There's Never A Good Reason To Stop On The Tracks

THERE’S NEVER A GOOD REASON TO STOP ON THE TRACKS, said the hand-painted sign hanging on Betty Peppler’s fence. The countless dollars paid to injury lawyers incensed her; the primary-colored foreign vehicles popped like piñata by barreling locomotives vexed her. Yet here: a blue Venza. Betty ran through her chain-link gate and threw open its driver-side door. “What are you doing?” she shouted. The train’s horn obliterated her words, but she’d lived on these tracks thirty years. She knew, to the nearest heartbeat, where the train was. This intersection had no streetlights and no drop gate. The railroad company had been sued from here to Sunday, for high speeds, failure to whistle, overgrown brush, and impenetrable fog. The railroad kept settling and the lawyers kept earning and Betty kept watching the trains triumph. She’d seen a freight-hopper dismount and tangle between cars, pulled his mangled body from the tracks; he’d lost his leg but retained his life. She’d watched a Cadillac stall, catapult twenty houses down the track, and pitch its driver 150 feet to his death. She respected the trains, loved them even. How was a train’s majestic, unstoppable power and speed not warning enough? The bells, lights, and blaring horn? The man in the Venza was old, disoriented. Betty ejected his seatbelt and pulled him from the car. “Why?” she shouted, but the question was mostly for the windless, steamy night. He was drunk; that was clear enough, if not from his behavior, from the percolating stench of piss and whiskey. She towed him toward her fence – the tracks nearly bisected Betty’s front yard – and turned to watch the Union Pacific’s gleaming shadow plunge through the dark, its round white headlight arc around the curve and across the ill-fated Venza, door hung open like a broken wing. Its horn cracked the night, and Betty pitied the engineer. Did he imagine a scythe in his hands? The trains were pitiless, inflexible, unflinching. They blasted their three-chime caution and barreled on. Not death and taxes, Betty thought, but trains. Light, sound, speed. The Venza exploded like an egg; noise rent the night and the train kept on. Blink and you’d miss it: the Venza’s carcass hurtled down the dark tracks, leaving only the shattered glitter of glass and plastic across Betty’s yard. She looked down at the old man. He had one age-mottled arm thrown over his face. “You should have watched,” Betty said. “It’s the closest thing we have to a god.” The train’s rumble receded, and Betty squatted next to the man. It was one a.m., but Betty didn’t sleep. “There’s never a good reason to stop on the tracks,” she told him. “You have to keep going. When life gets ugly, stare it down and keep driving. It’s the only way.” She hauled the man up, brought him inside. Let him sleep in Ben’s bed, even though it still wore the same sheets as the foggy night he’d stumbled onto the tracks three years ago.