After a short time she came to a spot where the pine trees seemed to spill down from the crest to the beginning of the deciduous forest. She entered the pines and led Jimmy to the crest and over to the far side. Immediately she saw the reason the vegetation grew so thickly to the top. A spring had formed a pool up there, and water seeped downward on both sides of the ridge. On the new side, she could see that the water had formed the beginning of a stream, and that farther down, the width and depth of the stream grew. The stream provided another clear path downward without fighting underbrush. As each section of the stream bed became wider and deeper, she and Jimmy could trot along it without being seen.
The climb they had just completed had put strain on the muscles along the backs of Jane’s legs, and now going downward put stress on the muscles in the front. The bullet wound in her thigh was old now—it had happened over a year ago—and she had come to think of herself as fully recovered, but as she descended, she felt a twinge, a sudden weakness in her right thigh that startled her and made her wonder for an instant whether her leg would give way under her. From time to time she felt the twinge again, but the leg held.
“We seem to be heading south,” Jimmy said. “That’s not toward home.”
“We don’t have much choice. The direction we’ve been taking is just away.”
“Then what? Circle back at night?”
“Maybe. Somehow we’ve got to lose this cop and get you back up to the reservation.”
“So I can surrender to a different cop.”
“Yes. That’s what it amounts to, but running makes you seem guilty. And being a fugitive in a murder case is highly risky. Any cops you meet will almost certainly draw their sidearms, and sometimes a nervous cop will misinterpret any movement as hostile. When we’re home we’ll get you a great defense lawyer, and get some private detectives going on investigating your case. While we’re out here running through the woods nobody’s doing anything to clear you.”
Jimmy said, “Clearing me sounds like it costs a lot of money.”
“Enough will be available,” Jane said.
“The clan mothers set aside money for this kind of thing?”
Jane didn’t bother to correct his impression.
They moved along the stream bed, careful not to step on the mossy rocks right near the water because they were slippery. “To tell you the truth, I wouldn’t have thought that you’d do something like this.”
“Then why did you leave me a message in the ladies’ room by the expressway?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I guess being there again brought that trip back to me, and I had been feeling sorry for myself. I didn’t really expect you to find it.”
“Just because I don’t live on the reservation I’m not suddenly a stranger. I never lived there anyway, except in the summer when my father was working far away.”
“That’s part of it,” he said. “And the other part is that you can be Indian or not whenever you want.”
“That’s not how it works. I don’t get to pick, and never did. My mother had eyes so blue they looked like the sky reflected in ice water, and skin like cream. She’s the one who chose, and she wanted to be Seneca because she loved my father. After the Wolf clan women adopted her, she was never anything else. And I’ve never been anything else.”
“You have blue eyes just like hers.”
She laughed. “Don’t sound like that. I didn’t steal them.”
“I meant you can pick.”
“If I wanted to, I could pass as something besides Seneca, and so could you—at least outside New York, where everyone’s used to seeing Haudenosaunee people. Having black hair and a dark complexion opens up a lot of possible ethnic identities. But I don’t forget who I am. And when the clan mothers say I’m the one to do something, I know who they are too.”
“Janie, you’re not still a true believer in the old religion, are you?”
“What I believe in these days is pretty much dominated by what I learned in science classes. But I sometimes like remembering that I’m not just one person. I’m part of a group of people like me. And I’ve never heard anything to make me think the old people were stupid.”
“I get you,” he said.
They kept trotting along the stream bed for a time, and then they both heard a faint hoot of a train’s horn, then another. They moved on, making their way downhill. As the stream bed flattened and no longer kept them hidden, Jane altered her course a little. The train horn sounded again, this time a long wail, then another hoot.
“There must be a town down there,” she said.
“How do you know?”
“They’re blowing their horn for a crossing—two short, one long, one short. They’re warning the vehicles that might not see them coming.”
They ran on for a few minutes and then saw, stretched across the bottom of the valley below, the train tracks. The double line of steel rails was coming out of a small town to their right. Jane stopped running and walked through a stand of trees, keeping herself in the foliage.
She followed the tracks with her eyes, moving her gaze from the spot where they emerged from the cluster of buildings at the edge of a grid of streets, stretched across a level field that looked like wheat, and then reached the hillside where they began to wind and go upward. She pointed. “Right over there—where the tracks turn and climb—I’ll bet a train would have to slow down to practically a walk.”
“Are you planning to jump a train?”
“I’m considering it,” she said, and watched Jimmy for a reaction. He said nothing.
She said, “Thank you for not mentioning Skip Walker.” Skip was a harsh nickname for a boy they had both known when they were young. At some point in early childhood he had decided to hop a train. He had run along beside it, then either tripped or been unable to hang on to a handhold after he’d made his leap. The train wheel had rolled over his leg and amputated it. “Skip” was a reference to the way he walked on his prosthetic leg, with a limp and a little hop. He had been one of those boys that everyone’s mother cited to scare them out of taking risks.
Jimmy shrugged. “Skip was seven or eight when he did that. We ought to be able to keep from being hurt that bad.”
Jane was still tracing the tracks with her eyes, walking along the hillside to see where the tracks went after the first turn. “It looks to me as though the tracks go mostly north,” she said. “If we jumped the train, our trip home might be a whole lot quicker.”
Jimmy said, “Let’s head for that place right over there, where it takes another turn and climbs at the same time. If they have people watching at the front and the back, they won’t see us if we pop out in the middle and climb aboard.”
They trotted along the hillside, staying among the trees but heading for the spot where the tracks turned and disappeared into thick woods. It took them a few minutes to run from their hill to the one where the tracks were. When they arrived they could look down above the tracks to see a place where the rails bisected the town. On one side they could see four church steeples, a row of long, flat-topped buildings that were probably stores and offices, and farther out, dozens of small houses with pitched gray roofs. On the other side of the tracks were a number of old brick buildings with rows of dirty, barely translucent windows, smokestacks, and railroad sidings. Beyond them there were metal Quonset huts that were either warehouses or garages.
A train snaked around the hill on the far side of the valley and sounded its horn as it came into town at the first intersection—two short, one long, one short blare, still somewhat faint. At each spot where the tracks crossed a road, they could see red lights begin to flash, and then a black-and-white barrier came down, and the train came through. Now they could see that the train had a big yellow engine in front and one right behind, and more and more freight cars appeared behind them from around the hill.
“It’s a big train,” said Jimmy. “I’ll bet it’s a hundred cars.”
“That’s got to be good for us,” Jane said. “Let’s get closer.”
They came down through the trees just as the front of the train passed, moving along at a slow, steady rate. There were hoppers, tank cars, boxcars, flatbeds laden with big loads of pipes or thick packs of flat material like wallboard or plywood, all strapped down tightly. There were gondolas full of coal or slag. The names blazoned on the cars were familiar from their childhood—Canadian National, Georgia Central, Chicago and North Western, Erie Lackawanna.
Jane stopped beside the tracks. The engines were at least twenty-five cars ahead of them now. Jane looked ahead toward the place where the tracks turned and climbed upward, and looked back to the curve where the next part of the train was still to appear, rolling toward them. She looked back up the hillside through the trees. She said, “I’m ready. Are you up to this?”
“Yep,” he said.
“Stay low. When we see the one we want, we’ll run for it. You get aboard, and then I will.”
He looked at her. “Are you sure you don’t want to go first?”
“I’m being sensible. If you get up there first, you’ll be able to pull me up. If I’m there first, I won’t be strong enough to pull you up.”
“What you’re really afraid of is that you’ll make it and I won’t,” he said. “But that’s okay. We’d better get going before that cop catches up and sees us.”
They watched the cars coming past, and then Jane said, “I see one coming. It’s a hopper with an open top. Black. See it?”
“I see it.” Jimmy began to trot, then sped up a little to match the speed of the car, jumped to grasp a vertical bar at the back that formed part of a ladder, and then stepped onto the small level space just before the rear coupling.
Jane ran in right behind him, grasped the bar, and pulled herself up. She clung there for a few seconds, and then they looked at each other and smiled as the engines pulled them around the first curve into deeper woods. “Let’s see if we can get up there on top,” Jane said, and sidestepped to the ladder. She climbed up, stepped over the rim of the hopper, and disappeared.
Jimmy climbed up after her, looked over the rim into the hopper, and climbed in beside her. The hopper was loaded with tiny, coarse stones like the gravel under the railroad ties. It was mounded in the center and shallower along the sides, so if they stayed near the outer areas, they were well hidden. Jimmy gave her a high five, and then lay back to look up at the sky. There were a few wispy white clouds very high up, each like a single brushstroke, but most of the sky was a pure blue.
The train stopped. A moment later, it began to back up. It went about twenty feet, and then stopped with a jolt, as though something had collided with the rear of the train. “They must be adding more cars,” said Jimmy. In a moment, the train started moving ahead again, very slowly overcoming its inertia and immense weight, and making its way up the first hill.
Jimmy started to sit up, but Jane put her hand on his chest. “Please don’t sit up yet. Let’s wait until we’re at least a few miles farther on, where there’s zero chance Tech Sergeant Isaac Lloyd will see us.”
Jimmy smiled. “You certainly have gotten cautious as a grown-up.”
Jane didn’t smile. “Sometimes the difference between sort of safe and absolutely safe is pretty unpleasant, so I lean toward absolutely safe.”
The train climbed the hill slowly, tugging its long string of cars up the gradual incline until it reached a gap in the hillside and sped up to twenty-five, then about thirty-five miles an hour.
Jane and Jimmy both unrolled their bedrolls and spread them on the gravel, their heads slightly inclined toward the mound. They used their packs as pillows and rested from their long, hard run. They passed through areas where the tall trees and the cuts through the hillsides kept them in shade much of the time, and then through rolling farmland. After a half hour they were both asleep, rocked gently in their hopper, hearing only the constant clacking of the wheels and feeling the fresh breeze passing over them.
They woke when the train blew its whistle to signal its approach to the first crossing at the next town, and they remained alert but out of sight until it regained its full speed on the way out of town.
As Jane lay on the gravel bed she decided riding the train was like lying in a boat. The hopper was open to the sky, and traveled at a nearly uniform slow speed, almost never stopping. Even twenty miles an hour felt like a huge luxury after so many days of traveling on foot.
Jane had been trying to keep herself persuaded that her wounded leg had recovered completely from the gunshot. She had certainly proven that it was strong enough to do what she had needed to do. Over a year of hard, steady training had brought back enough strength to travel on foot for two hundred miles or more in hilly country. But she wasn’t so sure the injuries nobody could see had healed.
The four men who had captured her in California had wanted desperately to find out where she had sent James Shelby, the man she had rescued from the courthouse. She would not tell them. For years, whenever she had taken on a new runner, she had promised, “I will die before I reveal where you are to anyone.” To make sure her promise would never be a lie, she had always carried in her purse a cut-glass perfume bottle containing the distilled and concentrated juice of the roots of Cicuta maculata, the water hemlock plant. Swallowing two bites of hemlock root was the traditional Seneca method of committing suicide. The common name for water hemlock in Western New York was cowbane, because now and then a foraging cow would try some. A single root would kill a fifteen-hundred-pound Holstein. But Jane had lost her purse in the fight before she’d been captured.
She’d had no way to kill herself, and so they had gotten the chance to torment her, to inflict enough suffering to make her want to trade James Shelby’s life, not for hers—she’d known they would kill her anyway—but for simple relief, the chance to make the pain stop. She had not told them. She had been preparing for death when her captors realized that Jane had helped victims to escape many times before, and so she had enemies who would pay millions to interrogate her themselves.
The four men who held her were all dead now. But in her dreams sometimes they would come back, and she would have to kill them again. It was as though she hadn’t yet been able to make their deaths final. She knew that the dream meant something. It meant that what had happened to her was not over. This afternoon, if she stretched and ran her own hand up her back from the waist to the shoulder blade, she could still feel the rows of horizontal scars. They had heated steel barbecue skewers with a propane torch and laid them on her back. She knew that in a few years the scars might be level with the rest of her skin, or even be hard to see, but they would never be gone. The puckered scar on her thigh from the bullet would never be smooth again.
She was not able to forget any of it, and that was the part that she felt most. From the time she was a child she had been strong, physically confident, and occasionally even reckless. She had gotten hurt, even hurt badly, but she had always known that bruises would fade, pain would go away, and she would be fit and strong again. She didn’t know that anymore.
Jane was feeling something that she had never felt before her capture, the suspicion that she was harboring an inner weakness, like a virus, that had begun to attack her during those awful days and nights. Now that she had felt the sensation of being utterly powerless, and the knowledge that somebody had really hurt her—not just caused her pain, but disfigured her, changed her so she would never be the same—she was sure she was the worse for it internally too. Would she be able to face the risk of going through such pain again?
Jane had learned to accept death fifteen years ago, when she started carrying poison with her every day. She had become accustomed to rising from her bed with the knowledge that she might have to die that day—die quickly, a few minutes of sharp pain and then darkness. This new condition was worse, a threat that she could not control by thinking about it. It was a reflex. She had been hurt once, so would she flinch each time after that? If Jimmy needed her, would she be quick and decisive, or would she hesitate?