“We don’t hang out with them much,” she goes on. “Some of them are cool, I guess. There’s one I met last summer played the harmonica. He was nice. But most of ’em, they’re these old fucked-up guys, y’know.”
“They never got aggressive with you?”
“Carter got chased by them once.” She glances up at her friends, who’re sitting above us on the slope, and addresses a sullen, muscular kid with the basic Road Warrior look: stubbly scalp, heavy designwork on his neck and arms, and enough cheap facial jewelry to set off an airport detector. “Wasn’t those guys chased you back in Pasco FTRA?”
Carter shrugs, takes a hit off his forty.
“He stole some of their shit,” Jailbait says. “But they couldn’t catch him.”
“I didn’t steal nothin’,” says Carter. “I was just walkin’ past and this ol’ fuck started waving a knife.”
“If you didn’t steal nothin’, you were thinkin’ about it.” This from a chunky blond girl in a tight turtleneck and a stained black mini and torn stockings. Her make-up’s so thick, it reminds me of Kabuki.
“Fuck you!” says Carter.
The girl’s voice grows querulous. “You know you were! You said you were gonna see if they had any wine!”
Carter jumps to his feet and makes as if to backhand her. He goes off on her, shouting, his face contorted with anger, using the C word with frequency. He’s sick of her skanky hole, why doesn’t she just fucking die.
The girl turns her head away, holds up an arm to ward off a blow; she’s crying, cursing him softly. The other three boys—less flamboyantly accessorized versions of the Carter doll—laugh and do some high-fiving.
“C’mon, Carter,” says Jailbait. “Don’t be an asshole.”
It was as if a switch had been triggered in Carter’s brain, releasing an icy fluid. He grows calm, mutters a final word of warning, and sits back down. The chunky girl lifts her head and glares at Jailbait.
It doesn’t matter what sort of question I ask the crusties, I realize. I could ask about their favorite TV show and tap into the same group dynamic, the same pattern of sullenness evolving into fury, then lapsing into drunken silence. I’m curious about them, but they’re impervious to curiosity. They’re floating on some terminal wavelength that’s beaming the length and breadth of the country, controlling them as they slide from exotic chemical peaks to troughs of low self-esteem. Another tragic cliché being woven into the decaying electric tapestry of the times.
I tell them I have to go; I’m hoping to catch out from the switchyard across the river in Vancouver, Washington, in a couple of hours; the guy I’m riding with says they’re putting together an eastbound.
“That’s a pussy yard,” Carter says, giving me a challenging stare; it’s the first time he’s spoken directly to me for an hour. “Fuckin’ old lady could catch out of Vancouver.”
A babble erupts from the other boys—they’re throwing out the names of various yards, ranking them according to degree of difficulty. Vidalia’s no problem. Likewise Dilworth. The bulls at Klamath Falls have gotten nasty. Salt Lake City’s not too bad, except for all the pedophiles.
“You think you know something, don’t you?” Carter says. “You got it all figured out.”
This confuses me. I can’t decide if Carter’s smarter than he looks, if he has a sense of what I’m thinking, or if this is just another bellicose twitch. I’d prefer to believe the former—it would be nice to be surprised.
“Figured what out?”
Carter comes up into a half-crouch, balanced on one hand; he’s trying to look menacing, doing a decent job of it. “Fuck you,” he says.
I’m almost drunk enough to respond. Carter doesn’t really want to fight, though I’m sure he could get into it; he just wants to win the moment—it’s all he’s got worth risking a fight over. Could be he’s a rotten kid and deserves his crummy life. But I don’t need to make things worse for him. Nor am I eager to have him and his pals dance on my head.
The six of them straggle up the embankment, away from me. Five of them at the crest, silhouetted against the backdrop of the convenience store. It looked as if the neon sign were the sky and the drugged, lost children were the newly aligned constellations of a hellish American midnight zodiac, and that Carter, stationed slightly below the rest, staring bitterly back at me, was the rising sign.
Madcat and I are somewhere in Montana, I think. One of those little prairie towns that at night show like a minor cluster of stars too disorganized to suggest a clever shape. The train has stopped, but I can’t see any signs from where we’re resting, just low, unlit buildings and a scrap yard. I’d ask Madcat, but he’s asleep. We’re sitting on the rear porchlike section of a grain car, bundled up against the early morning chill, and I worry about whether we should get off and hide in the weeds in case they check the cars. Then the train lurches forward, and we’re rolling again. As we gather speed I spot two men jogging along the tracks behind us, trying for another car. In the electric blue of the predawn darkness, they’re barely more than shadows, but I have an impression of raggedness, and I’m pretty sure one has a bushy beard. FTRA, I think. Officer Grandinetti is right, he just hasn’t taken his vision of the gang far enough. The FTRA are everywhere. Mystical, interpenetrating, sinister. I’ve asked one too many questions, and from his fastness deep in the Bitterroots, the criminal mastermind Daniel Boone has focused his monstrous intellect upon me, sent thought like a beam of fire from a crystal to sting the minds of his assassins and direct them to me.
A cold-looking smear of yellow light seeps up from the horizon, the gunmetal blue of the sky begins to pale, and the day reveals rolling wheat fields and a tiny reservation town of trailers and rusted pickups standing a quarter-mile or so from the tracks. It’s an ordinary sight made extraordinary by my vantage: tired, dirty, and illegal, sitting inside the roar of the train, in the midst of the solitudes, living a moment available to no one else, the shimmer of the wheat, clouds with silver edges and blue-gray weather heavy in their bellies pushing in low from the north, and the abandoned look of the trailers, discolored siding and sprung doors, one pitched at an angle, come off its blocks, and watchful crows perched along a fence line like punctuation—it’s all infused with a sense of urgent newness, the mealy blight of the ordinary washed away. Maybe, I think, this is something I should be homesick for, something I should pursue. But then I recall Mississippi Bones walking away at the end of our interview in the prison at Florence, leaning on his cane, a guard at his side. Halfway across the room he turned back and stared at me. In retrospect, I believe he may have been making a judgment as to whether it was worthwhile to offer me advice. When he did speak, his tone was friendly yet cautionary, like that of someone telling a child not to play in the street.
“Stay off the trains,” he said.
Over Yonder
IT WAS A BLACK TRAIN CARRIED BILLY LONG Gone away from Klamath Falls and into the east. Away from life itself, some might say. And if you were to hear the stories of those who watched it pass, you’d have to give credence to that possibility…though you’d be wise to temper your judgment, considering the character of the witnesses. Three hobos drunk on fortified wine, violent men with shot livers and enfeebled hearts and leaky imaginations who lived on the wild edge of nothing and were likely half-expecting their own black train to pass. Every car was unlettered, they’d tell you. No corporate logos, no mention of Union Pacific or Burlington Northern, no spray-painted graffiti. And the engine wasn’t a squatty little unit like they stick on freights front and back nowadays, it was the very image of the old Streamliner engines, but dead black instead of silver. The sort of train rumored to streak through small American towns in the four o’clock dark with a cargo of dead aliens or parts of a wrecked spacecraft, bound for Roswell or points of even more speculative military purpose. But all this particular train carried was Billy and the big man in a wide-brimmed hat who had stolen his dog, Stupid.
You could scarcely ever tell
when Billy Long Gone was mad, because he looked mad all the time. If you had caught sight of him that night, stomping along the tracks with his shoulders bowed under his pack, breath steaming in the cold, his eyes burning out from tangles of raggedy graying hair and beard, regular Manson lamps framed by heavy ridges and cheekbones so sharp, they like to punch through the skin, you’d have sworn he was the Badass King of the Hobos come to pay his disrespects. But truth is, Billy was rarely mad. All the glare and tension in his face that people took for anger was just a feverish wattage of weakness and fear. He was an anxious little man. Anxious about everything. About if he had money to buy sufficient wine to keep his head right, or if it was going to rain, or what was that noise out in the weeds, and was the freight schedule he’d gotten off the bull in Dilworth the real thing…or had the bull just been fucking with him? Nights when he got talky high on cheap greasy speed cooked up from starter fluid and sinus remedies, he’d try to explain where all that anxiety came from. He’d tell himself and anybody else within earshot a lie about a girl and a shit job and some money gone missing and him getting blamed for it. A lie, I say. The details simply didn’t hang together, and everything that had happened to him was someone else’s fault. But his friends knew it was standing in for another story hidden deep in the addled, short-circuited mess he’d made of his brain, something not so dramatic, something he’d juiced up to make himself feel better, something he couldn’t help living inside no matter how much wine or crank he buried it under, and that one was probably not a lie.
Now you’d do better coming between a man and his wife than you would stealing a tramp’s dog. It’s a relationship where the thought of divorce never enters in, a bond sealed in the coldest cracks of winter and the loneliest squats in Godforsakenland. Steal a tramp’s dog, you might be stealing the one thing that’s keeping him walking and above ground. So while Billy was mad some that night, he was mostly shaken up. He couldn’t figure why Stupid, a slobbery none-too-bright black Lab mix with small tolerance for strangers, had gone and trotted off with his abductor, wagging his tail and never a backward glance—that’s how the three hobos he’d been jungled up with described what happened while he was off fetching wine from the ShopRite. He had no reason to doubt them, drunks though they were. Neither did he doubt that they had, as they claimed, tried to stop the man, but couldn’t handle him because of his size. “Big as goddamn Hulk Hogan” was the phrase that one communicated to Billy. He loosened the ax handle he kept stowed in his pack, but he had no clear idea what he would do if he found the man.
The train was stopped on a siding outside the Klamath Falls switchyard, a stretch of track that ran straight as an avenue between ranks of tall spruce, and as Billy walked alongside it, peering into the open boxcars, he noticed a number of peculiarities. The walls of the cars were cold to the touch, yet not so cold as you’d expect steel to be on a chilly night, and they were unnaturally smooth. Not a scrape, a ding, or a dent. The only imperfection Billy observed was a long ridged mark like an old scar running across the door of one. As for the doors themselves, they had no locks, and while mounted in the usual fashion, they moved soundlessly, easily, and seemed fabricated of a metal considerably lighter and less reflective than steel—a three-quarter moon hanging overhead cast a silvery shine onto the tops of the rails, but the surfaces of the boxcars gave back scarcely a glimmer. Then, too, the damn thing didn’t smell like a train. No stink of refried diesel and spilled cargoes and treated wood. Instead, there was a faint musky odor, almost sweet, as if the entire string of cars had been doused with perfume. Ordinarily, Billy would have been spooked by these incongruities, but he was so worked up about his dog, he ignored the beeping of his interior alarm and kept on walking the tracks.
A stiff breeze kicked up, drawing ghostly vowels from the boughs, and the spruce tops wobbled, then tipped all to one side, like huge drunken dark green soldiers with pointy hats, causing Billy to feel alone among the mighty. He knew himself a tiny figure trudging through the ass-end of nothing beside a weird mile-long something that resembled a train but maybe wasn’t, far from the boozy coziness of his fire and his friends, spied on by the moon, the stars, and all the mysterious shapes that lived behind them. It minded him of an illustration in a children’s book he’d looked at recently—a pale boy with round eyes lost in a forest where the shadows were crookedly, sinisterly different in shape from the limbs and leaf sprays that cast them. It comforted Billy to think of this picture; it gave him a place to go with his fear, letting him pretend he was afraid instead of being afraid. He spent a lot of his time hiding out in the third person this way, objectifying the moments that upset him, especially when he was frightened or when he believed people were talking against him, whispering lies he couldn’t quite catch (this is why I’m telling the story like I am now, and not like I will later on when I relate how it was for me after things changed). So when he spotted Stupid poking his head out the door of the next boxcar, his heart was made suddenly, unreservedly, childishly glad, and he went forward in a shuffling run, hobbled by the weight of his pack. Stupid disappeared back into the car and by the time Billy reached the door, he couldn’t make out anything inside. The edge of his fear ripped away the flimsy shield of his imagination. He yanked out his ax handle and swooshed it through the air.
“Stupid!” he called. “Come on, boy!”
Stupid made a happy noise in his throat, but stayed hidden, and—to Billy’s surprise—another dog with a deeper bark went woof. Then a man’s voice, surprisingly mild, said, “Your dog’s comin’ with me, friend.”
“Hell you say!” Billy swung his ax handle against the door and was startled—the noise was not the expected clang but a dull thwack such as might have resulted from hitting a sofa cushion with a two-by-four.
“You send him on out!” Billy said. “I ain’t fuckin’ with ya!”
“I got no leash on him,” the man said.
Billy peered into the car and thought he spied a shadowy figure against the rear wall. He whistled and Stupid made another throaty response, but this one sounded confused. “Son of a bitch! Fuck you done with my dog?” Billy shouted.
A third dog—part terrier by the sound—let out a high-pitched rip of a growl. Paws clittered on the floor of the car.
“Tell you what, friend,” said the man. “Ain’t a thing I can do ’bout your dog. Dog’s in charge of where he’s headed. But I don’t mind too much you want to ride along.”
These words bred a cold vacancy in Billy’s gut and his legs went a little weak. Broke-brained as he was, he knew that taking a train ride with a giant in a pitch-dark boxcar was not the solution to any reasonable problem; but he couldn’t figure what else to do. A throbbing, rumbling noise started up. It didn’t have the belly-full-of-grinding-bones fullness of a real diesel engine, but an engine’s what it must have been, because a shuddery vibration shook the car, and the train jerked forward a couple of feet.
“Best hop on if you comin’,” said the man inside the car.
Billy glanced around to see if maybe a bull or somebody else official was nearby. It wasn’t in his nature to be running the yard cops in on anyone, especially a fellow tramp, but these were extreme circumstances. No one was in sight, though. Nothing but a bunch of cold dark and lonesome. The train lurched forward again, and this time it started rolling. All the dogs inside the car—Billy thought he could hear a half-dozen separate voices—got to yipping and woofing, as if excited to be going somewhere. The train began to roll faster.
Billy knew he had only seconds before he would no longer be able to keep up, before he’d lose his dog for sure. Desperation spiked in him, driving down his fear. With a shout he shucked his pack, heaved it into the car, then hauled himself in after it. As he lurched to his feet, ready to fight, the train lurched heavily and he went off balance, his arms windmilling, and rammed headfirst into the end wall of the car, knocking himself senseless.
Billy woke to find Stupid licking his face. The drool strings hanging from
the dog’s dewlaps flicked across his cheek and chin. He pushed Stupid away and sat up holding his head, which was gonging something fierce.
“Welcome aboard, friend,” said the man’s voice. Billy swiveled his neck around toward him, a movement that caused him to wince.
Flanked by four mongrels, the man was sitting against the far wall. His stretched-out legs seemed to reach halfway across the car, and his shoulders were Frankenstein-sized under the Army surplus poncho he was wearing. He was in better health than any hobos of Billy’s acquaintance. His shoulder length hair was dark and shiny, his eyes clear, and his horsy face unmarked by gin blossoms or spider veins or any other sign of ill-use. An ugly face, albeit an amiable one. He had a calmness about him that rankled Billy, who could barely recall what calm was like.
“I ain’t your goddamn friend.” Billy rubbed his neck, trying to ease a feeling of compression.
“Guess not,” said the man. “But I’m bettin’ you will be.”
The dogs gazed at Billy with the same casual indifference as that displayed by the man, as if they were his familiars. They were a sorry bunch: a scrawny German shepherd; a runty collie with a weepy right eye; a brindled hound with orange eyes and a crooked hind leg; and a stubby-legged gray mutt with a broad chest that, Billy thought, had probably been responsible for the yappy growl. Not a one looked worth the effort it would take to keep them fed and healthy, and Billy speculated that maybe the man suffered from a condition similar to the one that had troubled his old traveling companion Clueless Joe, who had tried to persuade a railroad bull in Yakima to marry him and his dog.
A couple of other things struck Billy as odd. First off, the train had to be traveling forty miles an hour, enough speed so that the sound of their passage should have been deafening; yet they weren’t yelling, they were speaking in normal tones of voice. And then there was a faint yellow light inside the car, like the faded illumination that comes during a brownout. The light had no apparent source.
Two Trains Running Page 5
