he musk cloud of a skunk drifted in the humid summer air of Patten Creek. Its warning stench permeated a small stretch of the Orange and Rockland Railroad, which ran like a scar across the belly of New York State. A low whistle sliced through the quiet of the moonless evening. Silky rodents raised their snouts, pricked up their ears and vanished into safe burrows nearby.

Nat Ruddle didn't move a muscle. His body, balled up like a fetus, was nestled between the twin rails of the train tracks. A deathly sleep engulfed him, the kind brought on by loneliness and too much alcohol. He lay oblivious to the faint vibrations of the steel his left hand was draped over.

It was only twenty-four hours earlier that a not-yet-inebriated Nat, perched on a shaky barstool in the cellar-like atmosphere of the Hogshead tavern, ordered his usual vodka and tonic with a twist and spotted his friend slinking out through the grunge-streaked, pock-marked bathroom door. It was one o'clock in the morning.

"Teddy, where you been? I tried calling you earlier," said Nat as the wheat-stalk figure of Theodore Christiansen sat next to him. Except for a couple in the rear booth and a lone brunette at the bar, they were the Hogshead's only patrons.

"I've been on a date with Patty Taylor" crowed Teddy with a hint of mock pride. "We went to that vigil for Mutt Mountain, you know the artist who shot himself last week."

"Yeah right, nice date," Nat spat sarcastically. He hadn't been on a date himself in over two years.

"Where you gonna take her next week, " he followed " to see the Dead?"

"Hey, it's not funny. The guy was practically a musical genius and there he is cut down in his prime. It's sad, like your precious Lennon."

"Big difference," Nat argued looking disappointed more than anything. "My precious Lennon was assassinated by a madman, this guy, Mountain, sliced an asterisk into his gut then sucked on a .38 and squeezed the trigger. I mean, he had a family for crissakes."

"He had a rough childhood, father abused him, or something like that," Teddy explained vaguely. His pale eyes flickered slightly and fixed on some point on the ceiling. "A tortured soul, it showed in his music. I guess he just couldn't handle the fame."

"Still he should have thought of his family before he offed himself," said Nat, his lip curled in disgust. "That's just selfish if you ask me. Like my old man leaving us the way he did."

"Wait a minute…"

"You know the story," he interrupted.

The deathly likeness of Nat's father flashed before his eyes, distracting him. He shook his head slowly and tried to concentrate on Teddy's features. A dull pain began to blossom behind his brow. These short episodes, or as Nat thought of them, little hauntings, seemed to occur more frequently lately. He found he couldn't control them. His father's face, in its grotesque moribund form, was barging in on his consciousness, haunting him from the inside.

Just as his head cleared, from across the room came a great crash of wood, metal, and glass. The bartender, who had been dozing in the corner, popped his head up like a turtle, looked around dazed, then dropped back into his comfortable shell. The rear booth erupted with guffaws as two heads craned out from their cubby. Nat and Teddy shuffled over to see what happened.

Sprawled on the unclean floor was the lone brunette. She appeared to be sleeping peacefully amid a pile of splintered barstool and shards of glass. Wire-framed granny glasses sat askew on her sunken cheeks. She clutched one aluminum brace in her right hand, another lay like a weapon after a medieval massacre near the emergency exit.

Nat stared down into what he thought a strikingly plain face. The nose not too long nor turned-up, the lips not bee-stung nor too delicate, the chin not jutted nor caved. It was an unremarkable face until the eyelids fluttered open and Nat found himself gazing into little orbs of foamy lilac. Her eyes absorbed his and there was a short surreal moment broken only when a gust of her stale tequila breath re-awakened him to his dank surroundings.

"She's crippled," Teddy whispered in his ear. Nat pushed his friend away, dismissive.

"Can I help you up?" offered Nat as he retrieved the other brace and grabbed her arm.

"I guess I had one too many," she said, cheeks coloring slightly. "Actually I was just about to leave…"

"It's these damn rickety stools." He stood her up on limp legs and put his arm around her for support. "Let me help you outside, I'll give you a lift home if you like." "Well I live just down the railroad tracks, about a quarter mile."

"C'mon then, I'll walk you."

As they walked through the bar, arm in arm, the brunette's aluminum braces clanked on the wooden floor, punctuating the silence.

Beneath the sliver of a waning moon, the couple walked along the channel between the rails, stepping from tie to tie. Like a stairway. The thought surprised him. …A stairway in some two-dimensional world. Those were the old man's words. He suddenly remembered walking these tracks with his father years ago. The old man would tell him stories about his youth, how he would jump the boxcars and travel for miles like a hobo. Oh, he loved those stories. Dad said he often felt the tracks were like his own little world then. The ties were like a stairway only flattened out, two-dimensional.

"Lydia," she was saying. "My name is Lydia."

"Oh, Lydia, that's an odd name." He said, helping her negotiate the ties. " I mean not odd so much as old-fashioned, nice."

"Cut the crap," she shot back. "What's yours."

"Nathaniel," he said, preferring the use of his full name now. It sounded equally old-fashioned, a match.

After a few steps she stumbled and Nat caught her in his arms, righted her. He continued to grip her waist as he studied her frame.

"How 'd this happen to you?" he blurted. "I mean were you born…"

"No, I jumped off a cliff," she said, searching his face.

"An accident?"

"I was trying to dive into a lake. I hit too close to shore, on the rocks." She stood up a little straighter on her braces, Nat let go of her waist and listened. "We were on vacation at a lake upstate. I was sixteen, all my friends were there, my boyfriend too. We all climbed this mountain to a little ledge, then one by one, everyone jumped off into the lake. Everyone except me, I was last and they all were chanting 'Jump Liddy, jump'. I was terrified but I had to do it, it was like a rite of passage. I had this feeling right before I jumped like my life would never be the same again after this, like I'd be jumping into some parallel world or something. Sounds silly, but sometimes I wonder if it didn't really come true."

Nat just nodded and started slowly down tracks again.

"Wait," She called. "This is where I live, right down here."

He turned and they started down a narrow embankment that led out to a cul-de-sac. Nat swept Lydia up into his arms. She was light and loose like a marionette, braces clacking. When she smiled up at him he felt important, like her shining hero.

Halfway along the path, Nat heard uneven footsteps approaching. He turned sideways to allow whomever it was to pass. He could detect a faint odor of ferment as the night-cloaked figure of a man stumbled closer. The man was humming, he turned to face them. Nat held his breath.

The wide, foreboding face of his father stared out of the darkness into Nat's stunned features.

"Howdy," the man sang. "Gorgeous night for a stroll, ain't it." Then he continued on his way, still humming, toward the railroad tracks.

Lydia lived in the basement apartment of small split-level at the arc of a dead end. Once inside, she collapsed into an ancient clump of couch and Nat eased himself into a beanbag chair. He found himself staring at the angular features of a Van Gogh self portrait, which oddly soothed him.

"That old man who passed us, that was old man Craw," Lydia breathed. "He walks the tracks almost every night, if he's not passed out on alcohol. The story goes, his little boy wandered off one day about fifteen years ago. They searched for days before they found the kid's body in the woods. In pieces. Somebody carved him up. That sick or what? Anyway, Craw couldn't accept it, I guess. He never gave up searching for his boy. His wife left him about a year after it all happened and now he's just a sad drunk, pathetic."

"Yeah, I've seen him at the bar, he looked pretty cheerful just now though," Nat said

"Alcohol, insanity, both are pretty good at hiding the pain," she said seriously, as if she had just realized this. Then suddenly she broke into a giddy laugh.

"You know, in a way, he reminds me of my own father."

"Is your dad an alcoholic too?" Lydia asked. She lit a cigarette, squinted through John Lennon frames.

"No, he died of a heart attack about two years ago. He was only fifty-five years old, I was nineteen. Sometimes I wish I could get some of that time back. We had our differences but I was really just starting to get to know him, on a different level I mean. There was something about that old man Craw that reminded me of him.

"Oh Nathaniel, I'm so sorry," said Lydia, a little off guard. "You want a beer or something?"

"You know how you told me how you felt just before you jumped that cliff?" he began, accepting a Coors. "Well I felt exactly the same the day my father died, just before. It was like I knew it was going to happen, but I couldn't do anything about it. It was the day he got out of the hospital after his first heart attack, he went out to the backyard and started cleaning it up, you know, picking up fallen branches, dog shit, whatever. These were my chores, my little jobs to take care of while he was away. He couldn't just remind me, or even order me to do them, he had to show me how irresponsible I was, as always. Stupid asshole! When he came in and sat on the couch, I'll never forget his face, never forget it. He looked so tired, more tired than I'd ever seen him. I new he was gonna die and I hated him for it, hated him!"

Nat leaned forward in the low chair and began to sob. He couldn't look Lydia in the face. When she called him over he buckled into her arms and gave himself over to her entirely until she whispered in his ear. He carried her into the rumpled bedroom and fell upon the bed. There they discovered each other's flesh and were able to shut out some of the pain.

It was the middle of the night when Nat woke in a glaze of sweat and beheld the mute specter of his father reflected on the cobwebbed ceiling. He knew he couldn't linger much longer, and was gone before the first light.

The following night, Nat made his way to his customary seat at the Hogshead. It was Saturday, eleven o'clock, the tavern was full of patrons trying to forget their weekly woes. Lydia was not among them, though she was all Nat thought of. He ran last night's film loop over and over in his mind, those lavender eyes looming as a backdrop. He slouched at his wobbly stool and poured down the drinks.

By twelve thirty, there was a slight disturbance at the front door of the tavern. Nat was shaken from his haze by a loud voice. "You've been told more than a few times that you're not welcome here, old man."

Nat shifted his view to the door and spied old man Craw's worn, smiling face as he was pushed back down the steps onto the sidewalk. It was enough to pull him off his stool toward the exit where he bumped into Teddy making an entrance with Patty Taylor.

"Nat, where you going so fast, buddy. You remember Patty," said Teddy, throwing an arm around his date. Nat stared past them at the old man, watched him collect himself then disappear.

Nat squeezed past Teddy and Patty, slurring some apologies, and stumbled wildly in the direction of the train tracks. He squinted through double vision, but the dark night revealed nothing. He called out desperately for Mr. Craw.

Half an hour later, only yards from the path that led to Lydia's place, a whistle sounded. A low rumble alerted small wildlife. A yellow beam rose from the darkness in the distance like a coal miner's helmet from a tunnel. The train approached steadily. Nat, stubbornly unaware, lay curled like a question mark on his two-dimensional stairway between life and death.

Now a figure emerged from the path and moved toward him. The trebly tones of railroad crossing gates jingled and red lights flashed. The figure kneeled beside him. The beam of light grew brighter. The figure gazed into Nat's face. And the rumble grew louder. The figure cradled Nat in its arms as another whistle blared. Like a crib bound infant, Nat roused from his black sleep to the vision of his father come alive. Loving eyes spoke to him, "My son, at last my son."

Suddenly he was aware of his surroundings and scrambled off the tracks. Backing up, he saw old man Craw standing above him, arms outstretched, between the rails.

"You live, you live!" cried Craw, over the roar.

Nat tried to scream, but nothing came as the train plowed through the space where he had collapsed, the space where the old man had stood.

Lydia opened her door to the shadow of Nathaniel. He followed her into the apartment, strangely quiescent.

"I've been hoping you would call. I thought I'd never see you again. I'm so glad you're here, even though it's the middle of the night… What's wrong?" Her words passed through his body like tiny spirits.

"There's been a terrible accident," he confessed. "The old man's been killed. He saved me from…"