LONG
ROAD HOME
(Part 10)
We twiddle our thumbs
in tall weeds until three hardhats working strings across the yard appear
fleetingly into view. Clown pops up to pursue
them, vowing over her shoulder to radio intelligence every fifteen minutes. She
traipses merrily out the trampled circle into the lengthy makeup yard.
Fifteen minutes
later, Wiz carps, ‘Why hasn’t she radioed?’
I mutter waving my hand, ‘Give her ten minutes more.’ We sweat, look and listen to units rumble
toward the spot where she vanished. Car
string after string bang together there into one train that surely is our ride
out of town. ‘Let’s get out of these
weeds,’ I finally urge, and we stand with our packs and hers. ‘Soon that
freight will highball.’
I lug two packs
following Wiz with his across a dozen vacant tracks toward the clamor. Nearing, we hear singing between car clashes,
and stoop to peek under a gondola.
Behold, Clown with crayon-hair flowing over a pink halter top giggles
within a ring of hardhats. They help her place coin after coin on a rail
beneath the three locomotives’ wheels, and the engineer rocks back-and-forth
over them to make ‘hobo jewelry’.
(Later, one may drills holes in the twice-sized, flattened coins that
retain a faint outline of the head and tail to fashion trinkets or
earrings.) She now holds up beautiful
pieces - nickels, dimes and quarters- to reflect sunlight. Wiz collapses his pocket telescope and cusses.
‘You know what?’ he
questions, brushing a bee from his face. ‘First of all, I’m allergic to bee
stings. Second, I don’t think she’s in danger. In fact, she seems to be
enjoying herself. Third, I’m so irate this is what I’m going to do…’ He keys the radio and bawls, ‘My name is
Clown and I like trainmen!’ In the
distance, Clown grabs her pants for the walkie-talkie. I yank my radio and yell, ‘After the finale,
gentlemen, get her on this California Man.’ The hardhats recoil that words
could pour so angrily from a hoboette’s jeans. She jerks out her radio and transmits, ‘Oh.
It’s you, boys. This is your train. All aboard!’
Wiz and I shake our
heads, and rise from our haunches. We
climb six rungs over the blue gondola wall and, with no inside ladder, drop the
packs five feet and tumble to the hot floor ourselves. Then we peer over the gondola like Kilorys. Men watch
her. They can’t take they’re eyes off the Medusa with a sharp tongue. ‘She’ll leave a trail of erections all the
way to
Moments later, Clown
mounts and drops to the gondola floor and we squat in the shared sunshine
smelling the diesel of two growling engines about to connect up front. We brace in the car center for the inevitable
jolt and, though the power joins ½-mile away, the couples pair-by-pair jam in a
staccato beat- our car rocks as if hit by a wave- that washes by and to the
rear end. In seconds the brakes hiss,
the horn trumpets and our freight charges out the rail.
‘I found it
stimulating to talk to the yard workers,’ says Clown as the car waggles down
the track. ‘There aren’t a lot of men in
these parts. I convinced them with the rail lingo you taught me, Doc, that I
knew what I was doing. So, they said,
‘Hold the train!’ After you spoiled it
with that radio slot they joked, ‘Your guys are better equipped than us,’ and
finally let me go.’
I grin and pull out
another L’Amour book. Wiz tunes his
scanner to crew chatter in the lead unit, and Clown, smiling mysteriously, eats
a whole jar of pickles before we reach the town limit.
This mile-long mixed
freight draws boxcars, grainers, oilers,
gondolas including our blue one, but no pigs or containers. This is called a ‘dog’ for low priority
that’ll side for hotshots having boxes and pigs zooming past from either
direction all day. But no one complains
because our train is shambling toward the Pacific. The track parallels I-70 for a few hours
across high, flat desert and on into canyon land past the
The afternoon journey
becomes a string of knots- sidings for faster freights- but we knew it would be
slow going when we made our play in
Most freight hoppers
watch the scenery flow until it blends with their personal past, and then they
drowse. Conversely, I’ve never seen Wiz without something to do, and now he
tinkers with various electronic gadgets from his pack for miles on end. Clown always has a book in hand, and prefers
it to the landscape sliding past the freight.
I, with a deep reserve for introspection, am my best own company in one
corner of the platform.
Suddenly Wiz holds
high his cell phone and blurts, ‘That’s it!
We are, as far as I know, the first hobos ever to send an e-Mail from a
moving freight.’ On request for
particulars and he replies, ‘It went to the Wiley Publisher Chief ‘Pam VanGeesen and.reported what I
just told you, that this is the first hobo e-Mail. I promised to try to update
her via the www.dailyspeculations.com
website with our daily progress.’
The freight lumbers
constantly at 40mph until the rail picks up a
parallel river with sporadic rapids. Our hopper overtakes a boat of rafters
traveling the same direction, but they’re intent on their ride and miss
ours. Clown asks if a hobo ever rides atop
a car, and I reply, ‘Yes, that’s called decking, a safe maneuver when done with
sensitivity.’ Wordlessly she zips up the
ladder of our rolling porch and, as Wiz shakes his head over a gadget, I trail
her like a worrying father.
A two-feet steel
catwalk runs the length of the car top that she crabs to the center and sits
on. Now, with one hand clutching the bucking grate like a cowgirl, the train
breeze punches her dreadlocks horizontally and she whoops ‘Yahoo!’ She leans back and unbuttons and strips off
her blouse and bra with the free hand, and waves them high at the boatload. The
rafters hoot approval for a quarter-mile before ebbing.
Satisfied, she
dresses and brushes by me on the catwalk to the ladder with, ‘It must have been
the excitement of the locomotives and the first ride.’ We descend to the platform and to Wiz
engrossed in electronics without knowing the better.
The region flattens
in the hot part of the day, and a Zen quality clutches the slowest train on
earth. Freight hopping ultimately becomes sitting on a large vibrating rock and
living inside one’s self. We’re grateful
for the hopper shade and each makes the best of his passing hours. Wiz declares he’s out of Internet range,
Clown reads, an opportunist dragonfly pinches insects on the wing in our car draft,
and I catnap. Several hours later, the
countryside turns agricultural checkerboard green and brown, with lofty red
barns.
There’s an old hobo
depiction where a slow freight stops at every house except when it comes to a
two-family house it stops twice. That’s
probably exaggeration, but I’ve seen tramps climb off milk-run drags like this
one to pick oranges in an orchard, rob vegetable from gardens, ‘gooseberry
pick’ (clothes from lines), and catch trackside pigeons for supper- and board
in time.
We side off the main
yet again for a double-stack hotshot to race by to