Train

 

And then there was that time the train whistle changed.

 

For about a week, when it would rise, wavering and wild over the roofs of my neighborhood, there was a… well… an answer.

 

At first I thought it was an echo, but there had never been an echo before. The geography hadn’t changed. No new building had been erected, overnight, for its moan to bounce back from.

 

No, this was a response. Like two instruments, identical but differently tuned, one would begin and the second would join and the two voices would twine around each other, low and mournful and long-suffering, the voice I recognized. And the new one, higher, keening, with an edge like irritation, or alarm, or surprise.

 

For a week this duet rolled, unremarked, up and down the streets, through open windows and closed doors. And then it was over.

 

It was months later. I was standing outside a bar in that instant camaraderie of smokers, just drunk enough to tell the story of the singing train that, for one week, had an accompaniment. I thought the story made me sound mysterious and unusually perceptive. But one of the other smokers just ground a butt out in the sand bucket, nodded, and said “the Lost Train” to a chorus of agreeing grunts all around.

 

“There was another set of tracks,” he said, “closer to the river but the water took it. Took all the land under it. It happened fast and they got almost all of the cars shunted to safety but they lost one locomotive and two Schnabel cars to the flooding. Every year, the same week it went down, you can hear it again. Just long enough to remind us.”

 

“Remind us?” I asked.

​

“That storm season’s coming."