A crow came and sat on the railroad sign for a while, then flew away again.
A train howled from far off, then rumbled closer the way trains do, throbbing and groaning and slicing along the rails. It blasted its horn as it went past, and Milo reached up to keep his cap from flying off.
He threw his knapsack into an open boxcar and jumped after it. Tumbled through dust and straw and rolled to a stop in the dark.
He scooched back to the door and rode there awhile, in the wind, watching the moon until he fell asleep.
—
He woke up because something at the dark end of the boxcar made a noise.
Animal?
“Someone there?” he called.
“Hell yes,” someone said. “A coupla someones.”
“Well, hello.”
“Hello yourself.”
Milo peered into the dark until his eyes made out three forms seated against the back wall.
Milo had ridden the rails before, down on Earth. If this were Earth, he’d take out his knife now and whittle a piece of wood. To look casual and cool, and to show he had a knife. But he didn’t have a knife, and this wasn’t Earth.
Milo said, “I’m looking for somebody.”
“Well, you found somebody.”
“Somebody in particular,” said Milo. “Death.
“She’s my girlfriend,” he added.
Clickety-clack.
“You’re talking about Suzie,” said one of the shapes, one of the voices. “You’re Milo. I heard o’ you.”
“Ten thousand lives,” said another voice. “You’re like Superman.”
“Well,” said Milo, “I don’t know about all that.”
“I heard from a guy who heard from a guy that you threw an elephant up in the air and it never came back down.”
Milo raised his eyebrows.
“Superman or not,” said the first, “y’ain’t supposed to date them. That’s like the man who married the ocean. Ever heard of that?”
“I’ve been warned.”
Clickety-clack.
“What’s it like?” asked one.
Milo considered the question and found it fair.
“Think about the most amazing girl you knew in high school,” he said. “Not your girlfriend or some other girl you hooked up with. I mean the one you never did hook up with. The one who haunted you and still haunts you. Know what I mean?”
They knew. Every man knew.
“Marsha Funderburg,” said one, in a quiet voice.
“Wu Ping,” said another.
“Vicki Tuscedero,” said a third.
“Well,” said Milo, “it’s like that.”
Outside the boxcar door, a few lights passing. Someone’s farm, probably.
“Well,” said the first voice after a while, “ain’t seen her. Sorry.”
The train slowed. Milo gathered up his knapsack and steadied himself against the door. When it slowed a bit more, he thought, he’d jump.
“Is it true,” one of the shadowmen asked, “there’s a place where you step off a sidewalk and turn into nothing?”
“It’s true,” answered Milo.
Click. Clack. Slower.
Lights ahead. Town.
He jumped.
—
He walked into the town and found the police station.
Not exactly a police station, per se. But most towns and cities had a place where you could go if you needed help, and this town had a nice one. A brick building right downtown, with a cement eagle over the door.
Milo found a tired-looking sergeant sitting behind a tall desk.
“Hi,” said the sergeant, in a friendly-enough tone for the middle of the night.
Milo said, “Hi. I’m looking for someone.”
“The someone got a name?”
Milo told him the name.
The sergeant appeared to freeze for a second. Then he leaned forward and surveyed Milo like a schoolmaster.
“That would make you Milo, I gather?”
Shit. “That’s right,” he said.
“Well, it shouldn’t really surprise you that I have instructions not to tell you anything. In fact, the instructions I have say that if you show up asking about Ms. Suzie, I’m to recommend you find some other way to focus your energies. There’s something of a tone to the message, if you don’t mind my saying so.”
“I’ll bet.”
“I’m also supposed to ask you to wait here,” said the sergeant, “if it’s not inconvenient, until—”
Milo was already gone.
—
He didn’t go far. Just a few blocks down, close to the railroad, where he stretched out on a park bench for a while and tried to sleep.
Woke up at some hour in the night with that feeling we all get of having just missed someone calling our name. He sat up and listened.
A breeze circled his bench. Shadows teased his eye.
Nothing. Across the park, a cat or a possum darted through the pool of a streetlamp.
Unable to get back to sleep, he shouldered his sack and walked back to the railroad tracks.
—
“Haunted? What do you mean, ‘haunted’?”
Milo sat in the middle of a crowded boxcar on a fast train, rocking and clacking. Sometimes when a train was well populated, it could become almost like a party. This one had become a great conversation, illuminated by flashlights and old-time lanterns, fueled by a whiskey jug making its rounds and an enormous knapsack full of Cajun hot fries.
Someone, an old man in gumboots, had said there were parts of the road that were haunted.
“How can anything here be haunted?” asked a woman with a henna tattoo across her forehead. “It’s the afterlife.”
“You can die in the afterlife,” said the old man, who was curious in his own right, just for being an old man. Everyone up here was youngish. Weren’t they?
Yeah, sure. Just like everyone was happy, and eager to get born again, and couldn’t wait to join the Oversoul.
“If you die in the afterlife,” asked a number of people, “where do you go?”
The old man explained that you go Nowhere.
“But you might take a while going,” he said.
—
Milo shuddered.
He slipped off the train at moonrise, with the jug tucked under his jacket, and drank his way down the road. Some road in the middle of nowhere. A stray dog joined him for a while.
—
His days and nights became a blur of towns and conversations.
“Death? The Death? She came for me, is all I know.”
“I’m not allowed to tell you anything, friend. There’s a message here—”
Sometimes he stuck out his thumb, and sometimes he’d catch a ride.
Sometimes he’d get a lecture or a cautionary tale.
The guy who tried to date the Northern Lights. The gal who loved the Jet Stream.
Everywhere, he kept thinking he’d walk into a bus station and find her selling magazines. Maybe she’d be on the bus itself, so he rode the bus sometimes, searching faces.
Sometimes he was recognized. He was, after all, famously old and wise, and famously in deep shit.
“Is it true,” they asked, “about the place that goes Nowhere? Is it like a tunnel? Is it a stormy place or, like, a big hand that reaches down and grabs you?”
“It’s just a sidewalk,” he told them.
He wandered through nights and days, and in and out of weeks, and almost over a year.
He got skinny, like a stick. He learned not to be hungry except when he had to be.
He began to smell musky, like an animal.