Muriel Gray - The Trickster

He’d guessed Martell would have a go, could tell by the way he had shifted eagerly in his seat as they’d climbed up the approach to Wolf Mountain. Joshua had hoped the lump of lard would doze illegally until they reached Silver, but he’d been alert and beady-eyed for miles. Those two serpentine tubes of blackness lay between them and town, and the conductor wasn’t in the mood for regulation-breaking sleep.

Joshua thought it best to ignore the bastard. Martell wasn’t the first to twist the knife and he wouldn’t be the last. Concentrating on smothering his fear was labour enough for now.

The conductor peeked across at his white-faced engineer, as he slapped the shoulder of the third occupant of the cab, a sullen brakeman called Henry. He gesticulated grandly towards Joshua, his two rodent-like eyes narrowing into slits of mirth.

‘Look, Henry. Hoghead’s got the jimmy-shits again ’bout goin’ through the Corkscrews.’

The brakeman disregarded both the slap and the remark, answering only with a barely perceptible upward movement of his head, the reverse of a nod. Martell was undeterred. This shift had bored the balls off him, with the brakeman sitting motionless and silent in front of him, his big ears sticking out like one of those Easter Island heads Martell had seen in a magazine once. And this damn engineer had no conversation either. Wasn’t much to ask that a man could expect a bit of parley at his work, instead of watching speechless as three hundred miles of Canadian Pacific track snaked beneath them in the snow.

There was nearly a mile of train behind them. Being in charge of a hundred cars of coal rumbling slowly across Canada meant big-time responsibility to Wesley Martell. He often pictured how his train looked from the air, a giant metal caterpillar picking its way through the mountains, the engine like the insect’s head, and himself, CP conductor, Martell, the brains in that head. This mile of hardware stopped, started or stayed at his say-so, and that made him feel good; made him more of a man than those jockeys braying into portable phones you saw on the sidewalks in Vancouver. No kid was ever going to look at those guys with big, wide, jealous eyes when they went about their business, least not the way they looked up at him in his cab, when he hi-balled his monster load through a station waving down at them like an oily Father Christmas.

But Martell didn’t get to be conductor, the big cheese on this buggy, without expecting a crumb of respect from his crew. Part of that respect was the civility to pass the time, jaw a little.

Seemed like this crew didn’t know the meaning of the word respect , sitting there like two dumb fucks, lost in their own dumb thoughts.

Wesley Martell didn’t much like to be left alone with his thoughts: too much track gazing and those thoughts had the habit of chucking up things he’d rather not meet again, thanks. Especially on a night haul, when the lights of the train illuminated a few yards of the track ahead, making it dance and gyrate on the edge of darkness like something alive. No, he’d rather talk. Talk was life. Silence was a kind of death, and he’d had enough silence on this journey.

Ten miles back Henry had said something to Joshua that Martell didn’t catch, and apart from that, nothing. Not a sound except the clacking of the wheels on the track and the throaty roar of the engine. So when the Corkscrew Tunnel rolled round, Martell took his shot.

Back at the depot, Joshua and his tunnels were the butt of an endless running joke amongst the local crews, and Martell was damned if he wasn’t going to use anything he could to get a little spark into this seven-hour bitch of a shift.

Joshua was still, quiet, and white. He had it coming.

‘Best keep a hand on that throttle, engineer. Think I saw something movin’ in there.’ He threw his head back and wheezed out a guffaw.

He laughed alone, but Henry turned his head slightly towards Martell before returning to gaze vacantly out of the window.

Joshua could feel his hands turning clammy. It wasn’t hard to ignore the fat guy. Ever since he’d confided in some brakemen from Toronto what had happened to him that day in the tunnel, he’d taken a ribbing that was now so obligatory it had practically entered the Canadian Railway Operating Rules Book.

What was hard, and getting harder every time they came through, was trying to resist jamming the dynamic brake handle on and jumping out of the train cab into the snow, before the three men and those hundred cars of grade one coal were launched into the gaping black mouth.

Funny to think that right now, on the wooden viewing platform up on the highway, tourists would be yelping to each other like excited coyotes, at spotting a freight train about to go through the famous tunnels. It was a Kodak-moment, all right: with a train as long as this one, the onlookers would see the engine disappear into the first tunnel, then double back on itself, only to appear to be travelling in the opposite direction to its freight before entering the second tunnel. There was a big painted illustration up on that platform for the real dumb tourists, the ones who stumbled out of a Winnebago and couldn’t figure out where they were, never mind what they were seeing.

Joshua had stopped on the highway once to look at the sign. It told him in kiddie-speak letters that they had blasted into the mountain ninety years ago, using the spiral design to avoid a wicked gradient through Wolf Pass. There were shitty pencil drawings of pioneers with big hats and moustaches, and a lot of bull about the early days of railway, but at least there was a diagram of how the tunnels worked inside the mountain. That was neat. You could see exactly how the Corkscrew worked, how it quartered the gradient with those two curly holes in the hill. Joshua had never thought about it much before then, and he didn’t think about it much after either. That is, until he had his fright.

It didn’t matter how many times he went over it in his head. He’d lain awake at nights in the CP bunkhouses and at home in Stoke, trying to figure out why he’d gotten scared. Worst thing was, it was a whole year ago, almost exactly this time last winter, and the scare hadn’t worn off.

Martell could go shaft himself. Joshua would tolerate all the fat fingers in the world poking him in the ribs, if he could just shake free of this paralysing, childish fear. He began to run through it again, the way he did every time they passed this way, trying to flush the memory away, make it safe.

The way he remembered it, they’d come through the lower tunnel, the engine just entering the second, when the End-to-Train unit had gone apeshit. There was a hot box back there and nothing for it but to stop. With the gradient they had to negotiate coming up before the higher tunnel, the last thing they needed was a car with screaming white-hot axles dragging behind them. Joshua recalled whistling through his teeth with exasperation as the whole damn hulk screeched to a halt and conductor and brakeman got up from their chairs and stretched their legs.

The boxes had stopped out there in the gorge, sitting in the thin wintry sunlight, leaving the cab of the engine about fifty yards into the tunnel, and Joshua knew he had to get back there and investigate. Barney the brakeman handed Joshua a thick black rubber torch with one hand and put the kettle on the hot plate with the other, saying clearly without words that the engineer would have their assistance when they were good and ready.

It was the delay that had pissed off Joshua. Just the time it was going to take to check it all out and put it right. It had been his homeward shift, taking him back to Beat River and Mary’s bed, a heavenly prospect after five nights in the bunkhouses, lying beside guys in their pits, snoring like they were sawing logs. He remembered thinking two things. The first was that at least it was lucky the cars had stopped outside the tunnel, and the second thought, like it had come from nowhere, was ‘the living rock’. Three innocent words, just sitting there doing nothing, going nowhere, meaning little. But there.