Trot’s gaze never rises from the rough metal floor of the hopper car, and he speaks as if reciting a passage of scripture or an alibi. “Started hopping trains when I lived in Texas. Ran with a group called the Recon Rejects. The folks got tired of warning me. Caught me the last time I ventured home, moved me to Tennessee with them. Same as Anne—got a shit sentence at home. My way didn’t line up with what Mommy and Daddy had planned for their son.”

“Gotta be careful out here,” Cinnamon says. “You got lucky hopping this grainer. It don’t always happen that way. Get a grainer with no porch, it’s not solid, just a skeletal crossbar. It’s what you call—”

“Yeah. A suicide ride,” Trot interrupts.

Cinnamon smiles. “Right, a suicide ride. Gotta ditch that bitch. I see you know your cars.”

Cinnamon seems to be feeling them out while offering up her wisdom of the rails. Anne would need a notebook to keep track of all the dos and don’ts of hopping freights.

“I know a bit,” Trot says. “Any idea where we’re headed?”

“If luck is with me and my research is correct, Alabama. Birmingham. But we need to scoot before it stops in the yard.”

“Bulls?” Trot asks.

“Oh, yeah,” Cinnamon tells them. “Rail pigs. But there’s a jungle I hang at down in Alabama. Group of crust kids. Kinda run by a skeez calls himself Dredd.”

“Dredd?” Anne says.

“Yeah, like in the comic book, Judge Dredd. Something he grew up reading. Huge fanatic. Dude is a total perv, though. Used to teach college.”

“How long you been riding?” Anne asks.

“Since I was sixteen. I’m twenty-five now.”

“Nine years.”

“Yeah, run away from home. Mother was no-account. Father got touchy when I got older—‘developed female qualities,’ as he spoke it. I had a boyfriend, couple years older. Started riding with him. Then we got separated, but I kept going. Was addicted, you know. No ties, no strings. Nothing holding me down.”

“That’s awful about your father.”

“Yeah, it’s a real letdown when you realize that family you see in the movies and the family you’s born into don’t live on the same block. That’s some make-believe Disney bullshit.”

“You got that right,” says Anne. “My home didn’t have no Peter Pan or Wendy. I was constantly at odds with my brothers and sisters. They seemed to think how we lived was the accepted norm. Where’d you call home?”

“Bluefield, West Virginia. Not much to talk about. Rural folk. Hard living. You?”