at the backs of their feet. They found two pairs of empty seats arranged before a table.
“Hey, we’re moving.”
The train began its advance away from the station, and Brandon and Keenan were briefly mesmerized by the illusion of flight that came from looking through the railcar’s large windows and watching their enclosed space move against the low skyline of the transit center’s false downtown, a Potemkin village of parking garages masquerading as office buildings. As the train rolled away from the station, past gates with flashing red lights and waiting cars with daydreaming drivers, Araceli threw herself back into her seat and let out a sigh. Halfway there, more or less. The train itself was a clean comfort, with its white walls and stainless steel poles and vinyl seats with aerodynamic shaping and the plaque by the door that proclaimed its provenance: BOMBARDIER, MONTREAL. After dropping off the boys and the briefest of stays at the old man’s house, she would set off south again for Marisela’s and await news of Scott and Maureen. She imagined different outcomes for their family debacle, including a divorce that ended with an empty house and Araceli vacuuming after the movers had left, or a tearful family reunion and ample thanks from Scott and Maureen to Araceli for seeing their boys through the crisis.
Through the window, the boys saw a landscape of shrinking backyards shuffle past: the repetition of laundry lines and old furniture did not hold Brandon’s attention for long, and he finally looked across at Araceli and asked, “Can you draw me a picture? Here in my notebook? Like the dragon you drew for Keenan. That was cool.”
“Yeah, it was tight,” Keenan said.
“I didn’t know you could draw,” Brandon said.
“¿Qué quieres? What do you want I draw for you?”
“How about a soldier?”
“¿Un soldado? Fácil.”
She took his lined notebook and pencil and looked for a blank page, glancing quickly at his crude war scenes, little stick-figure Brueghels in which one army of stick men set off cannons and laid siege to rectangular forts and pummeled enemies who raised up stick hands and ran from scribbled explosions. This boy is very smart but he does not know art. Brandon watched, intently, as she traced some initial lines and a man in uniform with a weapon held across his chest took form on paper. It was a musket like the ones in his book American Revolution and Araceli drew it from memory, though she gave her soldier a modern uniform, with a row of medals and a steel helmet. Then she worked on the face, choosing features that were deeply familiar to her, and made it stare straight back at the viewer.
“Wow,” Brandon said when she finished. “That guy’s face—he looks really tough.”
“Really mean,” Keenan added.
The face belonged to Araceli’s mother.
Her art session was interrupted, suddenly, by the jolt of the train’s arrival in Fullerton, the last station before Los Angeles. Four people waiting on the platform quickly stepped on board and the train lurched forward anew. Soon the train was entering the industrial districts southeast of Los Angeles, one windowless warehouse followed by another as the train accelerated and began to vibrate slightly. The buildings began to age, the neutered, primary-colored plaster of the late twentieth century giving way to the earth-toned constructions of brick and cement of earlier eons. Suddenly the warehouses had windows, many dark and frosted over with dust and cobwebs so that they resembled thousands of cataract-infested eyes. The train went faster still and vibrated violently, causing Keenan to squeeze Araceli’s hand. Brandon held on to the armrest and felt his head strike the window, and wondered if the train might disintegrate, or if the forces of acceleration might transform this rolling steel box into a time machine that would transport them from the archaic era of brick now visible outside the window, to even simpler ages of wood, smoke, and stone.
The train slowed suddenly as it entered a switching yard with at least twenty parallel tracks. They rolled slowly past rusting hopper cars that had made hundreds of journeys from Kansas with wheat and corn, past tank cars oozing black tar, and container cars with German and Chinese names and bar codes stamped incongruously on their sides. The train made a long, sweeping turn under a freeway bridge and Araceli watched the haphazard cables and wires that followed the tracks moving like a black, horizontal rain. She noted too the random dispersal of trash on the embankment, the plastic