by Dave Kindred
“You never would let me wash those things,” Cheryl said to her grandson. She meant the stinking bibs that he had worn living on the street, even before his train-hopping days.
Jared laughed. “Gotta look dirty, or people won’t drop any cash on us.”
I had feared he would be skin and bones. He was always slight, and I knew the years on the road had been unkind. As we drove from Washington to Orange, there was no reason to imagine he would look as good as he did. Thin, but no thinner than the last time we saw him, he seemed to be strong and healthy, with a touch of rosy color about his face and a light in his eyes. When he came to hug us, he giggled a lot and bounced around, almost dancing, and in the first moments he asked, “Grandpa, do you remember telling me stories about Pee Wee Reese and Muhammad Ali and that soccer guy who kept saying, ‘Love, love, love’?”
I had told those stories sixteen years earlier. I had talked him to sleep, a child next to me in bed, listening to the same stories night after night. They were a sportswriter’s stories chosen because I knew enough details to fill time until an eight-year-old fell asleep. All that had happened since—life happening—and he still remembered us in bed.
There at his father’s home in Virginia I saw Jared as a three-year-old at Newnan’s fire station saying, “Bye-bye, fire truck,” and sliding under our jukebox looking for Elvis. I could see him, ten years old, swinging in the backyard while his German shepherd, Ikea, ran barking at his flying feet. I could see him, fifteen years old, driving a bouncing, careening go-cart across our pastures. Each day was another miracle made possible by some unknowable biochemical arrangement so complex that we reduce it to one word—life. Those mornings when Jared slept in my bed, I watched him in wonder that such a miracle as that boy could happen. I wanted to protect him, hold him close, keep him safe from a cold, hard, mean world that could, for no reason that made sense, beat him up and leave him lonely. I wanted him to be a kid forever.
There was a tattoo on his left shoulder. SCURVY was written in cursive above a skull with railroad spikes through the eyeholes. Below the skull were the numbers “1 2 3.” He explained the markings: “It’s ‘Scurvy Bastards: Thou shalt not lie, thou shalt not cheat, thou shalt not steal.’” It was a travelin’ kid’s code of ethics—not the Ten Commandments, but more rules than some ordinary citizens follow and enough to remind me of what Dear God once said of Jared: “So good to everybody, he’s a train-hopping Jesus.”
Jared’s beard. The color of cinnamon. Allowed to grow untended, it was an exotic frame for the blue eyes and fine features of his small face. Later that day we made a family photograph. Smiling, he stood behind his grandmother with his left hand on her left shoulder. His right hand squeezed a tuft of the beard at his chin. “This’ll keep me warm all winter,” he said.
From Myrtle Beach, Jared, Aggro, and Jimbo had ridden a freight to Richmond, where friends picked them up and drove them north to Orange. “Whenever Jared would come to town,” one friend, Sean Lawson, said, “it was like Gandalf from The Hobbit had come to visit. He was the great traveler who brought good times and amazing stories. We took to calling him the Nomad. To me he was a
symbol of absolute freedom. And I envied his charisma. Man, him and Carlton cigarettes. The really long, skinny ones. He’d say the name like a snob, ‘a Caaahhhlton.’ And one time he said he’d never drink clear liquor again. He’d punched out a window. But I saw him drinking vodka and called him on it. He said, all high and mighty, ‘Not vodka-alcohol, vodka-water, fool!’ So funny, I gave him a pass.”
The better to create distance between civilization and the road dogs’ distinctive, long-lasting odors, Jeff had invited/ordered Jared’s crew to stay in his garage. “Got my own Walking Dead TV show out there,” he said. The star of the show was Charity Ann Williams. “Nobody calls her Charity,” Jared said. “She’s Aggro.”
Unafraid and savvy, thick from shoulders to hips, five foot eight, 170 pounds, tattooed and pierced, Aggro was a dark presence in black boots and black bibs with her scissor-chopped brown hair under a short-billed jeans cap. When she was nineteen and living in Plano, Texas, her high school sweetheart died of a meth overdose. She had been on the road ever since, save for eighteen months when she worked in a San Antonio meatpacking plant. A hard-ass romantic, she practically sang about her first ride on a freight.
“There were four of us riding a flat car between two semi-trailers, otherwise known as a piggyback, from Oakland, California, to Eugene, Oregon. We would hang our feet over the edge, and we’d hide under the axles when passing through towns. It was amazing to ride through the Cascades, surfing the car, seeing the Milky Way in the night sky. I said, ‘I’ll never hitchhike again.’ I fell in love. That first ride, it’s like your first kiss, scary but exhilarating at the same time. You know that either you’ll ride freight till the day you die or never again. Me, I became married to those steel wheels and miles of track.”
During Jared’s time with Maggie in Mount Airy—when he first heard Aggro’s name, a rider somehow connected to a killing—Aggro spent six months in a Kansas City jail for beating up a “home bum,” a vagrant living on the streets of his hometown. On release, she did a Facebook post:
Contrary to popular belief… I did NOT do 30 years. I am NOT a heroin addict nor have I ever touched the stuff and I’m out of jail. I’ll be staying in Kansas City going to college and learning how to tattoo.
That day in Orange she told me she had learned the source of Jared’s good looks. She was sitting on a picnic table when a man walked toward her. “He wore camo slacks and a blue hoodie. I’d never met Jeff, but I looked over at Goblin and said, ‘Your dad’s here.’ One look and I thought, That’s Goblin in twenty years.”
Twenty years, what a gift that would be. Twenty years from that day, in October of 2033, Jared would be forty-four years old. He’d likely be a husband and father. The handyman work he liked doing with Butch in Mount Airy might be his full-time job; his mother had talked about working in a custom-bike shop because, like his father and like his brother Jacob, he was good with machines.
But twenty years? In twenty years, a wanderer might run through several lives. Aggro’s formula was one to five, a year on the road being five at home, meaning Jared’s five came to twenty-five. On this second stop of what Aggro called “the Goblin Family Tour,” she said, “You better pay attention, we get old quick.”
Now Jared sat in Jeff’s garage with his second-family siblings. Kaleb was a firefighter in training at age seventeen. Nine-year-old Josie shadowed Jared’s every move without ever speaking, eyes wide open to better see this brother she didn’t know. She wasn’t alone in her curiosity. We had known the Jared who lived in our homes. But the Jared who stood in front of us at his father’s farm—I didn’t know the travelin’ kid Goblin.
I now know he came from San Diego and New Orleans, from upstate New York and the high desert of New Mexico. I know he chased naked girls in an Ocala forest, slept with a French–Puerto Rican beauty on the sands of Coney Island, and found in North Carolina the woman he could have, would have, should have married. “It’s fun, Grandpa,” he said. And I believed I knew what he meant. He had seen lives in our world that were no fun, that were mean and angry, that were little more sober than his, and he had chosen to live another way.
By the time he arrived at Jeff’s place on that day in October of 2013, he had been with street preachers selling Jesus and street urchins selling crack among the mad dogs of Houston’s Fifth Ward. He had danced on Bourbon Street and in a gondola moving through the New Mexico night. He had loved the angel-faced singer Sarafina Scarlet. He was an alcoholic and an adventurer, a train-hopping ninja, a leader, lover, and fighter. To quote Maggie again, “He was the happiest guy I’d ever seen.”
JEFF’S STORY
I told him he was the bravest guy I knew. My greatest fear had been that he would be beat to death. I told him, “You’re going to get the shit kicked out of you and thrown off a train and never be heard from ag
ain. You’ll be left somewhere for the coyotes to eat.” He’d say, “Naw, not going to happen, Dad.”
He knew I was embarrassed by him and wanted him to settle down and get a job. At the same time, I was proud of him. I wouldn’t have been able to do what he did. He went farther west than I ever did, he saw more of the country than I ever will. He did what the Civil War campaigners did in the 1860s. They were kids too, a thousand miles from home walking in foreign lands, hopping trains, no way of telling where they were going.
I thought about my great-great-grandfather, Overton Kindred. In his eighties, he’d just take off walking. He’d walk from Illinois to Kentucky, four hundred miles down there, to visit relatives and walk back, nobody knowing where he was. I said, “Jared, you’re following kind of a family tradition.” I attribute that wanderlust in him to the family genes.
I tried to convince him to be a living historical Civil War campaigner. “Ride a horse across the country, Jared, and you’ll get more support than you can imagine.” In northern Virginia, there was a guy who rode a horse every year up to Gettysburg along Route 15, the same route the Army of Northern Virginia took. He lived on his horse those two, three weeks. That’s why I gave Jared that Confederate slouch hat and eating gear. He’d have been a hero out there.
That part of what he did, I was envious of. He was just like those eighteen-year-old kids in the Civil War—they marched into places where they were scared to death knowing that the next day you’ll die. But a faction of them loved it—just the way Jared loved it.
Cheryl and I had to leave Orange to get back to Washington early that afternoon. Before leaving, I wanted a photograph of Jared with Robert E. Lee. Orange was the northernmost settlement in the Confederacy from March 1862 to May 1864. In those months, Lee headquartered there. On Jeff’s living room wall, there was a handsome print of the general.
I said to Jared, “Let’s go take a picture with General Lee.”
With a muzzle-loading shotgun in hand, Jared struck a pose in front of the portrait. He raised his chin a click and held the old gun across his chest. To see him then, a skinny kid with a scraggly beard, was to see what Jeff saw, a twenty-first-century version of those young soldiers who marched into places that scared them.
Jared had been to dark places, more even than we knew then, and that afternoon we said our goodbyes to him, to Aggro, and to Jimbo. The three wanderers planned to move on from Virginia to Philadelphia.
“Don’t forget, you guys, please stay in touch, someday I want to understand your story,” I said. “Tell me why, tell me everything, tell it to me from beginning to the end, don’t leave anything out, and make it funny.”
Jared: “Oh, yeah, we can make it funny.”
Jeff: “Leave out the tragic parts.”
Jared: “Yeah, no tragic.”
AGGRO’S STORY
The fun parts, okay?—like catching out. Goblin was with us in a little town somewhere near Savannah. We shouldered up our packs after gearing up at the local gas station and headed up to a bridge that crossed the rail yard. You couldn’t walk right up to the hop-out on account of a chain-link fence and just plain wilderness. So we hiked up the bridge, legged over the side, dipped down underneath the bridge, and heel-toed our way down an embankment.
At the bottom was a partition about seven feet high. I slipped my backpack straps off my shoulders and let my pack fall with a thud and a cloud of dust. Eyes scanning and searching every beam and surface for a sign in Sharpie ink, paint, chalk, or grease. Symbols, signs, names, and caricatures ranging from elaborate and beautiful to crude stick figures. Saying, like, “Hobo Joe wuz here,” signed and dated.
Goblin and I scurry and rummage, tagging here and there where there is space and searching for evidence of a recent hop. Did they leave anything behind? This hop didn’t have a firebox, but there was a wood pile and a small grate. The heat coming off the rail yard was tangible. Mixed with the sound of cicadas, it became a creature unto itself. There’s a cool dampness under the bridge in the solidified mud and moss. I could smell the rust from the train cars and old tin cans.
There’s a break in the trees. What’s that over there? We go crunching, snapping, shuffling, crackling through the leaves, twigs, debris. A circle of mismatched dining room chairs, stools, milk crates! Rail tags cover everything! And a wind chime made of glass bottles, pieces of colored glass, rail spikes, pieces of ties, and other hobo mementos.
The tags are Savannah-bound, a couple years old. There’s a grate over the pit for cooking. I wished it was cold enough or we were going to be there long enough to use it. Well, damn—“Let’s just stay a day,” Goblin says with big eyes.
Now it’s evening and skeeters are coming with vengeance. All you can smell is Deet, Off, and Deep Woods, and you hear the sound of aerosol spray. Hey, pass the booze! Sodium-vapor lights come to life in the yard like huge stationary fireflies. Automobiles are rumbling over the bridge, train cars creaking and banging around in the yard. The engines hum, tick, and whoop while radios crackle with static and unintelligible voices as the switchmen do what they do best—build our rides.
Smiles in the dark mix with hushed voices and the chuff and snuffle of sleeping dogs. Stories overlap and the laughs get a little bit too loud as the booze lubricates the night. The air smells sweet now, like jasmine and honeysuckle. The sharp taste of straight cheap booze kissed by chaser is on my tongue.
What’s that? Did you hear that? A low rumble coming from down the mainline. The night goes from relaxed to supercharged that fast. Now we’re sitting up erect, ears twitching, nostrils flared, as if we’re the very dogs at our feet. Shhh! Did you hear that? Which way is it coming from? Hurried now, bottle caps are screwed on—shit!—and have to be rethreaded. The rustle and hustle of gear being packed quickly and the shuffling of feet. Ow! Shit! Get the fuck outta the way!
Goblin goes up to the main rail, keeping to the shadows, glancing one way and then the other. There! At the end of the track: a lonesome whistle calls and three lights dance out of the darkness. Watching, waiting.
He steps back down from the track in three quick strides, shufflin’ the way he does, taking a pouch of tobacco out of his Carhartts, and all of us are waiting like dogs on a bone. Goblin speaks around the rolled cigarette in his mouth while he sparks the flame, “Northbound!”
We had no idea when we would see Jared again. He might have been a soldier home on leave from a war we could not hope to understand. We just wanted him safe, and it was wonderful to see him so happy on this morning at his father’s in the woods shimmering with autumn’s colors.
It was a day of redemption. The son I loved as best I knew how had brought into his home the son he loved as best he knew how. When he might have stayed away, the son had returned to the father’s embrace. What had gone before all those years ago was done, and if not forgotten at least forgiven in ways that made possible a day when we were a family again.
Twenty-one years earlier, Jeff and Lynn had left Georgia with the boys. On that day, Jared, three years old, looked at Cheryl through the window by the van’s second-row passenger seat. She saw the sadness of separation on his face. This time, Aggro told me, “Gobs was really emotional about seeing Cheryl. He just was so happy to spend time with her. He talked about this special bond they had.”
We stood by Jared at Jeff’s garage, and we didn’t want to leave, and we stood there some more. We wanted the day to never end. Grandpa hugged him and Grandma hugged him, and we said take care, be safe, if you need anything, call.
“Love you, boy,” I said.
“Love you, Grandpa,” he said. “Love you, Grandma.”
As we drove away, Cheryl saw Jared wave. We were a minute down the road before she spoke.
“Did you see the tears in Jared’s eyes?” she said. “He cried when we left, and he tried to not let us know.”
Two days later, Jeff drove Jared, Aggro, and Jimbo to the Fredericksburg railroad station. The crew planned to head for Philadelphia for Thank
sgiving, Christmas, and the New Year’s holidays.
“Jared was the first one out of the truck, so excited, he couldn’t wait to get out of that truck,” Jeff said. “He was getting all their gear out, chattering away, already talking about where they were going, and I’m saying, ‘Jared!’ Nothing. He’s not listening. ‘Jared!!’ He’s doing this, doing that. And Jimbo says, ‘Dude! Your dad’s trying to get your attention.’ Jared goes, ‘Oh. Yeah, Dad?’”
Jeff gave him a jacket from his Ford shop and said, “You’re going up north, take this.”
Jared said, “Cool, Dad. Thanks.”
“And off they went,” Jeff said. “I didn’t know if I’d ever see him again. It was like that every time. Three or four times, he had come to Virginia and stopped to see us. Every time I took him to the train station, I thought it would be the last time I saw him.”
NINETEEN
In early December 2013, Jared called from Philadelphia.
“After Christmas,” he said, “I’ll shoot over to Illinois to see you.”
“How will you get here?”
“Freight train,” he said.
The logistics of his traveling baffled me then and baffle me yet. I could retrace some of his movements through my notes of phone calls and interviews. But he talked about it casually, as if an illegal, dangerous, 1,500-mile freight train ride from an East Coast metropolis to a stinkweed hamlet in Illinois were nothing more than a sportswriter’s commute to a ballpark.
Riding with Jared, Aggro and Jimbo had gone to Philadelphia to pick up a puppy before heading out of the winter’s cold, probably to Tennessee. Jared had intended to leave with them, but while helping move furniture for an old acquaintance, he made a new friend—a woman named Brooke. “Jared and I hit it off right away,” Brooke told me. “He was adorable and funny, just a good-hearted guy who seemed to be enjoying his life.”