The big locomotive came alive, its exhausts rasping out as it left the station behind and made hollow thunder on the railroad bridge. Paul spun two unions loose, pulled down a hot section of two-inch pipe, reached into the injector with a pair of long-nosed pliers, and fished inside.

The engineer blew a crossing signal for Cotton Road and pulled the throttle wider. “Can you see what you’re doing?” he yelled.

“Don’t have to. This is a Hancock inspirator. I’ve got a book on it.” Paul pulled out a broken valve seat with the pliers and put it into the engineer’s glove. “Souvenir.”

He reassembled the injector piping and climbed into a nest of hot steam lines on top of the boiler to turn on the main appliance valve. Steam pressure hammered the pipe, but there was no leak. He pulled back on a brass lever and the injector sucked up a charge of water from the tender and sent it whistling through to the boiler.

The engineer watched his water indicator inch up. He nodded once. “Get ready to jump,” he yelled. “I’m slowing for the first Patterson crossing.” The locomotive rocked on the bad track coming out of Badeaux’s swamp, and when the whistle sang out for the first road, Paul got down on the lowest cab step, feeling the train drag. He hopped to the asphalt road and ran a few steps, grabbing the pole of a crossing sign. The engine’s exhausts cracked like gunshots, and the coaches lurched as they gathered speed.

He leaned on the pole, watching the bright windows float past. When the diner approached, he looked up at the broad light-filled windows, the silver menu holders, the shining bud vases. Only a few people sat on his side, a man in a brown suit, two old women, and then like an electric shock came the face of Colette, staring out into the dark, seeing nothing, certainly not him, her face more beautiful than he had ever seen it, full of energy and excitement. Before he could move, she sailed by and was gone. He caught a glimpse of dark hair flowing over her shoulders, and then nothing, a baggage car and an empty coach, the end of the train. He was left in a dark, windy guilt. He had fixed the giant machine that was taking her away, had forgotten that his love was on the train. He began to sense what he’d lost, and as the steam whistle fluted a huge warning a mile to the west, he tried to remember her face, her perfume. He cupped his hands over his nose, hoping for some trace of her there, but he smelled only the oily scent of machinery.

* * *

The next morning he lay in his bed, feeling like an old sack washed up on the riverbank. He kept his eyes closed, listening. In the kitchen his mother threw his lunch box on the table. A skillet banged on a stove burner; the coffeepot rang as she charged it with grounds. He opened his eyes and rolled out of bed, hoping that his mind would not come with him, that for one day at least, he could be just a body.