Lester and Vera approached from the side, out in the open. The squatters were gone. No one wanted to be in the doomed train being ripped of its skin, its ribs and frame cut away. The eternal adversaries of rail travel, the bums and bulls, had finally agreed on something: That it was too bad. That it had been a great train, and they were ashamed. The squatters left for the subfloors and gutted tenements of the Gateway, and the bulls to patrol other sections of the railyard. No one wanted to look at the train. They agreed that destruction should be done out suddenly, catastrophically. Destruction should be mindless, not meted out by executives—a ledgered, meticulous death. They retreated to other city haunts in shame, and for the first time since it was launched in Minneapolis on May 29, 1935 at twelve o’clock noon, having been christened with water from Minnehaha Falls, The Hiawatha carried no mineral or human freight. It no longer trucked the cargo of emotion, popular myth, shelter, or travel. For the first time, as the crews sparked the cutting torches and rubbed their gin-reddened eyes, it was devoid of a reason for being.

So Lester and Vera approached the train unnoticed, and without fanfare, without shout or whistle-blow, the hiss of air brakes or the scowl of flat-footed and weary conductors. They boarded the broken steps of a sleeper car and searched for a bunk not too soiled. They found one that had candle wax melted to the lip of the bunk below, with soot-blackened wood paneling, and an advertisement that shouted Henderson’s Cars! All Models! stuck between the mattress and the wall. They lay down. They spooned, still too shy and tender to face each other, and looked through the broken window where dogs went high-tailed and snarling through the lot grass. The errant lights of the yard bosses sprayed the side of the car, but no one approached, and, on the edge of the city, they were alone.

It became their place. Though it was doomed, eaten up by the crews car by car, as the train used to devour the alluvial landscape from the Dells to Tomah, it became theirs. They were stowaways, jumpers staying in the state cabin previously reserved for Hubert Humphrey and the mobsters who came north from Chicago out of habit, since they no longer had to boat booze across northern lakes or cart it on wagons farther west.

It became theirs, silently straining toward the past. Lester and Vera realized early on that lovers have to make their own maps of the city. They had to time their comings and goings so they didn’t run into the familiar—family or friends; or the too unfamiliar—resentful strangers who read their hand-holding, brown on white, as a tragic breach of etiquette, as the worst of all possible urban outcomes.