GUY ADAMS
7
skins. Briefly, Hughie considered paying a visit to one of his staple-breasted honeys but the night was too hot and even the effort of masturbation seemed too steep a mountain to climb. Instead, he rolled himself a smoke and lost himself in the late-night radio tunes. The swamp sang along. Then the air in front of his porch suddenly filled with noise and whizzing metal. The trees split in a shower of shed leaves. The earth erupted in fistsized divots, splattering against the front of Hughie’s home with a drumroll. Hughie rolled off his chair, as much in surprise as from the impact of mud and vegetation. His first thought was a grenade. Vietnam had been pretty uneventful for Hughie but he’d seen enough combat to think the worst of a loud noise. It wasn’t a grenade. Hughie’s eyes were tightly closed. Had he been watching, he would have seen an old-fashioned steam train cut its way through the detritus and come to a halt in a diagonal line across his backyard. The train smoked like an earth-struck comet, white plumes rising from its glistening iron body. Hughie, aware only that he wasn’t as dead as he had expected to be, opened his eyes and stared at the foreign object on his land. There is a limit to what one can say about seeing an antique locomotive appear out of nowhere and Hughie summed it up with a whispered “motherfucker…” as he rolled onto his ass and tried to make the damn thing disappear by staring at it. It refused, despite his best