses steam anymore. It’s all diesels and electrics and hybrid fuels.”

“That’s good to know,” Minny said. “I don’t want to embarrass you once we get inside the choo-choo barn.”

“Minny! We’re meeting Merv, the master mechanic, in the backshop. That’s where they fix the trains. Trains! Rolling stock!”

“Got it. Take these men seriously. No man has ever asked for that before! Anything else on our shopping list? Milk, eggs, cabooses?”

“Cabooses, yes.” I wanted to tell her about my dream, but out here in the sunlight it was weird. “And passenger cars. Antiques. The kind of thing everyone goes crazy for because it’s so old.”

“Oh, antiquing! I knew we’d work that in,” Minny said. We paused at the entrance and shrugged into our safety vests. “I’m not putting this helmet on until I have to. I don’t want to walk around all night with helmet hair.”

“Put it on now,” I said. “If you don’t, Merv will tell you to do it.”

“Mmm,” Minny said. “I like Merv already.”

We entered the portal to Guyville, a huge space with wide banks of lights hovering above lathes, milling machines, drill presses, planers, and grinders. The air was thick with dust and oil, like a restaurant where they’re obsessed with garlic. Men in safety goggles and helmets were using the machines to shape pieces of metal in steady streams of noise and arcs of fireflies.

Minny studied the men in the shop. “No. No. No. Maybe,” she said. At the far end of the building, Merv, dressed in stained canvas coveralls with pockets and loops, with arctic blue goggles hanging from his neck, glanced up from a laptop that was wired into the locomotive they had backed inside. When he spotted us, he took his helmet off the table beside him and planted it on his head.

Minny said, firmly, “Yes.”

“Merv??” I asked. 

“That’s Merv? You didn’t tell me about his hands.”

“He never speaks!”

“Teddy and I spoke all the time. We had a fight every day. Always the same fight.”

Merv walked over and invited us into his office. His three computers rested on a steel sheet set across two wooden crates. He had a table, chairs, and shelving. I had never seen so many catalogues for Snap-on Tools. There was no calendar of pin-up girls. 

“Mervin Rettenmund, this is Minny Mirel,” I said.

“Ms. Mirel,” Merv said. Since he had already met one woman, me, he was prepared today to meet another. “Call me Merv.” Merv’s helmet said DELTA LINES on one side and SAFETY REIGNS ON OUR TRAIN on the other.

“Sure thing, Merv. Thank you for inviting us into your backshop,” Minny said. She was enjoying shaking his hand. “But you should call me Minny.”

“OK,” he said.

This is where I should have taken control of this meeting. I had the Delta Lines inventory and all of my questions on my phone. I had some expressions of interest from other railroads. But my brain seemed to have been exhausted by the effort to introduce everyone.

Minny put her hands on her hips and asked, “What have you got for us, Merv?” 

Merv led us outside to his truck, which was parked on one of the yard tracks. It was painted in Delta Lines blue with the white triangle; the truck’s railroad wheels were down and its highway tires were up. The track ahead was a clear alley between sidings full of cars. In the distance we could hear freight cars crashing like rhinos as the crews coupled them together to build trains. Minny tried to climb into the front seat with Merv, but I turned her around and guided her toward the back. We exchanged a series of gestures and looks before she finally climbed in there.

The ride through the yard and the Delta Lines’ discards should’ve been an easy jaunt on a sky-blue day. But I have visited too many railroad yards like this one. All those freight cars that a more affluent railroad would have left by the side of the road with a “FREE” sign taped to them. All the artwork and graffiti defacing the famous logos. Some day soon, men in protective suits wielding oxygen-propane torches would slice this equipment into mah jongg tiles and pile them up for the ride to the smelter. Everything was depressing me. 

But then we passed a Virginian & Ohio boxcar that a talented tagger had turned into a swirl of fat arrows like tropical storm warnings. I had told Minny about the gallery I wanted to open. Minny talks all the time, but she also listens, and she snapped some photos as we rode past. 

As Merv’s truck bumped down the track, I forced myself to reenter the conversation. “These wheelsets look salvageable,” I said. “Maybe even the brake gear.”

“Sure,” Minny said. “My husband parted out a Chevy Blazer one summer. He made real money on it.”

“What year?” Merv asked.

“It was an ’82,” Minny said. I knew she was guessing.

Merv said “Urm.” It was uttered with appreciation. 

Merv stopped the truck when we came even with the first retired locomotive and we climbed out. Merv’s boys had done a thorough job of evicting the birds and washing the machine’s innards. I could see how solid this unit was.

One of the boys climbed down from the engine cab. He was tall and lean and shaggy and blond and he loped rather than walked. His helmet was plastered with band stickers. Merv tapped fists with him.

“I blasted them with an air horn first,” Merv told us. He meant the purple martins. “Scared ’em away before we got started.”

I suddenly felt anxious about the birds. Where were these birds going to go? Did they have friends who would take them in? And then Minny recited:

“ ‘This is the final resting place of engines, farm equipment, and that rare, never more than occasional man.’ ”

We all looked at her.

“Richard Hugo,” she said. “Northwest poet.”

“Good one,” the blond man said. “Did he work for a railroad?”

“No, he worked for Boeing. But he knew empty spaces.”

“Well, I like that final resting place,” the blond man said. “Merv does, too. He reads a poem every goddamned day.”

Merv cleared his throat and said, “Vee, Minny. This is Tom.”

“You’re a Renaissance man, Tom,” Minny said after shaking his hand. “You fix the trains, you wash the trains, you love poetry. But let’s cut to the chase, right, Vee?”

“Right,” I said, because I had lost the thread. 

“Right,” Minny said. “My colleague and I are interested in all of your Essex class engines. What are the others, Vee? Midways? We think they all have second careers waiting for them. We even have a line on spare parts. But we would really like to see those passenger cars. We can use them to spotlight you on social media.” 

“Cool,” Tom said. “Let’s roll down there, babe. The coaches are on 3 track.”

We walked back to the truck. Minny steered me into the backseat with her. “Give them the front,” she said, quietly.

The men were talking outside.

“They’re an interesting couple,” Minny said. “Mr. Machine Man and Ready to Tan Surfer Dude. I’ll bet they get a lot done at their house.”

“What? Who?”

“Merv and Tom. Can you not tell these things?!” 

“I don’t believe it.”

“You didn’t believe that Ollie was gay,” Minny said.

“He was a lot younger when I hired him.”

“Men get more gay as they get more old? You think that’s going to slow Teddy down? Oh, this is so much more fun than the podcast I had to do on fashion. Did you know that skinnies are out and Dad sneakers are in? I had to ask for an emergency briefing from my students. Give me these boxcars any day, or whatever these thingies are parked over here.” 

Merv and Tom climbed into the front seat. Minny leaned forward and tugged Tom’s sleeve. “Hey, handsome, I hear you have some cabooses you want to unload.”

Tom laughed and whacked Merv’s shoulder. “Let’s make some deals, babe!”

Merv checked the rearview mirror to make sure no trains were stalking us and started the truck. He cleared his throat again. “OK,” he said.

With Minny’s help I got through the rest of the tour. As we rattled over the rail joints, I managed to ask my questions: How much technical assistance Delta Lines could provide. How would we access the yard while we removed their unwanted rolling stock. “Let’s clear out this yard, Merv,” I said. 

“Amen to that,” he said.

Looking over the passenger coaches didn’t take long. They were named for presidents, though not any of the good ones. The exteriors were intact and could easily be brought back to a gleam; the interiors had been stripped of their wrought iron seat frames and fancy woodwork. The buyers could outfit these cars as they saw fit.

I walked around them and peered in and under them and after awhile I was pretending to study them. There was only one place I wanted to go. I said, “Merv, drive us down to the cabooses, please. And stop at the last one.”

The cabooses were a lineup of obsolete technology. Smokejacks jutted from the roofs. Did they still have pot-bellied stoves and hampers for cans of lard and sacks of flour? And then we came to the end and my caboose, and Merv stopped the truck.

What was it about this gaudy wooden box on wheels? Why had it starred in my dream? If you lined up every caboose ever built, they would stretch from here to the Moon. What was so special about this one? I wanted to turn to Barry, who had been standing by my side all these years. He usually stood on my left because his hearing was better in his right ear. But he was a hundred miles away, or a hundred years, and eventually the silence between us would stretch from here to the Moon.

The four of us stood in the bright central Washington sunlight. The white horse beneath the caboose’s windows was well-drawn, with the suggestion of long, rippling muscles. I read the railroad name beneath the horse. “The G&S.”

“Delta Lines bought a lot of these old-time mountain railroads,” Merv said. “The G&S must’ve been one. Don’t know about it, though. Before my time.”

“Only thing around here that’s older than Merv,” Tom said. Merv actually blushed. Minny laughed. I felt as if I weren’t even there. But then Minny reached up and put her hand on my shoulder. “Vee needs a minute,” she told Merv and Tom. “It’s been a stressful week. She’s been buying and selling trains since the opening gong on Monday.”

“Climb up inside,” Tom said. “Get out of the sun. I opened the doors to air it out. Babe, go get a bottle of water.”

The Maintenance of Way crew had definitely chilled in this caboose. Their pungent ganga reminded me of a jungle trail Barry and I had hiked in Kauai that had been littered with newly ripened fallen fruit. The caboose was empty except for some aluminum beach chairs stacked in a corner. The iron Oh Shit bar ran the length of the caboose, suspended from the ceiling. You grabbed that if your train ran into trouble. There’s nothing to grab in your marriage. Tom snapped four chairs open and set them on the wide planks of the floor. I sagged into one and then Merv handed around bottles of water from a cooler in his truck. We all took off our helmets. I held my bottle to my forehead.

“Helmet hair,” Minny complained.

“Tell me about it,” Tom said. They both ran their fingers through their hair. Merv smiled at Tom.

“We should buy a caboose, Vee,” Minny said. “We should meet clients in a caboose, not in a strip mall. Look at this car. It’s got an upstairs and a downstairs and a front porch and a back porch. Plus it’s cute.”

“G&S,” I said, and we were all startled by my voice, as if the flywheel that lived in my head had been caught but had suddenly come loose. “The Gumstump & Snowshoe. Ran through Leavenworth and up into the North Cascades. They built it because they were mining for silver.”

“No silver out here,” Merv said.

“That’s why there’s no more Gumstump & Snowshoe,” I said. They laughed. Minny looked relieved.

“Merv, I can sell these trains,” I told him. “Here’s what we do to start. You said the coaches have been standing behind your roundhouse. Tow them back there before somebody goes at them with spray cans, but use your drone to film them while they’re rolling. We’ll edit the film down to a couple of minutes and add music.”

“Floyd, for sure,” Tom said. Minny mimed sticking her finger down her throat.

“Do the same with the cabooses, too,” I said. “We’ll market the coaches to museums and collectors, but let’s try the cabooses on the general public. There hasn’t been a caboose clearance sale in decades. You must have dozens of them.”

“These hacks are going to take hours in the shop to bring them up to standard,” Merv protested. “They can’t go as they are. We don’t have time to work on ’em.”

“They do go as they are, Merv. They don’t have to survive the slack action at the end of a 5,000-ton train. All they have to do is stand still. We’ll sell them as rentals, campsites, gift shops, and potting sheds. Truck one out to the woods and presto, you have a hunting lodge.”

“Sweet,” Tom said. “Now I want one.”

Even Merv was getting into it. “I thought we were stuck with all this junk.”

“Not when you have Vienna David on the job,” Minny said. “This is why you’re going to sign with us.”

“I’ll send you a proposal on Monday,” I said. I could sense I was coming to the end of this track. “Thanks for the water. I’d like to leave now.”

The men jumped up as if I had announced I had been cleared to give birth. On the way back to the truck, Minny asked, “Hey boys. Where can we go tonight to hear some live music?”

“What kind of music?” Tom asked.

“Whatta ya got?”

***

What we got was country music and men buying us beer. Minny danced, even though she hates the entire genre. She even danced the line dances. At the annual salvage and recycling conference, I love going out at night to a bar with a good band. I usually go with my friend Polly from Rails West in Sacramento. The salvage people are mostly men, so there’s always someone to dance with. Barry liked dancing in the beginning. Then he didn’t. Would he start over with a new dance partner? Good luck, kid.

But dancing tonight? No.

I finished the plate of onion rings we had ordered with the last round of beer and smiled but shook my head to yet another wannabe cowboy who wanted to try me out on the dance floor. He said something that was partially obscured by the music but was probably on the border of disappointment and impolite. Rejection is hard. Just then Merv loomed in the space beside me and my would-be paramour retreated.

“I was going for a smoke,” he said. “Join me?”

“Sure,” I said. I waved to Minny, who was laughing with three women in cowboy hats and boots and probably not missing Sylvia Plath. I pointed to the door and Merv. She nodded and waved back.

Merv and I leaned against the brick wall in the cool night air. Merv was dressed in black jeans, a black button-down shirt, and a gray tie with narrow white stripes. I was wearing whatever I’d found in the jumble of my car: black tights, a purple and gold University of Washington T-shirt, and a shiny silver hoodie I had won in a raffle at an American Federation of Refrigerated Shippers convention. There was a penguin riding a scooter on the back. The zipper pull was a plastic icicle. Merv offered me a cigarette and lit a match.

I took a deep drag, held it, and coughed so explosively that Merv rushed inside and returned with a glass of ice water.

“Thanks,” I gasped.

“You don’t smoke.” 

“I’m going to learn.”

Merv said “Don’t” and gently took my cigarette away.

We stood in silence. I sipped my ice water and soothed the burning in my throat. We heard a freight train whistling its warning as it approached a highway crossing.

“One of yours?”

“Not at this hour.” Merv took a satisfying puff and blew a smoke ring. “Tell me about the caboose,” he said.

“Nothing to tell.”

“Bullshit. The minute you spotted it, you were snake-bit.”

I swirled the ice in my glass. “The caboose was a dream. From childhood. Are you one of those people who likes to hear other people’s dreams?”

“I have to,” he said. “Tom.”

I was beginning to like Mervin Rettenmund.

“There was a train,” I began. “The train had a caboose that was orange and red with a flying horse on the side. The conductor said I could sit high up in the tower so I could see everything. He let me ring a brass bell. We ran through mountains and tunnels that were very dark, but I wasn’t afraid. Other trains rushed past and all the engines trailed clouds like a sunrise and whistled like birds. We stopped at a white farmhouse with a red barn. I left the caboose and climbed over the farmhouse fence. I was good at climbing fences.”

I sounded sing-songy, like a child.

“There was a dog on the porch and she ran to me. I loved her and called her name. I never remembered the name I called. I played with the little girls who lived in the farmhouse and we were all the same age. Their names were Ann and Martha. When it was time to go home, I could never find the caboose, or my friends, or the dog, but somehow the farmhouse got farther away. I could see there was a light on upstairs. That’s always when I woke up.”

Forty years crushes your earliest memories into paper too thin to read, but I have never forgotten that trip.

“Tom interprets dreams,” Merv said. “I never have any. But I know what he would say about yours.”

“What?”

“You’ve got to ride that caboose again.”

That was a lot for Merv to say, and for me to hear. I could see Jupiter shining above the rooflines of Fillmore. Merv dropped his cigarette and rubbed it firmly with the sole of his shoe. Railroad men are always ready to dance, and they are always careful about fire.

“You said you were from around here?”

“Gumstump,” I said. “My parents divorced when I was little and Mom moved us to Seattle. Dad stayed here. He didn’t want to live in a city, and he didn’t want to leave his trains.”

Merv said, “Wait.” And then, “Wait.” Two men walked out of the tavern, laughing. They nodded and we nodded. Merv waited for them to pass us on their way to their trucks. “Model trains. You said he built model trains. Gumstump. You lived in Gumstump. Was your father Henry Karlinsky?”

“Yes,” I said, startled to hear a stranger speak my father’s name. “Did you know him?”

“No,” Merv said. “But I know folks who did.”

I wasn’t sure how to follow up with this, but just then Minny walked out of the tavern. “I am done,” she announced. “Where is our motel? It’s not out on the prairie somewhere, is it? Merv, can you drive us?”

“It’s just down the street,” I said. “We’ll walk. The air will do us good. Night, Merv.”

“Merv,” Minny said. She reached up and adjusted the knot in his tie, which hadn’t needed adjusting. “Good night, Mr. Merv.”

“Night,” Merv said.

The ringlets of Minny’s hair were plastered to her forehead. “Tom says when we come back he’ll take us fishing. Bait, fish guts, no way. We can probably talk him into something else. All we have to do is act like the locals and dance to their awful music. And why were you out here smoking with Merv? I can smell it on your clothes, young lady.”

“We were talking trains.”

“Of course you were,” Minny said. “You love trains, Vee. That’s exactly the person they want to deal with. When Teddy sold his record collection, he schlepped it to the shop where he knew he could tell the buyer about each disc. She doubled as a grief counselor. Teddy almost cried. I had to drive us home, and he never let me drive his stupid Camaro.”

“You miss Teddy,” I said, and then I thought I shouldn’t have said it, because Minny went silent, but she said, “Yes.”

In our motel room, Minny threw herself down on her bed. I pulled her boots off and went to the tap to fill a glass of water. Minny rolled the blanket around her and said, “It only lasts a few years. Missing them.”

“How many years?”

“I’ll find out.”

I thought Minny was asleep, but she opened her reddened eyes and said, “It won’t take you long.”

“No?”

“No. You don’t notice Barry anymore. I right away noticed something wrong with Teddy. You didn’t notice anything with Barry.”

“And why is that, doctor?”

“Because you don’t really care.”

Either the flywheel had caught again or I had outsourced my brain, because I had nothing.

“Sorry, Vee,” Minny mumbled. “If I don’t keep talking, I’ll sink.”

I turned out the overhead light and plopped into a padded chair by the window. When did I slide into not caring? When did our lives devolve into jobs, commuting to jobs, and lists of things to do? No one has ever come to the end of a list of things to do. The most important things are never on the list.

Hours later, I roused myself and staggered to my bed.

***

In the morning, I opened my eyes and remembered Barry and waited for gravity to smash me like a pancake. Nothing. I evicted Minny from her tangle of blanket and we both started moving as if we had run a marathon—poorly. We established base camp at a sidewalk table in front of Mom’s. Minny was hunched inside a layer of fleece in the early-morning cool. She was wearing sunglasses with white frames. She wasn’t speaking. Mom brought us scrambled eggs, orange slices, and coffee. The fresh smells broke through my haze. The sky was cloudless and blue and I was breathing the dust and vegetation of the high desert at the start of summer as we nibbled our breakfast. I could hear trains running outside the downtown area.

When my phone rang, I thought, Barry? I walked around the corner to answer.

“Hello,” a woman’s voice said. “Is this Vienna David?”

“Yes,” I said. For a moment I was sure this was the girlfriend, and then I was insanely angry. Not because she was the girlfriend. Because she was interrupting breakfast. And my head hurt. There wasn’t much in there about my husband. I leaned against the alley wall of Mom’s. 

“Hi, my name is Katie, and I had a call this morning from Merv. Merv from Delta?”

“Yes?” I wasn’t following this at all.

“He said you might want to talk to my father. Wendell. He knew your father.”

“Oh,” I said, and then Katie said, “About your caboose?”

Trains were heading east and west. Generations of people in Fillmore woke up and went about their day and went to sleep with wheels on rails playing in the background.

“Sure,” I said. “Put him on.”

“It would be easier if you could drop by,” Katie said. “Dad doesn’t hear well over the phone, and he wants to meet you. We live right here in town.”

“Urm,” I said.

“It would mean a lot to Dad,” Katie said. 

“OK,” I said. After a few hours with Merv I was talking like Merv. “Text me the address.”

Minny had pushed her plate to the center of the table and had propped her head on her folded arms. I nudged her and she said “Fuck off” into her fleece sleeves.

“I have an errand,” I told her. “You can hang here or come along.”

Minny sat up, slowly, and slid her sunglasses back on. “I’ll hang,” she said. “Oh, I told Mom to charge breakfast to your account. Do you have one? You have one now. And I ordered some apples and biscuits with jam for the road.”

Katie, who was about my age, ushered me into a screened-in porch at the back of her family’s house. The porch was hung with dozens of brass and steel railroad lanterns with white, green, and red lenses. Wendell sat at one end of a padded wicker couch. The day was warming, but he wore a cream button-down cardigan over a dark plaid hunter’s shirt and had a blanket spread across his lap.

“Dad, this is Vienna David. Henry’s daughter. I told you she was going to visit.”

Wendell, who had been staring into the distance, or perhaps into time, focused on me. He had white hair like straw on the sides of his head and his eyes must have been a startling mountain-lake blue when he was young. 

“Are you Vee?” he asked. His voice was a tenor broken by static.

“Yes I am.” So he must’ve known my father. He knew I was Vee, not Vienna. “How do you do, Wendell?” I sat on the couch beside him and took his hand in mine. I could feel the knots beneath his mottled skin. He smelled like talcum powder.

“I’ll leave you two to talk,” Katie said, then quietly, to me, “Thank you. Coffee? Tea?”

“No thanks, I just came from Mom’s.” 

Wendell’s face, which had seemed heavy and immobile, broke into a smile. He must be deep in his nineties. The age my father would’ve been if he were still right on the rails.

“You’re Vee,” Wendell said. He squeezed my hand. I wondered if he intended to say anything else and why I was here. And then he said, “Make the caboose go first!”

“What do you mean, Wendell?”

“That was you,” he said. “You said it wasn’t fair that the caboose always went last. You explained it to us and your father ran the train backwards for you.”

“He did?”

“Yes. Henry and I met when we worked for the Burlington. We were on the same shift, you see, so we got to talking. And I was part of the crew for his model railroad. I didn’t build models myself, but I loved running his trains. He was so good. An artist. All those mountains and valleys and rivers. He could’ve built a glacier if he’d had the room. Your mother didn’t care for trains, though.”

My mother divorced my father because of trains, big and small, but I suspected Wendell knew that and this was his polite way of saying it.

“We weren’t allowed to touch the trains,” I said. 

“We weren’t either! We could use the controls to run the trains, but we couldn’t touch ’em. That was against the law! If you forgot and touched something, you’d hear about it, too!” Wendell started a laugh that turned into a cough and quickly stifled it with his hands. “Don’t want to upset my daughter,” he confided.

“I won’t tell. But don’t faint on me, OK?”

“Scout’s honor,” Wendell said. “That box of magazines by the bookcase there. Would you bring me the magazine on top.”

The bookcase was packed tight with books on railroads from around the world. The box was full of railroad magazines. But the magazine Wendell wanted, an ancient copy of Model Trains and Trainmen, had a photo of my father on the cover, taken when he was younger than I am now, holding a prize-winning model of a steam engine. The camera had caught him smiling. He might’ve been between laughs. In my memory he was always subdued, as if he’d been called in to report on a derailment. 

Katie arrived with a tea set on a tray and a plate of wafers with chocolate centers. “You can have cookies today, Dad,” she said. “This is a special occasion.”

“Every day is a special occasion,” Wendell said. He reached for a cookie. Nothing else seemed to matter to him at that moment.

I sat beside Wendell and opened the magazine to the story about my father. “Henry Karlinsky, Master Modeler, Makes Magic in the Mountains,” the headline read. I didn’t know my father was famous in this little world. When Mom left him, we never came back to the house. Mom hated tiny Gumstump and all the tiny towns around it. Dad visited us in Seattle. I pictured Dad in his blue suit, thin and bony like the key to a treasure chest. He always seemed to be standing awkwardly in a corner or against a wall, as if he were a footnote rather than a father.

Wendell reached over and with some effort from his stiff fingers he flipped the magazine open to a two-page, panoramic photo of my father’s basement empire. There was a city on a river and another in the hills and floor-to-ceiling mountains with trains running precariously on their flanks. I didn’t remember much of it, but there I was, perched on a stool beneath a railroad bridge that arched like a rainbow. I was wearing overalls with a puppy embroidered on the front and on my lap I was holding an orange and red caboose with a white horse on it.

“You told me all about it,” Wendell said while he munched his cookie. “How you traveled in the caboose to visit your friends. They lived in the farmhouse. You were an imaginative little thing. Tea?”

“Farmhouse?”

Wendell laboriously turned the next page and there was a feature within the feature about the problem Dad faced from the washer and dryer. His solution was to build a hinged shelf that he could lower into position above the appliances when he wanted to run his trains. The sidebar showed how it worked. The sidebar didn’t explain what Mom thought of all the ropes and pulleys. 

Dad had attached a farmhouse and a barn to the shelf.

“Of course, a real railroad wouldn’t lay a spur track to a farm, and your father was a stickler for realism,” Wendell said. “Henry was going to build a factory or something. But you wanted the farmhouse because your friends needed someplace to live. You can take this magazine with you, by the way.”

My father built me a farmhouse?

“Henry hadn’t run any trains in years. Not since he took sick,” Wendell said. “After he died, we waited for somebody to come out here and tell us what to do. We wanted to save the railroad, you see, but then his brother showed up and he cleared that house in no time.”

“That must’ve been my Uncle Ralph,” I said. I could imagine my burly, no-nonsense uncle striding from room to room, declaring yes to this and no to that. God knows what he made of all the trains. He would’ve seen them as toys.

Wendell helped himself to another cookie, winked at me, then took a bite. “We asked your uncle if we could run the trains one last time and he said go for it, so we went for it. The track was dirty. It doesn’t conduct electricity well when it’s dirty. But we got one train rolling. We tacked your caboose to it, because it was your father’s favorite, and then we ran it backwards so the caboose could go first. We ran it up to the farmhouse and back. Are you all right, Vee?”

“Yes.” To cover my confusion I took a sip of tea. It was too hot and I sloshed it as I put it back on its saucer. I wiped my mouth with a paper napkin and then I wiped my eyes and then I started bawling, which brought Katie at a run.

“I’m fine,” I said as they fussed over me. “Just a little emotional. I’m fine, really.”

Wendell handed me some tissues from the pocket of his cardigan and I blew my nose. Katie made sure both of us were all right—I could tell that with her elderly father in residence, this was second nature to her—before she ducked out again.

“Sorry,” I said to Wendell.

Wendell took my hand and said, “I want to say something about your father.”

“Yes,” I said, because I couldn’t say no.

“Henry knew trains,” he said. “Trains have numbers. They have sides and ends. Not like people. But Henry did his best.” He squeezed my hand. “Have another cookie, before my daughter takes them away.”

“Thanks, Wendell,” I said. “Maybe I can visit you again. Do you need anything?”

“Maybe later,” Wendell said. “I’ll ask Katie. But right now I’m happy. I couldn’t possibly do anything else.”

I took three cookies, folded some of Wendell’s unused tissues around them, and slipped them into his cardigan’s pocket.

***

I drove downtown to find Minny. A train blocked me at a grade crossing. The grimy green engine was pulling hoppers full of coal. My brain was full, like one of these cars, full of dull black indigestible rocks. I assigned a topic to each car as it rumbled past: Barry. My father. Questions for my mother. I was interrupted by a hopper that had been tagged in bloody red by TURNIKIT. The U was canted slightly to the left. The arm of the R was trying to kick the N off the train. I wondered how you contacted a tagger. I wanted TURNIKIT in my gallery.

Today, after I got home, I would walk Bobbin on our favorite beach. I’d throw sticks into the water because I like my dogs wet and worn-out. I’d watch the sailboats tacking across the Sound with the Olympics gray in the distance, and try to think about everything. Or think about nothing. But first I had to bump my brain off the siding it was stuck on and write a proposal for a struggling railroad that needed cash. I was happy to have a specific task to keep me busy.

The end of the train whooshed by. A black box hung off the last hopper, with a computer, not a conductor, monitoring the health of the train.

A train without a caboose? It was just another day in the railroad business, but I knew what Minny would say.

Where’s the poetry in that?