The Trench

Kevin Fitzgerald leaned on the railing of a brand-new bridge over a brand-new canyon in the middle of downtown Reno and waited for a train to go by thirty-three feet beneath his shoes, and thought that in twenty years of writing about this town he had never once had to cover a story in which the railroad, of all things, went away.

It had not gone away. That was the thing his editor kept wanting him to simplify and that he kept refusing to simplify, because it was the whole point. The trains were not leaving. There would be more of them than ever, longer ones, double-stacked, ever since the big Union Pacific merger back in the nineties that had started this entire argument by promising to run a train through the heart of Reno every twenty minutes for the rest of time. The town had looked at that promise, at the gates coming down every twenty minutes across the streets that tied one half of downtown to the other, the ambulances waiting, the tourists trapped, and had decided, after years of the loudest fighting Kevin had ever watched, to spend the better part of three hundred million dollars digging the railroad a trench and dropping it below the city. Two miles of it, more or less. Thirty-three feet down. A dozen streets carried over the top on bridges like the one he stood on. The trains would still come. You just would not have to look at them anymore, or wait for them, or, if the engineers were right, hardly hear them.

He had covered every foot of it. He had been the city hall man for the paper since he was a young reporter, and he had sat through the council meetings and the lawsuits and the 2002 election that had turned, as much as an election could turn on anything, on a hole in the ground that did not exist yet. He had written up the petition drive, fifteen thousand signatures from people who thought the whole thing was a boondoggle. He had written up the casino that sued over its share of the special tax and won. He had written the cost overruns as they arrived, the number climbing from what they had promised to what it actually was, and he had learned, doing it, the oldest lesson of his beat, which was that a town will tell itself any story it needs to about a number in order to do the thing it has already decided to do.

Now the digging was done, and the trains had started running down there in the trench this year, and the paper wanted a piece for the near-finish of it, and Kevin had come out to stand on the bridge because he did not know how to write the piece from his desk.

He looked down into the cut. Clean concrete walls, the two bright rails at the bottom, the whole thing swept and engineered and strangely peaceful, a river of steel where a river of steel had always run except that now it ran below instead of through. Somewhere back at the paper there was a photograph he had asked them to pull, from the dig two years ago, when the excavation had turned the middle of downtown into an archaeological site and men with trowels had come up out of the ground with whiskey bottles from the eighteen-sixties, and a brick-lined pedestrian tunnel nobody living had known was there, and the basement of a Masonic lodge, the buried first draft of the town coming up in pieces under the backhoes. They had put some of it in a case in the old depot lobby. Kevin had gone and looked at it and felt something he still could not name, the sensation of a town being made to cough up its own beginning.

Because this was the beginning. That was what he could not simplify. The railroad had not come to Reno; the railroad was Reno, had made it out of nothing in 1868, had driven its stakes into the meadow by the river ford and auctioned off the lots and named the place and then run its trains straight down the center of the thing it had created for a hundred and thirty-seven years, at grade, in the open, the way you would run a spine down the middle of a body. The town had grown up around the tracks the way flesh grows around bone. And now the town had grown big enough, and rich enough, and impatient enough, to reach down and lower its own spine out of sight.

His own people had come in on it. Kevin knew this the way you know the things your family says at funerals. His great-great-grandmother Bridget had gotten off a train from County Clare and gone to work cooking in a hotel on Commercial Row that existed for one reason, which was that the depot was across the street and hungry travelers came off the platform three times a day. There had been Fitzgeralds within a hundred yards of these tracks ever since. His great-grandfather had walked a beat down here. His grandfather Michael had spent one hard year riveting up the tall hotel by the river and then a harder decade building walls for the government, a man who put things up. And here was Kevin, who had spent his whole working life instead writing things down, standing on a bridge watching the town swallow the tracks his family had first walked into town beside, and the paper wanted eight hundred words and a hopeful ending.

He did not have a hopeful ending. He was not sure the story took one. It was not a death, though he had covered so many downtown deaths, the Mapes, Harolds, the whole erased skyline, that his hands reached for the death-shape out of habit. Nothing was dying here. Something was only being moved, put below, made quiet, kept and hidden at the same time, the way the town seemed to want to do lately with everything it could not decide how to feel about, its river, its railroad, its own loud beginning. He thought the honest ending was that the trains would keep coming and almost nobody would notice them anymore, and that this was both a triumph of engineering and a small strange act of forgetting, and that he did not know which of those two things it mostly was and neither, he suspected, did anyone else.

Then he felt it before he heard it, the bridge deck taking up a low tremble under his forearms on the rail, and he looked east and saw the headlight coming, a freight, long and unhurried, running the new steel at the bottom of the cut. It came on and passed beneath him, car after stacked car, close enough that he could read the reporting marks, thirty-three feet down and going somewhere the way it always had, and the sound of it, when it reached him, was already smaller than any train he had heard in this town in his life.

Kevin took out his notebook. He watched the last cars run out from under the bridge toward Sutro Street and the desert beyond it, and he wrote down, to start with, only what was true: that the train had gone by, and that he had had to lean over the rail to see it.

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