I tell him I’d like to hear his angle on the FTRA story, and he says fiercely, “I ain’t got no damn story. Not one I want you to hear.” But after I buy him a pint of T-bird, he seems mollified and takes the stool beside me. As he talks, he has the habit of looking down at his glass and then slowly turning his head toward me, a tight movement, finishing the turn as he finishes his thought—he might be tracking the carriage of an invisible typewriter.
“None of you gave a shit about us before,” he says. “We could dry the fuck up and blow away, you wouldn’t care. Now some nut case kills a few people, and you’re all over us. How’d you like it I come in your house and go to asking a bunch of dumb-ass questions? S’pose I barge into your living room and say, ‘’S’cuse me, buddy. You always drink two martinis ’fore you screw your girlfriend, or is that just ’cause it’s Tuesday?’”
I start to speak, but he cuts me off.
“You got your own nuts you can write about. Ted Bundy and all them other freaks. Sidetrack don’t have a damn thing to do with the FTRA.” He holds up his empty pint, which he’s drained in three gulps—I signal the bartender.
“Sooner or later,” he goes on, “one of you shitbrains is gonna piss somebody off and get yourself killed. Then you’ll have a fucking story. The rails ain’t no place to be asking questions. Hobos want to be left the fuck alone. That’s why we’re out there. Keep pestering us, we’ll let you know about it.”
By the time he’s started in on his third pint, Flash has completely abandoned his intention of not talking to me, and is taking it upon himself to smarten me up, chump that I am. He’s mellowed; his gestures are not so tightly controlled, and his voice has acquired a lazy, gassed quality, causing me to think that his original hostility might have been chemically enhanced.
“People are setting up Eddie Bauer tents in the jungles,” he says. “Walking around with scanners and hiking boots. You take a stroll through a place where everybody’s starving, and you’re packing a bag of groceries, what you expects gonna happen? The rails is where we live, man. It ain’t a fucking theme park. All this shit you’re stirring up—” he taps me on the chest “—one of you’s gonna wind up eating it. And it ain’t because the FTRA is the fucking mafia, y’know. ’Cause it ain’t. We take care of our own, but that’s as far as it goes.”
I ask him if there’s a hierarchy in the gang, any structure, and he lets out a scornful laugh.
“You think I kill people, don’t you?” he asks. “That’s the reason you’re talking to me.”
The question catches me off guard. “I don’t know. Do you?”
He gives me a steady look. “I do what I have to. We all do what we have to, right?”
“I suppose.”
“Well, that’s exactly what I do…what I have to. That’s your structure. That’s all the structure there is.”
“So you’re saying it’s the survival of the fittest?”
“I’m saying that right here, the three of us—” his gesture includes me and Madcat “—if we’re out riding, one of us is president, one’s vice president.” He grins. “Then there’s you.”
“If that’s all it is, why join a gang?”
“Brotherhood, man. You need me to explain brotherhood to you?”
The Aleut woman a few seats down makes a low keening noise, and Flash regards her with disfavor.
“I got no reason to tell you shit,” he says, coming back to me. “I told you some of the things I done, you wouldn’t understand ’em. The world you live in, the only excuse there is for killing is self-defense. But where I live there might be a thousand good reasons for killing somebody any given moment. That don’t mean you got to enjoy it. But you better be up for it.”
I think of men accustomed to killing whom I’ve spoken to in prison, who’ve handed me similar bullshit. Every one of them maintained an outlaw bad-to-the-bone stance until they felt they were in a circumstance in which they had nothing to prove, no one to impress; then they revealed a more buoyant side to their natures, brimming over with cheerfulness, their talk rife with homily, as if bloodshed had done wonders for their spirits, as if having crossed over the border of acceptable human conduct, they had been delighted to discover that they had retained their basic sensibilities and not been transformed into a depraved subspecies by the resonance of their crimes. I sense this potential in Flash; though he hasn’t dropped his badass pose, I’m certain that in another environment, he’d loosen up and wax anecdotal and analyze himself in terms of a woeful childhood.
“You and me should take a ride sometime,” he says. “If you want to get to know somebody, best way is to take a ride with ’em.”
He’s mocking me, and the only thing I can think to say is, “Yeah, maybe.”
“Well, you let me know, huh?” He gets to his feet, digs for his wallet, then remembers that I’m the one paying. He nods to Madcat and says, “Safe rails, brother.” And then he’s gone.
Madcat is holding his head to one side, a hand still pressed to his brow to alleviate the throbbing of the lump above his eye. I ask if he’s okay, and he says, “Pissed off is all.”
“Why’s that?” I ask, and he says, “The guy who whipped me, he wasn’t that big a deal. Guess I ain’t as much a man as I used to be.”
He seems unreasonably distressed—he’s lost fights before. I can’t think how to restore his spirits.
“You still up for riding?”
“Oh, yeah. I’ll be fine.”
But he looks utterly dejected.
I ask if he wants some more wine before we head out, and he says, “Naw, fuck. Wine don’t do no good for me.”
He stares down into his glass, swirls the liquid around; then lifts his head and turns his gaze to the street, watching the passers-by with a forlorn expression, as if seeing in their brisk movements yet another condemnation of his weakness.
“Wish’t I’d had me a bottle of whiskey,” he says. “I’d been drinking whiskey, I’d a kicked his ass.”
Cricket is 48, a grandmother, and an FTRA member. She once operated a cleaning business in Tucson that catered to restaurants and resorts, but in 1988 she began to feel “stressed out, there was too many things goin’ on,” and she sold everything she owned and hit the rails—she’d done some riding previously, and she loved the trains. Ever since, she’s ridden from town to town, stopping now and then to work, helping build stages for bands in a Spokane hotel, or “hanging a sign” to get house-cleaning jobs. I contact her by phone, and she tells me she’s temporarily off the rails due to problems associated with injuries she received in 1994, when two hobos named Pacman and Lone Wolf killed her friend, Joseph Carbaugh, axed her in the head, then threw her and another friend off a moving train near Glenwood Springs, Colorado. Pacman and Lone Wolf are independent hobos, she says, though they claim to be members of a group called the Wrecking Crew. Or maybe it was the Goon Squad—sometimes, she says, she can’t remember names, because of her injuries.
“I thought the Wrecking Crew and the Goon Squad were part of the gang,” I say, recalling Grandinetti’s lecture. “Part of the FTRA.”
“Naw, they’re separate groups,” Cricket says. “But FTRA ain’t a gang.”
“What is it, then?”
“It’s a brotherhood, a sisterhood,” she says. “We hold reunions, like high school classes do. We go to reunions, we party, we travel.”