Read Online Essays from the Nick of Time by Mark Slouka - Free Book Online Page B

it to the window just in time to see our neighbor, a good-natured man who had talked to me just the afternoon before about the advantages of delivering pizza, stagger down the walk and into his apartment. His beloved German shepherd, I discovered, had run onto the tracks. Facing the other direction, gobbling something between the ties, it didn’t hear the electric locomotive—so much quieter than diesel—sailing in on the smooth, welded rails, didn’t respond to its owner’s increasingly frantic calls. The dog wasn’t smashed, he told me much later, the horror somehow tied to this one fact above all others; the creature simply disappeared—as though the train were some kind of eraser, the dog he’d known for years but a sketch on a child’s slate.
    There were other times when the tracks crossed our lives. Some months later a northbound freight slammed into an eighteen-wheeler that had grounded out on the crossing with a concussion so terrific that half a mile away I spilled my coffee all over my desk. I found half the truck like a scissored beetle at the intersection, the other half at the end of a three-hundred-yard trench dug into the rocks and wild melon vines of the rail bed. Seeing how things were, the driver had bailed out and watched from the road as the engineer, trying to stop what couldn’t be stopped, rode the train a full quarter mile to the moment everyone knew must come. He lived.
    Others did not. Fairly regularly, somewhere along the line, the trains that punctuated the hours of our days passed through men like a stick through an egg: men walking to the canyons to sleep, men thick with tequila, men, like the four who died together one night, playing cards on the ties. I’d seen the warning signs on Highway 5—the stenciled silhouettes not of a leaping deer or elk but of a migrant family running across a road, a man dragging a woman dragging a little girl nearly airborne like the tail of a kite—but the signs were in the wrong place. It was the locomotive, appropriately enough—that grand, nineteenth-century emblem of our imperial reach, our elect status—that killed them. After a day spent moving the Anglos’ dirt or muscling trees with hundred-pound root balls into the desert soil, they went down before the iron horse, symbol of God’s approbation and love for us, not them. Destiny made manifest.
    I knew these things—it would have been impossible not to—and yet there was time enough, life enough, separating one incident from the next, large tragedies from small, that I was able to keep them and the questions they brought with them at bay. My life, the dough of my days, folded them in. Our neighbor became our friend, played with our children, brought another dog home from the pound, and grew to love it. Little boys threw sticks in the trench; dogs peed in it. Eventually the city covered it up. The men who died on the tracks were strangers to me; I knew neither their faces nor their stories.
    Julia Toledo’s death, though distant, cut closer to home. Like tens of thousands of others, I didn’t know she had lived until the day the news, traveling through the threads and ganglia of the nation’s web, told me she had died. Three thousand miles away, preparing to move east (my destiny no longer manifest), I heard about her fate, saw her face and the faces of her sons, and felt that in a world of unspeakable wrongs, some manner of crime had been committed. A crime as gratuitous as it was wretched. A crime, like so many others, that demanded a wider reckoning.
    I traveled to Connecticut. I walked the tracks at night as the trains came rushing out of the north like great, speeding walls. There was nothing to know, no one to speak to.
    IV
    During the American Civil War, observers noted a curious fact: the sounds of a battle, clearly distinguishable at ten miles, could be utterly inaudible at two. These weird wrinkles in the landscape were called “acoustic shadows.” Modernize the phenomenon,