Читаем Two Trains Running полностью

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.”

Перейти на страницу:

Похожие книги

Все жанры