The Homeless Millionaire

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

I was wearing a T-shirt, a flannel shirt, and my jean jacket. The jacket ended at my waist. I was tired, and getting ravenously hungry. The good side to all this was that I was too uncomfortable to worry about what I'd done. The only thing I cared about was the fucking cold.

I told myself that once the sun came up, it would get warmer. I only had to survive the next five minutes. Then the next five minutes. Then the next. I told myself things could be worse: it could be raining. I still felt miserable as hell.

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 begin 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 bed. 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 marshalling 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, had no idea 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 dense trees to my right and scattered buildings to my left.

The track ran straight as an arrow, but the train kept moving slowly. I was both bothered and grateful: someone could spot me, but it wasn't freezing any more. The town was asleep, all the house windows were dark. The only place that was lit up was a gas station.

The train lurched and the wheels started squealing and we began turning left. It was a long curve, and I risked moving from under the cistern tank and saw a bridge ahead. To the right was another bridge, a brightly illuminated road bridge, and I saw 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 to speed up again.

I was so hungry that 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 lake with a large building perched on a hill overlooking the shore: it was richly lit and seemed to be some sort of hotel or resort. Then the valley widened, and the railroad diverged from the road to the point where the highway disappeared from sight. I was very happy about that. 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 survived 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 finished the whisky, and started chewing on a cigarette. I ate a couple of cigarettes before I was hit by a wave of nausea that almost made me throw up. There was a good side to this, too: it kept me awake and alert. I was so tired that otherwise I could have fallen off the train.

An hour or so after dawn, isolated outposts of civilization began to appear now and then: a wooden cabin, a rest stop, a cluster of houses. The railroad weaved back and forth over the highway a couple of times, and I saw traffic: 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 boring routines. Now I yearned to be one of them, driving in a cheap car to a low-paying stupid job, with a beer after work 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 someone might see me. I made up my mind to jump off the train at the nearest town. I calculated that I'd travelled well over a hundred miles. I could risk being seen by other people; it wouldn't automatically connect me to the killing.

But the train hardly slowed down at all while going through the next couple of tiny towns, and I was too scared to jump off. A twisted ankle would really make things difficult. 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.

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 the shore of a big lake. There were boats and yachts on that lake. I envied the people on those boats so much it was like physical pain.

I saw this guy fishing off a rowboat no more than thirty yards offshore. He was an older guy, I could see grey hair escaping from under his silly little red hat. I wanted to be him, I was ready to sacrifice thirty years of my life to swap places with him.

We came to a place called Canoe and I was sorely tempted to leave the train there but we were going just a little 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 turned left sharply 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, looking for a good spot to jump off. But the ground next to the tracks was pretty rough, and it would be all too easy to fuck myself up in some way.

It was just as well that I didn't try to jump because a moment later we started to slow down again, and when I looked along the train I saw a red semaphore light. The train came to a stop with 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. It had 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 very long while I felt almost at peace. My stomach rumbled, and it hit me that I was so fucking hungry I could eat the bark off the trees. So I began to walk, keeping an eye out for a store or an eatery of some kind.

I walked along the shoulder of the road and soon saw a street sign that informed me it was called Lakeshore Road. I heard a car approaching from behind and did my best to walk steadily and with a carefree air. The woman that drove that car it glanced at me when she passed, and I had the feeling she watched me in her rear-view mirror for a while. It dawned on me that I must be quite a sight after travelling on that train.

Without breaking my step, I spat on my hands and smoothed my hair and examined my clothes. There were numerous black smudges on my jeans and jacket, and when I wiped my face with the cuff of my shirt it became clear 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 went round a curve in the road I saw that I was headed downtown: I could see taller buildings in the distance

Maybe fifty paces later I saw a sign that told me the town was called Salmon Arm and it actually made me smile; it had to be one of the most stupid town names in the world. It seemed impossible to get nabbed by cops in a place called Salmon Arm. Salmon Arm police? There could be no such thing.

Feeling a little safer, I lit another cigarette and kept walking and came to a big house with a sign that advertised bed and breakfast. I was sorely tempted to go in there and take a room, eat the breakfast, take a shower, and have a good long sleep. But I'd have to register, and I didn't want to leave any trace of my presence.

The sun was already 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 entered. I grabbed a couple of tins of luncheon meat and a loaf of sliced bread and a big plastic bottle of Coke. I also grabbed a couple of candy bars at the counter when I was about to pay. The old geezer was still busy reading. I wished him good morning, and asked for cigarettes.

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 seemed totally unfocused when he finally looked at me. It suited me fine.

He took a long time giving me change from ten bucks; he just had a couple of banknotes in the till, and I ended up with a heavy pocketful of quarters. I started chomping on a Mars bar even before I got the change and it was fucking heaven, I'd never eaten anything so good in my entire life.

I stopped outside the entrance and finished the bar and unwrapped another and had a good, long drink of Coke. My watch said it was twenty two past noon. I finished the second Mars bar and had another drink and lit a cigarette. I had no plan, no idea of what to do next. I just knew that I must keep moving. So I started walking again, heading for downtown.

A couple of minutes later I came across a small plaza with a bank, a small supermarket, and a laundromat. 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.