“Of course it does,” said Carrie, but now she was watching the attentive ginger-bearded men incline toward each other, ever so slightly. “And how odd are they?” she asked.
“As odd as they’d like to be,” said Dulcy.
“What do they do, when they’re alone with each other?”
“You’d like me to guess about this out loud?”
“I would,” said Carrie, leaning forward. Her cheeks were pink again, and her wide blue eyes wanted fun, or a fight. But Dulcy was watching the porter hand a fresh whiskey to the thin man, who surrendered his book to take it. All was revealed: the third and fourth fingers of his left hand were missing, and the back of the hand was scarred.
“Do you think it was an explosion?” asked Carrie, miner’s daughter. “A captain? He’s awfully well-dressed, but he’s young enough to have gone to one of the technical colleges.”
The train lurched, and the insurance man turned to reassure the unworried cardplayers. The young man downed half his drink and reclaimed his book: Nostromo. He looked hunted, as well he should. “No,” Dulcy said. “He’s a veteran.” She slid back into her story: my husband was a soldier. She’d have to read up. You needed a man to really disappear.
???
Sometimes, while they traveled, Walton had talked about the West as a dreamscape, a place like the steppes or the outback, and he would describe how sun-blasted and moon-blasted and immense it had seemed at first. The landscape made him think of Spain, and it made him feel a little like Don Quixote. And so Dulcinea: this was meant to be her landscape.
She thought about this when she woke up to a jolt of worry about whether the door was locked, confusion at the way her neck and ribs hurt, before she understood the train sounds and heard Carrie’s breathing in the lower bunk. They were passing through another bleak town, wood buildings so fresh people could probably watch them warp, on their way up to a plateau with long slow humps of winter wheat. The snow was a goose-down blanket over an infinity, a death march, of dirty gold grass.
Dulcy’s new landscape: not New York, not Seattle, no place Victor knew or could possibly understand. She lurched into her clothes and made her way back to the dining car. Onward Christian soldiers: the breakfast menu didn’t offer much of a virtuous middle ground between health and excess. She considered oatmeal and fresh fruit before asking for coffee with cream, sausages with fried apples, hashed potatoes, a poached egg. She watched the rest of the diners, but in this harsh light, a day later, no one seemed Victor-sent. The beards were too interested in each other, the talky insurance agent was far too self-involved, and the man with the wounded hand so lacked interest in anyone that he hadn’t come to breakfast. The volume in the car went up as the cardplaying ladies in black entered, laughing again. Mourning—who was to judge? Maybe there’d been no love at all, only duty. They drank cider with their hash and rolled their eyes at the landscape. The handsome blond ate a whole egg with each bite, and while his elegant jaw moved like a stamping press, it occurred to her that he hadn’t read a word since he’d boarded. She thought of the way that Victor ate—his eggs would have been hard-cooked, sliced into a half-dozen bites—and suddenly wanted to be sick, wanted to be off the train, wanted to be hidden and still and anonymous, vanished, a blank. She lost all doubt.
She was seated near the galley, where the black porter was talking about what he planned to do on his break in Spokane—see his mother, drink whiskey, watch a play. Dulcy pulled paper and a pen from her bag and finally replied to Victor’s letter. She waved to the porter and gave him twenty dollars for a few favors: he would mail Victor’s letter, redirect Walton’s trunk, and forget he’d done either of these things.
???
In the cabin, Carrie was still folded like a handkerchief in the bottom bunk. The train was ripping around curves like a bobsled, catching up with itself, as Dulcy climbed into the upper bunk, smoothed her map, and confirmed that due to the snow they’d be at least twelve hours late on the seventeen-hundred-mile trip to St. Paul. The Boys would cool their heels at a good hotel, relieved to have the reunion postponed. Spokane had become a daytime stop, and the mountain towns of northern Montana had no outlet beyond this east – west route. Too early, too late. If she had anything in mind, anything at all, it wasn’t a mountain pass or a prairie.
The train inched into another narrow-canyoned lumber town, and passengers picked their way across frozen mud toward ugly taverns. It was the kind of place a low winter sun never reached. In a few days, Victor would pass this with his eyes squinched, not understanding the size of the landscape, the way anyone could disappear. Still, people got off at all these stops, mostly from the tourist cars. Which was a bit of a joke—surely she was the tourist, and these battered people were on their way to another war.
“What hole are we in now?” asked Carrie. “And would you stop rattling that paper? What are you looking at?”
“Nothing worth talking about,” said Dulcy. She climbed down. They watched a young woman slide on the boards along the track, nearly dropping a baby and a corduroy valise.
Carrie looked away. “You’d tell Martha. I would very much like to talk to her now,” she said. “I miss her so much, and I feel worse for not missing Dad a bit.”
Dulcy curled around her, and for a while they were quiet. Dulcy reached for the novel Carrie had been reading, wedged between the train wall and the bunk. She flipped pages: portents, seductions, revelations. It was about a Boston girl who boarded a ship for France after being seduced, ravished . Her rapist had a dream of guilt and pursued, but learned on the docks of Marseille that she’d jumped overboard; he vowed to be a better man.
Ravished . Did ravishers exist, in a pleasant way? Dulcy didn’t think so; she made herself remember what it had felt like, Victor holding her down, ripping at her, and any last bit of blur disappeared. “Do you think you’ll ever get your mind back?” she asked, climbing off the bunk.
“I don’t understand anything you say,” said Carrie from under the blankets. Even her voice sounded green.
Dulcy tugged at the window and hurled the book against a wall of pines. It started a small landslide of scree. “I might have read that one,” said Carrie, one eye open. “What happened to your lip?”
The evidence of Victor’s very deep, truly profound emotions had ripened overnight, so that Dulcy’s lip no longer looked pleasantly bee-stung. Her mind was doing the same thing, losing its facade, letting its bruising up to the surface. “I dropped my book while I was reading.”
“There’s my point,” said Carrie. She smiled. “We should both read lighter books for a bit.”