BOXCAR

She made him forget the fate of all beautiful things. He sits curled up in a ball in utter darkness in an empty boxcar, fondling the edges of a tattered photo in his coat pocket, his last image of her, with little edges protruding beyond the pages of a novel he could never seem to finish; The Plague, by Camus. The Plague had safely protected her for almost two years. Strangers might have thought the photo was just a bookmark, like he was halfway through a good piece of literature, one of those little novels that weigh more than they should, but he could never actually read it for more than an hour before the gloom and the impending darkness overwhelmed him.

Joshua Callum Cavanaugh flicks the edge of this photo, and smiles gently in a fuzzy memory of a peaceful evening that they once enjoyed together somewhere far away. He shivers in the darkness of the empty boxcar as it creaks and rattles westward. Hundreds of old steel wheels on a Union Pacific freight train, screeching at full speed along the steel rails, forming an unrelenting roar, mixing into a clunking rhythm that has remained constant since the train had slowed down for a few minutes around midnight to pass through a sleeping town, somewhere in the vast high plains of the Texas Panhandle.

Eyes wide open, pupils open and hungry for the pain and joy of it all, waiting, he yearns to engage that which no soul can thwart, and thus it begins—another ray of light, a pulsing signal, an ebullient rush of liquid, mercury-like white beams shooting through crevices, illuminating motes of glistening dust, floating galaxies, as the train roars westward through the storm. Some beams of light are fierce, coming from sources that are bright and close to the tracks, forming vivid shards of light that suddenly stab bright shafts across the empty space, a pinhole supernova. Arcs of light cut through the boxcar, sweeping forward. Other beams move slowly, coming from sources far away, lights left on like beacons for lost dreams, perhaps a dim porch light on a remote ranch house, and these softer rays of dim light move serenely, reassuringly, through the interior of the boxcar.

Three massive engines pull the long train, punching a hole through the fierce wall of low pressure that has blown arctic air all the way from the Bering Straight onto the Texas plains. Frigid cold makes sleep impossible. A tremor rises in his spine and he pulls his knees closer to his chest, hoping to save heat. Hunger makes being awake uncomfortable. No snacks, he reaches into his backpack to find a plastic bottle of water, the same one he has been refilling for over a week, slushy with ice, and he savors the flow of cold liquid that he took from a faucet behind a grain silo a few hours earlier in a fading prairie town. His mind drifts to her again; to her he descends in the darkness, until he reaches and holds her soft, intuitive hand in a dimly lit bar far away, listening to soft piano, inhaling her, watching the glow of a candle in her eyes.

He strokes his long beard and fondles hard beads of ice frozen onto the hair. Oblivious, detached, without flinching, he slowly pulls one away, yanking the hair out by the root. He wipes his lips with a black cotton glove that has the fingertips cut off. He has been shivering since yesterday afternoon, when dusk subsided to the darkness. The train keeps moving, clunking along, and the rhythmic sound of the railroad ties lulls him in and out of sleepy trances. He becomes alert for a moment, adjusts the hood of his coat over most of his face and watches another group of lasers sweeping through the boxcar. The train jostles him, a steady rocking motion, and his head falls back against the wall and his mouth falls slightly open.

In the hour before dawn, a weary comfort finally settles over him as he thinks of her, of the way she made him feel, and the way her hands understood him. He sniffs the frigid air until his lungs are full and his nose burns, and he ponders the faint scent of old wood and metal and a thousand untold cargos, come and gone. Too exhausted to sleep, his eyes barely open, he notices something at the opposite end of the boxcar. He blinks, taking another deep breath, trying to sharpen his senses, reassuring himself that he has seen the boxcar full of light several times throughout the night, and that it has been completely empty, but still, he squints, sure that he sees something on the floor: a dark silhouette of a man.

The train runs full speed. The sleep falls out of his ears and the sound of the track rises to a roar. A fierce laser slices into the boxcar. A ringing bell at a roadside crossing tolls intrusively and he twitches, frightened, feeling his heart pounding in his chest, and he sees the dark image of a limp body surrounded by a crimson pool of steaming liquid, the darker blood that comes from mortal wounds.

Panic strikes him in a jolt and he moans in horror. The dead body jostles with the motion of the train, as if it is still warm, still soft and fresh, still immune to rigor mortis. A leg and an arm are severed from the torso, a few feet away. Mangled meat and tendons and arteries dangle from the open wounds in an oozing pool of blood, a myriad of limp tentacles and tendons, severed veins and ligaments, their complexity denying any hope of reattachment. Limbs once united in one delicate miracle, now irrevocably torn; a finger on the severed hand moves.

He crawls forward cautiously, but freezes, halfway to the body, motionless, blinking, disbelieving. He looks closely; close enough to recognize the uniform, the equipment. He tries to see the face, trying to see who it is, when he realizes what is happening. His left hand comes up slowly, reaching forward as he begins to weep.

In a flash, the body is gone and he screams in anger. He scurries on hands and knees quickly across the floor of the boxcar, to the spot where he is sure he saw the body, and he slowly sweeps his fingertips where he had seen a dark pool of blood, then slowly, the same fingers moved to his cheek, now wet.

"Am I ..?"

His eyes flash wide open. He uncurls himself from the wall and rolls onto his hands and knees, then stands up slowly, pushing himself up off a knee, stretching the stiffness from his cold back like an old man. His eyes search in the flickering light that penetrates the darkness.

Soft gray light now illuminates the crevices and the warm steam of his breath rolls out in the freezing air. He feels his way along the wall till his fingers find the latch for the sliding door. He opens it a few feet. A rush of frigid air gushes into the empty boxcar and the dim light of dawn fills the spaces between all things with soft hues.

He casts a cynical glance backward to the place where he had seen the corpse, knowing that there will be no evidence, squinting to keep dust out of his eyes, expecting no clues, nothing but a vivid memory that will, like all memories, succumb to the erosive forces of time. He inhales, recovering his reason, while sorrow reverberates like an echo pealing through a narrow valley, and he shakes his head as his eyes seek meaning along the sharpening images on the distant horizon. He pulls the last cigarette out of a pack of Camels, tosses the empty pack aside, snaps out a silver Zippo and lights up, sucking that first hit deeply.

He taps his pocket to feel his flask bottle of Jim Beam in a paper bag and he pulls it out and holds it up for inspection. Only two fingers, he frowns; he's been drinking a couple of these everyday since China, just to dull the noise. He turns the bottle up, swallows the sharp liquid in two big gulps, closing his eyes while the edge softens, the noise recedes, holding the bottle in his hand like a grenade with the pin out, ready to throw death into oblivion, but then, as the whiskey burns down and warms his chest, his eyes clear up and he is taken by the uncorrupted purity of the vast rolling plains. He slides the empty bottle into his pocket.

The train slows and creeps quietly into a small town. He jabs a hand numbed by the coldness into the pocket of his faded blue jeans, pulls out his wad of cash for inspection; ninety four bucks, twelve cents, and then digs two more coins out the mysterious mini-pocket above his right pocket: one from mainland China, one from Venezuela, mementos which—like The Plague—weigh more than they should. Both coins are still in shiny mint condition.

Leaning against the door, he peers out to see the full length of the long train in a gentle curve, slowly approaching the sleeping town. He observes the outskirts, wondering if he should stop for a couple weeks to work an odd job. He sits down and dangles his feet out the open door, waiting for the inspiration to jump, looking into the modest wooden homes for signs of warmth, passing the unmarked graves of swarms of painted warriors from once vibrant tribes.

A tribe of Mescalero once roamed these plains. He remembered earning an `A' on a paper in high school about these warriors, boldly galloping over the wide open vistas atop powerful steeds, foreign creatures imported by the Spaniards that allowed them to extend their natural boundaries, hunt buffalo from afar, wage war and steal little girls from other tribes that they might have otherwise ignored.

He stares at these two coins in his right palm, wondering for a moment if the Mescaleros even had pockets on their pants. He rubs one of the coins, feeling the rigid lines of the freshly stamped images, still vivid, the faces of sanctioned heroes, images still sharp and focused and unchallenged by time.

He closes his eyes and falls again into memories that move with a steady momentum, like the train, formed by habits, creating expectations, channeling energy, cutting deep rivers through which flow the most mysterious chemicals; impassioned feelings become ideas become principles become beliefs as unshakable, as tangible, as implicit as gravity. Chemicals and emotions, paths cut into the fresh soul in youth, the fertile ground, trenches unformed, until a flow of feelings tills deep rows that capture ideas like sediments, nestling in the crevices of convoluted gray matter, and Josh Cavanaugh longs to be new, a new soul, blank, fertile terrain untilled, a land of gently shifting streams, to be reborn benign and placid, to shed the weight of years and hardened perceptions. He starts picking out memories of her that he wants to save, special moments, yearning to protect them from time, from the corruption, recalling her beauty, and he fights to sharpen the fading of the edges, resisting the slow erosion of memories that presages rebirth and exoneration.

He knows he's losing it. It's all slipping away. He will need to focus to keep the images vivid over time, a long time, for the rest of a lifetime, otherwise the same phenomenon that allows the healthy mind to slowly become new and move away from darkness will cause the loss of memories that he treasures. So he picks a particular image, then closes his eyes, and like an artist, he sharpens a blurred edge, brightens a fading hue, remembers a certain color of a wall in their favorite restaurant, or a dress, or the red fingernail polish on her long fingers as she stroked his cock in the back of a taxi, the brine aroma of life on the back of her hand, mixing with her perfume, her sweat, ancient streets wafting through a open window, her warm breath when she whispered absolution into his weary heart, then he fixates for a moment on a reflection of moonlight in her hair, and he inhales the fragrances of places far away. He makes vivid each of his senses, sharpening the fading edges, until once again, the image is restored; like it happened a mere moment ago.

Coming back, he opens his eyes and slowly lifts his palm so that the coins reflect light from the sky. He rubs his right index finger with his thumb, rubbing scarred skin, scarred as if he dipped the finger into acid and the skin had slightly melted, and he notices that some sensation is returning to the once dead appendage, and the fingernail seems to be growing a little healthier; an injury once deemed permanent, slowly healing.

The train slows and he pulls The Plague out of his coat pocket and extracts the decaying photo; he stares at her image and takes a deep breath. A trace of a forlorn smile warms his ice blue eyes. He pockets the slim paperback, sucks a deep hit, flicks it away, ties his dark shoulder-length hair back in a single pony tail, lifts the hood on his jacket, then grabs his backpack and jumps out of the rolling boxcar, and he nearly trips and falls and blurts out, "shit" and then begins walking.

The train rolls toward an empty horizon; silence envelops him. He squats down and places the coins on the shiny steel rail, like he did when he was a boy, and watches the caboose on the train as it departs slowly to the west. He is watching the caboose when he smells coffee and eggs and bacon cooking somewhere upwind, and he lifts his nose up into a gentle breeze, suddenly famished. The aroma of a southern breakfast mixes with the pungent odor of pine tar from the railroad ties, and kneeling between the shiny rails of the tracks that stretch across the full breadth of the miracle, he wonders: how did I become this? How did I get here, of all places? He adjusts the coins atop the rail, heads up, then stands up slowly and walks toward breakfast in the frigid wind.

PROSCHEMATA

That For Which They Fought

The Cold War was ending without a single celebration. No victory marches through ornate arches. No ticker tape for the triumphant. No treaties imposing excruciating remunerations. Walls simply withered. Estranged peoples hammered and chiseled their way through a veneer of enmity, and two young men, both of whom had come of age in America in the final days of this unpleasantness, both wearing cool shades, one with light brown hair, the other glowing blond, drove down a rural road along the coast of the Florida panhandle in a convertible 1967 GTO Coupe. The big engine purred deeply at seventy-five miles an hour. Patches of brown bondo on dull green paint gave the square-nosed car the look of a battle-tested military vehicle dressed in camouflage. Top down, the late afternoon sun fell toward the horizon in a cloudless, blue-orange sky.

Joshua Callum Cavanaugh drove the Goat. Thomas Eugene Clay sat in low repose in the passenger seat, his head swaying against the headrest, feeling the Floridian sunshine on his face. Joshua flipped a cassette tape and Money, by Pink Floyd, exploded to life. A song's worth of road passed without words and Josh slowly turned down the volume before another could begin.

"So, Tommy, why'd you join the Navy?" He spoke with the tone of a young man with an untested heart.

"The uniforms, no doubt—the best uniforms."

"No, really."

Tommy slowly rolled his head to the left to frown at Josh. "Are you serious, man? Why does anyone join any military? Jeez! Don't do this to me."

"Yeah! Why?" Joshua repeated.

"Really?" Tommy paused, slowly lifting his head away from the headrest, staring straight ahead at the empty stretch of highway. "Well, I loved flying when I was a kid, but I've never been a joiner, so I took a different approach after my junior year in college, when I realized I was being recruited to kill people; that an aircraft was nothing more than an over-glorified weapon. It's really nothing more than a glorified cross bow or a sword or a pistol."

Josh took his eyes off the road long enough to cast a bemused glance over at Tommy. "A sword? You see the sleek lines on an F-18 Hornet and you think, hey, this is no different than a sword?"

"Yeah, so I really took a knife to my patriotism ...

"Or a sword!" Josh chuckled.

"Ha, muy bueno! Yeah, so I took a machete to my patriotism."

"How about a chainsaw?" Josh interrupted.

"Hey! You want my fucking answer or not?" Tommy scowled.

"Fine, so you took some sort of instrument with a sharp edge, and then what?"

Tommy glared at Josh for a moment, then retraced his thoughts. "So I took this edged, intellectual weapon," he shook his head proudly, "and I started to cut away some fat, and for a while, I was pretty concerned, since there is so much bullshit going on in our political system that I nearly changed my mind. Really, don't get me started, but one day, while I was hacking the fat off of this naïve idea of patriotism that we're all spoon-fed when we're children, I felt something solid. I got to a point where I couldn't hack anymore off. I reached a sort of critical mass, beyond which some of the ideas couldn't be reduced. I mean, I didn't run out and the join those faggy university socialists or anything, but I read the strongest criticisms, honestly, and I hung-out with the people who call themselves liberals, listened carefully, opened my eyes, and I got to a point where I was confronted with my own beliefs, and I do believe in something."