Hobo

Book by Cotton Eddy Joe

“A hobo works and wanders, a tramp dreams and wanders, and a bum drinks and wanders.”—BEN L. REITMAN

“Bums loafs and sits. Tramps loafs and walks. But a hobo moves and works, and he’s clean.” —WORDS OF AN “EXPERIENCED HOBO” FROM THE BOOK AMERICAN TRAMP AND UNDERWORLD SLANG by Irwin Godfrey

If a man says he’s a hobo—don’t believe him
If a man says he’s a tramp—believe him
Because every man is a tramp

Waiting on a Train

I looked like Rudolph—my nose was red and hard from the cold. Alabama (the tramp who taught me trains) and me were in Wyoming and there were icicles hanging on the trees. The Burlington Northern railroad tracks sat on a hill of rock—quiet—except for the whisper of an autumn gale that had frozen them solid. I could have tapped those tracks with a hammer and shattered them like glass. In that silence between trains you can hear your toes wiggle in your boots. I had gone a thousand miles on one pair of socks. There was a turkey vulture up in the air, looking for ghosts. On the hills where the tracks disappeared a cold rain fell like needles and the hidden sun glowed silver through the broken clouds. I lay back on my bedroll and closed my eyes.

The luck of the tramp changes as the whistle blows. Under his wool poncho, beneath his metal flask, his heart leaps like a jackrabbit. Out of his sleeping bear slumber a tramp comes running with a bedroll on his shoulder. He is a joker in the deck, this little man with a bandanna around his neck, a trucker hat on his head, and a hole in his boot. I took off running.

I caught up with Alabama. He had his hand on the grab iron of a freight car and his boots were skipping along the gravel. He climbed up the ladder and wrestled himself onto the platform. I grabbed the ladder and it froze my fingers stiff. I ran along like that, my hand frozen to the ladder, until I got my other hand on it, and when I did the train lifted me off the ground—like an angel. I climbed up the ladder and hopped onto the platform. I stuck my head out into the air. The cold wind pushed my hair back. And there I was, steady rolling with icicles hanging on the trees, just like Robert Johnson, the blues singer, sang about. I’d never hopped a freight before, but goddamn it if it wasn’t exactly what God had intended for me. It reminded me of barreling down the highway in my dad’s truck—looking out the window—daydreaming—counting mile markers—crossing state lines like they were telephone poles. Back then is when I first got it, “the fever”—white line fever, as truckers call it. And I’ve never been the same since.

Black diesel billowed up from the head end of the train. There were four monster locomotives up there, pulling boxcars like sled dogs and coughing smoke out of their big diesel smokestacks. The bark of those diesel engines held the cry of a million pistons and cracked the silence in the Wyoming prairie apart. A light snow fell on the back end of the train, where the black oil rigs, flatcars, hoppers, and refrigerator cars wobbled over the rails like crippled old men. The only other sounds—a cricket grinding her legs, the lonely sputter of a grasshopper hopping, and the silence of dust settling—quiet as death. Above the fire pit we had just abandoned, I could see the ash of a few smoldering branches.

Alabama said the car we were on was called a grainer because it hauled grain. On the side of the grainer right above the words ace center flow (the name of the freight car) was a hobo tag drawn in white chalk. It was a little sketch of a palm tree with a Mexican hobo hunched down underneath it. He was wearing a poncho and a sombrero, and beneath the palm tree, the hobo who doodled it had written his moniker—Herby. I went on to see that tag in four trains in four states in four weeks.

After ten hours on that train, the clatter of the crooked rails and thunder of the slack action had become so intense that I couldn’t hear myself think. The damn western sun was stabbing my eyeballs and the pants I had bought for work were starting to stink like manure—good old farm cow shit. I cringed under the brim of my hat and watched my shadow creep slow across the grainer’s wall. We were sitting right above the wheels. When the brakes clamped down on them, the brake pads tore steel right off the top—the metallic flakes sparkled in the sunlight. I rolled up in my poncho, lay down on the floor of the car, and watched rusty paint flakes dance in the corner. I daydreamed of carefree America: casino coffee, fucking under white motel sheets, showers with soap, and shingled roofs. I knew that when those foothills ate the sun our boxcar would freeze solid again, and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it.

Riding freight is like riding in the back of a pickup truck down a washboard dirt road in Mexico while smoking two hundred Camel straights and eating fifty hard-boiled eggs like Cool Hand Luke. Most of all it feels like getting the piss kicked out of you in a stone-dark dungeon. I had black hands, and when I scratched my eyes it made me look like a raccoon. But deep down I didn’t care much, because I was too busy dreaming about all the tramping in the woods I was going to do—all the burning twigs with wooden matches, dipping my nose in cold Rocky Mountain river water and wearing a fur coat like a kid coyote in the moonlight. It warmed my heart to think about all the dirt I would have to eat and all the pretty ladies I would have to serenade—just to get a kiss and a meal. All on my little journey tramping across the country. I sat up, leaned my back against the grainer wall, and watched the sunset.
From the Hardcover edition.