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It was shaking a stick at a steer, a hoghead calling Martell by his first name.
‘Well let’s us just stop in the upper tunnel and check it out. Clear it up for good.’
Joshua dared not look at him. He sat motionless, his throat dry.
‘You heard. Hit the brakes. Now.’
He heard all right. Why not? Joshua knew it would get him one day. Every time he dreamed of that rushing, hungry darkness, he knew it would get him. Why not now? Now was as good a time as any.
Turning slowly to look at Martell, he pulled back the brake and watched the conductor’s florid face as the train began its laborious process of halting.
Forty-five seconds later, they stopped just inside the mouth of the upper tunnel.
Joshua Tennent held his conductor’s eyes in a gaze like a mongoose holding a snake. Martell twitched. Maybe the engineer was really crazy. Maybe this was where he went Charlie Manson and they’d all end up being stencils for a cop’s chalk outline. But then again maybe not. There was face to be saved here, and when all was said and done he was the guy in charge, and crazy or not, Tennent had better understand that, and understand it good.
Henry was open-mouthed, looking from Joshua to Martell and back again, as though the secret of why a substantial portion of BC’s coal supply came to be stationary in the mouth of the upper Corkscrew Tunnel, lay in the air somewhere between them.
‘Want to get out and say hi to the rock?’ The conductor spat the words.
A pause.
‘Sure. After you, Wesley.’
The delay in the reply was deliberate, the tone of voice imitating Joshua. ‘After you, son.’
Joshua stood. It would get him. Of course it would. He would face it now, it would get him, and the thing would be done. Over.
It would be okay. Better than all those bad dreams, and the feeling in those dreams that someday the sunlit arch might not be enough to stop it. His eyes never leaving those of the conductor, he walked to the cab door behind his seat, pushed down the thin aluminium handle, and opened it. Cold air poured in like syrup.
‘Coming? Or are you scared, Wesley?’
Funny thing though, Wesley Martell was scared. He kept thinking about the rock. The living rock. Even though he knew the whole thing was bullshit, his stomach turned a loop at having to walk out that cab door and stand three feet from the craggy wall. But he was still more mad than scared, and if that crazy shit-for-brains hoghead thought he was going to back down now, then he ate loony flakes for breakfast.
‘Oh sure, Tennent. It’s tricklin’ down my legs and fillin’ my boots. But I’m right at your heels, boy.’
Joshua inhaled a lungful of warm cab air and stepped out onto the metal platform to face the rock. Martell was at his side immediately.
Joshua waited. The two men stood silently, their backs to the light of the window, staring at the icy stone. Nothing happened. Joshua closed his eyes. Nothing. The only sound was that of the massive diesel engine chugging beneath a sheath of steel. Martell felt the cold settle on him like a silk cloak.
Joshua opened his eyes, his breast heaving with a mixture of relief and dismay. Did he really imagine it last time? Was he crazy? He’d dreamed of this so many times in the last year, tossing and sweating in his bed as the nightmare darkness swept him away, and yet he knew there was nothing here but rock. He couldn’t ‘feel’ any sound at all.
He looked at Martell with naked contempt. ‘Happy?’
‘Pleased as a baby at the tit. I guess the livin’ rock ain’t home today.’
He squeezed another laugh out of that box of phlegm he stored somewhere under his shirt and kept laughing as they re-entered the cab, closed the door and returned to their chairs.
The throttle opened and the train made a series of metallic screeches of protest as it inched away. It was the deafening noise of the engine that prevented the three men hearing the other sound.
The sound of two six-foot-long icicles shattering as they splintered onto the metal platform where the conductor and engineer had stood.
3 (#ulink_d6ce91ca-a696-5a99-ac9f-bf2ec88af7b8)
Billy broke the laws of physics every time he yelled. How a holler that loud came to be emitted from such a tiny frame would have given Einstein pause to pull his moustache in thought.
‘It’s coming!’
Sam Hunt made a mock ear-trumpet with his hand and leaned towards his son. ‘Sorry? Didn’t get that.’
Billy’s small oval face looked up at Sam and broke into a grin. ‘Sure you did. Feel. It’s coming now.’
Sam bent into a crouch and laid a palm on the freezing rail. He could feel nothing, but Billy, they both knew, was the expert here.
‘Okay then. Bird or Queen this time?’
Billy was thoughtful. He turned the pale yellow dollar coin over in his mittened hand and made a decision. ‘I’m gonna go for the duck. You put yours Queen-up.’
He leaned forward and placed the dollar on top of the rail track as carefully as if he were handling a rod of plutonium. Sam, smiling, positioned his dollar a yard further up the track, the profile of the Queen of England facing the direction of the oncoming train like she knew what she was in for.
From here on the edge of town you could just make out the entrance of the tunnel, looming above the pines about three miles off, but Sam was damned if he knew how Billy could feel the vibrations of a train that far away. But he did, and here it came, the headlight emerging from the dark hole right on cue.
‘Stand back, Billy.’ Sam stretched a hand out for the boy’s.
‘Aw get real, Dad. That’s not gonna be here for at least five minutes.’
Sam stood up and looked towards the tunnel mouth, his hand still extended to his son. ‘No, you’re right, Billy boy. Why don’t you just lie with your head on the rail, and if it gets cut off at the neck your Mom and I see what we can get for your bike at a jumble sale?’
Billy sighed and rolled his eyes. He stood up and took the large offered hand, and together they moved back from the track. Still holding hands, they squatted on the snowy embankment ten feet away to wait.
From behind the forest came the deep, long, discordant hoot of the train’s horn, filling Silver Valley with a sound so thick it resonated in the spine as well as in the ears. Sam lifted his head like a cat smelling fish.
‘You like that sound, Dad, don’t you?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I like it too.’
Sam looked down at the face of the boy, framed now in his blue anorak hood, his black eyes glittering in a brown face. ‘What’s it make you think of, Billy?’
The boy looked solemn. ‘You.’
Sam was silent. He tightened his grip on the mitten containing his son’s small hand and resumed gazing up the track.
Billy smiled up at him. ‘Don’t you want to know why?’
‘Do I have a choice here?’
The boy giggled, a sound so sweet that Sam thought it might make primroses poke through the snow at their feet. ‘It just sounds like you, that’s all. I don’t know why.’
‘So I sound like a freight train horn, is that what you’re saying? Remind me of that if I’m ever tempted into a Karaoke Bar.’
But he’d lost his son’s attention. Billy had his timing wrong for once. The train was already in sight on the long straight leading into town, and it would be on top of their dollars in about a minute.
Billy yelped like a rodeo MC and jumped to his feet.
‘How big, Dad? How big? What’s the record?’ He was jumping on the spot.
‘Two-and-a-half inches. I think.’
‘Metric, Dad. What’s that in centimetres?’
Sam, legs drawn up to his armpits, his arms flopping lazily over the knees, looked down into the snow and laughed. ‘Got me there, Billy boy. Guess I’m not doing so hot today. Sound like a horn and can’t count modern.’
The rails were singing now as fourteen thousand tons of iron tested their rivets, and when the horn sounded again, father and son nearly felt it blow their hair.
Billy was right. Sam loved that sound. He remembered seeing a small ad in the Silver Valley Weekly that read, ‘Superior condo to let near ski slopes. Off highway and no train noise’ and thinking he wouldn’t much care for that, not if you couldn’t hear the trains. He also knew the advertiser was lying. There was nowhere in Silver, or anywhere in the whole valley for that matter, where you could insulate yourself from that melancholy trumpeting. Not even the grazing elk looked up when it sounded. As far as Sam figured, it was part of the mountains, a sound as natural as the woodpecker or the squirrel, and anyone who wanted a condo where you couldn’t hear it deserved a dunce cap.
The train was on them. They could see the men in the cab, sitting high in the dirty red-and-white-striped metal box. The engine looked like a face, the crew peering out of small windows that made eyes at either side of a huge snout housing the horsepower.
Billy waved up at the big metal face, yelling hopelessly, his voice lost in the roar of the thundering diesel engine, unaware that Sam held the hem at the back of his anorak protectively.
From one of the eyes in the iron face, the flesh-and-blood face of a fat man scowled down at them as the engine rumbled past. No one was going to wave at Billy today. Sam watched his son’s expression turn from excitement to disappointment as the cab slipped away and they faced nothing but a mile of coal cars, shedding ice as the sun got to work on them.
‘He didn’t see us, Dad.’
Sam knew they’d been seen all right. In fact he knew exactly what that fat face had been thinking, as it looked lazily out of its window and fixed its beady eyes on them. But he would do everything in his power to protect Billy from that thought.
‘Guess not. How’re the dollars doin’?’
‘Still there I think. I can see mine. Only about twenty cars to go.’
Man and boy waited patiently, man perhaps more patiently than boy, until the last car rolled by, and they watched the back end of the train slide away.
Billy looked down at Sam, who still squatted in the snow, lost in thought. ‘Can I get ’em?’
‘Yeah. Go for it. Remember they’re hot.’
Billy darted forward to the rail as Sam stood and stretched his six-foot body beneath its down-filled jacket: by the way his son was breathily mouthing, wow, he guessed they’d had a result. He joined him by the track.
‘At least eight centimetres, Dad. Look.’ Billy passed the flattened disc of yellow metal to his father, eyes wide in anticipation of approval as Sam turned the hot trophy over in his gloved hand.
‘Matter that it ain’t exactly round?’
Billy shook his head.
‘Then I guess it’s a record. Official.’
Billy cheered and snatched back the metamorphosed dollar. He ran to where Sam had placed his. ‘Sorry, Dad. Yours slipped.’
True enough. Sam’s dollar had fallen off the track before the train could do its business. He was glad the glory had all been Billy’s but he feigned a little hurt as he pocketed the unchanged coin. ‘Gee. This isn’t my day.’
Billy came up to his father, put his short little arms around Sam’s padded waist and hugged him. ‘I love you, Dad. You can have mine.’
If love could have weight, Sam thought that freight train would have trouble shifting his. He wanted to squeeze his son so hard his muscles ached at the restraint they were under. ‘I love you too, Billy. You keep the dollar. There’ll be plenty more. I’ll beat ya yet.’
Billy broke the hug and ran through the thick snow, stumbling like a cripple to the parked car, making a noise like a train as he went.
Sam looked at the retreating train, the distant sound of its bell clanging as it slowed up through town.
If that driver really had been thinking what Sam suspected, he thought at that moment, he might be inclined to pull the fat bastard from the cab and kill him. But how could Sam know that Wesley Martell was innocent? Martell wasn’t thinking That kid must be crazy if he thinks I’m going to wave at two stinking Indians. In fact Martell hadn’t even noticed them. Nothing had been further from his thoughts.
‘The light you can leave on all day. Light 96 CHFM. Stevie Wonder comin’ up next …’
Sam’s hand couldn’t get to the car stereo off-button fast enough. What the hell did Katie do with his cassettes? The radio would kick in if there was no tape in the player, and even after ten years of marriage, Sam still hadn’t learned to turn the goddamn thing off before he started the ignition. Katie always left the radio on, he should know by now. There were only two stations a car radio could pick up this far into the mountains, both of them beaming in from Calgary, and both of them made Sam long for legislation to shoot disc jockeys. He could just about stomach 107 Kick FM, pumping out dinosaur rock music until the signal broke up, but when Katie had been driving the radio mysteriously tuned itself back to this easy-listening nightmare.
He remembered how once, exasperated, he had turned it off while Katie was singing along to a Lionel Richie song, causing her to tut and smack him on the head, ignoring the fact he was driving. Sam had done a mock swerve. Billy and Jess in the back had laughed hard at that and he’d growled, and asked her why the hell she listened to it.
‘You get a traffic report from Captain Kirk, the chopper pilot.’
‘Yeah, but it’s Calgary traffic. The guy’s flying about above Calgary, Katie. You find it useful, knowing that there’s a tailback on Barlow Trail, when you’re sitting in the car in Silver, two hundred miles away?’
She’d grinned, and hit him on the top of the head again, making his straight black hair flop over his eyes.
‘I like it, okay?’
‘Right. Maybe we can get your parents to tape the traffic reports from Vancouver and mail them over. That would sure make life a fuller all-round experience.’
She’d laughed and put the radio back on. Sam had winced, but out of the corner of his eye he had watched her singing and laughing, and suddenly Light 96 didn’t seem so bad.
Right now, though, it was more than he could stand.
The only solution was his cassettes, but it looked like she’d cleared them away again.
‘Dig in the glovebox, Billy, will you? Any music in there?’
Billy opened it and rummaged around. ‘Nah.’
‘What does she do with them?’
Billy smiled.
‘Help me choose some at the gas station?’
‘Sure.’
Sam turned the car into Silver’s main street and headed for the Petro-Canada. Cruising down the wide street, its verge piled high with wedges of old black snow, always made Sam feel like he was being covered in warm syrup. It was comforting. It was safe. It was also breathtakingly beautiful. At the eastern end of the street Wolf Mountain stabbed into the sky, a pyramid of seemingly impenetrable rock. Since Silver was nearly five thousand feet above sea level, and Wolf Mountain officially eight-and-a-half thousand, the stone cliffs that towered over the town were pushing four thousand feet. But its fortress was a lie. The climber braving those crags would be crestfallen to discover that the mountain was all bravado and had been tamed several times over.
Not only did the railroad run right through its guts, but its gentler western flanks were blanketed with ski trails and restaurants, hiding from the town as though Silver might notice the mountain had gone soft and lose its temper.
