Two Trains Running

The FTRA Story

THE MAN WHO CALLS HIMSELF MISSOULA MIKE has passed out again, slumped onto his side, clutching a nearly empty quart bottle of vodka. His face is haggard, masked by grime and a prophet’s beard gone to gray; his clothes are filthy. He appears to be in his sixties, but just as likely he’s an ill-used forty-five. He coughs, and a wad of phlegm eels from his mouth, nests in the beard. Then, waking, he props himself on an elbow and stares wildly out at me from his lean-to. The glow from our dying campfire deepens his wrinkles with shadow, flares in his eyes, exposes stained teeth, and, ghoulishly underlit, his features resemble those of a Halloween mask, a red-eyed hobo from hell.

“Punk-ass camp thieves!” he says, veering off in a conversational direction that bears no relation to what we’ve been discussing. “They don’t come ’round fuckin’ with me no more.

Six inches of vodka ago, when Mike was capable of rational speech, he promised to reveal the secrets of the FTRA (Freight Train Riders of America), a shadowy gang of rail-riding transients characterized by elements of the press as the hobo mob. In return, he extracted my promise not to use his real name—if I did, he said, he would be subject to reprisals from his gang brothers. But no secrets have been forthcoming. Instead, he has engaged in a lengthy bout of chest beating, threatening other FTRA members who have wronged him and his friends. Now he’s moved on to camp thieves.

“They know Ol’ Double M’s got something for ’em.” He grabs the ax handle he keeps by his side, and takes a feeble swipe at the air to emphasize his displeasure. “Cocksuckers!”

It occurs to me that I’ve talked to a lot of drunks recently, both FTRA members and those who pretend to be FTRA. Articles and TV pieces about the gang have generated a degree of heat on the rails, causing security to tighten in and around the switchyards, and, to avoid police attention, many FTRA members have put aside their colors: bandanas ritually urinated upon by the participants in their individual initiations. However, a number of unaffiliated hobos, seeking a dubious celebrity, have taken to wearing them. Mike has earned a degree of credence with me by keeping his colors in his pack.

We’re in a hobo jungle outside the enormous Union Pacific switchyard at Roseville, California, a place where hobos camp for a day or two until they can hop a freight—a longer stay may attract the interest of the railroad bulls. The darkness is picked out by fires tended by silhouetted figures. Shouts and laughter punctuate the sizzling of crickets, and every so often the moan of a freight train achieves a ghostly dominance. By day, the jungle had the appearance of a seedy campground, lean-tos and sleeping bag nests scattered in among dry-leaved shrubs; but now, colored by my paranoia, it looks like the bottom of the world, a smoky, reeking, Dantean place inhabited by people who have allowed addiction or financial failure or war-related trauma to turn them away from society, men and women whose identities have become blurred by years of telling tall tales, by lying and showing false IDs, in the process creating a new legend for themselves out of the mean fabric of their existence.

A gangly hobo, much younger than Mike, comes over to bum a cigarette. He peers at Mike and says, “Hey, man! You fucked up?”

Mike sits up, unsteady, managing to maintain a sort of tilted half-lotus, but he says nothing.

“You the guy’s been askin’ ’bout the FTRA?” The gangly hobo asks this of me and stoops to light his cigarette from an ember.

“Yeah,” I say. “You FTRA?”

“Hell, no! Couple those motherfuckers lookin’ to kill my ass.”

“Oh, yeah? FTRA guys? What happened?”

The gangly hobo eyes me with suspicion. “Nothin’ happened. Just these pitiful fuckers decided they’s goin’ to kill me for somethin’ they thought I done. They been goin’ round three months sayin’ I better keep the hell off the rails. But—” he spreads his arms, offering a target “—here I am. You know? Here I fuckin’ am.”

I try to question him further, but he’s stalks off back to his camp. Mike’s eyes are half-closed, his head begins to droop. Then a long plaintive blast of train sadness issues from the switchyard, and he stiffens, his eyes snap open. I get the idea he’s listening to a signal from the back of beyond, a sound only he can interpret. His features are gathered in harsh, attentive lines, and with his ax handle held scepter-style, his beard decorated with bits of vegetation, in the instant before he loses consciousness, he looks dressed in a kind of pagan dignity, the image of a mad, primitive king.

The immense neighborhood of the rails, 170,000 miles of track, supports a population no larger than that of a small town; yet this population is widely variegated. Yuppie riders, prosperous souls for whom freight-hopping is a hobby. Eco-activist riders, most of them young, who view riding as a means of using the system against itself. Crusty punks, drunk punks, gutter punks: the order and suborders of the next generation of hobos. Pierced; tattooed; homeless; they travel from squat to squat on the trains. Then there are the hardcore hobos, those who spend their lives moving along the rails. Included in their number are the FTRA, who distinguish between their membership and the general run of hobos by calling themselves “tramps” (or “train tramps”) and “trampettes.”

This attenuated neighborhood and its citizenry constitute a grapevine that stretches coast to coast, conveying information such as how to get the best dumpster pizza in Denver, and where to find water near the Rio Grande yard in Pueblo. It also serves to carry horrific tales concerning the FTRA: a woman raped under a railroad bridge; a man left tied up and sodomized in a freight car, lying in his own blood and feces; two gutter punks and their dogs slaughtered by the gang in a boxcar, their girlfriends raped and then thrown from the train. Such stories are seconded by the majority of media reports. A week-long series on Portland’s KOIN-TV identifies the FTRA as Freight Train Killers, and features an interview with a yuppie rider named K-Line who says she flung herself from a moving train to avoid rape by a group of gang members. A Los Angeles Times article speaks of a “mysterious brotherhood” and states that the gang has “set up rail lines out of Texas as drug-running corridors.” The Spokane Spokesman-Review, under the heading “Killers Ride The Rails,” says that “a racist gang of hobos may be responsible for 300 transient murders…” Internet websites show pictures of hideously damaged corpses and print stories about FTRA atrocities. These and other print and electronic sources, inspired to a great extent by the exploits of hobo serial killer and alleged FTRA member Robert Silveria, paint a picture of a murderous criminal organization that holds barbarous initiation ceremonies involving rape and beating, along with ritual urination. Hardcore felons armed with weighted ax handles called Goon Sticks, who prey upon other transients, create an atmosphere of terror in switchyards and hobo jungles across the nation.

Estimates regarding the size of the FTRA’s membership range from seven or eight hundred to upwards of two thousand—most riders would subscribe to the lower figure. Several police officers have put forward the idea that on occasion FTRA members serve as mules for biker gangs, bringing in heroin from Mexico; but none have gone so far as to say that this is endemic. The crimes with which FTRA hobos are most frequently charged are trespassing, disorderly conduct, and petty thievery, and these incidents are handled by railroad bulls, who usually let the offenders off with a ticket. Local cops don’t spend much time in the rail yards, and, according to one detective, the average hobo’s hygiene is so bad that most officers don’t want them in their patrol cars.

There’s little consensus on any subject among FTRA members themselves, not even concerning the origin of the group. The most believable story has it that a group of 12 hobos, Vietnam vets all, were partying beneath a bridge in Whitefish, Montana (or a bar in Libby, if you’re to credit a variant version) in 1985, watching a freight train roll past. When an X-TRA container came into view, a hobo named Daniel Boone said jokingly, “We oughta call ourselves the FTRA—Fuck The Reagan Administration.” Thus Daniel Boone is acknowledged to be the founder of the gang, an honor he reportedly now considers an embarrassment (he’s given up life on the rails and become an itinerant preacher in the Bitterroot Mountains of Montana, living out of a camper van). But Mississippi Bones (aka Marvin Moore, a gang member currently serving a sentence for first degree murder) claims the organization was founded in the 1940s by a black hobo named Coal Train, who died some thirty years later in a lean-to next to an abandoned Texaco station in Desert Center, California. Bones says he “carried the old man some wine” and sat with him a while, and has no doubt that he was the actual founding father.

The chief source for almost every news story concerning the FTRA is Officer Robert Grandinetti, a heavyset, affable man closing in on retirement age, who works out of the Office of Special Police Problems in Spokane, Washington. He has made the gang his special project, not only pursuing and arresting them, but also devoting considerable time to raising the national consciousness as regards their particular menace. He’s appeared on America’s Most Wanted and makes presentations on the subject to federal commissions and law enforcement groups. Days, he patrols beneath the city’s railroad bridges, areas where riders gather to “catch out” (the hobo term for hopping a freight). He carries a Polaroid camera with which he takes the picture of anyone he suspects of associating with or belonging to the FTRA, and these pictures are then mounted in hefty scrapbooks, along with mug shots and photographs of FTRA graffiti. He’s compiled an extensive database on the gang’s membership, and has a collection of FTRA artifacts, the most impressive being a Goon Stick (he calls it a Goonie Stick), an ax handle to one end of which has been welded a softball-sized lump of lead. He speaks with relish about the subject, expressing what seems a gruff fondness for certain gang members.

As we sit in his office, a fluorescent-lit cube with several desks and a prominently displayed employee award, Grandinetti utilizes visual aids—photographs, FTRA bandanas, and so forth—with the facile air of someone who has given the same show many times before (this due in part, I assume, to the fact that over the years he has lectured on police matters in the Spokane school system). His awareness of the FTRA derives from a series of unsolved murders in the early ’90s, bodies found near the tracks along the Highline route from Cheney, Washington, to Sandpoint, Idaho, all with their jackets and shirts pulled over their heads, and their trousers pulled down. “If there’d just been a couple, I could buy them as accidents,” he says. “But after six of them, the accident theory didn’t fly.” He goes on to say that there were over 450 trespass deaths on railroad property during the past year, and he believes a significant percentage of these were homicides perpetrated by the FTRA. To support this assumption, he cites cases in which the victim was struck by a train in a switchyard, yet there was little blood at the scene, suggesting that the victim was killed elsewhere, and the body placed on the tracks so the impact of the train would cover up the actual cause of death: blunt force trauma. But Grandinetti admits that in most of these cases it’s impossible to determine whether the crimes were committed by the FTRA or independent hobos…or by anyone else, for that matter. Switchyards are generally situated in or near dangerous neighborhoods, and the idea that an indigent may have murdered a hobo is hardly unthinkable.

Over the course of an hour, Grandinetti sketches his vision of the gang. He talks about the various subgroups within the gang—the Goon Squad, the Wrecking Crew, STP (Start The Party). He explains “double-clutching”—the practice of obtaining emergency food stamps in one town, hopping a freight to the next, obtaining more food stamps there, and continuing the process until a hobo accumulated six or seven hundred dollars worth, which are then sold to a grocery store for 50 cents on the dollar. He describes how FTRA tramps will “hustle junk” (pick up scrap metal) and steal wire from freight yards, strip the copper and sell it in bulk to recycling businesses. Otherwise, he says, they “work the sign” (Will Work For Food) in order to get cash for their drugs and alcohol. He talks about the “home guard,” homeless people who serve as procurers of drugs for gang members. But most of these practices are engaged in by hobos of every stripe, not just the FTRA, and little of what he says would be denied by the FTRA; though several members told me they would never steal from the railroads—you don’t shit where you live.

To accept that the FTRA is a menace of the proportions Grandinetti claims—an organization that runs safe houses and has locked down switchyards all over the country—it seems necessary to believe further that there is some order to the gang’s apparent disorder: Officers charged with obtaining revenue and determining goals. Chapters that communicate one with the other. Some sort of structure. Grandinetti tells me that from gang snitches he’s learned of a group within the FTRA called “the Death Squad,” whose function is to carry out hits. He claims that this group is led by their self-exiled founder, Daniel Boone. It’s at this juncture that Grandinetti begins to preface his statements with the phrase “I can’t prove it but…” and he says his informants have told him that two gang members were hired by right-wingers to derail an Amtrak train in Arizona a few years back. He’s also heard a rumor that a white power group is attempting to organize the FTRA into a hobo army.

Under pewter skies, we drive out into the industrial wastes of the Spokane Valley and stop by the railroad tracks beneath the Freya Street bridge, its cement pillars and abutments spangled with FTRA graffiti—cartoon train tracks, swastikas, lightning bolts, along with messages and dates and train names. Among them is a section of wall devoted to a memorial for Horizontal John, an FTRA member who died of liver failure underneath the bridge the previous summer. Two hobos are camped here today, warming themselves by a small fire. Sheets of cardboard lie on the packed dirt nearby, and there are signs of past encampments: a worn-out shoe; a wadded pink cloth that might be a piece of blanket; empty cans; soggy newspapers. Neither of the two men are FTRA, but Grandinetti takes their pictures and checks them for warrants. One has a minor charge outstanding against him. Grandinetti’s associate applies handcuffs and calls for a patrol car to take him to jail. Once this has been handled, Grandinetti strolls about, commenting on the graffiti. He’s amused by one that warns AVOID JABBERJAW. Jabberjaw is a transient hooker rumored to have contracted AIDS, and Grandinetti says that this might be the ultimate cure for the FTRA.

I come across a series of messages left by a rider named Big Ed that insult and taunt the gang, and I make the comment that Big Ed must be pretty damn big to risk FTRA retribution. Grandinetti doesn’t appear to have heard me, and I’m starting to think there’s a lot more relating to the gang he’s not hearing, that he’s disposed to hear only what paints them in the most baleful light. I recall during our initial phone conversation, I mentioned that someone had told me he thought the FTRA was no more than an urban legend. Grandinetti became angry and said he didn’t want to talk to anyone who held that view. It’s important to him, I realize, that the FTRA poses a menace worthy of national attention, more of a menace than it perhaps is. I doubt he’s trying to sell me anything—not consciously, anyway. He’s a true believer, an evangel of the cause, and this work will comprise his legacy, his mark. I ask if he’s going to miss all this when he retires, or if he’s looking forward to going fishing. He looks offended, and tells me he’s going to be kept very busy, thank you, traveling and lecturing about the FTRA.

After Grandinetti drives away, I wander about for a few minutes. These open spaces, under modern bridges enclosed by sweeping arches and pillars, have something of the feel of a church, as if they’re cathedrals upon which construction was suddenly halted, now standing unused except by those who deface them, who have adapted them to some less grandiose form of worship. This one, with its memorial wall and solitary pilgrim, the remaining hobo sitting head down and silent by his guttering fire, a slight bearded man in a shabby brown coat…it has that atmosphere more than most. The hobo turns his head to me, and it seems he’s about to speak. But maybe there’s too much authority in the air, too much of a police vibe. Without a word, he picks up the cloth sack containing his possessions and hurries off along the tracks.

The maximum security unit of the U.S. Penitentiary at Florence, Colorado, a red brick-and-glass chunk of modern penology that sits atop a subterranean high-tech Kafkaville of sanitized tile and electronic gates…it seems way too much prison for Mississippi Bones. He’s a diminutive, frail-looking man of late middle age with a lined face, dressed in chinos and walking this day with a cane due to an injured foot. I meet him in a midsize auditorium ranged by rows of black vinyl-covered chairs, all bolted to the floor, where visitors and inmates can mingle under the watchful eyes of guards. This morning, except for a guard and a prison official who converse at a distance beside a desk, we’re the only two people in the room. Every surface glistens. Dust is not permitted. I imagine there are secret angles involved in the room’s design that will convey our slightest whisper to the area of the desk. Bones sits on the edge of his chair, hands on the head of his cane, and nods at the two men watching us. “I hate those sons of bitches,” he says. “They’re trying to listen to us, so we got to keep it down.”

Bones is serving a 25-year-stretch for killing a fellow FTRA member named F-Trooper, a crime for which he does not apologize; he claims that if he hadn’t done the deed, F-Trooper would have killed him—he had already tried it once, going after Bones when he was camped by the Rattlesnake Creek in Missoula, Montana, attacking him with a skinning knife, twisting it in his side until he had more-or-less removed three of Bones’s ribs. The attack was provoked, Bones says, by F-Trooper’s lust for his wife Jane.

It took Bones nearly a year to recover from his injuries. He underwent five operations, was stricken by a lung infection, and his weight dropped below 100 pounds. He was living on Percodans, and he expected to die. When he got back on his feet and went out again onto the rails, he ran into F-Trooper in the railyard in Missoula. F-Trooper, Bones says, had been planning on going to Helena to get his food stamps, but he changed his plans and decided to ride to Portland with Bones and his wife. Bones realized then that he was in danger from the man, and he says that he acted in self-defense.

At this juncture, Bones gets to his feet and demonstrates how he shot F-Trooper. He makes his right fist into a gun, places his forefinger against the top of my head, and pretends to fire down through my skull. It’s an interesting moment. He no longer seems quite so frail.

“If I hadn’t been drunk,” Bones continues, “I’d a’never been charged. See, the boxcar we was in had a big red X marked on the side. That means they was goin’ to break the car off and send it to the repair yard. But I was so drunk I didn’t notice the mark. I figured F-Trooper would just go on off to Portland with the rest of the train.”

Bones’s relationship with the FTRA points up something that I’m coming to believe: that petty squabbles proliferate throughout the membership, and that ultimately the gang is more a danger to itself than to anyone else. During the interview, Bones voices bitterness toward a number of his FTRA brothers whom he says took money from the police to testify against him; he expresses particular loathing for a hobo named Moose who, he claims, had no knowledge of the crime and lied about it to the authorities. “I kept to the code,” he says. “I didn’t give up nothin’ on nobody. And that’s a lot more than some of those sons of bitches did for me.”

Bones speaks of his affection for various gang members, but his attitude toward the rituals of the FTRA is less respectful. For one thing, nobody jumped him into the gang, he participated in no initiation; he started wearing the bandana and silver concho on his own authority. “I wore the red out of Arizona,” he says, referring to the color of the bandanas worn by gang members who ride the old Southern Pacific routes. “Nobody would gainsay me.” He scoffs at the notion that there is any sort of hierarchy in the gang. “You get six or seven together,” he tells me, “and somebody’ll call the shots. But that’s all.” He disputes the idea that rape and beating are part and parcel of FTRA initiations. “Once in a while some punk’ll want to get in, and then there’ll be a fight, but it ain’t a regular thing. I never heard ’bout nobody getting raped.” He’s equally dismissive of the idea that the gang poses a serious menace.

“They’re saying we’re a threat to society, but the truth is, society is more a threat to us. Tramps get murdered all the time.” He tells me about the time he was sleeping with his wife in a lean-to in the hobo jungle near Pasco, Washington, when a local opened fire on them from the bushes with a rifle.

“The thing you got to understand,” he says, “hobos don’t want much. FTRA or independent, it don’t matter. They want a piece of dirt in the shade, they want their food stamps, they want something to drink, something to smoke, and something to screw.”

Bones is scarcely what the law would consider a credible witness, certainly not so credible as Officer Grandinetti. He has an extensive arrest record, and he goes on at some length about “utilizing personal magnetism to subdue ruthless people,” which speaks both to a measure of craftiness and a healthy streak of arrogance. He lies effortlessly; he’s lied to me and subsequently admitted it. Like anyone in prison, he’s working every angle he can, and I suspect he’s working some angle with me. Not that I can fault him for it—he’s alone, he has no idea where his wife is, no one writes him, and, except for his lawyer, I’m the only person from outside the walls with whom he’s had contact. But despite this, and while I’m hesitant to make an informed judgment about his character based on a single interview, I find what he tells me, if not credible, then at least genuine in its essence. My acceptance of what he says probably has something to do with his enthusiasm for hoboing, for trains, for animals—especially his German shepherd, Star—and the outdoors. This enthusiasm seems an irreducible distillate of the man, and the longer we talk, the more what he says seems funded by that portion of his sensibility; and the more frequently he goes back to what we’ve previously discussed in order to clarify some point, or to reshape a story so it better reflects the truth. It’s as if he’s gone past his natural suspicion of me, and is having a good time talking to someone from the world.

Our conversation turns to the trains, and when I tell Bones about my infant experiences on the rails, he lifts an eyebrow and says, “You’ve ridden?”

“Yeah, a little.”

Bones continues looking at me for a long moment, his expression neutral, and I think he’s trying to fit the information into his understanding of me, reassessing my potential. Or could be he’s merely surprised. Then he grins, and I can see the face of the boy emerge from all those lines and wrinkles. It’s a look of unalloyed pleasure, as if everything around us, walls and razor wire and guards, had vanished, and we were sitting on a patch of dirt somewhere warm, passing a bottle.

“Man, ain’t it fun!” he says.

I’m riding in a boxcar south along the Columbia River, which must be nearly a mile wide at this point, and it’s hard to tell which is the reflecting medium and which the source of light—the river, every eddy bearing a captive glint, or the starry sky above. The towering hills that follow the watercourse show dark and nearly featureless, all but their lowermost reaches in shadow, making it appear that the curtain of night has been gathered into great black folds at the edge of the bright stage it delimits. Though it’s incredibly loud in the car, too loud for speech, something about the solitude and immensity of the scene, and perhaps the sense I have of the peculiarly American tradition of which I’m now a small part, the rail riders of the Civil War era, the hobos of the Depression, the FTRA…all this serves to describe a silence inside me, to shut me off from the rattling and the cold iron smells of the train, even from the noise of ambient thought, and after a while, emerging from an almost meditative state, I wonder if this is what Adman means by “the Drift.”

Adman is the train name of Todd Waters, a brisk, fiftyish man with a neat gray beard who runs a successful Minneapolis advertising agency. He’s been riding for more than twenty years, and admits to being what is called a “yuppie rider” or a “yuppie hobo.” Most tramps use shoestrings to tie off their trouser cuffs when they’re boarding a freight to prevent the fabric from catching on something and causing them to fall. Adman uses Velcro fasteners. When I met him he was wearing a sporty cap, and a denim jacket and trousers that appeared to be matching, and I thought he would look more natural steering a yacht than hopping a freight. He’s given to comparing the quintessential hobo to a Hesse character whose purpose in life was “to make men homesick for their freedom,” and he asserts that the experience of riding elevates him into a state he calls “the Drift,” wherein it seems that his dreams and thoughts are colored not by his own past, but by the stars he’s passing beneath and the places he’s passing through.

I can’t quite go there with Adman—I haven’t yet found anyone on the rails who’s made me homesick for my freedom. But you have to respect Adman because he’s done something with his romantic zeal. Back in 1983 he created the Penny Route, encouraging people to contribute a penny for every mile he rode; he wound up raising more than a hundred thousand dollars for the National Coalition for the Homeless. Since then he’s established himself as a respected figure in the hobo community, someone who can speak both to and for the transient rail population. What’s troublesome about yuppie hobos in general, however, are the increasing numbers of sport riders and scenery freaks who sally forth onto the rails without regard for the risks involved. Should someone with a little fame—a minor rock star or a peripheral Kennedy relative—decide to hop a freight in order to research a part or just to feel that “Jack Kerouac thing,” and then fall under the wheels of a boxcar, Officer Grandinetti will be turning up on every television program from Nightline to American Journal, wagging his finger and putting the bogeyman face of the FTRA on the tragedy, whether it applies or not, and the media frenzy will begin.

From the standpoint of the railroad companies, one might think that an intensified law enforcement focus on the subject of the FTRA, wrong-headed or not, would be a good thing, since it would probably result in even more security and fewer criminal incidents involving transients. But Ed Trandahl, a spokesman for Union Pacific, laughed when I mentioned Grandinetti, and said, “Oh, yeah. We know about him.” He went on to say that “The FTRA is a totally overblown deal. Union Pacific has thoroughly explored this with our railroad police, and there’s no massive organization at work here. Our investigators have gone over hundreds of cases and we can’t find any correlation to what Mr. Grandinetti is saying.”

The 39-year-old hobo who brought the heat down onto the rails, Robert Joseph Silveria (aka Sidetrack) has the word “Freedom” tattooed on his neck. In his case freedom is, indeed, just another word for nothing left to lose—on January 31, 1998, he pled guilty to two counts of first degree murder, and was sentenced to two consecutive life sentences for having caused the deaths of Michael Clites, 24, and William Petit, Jr., 39, both transients, by means of blunt force trauma. He is due to be tried in Kansas and Florida on similar charges, and there is solid evidence connecting him with the murders of transients in Emeryville, Oregon, in West Sacramento, in Salt Lake City, and Whitefish, Montana. When I first interviewed Detective Mike Quakenbush of Salem, Oregon, who arrested Silveria, he told me that he believed Silveria was “good for a lot more murders than those with which he’d been linked,” and, according to the San Francisco Examiner, Silveria himself told an uncle by marriage that he had killed 47 people out of a deep anger. In letters to a former jail acquaintance, Silveria declared that he was the leader of the homeless nation, and wrote, “I could have tortured others of your world, but I chose to torture my world, because I preyed on the weak.”

Quakenbush described Silveria as being cordial, amiable, having a pleasant manner typical of serial killers, and believes that this allowed him to get close to his victims. Silveria reminds him of Eddie Haskell from the Leave It to Beaver show. But Silveria is not a member of the FTRA. In fact, he made a point during his confession that his crimes had nothing to do with the FTRA. There’s no doubt that Silveria rode and jungled up with FTRA hobos, but such loose associations are common on the rails and hardly constitute evidence of collusion.

Quakenbush’s take on the FTRA is more restrained than that of Officer Grandinetti. In his view, they have the profile of a ’50s or ’60s biker gang, and though they have no set hierarchy, he suspects there may be powerbrokers among them, “people who can get things done.” But he told me it’s impossible to get a handle on them because of the anonymity of their lifestyle, which enables them to slide through the system, to move two states down the road in a matter of hours without going through easily surveilled areas such as airports and bus stations. Maybe, he said, there’s a pecking order based on seniority, on how long an FTRA member has been riding; but again, it’s hard to be sure. My impression of Quakenbush’s attitude toward the FTRA is that they’re interesting to him from a law enforcement standpoint, but that he’s got more pressing matters on his desk.

Madcat’s a veteran of Desert Storm, and he’s got pictures to prove it. Photographs of him and his buddies dressed in camo and posed with their weapons in the sand. He keeps them wrapped in a small American flag, and uses them like ID. Breaks them out, explains the meaning and circumstances attendant upon each, then packs them up, never to be shown again. I’ve tried to get him talking about the war, thinking that the reason he’s on the rails and homeless must have some relation to his tour of duty. He hasn’t told me much. He once described the enormous encampment in the desert where he was billeted, a medium-sized town of lion-colored tents and roaring machinery. One day, he says, he was driving a truck through the desert and came upon a crate of Stinger missiles lying in the middle of nowhere. He thought this was funny until he was ordered to transport them to an arsenal and learned that they were unstable, that a sudden jolt might launch one straight at the back of his head—at least that’s what he was told. He drove at 3 mph all the way, and was disciplined for his tardiness.

“Don’t matter you got smart bombs,” he says, “when all there is, is idiots to drop ’em.”

Madcat doesn’t talk much about anything in his past. From his accent, I’d guess he’s from the south, maybe Texas; the way he says “forward” (“fao-wud”) puts me in mind of people I know in Houston. He’s average height, skinny, got a touch of gray in his ragged beard. Early thirties, I figure. A sharp, wary face dominated by large grayish blue eyes, the kind of face one sees staring glumly at the camera in Mathew Brady’s Civil War photographs. Whenever we’ve ridden together, he rarely speaks unless I ask him a question. For the most part he stays quietly drunk and plays with dogs belonging to other hobos. Since many FTRA tramps travel with dogs, he’s gotten to know quite a few of them.

“They’re all right,” he says. “You mess with ’em, they’ll stand up to you. And there’s some you want to be careful around. But you can say the same about a lot of bars you walk into, the people there.”

This particular afternoon I’m supposed to meet an FTRA member known as Erie Flash at Madcat’s office, a Seattle tavern that caters to transients. Ranks of pint and half-pint bottles of Thunderbird stand in front of a clouded mirror behind the bar, and the chewed-up leatherette booths are occupied by an assortment of damaged-looking people: an elderly Santa-shaped gentleman with a lumpish, mauve nose; a pair of down-at-heels Afro-Americans; a disheveled middle-aged couple who’re having an argument. A chubby Aleut woman in a torn man’s shirt and jeans sits at the bar, holding her head in her hands. Madcat’s not in the best shape himself. He’s nursing a glass of wine, pressing the heel of one hand against his brow; he’s been in a fight, and sports a bloody nose and a discolored lump over one eye. Fighting is the most prominent symptom of Madcat’s problem. When he’s staying in a city, in a squat or a mission, he’ll get in a fight a day, sometimes more; he claims that fighting is the only way he “can get the devil out.” But when he’s riding, it seems that the closeness of the train soothes his particular devil. It’s possible, I think, the trains have a similar effect on others, which would explain in part why there’s so much sadness out on the rails—some hobos are attracted to the trains because the potency of those 2-million-ton presences and their metal voices act to subsume their pain.

We’ve been waiting almost an hour when Flash makes his appearance. He’s tall, physically imposing, and has a biker intensity that’s in line with his reputation as a man with—according to the grapevine—no compunctions about murder. It’s said he manufactures speed from starter fluid and drugstore inhalers, among other ingredients, and once he gets cranked up, he’s a dangerous person to be around. Under a denim jacket, he’s wearing his FTRA colors, a black bandana held in place by two silver conchos. Thick black hair threaded with gray falls to his shoulders. Dark, alert eyes. His hands are large, with prominent knuckles; his features are well-defined, strong, but dissolution has taken a toll, and what I’m seeing now is the ruins of a handsome man. He’s been staying with a local woman in her home, and looks healthier than other gang members I’ve encountered. Like most hobos, he doesn’t offer a handshake to someone he’s just met.

I tell him I’d like to hear his angle on the FTRA story, and he says fiercely, “I ain’t got no damn story. Not one I want you to hear.” But after I buy him a pint of T-bird, he seems mollified and takes the stool beside me. As he talks, he has the habit of looking down at his glass and then slowly turning his head toward me, a tight movement, finishing the turn as he finishes his thought—he might be tracking the carriage of an invisible typewriter.

“None of you gave a shit about us before,” he says. “We could dry the fuck up and blow away, you wouldn’t care. Now some nut case kills a few people, and you’re all over us. How’d you like it I come in your house and go to asking a bunch of dumb-ass questions? S’pose I barge into your living room and say, ‘’S’cuse me, buddy. You always drink two martinis ’fore you screw your girlfriend, or is that just ’cause it’s Tuesday?’”

I start to speak, but he cuts me off.

“You got your own nuts you can write about. Ted Bundy and all them other freaks. Sidetrack don’t have a damn thing to do with the FTRA.” He holds up his empty pint, which he’s drained in three gulps—I signal the bartender.

“Sooner or later,” he goes on, “one of you shitbrains is gonna piss somebody off and get yourself killed. Then you’ll have a fucking story. The rails ain’t no place to be asking questions. Hobos want to be left the fuck alone. That’s why we’re out there. Keep pestering us, we’ll let you know about it.”

By the time he’s started in on his third pint, Flash has completely abandoned his intention of not talking to me, and is taking it upon himself to smarten me up, chump that I am. He’s mellowed; his gestures are not so tightly controlled, and his voice has acquired a lazy, gassed quality, causing me to think that his original hostility might have been chemically enhanced.

“People are setting up Eddie Bauer tents in the jungles,” he says. “Walking around with scanners and hiking boots. You take a stroll through a place where everybody’s starving, and you’re packing a bag of groceries, what you expects gonna happen? The rails is where we live, man. It ain’t a fucking theme park. All this shit you’re stirring up—” he taps me on the chest “—one of you’s gonna wind up eating it. And it ain’t because the FTRA is the fucking mafia, y’know. ’Cause it ain’t. We take care of our own, but that’s as far as it goes.”

I ask him if there’s a hierarchy in the gang, any structure, and he lets out a scornful laugh.

“You think I kill people, don’t you?” he asks. “That’s the reason you’re talking to me.”

The question catches me off guard. “I don’t know. Do you?”

He gives me a steady look. “I do what I have to. We all do what we have to, right?”

“I suppose.”

“Well, that’s exactly what I do…what I have to. That’s your structure. That’s all the structure there is.”

“So you’re saying it’s the survival of the fittest?”

“I’m saying that right here, the three of us—” his gesture includes me and Madcat “—if we’re out riding, one of us is president, one’s vice president.” He grins. “Then there’s you.”

“If that’s all it is, why join a gang?”

“Brotherhood, man. You need me to explain brotherhood to you?”

The Aleut woman a few seats down makes a low keening noise, and Flash regards her with disfavor.

“I got no reason to tell you shit,” he says, coming back to me. “I told you some of the things I done, you wouldn’t understand ’em. The world you live in, the only excuse there is for killing is self-defense. But where I live there might be a thousand good reasons for killing somebody any given moment. That don’t mean you got to enjoy it. But you better be up for it.”

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. Below 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.

“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.