Two Trains Running

 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.