easter 2016

"Something hidden, Go and find it. Go and look behind the ranges, Something lost behind the ranges. Lost and waiting for you. Go."  --- R. Kipling 

 

April first. 5am. Everything is set.
I roll out of bed put on my boots grab some water.. my pack, my wallet, my jacket.
5:05, ignition. Break.. sunglasses.
The drive will be long, but first the sunrise. When the sun hits, I tell myself, you can forget everything, you are gone.

'You're going to have to feed those chickens before they let you'
'No the fence right'
'Well sure, but those chickens sure gonna miss you'
'I'm gonna miss that fence'
'..5am, huh?'
'Ja mon'
'All the way to Madison.. You need a little to-go breakfast? Let me get Jen... Yeah that's too early for me, else I'd be up.. You know.'
'Sure. Well trucks only five feet. I can manage that much easy'
'Night then, bruv. Keep in touch'

The high desert is a blue lagoon and the hispanic station is polishing off comedy hour. The highway so empty in the emptied dunes it's like a painting. Emptied like a laugh, and me sinking deep down into it with my right foot. I slap myself alive every few minutes for emphasis. Say please, baby. Now call me coffee.. Coffee.. Soon..
Dawn approaches green and thin just on the rise and I descend the last climb into the familiar patchwork valley, phantom rays of daylight straying over the hills before I reach the bottom of the grade. The I-90 snakes away from out the cobalt distance in the north, west to eastward. I take the onramp and throw in the first cd of the day for the drive ahead and for the coming journey, blaring through the gorge and then Spokane and further, through the jingle jangle morning for new york ..and for the tangerine dream submarine mr tambourine man lying long and loud in those colossal cotton eves.

Two hours of steep windy north Idaho interstate, and then a sharp exit off again out of the mountains and into flathead country... empty. Like a laugh. From there a couple of hours north by the lake through Kalispel and over the woods to grandmothers house look at those fucking mountains to grandmothers house to the river just look at those mountains I am so anxious to get there I stop only for gas every couple hundred miles, eager to start work. I managed to glance some of the drive, but for the most of it I only wonder.

Montana, Montana. Almost there. New pace new scenery, Montana. Alaska Alabama New Mexico New England, Montana. It's a new love it's a new life for me, Montana.

Pulling into a new farm always gives me nerves. Like catching out on the fly, you don't know just how it's going to play until you grab on with everything you've got and let it take you or throw you. It isn't just a new employer it's a new family, and not just work but a project and lesson all it's own. A new farm means new faces and foreign contexts, where kind gentle people will feed you and house you.. and challenge you. But I've since decided that it need not matter which way it goes. You are going to stay exactly as long as you feel like staying no matter what and that is the beauty of living belly-first. Follow the nose, trust the nose.

All quiet when I arrive. Nothing callow, nothing sketchy about the establishment but a modesty in it's demeanor. We are embedded in the tall pine forest against low hills, and I am reminded of the reality of the agreement. A family.. one with it's own struggles and handicaps.. has invited me to come and eat and live and work from their own table.

I lope up to the main house further up the lot, big and yellow, thinking maybe I'm not cut out for long drives maybe I'd better go easier on that gas because my right hip and knee are cramped as hell. Big and yellow, like the victorian down the road I used to visit in younger days with flowers at my chest and butterflies. Smoke fluming out under a little silver sheeted top-hat atop neat grey shingles... Knock knock, moneybags. First its dogs, and when the door opens a weathered, stout, grey woman greets me. Decidedly in her early sixties. A long denim skirt and purple sweater.

"Why Hello, you made it!"
"Only because I got tired of the drive?"
"Shoes off and first the rules!....Have a seat young man."

I forget her name. Good lady despite minor annoyances. Jewish. Very strong-headed. Hearty, young at heart for her age, which is a very good sign in a woman passed her prime. Certainly plenty of trouble too when push came to shove. Dinner was to be set shortly and I settled into one of the loveseats to make conversation with the daughter and son-in-law, visiting for the night, best I could. They're alright people from what I could tell, if a little too modest for my tastes as long as I'm a houseguest. But then, I was always just a house guest.

When conversation dies off -- oh, inevitability! -- my host notices that her 3 year old grand-daughter is excited to see someone new. Trying to inoculate me with her little world. Without missing a beat she asks if I would kindly read a book to her for the remaining interval before the evening meal. I'm no good with kids, but when I'm up for it or put up to it, I do try the very best I can to make them happy. I have found reading to be an easy way to clear your throat now and again against the inhumanity of long, long silences out there on the rails, and by this time am no stranger to a bit of delivery.

did the wind make her send 
wishes the far distant land

or a bed full of prayers 

To the ghost of a friend

and the train track will take 
all the wounded ones home 

please wait for the parade

fare thee well mara jane

I jump back into my truck two weeks later with a couple hundred bucks extra cash, ready to continue east. Cutting through the quick of the earliest morning, fumbling groggy and stiff out into the black slow malaise with all of my gear as quickly and quietly as possible.. It's the first time in about a year that I it is preferable to sneak off like this. When your patience is gone and it's a race on just to catch up and lick it before you lose it. I felt like they might've been on to me after confiding to brother-o-dan boy about my plans to skip off in the near future. So I went full stealth mode: No possibility of a guilt trip when you don't give them the chance. Of course they'll assume you've stolen something at first, and I never stole anything from anybody but their trust, but all the more reason then to tip toe your way out.

Again the emptied miles of road and that sense of freedom and wonder, broadening, stretching far beyond it. Again setting out into the frosty northern night with all of your belongings, money and well-lighted for a brave new world. Coasting back over those long country roads straight into the waning gibous night-dawn, into and through and beyond the plaster-paris, high-line town of Whitefish. Thinking.. now. Now, now, now begins the real trip. Now I am gone.. gone everlasting. Gone like a mountain cat, gone like howlin' wolf, like smokestack lightning. Gone like a thief in the night with a million errant jewels all my own welcoming me home to an immaculate solitude clean, clear and pure beneath their ageless articulation.

I take the 93 south to Missoula and back on the I-90 next, this time for Bozeman then Billings. No detours. The drive is gorgeous, until the Crow Reservation. Then everything opens up into a flat expanse of plain and plateau, but not without flavor, not without a cool flaxen ambiance. I hit the radio and hear that Merle Haggard has died, and they are playing all of his best and I content myself with nothing but classic country, from Wyoming to the sotas and clear to Wisconsin.

A few thousand miles of solitude will do more for a guy than any shrink, casket or capsule ever did anybody. Your senses are starved for challenge for contrast and novelty. Even in adversity, your mind absorbed your tendons and extremities devoured and blistered by the hours and all is whittled down into nothing, whittled right down into your chest where only the heart can remain unscathed. There is no better cause for this sort of silent cataclysm than the slow motion shrapnel of your own putrefaction within the "normalcy" of the age. Drugs need not have anything to do with it... let me be evidence of that. Only of the magnetic effect, the inspiration which wilderness and wind, field and stream, has always created in the heart and soul of generation on generations of young people.

Re: halloween 2014

Oklahoma.




Light. Slack-action. Jerky.. gone. Water.. still ice. Brain.. still ice.

It's late am and miles yet to land ho, still truckin along 40 miles a square gallon speed, 40-some snug tug a lug parts per million. Things have warmed up.. a balmy 40ish, and I decide it's a good time for some reading, as long as hands are operable. It's now or never. So, curled up in my bag in the three-hole canada can I've got Cormac McCarthy by the balls, finishing off the last four or five pages of a serious novel.. Bun in the oven, heaving bosom, heavy with child fixing to break water, when friendo jumps down out of thin air and I jump all the way out of my skin.

"What the fuck"

"Did you think I was a train ghost?"

"Whaddya want asshole"

"Just came back to tell you I'm gettin off up here, crew change comin up. That and I needed to warm up. That was a ball breaker ride huh. What you got there? You're reading a fuckin book?"

pj accents 'warm up' with a raised flask and offers me a nip.

"Good man. Cold enough for me. Where are we mapquest?"

"Muskogee Oklahoma, book hunt!"

That we were. And I've been to Muskogee too.. and if there's ever a next time on that here's hoping it'll be only arollin through it again.

McAlister though, is some miles south of there. And it's like night and day. Straight unsolicited generosity. Riding through exactly 2 years later, coming north, I was laying on the floor dozing off in one of the slaves and had an unexpected visit from an engineer. The train had stopped for the crew change, presumably where they all do, but my dumb ass was thinking it was signals because we still looked so far out on google and I had no idea they did thousand mile checks there then. Guy didn't notice me at first, maybe cause I had the lights dimmed, and he got the heebs when he saw me and said he was afraid I might've been a corpse, sprawled out in the corner the way I was. I apologized and he asked me where I was heading, I said McAlister and added that I had figured it'd be another few miles before the crew change. Younger looking guy with a red beard. Said to stay down and don't worry, he'd stop the train again in five minutes, with the back end at a secluded spot in town, just for me.. and to hop off when I felt the train slow. That he'd wait a few minutes to allow me to do so. I.. really didn't know what to say to that. But I knew that I was in fact going to be getting off in McAlister. I was still sort of in deliberating stages before he appeared, would've slept clear up to kansas actually.

A young woman returning to her car at a shopping center saw me walking towards mcdonalds and called me over to give me a five. And I'm certain the same thing happened to us at the same mcdonalds when I had pj. The CVS has their trash bin stacked with shit on both occasions too. Granola Bars, cookies, sports drinks.. An older dude in the parking lot there noticed my pink fingers I guess and walked all the way over to leave me with his winter driving gloves. Pigskin, lined with fur or something soft and white. I couldn't bring myself to refuse so I walked a few miles with those big things on, the size of boxing gloves, before stashing them in my bag thinkin I might pull them out again in the dark and sleet. Straight generosity, though, and I was floored by this on both occasions.

First night we lay over in one of those garages they set out all pretty and readymade for someone to come and wheel away for a few thousand, and then penny makes bank at the shops over on the east side and we go to a hotel down the road the next. Peaches and gravy.

Of course when I took the sign a cop pulled up and told me to kick rocks. Penny tells me if they hadn't given us the thumb we might've made enough to call in a couple of hookers. I tell him nothing that cheap's bangable and he says I wouldn't believe the places a 100 ever got him. I tell him he's thinking of pole dancers... and that a guy may just as well go find a shopping mall and watch all the ass running around in those places with skirts hiked up to the dimples without dropping a dime on any of it. To which he says something about the age demographic of weed dealers in small towns I won't repeat.

Next day we head back for the yard. Nothing left to do when sign-flying's illegal but find a library and hope plenty of people will see you walking in the snow, all the way back to the prairies to build a fire and cook yer dog. They load me up with 2 bags full of everything left in their hotcase at the liquorstore behind Union Pacific and I sleep in the grainery just down the track from where the southbounds stop. Leaving bright and early the next day to avoid further notice.

Texas

A coal train takes us south over the border to Denison. The plan is to hold up at the yard in Ft. Worth for a day, which is still yet another 8 hours down the rails and as far as we know we'll be departing any minute. So we’re in there waiting for the thing to pull, sharing anecdotes and picking our butts, when the door opens without warning and one of the ugliest faces I’ve ever seen in my life ducks through. He pauses a moment before a look of hostility spreads across this baby eating skud missile, asslicking axeface .. and all he says is 'ahhhhh shiiiiit'. I throw up my hands in surrender. A foggy something or other about open carry firearms in the south springing to mind at the sound of the texan's accent. We both sorry him and, unwilling to wait for whatever else he was going to say, fly out the back in a matter of seconds and off through the bushes for cover like a couple of girls with their titties hanging. Running through the brush I can hear friendo having emotional convulsions. Cursing at himself and swearing he didn't know they refueled here, something about his warrant and being broke and when we clear the thicket I see tears in those big pink and blue jewels of his and feel a little blue myself for being such a dick to him earlier in the morning and not knowing how to console the bastard.

"What do we do, bedlilly?" says pj, staring off into the distance.

"I say, uh, bedlilly tell the man to chill the fuck out and let's try and make a little money in town. It can't be that far a walk."

Denison is alright. It's got all the accessories and it's only a mile and a half up the road over the big bridge. Signs aren't welcome here either, but some lady catches us up walking through the wally lot and gives us each a ten. Heart of gold. Then pj gives me his saying he's got his paycheck finally, and I don't think anything of the gesture until it's too late: Would've been best if I'd refused the bill. Only then the score'd have been settled between us.
After completing the routine dental-clinic-Mcdonalds-Walmart-booze market circuit we make our way back to the yard and find a southward coal train sitting on the main, possibly it was the same one.

At this point.. mulling it over carefully, ruminating, I am chewing over the idea of riding another dpu with my dawg and finding the prospect unpleasant. Tensions were pretty high earlier that day on the ride from Oh Kay and in the interest of safety and perseverance of his health and mine I decide against it. I decide to pull the plug while the pulling out is still good as I watch him head off for the caboose and drain my one 24oz. So long then ol limburger, you devil.

The ride down to dfw through the night and all that blinding coal dust is warm enough to think but not enough to sleep uncovered, and when we side out for a time a ways north of it the wait is agonizingly long. I see a flashlight half a mile back near the rear, browsing buckets, and a distant muffled call registers a few times and it takes me some minutes before I realize who it is.
My mind is raw, my limbs asleep. But the morning is still a young one and dark, so I jump off with my things and sack out behind a garage in someone's backyard nearby and take a desperately needed snooze. At least we're here and if the train leaves without me odds are there'll be a bus stop around nearby, or at the very least another train siding within a day.

I hear the air hiss from somewhere deep in slumber, 2 fugitive weeks out of the west and 2 hours gone, my head like clockwork jerks out of it's coma and I jump up and roll up and boot up and pack on back to the coal with enormous effort. Just in time to drag myself up the ladder and dive into the bucket as it gently inches forward forward, forward.

I squint once back over the side to where I had been laying for anything I might've left. Sleeping bag, check. Backpack, canteen.. check. Sleeping bag, check. Boots.. on. Good. The pink sun is a blurred marble of a thing creeping up out of the daze and I hold up my two black greasy paws before it and wonder which line might be the life line.

Re: halloween 2014

Kansas City


Bright and early we roll in, and like good little tramps we abandon ship before it disappears into the steel labyrinth for another crew change. Walk isn't far to amenities this time and there is more breath for conversation. Jane says something about having respect for the rail workers and I say you can't feel personal respect for someone just because they work for your favorite company else your respect carries no weight at all. We wrestle on that and take pot shots for a mile before reaching a mavericks. There we drop in for coffee and burritos then head for the center of town only a couple miles further.


Technically, we were both penniless by this point. But I still had my oregon food stamps which got me by the beginning of every month, and he waiting on a late payment for a gig from months prior, scraping along on handouts from old women for bedlilly, scrappiest labrador in all the land.

It’s the biggest city I’ve seen since leaving seattle earlier that year and I decided then and there that all big cities must be more or less the same. The high rises and traffic and slickers and suits and ties and street talk and construction workers and crazies of all shapes and sizes and denominations. Descriptors. All concrete and nothing real.

We recharge at the library for an hour and when I'm heading out the door at the entrance there to leave I brush by a familiar looking young guy going the other way. Everybody has familiar features in one quality or another. But when I get out to the curbside and pull out a cigarette to wait on pj I watch the dude come back through the door looking like he'd seen a ghost, approaching me hesitantly.

"Don't I look familiar?" He says, pointing at his face. Not an inch short or taller than I.

"Oh.." I remember him then. The guy I roomed with at a hostel in anchorage for a couple weeks. He was a lot more haggard looking before, out of his element.

"Yeah, Cliff, I did think so.. What are you doing all the way out here?"

"I'm asking you the same thing. This is my town, I live here."

"Traveling, as they say, in some parts of the world. Ehh, Right.. lost yer email or I'd have gotten in touch.. How was Whittier then?"

"A total shit-hole, man. Tweakers, shit pay, shit food. I shouldnt've ever gone. They didn't even cover my return flight. I got robbed"

"Sorry to hear that, sounds unpleasant."

"What about North Pacific?"

"Great. 5 thousand overall. And, uh, no tweakers."

"So now you're spending it, traveling?"

"Nah, I spent it all within the month. Now I'm flat broke and riding freight, seein places for the hell of it."

"Whoa"


At this the guy gets a funny look in his eye like he's seeing more apparitions and he wants to slowly back away. Uh oh, I'm losing him already. He thinks I'm insane. Come on partner, whatchu go in yer pockets.

Says he, as if reading my mind, "I'm broke too, I've had to sell my laptop. Even worse, my girl threw me out last month and I've been on my sisters couch. Won't let me see the kids."

"That's a shame, cliff. That's really too bad. You gonna be alright?"

"Yeah. I think so, I think so.."


I didn’t expect anything from this exchange as it was. Poor guy was still a nervous wreck. Pj makes his appearance and we say so long to Cliff, “small fuckin world after all hey?” and we beat it to find le ol’ busking corner on the east side of town.

Doggies one and two make no money, and really in hindsight I don't know what he was thinking, that part of town was so dead. Even worse, I can’t find any cute girls on my solo expedition and conclude they must all be on the far side of State Line road for all the lookers we’ve got running around in this part of town — that’s none.. NONE. Guys gotta have something else to look at in his off hours from the only motherfucker there is to talk to the other 90% of the time, tramping all over the place not pussy enough between us to chew a stick of bubblegum. Of course, half the problem is travel season's long gone and all the pretty train girls and hippy sluts are wintering over in nola or california somewhere trimming weed. The other half is that our mutual patience for one another has reached a breaking point and it has rather a dampening effect on our libidos. If the near constant physical exhaustion isn't enough as it is.

That night the temperature snaps below freezing and it’s a fucking blizzard. We go from bright summer skies to full on winter overnight and after trying the NS yard first and finding nothing we decide against chicago altogether, and decide on texas instead. There is evidently a winter storm set to blast the entire midwest over the course of the next few weeks and chicago would see the thick of it.

Texas... where we can get back in touch with our feminine sides and walk around in our t-shirts and drink our jack straight without worrying about frostbite. So we hit up this wooded area near a travel stop and play boyscouts for a few days, salvaging a new camp out of all the old trash our southbound forebears had left through the years. Chairs, tarps, tents, insulation, snowboots, jackets, single gloves, ear muffs, cans of corn, pots and pans, broken umbrellas, mattresses, nudie mags, rusty knives, shovels, buckets, dog collars, panties, tampons, condoms, golf bags, baseball bats, bubblewrap, beanies, bandanas, blankets, belts, bricks, billfolds, britches, all kinds of shit. But we keep missing the southbound because the times in the book are outdated and we don't realize that it's been coming in the early mornings while we were still frozen solid.

The cold gets colder and the hunger and isolation begins to wear my partner down pretty bad. Me too, somewhat, after a number of uneventful days placidly digging through the garbage bins at the travel stop for cold pizza and breakfast sandwiches. Oh, memories and life events, how many you are. But I had also spent the previous two winters alone outside.. Completely alone... So I'm still yet at least psychologically unaffected in comparison, still trapped in the ascetic complacency of my own voluntary destitution.
Soon though there is a falling out, and I have to stow my chips for a moment and make amends. The alternative seemed too much in bad taste as things stood then. The time wasn't right for it, not by my watch. I wasn't satisfied with the situation yet and could sense a few more miles on this bastard 2 1/2 man crew and therefore intended to drag it dead into the dirt before I cut it loose, before I pulled the plug. I have to follow penny from a distance at first, him yelling threats over his shoulder with every nerve he could manage, panties in a twist because I'd neglected to mention I'd recently received a random 200 via paypal from my mother.. My bad, bro, my bad. The scene continues a mile down the road where he heads into a mcdonalds and there I pull out the mad acting skills I always forget I have and smooth things over with terrific tact.

I even cried. Real tears. Amazing...The trick is to think of something buried in your memory that dredges up legitimate grief, and then double think it into an internal narrative which manifests a belief that it is somehow directly related to the here and now, so that you are effectively reliving it. Only later I'd heard walken himself describe this method in a review, reminiscing on scenes from the old film dear hunter. He had a specific term for it that escapes me now. Boom, genius.

So that same night we've switched over to the other line, in the nearby UP departure yd, neff, and we’ve finally found a san antonio manifest that's been set out. Call-in on the cars weighs it in at t-minus 2-3 hours, well after bed-time. So we fart around for a bit, ears open for air should they slap engines on early, wandering up and down the yard tagging cars. I’m doing two three sometimes four monikers at a time - I have a whole mythos worked out by the end of the night - sometimes scrawling random lines of poetry, drawing naked women and getting dippy on 211. It’s nights like this that make it all worth it. You have everything you need. You have your train and all the time to spare before rolling out the bedding and drifting off in perfect quiet, waiting for the steel to carry you into dreamland and beyond it.

I spent 30–36 blue boned hours on that ride, nearly two days in deep freeze inside my 20 ton coffin. A primitive cryogenic sleep, hobo style. All the way out to Oklahoma. My feet and one asscheek all numb as razors deep in my bag under the unforgiving onslaught of air and metal, and every time I get out to make water I can't get ahold of the zipper because I can't feel my fingers enough to tell fist from fish. So I spend the duration shut up in my bedding like a jailbird sleeping in half lucid 6 hour stretches and intermittently jacking off to keep semi warm when there's too much wind to read or too much everything to anything else. A good deal of that time we weren't moving at all but getting flatswitched in parsons yard, Kansas... the explosions of our containers being unhooked and shot into another string thundering into our bones and the collisions of adjacent strings throughout the night. Bang. Bang... BANG. OwwwwOwwwOwww.

Laying inside that canadian grain half mummified, hungrier than shit, thoughts did not stray far from that of a burger, fries and shake... and sometimes tits. On ronald mcdonald.

Re: halloween 2014

Green River


Tolerant and generous. Riders of the overland route have passed in and out of this little old place, nestled in the great berms of a deep basin, continuously for years and I don't believe anybody's ever seen any sign of bad blood between the two communities.


The last time I passed through Green River it lay under a foot of snow and I was aiming the other direction, for salt lake. Plan was to roll over the rockies from there to Denver, and I had spent that day at the other overpass by the cafe, drowsing in the sun against the wall beneath. But later on moving down the road to wait further back and open up a little bottle of krakken I'd picked up. Time to freeze to death in peace.

I remember when the right IM arrived from the east after midnight the moon'd come out and all was peaches in krakken land, out in the snowfields, but for some reason there was something going on with my foot and I had to limp as fast as I could up the drive, over the packed sleet. Very nearly eating shit a number of times, all the way back to the dupes. The harsh cold wrecks your lungs fast in these situations, and after 10 minutes of that it was all I had left to pull myself up into the cab... Oh, wait, now I'm remembering something else... Engines were locked on that train that night, nevermind.. Almost unheard of for UP, and I wound up having to limp all the way back the other way, passing the midsection toward the front before I found a rideable well. And I found it just when the brakes aired, for the second time. That's why I remember being so exhausted and panicked. Snow on the ground, watching for headlights, trying not to slip, numb hands in the wind, strained achilles.


Yeah, that was it. The lining of my steeltoes had worn and the inner plastic was falling apart and rubbing incessantly just below the ankle. That and there was the same sort of thing going on at the toe-end in the other boot and I was having considerable pain in that foot too, off and on. Sturdy footwear is the most important thing to get right for a long trip, especially for winter months. Trouble is with boots you often don't have discomfort until it's far too late to exchange them. Only way to find out which ones are actually worth the money and which aren't is after long bouts of trial and error.



With PJ then, on the first occasion, we arrived sometime in the early evening shortly after sundown. There was a layer of snow on the ground then, too. We head first to launder our shit before the mat closes. The woman and her husband who ran the place are both there and are both a totally legit couple of human beings. While pj's in the shitter, she and I have some small talk and seeing as how I was all right in the head and polite she decides to bring me to the restaurant next door and get us both take-out, without any instigation whatsoever from either of us. I was so dumbfounded and awkward about the favor I didn't know how to be about it..


On the way back through town the nightshift clerk at family dollar brings us out clearance dog food and candy bars. And then, a stretch more down the road, there was this car full of bonnie young gals that stops up next to us in the street and they shell out a fiver each no questions asked. I guess for being so damned sexy ourselves, who knows. Blowing kisses they drive off and I feel like dancing a boogy right after them.

"Penny!" I spray, "Penny, we've gotten to be celebrities!".. "Now Penny, look here, it's been a good run but I don't know if I can take the fame anymore. It upsets my sensibilities, understand? I don't want no mo part in it, you hear me cap?" …


"PENNY PL—"

"HSHHHHH, feckin sharp! Keep it down, christ."

"Let's find some girls, dawgy"

"Don't be such a goddamn rapist and maybe we can"

"Yer the feckin pedophile"

When we finally sack out in the frost bitten air we sleep on bellies gorged with mexican food. The open sky drops cold down onto my face like I'm orbiting out in the vacuum itself, and I think back to that time I'd blacked out one christmas outside at a bus stop and woke up with my cheek planted numbly on the concrete. When your face hurts and you haven't just woken from a deep sleep, you know that it's coming soon. No two ways about that, so long as you're bundled up anyway.




Cheyenne


The plan next day is to grab a denver bound train by my suggestion. And when something that looks an awful lot like it comes in we haven't waited more than an hour and we are enthusiastic, denver it is then! all aboard for denver. I don't know whether the train has been rerouted or the ID itself has a twin, but it was not our train in any case and we found ourselves rolling into cheyanne 24 hours later.

There is a huge delay, hours of mystery waiting on one lone track somewhere in the nowhere between Laramie and Cheyanne. The dawg's mut pissed in their miniwell and he moves back to the dupes at some point, and when I get out to stretch myself for the last time and see him flagging me down from 20 fifties or so back I'm surprised I even notice his little arms waving all that way down at the corner of my eye. Turning towards him squarely I flip him off with both hands high and hard and I scream a big triumphant 'fuck you', and laugh as he throws an arm at me in the 'up yours, then' fashion. All this quiet with nothing to do and I'm starting to feel like a mongrel myself I'm so backed up. It's been weeks since I got freaky with myself, I've been too busy being down and out to get any action or remember to pretend I'm getting some now and then. Hoping PJ doesn't take my middle fingers to heart I grab my shit and mosey on down to the pussy caboose. We don't know why we are waiting so long yet, and 6 hours is cause for concern. PJ switches on the radio and punches in the road frequencies and soon we are able to gain some bearings as we follow the intermittent conversations held between dispatch and crew. The conductors have to stop all the time, for no special reason in places, and I was only just learning this then. But did not feel in any rush about it anyway and welcomed the extra downtime. Mapping out other things and plans unrelated when there was quiet, and remembering people and places I'd been when there wasn't.

Cheyenne.. state capital. For one day it is like any other small town. The market, the bookstore, the world-thirsty locals and their dull conversation, the colorful homebums at the mission, the library. But it's also got an all-pervading old-town look to it. Like any old town anywhere, but without the skyscrapers towering up around it. Like it started out kinda big but never got any bigger, never developed beyond that. We hold one last sidelong conference for denver, reminding ourselves that speer yd is at least 10 miles out, and just like that we are on a couple of grainers in the twilight again, rolling for nebraska.

North Platte

8 hours later, four or five in the am. We set up to bail at the first clearance light, the yd itself not being a friendly one, so big and chaotic... And it's 10 miles to town from there. I've got thoughts on the brain all night long this time, on the ride over, and didn't sleep hardly but an hour. So on the march into town I witness all the nuances and shades of approaching dawn overhead, time-lapsed in half a step to the rhythm of my right foot and I see stars where there are none and hear birds where there are none and see flashes of light where there probably weren't any either on this delirious nonstop 3 hour death waltz for mcdonalds.

The rest of the morning I get pretty grouchy and try not to make any hard remarks but inevitably make a few and the dawg gets butthurdt. Can't be helped.. Im a dick when I don't get my rest. Crazy, too. But its my own fault if I didn't sleep and the dawg doesn't deserve my sour smells. For whatever reason PJ decides not to spange and we don't make any bills either sitting at the walmart and after a quick bite to eat we do the skeleton dance all over again back to the yard.

There was this woman in her 30's somewhere on the way there and she looks like Jennifer Connelly. I am haunted by this woman everywhere I go. Women that look just like her, and we always notice eachother. Always locking eyes. Always smiling. Gazing from behind a microphone, pregnant at the intersection, braving the downpoor in a strange new city.. I've no idea what it is or why they always look so distinctively similar. But here she was again. This woman sees us poking around a neighboring church for an outlet to shave my head with after finding a free box on a car port with a pair of old clippers in it. She invites us over to her lawn, baby on a hip, and offers us water. We explain what we're doing and she laughs and disappears into the house. A couple minutes later shes back with an extension cord trailing behind her, baby on the hip, "I'd forgot where I'd left it" she explains, and pj sets to work on my skull. But the cut takes longer than it should because the clippers might as well be made out of plastic they're so dull. As to be expected. Jennifer notices and brings out her own clippers, laughing. "That'll never do, please just use mine".

The whole time I'm kind of bewitched. As I am every time I see her. My throat thickened and my veins opened but when the work was done and it was time to go I couldn't for the life of me think of what to say or how to say it other than a nod and thanks. But goddamn if I didn't want to just get down with you right there on your lawn and bury my face in you. In front of your kids, in front of my dawg, in front of everyone in the world I wouldn't've noticed. Did I know you from somewhere? But it doesn't make any difference does it.


"Jane"

"Yessm"

"That woman's single"

"With kids"

"I still wanna marry her"

"Why dontcha then, hot shot"

"She's way out of my league, Jane. Still just a boy to her"

"Some other time then, huh"

"Maybe"

We have a ball the next few hours finding the outbound tracks in the biggest departure yard of the us of a… It's a wonder we didn't have any cops show up on the spot since it was cuffs for Ron after they'd spotted him from a camera right around the west bridge once, before his head injury I think, running like hell into the yard. Some said it was because he was running like he'd stolen something. But it was chaotic all the same for us jumping all those strings and hiding from all the workers in broad daylight, with extra scrotums full of groceries hangin haphazard like off our shoulders. At one point we scramble up into a full sized gondola, containers banging and flat switching all around, Jane handing over the pooch from atop the knuckle itself gets his grocery bag hung up on something and damn near slips down between when another truck came rumbling passed. Fuck!

"this bag you gave me is bad luck"

"oh?"

He jumps in to safety and immediately starts emptying his shopping bag into the remainder of his pack, "It's baaad fuckin ju ju, man. Imma leave it here, unless you want it".

"If it's bad luck for you it might not be a whole lot better for me, friend. Better leave it then."

Grainers again for us, and we barely have time to make a run for it as the fred is coming up just about as soon as we spot the damn thing, through the holes in the lip of our gondola, some 15-20 tracks over. But it's a clear shot and we catch it running full sail, each dragging himself up into his V porch, breathless, and he w/ his dog.

How in all the lands of shit scum and cuss he carries on like that, dragging the pooch along in tight situations week after week, I wouldn't even want to try. Holy smokes, batman. Don't know how much I invest in luck personally, but neither do I suppose I would if I lived that way myself, day in day out, batshit like a bat out of hell. So here it is, or there it was another dusk, settling in over us and it's curtains and we're off on another night train, and sleep I did. Slept hard. 10 hours to Missouri. And 10 days out of the west.