Leave Out the Tragic Parts

by Dave Kindred

  He didn’t even look and didn’t say thanks. I knew it wasn’t his fault. The alcohol had such a hold on him.

  Maggie was heartbroken. She told me she had been in hospitals three times herself, trying to keep up with him. She was heartbroken and scared.

  In her year with him, Maggie had taken Jared to eight hospitals. This was the first since Mount Airy and Winston-Salem; that time, in December of 2012, she had refused to let him die. “The drive from Houston to home, that’s when I knew I loved him,” she said. And she knew he loved her that winter in Mount Airy “because who else loves to walk with me and Dixie to the Red Barn?”

  Now, late in June of 2013, in the northern Virginia hospital, she asked Stephen to watch Dixie while she went in to see Jared.

  “I told Jared, ‘I can’t do this anymore,’” she said. “‘I’m going home. We’ll get together later.’”

  Maggie was going home, leaving him behind. She had never left him before, and it hurt. She did it because she was frightened by what she had seen and by what she saw coming.

  She left by bus for North Carolina, to her mother’s place, and she could do that only because Jared had brought Maggie and Kayla together. So long separated, they had become mother and daughter again through him, partners on that drive from Texas to Mount Airy, partners with him through a winter in that little house down the hill from the Red Barn.

  For the next six months of 2013 and into the first days of 2014, Maggie and Jared often talked by phone. They made plans to meet up again.

  On July 9, 2013, Jared called me. He needed $19 for a bus ticket from Amherst, Massachusetts, to New York.

  I promised to send the money by Western Union. I also said, again, “We want to see you. Do you go to Chicago at all?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I’ll let you know.”

  I didn’t expect an answer. It’s not as if he operated on Amtrak’s schedule.

  “What’re you doing in New York?” I said. “Meeting Maggie?”

  “We broke up,” he said.

  “Oh. Too bad.”

  “Just arguing too much. Life on the road. She wants to do her thing. I’ll do mine.”

  That day I knew Maggie only as the name of his latest girlfriend. Now I know more. I now know that what Jared said that day was the least he could have said. He could have told me that Maggie was important to him in ways that no one else ever was. She had saved his life, more than once, and she had taken him into her home. He could have said that by sleeping with her in that attic room above her mother’s bedroom he had seen the possibilities of a life off the road. He had fallen in love with a girl who loved him as he was and who was willing, even eager, to be with him forever. How I wish he had told me that. If only he had said that now he wanted to become an old man like his grandpa—had he said any of that, all of us, Cheryl and I and Jeff and Lynn and Lisa and Jacob, would have gone to war together against the life killing him.

  Instead, he said only, “We broke up,” and I said only, “Oh. Too bad.”

  I said nothing when I should have said everything. As Jared and Jacob grew up, I had hoped they would trust me with their fears and dreams. Maybe I hoped for more than any grandsons could deliver, or any son, for I had been silent in my father’s presence and my son had been silent in my presence. Still, how I wish that Jared, in distress, could have talked to me. How I wish he could have said what frightened him instead of saying, “She wants to do her thing. I’ll do mine.”

  I am a reporter. I ask questions for a living. For fifty years, I have asked questions that helped people tell their stories when they didn’t know they had a story to tell. And now, with my grandson’s life changing, I asked nothing, not a single damned question. I said only, “Oh. Too bad.” Now I know how much Jared could have said that day. Now I know how much he hid, how much he must have hurt. Now I hurt for all those questions unasked and fears unspoken.

  SIXTEEN

  By that summer of 2013, Cheryl and I had not seen Jared in three years. We last saw him as we were packing up our house before moving from Virginia to Illinois. In those missing years, the Jared we knew was a voice on the phone. “Just maxin’ and relaxin’ and payin’ no taxes,” he said. He would call with a report on his latest movements, his voice chirpy, his tone that of a kid having fun, even when a bodybuilding friend had cajoled him into workouts that left him breathless. “Sixty-five push-ups every day,” Jared said. “And we’re doing Tysons too.”

  A sportswriting grandfather knew about physical workouts, and I had seen Mike Tyson first win boxing’s heavyweight championship. Yet I knew nothing of “Tysons.” Jared said, “It’s a prison thing. Tyson did ’em. You take a deck of cards and put ’em on the floor. Then you squat down, all the way down, and pick up a card with your butt crack, and straighten up. You squat again until you’ve picked up all the cards.”

  The image was disconcerting enough, let alone the thought of performing the trick. “I won’t be doing those,” I said.

  We hoped he would soon be back with Maggie. On Facebook we had seen a picture of them, a boy and a girl having fun, smiling amid rubble next to the shining steel stripes of a railroad track. They held a case of beer as if it were a trophy for Best-Looking Couple Out There. I knew how proud he was of his porch-building work with Butch in Mount Airy. Maybe they’d be together in Carolina again.

  “Where are you now, boy?” I asked.

  “We’re in Jacksonville, Florida.”

  “Who’s ‘we’?”

  “Me, Jimbo, and Aggro.”

  “Aggro? Who’s that? What kind of name is that?”

  “She’s a girl. Aggro—short for aggressive and aggravating.”

  Discharging himself AMA from the Virginia hospital after Maggie left town, Jared had hitchhiked to Baltimore. There he hooked up with Craig AntiHero, the neophyte tattoo artist who had done his face with a powered-up toothbrush. Along the way, they met Jimbo and Aggro, traveling together as a couple (and once arrested in Fredericksburg, Virginia, for “public indecency,” the legal term of art for sexual intercourse practiced on grass behind a grocery store). Aggro, whose given name was Charity Ann Williams, was twenty-eight years old. She’d been on the road nine years. With five or six phone calls, she said, she could find anybody out there. As it happened, she and Jimbo knew people Jared knew, and he knew people they knew. They became an instant new crew: Goblin, Jimbo, and Aggro.

  Perhaps Jared recognized the name Aggro. He had heard it months before, during his Mount Airy idyll. The grapevine rumor had someone named Aggro and guys named Eddo and Jewls beating up a kid in California and leaving him for dead. If Jared made the connection between his new pal and that incident, he didn’t let on. Out there, you hear about a lot of people dying.

  Aggro, Jimbo, and Jared had gone south to Jacksonville and now would ride north to Myrtle Beach.

  “Then we’ll shoot up to Dad’s for the Chili Cook-Off,” Jared said.

  The cook-off was a family friend’s annual October outing.

  I said, “Really? You’ll be at the cook-off? We’ll be there then too.”

  How wonderful that by the happiest of coincidences we could be with Jared again. For the first time, we would meet him in both his roles, as our grandson and as a travelin’ kid, twenty-four years old, a young man on that journey I wrote about the week of his birth, a journey “full of hope and peril, sadness and joy.”

  That day I would hear Aggro’s account of first meeting Jared in front of a gas station next to a liquor store. She said, “After two thirty racks,” meaning two thirty-can cases of beer, Craig AntiHero tried to steal two half-gallons of Jack Daniel’s. “That ended up with the sales clerk chasing him out of the store and beating on him in the street. Seeing this, Goblin ran out into that busy street to save Craig and got hit by a car, not bad, just enough to knock him off stride. Later I found out he’d been really hit by a car in Arizona. That’s when I knew he was good people. I mean, if you’ve already been run down once and you’
re still crazy enough to bounce through cars to help your friend in a fight, I want you on my team.”

  AGGRO’S STORY

  From the Baltimore hop-out where we met Goblin, we figured we were going to ride through DC and, considering the security there, we needed a good ride to hide in. An empty gondola was our best choice. But once we got to the outskirts, an Amtrak conductor spotted us and called in to the authorities. So we got pulled off by a CSX engineer.

  He said Amtrak wanted him to call the police on us, but he wouldn’t do that. He told us, “I don’t give a fuck. And CSX doesn’t give a shit.” So, being a nice guy, he walked us to the last locomotive, the fifth unit in the string, and said we could ride there. After that dirty, hot gondola, this was like riding in a Cadillac. He gave us each a cigarette and turned on the air-conditioning and told us he could drop us in Richmond. That was Goblin’s first ride ever in a locomotive, and he was thrilled. The CSX guy said, “Enjoy yourselves. And don’t touch any buttons!”

  One of them, Jimbo or Goblin, ended up hitting the bell button anyway.

  Later, trying to hop out at Rocky Mount, North Carolina, we saw a train being refueled, and Jimbo asked the engineer about his destination. The engineer yelled to him, “Might be going to Hamlet, might be going to Florence, might be going to Jacksonville. I don’t know, I just drive the thing. But I do know it’s going south.”

  The three of us stood there, looked at one another, shrugged, and said, “Fuck it, we’re going somewhere.”

  Aggro was an old-timer in the dirty, thrilling, complex, dangerous world of train-hoppers. She knew it all. Later, I asked her questions, and she wrote me long letters printed neatly on yellow legal-pad paper, such as this:

  The first thing everybody says when they find out I ride trains is, “Oh my God, people still do that?” Yes, a lot. “Oh my God, how do you do that?” I tell them there’s no way a completely sane person can live the way we do and enjoy it. We’re all a little crazy. What kind of person willingly and happily gives up their home, all their possessions, and sometimes their family, to live in the streets? For some of us, being on the street was better than home. Some people don’t choose to be homeless, but all train riders chose trains. I’ve yet to meet someone who was scary crazy, and I don’t think I’ve ever come across any psychos. But how would I know? We all thought alike.

  Anyone can look at a dirty kid in Carhartts with a backpack and/or dog and think “hobo,” just like anyone can look at a beagle and think “dog.” But a beagle is not a Saint Bernard, just as all ’boes are not cut from the same cloth. We’ve got junkies and alkies (alcoholics), coffee snobs and vegans, oogles and elitists. Everyone fits into their own tribe. There are even some hippies among us! Oogles are the ignorant young kids that have just started out and know dick about freight trains, usually impressionable little shits, to be honest. Elitists are what we call “train nerds” or “train core.” They think they know the rails like they built them. They do know stuff, so they’re not so bad if you can put up with the attitude. That’s why we separate ourselves into different sects, divided up into crews, like Goblin’s “Scurvy Bastards.” Not all of us can get along.…

  We’re primal people. Don’t get me wrong, some of the most well-educated and well-read people I’ve met are among the hoboes, but we live by the law of the wild. Everything is body language and pheromones. Yes, pheromones. No deodorant for this crowd.

  There’s no one leader. All of us are running from or shunning the authority of a society that we either don’t understand or don’t want to understand. That includes authority figures, thus the dislike of religion, politics, all law enforcement—with the exception of the Secret Service, they’re pretty cool. Like any pack of ferals, we fall in line to a dominant personality. Dominance by brute strength and intimidation or dominance by sly persuasion. But it’s not all jungle yodeling and chest pounding. An “alpha” has to think like one too. He or she is responsible for the whole pack.…

  There are some old-timers out there we call “gearless and fearless” because they travel with nothing but the clothes on their back and a small day-pack for food. They’re the best, the troubadours of the rails. You can learn a lot from those guys. I know it sounds strange, but for some of us they’re the only father figures we’ve ever had. The same goes for the older female riders—though they’re mostly retired by the time they hit the age to have “Mama” attached to their names. We’ve got more brothers and sisters than we could ever possibly count. Ranging from crazy-ass punk-rock kids with face tattoos and piercings to old-timey-style-dressed elitists with felt brimmed hats and suspenders. Put it all together and it shows the evolution of an idea into a culture into a whole other society. It’s an underbelly of America that most people don’t even know exists.…

  Yes, those underbelly people stink. They smell of grease and mud and bodily fluids; it’s not like there are public showers along railroad tracks, which means the body odors of the seriously unwashed become next to palpable. Aggro rule of the road #1: Don’t trust a tramp who smells like soap. Rule #2: If they wear cologne, run ’em out of camp. “All of us think that shit stinks.”

  There’s a sisterhood of lady riders—and it sure as hell doesn’t include what we call “squat mattresses.” A squat mattress is exactly what it sounds like—a female who’ll let any guy sleep on her. Not classified as a “slut”—sluts are not looked down on in our world. But, excuse my language, squat mattresses are cum dumpsters. Many train ladies will proudly call themselves sluts or whores. Sluts do it for the love of sex, whores do it to get what they want. Squat mattresses do it because they think it’s cute and will get guys to like them. They are despised by us lady riders who would never lower ourselves to that level. Our motto is, if you don’t like us, there must be something wrong with you.…

  We do have characters, from complete sweethearts like Goblin to serious hard-asses. One comes to mind. He was a lean, mean, destroying machine. Looked like John Henry personified. His hands were the size of my face, one fist like two of mine, not a kid to be messed with. One time he almost ripped a kid’s ear off. Bunch of high school kids coming out of a hotel. Prom or something. This guy bumped into one of them and apologized. The kid scoffs and turns away. BIG MISTAKE. He took the kid by the ears to head-butt him—only one ear came off. It was hanging from a little piece of skin. He looked at it, tried to put it back, and when it wouldn’t go back on, we all took off.

  How many people do I know in the train tramp tribe? Couple hundred, maybe more. The longer you ride, the fewer people you know. When someone starts out, they don’t know anyone and it’s one big exciting adventure full of possibilities and intriguing people, some of them terrifying. By the time you hit your intermediate years, you know quite a few people and if you don’t know them, you will soon. Those years you’re riding hard and not making plans, just riding for the love of it. By the end of those years, it seems the kids get younger and all your friends are settling down, having kids, dying, or already dead. I’m at the eight-year mark, though that doesn’t mean eight straight years riding. Sometimes I take a “vacation” and house-up for a little bit, but I still count those years. Being inside for a while didn’t change my attitude or outlook on life. I know that I will ride until the day I die. Come hell or high water, when all is said and done, I’ll be on the next thing smokin’, bound for God only knows where.…

  I asked, “How do you find trains?” The answer was as simple as it was unexpected. Sometimes she just went to the public library. Chicago had a good one. “They’ve got satellite images of all the yards.” She would first spray herself with Febreze—snuffing out a travelin’ kid’s odors—and then, with perfect manners and diction, say at a reception desk, “Excuse me, I’m a rail enthusiast. Do you have any maps of the railroads coming into Chicago?” And thank you very much.

  Next to “suicides,” where you can roll through an opening and onto the racks, empty boxcars are the worst places to ride. You’re in the rolling thunder
of steel doors and steel floors, everything rattling, a “roar best appreciated by fans of Death Metal music.” To be on “door watch” means it’s your job to “spike” the doors. You jam a railroad spike in a space in the floor so the doors can’t slide shut and trap you in there until yard bulls open them and take you to jail, if you’ve managed to stay alive. Don’t ride an empty coal car because they can dump coal on top of you. For that matter, don’t ride a loaded coal car. You’re on top of the coal, but you can sink in it as if it’s quicksand. The ultimate horror is that the bottom sluice gate opens and the coal goes sliding into a great dark abyss and you slide with it. You’re next heard from, if ever, when workmen uncover your blackened corpse.

  Another popular ride is grainer porches—the small, flat landing on either end of a grain car. But they often have as much open space as flooring. On a “suicide porch,” if you toss and turn in your sleep, you might roll off the porch and under the train. Getting shaken around on the trains is one of the reasons we say every year on the rails adds an extra one to your actual age.

  You asked about religion on the rails. Someone who doesn’t know better would say there isn’t any. But there is one religion on the rails. If we’re having a shitty day panhandling or going to catch out, we all say a silent prayer to the train gods. There’s no shape or a look, the way Christians view God. But the train gods live on the great freight in the sky. When you die, old-timers call it “catching that westbound.” I’m assuming “west” because that’s where the sun sets. You know the song “Big Rock Candy Mountain”? Well, that’s what heaven would be like for us. A mama ’bo taught me the rhyme when I was still wet behind the ears. If you’re a good ’bo when you die, you go to ride that great freight in the sky. If you’re bad, you don’t go to hell, you end up in a place much worse than that—you go to North Platte!