Читать книгу West Virginia - Joe Halstead - Страница 14

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HEADING SOUTH THE NEXT MORNING, Jamie watched through the window of the Amtrak and saw the skyline of New York and its steel skyscrapers disappear—the city turning into country. Later, he noticed the piles of snow blanketing everything and there was a darkness to the world as the train turned west and left Washington, DC. He thought about how his life seemed like a terrifying series of smash cuts, and, after a twelve-dollar personal pizza and a cup of black coffee in the dining car, the tracks wavered slowly ahead past Charlottesville and the landscape closed off. The train continued through it in the general direction of West Virginia until the markings of civilization ended in acres of dark woods and hollers and freshly dug strip mines resembling, he thought, enormous graves large enough to bury a race of ten-thousand-pound people. In the dark, he couldn’t make out the mountains, only black, asymmetrical varieties of shadowy apexes, and when he was the last person left in the car after thirteen hours, the train’s lights lit up the next stop and he finally saw the rickety mid-twentieth-century lettering erected across its roof, identifying it as the Prince, West Virginia, station.