Two Trains Running

by Lucius Shepard

  I think of men accustomed to killing whom I’ve spoken to in prison, who’ve handed me similar bullshit. Every one of them maintained an outlaw bad-to-the-bone stance until they felt they were in a circumstance in which they had nothing to prove, no one to impress; then they revealed a more buoyant side to their natures, brimming over with cheerfulness, their talk rife with homily, as if bloodshed had done wonders for their spirits, as if having crossed over the border of acceptable human conduct, they had been delighted to discover that they had retained their basic sensibilities and not been transformed into a depraved subspecies by the resonance of their crimes. I sense this potential in Flash; though he hasn’t dropped his badass pose, I’m certain that in another environment, he’d loosen up and wax anecdotal and analyze himself in terms of a woeful childhood.

  “You and me should take a ride sometime,” he says. “If you want to get to know somebody, best way is to take a ride with ’em.”

  He’s mocking me, and the only thing I can think to say is, “Yeah, maybe.”

  “Well, you let me know, huh?” He gets to his feet, digs for his wallet, then remembers that I’m the one paying. He nods to Madcat and says, “Safe rails, brother.” And then he’s gone.

  Madcat is holding his head to one side, a hand still pressed to his brow to alleviate the throbbing of the lump above his eye. I ask if he’s okay, and he says, “Pissed off is all.”

  “Why’s that?” I ask, and he says, “The guy who whipped me, he wasn’t that big a deal. Guess I ain’t as much a man as I used to be.”

  He seems unreasonably distressed—he’s lost fights before. I can’t think how to restore his spirits.

  “You still up for riding?”

  “Oh, yeah. I’ll be fine.”

  But he looks utterly dejected.

  I ask if he wants some more wine before we head out, and he says, “Naw, fuck. Wine don’t do no good for me.”

  He stares down into his glass, swirls the liquid around; then lifts his head and turns his gaze to the street, watching the passers-by with a forlorn expression, as if seeing in their brisk movements yet another condemnation of his weakness.

  “Wish’t I’d had me a bottle of whiskey,” he says. “I’d been drinking whiskey, I’d a kicked his ass.”

  Cricket is 48, a grandmother, and an FTRA member. She once operated a cleaning business in Tucson that catered to restaurants and resorts, but in 1988 she began to feel “stressed out, there was too many things goin’ on,” and she sold everything she owned and hit the rails—she’d done some riding previously, and she loved the trains. Ever since, she’s ridden from town to town, stopping now and then to work, helping build stages for bands in a Spokane hotel, or “hanging a sign” to get house-cleaning jobs. I contact her by phone, and she tells me she’s temporarily off the rails due to problems associated with injuries she received in 1994, when two hobos named Pacman and Lone Wolf killed her friend, Joseph Carbaugh, axed her in the head, then threw her and another friend off a moving train near Glenwood Springs, Colorado. Pacman and Lone Wolf are independent hobos, she says, though they claim to be members of a group called the Wrecking Crew. Or maybe it was the Goon Squad—sometimes, she says, she can’t remember names, because of her injuries.

  “I thought the Wrecking Crew and the Goon Squad were part of the gang,” I say, recalling Grandinetti’s lecture. “Part of the FTRA.”

  “Naw, they’re separate groups,” Cricket says. “But FTRA ain’t a gang.”

  “What is it, then?”

  “It’s a brotherhood, a sisterhood,” she says. “We hold reunions, like high school classes do. We go to reunions, we party, we travel.”

  I ask if rape was involved in her initiation, or in any other FTRA woman’s initiation that she knows of, and she says, “That’s bullshit! When I first got with the FTRA, I was a south rider, riding out of Tucson with Santa Claus and some of those guys, and there wasn’t no initiation. Then I started going with Diamond Dave, and when we went up north, he got initiated, so I did, too. ‘New tits on the tracks,’ we call it. All it was, you had to go one-on-one with another chick. I had to sit there and prove I could ride anywhere. That I knew enough to ride. But rape…I mean, it happens on the rails sometimes. But it’s like everywhere, like in society. It’s usually somebody you know. Date rape.”

  “Did you have to fight during the initiation?”

  “Yeah,” she says. “Tracy Jean Parker. She was on me pretty good. But that was just her, it wasn’t an FTRA thing. Real fights are few and far between.”

  I ask her about drug running, “…drug corridors along the rails from Texas,” and she says, “That’s not the FTRA…or maybe there’s one or two. Some of those new little FTRAs, they all got barbed-wire tattoos on their arms. They got different ethics from us. The Hole in the Wall Gang. Montana Brew Crew. Some of them are maybe into that. But the older crew, we get drunk, we cause a commotion. Sometimes chicks’ll strip naked or go topless just to get a reaction from a yard master or the bulls. But we don’t take it to town.

  “You’re gonna have a rotten apple or two in every group,” she goes on. “Like Sidetrack. I traveled with him, I slept beside him many times. He was always laughing and smiling. It’s hard for me to believe he did all that they said.”

  “Does the FTRA operate safe houses?” I ask.

  “There’s the missions,” she says, sounding a bit puzzled. “God’s Love in Helena, and there’s one in Pasco. Charity House in Spokane. And when I get to a town and I got friends there, I visit them.”

  Like others in the FTRA, Cricket has problems with certain of her brothers, Mississippi Bones in particular. “He was a manipulator,” she says. “He was always siccin’ Misty Jane—that was his wife—onto other women, gettin’ her to fight ’em. I seen him get her onto Sweetpea and Snow White and Missy Jones. He cut my rag (took her bandana) one time, but I waited till he passed out and took it back. Everything Bones did was behind drinkin’. He got disgraced soon after that—Chester the Molester took his concho. If F-Trooper cut him, chances are he had a good reason.”

  I ask if there’s anything she wants to get out about the FTRA, and after a pause, she says, “You got no idea how many different kinds of people ride. Carneys. Mexicans and Indians. Religious people. Preachers, people from the Rainbow Gathering. Deadheads. More kinds’n I can think of right now. If any of ’em commit a crime, the cops try and pin it on the FTRA.

  “Bein’ FTRA don’t get you nothin’—not the way people are sayin’. Your brothers and sisters’ll help you out, now. There’s a lot of helpin’ goin’ on out there. One time I’m gettin’ married on the tracks in Spokane up close to the Welfare Bridge. Gettin’ married to Cherokee. Manny the railroad bull—he’s an ordained preacher, he’s doin’ the ceremony. We didn’t have no money for rings, so these two sisters from Helena bought some rings and hopped a train to come all the way up and give ’em to us.

  “That was somethin’ special. But mostly it’s little things. Like when Joshua Longgone lost his dog, and everyone spent hours beatin’ the weeds for him. Or when you haven’t got money for food, and someone’ll hand you over a few dollars. Or when you bring a bottle to someone who’s startin’ to shake all over, goin’ for the DTs, just dyin’ for a drink.”

  The day after New Years, 1998, and I’m at a hobo gathering in New Mexico, maybe a hundred people jungled up on a patch of desert figured by saguaro and mesquite and sage and a big, dark lizardback tumble of rock that sticks up beside a section of Southern Pacific track. Atop the rock, several flags are flying—American, Confederate, MIA, Anarchist. The raising of the Anarchist banner caused a minor dust-up earlier in the day, when one of the encamped riders, said to be a KKK member, objected to its presence; but he’s been appeased. He and his family spend a good deal of their time zooming around on motorized all-terrain bikes, making an aggressive show of having fun, and don’t mix with the rest of us.

  I’m perched on a ledge close to the flags, gazing down on the place. Belo
w and to my left, some elderly hobos are sitting beneath two small shade trees, occupying chairs arranged in a circle around the remains of the previous night’s campfire; beyond them, a communal kitchen has been erected, and people are busy cooking hash for breakfast. Farther off, there’s a trailer on which helium tanks are mounted; they’re used to fill balloons, which now and again can be seen floating off into a clouded pewter sky. Children scoot about, playing and squabbling in the dirt. Tents scattered here and there; vehicles of every description—pickups, campers, old shitboxes. The whole thing calls to mind a scene from a low-budget film about life after some civilization-destroying disaster, the peaceful settlement of the good guys in the moment before the motorized barbarians come swooping down to rape and steal gas. Trains pass with regularity, and when this happens, rockets are set off and people move close to the tracks and wave. The engineers sound their whistles, wave back, and on occasion toss freight schedules from the engine window.

  The King of the Hobos, Frog Fortin, an FTRA member whose coronation took place last summer at the hobo convention in Britt, Iowa, was supposed to put in an appearance here, but to my dismay, he’s a no-show. The majority of the attendees are railfans, people who’ve done some hoboing but now have day jobs and families and can’t be classified as hobos—they simply love trains. There are also, as mentioned, some old-time hobos, men in their sixties and seventies; and there are staff members of the Hobo Times, “America’s Journal of Wanderlust,” a publication given to printing treacly hobo poetry.

  Most of these folks don’t feel like talking about the FTRA. Some disparage them, passing them off as drunks who’re more likely to harm themselves than anyone else. Others are hostile when I mention the subject. They feel that the FTRA has brought down the heat on all riders, and don’t want to contribute to more bad publicity. Most of those who are willing to talk don’t have much to add to what I already know, but I meet a photographer who’s ridden with the FTRA, who tells me about black FTRA members—New York Slim, the Bushman, et al.—and attributes FTRA racism to the enforced racism inherent in the prison system. It’s more habitual, he says, than real. Another rider, Lee, agrees with him, and says that although the FTRA use racist iconography in their tattoos and graffiti, they are “oddly egalitarian racists.”

  Lee is a 42-year-old wilderness squatter who was involved with the Earth First movement, until he became fed up with the group’s internal politics. He lives in a tiny house he built himself in the midst of a redwood forest in Northern California; it’s so carefully camouflaged, it’s almost impossible to spot from a distance of 15 feet. There he publishes Hobos from Hell/There’s Something About a Train, a ’zine containing stories about the rails written by a variety of hobos. He’s dressed, as is his custom, all in black. Black sweats, black raincoat, black baseball hat. Makes him harder to spot in the yards at night. Though he’s no hermit, his face has the sort of mild openness I associate with someone who’s spent time in the solitudes. His features are weathered, but his energy and humor make him seem younger than his years. He says he looks forward “to the collapse of the Industrial State,” but when that happens, he’ll miss the trains. It strikes me that, for Lee, a perfect world would be one in which man has become extinct, the planet has reverted to a natural state, and the only reminders of the human past are the trains, evolved to an inorganic form of life, traveling endlessly across the wild and making their eerie music.

  Because I want to talk about the FTRA, Lee decides to take our conversation up to the flags, where no one else will hear. But we wind up talking less about the FTRA than about “the next generation of hobos,” one that includes the “crusty punks” and young eco-activist riders. Lee places the latter in the tradition of the Wobblies, who used the rails to spread their political message back in the ’30s; he describes them as “goal-oriented, self-educated wanderers.” The crusty punks are pierced, tattooed, homeless youth who come out of hardcore squat scenes in urban areas, and are “apolitical, non-racist white trash.” A subgroup, the “gutter punks,” he likens to the Untouchable class excluded from the Hindus. He expresses concern that these younger riders haven’t been accepted by the old hobos, mainly because their rowdy behavior has attracted the attention of the police and thus brought down even more heat. He seems to like them all, has ridden with them, but he’s frustrated by the crusties’ self-destructiveness. I wonder if his attitude toward them, his compassion, may echo a similar attitude that caused him frustration when he was involved with the Earth Firsters.

  That night people gather around the campfire, drinking beer and swapping rail stories. There’s SLC, a hobo out of Salt Lake who once owned a mail-order computer company, which he lost to the IRS, and has just spent a month working on a hog farm; there’s Dante Faqwa, an old-time hobo; there’s Buzz Potter, editor of the Hobo Times; there’s a lady hobo, Connecticut Shorty; there’s a short, truculent guy in his late twenties who calls himself Bad Bob. Lee is there with a couple of friends. Adman is there. Along with many, many others I haven’t met. Listening to scraps of conversation, it’s possible to believe that I’m in a hobo jungle back during the Depression:

  “Is the Sacramento Kid around the fire?”

  “…wasn’t a bull for a thousand miles…”

  “…it’s always been a motherfucker to catch out of…”

  “…they closed the mission in Atlanta…”

  “…the train didn’t go till sundown…”

  “…best chicken I ever ate came from that alley…”

  Whenever a train draws close, fireworks are set off; starbursts flower overhead as the engine approaches the camp, roaring and moaning, flattening the brush with the wind of its passage. Night is the best time to watch trains; they seem grander and more magical. There’s a gravity about them you can’t feel as strongly in the daylight. They are, I think, kind of like the giant sandworms in Dune…of course, it’s possible this and all my previous perceptions are colored by the fact that I’m seriously baked. Two monster joints and a bunch of beer. Whatever, I realize that I’m being seduced by all the happy-wanderer, freedom’s-just-another-word-for-freight-hopping, hash-cooking, dumpster-diving esprit de poverty that’s rising up from these sons and daughters of the iron horse, like heat from Mother Nature’s steaming yoni. Which is okay, I suppose. I’ll have to turn in my cynic’s card, but hey, maybe I’ve migrated to a better world. Maybe the stars are actually spelling out song lyrics, and the pile of stones shadowing us has turned into the Big Rock Candy Mountain.

  Then the singing starts for real. Old broadwater ballads such as “Barbara Allen” delivered by a friend of Lee’s whose sweet tenor exhibits signs of academic training. A rider in a bush hat and desert camo hauls out a guitar. In a brief conversation earlier that day, he made violently homophobic comments; but now, with no appreciable acknowledgment of irony, he proceeds to deliver a thoroughly professional rendition of “City of New Orleans,” concluding with the reverential statement, “That song was written by Mister Steven Goodman.” More train songs follow. The mystical union of the rails is dissolving into a hootenanny. I sense that once all the railroad songs have been exhausted, a few verses of “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” would not be deemed inappropriate.

  Adman drops into a chair close by, and says something about “the bluehairs in their RVs,” contrasting these conservative seniors and their feeble journeyings with “the wisdom in the eyes of old hobos.” His delivery grows increasingly rhapsodic, peaking as he describes how, during one series of rides, his cassette recorder broke and he was forced to scavenge for batteries. “I hooked it up with batteries from a dumpster, and I’m listening to opera.” His voice full of wonderment, as if recounting not long after the event, how the young Arthur Pendragon pulled Excalibur from its imprisoning stone. He’s probably as blitzed as I am, but even knowing this, it’s hard to bear. The whole scene has become an enormous sugar rush, and I have to get away. I like these people. No matter how dippy this part of their fantasy, the rest
of it’s way cooler than most. I move out into the darkness, where other refugees from the fire are drinking cups of beer and looking off into the blue shadows of the desert.

  Tonight I’m drinking more heavily, sitting on a grassy embankment next to a Portland strip mall with half a dozen crusty punks. They’re happy to drink up my money, but only one wants to talk. Her name, she tells me, is Jailbait. She could pass for thirteen, says she’s seventeen—if you split the difference, you’d probably be right. Dirty blond hair hangs into her eyes, accentuating her waifish quality. Clean her up, dress her in something besides baggy jeans and a hooded sweatshirt, she’d be breaking ninth grade hearts. A crop of inflamed blemishes straggles across her forehead, so distinct against the pale skin, it makes me think I could connect the dots and come up with a clown’s face or a crude map of Rhode Island; and maybe it’s only a combination of the malt liquor and the reflection of the neon sign on the roof behind us, but her teeth look kind of green.

  Jailbait’s been living in a squat with her friends for six weeks, but now it’s getting cold, they’re thinking about LA or maybe San Diego. She tells me she comes from LA, but I hear the great Midwest in her speech. I ask why she left home, and she looks off into the sky, where stars are sailing clear of a patchy mist, and says without inflection, “It was just fucked up.” She’s been riding for a year, she says, and she’s never had any trouble with the FTRA.

  “They yell sex stuff at us sometimes, y’know. But that’s about it.” She rubs at a freshly inked homemade tat that spreads from the soft area between thumb and forefinger to cover the back of her left hand. I can’t make out what it’s supposed to be—a blurred network of blue-black lines—but I’m fairly certain the tiny scabs at the center are tracks.