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.”
Bones is scarcely what the law would consider a credible witness, certainly not so credible as Officer Grandinetti. He has an extensive arrest record, and he goes on at some length about “utilizing personal magnetism to subdue ruthless people,” which speaks both to a measure of craftiness and a healthy streak of arrogance. He lies effortlessly; he’s lied to me and subsequently admitted it. Like anyone in prison, he’s working every angle he can, and I suspect he’s working some angle with me. Not that I can fault him for it—he’s alone, he has no idea where his wife is, no one writes him, and, except for his lawyer, I’m the only person from outside the walls with whom he’s had contact. But despite this, and while I’m hesitant to make an informed judgment about his character based on a single interview, I find what he tells me, if not credible, then at least genuine in its essence. My acceptance of what he says probably has something to do with his enthusiasm for hoboing, for trains, for animals—especially his German shepherd, Star—and the outdoors. This enthusiasm seems an irreducible distillate of the man, and the longer we talk, the more what he says seems funded by that portion of his sensibility; and the more frequently he goes back to what we’ve previously discussed in order to clarify some point, or to reshape a story so it better reflects the truth. It’s as if he’s gone past his natural suspicion of me, and is having a good time talking to someone from the world.
Our conversation turns to the trains, and when I tell Bones about my infant experiences on the rails, he lifts an eyebrow and says, “You’ve ridden?”
“Yeah, a little.”
Bones continues looking at me for a long moment, his expression neutral, and I think he’s trying to fit the information into his understanding of me, reassessing my potential. Or could be he’s merely surprised. Then he grins, and I can see the face of the boy emerge from all those lines and wrinkles. It’s a look of unalloyed pleasure, as if everything around us, walls and razor wire and guards, had vanished, and we were sitting on a patch of dirt somewhere warm, passing a bottle.
“Man, ain’t it fun!” he says.
I’m riding in a boxcar south along the Columbia River, which must be nearly a mile wide at this point, and it’s hard to tell which is the reflecting medium and which the source of light—the river, every eddy bearing a captive glint, or the starry sky above. The towering hills that follow the watercourse show dark and nearly featureless, all but their lowermost reaches in shadow, making it appear that the curtain of night has been gathered into great black folds at the edge of the bright stage it delimits. Though it’s incredibly loud in the car, too loud for speech, something about the solitude and immensity of the scene, and perhaps the sense I have of the peculiarly American tradition of which I’m now a small part, the rail riders of the Civil War era, the hobos of the Depression, the FTRA…all this serves to describe a silence inside me, to shut me off from the rattling and the cold iron smells of the train, even from the noise of ambient thought, and after a while, emerging from an almost meditative state, I wonder if this is what Adman means by “the Drift.”
Adman is the train name of Todd Waters, a brisk, fiftyish man with a neat gray beard who runs a successful Minneapolis advertising agency. He’s been riding for more than twenty years, and admits to being what is called a “yuppie rider” or a “yuppie hobo.” Most tramps use shoestrings to tie off their trouser cuffs when they’re boarding a freight to prevent the fabric from catching on something and causing them to fall. Adman uses Velcro fasteners. When I met him he was wearing a sporty cap, and a denim jacket and trousers that appeared to be matching, and I thought he would look more natural steering a yacht than hopping a freight. He’s given to comparing the quintessential hobo to a Hesse character whose purpose in life was “to make men homesick for their freedom,” and he asserts that the experience of riding elevates him into a state he calls “the Drift,” wherein it seems that his dreams and thoughts are colored not by his own past, but by the stars he’s passing beneath and the places he’s passing through.
I can’t quite go there with Adman—I haven’t yet found anyone on the rails who’s made me homesick for my freedom. But you have to respect Adman because he’s done something with his romantic zeal. Back in 1983 he created the Penny Route, encouraging people to contribute a penny for every mile he rode; he wound up raising more than a hundred thousand dollars for the National Coalition for the Homeless. Since then he’s established himself as a respected figure in the hobo community, someone who can speak both to and for the transient rail population. What’s troublesome about yuppie hobos in general, however, are the increasing numbers of sport riders and scenery freaks who sally forth onto the rails without regard for the risks involved. Should someone with a little fame—a minor rock star or a peripheral Kennedy relative—decide to hop a freight in order to research a part or just to feel that “Jack Kerouac thing,” and then fall under the wheels of a boxcar, Officer Grandinetti will be turning up on every television program from Nightline to American Journal, wagging his finger and putting the bogeyman face of the FTRA on the tragedy, whether it applies or not, and the media frenzy will begin.