The Homeless Millionaire

It got really cold really quickly. The train was rolling along at around thirty miles per hour, fast enough for a steady draft that hit my hunched back, h.i.p.s, and legs. My teeth were chattering after a few minutes.

I hadn't taken any winter clothes when I was leaving Toronto. I had been too stupid to plan that far ahead. I guess that buried deep in my subconscious, there was a notion that I would visit home sometime during the fall. I was wearing a T-shirt, a flannel shirt, and my jean jacket. The jacket ended at my waist. I was tired, and beginning to get ravenously hungry.

The one advantage in this situation was that I didn't think at all about what had happened. I killed a man, but I didn't care. All I cared about was getting warm. I knew things would improve once the sun came up. But there were at least a couple of hours to go before sunrise. I wasn't sure I'd be able to stand the cold that long.

The track curved and the train began running south. Of course it made no difference except in my mind: I was going south, south, south. It would get warmer. I only had to survive the next five minutes. Then the next five minutes. Then the next.

Gradually, the steep slopes on both sides of the track melted away into darkness: we had entered a broad valley. I moved to the side of the car and looked past the side of the cistern. I could see the highway and a couple of houses - we were approaching a town. I felt the train beginning to slow down and I was immediately terrified that someone would see me.

There was only one thing to do. I lay down flat on the cistern bed, and came close to screaming when my face touched the cold metal. I could just about fit my head and torso between the cistern tank and the chassis. The bag on my back didn't let me crawl under the tank. I spread out my legs so that they wouldn't dangle over the edge and hoped that the train wouldn't stop. If it did, and if anyone bothered to walk down the train for a quick inspection -

The train didn't stop. It rolled on at maybe ten miles per hour through a big marshaling yard. A couple of lamps illuminated a sign on a big, square building standing guard over the web of tracks: Revelstoke. I'd never heard of a place called Revelstoke, didn't know it existed. The train continued moving at a sedate pace, jerking as it passed over the points in the track; the diesel locomotive in front emitted a single deep hoot. Then we were out of the station and there were trees on my right and buildings on my left.

The track ran straight as an arrow, but the train slowed down even more. I was grateful for that: it wasn't so cold any more. The town was asleep: the house windows were all dark. The only place that was lit up was a gas station. The train lurched slightly and the wheels started squeaking and we started turning left. It was a long curve, and I risked moving my head from under the cistern tank and saw a bridge ahead. To the right was another bridge, a brightly illuminated road bridge, and I made out a sign announcing that we were crossing over the Columbia river.

I sneaked a look at my watch: it was nearing five in the morning. I estimated I had traveled at most twenty miles from the lay-by where I killed Peter Schmidt. That wasn't much, and I abandoned the idea of jumping off the train as soon as it cleared the bridge. I still had a couple of mouthfuls of whisky left in the bottle, and I had one as soon as we'd crossed the river and the train started speeding up again.

I was so hungry I was tempted to lick the lump of machine grease stuck to a metal nut near my face. I stayed prone while the train passed a big logging yard and a sawmill and a couple of small lakes, then a bigger one with a large building perched on a hill overlooking the shore - it was richly illuminated and seemed to be some sort of hotel or resort. The valley widened, and the railroad diverged from the road to the point where the highway disappeared from sight. We were going quite fast again, maybe forty miles per hour, but the cold wasn't as intense as it had been earlier.

I really don't know how I managed to survive the next six hours. The sun came up around seven and soon after that my teeth stopped chattering. But I was beginning to literally die of hunger. I'd finished the whisky and started chewing on my cigarettes, I ate a couple before I was hit by a wave of nausea that forced me to stop. The good side to this was that it kept me awake and alert; I was so tired that otherwise I might have fallen off the cistern.

An hour or so after dawn, isolated outposts of civilization began to appear on a semi-regular basis: a wooden cabin, a rest stop, a cl.u.s.ter of houses. The railroad weaved back and forth over the highway a couple of times, and I saw traffic on the road: cars, vans, trucks, normal people going about their normal lives. I'd always felt a slight contempt for those so-called normal people, with their petty thoughts and money worries and silly little concerns. Now I yearned to be one of them, driving in a cheap car to a low-paying stupid job, with an after-work beer in the company of like-minded morons being the highlight of my day.

We passed a couple of sawmills and there were more and more houses scattered around and I began to worry again that I might be noticed by someone. I made up my mind to jump off the train at the nearest town we came to. I estimated that I had traveled well over a hundred miles, enough to risk being seen by other people without being connected to the killing. But the train hardly slowed down at all while going through the next couple of tiny towns. I was so hungry that I dipped the tip of my finger in that lump of machine grease I'd spotted earlier, and smeared it on my lips. Amazingly, it helped a little. It was noticeably warmer too, it was a sunny day and where the sunlight fell on my body it actually felt warm.

The train ran through the outskirts of a fair-sized town whose name began with an S - that was all I managed to spot - and then over a bridge and along a big lake. There were boats and yachts on that lake, God how I envied those stupid little people with their stupid little lives. The track ran right next to the shore and there was this guy fishing off a rowboat fifty yards out, he was old, I could see grey hair escaping from under his silly little red hat, and I wanted to be him, I wanted to swap places with him, I've have given away thirty years of my life just to be able to do that.

We came to a place called Canoe and I was sorely tempted to leave the train there but it was going too fast, over twenty miles per hour. We were running along the shore of another big lake with big rafts of logs floating on the water. Then the track made a sharp turn to the south to run around a big bay and the train slowed down a little. I moved to the edge of the cistern and got my foot down on the step and leaned out holding onto the handrail, trying to spot a good place to jump off. But the ground next to the tracks was pretty rough, it would be only too easy to twist an ankle or f.u.c.k myself up in some other way.

It was just as well that I didn't try to jump because a moment later we started to slow down pretty sharply, and when I looked along the train I saw a red semaphore light. The train came to a stop amidst a lot of squealing from the metal. I could see a couple of houses through the trees to the left and the flat, muddy shore of the lake to the right, with next to no vegetation. I got back onto the cistern and squeezed past the tank and jumped off on the left side and ran a few steps to hide in the trees.

The first thing I did was light a cigarette. I stood among the trees and smoked and listened to the birds and for the first time in a long while I felt almost at peace. My stomach rumbled, and I became aware again that I was so f.u.c.k.i.n.g hungry I was almost ready to start eating the bark off the trees. So I started walking, at first I kept to the trees but the ground was too rough and I turned left and came out on the shoulder of the road. It was called Lakeshore Road and a car passed me by, the woman driving it glancing in my direction. I realized that I must be quite a sight and quickened my step.

As I walked, I spat on my hands and smoothed my hair and looked at my clothes. I was dirty, there were black smudges all over my jeans and the sleeves of my jacket, and when I wiped my face with the cuff of my shirt it became apparent I could really use a wash. There were houses on the other side of the road, big houses with big front yards, and after I rounded a soft curve I saw that I was headed for the center of the town.

Fifty paces later I saw a sign that informed me the place was called Salmon Arm and I almost laughed - a salmon with arms, that was a good one. I lit another cigarette and kept walking and looking for any place where I might get some food. I passed a big house with a sign that advertised bed and breakfast and I was sorely tempted to go in there and take a room, eat the breakfast, take a shower, have a good long sleep. But they'd want me to register, and I didn't want to leave any trace of my presence.

The sun was high up in the cloudless sky and I was actually beginning to sweat a little. A couple of minutes later I saw a convenience store and crossed the road and went in.

There was no one inside apart from an old guy behind the counter. His face was stuck into a newspaper and he didn't even look up when I came in. I grabbed a couple of tins of luncheon meat and a loaf of sliced bread and a big plastic bottle of Coke. I also took a couple of candy bars when I went up to the counter to pay and said good morning and asked for a couple of packs of Rothmans. He barely looked up from his paper when he was serving me, he must have been reading something really interesting. He was wearing glasses with bifocal lenses, and his eyes were unfocused when he finally looked at me. I was very happy about that.

The old guy took a long time to give me my change from ten bucks; he had just a couple of banknotes in the till, and I ended up with a pocketful of change. I started chomping on a Mars bar even before I left the store, it was f.u.c.k.i.n.g heaven, I'd never eaten anything so good in my entire life. I stopped outside the entrance to the store and finished the bar and unwrapped another and had a good, long drink from the Coke bottle. My watch said it was twenty past noon. I finished the second Mars bar and had another drink and lit a cigarette. I had no idea what to do next, I just knew that I must keep moving. So I started walking again, headed for downtown.

A couple of minutes later I came across a small plaza with a bank, a small supermarket, and a laundromat. When I was putting away the bread and the tinned meat I had discovered that some of the clothes inside my bag were moist: water had leaked out of the shopping bag where I'd put the clothes I'd washed in the creek. There were few people around: a couple of women were smoking and talking by the entrance to the supermarket, that was all.

I cut across the parking lot and went into the laundromat.