The text message was from an unknown number, accompanied by a red-pinned beige nowhere: Care to rendezvous with your old tramp pal? I’ll be there in two days. Will responded, to confirm that it was Monty, though it could be nobody else, only to receive a terse: He gone. When he dialed the number it went straight to the voicemail of someone named Deb. Will pulled to the shoulder when his phone told him he had arrived at the pushpin’s location, a railroad siding outside of town. All was still, shimmering in the summer heat, as though reluctant to break a sweat.

“Where are we, Daddy?” Sam asked from the backseat, craning her neck to look up at the ashy haze that hung over everything.

“On an adventure,” Will answered.

The girls—five-year-old Samantha and three-year-old Vivian—looked in vain for signs of an impending adventure among the train cars. The road along which the train siding ran was little used, and there was nothing to stop them walking up the steep berm and out amongst the snaking tracks. Blackberries grew alongside in an untamed snarl, the vines thick, sagging from the weight of the ripe fruit. He gave the girls empty yogurt containers and they shuffled towards the bushes as though joined at the shoulder, chirping and pecking at one another like birds, unwilling to allow any space between them.

A few minutes later a man carrying an enormous backpack ambled around the back of a boxcar carrying what Will was sure was a knife. For a brief moment he thought he had gotten it all wrong—that this man was not Monty at all, but someone else, a madman. He stepped over to the girls and laid a hand on each of them. He was struck, painfully and not for the first time, by how slender and small they were. How easy it would be–just the twist of the wrist–to snap their collarbones.

Recognition clicked in. It was Monty after all.

His hair looked to have been cut with a dull knife without regard to length, in places right to his pale scalp. His clothes had been similarly modified, all black and brown denim hacked off in odd places. It wasn’t until he raised his knife and slashed at the crimson wall of a boxcar that Will realized that the knife was not a knife at all, but some sort of white marker.

“You’re hurting me, Daddy,” Viv said.

Will released his grip. The girls shrugged their shoulders restlessly and huddled in his shadow, fingers, mouths, and shirts stained purple.

“Is that Uncle Monty?” Viv scratched her cheek, leaving behind a ruby streak of blackberry juice.

“That looks like blood,” Sam said, turning to her sister and giggling. “You’re all bloody.”

Viv looked up at her father, confused, checking herself for cuts. Sam reached into Viv’s tub and plucked out a berry while the younger girl was distracted.

“You’re fine,” he told her, then, to Sam: “Stop it.”

Monty was still about 50 feet down the line, moving slowly and examining the markings on the boxcars, but he looked up at the sound of their voices. Smiled, waved, and approached, his gait rapid and stuttering.

“Girls, this is your Uncle Monty.”

Monty squatted and waved at them. Sam offered him a blank stare. Viv hid behind Will’s legs.

“They’ll warm up,” Will said. “How was the ride?”

“Not bad. Hazy.” Monty squinted up into the sky.

Will explained about the wildfires burning in British Columbia, the smoke blowing down.

 “Might cause a delay,” Monty said. “There’s a lady up in Vancouver I’m supposed to see, but there’s no hurry. She’s pretty stuck these days. Like most people.” Will, who had assumed that this was Monty’s destination, not a waypoint on a longer journey, nodded to hide his disappointment.

The girls were arguing. Sam had laid hold of her sister’s tub and Viv was pulling back, shouting. The thin plastic container’s mouth flexed into a surprised oval. Sam smirked and released her grip, sending Viv tumbling backwards into the brambles and spilling the berries. It took ten minutes to extract her, during which Sam stood by, watching with an empty expression on her face, one hand thrust up the back of her shirt to expose her pale belly. Viv emerged sobbing and covered in raking scratches. They loaded into the car and pulled away without speaking, the two adults and older child listening to Viv’s crying. Monty darted furtive looks at Sam through the rearview mirror, a vague smile on his face.

“You smell funny,” Sam said, pinching her nose shut as she stared back at Monty through the mirror. “You smell like burned farts.” Monty raised his eyebrows in mock horror and Viv stopped crying abruptly.

Will looked back at Sam. “That’s a very rude thing to say.”

“But—”

“We’re going home. It’s time for dinner.”

The family business was apples, grown on a large orchard near Wenatchee. Will, an only child, was in line to take over after school, the natural culmination of his journey into manhood: the stoic tolerance of interminable waves of work to round the sharp edges of his personality until he resembled all the other men. So it shocked everyone—his father in particular—when Will announced his decision to eschew the traditional agrarian state schools in favor of Fairhaven College, a small liberal arts institution that offered him a small scholarship. “What can those hippies teach you?” his father had asked, frowning at the Fairhaven brochure through his reading glasses.

The school was, as expected, crowded with hippies. Monty, Will’s assigned dormitory roommate, was from California, somewhere north of San Francisco. He dressed in ratty clothing, giving an impression of poverty that Will soon discovered was completely contrived. Monty’s mother was wealthy and kept him flush with pocket money most of the time, though he was disdainful of currency, his mouth curling at the edges whenever he pulled the unkempt wad of bills from his pocket. Will found this attitude towards money off-putting, too close to matching his father’s description of aloof, oblivious city folk. Yet this particular peculiarity was of small consequence when stacked against the full measure of Monty’s strangeness which, on balance, Will found intoxicating. Monty was industrious, curious, and creative, willing to devote, without a shred of guilt, entire days to his sketchbook or a rambling excursion. He seemed untroubled by the prospect of life after college. His future, unlike Will’s, did not shimmer with the vague but irrefutable promise of duty.

Neither of them were much taken with the brand of revelry practiced in the dormitory. When the racket in the adjoining rooms became too much, they would go on a long walk without destination. Over time, these walks became longer and longer. They walked the Lummi Reservation and caught rides with fishermen out to the islands. They bushwacked up the Nooksack River until the way became impassable. They tramped down neglected game trails that ran through the county’s dairy farms, ducking behind windbreaks to avoid encounters with the shiny pickups that patrolled the perimeters. They spoke very little on these excursions, and Will felt as though he and Monty were searching for something very important. He was not sure exactly what it was. But that did not matter. What mattered was that something was missing from the world, something that very few people noticed, and to seek it out was noble and exciting. At times they walked straight through the night. Will loved nothing more than the sight of dawn’s light leaking into the sky after a night’s tramping.

On the way back to school they would stop at Quimby’s, an all-night diner on the waterfront that catered to the odd hours and customs of the local fishermen. Monty bought enormous amounts of fried seafood which they ate in silence, smelling the fishermen’s cigarettes and fryer grease. Once Monty revealed, after the shriveled waitress dropped the check on their table, that he had no money. “Ma cut me off,” he said, shrugging. “Said I needed to learn to fend for myself. Can you cover it?” Will, penniless, began to panic, but Monty just chuckled and approached the waitress who, through a blue cloud of Camel smoke, took down Monty’s name and copied his ID for an IOU. Monty seemed unfazed by the experience, but Will left Quimby’s shaken, and secreted two precious twenty dollar bills under the insole of his sneaker before their next walk.

Often they ended up on the train tracks that ran along the bay south of town and disappeared into a tunnel. The headland through which the tunnel cut was so rugged that there was no way to continue along the shore: it was either through the tunnel, or back the way they had come. They risked a few short forays into the opening at first, examining the graffiti-lined walls. Monty always wanted to push a little further, and even spoke of traveling the tunnel’s full length, which he calculated at less than a mile. Over time Monty’s urging grew more insistent, and Will, fearful that his reluctance was rooted not in prudence but in simple cowardice, ground his teeth and tried to show a gameness he did not feel. At some point, he knew, it would become necessary to abandon himself to the tunnel’s dangers, to brave its darkened recesses. But he had not yet steeled himself for that enterprise by the night that it mattered.

It was after two in the morning, a time at which Monty seemed accustomed to being awake but always sent Will into a low-grade delirium. The world lost its sharp edges and he lost his capacity to speak, or even think in any focused way. But he could walk, and it was a great night for walking: late winter, the ground firm and desiccated. They traveled in companionable silence through a light drizzle that left a downy sheen on their clothing. They passed through campus, the red-bricked thoroughfare quiet and still, save the fountain in the square that frothed with a composed frivolity. They avoided the bars with their spheres of light and noise, passing down alleys and along the streets of darkened shops. Monty placed stickers on newspaper boxes, lamp posts, trash cans. The stickers were of his own design, postal labels washed in brown ink and inscribed with ragged pink letters, and all bore the same message:

God Bless You Mr. Mindfuck.

Monty waved irritably when Will asked who Mr. Mindfuck was. “They’re all mindfuckers. Everyone coming here thinks there’s a special magical little place reserved just for them, and all the teachers basically say, ‘yep, it’s true! You’re meant for great things!’”

Will listened, silent and pensive. He thought of his father, tending the orchards. These weren’t the words he would have used, but the old man would agree with the sentiment—that Will’s generation was too eager to move away, to abdicate the place carved out for them.

At the edge of downtown the streets rolled to the water and the rail line. They rounded a curve and saw a train stopped on the tracks, trembling like an enormous frightened animal. Monty stopped to observe the markings on the cars. He took out a small disposable camera and snapped a photo of a bearded cowboy in profile.

“The colossus,” Monty said.

“Who?”

“The Colossus of Roads. Last king of the train hobos.”

The train lay half-in, half-out of the tunnel, a worm burrowing into the earth.

“I’m taking it.” Monty wore an expression of startled realization, as though the decision had been made by someone else. He was breathing fast and shallow.

“You’re taking what?”

“This train.” Monty climbed the access ladder and over the lip of an empty car designed to carry shipping containers. “Come on,” Monty said.

Will laughed, for he still had a scrap of hope that it was just a game, that Monty would climb down and they would walk back to the dorms like they always did.

“Where are we going?” Will asked. But he did not reach out for the ladder.

“I have no idea. That’s the fucking point, Will.” Monty’s eyes rolled in his head and he ran his hands over the stacker car’s patina of flaked yellow paint and rust. A series of shudders ran through the train and it began, slowly, to roll. Will walked alongside as it accelerated.

“Last chance, Will.”

But Will would only take a few stumbling steps, and made no move to reach for the handrail. There was not even time to say anything further before the speed of the train carried Monty off into the tunnel’s blackness. The train was still accelerating gradually and for a brief moment Will considered a berserk lunge, to try and catch hold of a ladder and climb on while it was moving, but immediately thought better of it and stepped down onto the narrow strip of beach, where he sat on a length of driftwood and watched the train go. It seemed to take a long time.

Will continued to take daily walks in Monty’s absence. But they became shorter, painting a shrinking circle that spiraled closer and closer to the campus until one day he did not set out at all. Will retreated into his studies, leaving his room only to attend classes, eat, or visit the library, ruminating endlessly on a singular question: what would have happened if he’d followed Monty onto that train?

Then he met Wendy.

Wendy was two years older than Will, a junior transfer to the university, and they ended up in a media literacy seminar together. They never spoke. He always sat a row behind her and a bit to the side, where he could look at her out of the corner of his eye. He memorized the curve of her strong jaw, the soft down running along it that could only be seen in a certain light, her pale blue eyes and thick black hair, always up in a careless bun. One day, towards the end of the term, she arrived with her hair down. It was longer than he’d realized—long enough to hide her jaw, a curtain drawn across his customary view. He spent the class in a mild state of panic. She was preoccupied with her bag as she stepped from the classroom and would have walked past him had he not reached out a hand. She stopped, startled, and Will discovered that he had never looked her full in the face. She was far more beautiful than he’d realized. He started and aborted several sentences as she stood patiently, her gaze shifting between his face and the polished concrete floor. It was as though they both understood there was something shy and precious inside Will’s mind and that, if they were willing to wait for a few awkward moments, it would reveal itself.

When she graduated, Wendy decided to stay in Bellingham with Will. By the time he graduated the following spring, she was pregnant with Sam. They got married and moved to Tacoma, where Wendy’s parents lived and could help with the baby.

Will’s degree was in the Political Economy of Urban Cooperatives, a major he had designed himself and failed to parlay into anything resembling regular employment. There were the occasional contracts to write product descriptions for online retailers, but the work was intermittent and paid poorly. Wendy, a broker, made the real money. Will stayed home with the girls and tinkered with a permit application to build a community garden on the eroded, weed-choked banks of the Puyallup River.

Wendy had dinner ready by the time Will and Monty arrived home with the girls. Immediately afterward Wendy, with Viv on her hip, stood at the bottom of the stairs and announced that she and the girls were going to bed.

“But it’s early,” Will protested.

Wendy clapped her hands.

“Come on, girls.”

Sam, on the floor, scowled and began to kick the wall in protest. “I don’t want to!”

Will walked over and bent to kiss Wendy. She seemed not to notice.

“Sam. Stop it.”

Sam looked up at her mother and kicked the wall again. Wendy strode over, grabbed Sam by the ankle, and began dragging her towards the stairs. Sam grabbed hold of a chair leg and shrieked.

“I’m not!”

Will cast a brief, appraising glance at Wendy as she ascended, dragging Sam backwards. The curve of her ass elicited a small flicker of arousal, which was doused entirely when he noticed Viv looking back at him, her face slack, glazed. She gave a wet belch and slapped Wendy’s arm.

He sighed, shrugged at Monty, and gestured toward the door.

Outside Will split a few pieces of wood and kindled a small blaze, watching carefully as the embers leapt into the dead August grass. He poured out whiskey. They sat and talked of their time together in Bellingham, though the conversation quickly foundered, for though the details of that time were etched vividly in Will’s mind, the truth was they had spent only a handful of months together. Strange, he thought, how such a short time period could hold so firmly to his imagination.

“It was the start of my life as a train hobo,” Monty said, when the conversation turned to their last night together: the tracks, the train, the sudden and violent separation. “Course it’s not for everyone—not for most, actually. I’ve been thrown off trains. Chased by dogs. Slept in jails. Most of the old timers are hanging it up. Too risky, all the extra security since 9-11. Cameras installed on the suspension bridges, all kinds of shit. Truth is? Think the day is coming when I put roots down somewhere. Maybe Eugene. Not too wet, good trainyard. Shit, might even try to get a job with Burlington Northern. The Colossus was a yardman, you know that? That’s how he got up so much, walking the lines. But there aren’t many jobs left. Born out of my time, I guess.” He sighed. “I’d have made a good brakeman, though.”

“Brakeman?”

The fire’s smoke drifted into Monty’s face and he craned away, eyes screwed shut as he answered.

“Back in the day each car had its own brakes, controlled from the top of the train. The brakeman’s job was to climb along, car to car, adjusting. During the winter, when the cars froze, brakemen would just fly right off. Then they invented air brakes. And…” Monty’s eyes popped open, and he slapped his palms together. “Wham! That was the end of it. The modern brakeman doesn’t do any braking at all. Just grunts around, throwing switches.” He took a small sip of whiskey and spat it into the flames. “It’s a bitch job now.”

The moon rose. Will tended the fire carefully, on account of the burn ban.

“Listen,” Monty said.

“I’m listening, brother.” The night was warm and Will could taste the ash from the forest fires; it filled the cracks in his teeth and clung to the hairs on his arms. A mournful whistling wafted up the hill.

“We aren’t that far from the yard, are we?”

“Well, that siding where I found you is clear across town, it’s not even really in town at all, but down—”

“Not there. Right down the hill. There’s a yard down there, a proper yard. I can hear them calling.”

Will thought of Wendy, asleep on her side, curled up at the edge of the bed. She would have kicked the blankets off against the heat. If she hadn’t already, at some point she would wake and notice he hadn’t come to bed. She never slept soundly when he was out. The idea set his teeth on edge.

“I can’t drive,” he said, and Monty, who was removing things from his bag and stuffing them into his pockets, shook his head and laughed.

“Who said anything about driving?”

Will felt buoyant, as though a dreamy fog had gathered around his brain. Every thought emerged concealed in a thin film, like the ash accumulating on the ground and the roofs of cars. One such thought struck when they were halfway down the hill: his phone, resting on the kitchen counter. He had glanced at it while putting on his coat, yet somehow it had not made its way into his pocket.

As they approached the yard the whistling swelled, shrill blasts accompanied by a great clanging and crashing as the engineers bucked the cars together. A single, powerful streetlight poured garish light on a gatehouse, the guard within, and the asphalt surrounding it. Entry and egress to the yard was controlled by the gatehouse’s cantilevering arm. Nothing transpired during the ten minutes they stood a short distance away, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes cut with hash that Monty continually produced from some inner recess in his clothing. Will swayed like a breeze-blown sapling. Now that they had arrived, the idea of going into the trainyard terrified him.

Monty murmured skeptically and struck out again, paralleling the yard’s tall, barbed wire-topped fence. They walked the street for a quarter mile before Monty found what he sought: a curled back corner of chain link. He clamored through and Will followed. They climbed up and over a coupling into the space between two trains, a space simultaneously confining and limitless. Roughly ten feet separated the two sets of cars, though the narrow notch of gravel extended indeterminably in both directions. Will felt for a moment as though time had collapsed, the last five years rolled up and discarded, and they had stepped straight into his static memories of Bellingham.

“Markal Paint Sticks,” Monty said, holding one up. “The best. Just need a little circumcision from time to time.” He peeled away the dried outer paint, worked the tip out until several white centimeters were exposed, and handed it to Will, who turned it over in his hands several times. It had flat sides, like an overlarge pencil. He gripped it in his hand and stepped up to a bare patch of steel without knowing what sort of mark he intended to make. He dragged the tip across the metal. The paint was soft and slid on easily. It felt good. His line swirled down in a spiral.

“The vortex. One of nature’s repeating patterns. The snail’s shell. The toilet bowl’s flush.” With practiced strokes Monty marked out a triangular flag, complete with a pair of flutters. Below it in boxy letters he wrote: Victor Vortex and the Brakeman of Monotony. “It’s just like with a crayon, how it wears down uneven. You get the best lines if you keep turning it to find the chiseled end.”

They moved slowly along the line, leaving marks on the cars and examining those left by others. Monty only ever drew the triangular flag, though each one received a custom caption.

Full Belly Foibles

Blue Eyed in the Red Room

Profits of Doom

A cascading crash ran through one of the trains and it groaned into motion. The narrow lane between the trains seemed to close in.

“It’s probably a good time for me to head home,” Will said.

Monty looked at him strangely.

“No, Will.” He gestured at the moving train. It had yet to gather any real speed. “Have you forgotten why you’re here?”

“What?” Will’s brain felt like porridge gone cold, stiffening by the minute. Shouldn’t have smoked that fucking hash. He was no longer able to enjoy the reckless delirium that had launched this nocturnal enterprise. From somewhere off in the night a whistle shrieked, a harbinger of tomorrow’s responsibilities.

“If you don’t do it tonight, you never will.”

Will closed his eyes. If there’s a second whistle I’ll go home, he told himself. But after counting to ten there was none, and before he could reconsider he laid hold of a boxcar ladder as it moved past him, dragging him forward and up and aboard.

A neutered, smoke-laden breeze kicked up into Will’s face as he sat looking down the length of the car. He fidgeted, trying to get comfortable, searching his memory for the exact moment when he lost the ability to release himself to the night. There did not seem to be one. It had been a gradual, imperceptible hardening into domesticity. He pictured his bedroom. Was Wendy still asleep? Or had she risen, gone to check on him, and noticed his absence? Had she discovered his phone, abandoned on the kitchen table?

As the urban hardscape of Tacoma gave way to woods, it occurred to Will that he had no idea which way the train was going. He frowned and looked out at the black forms of the trees. They frightened him. Perhaps it was the lightless nowhere of these particular trees–the knowledge that they were no proper forest, just a band of cellulose insulation buffering the rails from the towns beyond. He pictured Sam and Viv in their shared bed, arms thrown around one another. He almost stopped to look over his shoulder, as though he could see back to Tacoma, see his house, maybe even the upper window where Wendy was certainly awake, pacing, calling.

Monty handed Will another spliff. Will took one drag and handed it back, fearing the creep of anxiety brought on by the hash but enjoying the sensation of smoking. He asked Monty if he could roll a simple cigarette, without the hash, and spent the next ten minutes fumbling in the dark, finally producing a lumpy, L-shaped confection that he lit and puffed upon for several minutes before a gust of wind sucked the ember away.

The train passed over a river. Will looked down at the water, then out into the darkness. They were passing through a pasture of some sort, with lumps—hay bales, cows, Will couldn’t tell—scattered about. Then the trees abruptly closed up. Watching the trees whip by made him queasy. He turned to Monty, who sat with his legs splayed before him, unconcerned, a vague smile on his chapped lips.

“You know where this thing is going, right?”

Monty nodded. “North.”

Will squinted at the darkness. They seemed to have left the yard going east, and if there had been any course correction he had failed to notice it.

“You’re sure?”

At that moment a shudder ran through the cars.

“Why are we slowing down?” Will asked.

“We’re not,” Monty said, just as another shudder ran through the train, which decreased its speed again.

“We’re going up,” Will said. “Why are we going up?”

Monty frowned, rummaged in his pockets and withdrew a phone.

“You have a phone?” Will asked, incredulous.

Monty shrugged, brought its screen to life and began to fiddle with it. “Only for emergencies. I don’t give out the number.” He paused, then: “that can’t be right.”

On the screen, a blue dot pulsed from the center of an empty space. Monty zoomed out until they could see Tacoma, far to the west.

“We’re going east,” Will said. The air temperature had dropped precipitously, and he shivered. “Into the mountains.”

“Must have…” Monty trailed off, stabbed at the phone. “…coulda swore. Damn. No signal.”

“Where will it stop next?”

Monty was silent, grim-faced. Will could only laugh, a tight, despairing wheeze.

“Well, we are properly fucked now. We’re going over the pass. Could be in Idaho before we stop.”

Monty sat up straight and looked around, startled. “Idaho? I can’t go to Idaho. I’ve got places to be, man.” Monty’s voice was shrill and plaintive. He opened his mouth, closed it again and squinted at Will, as though seeing him for the first time. “How much money you got on you?”

“Zero.” Will, expecting his stomach to lurch at the discovery that he had not only left his phone behind, but his wallet as well, felt instead a flutter of excitement. “Not a dime.”

“Credit card?”

For a moment Will wanted to reach out and shake him, to pull him close and laugh into his face. But then he looked at Monty—gaunt, pale, shivering in the mountain air—and his anger turned to irritation.

“What’re you so worried about?” Will asked. “Isn’t this how it works? ‘Riding the world’ and all that? Didn’t you ride a train into Tacoma today?”

“Yeah. An Amtrak.”

“So how many freight trains have you actually ridden on?”

“A few… three or four. I thought for sure this was going North. Just up to Seattle, and we could hop right back and be home by morning. I’m sorry, man.” Monty hung his head and hugged himself. Within a few minutes he began to snore softly. Will felt himself fading too, despite the cold, when the train whistled, long and mournful. He opened his eyes to see the train climb into a narrow defile blasted into the rock. The train whistled again, and they were plunged into a complete, frigid darkness. A tunnel, Will realized. He climbed shakily to his feet and grasped the rung of a ladder. Without thinking he began to climb. At the top of the car he could sense, but not see, the tunnel roof, no more than a few feet above. Below Monty, awakened by the echoing racket, shouted something unintelligible. 

The train began to gather speed again and they burst out into the moonlight. The air was clearer on the east side of the mountains, free of smoke, and Will stayed there for a few minutes, head thrust above the top of the shipping container, looking at the Cascade foothills as they ran down into the valley below. Monty called out again. Will laughed. He crowed.

The yardman was waiting when they pulled into the Ellensburg yard, truck headlights shining between the cars as the train slowed to a stop. He pulled up alongside and called out.

“Come on down,” he said.

 “The vortex seems to have caught us,” Monty said, grinning through blue lips. The return to civilization seemed to have restored a bit of his jaunty humor. He offered a sloppy salute to the yardman, a boxy silhouette carved out of the headlights’ harsh glare.

The yardman grunted into a walkie-talkie and asked them for identification. As he did so he shifted slightly, giving Will a brief look at the man, his orange safety vest and leather work gloves, though his face remained cloaked in shadow beneath the brim of a ballcap. Will reached into his pocket. There, where his wallet would have been, he felt the paint stick and, without pausing to reconsider, stepped forward and plunged its waxy tip into the yardman’s eye. The man let out a shill shriek and dropped to the ground pawing at his violated socket. Monty squawked in surprise, pivoted in the gravel, and ran.

The yardman’s hat had fallen to the ground, and Will reached down to pick it up. He put it on, clamored over a coupling and began to jog along between the two lines of idling train cars, concealed by the shadows of the towering shipping containers. The corridor doglegged slowly to the left, and soon he was alone with his breathing. Monty was long gone. After a few minutes Will stopped to pant, rubbing the stitch in his side, and waited for the sounds that would signal a pursuit—sirens, shouting, barking—but heard nothing save the staccato calls of small birds. The birds seemed to be chiding one another in a manner that reminded him of his daughters. He stood and listened until the train cars’ silhouettes could be made out against the sky. There was a hollow feeling in his guts and a heaviness in his legs, but his mind had defogged. He was elated by the emptiness of his pockets. The corridor lost its menace in the predawn light and he set out along it, slowly, pausing from time to time to study the paint stick markings on the boxcars.