Barbara Nickless - Blood on the Tracks

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously.

Text copyright 2016 by Barbara Nickless

All rights reserved.

No part of this work may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

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ISBN-10: 1503936864

ISBN-13: 9781503936867

Cover design by Christian Fuenfhausen Design

For Steve, Kyle, and Amanda.

And for Cathy, who was there the longest.

CONTENTS

THE BURNED MAN

His life wasnt worth spit in a hard rain.

For two weeks hed been camping under the 7th Street Bridge, smoking and dozing next to the slow roll of the Los Angeles River. Through the misery of dry-heat days and blue-neon nights, he listened to the roar of traffic overhead and wondered how a man could shed the perilous weight of memory.

Time and again, he imagined climbing the crumbling pylons of the bridge, folding his uniform neatly over the rail, and stepping naked onto the highway to let that roar take him down.

After fifteen days, and with his mind made up, he was standing on the bridge when his phone rang. His woman, calling from Denver.

I miss you, Tucker. Please come home.

I cant, he said. Bad has filled every part of me. There aint room for nothing else.

Please, Tucker. I love you. Ive thought about what you said. Ive thought about nothing else. A pause, while the sound of her breath filled his ear. I will marry you.

Her words fell on him like rain, coming down sweet and clean, washing away the dust devils of Iraq. He ran his hands over the remains of his face and felt the memory of her fingers there from when shed last touched him. He realized, to his surprise, that even constant pain left room for love.

Im coming, he told her. A week, Ill be there.

A week, she said, Ill be done with everything else.

He backed away from the road, packed all he owned into his ruck, and thumbed his way to the rail yard.

Hopping trains was brutal. A split second of distraction or carelessness or just pure bad luck could cost you your fingers or hands, a leg or your life. You could be arrested, jailed, beaten, robbed. Murdered as you slept, your body tossed into a ravine somewhere between nowhere and nohow.

Worse for the Burned Man: everywhere he went he took his face, a haunted-house mask that never came off no matter how many surgeries they gave him in the burn unit at Brooke Army Medical. A face not even a mother could love, as his mother had proved when shed up and left, the door of the ICU slamming closed behind her, somewhere between his sixth surgery and the tenth.

But his woman loved him.

Loved him even with this face. Loved him even when he called her dumb and crazy and all the other shit hed thrown at her when she said she loved him still, loved him before the war and loved him after, even with all that the war had done to him. He told her it was pity, not love, and you damn sure couldnt make a life out of pity. Shed pushed right back, telling him now he was being the stupid one, tossing away love like they sang about on the radio.

Look at me, hed yelled, shoving his face into hers. Look at what I am!

But shed only raised her fingers to the ruins of him, pressed her palms against the ravines and overhangs and gullies that mapped out his face and said she cherished his new geography. That was the word shed used cherished . The hills and furrows of his body were as close to traveling as she was likely to get, she said, and as far as she had a care to go.

Come home soon, shed said the last time hed run off.

The Burned Man had never been one for staying put. Even before the war hed been riding trains, putting out his thumb on highways, working whatever crew would take him this way and that. After the war it got worsethe ghosts more shrill, the demons unrelenting.

But maybe it was finally time to float down and let the world reclaim him. If he didnt grab hold of this woman, he would drift away in a delirium of grief and rage until he ended up back under the 7th Street Bridge.

Then standing on top of it, waiting for that roar to take him down.

So the morning after she called, in a predawn blue flecked with stars, he caught out. He went north in a boxcar to the cold fog of Olympia and the long rolling call of the ocean, took a gondola carrying steel pipe across the pine-choked wilds of Montana, and finally into Wyoming, where he jumped aboard a coal train clattering south toward Denver and the warmth of his woman.

He spent the Wyoming days crouched between the hoppers so that the wind was in his teeth and his eyes burned with cinders, then roughshodding over miles of ballast looking for unwatched locomotives in which to pass the nights. The wide land brought him some peace, hinted that maybe God was around after all, buried deep in the details and ready to let him be. Maybe God no longer kept a ledger against him of dead friends and dead Iraqis, no longer wanted to punish him with a face that opened a door to the dead every time he looked in the mirror.

Smack between Shawnee Junction and Wolf, sitting solo in a snowy hobo camp, he ran into some trouble. He usually didsome skinhead tramp taking exception to his face. But he managed okay; a few bruises, one long scrape. Pain, as his sergeant had said, was weakness leaving the body. Hed given the other guy a fair dose of it.

In Cheyenne he got a tattoo on his upper arm, on a piece of flesh as smooth as a babys skin. Hed been drinking with a repair crew on the north line, and when he talked about his face and the constant hassle, an old German told him if he had a tattoo of a double lightning bolt no one would mess with him.

Face like that, you dont need to do a damn thing, the German said as they sat on a dead tree trunk pulled up next to the campfire. They give you any grief, you let em see the tat. Itll send em off, tail tucked.

Dont this mean I killed someone?

You did, right? In the war?

The Burned Man looked away, out into a darkness shot through with trailing embers. Yeah.

So there you be.

What if I run into a real banger?

The German spit a long stream of tobacco into the fire. Youre white. Youre a vet. You look like the devil threw you onto his personal bonfire. Youll be good.

That night the Burned Man dreamed that roots grew from his feet, going deep into the earth, and his hands reached toward the sky like saplings. It was him, growing up and growing old alongside his woman.

By the time he got to Denver, his heart was swept clean. He washed up and changed into his uniform in a gas station bathroom, walked to 38th Avenue, then stuck out his thumb and caught a ride north on Pecos with a guy on a milk run. In exchange for the lift, the Burned Man helped deliver the bottles, leaving the milk on narrow stoops while on the other side of walls, radios clicked on with morning shows and dogs scratched at doors. In the driveways, SUVs and minivans lumbered out of the dark, perspiring frost. A man drove a rumbling pickup down the street, a boy tossing newspapers from the bed.

The Burned Man looked at all this and thought maybe he could have it, too.