Adrian McKinty - Hidden River

“Yes,” John agreed.

“No difference,” I said again, and we drank our beers in agreement. Two people who couldn’t have been more wrong, since getting off the train at Fraser, Colorado, was to make all the difference in the world. Our fates weren’t taking us to California, to the Golden Gate Park, to Chinatown, to the airport and a ten-hour flight to Europe. No, the center of gravity in our story, the one dragging us like a black hole, was the one who had cast the first stone, the one who had killed Victoria Patawasti. We were going back to Denver, but we didn’t know it yet.

When Vishnu came to the Earth as a midget, he called himself Vamana. He stopped the demon Bali from destroying the planet. He tricked Bali with his diminutive size and sent him to the Underworld, telling him that appearances can be deceiving and that you should always watch out for the little guy.

I thought of this as John and I stared angrily at the midget. We weren’t upset at him. It wasn’t his fault that the ticket office had been closed, that a sign said “Buy rail tickets at the Continental Divide Saloon,” that the saloon was a quarter of a mile into the town of Fraser, that the Amtrak train was late leaving Denver and had to make up time by departing Fraser earlier than planned, that we had heard the air horn too late, and that the train had left without us.

The next westbound train was coming this time tomorrow but there was a train going to Chicago in half an hour, the man selling the tickets had explained. John and I had decided Chicago would do just fine without, of course, considering that the Chicago train would have to go back through Denver.

The midget had gotten off the train at Fraser too, but he hadn’t gone to the ticket office. Instead, he’d gone to a bar for a while and now he was standing a little down the platform from us. It made me a bit nervous.

Especially since the Chicago train was late.

It hadn’t come in half an hour. It hadn’t come in an hour.

It hadn’t come by midnight.

When you called up Amtrak’s toll-free number, an undead voice told you that the train was just arriving in Fraser. The voice had been claiming this for several hours….

Birds. The air. The moon so bright you could see vapor trails. The cold. Snow on the mountains circling the little half-assed ski town. The steel train tracks going nineteenth-century straight into the mountain.

John waxing philosophical:

“Waiting’s good for you. You notice things. You slow time down into its components. Too often we put our consciousness on cruise control. You autopilot your way through the day, the week, your existence in this world….”

Pop psychology from that motorcycle book, I imagined, but I wasn’t going to rise to the bait. It was very cold. You wouldn’t have thought it was the summer. Much chillier than those mountains behind Boulder.

I looked up the long platform. The midget was smoking. We had no smokes, I considered going up and asking him for one to keep out the cold.

“Look at all those stars,” John said.

He was annoying me and I purposely did not look up.

“I should have done astronomy. I should have gone to Oxford or Cambridge. I didn’t have the A levels. You had, Alex, you should have gone. But I suppose you needed to be near your ma.”

I gave him a look that he didn’t see.

“Terrible business, your ma. I was very close to her too, you know. You know, I agreed with their decision. Your da and ma,” John said.

Never a good time for this topic and especially not when John had bloody killed someone and I’d been shot at and the cops were after us and I hadn’t had a hit of heroin after a long, stressful day that still was not coming to a fucking end.

“What decision was that?” I said coldly.

“You know, not to do the chemotherapy,” John said almost breezily. I could have punched the bastard.

“You supported their embrace of death,” I said incredulously.

“Now, Alex, that’s not fair. Homeopathy could have worked, those alternative treatments are not nonsense, there’s more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy and all that. You’re awful hard on your dad, Alex. It was your ma’s decision too.”

John had no idea how close he was to having the shit beaten out of him. I was seething. This, he well knew, was a subject we did not ever talk about. This and my resignation from the cops, but more so this. Was he trying to provoke me into a fight to forget what had happened? Or was he just being stupid? My blood was boiling, and after all, this was all his fault. I bit my tongue and walked over to the midget.

Maybe, technically, he wasn’t a midget. If he’d been a woman, you would have said she was petite. He stood about five feet tall, with a beard, leather jacket, jeans, Denver Nuggets cap. Forties, I would have guessed.

“Couldn’t bum a smoke, could I?” I said.

“Certainly,” he said and handed over a pack of Marlboro Lights. I took one and lit mine from his.

“I don’t normally smoke, but it’s freezing,” I explained.

“Yeah, we’re nine thousand feet up, it makes a difference,” he said.

“Train’s late,” I said, drawing in the tobacco gratefully.

“Yeah, the California Zephyr’s late. The California Zephyr’s always late. It goes at forty miles an hour and stops anytime the engineer wants to let people off.”

“Really?”

“Uh-huh. Did you know that in Greek zephyr means ‘fast wind’? Amtrak employs a satirist to name its trains.”

I grinned.

“You’re pretty funny,” I said.

“David Redhorse,” he said, and offered me his hand.

I shook it. The name sounded odd and familiar. Though probably Redhorse out here was like Lawson back home. Millions of the buggers.

“Alex, uh, Wilson, Alexander Wilson,” I said. “Did you get stuck too? I noticed you getting on at Denver and then getting off the train a little behind us at Fraser.”

“No, no, I have relatives up here, I was just visiting them. I get to ride the train free,” he said. “What were you doing in Fraser?”

“Uh, nothing, just traveling, we’re tourists.”

“I thought I detected an accent. Australian?” he asked.

“Yeah, yeah, we’re Australian,” I said, and then, realizing that John might blow the gaff and make the man suspicious, called him over.

“John, come over, David here was asking where we were from and I was saying we’re just a couple of bums from Australia, traveling around the world.”

“Yeah, we’re from Sydney, Sydney, Australia, going to Chicago now,” John said, giving me a look. The North Belfast accent was so unlike the well-known accent from the south of Ireland that you could conceivably confuse it with Australian.

“Chicago, how come you came out here?” Redhorse asked.

I looked at him. There was something about him. Something not quite right. Where had I heard that name before?

“We got on the wrong train at Denver,” I said, “we were heading to Chicago but we got on the wrong train. West instead of east. Going to Chicago, then New York and then Europe.”

“Wrong train, huh? Not surprised, they don’t tell you anything at Denver. Lucky you noticed you were going west. The life, though. I’d love to travel the world, but I’m afraid to fly, always have been, you’ll never get me on a plane,” Redhorse said.

“Statistically, it’s the safest way to travel, safer than the train, much safer than a car,” John said.

“Well, that’s not the way I see it. If you have a car crash or a train crash it’s not necessarily fatal, but in almost every plane crash everybody dies,” Redhorse said.

John said something back, but I was having trouble concentrating. The ketch wanted to find a home. Redhorse was making me nervous. He said something to John. They both looked at me.