Wonder

It wasn't the cold air blasting on my face that woke me up. A pounding headache forced me to open my eyes but my sight was blurry and the sun was unnaturally bright. My right arm trapped under my body, ached at the joints. I carefully attempted lifting my body and sat there on all fours, looking around me.

Soon I realized I was sitting on coal. I was in the back of an open gondola wagon full of heaps of the glinting black rocks. The soot had darkened my arms, my clothes; I could taste it, earthy and gritty. I spat, but I spat blood mixed with it. I felt my neck stiff and a shooting pain in my right jaw. My tongue ran over my upper teeth. One of them broken and sharp like a blade.

"Crap," I thought.

My sight now was clear enough to figure the world around me. I focused across me and saw a moving object. Underneath that, a few backpacks.

I had a flashback of riding a wagon. The freight ladder, the rusty metal, the ash trees, the rhythmic roaring sound of the train rumbling down the tracks of the railway cutting through the side of the mountain.

"I'm a rider." Μy lips moved, nothing came out but my sense of self slowly got back to an unfinished puzzle. Still there was a lot missing. At the time, I couldn't remember my name. My fingers run over my face. My beard was filthy, my face swollen.

I am a rider. I ride freight trains with others. We go nowhere but end up all over the country. When we need food we wait for the train to slow down near the cities and hop off for a few days. Then we wait for the next box car or gondola and never return.

Why am I in a coal porter? Coal wagons are more dangerous, everyone knows that. You can get smashed and buried under coal if the train suddenly stops. I crawled towards the backpacks. "Which is mine?" I opened all three. The green one had a torn paper map with the Neshaminy Falls Station circled. Some cans of food, bread, water, clothes. "This isn't mine". The black one was old and much smaller. It had a plastic water bottle filled with gin, rolling tobacco, papers, tips... This is mine. No ID, only some change.

"Great."

The third one had the feel of a woman. Soft and heavy. There were hair clips inside along with a couple of books, toilet paper, chips, cola, lighters, some clothes; smelled like tangerines and almonds. Where is the woman? Where is the man? Instinctively I followed the moving object above the backpacks, the one I'd noticed earlier. It moved in the same nurturing rhythm of the train but was not part of it. I hung on to the metal walls of the gondola and stood up. At my eye level I saw his shoes. Dark, filthy, corduroy trainers. His feet didn't seem to resist anything. No movement of their own. I grabbed onto him and climbed the pile of coal reaching the top. His upper half curled over the wagon lip, his pants soiled, earthy; he stunk. I figured he's dead but couldn't believe it. I shook him, desperately. I spoke, I yelled, but no answer. With all my strength I moved his shoulders and there I saw the state of the body.

His head broken in half, unrecognizable for a man, his right arm dismembered, the tissues hanging like ribbons had no more blood to shed.

I fell back looking away from the gory sight.

What had happened? What happened to us? Where is the woman? I felt the tenderness in my gums, around my broken tooth. "Did he do this? Was I punched?" I tried to recall.

"Did I do this to him? " a sense of dread took me over. Suddenly the open air felt tainted and I was taking short painful breaths. I couldn't have done such a thing. I'm no murderer. Am I? Maybe they attacked me. They beat me first and I got rid of the girl and then.. No. Maybe he hit the girl and I helped. Things went wrong. Maybe I pushed him at the edge of the gondola while I was trying to flee and he got hit by the trees; he wasn't careful.

What do I do now?

If anyone sees all this with me in here, they'll get the wrong idea of the events. The center metal beams across the porter were too high to reach. We shouldn't have been in the coal wagon. There is nearly no way out.

I lifted myself, grabbed onto his lifeless body, and reached the top again. I could see the forests spread like a blanket among the mountains. It was getting near afternoon, the sun still up but the cold wind predicted a freezing night. There will be checks at the next station. The last few years there have been Feds searching for trespassers on cargo trains and they won't be good news for me if I don't figure something out.

The train, like a slithering snake, started taking what seemed to be a long curve. An opening between the tree tops made way for the view of a lake and an old metallic railway bridge.

It had me thinking for a moment. What if I wasn't the one getting off the train? I looked at the corpse and then down and under the railway. He didn't weigh much when I first moved him around.

This could work.

The lake was deep and quiet. They'd never find him. The train was nearly over the dark body of water; time --and my options-- was running out. I grabbed him from the armpits and tipped him over the gondola, barely holding him back, waiting for the best opportunity to let him go. He smelled like the train, metallic and earthy. The cold wind grew stronger, the sun saturated with warm hues the horizon, the lake was now under us.

I threw him off the train. Over the bridge, over human compassion, and into non-existence. Then I threw the two bags that did not belong to me. I couldn't hear or see a thing but made sure to stare at the lake and see the ripples in the waters. That gave me a feeling of self assurance and I lay down over the coal exhausted.

Now I only wonder.

Will I manage to bear the fragments of my deeds, the ones I know I've done and the ones I suspect, for the rest of my living days?

A gust of cold wind blew in the gondola.

"Oh! Ugh, I remember."