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“You broke my heart, you sorry son of a bitch.” Annie’s eyes fixed straight ahead. “You’d been romancin’ me for a long time, and finally I told you I was gonna leave Chester. We’re s’posed to meet at Mother Love’s in Missoula. I waited for you almost a week.” She turned a steely look on me. “It was bad enough thinkin’ you run out on me, but I know you fuckin’ forgot! You was probably so damn stoned, you didn’t even know you were hittin’ on me!”

Here I’d been thinking I must have raped her, and now finding out I’d stood her up…well, if I’d been back in my old life that would have pissed me off good and proper. I might have laughed drunkenly and said something like, Broke your heart? Who the fuck you think you are? A goddamn princess? But I’d become a wiser man. “I’m real sorry,” I said. “Chances are I was so messed up behind…”

“I realize I wasn’t much back then,” she went on, a quaver in her voice, “but goddammit, I think I deserved better’n to get left alone in a mission in fuckin’ Missoula fightin’ off a buncha ol’ animals day and night for a week! I know I deserved better!”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I truly am. I wouldn’t do it now.”

“The hell’s that mean?”

“Means now all the shit’s been scraped off my soul, I still like you. It means that me likin’ you must run deep.”

She shifted like she was about to stand up, but she stayed put. “I don’t…” she began; she drew a breath and held it for couple of seconds before letting it out. “You’re just horny.”

“Well, that don’t mean I don’t like you.”

This brought a slight softening of her expression, but then she said, “Shit, I ain’t listenin’ to this,” and got to her feet.

“C’mon, Annie. You ’member how it was back in the world.” I stood up behind her. “We were fuckin’ wrecks, the both of us. We’d likely have killed each other.”

“That’s still an option, far as I’m concerned.”

It’s funny sometimes how you enter into an involvement. You’re not even thinking about it with the front of your mind, you’re dealing with some stupid bullshit, then all of a sudden it’s standing right there, and you say, Oh yeah, that’s what I been wanting, that’s what the back of my mind’s been occupied with, and now you can’t do without it. Watching the featherings of whitish blond hair beside Annie’s left ear was the thing that did it for me. I put a hand on her shoulder, lightly, ready to jerk it back if she complained or took a swing at me. She flinched, but let the hand stay where it was. Then she said, “Yon ain’t gettin’ laid anytime soon, I can promise you that.”

“What can I get?” I asked, trying to put a laugh in the words.

“You keep pushin’, you’ll find out.” She stepped away, turned to me, and I could see our old trouble in her worn, still-pretty face. “Just take it slow, okay? I ain’t too good at forgive and forget.”

I held up my hands, surrendering.

She pinned me with another hard look, as if searching for signs of falsity. Then she gave a rueful shake of her head. “Let’s go on home,” she said.

“Don’t you want to hang out here with the train?”

“I’m gonna hunt up some decent food and fix you dinner,” she said. “I wanna find out if we can spend an evening together without makin’ each other crazy.” She ran her eye along the sleek curve of the engine. “This ol’ train be ’long here any time I want it.”

Back when I opted out of society, choosing to live free, as I perceived it then, I could have wound up on the streets in some homeless-friendly city like Portland, but I don’t believe I would have made the choice I did if I hadn’t loved trains. Loved their idea and their reality. Hobos were to my mind the knight templars of the homeless, carrying on a brave tradition of anti-establishment activity, like bikers and other such noble outcasts. Five years later I doubt I could have pronounced the word “anti-establishment,” and the true reasons for my checking out—laziness, stubbornness, residual anger, and damn foolishness—had been wiped away by countless pints of fortified wine and enough speed to make every racehorse in America run fast. But I never lost my love for the trains, and neither had Annie.

“I ’member the first time I rode,” she said. “It was the best damn feelin’! I caught me a local out of Tucson with this guy I met in Albuquerque. We found us a flatcar loaded with pipe. Right in the middle of the pipe there was this little square area that was clear. Like a nest. We got ourselves down in there and partied all the way to Denver.”