I was extremely impressed.
"On a normal train you'd be real leery of setting the brake while half your train's still coming up the hill. The rear would start pulling backward and you'd break in two."
"Oh," I said. "So then you'd have two trains."
"Then you'd have a nice long vacation without a paycheck."
"Oh."
"But I had helper engines that could push on me from the back, so I was pretty sure we wouldn't break in two. I radioed my helper engineer back there to keep pushing up the hill at full throttle, that's throttle eight, and then cut it back to throttle one when he topped over."
"So he was pushing and you were braking at the same time."
"Yep. Setting the brake early enough, that was the part I never got before. It kind of goes against what you think's right."
"Nobody can just tell you how to do that hill?"
"No, because every train's different on every hill. Every single run is a brand-new job. You have to learn the feel of it."
"So you can't necessarily do the same thing next time?"
"Not exactly the same thing, no. But on this train the minimum set worked perfect. And then I worked the throttle to maintain forty miles an hour. I came down the hill through Sybil and Fenner, the last siding before the Benson bridge. I got a flashing yellow after Sybil so I knew we'd probably have to go into Fenner. Then we went by a yellow, and the next signal was a diverging approach, a red over yellow, and I had to be down to twenty-five at that signal so we could get into the siding. Sure enough, there was a train on the main line headed east."
"What if you'd been going sixty, like last time?"
He winked. "I wouldn't be getting any nice letters telling me how good I am at my job."
"Seriously. What if you saw a headlight coming at you in the dark?"
"You heard about Fenton Lee, then, did you?"
"What would you do?"
Loyd looked at me. "Jump off."
"Yeah?"
"Oh, yeah. I did it one time already, when I was a fireman. The engineer hit a siding too fast and that sucker looked like it was going off the track. I was out of there like buckshot. I got a big old bruise on my butt, and the guys laughed at me because they didn't derail. I don't care. There's things worth risking your life for, but a hunk of metal's not one of them."
I watched him drink his coffee. In the hot sun his hair had dried to its normal glossy, animal black. The mesquite leaves cast feathery shadows all over his face and the muscular slope of his chest. The sight of his bare feet stirred me oddly. I badly wanted to take him inside to bed.
"Well. But you are real good at your job," I said.
"I'm getting there."
"I guess I never knew there was so much to it."
He set down his cup and crossed his arms. "Pretty good for an Injun boy, huh?"
"You could have told me more about it."
He smiled. "Codi, did anybody ever tell you a damn thing you didn't want to know?"
I stalled, avoiding the question. "If I told you I wanted to go to bed with you right now, would you think I only loved you for your mind?"
His eyes sparkled. "I think I could overlook it."
That night I lay in Loyd's arms and cried. Since the day I spent with Uda in the attic, wishes and anger had backed up in me, and now they rushed out, rocketing my mind around on a wild track toward emptiness. I told Loyd about the photographs and unrelated things, old things, like making pies with Uda Dell. "I have all these memories I couldn't get hold of before, but it doesn't make me feel any better," I said.
"What kind of memories?"
"Everything. Really, my whole childhood. Most of it I had no idea was there. And most of it's happy. But Loyd, it's like the tape broke when I was fifteen, and my life started over then. The life I'd been living before that was so different-I don't know how to say this, but I just couldn't touch that happiness anymore, I'd changed so much. That was some other little bright-eyed, righteous girl parading around trying to rescue drowning coyotes and save chickens from the stewpot. A dumb little kid who thought the sun had a smiley face on it."
"And what happened when she was fifteen?"
I withdrew from Loyd's arms. Had I set him up to ask? I lay looking at the wall, considering whether I could tell him. If I only had two more months in Grace, it wasn't long enough. "I can't explain it," I said. "I guess it finally hit me that nobody was going to take care of me."