They told the story in bars up and down the highway and no one knew where the story started or where it came from.
The towns along the highway were grain towns. Rows of elevators stood between the road and the railway and the grain trucks came up from the ranches with the golden harvest and the wheat filled the elevators and then filled the rail cars that formed the trains that launched themselves across the high plains and through the mountain passes to Portland and grain ships and the great ocean.
The people of those places had few recreations. No movie houses or bowling allies. No restaurants except the franchises. On summer nights and in the Christmas season people drove up and down the main drag, exchanging insults and greetings and long after the high school years they continued this custom. The great skill practiced by the people was in throwing beer bottles out the windows of their vehicles to smash the windshield of the car behind them and it took much skill to do it cleanly.
When the storms hit town there was no one to be seen. In the taverns people huddled and waited later and later to make the journey home and men and women who had fallen out years earlier sometimes reconciled just so they'd have someone to talk to.
On nights like this the story of the trains would be resurrected.
``The strangest thing ever,'' Lee Graham said. ``I wasn't there myself but Harley was. Old Harley that got killed hunting last year, he knew. He saw it.''
``You never hear it first hand, that's why I wonder,'' said Maggie behind the bar.
``Well like I said I didn't see it, but there's them that did and what they saw, it was the strangest thing. A grain train out of Broken Spear and an Amtrak in the night and the wind at eighty mile gusts and snow behind it and how it could have happened with all their electronics is beyond me but those trains were heading for each other at sixty miles an hour and not braking.'' They'd all heard it before. Heads nodded. A migrant worker who spoke no English almost broke the spell by starting up the juke box. Mariah Carey filled the room.
``The strangest thing,'' said Lee Graham, ``Old Harley saw it with his own eyes. That Amtrak train it turned to spirit, lightened itself and turned transparent and that Amtrak ran straight through the grain train like it wasn't there. Ran right through it and went on its way without so much as slowing and the grain train lights disappearing in the snow - never slowed down either like they didn't see each other but Old Harley saw them. Saw them both sure as shooting. The strangest thing.''
More beer was served. More beer was drunk. The migrant worker went to the door and saw that the wind was quieting. He would sleep in his truck in the parking lot tonight. Wrapped in two sleeping bags and a bright blanket from his home country. He pulled his coat round his ears and made a run for his truck.
The bar was closing. Good nights were called across the room. Remote starters clicked and engines in the parking lot roared to life to run the heater a few minutes before their occupants ventured out of the tavern.
``Watch the crossing!'' Maggie called as she thankfully shut out the last customer.