1.

On the train back to Hudson, the Cowboy sat across the aisle and two rows behind Jack.

The car was half full.

Jack's seatmate was a big, florid man, sixty-something, in relaxed-fit jeans and a blue denim work shirt patched with a piece of duct tape. Yosemite Sam mustache. Hair in a ponytail.

An old hippie, Jack figured.

For the first hour, the hippie didn't speak.

When the train stopped between stations for fifteen minutes, the hippie said to himself, "In the summer, the heat makes tracks buckle. In the winter, the cold freezes the switches. Too cold. Too hot. Just right. The Goldilocks Line."

Jack had the inside seat, next to the window, on the river side of the train.

Through the reflection of the old hippie in the glass, Jack watched the moonlit landscape rush past.

Across the Hudson, lights of a town twinkled.

The hippie, looking across Jack, gazed out the window, too.

When the train passed a NYC street vendor's falafel cart washed up on the shore of the Hudson, the hippie said, "Hudson River's an estuary. Tidal saltwater runs one hundred fifty-three miles upriver."

In the window reflection, Jack saw the hippie shake his head sadly at the cart.

Jack wondered how it got there.

The hippie clearly saw it as merely one more example of the struggle to keep the Hudson from pollution.

"Used to freeze over," the hippie continued. "You could walk across the river from Mycenae to Catskill."

Jack turned to face the hippie.

"Four hundred years ago," the hippie said, "when Hendrick Hudson discovered the river, it all looked different. Now, the elms, gone. Chestnut trees, gone. The 1938 hurricane leveled forests."

At Poughkeepsie, a dozen people got off.

"The storm last week headed out over the Atlantic," he said. "But this new one, it's like three systems going to hit us at the same time."

Jack didn't respond.

"It's all the same thing," the hippie said. "All one system. Global warming, yup."

Jack checked over his shoulder. The Cowboy sat straight in his seat, military posture.

At Rhinecliff, almost everyone got off the train. Only Jack, the Cowboy, and the hippie were left in the car.

"You know how many people get killed by trains every year?" the hippie asked.

Jack didn't answer.

"A lot, let me tell you," the hippie said. "The engineer sees someone on the track, but can't stop in time. They have kind of a lottery, see who kills the most."

When Jack gave him a skeptical look, the hippie said, "True. My father was a conductor." Then: "PCBs in the river," the hippie said. "Lakes clogged with milfoil. On this trip, look out the window during the day. One pond after another, the surface is so green it looks solid. Some imports, they're lovely, like the hibiscus. Red blooms. Big as a kid's head. Globalization brings in new species like Queen Ann's lace. Snakehead fish in the watershed out-compete the local fish. Zebra mussels, same problem. Predator invasions. Like lionfish. They're natives of the Indian and Pacific Oceans, but are now in the Atlantic. And," the hippie leaned closer to Jack, "they have no known enemies."

Jack realized he was being as silent with the hippie as the Cowboy had been with him.

"There are six billion people alive right now," the hippie said. "To survive, to make the world habitable, we need to lose four billion."

The hippie snapped his finger as if the gesture could annihilate people the hippie considered dispensable.

"I'm the guy," the hippie was saying, "who was at Newport when Pete Seeger asked for an axe to cut the cables of Dylan's electric guitar...."

The car vibrated with thunder.

"Forty-eight billion text messages in December 2007 alone," the hippie said. "It's End Times, I tell you. I'm a Buddhist, but I'm not going to put up with this shit."

Jack climbed past the hippie's fat thighs and headed up the aisle to make a cell phone call from the empty cafe car.

"I'm a good person," the hippie was saying to himself, "but I'm going to fuck him up so bad."

As the automatic door hissed closed behind Jack, the hippie was talking in a louder voice about "high-steel Mohican workers" and a shad bake.

Behind Jack, the door hissed open.

The Cowboy entered the space between the cars, and, before Jack could turn, wrapped his forearm around Jack's neck, choking him, and kneed Jack in the small of the back.

Jack dropped.

The Cowboy put his hands together as if in prayer and hit Jack on the back of the neck.

Jack had always heard about people who'd been hit on the head who saw stars, but he'd assumed it was an exaggeration.

Jack saw stars.

It was like being back in Cosmic Bowling.

He barely felt the Cowboy kick him in the side.

Oddly, he also felt clearheaded as if part of his consciousness had left his body and hovered somewhere in the upper right corner of the space between the cars-a viewpoint from which he saw the Cowboy take from his pocket a large key, which he fit into a keyhole on a panel and turned.

The Cowboy opened the outside door.

Framed in the doorway, woods rushed past.

Jack smelled fresh air and earth.

Everything had happened so fast. Less than a minute.

The Cowboy now held, not a key, but a straight razor.

And was leaning over Jack's body.

Abruptly, Jack's consciousness was back in his body-and Jack was gazing into the Cowboy's impassive face.

The Cowboy flipped open the razor. And was about to slash Jack's throat-when Jack kicked out, once into air, a second time, hitting something solid, a wall, and pushed himself across the floor.

The Cowboy brought his right hand, his razor hand, across his chest, and leaned closer to Jack. With his left hand he went to push Jack's face back to raise Jack's chin, exposing the neck.

Jack slammed the heel of his right hand against the Cowboy's oncoming fingers.

There was a snap.

The Cowboy's left eye twitched. Otherwise, he showed no sign of pain.

But it gave Jack enough time to kick out again, harder, scooting himself backward across the floor.

Jack felt nothing but rushing air under the back of his head.

The Cowboy slashed his razor-and would have slit Jack's throat if Jack hadn't kicked again, shooting himself through the open train door.

For a moment, Jack felt suspended in space.

He felt as if someone had drawn a piece of ice across his thigh.

Cold.

Then, wet.

He cut me, Jack thought.

A wall of noise was passing as if Jack, suspended in space, calmly watched a hurricane pass.

Or like Moses; hidden in a cleft of rock, watched the Eloheim pass.

Stars winked in the sky. Not as gaudy as the sky at Cosmic Bowling.

Maybe the noise was not the train.

Or not just the train.

Thunder?

The ghosts of Hendrick Hudson's men bowling?

Jack felt as if he could sleep forever.

He landed in a marsh, cracking his head on something. A log? Twisting his neck.

He couldn't sort out the pain from the Cowboy's attack from the pain of falling from the train and hitting mud, rocks, branches....

He wondered-almost disinterestedly-how badly his thigh had been cut.

The stars receded.

Fast.

Faster.

Streaking away from him. Or toward him as if he were a starship hitting warp speed in the movies.

And there was no sound.

No sound.

Had the shock made him deaf?

Or had he shocked all the marsh creatures by dropping into nature?

Very near his left ear, he heard a chirp.

That's when he lost consciousness.

2.

The stars were back in place.

The marsh was crazy with noises. Peepers, rustling reeds, an owl-all nature unnaturally loud.

The marsh smelled fetid.

Or maybe it was Jack himself, stinking worse than the hippie on the train.

Jack felt as if he'd slept for hours.

But off to the right he saw the winking lights of the train disappearing around a bend, heading towards Hudson.