“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.