"Look't what's in here," one of them said, surveying the current occupants of the car. "Got us a coupla track tunas." He was fat and greasy, with long gray hair knotted in a ponytail. His accent was West Texan.
"It's Miller time," a second hobo said, looking at the bottle of Red Label. He was short and muscular, and also had a Texas twang.
Next to him was a thirty-something black man. The one who they'd just pulled in was a skinhead covered with homemade prison tattoos.
"Gimme the bottle, asshole," the skinhead said.
"You got it…" Lucky grinned, dully. He quickly drained the bottle and threw it out the door of the slow-moving car. "All gone," he slurred through his already busted lips.
"Fuckin' Yankee," the black hobo growled when he heard Lucky's accent.
"You're in my place," the short, muscular one said, moving toward Lucky.
Lucky tried to get up, but before he could rise, the hobo kicked his legs out from under him and he landed back on his ass.
"Where'd you get them great patent-leather shoes?" he said, leering at Lucky's garbage-bagged feet.
Lucky and Mike were in deep shit and they knew it. One way or the other, they were about to get the crap kicked out of them for no reason at all. That was the way it went on the rails sometimes. It was an unforgiving life.
The boxcar they were on was known as a "sleeper" car, and was favored by train-riders because it was a vacant car in the center of a loaded train that had been left on when the train had been assembled. It was sometimes easier for the switch crew to leave it engaged than to move lines of cars all over the yard in an attempt to drop it. Every train had one or two sleepers, and they were prized spots for hobos. This one, however, was about to change ownership.
"Why don' we all jus' take it easy?" Lucky slurred, trying to get his senses to function correctly.
"Fuckin' Yankees is just like hemorrhoids," the gray-haired hobo droned. "It's okay if they come down an' go right back up. But when they come down an' stay down they irritate the hell outta ya."
" 'At's good," Lucky said, trying to grin, but feeling the scabs cracking around his mouth.
"You two track tunas is 'bout ta be flyin' fish," the skinhead said, and without warning, the four Texans rushed the two Yankees.
It wasn't much of a fight because Lucky and Mike were so out of it. After head-butting the short one, Lucky was grabbed by two others and thrown out of the moving train. His backpack followed. Lucky summoned what sobriety he could as he sailed high over the graded shoulder. The train was going only about fifteen miles an hour. At the last moment, Lucky ducked his head, rolled awkwardly down a slight grade, and finally came to a painful, bone-jarring halt. Moments later, he could see Mike also being hurled through the air with his back to the ground, struggling to get his body turned. He landed badly, with a loud thump and grunt, and no bone-saving roll. He didn't move once he hit.
"Shit," Lucky mumbled. "That ain't how you do it, Mike."
The train roared on. They could hear a diminishing rebel yell from the Faraway sleeper car and soon they were left in still mountain silence.
Lucky stumbled to his feet and checked his scrapes and bruises. Then he moved drunkenly to Hollywood Mike, who was still on his back, unconscious. Lucky went hunting for his pack, then brought it back. He opened it and pulled out an old refilled Evian water bottle and a torn T-shirt. He poured some water onto the shirt, then put the compress on Mike's forehead. Mike groaned and his eyes finally opened. He looked up at Lucky. "Whaa happened?"
"Bubbas threw us off the motherfuckin' train," Lucky slurred, and looked around. Off to the north he could see a deep meadow and lush green bushes. "Looks like water over there."
Hollywood Mike tried to sit up. "Think some ribs are broken," he groaned.
"Bubbas threw us off the motherfuckin' train," Lucky said again, trying to clear his vision.
He helped Hollywood Mike to his feet. The twenty-two-year-old groaned and let out a sharp cry of pain.
"Schwarzenegger is de 'Homewrecker,' " Lucky mused, looking at Mike's T-shirt, "but you an' me is de homeless wrecks."
The greenery was located at the edge of a large lake. The water was cold and clear. Lucky stripped off his shirt and pants, unwrapped the garbage bags from his feet, and waded in. He scrubbed the grime out of his hair with his fingers and sluiced the grit off his body with his hands. He was careful not to open the sores on his mouth. The cold water and the half-mile walk had sobered him up some. "This life is sure gettin' old," he said, as he came out of the water and sat on a large rock in his underwear. "Maybe I should stop ridin' high iron an' go pick fruit in California, or maybe yer old man will give me a job, make me a movie star?"
"You don't wanna work for him, he's an asshole," Hollywood Mike said softly through gritted teeth, still holding his ribs. "But sometimes I miss himI don't know whyI guess because…"
" 'Cause he's your only relative," Lucky finished. Mike had made this zigzag several times before… pure anger and hatred, followed by loneliness and longing. Mike desperately needed a father, a service the older 'bo was not prepared to perform. Lucky was mostly on a search for his next bottle. Surfing a cresting wave on a slippery board, he was always just a few hours in front of the D. T. S, those scary hallucinations caused by alcohol withdrawal and the destructive imaginings of his own brain. He had fallen into that snake pit twice before, once screaming so desperately that four hobos had hand-delivered him to the hospital ER in Wilmington, Delaware, while he slapped at hallucinatory snakes and bugs that crawled all over him, feasting mostly on his eyes.
Lucky was now out of money and booze. He needed to start working on finding that next bottle before the dangerous curl on this alcohol-induced wave collapsed again, driving him under.
Lucky looked out across the lake. A half-mile away there appeared to be a fishing village. Then he swung his gaze back in the other direction, where there was a mammoth stone prison.
"The fuck is that over there?" Lucky said, pointing at the huge building. He could also see a small plume of dust from a fast-moving vehicle on a dirt road a mile or so away.
"Looks like a prison," Mike said.
They watched in growing panic as the vehicle now headed right at them. As it got closer they recognized it as a jeep painted military green. Lucky and Hollywood Mike quickly gathered up their things and started to retreat from the shore as it came nearer. They scrambled up into the tree line and crouched down in the ground cover of heavy, tangled forest growth. The jeep pulled up to where they had been standing. Two soldiers were in the back of the jeep and another one was driving. All were heavily armed.
"They got rifles," Mike whispered.
"Those're German MP5S," Lucky said. "Submachine guns."
Then the soldier closest to them pulled up a bullhorn and pointed it in their general direction. "We aren't gonna chase you in there and flush you guys out, but this here is all military property. We saw you through field glasses. Here's the dealGet off this land. It's posted. Get back past the highway or over to Vanishing Lake Village. We see you in here again, you're both goin' in mummy sacks."
The man with the bullhorn then nodded to the other man in the back of the jeep, who fired his machine gun into the high branches over their heads. The gun chattered nine-millimeter death. Bullet-riddled tree limbs rained down where Lucky and Hollywood Mike were hiding. Then the jeep pulled away, heading back the way it came.
"How come if we're in Texas, the side of that jeep said 'Fort Detrick, Maryland'?" Lucky asked.
"Who cares. Let's just get outta here."
They picked up their tattered gear and, with Hollywood Mike still holding his ribs, they moved off toward the fishing village, about a mile away.