"You want coffee?"
"No thanks."
He sat looking at me, smiling, waiting.
"Guess what," I said finally, handing him the letter. He read it, grinning broadly.
"It doesn't mean anything," I said. "I still can't stay."
"It does mean something. It means they want you, whether you stay or not. It means you're real good at what you do."
I took the letter back and looked at it, not at the words but the object itself. "I guess you're right," I said. "I don't think anybody ever told me that before. Not in a letter. I guess that's something."
"Sure it is."
"I was thinking of it as just one more choice I'd have to make. A complication."
"Life's a complication."
"Sure," I said. "Death is probably a piece of cake by comparison."
We looked at each other for a while. "So tell me about your day, honey," I finally said. We both laughed at that.
"Another buck in the bank, doll."
"Is that it? Do you like driving trains? You never talk about it."
"You really want to hear about it?"
"I think so."
"Okay. Yeah, I like driving trains. Today I went out on a dog catch."
"Not the Amtrak?"
"No. A special mission."
"You had to catch a dog?"
"A dog catch is when you go out to bring in a train after the crew's died on the main line."
"The whole crew died?" I was visited by the unwelcome thought of Fenton Lee in his sheared-off engine, after the head-on collision. I knew this couldn't be what Loyd meant.
He smiled. "Died on the hours-of-service law. They'd worked a full twelve hours but there were holdups somewhere and they still hadn't gotten to a tie-up point. You can't work more than twelve hours straight because you'd be tired and it would be dangerous; it's federal law. So you just stop where you are, and wait for a relief crew."
"Good thing airline pilots don't do that," I said.
"I bet they go to sleep at the wheel more than we do, too." Loyd said.
"So you went out and caught the dog."
"Me and another engineer and a conductor and a brakeman all deadheaded out to Dragoon to pick up the train. The dead crew came back to Grace in a car."
"And you, what, took the train on into Tucson?"
"Yep."
"So what does that mean, what do you do exactly? Is there a steering wheel?"
He laughed. "No. You adjust throttles, you set brakes, you watch signals. You use your head. Today I had to use my head. I was the lead engineer and it was a real heavy train, over ten thousand tons. There were two helper engines coupled at the rear of the train."
"Ten thousand tons?"
He nodded. "A little better than a mile and a half long."
"And you're in the front engine, and there's two engines pushing on the back?"
"Yep. The hard part was topping over Dragoon. That's a real long hill, a long descending grade from Dragoon to the Benson bridge, and there's a siding you sometimes have to pull into there, at twenty-five miles an hour. But the train is so damn heavy it wants to take off on you down that hill. I've messed up on that hill a bunch of times before. Just between you and me, one time I went flying through there at sixty, hoping to God there was nobody coming on the main line. I never could have gotten into the siding track."
"I guess there was nobody coming."
"No. But today there was, and I got us in safe and sound. Today I did it exactly right." He smiled at me over his coffee cup.
"So tell me about it."
"Well, we topped over the hill way below the speed limit, and when I got about half the train over the hill I set a minimum amount of air brakes. Then I waited for it to take hold. The brakes take hold all along the train, in every car, front to back. And then I just watched the speedometer keep coming up."
"You're still speeding up? Even after you've set the brake?"
"You've got six thousand tons and a mile of train coming down the hill behind you. What do you think it's going to do?"
Doc Homer used to pose puzzles like this to Hallie and me, to develop our cognitive skills. "But you've also got some-odd thousand tons still coming up the hill behind you."
"That's right. A little less coming up, and a little more coming down, every minute. That's the tricky part. That's the Zen of Southern Pacific."