Diesel Disco

SHORT STORY

Train crews reporting trespassers in five miles, I hear the dispatcher warn from Roy’s radio. Copy, he mumbles back. He’s young for a conductor. I can tell because of how much he talks. He has yet to be churned up and spit out by the freight life like the other guys I know, most of us twice Roy’s senior. I can tell he’s new to this sort of thing based on his low tolerance for caffeine. We’ve been driving for almost eight hours and he’s only on coffee number two. He eyes me like I’m some ravenous safari animal as I empty yet another Red Bull and toss it into the ever-expanding museum of crushed cans and nicotine packets lining the control panel. I flip on the headlights as we approach a dark tunnel, which Roy observes then proceeds to scribble in his notepad. He’s likely training for an engineer position like mine. I can’t help but feel my ego slightly inflate each time Roy displays a small act of deference. He turns to me. I’ve only ever worked passenger trains. He pauses to scan our cab, cautiously. Is freight always this…depressing? I point to the door behind us. Yeah, the company is minimal but if you get lonely, you can always talk to the soybeans! We’re lugging nearly three thousand tons of those loose little guys. By the end of this shift, they might even start to talk back.

Roy nervously chews away at his cuticles as he stares ahead. Before I can check in on him, he asks, Should we be worried about the, uh, trespassers? You know, the ones dispatch mentioned? I pause before answering to prepare an unbothered tone but I can already feel the annoyance percolating up my throat. I’ve been behind this wheel for half a decade now and the same clowns have been trespassing since the day I started. I’ve filed over fifty complaints with the safety board and reported even more to local law enforcement. They’re all about as useful as a caboose in the twenty-first century. He stares at me blankly. …So not useful at all, I clarify. Roy nods and scribbles again. He looks up at me. It sounds like these “clowns” really get under your skin, what’s their deal anyway? Who would want to hang out in some dingy train tunnels in their spare time? I shrug and look through the windshield stretching across the graying sky. I don’t want Roy to know just how much I know, mainly because that would reveal the concerning amount of time and energy that I’ve dedicated to these strangers over the past few years. All the weekends that I’ve spent tracking their movements with stolen lidar equipment.

The obsession began when I ran into some mechanical issues during a graveyard shift a few years back. I had to spend the night at some dilapidated motel by the tracks. After several hours of attempting to sleep on over a thousand milligrams of caffeine, I decided to take a walk along the train route. After all, there’s something quite soothing about undisturbed tracks in the dead of night. When I reached the tunnel housing my sick train, I heard the faint sounds of shoes shuffling. I followed a thin sliver of green light into the tunnel and halted behind what appeared to be a man’s back, causing me to nearly lose my footing. The man remained unturned, the brim of his backwards cap facing me and his ears cushioned between a pair of oversized headphones. Over his shoulder was a computer screen illuminating a small soundboard. I watched his fingers trace the buttons and knobs like mine do when I’m operating the control panel. A crowd of over twenty people, each wearing the same headphones as the DJ, danced ahead of us along the narrow gap between tunnel and train, some even hanging off of the gangway bellows and pumping their fists in the air to the sound of, well, nothing. A party with no music. I failed to understand it until I noticed the glowing graffiti along the wall of my locomotive: Welcome to the Silent Diesel Disco.

The next morning I could barely pull myself off of the hard motel mattress. I thought about the silent dancers and their vandalism of my train. A train that was built decades before any of them were even born. The worst part wasn’t the disrespect but the thrill and carelessness in their bodies as they stomped around the tunnel in unison. The way they all looked at each other like their lives weren’t finite. I followed them from that point on. The Silent Diesel Disco convened almost every week, in a different tunnel each time, with more room to set up their equipment and move their bodies freely without the obstruction of a suspended train. They were reckless. At any moment, a train weighing twenty thousand tons could exterminate all of them in less than a fifth of a second and continue barreling down the main line like nothing happened.

I catch Roy peeking at his phone from the inside of his denim pocket. I should say something but I don’t. The Federal Railroad Association is a real stickler about electronic devices. Truckers are free to listen to all the music that they desire while they drive long hours across the country. All we have is the steady tempo of our train wheels and the soft hums of wind caressing our moving windows. Hence our need for exorbitant levels of Red Bull fluid. It’s the only way to counteract the sedative qualities of our work environment. I have found ways to alleviate my boredom on longer trips, though. Sometimes I play video games in my head when I start to get tired of my own thoughts. Pac-Man is my favorite game to imagine because it’s the easiest to create from the world ahead of me. If I stare at the tracks for long enough, they eventually bend and stretch into a blue labyrinth, filled with white dots for my consumption. It’s also my favorite because I used to play it with my son. Pac-Man was the only working arcade game at the pizza joint we liked to go to. William, the manager who we called Big Will, was obsessed with locomotives so I gave him the flattened train coins that I’d find along the tracks in exchange for free bread sticks. Will liked my son so much that he even started letting us use the Pac-Man machine for no charge. He would laugh from behind the counter as Leo mimicked Pac-Man’s crunching noises, aggressively chomping down on his pepperoni pizza slice like it was a big white dot from the maze.

My chest tightens at the thought of the pizza box logo. One of those pizza boxes could always be found sitting atop our kitchen counter when Will started giving Leo rides home from school. Leo’s mom was attending to her sick father in Colombia for almost six months, leaving me with all Leo-related responsibilities, which were becoming increasingly difficult to carry out given the volatility of my work schedule at the time. Will had been kind enough to offer his support in some platonic co-parent capacity and I agreed to it, without consulting my now ex-wife. After all, Leo was excited to get free root beer floats after school without his buzzkill dad capping him off. When Leo’s grandfather eventually died, his mom returned to the states and promised she’d never leave for that long again. She broke that promise several months later, after Will got arrested in front of his pizza joint. You should’ve known better, leaving our son alone with some grown man. Our son! I’ll never forget the way she said those two words. The last two words I’d ever hear from the woman I was married to for a quarter of my life. I can still picture the way my son looked up at me the last time I saw him, before his mother took him away for good. I passed by the pizza joint every day for a year after it happened, just to make sure it was still closed down. I thought about breaking in and throwing all the pizza boxes into the wood-fired oven until the whole place would light up into flames, with me at the center.

We’re coming up on hour twelve. I adjust the air pressure in the brake pipe and the wheels slow as we near the entrance of a tunnel. Roy inspects our cab and jots down some more notes, then updates dispatch of our locomotive’s rest location through his radio. Once we’re fully dismounted, I lead us toward a small diner that I've frequented during previous rest periods along this route. I order my usual ribeye plate with a baked potato on the side, loaded with sour cream, bacon and chives for an extra 50 cents. Roy orders a caesar salad, lemonade and a slice of pepperoni pizza. I ignore the chomping sounds, shifting my focus to cutting my steak. We eat in silence but it doesn’t feel awkward. It almost feels familiar, as if we’ve dined here together several times before and there’s nothing new to say about it. As if we’ve been co-operating freight trains for years, always trusting each other’s judgments without needing to say a word. After dinner, we head towards a motel, just as janky as all the others I’ve stayed in. Before he enters his respective room, Roy wishes me a good night then closes his door. I pretend to head inside of mine but I quickly sneak away to hunt for the disco party. My tracker tells me they’re not far.

The next morning, I call Roy and let him know that I didn’t get enough sleep last night to safely operate the vehicle today. I couldn’t live with myself if I put your life in jeopardy. He laughs and calls me dramatic. I look down at my new headphones, ripped from the unsuspecting head of a silent diesel dancer last night, and laugh back. It feels good to laugh. I throw on my new set of wireless Beats, pair them to my bluetooth and head outside to explore the tunnels. I’ve never explored them during the day since I’ve almost exclusively held my rest periods at night. I walk through several tunnels, each longer than the last. I come across the same tunnel where my very first encounter with the Silent Diesel Disco took place. I can tell it’s the one because of the unique way that the vegetation wraps around the tunnel’s mouth. I sit cross-legged in the center of the track and close my eyes. In my ears, a song plays that I’ve never heard before. For a brief moment, I feel more connected to the train track below me than I ever have before. All these years later. I feel my phone buzz in my back pocket and scoop it out to reveal a new text from Roy. You’ll never believe it LOL! Railway called. I figured out the train! Bringing it to the station now. Stay put and someone will be back for you. I shove my phone back into my pocket and stare ahead, confused by this message from Roy. Yet unsurprised. I knew he would make a good engineer. Before I stand up, my phone buzzes again. This time, no new notifications. The buzz turns into a violent tremor, this time from the earth below me. The tracks ahead of me are rattling with a force so thunderous that I am unable to stand up without falling. Light swallows the tunnel.

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