Two Trains Running

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.