Kevin Kling's Holiday Inn (13 page)

The guy now says he wants to stay with us. Bob says that would be unwise and advises the guy to try and catch up to his pal. Bob says he thinks everything will turn out fine.

The guy says, “You think so?”

Bob is sure of it.

I have a few stories that could shake his trust in Bob, but I keep them to myself.

Bob says, “Now go.”

The guy thanks Bob and starts over the hill.

I stay awake that night clutching that stick, Bob sleeping like a baby. There are few things worse than a hippie gone bad.

We get to Havre, Montana, and we’re immediately met by the yard bull. A yard bull is the cop hired by the town to make sure nothing happens in the freight yard. That means nothing. Conductors don’t want you on the train and the yard bulls don’t want you getting off. Whatever you were before you got on the train, you are now riffraff. Yard bulls hate problems of any kind and unauthorized people of any kind. Yard bulls can kill you and sometimes they do. This yard bull holds what looks like a wheelbarrow handle without the wheelbarrow. He says he’s had it with all these hippies coming through for the Rainbow Gathering. A professional hobo is one thing, but these goofballs getting killed for being stupid makes a place look bad.

He says, “You two weren’t thinking on staying here.”

We say, “No, we weren’t.”

He says, “That’s good.”

We say, “We’ll be going as soon as the train pulls out.”

“No,” he says, “you’ll be going sooner than that.”

We gather all of our gear and the cardboard and walk toward the next town, fifteen miles away. Our train passes us some minutes later. We enter the hobo jungle and wait for the next train. Something made of rubber is burning, for warmth. We meet a very old man, actual years somewhere between forty to eighty, smoking a pipe. This guy could kill the “guess your age” guy at the state fair. The quite-possibly-old man is very interested in us. Where you from, where you going, do you have a house, what’s your shoe size, what are you doing for Memorial Day? It’s uncomfortable.

When a train finally arrives Bob says, “We’re taking it.” I agree.

But the next train is all flatbeds, no boxcars.

“Ooohhhh,” the Q.P.O. man says, “you’re stuck here for the night.” He giggles. Giggles in a pitch not heard since the junior high locker room.

Bob says, “No, we’re taking it.”

“This train goes over the mountains,” says the man. “You can’t go over the mountains on a flatbed. You’ll … ” and he takes his pipe and starts bouncing it on a box. He bounces it to the edge of the box and then … off. Then he giggles.

Bob says, “We can make it.” I’m with Bob. I’m not staying in that jungle.

We find some tie-downs used for keeping freight secured.

We lie on the flatbed. Bob puts the cardboard under us. “Told you you’d thank me later.”

“I really wasn’t thinking about thanking you, Bob.” We set up the ties, one over our chests, the other over our legs.

The old hobo tightens the strap over our chests, then slaps the side of the car like the rear end of a horse. “All set, but I tell you …” He takes his pipe out again and, in front of his strapped-in audience, bounces it on the flatbed … to the edge … and … giggle. The train pulls out of the yard. The man waves a final goodbye. I’m still certain of our decision. Just ahead are the Rocky Mountains. The train builds speed. “Here we go,” says Bob.

I’ve never been so scared in my life, but the rhythm of the rails begins and in under ten minutes I am lulled to sleep.

The train tunnel outside of Seattle is famous. It goes straight through the middle of a mountain, and Bob warns me that it will test me: “You will learn to be patient.”

I quickly say, “I know, I know.”

We enter the tunnel and it gets dark, then smells of diesel.

I put a towel over my mouth, trying to suck oxygen through the towel. I sing “Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall.” When I get to no bottles of beer on the wall, I reload. Twice through and down to forty-five bottles before I see daylight. I look at Bob and hope I don’t look like that, but I bet I do. I throw that towel away. I’ll throw everything else I’m wearing away later.

But we’ve made it. Guys from jungles outside of Seattle wave, welcoming us to the land of milk and honey.

We’ve made it.

We have our seafood dinner at Ivar’s, and Bob agrees it’s the best seafood ever. I think we could’ve eaten the box it came in and been in heaven.

Bob gets a job in a tuna factory in Alaska and hops a ferry out of Seattle. He says we’ll meet up back in Minneapolis at the end of the summer. He says I know enough about the rails now, and he’s right. Even though I’ll miss him, I do feel confident.

Once I get past that tunnel I’ll be fine.

I’m all geared up and ready to sing twice through and down to forty-five bottles of beer on the wall, towel over my mouth … but I hit twenty-three bottles the first time through, and it’s daylight already. On the way out of Seattle, you go downhill.

I’m going through Montana. Havre is just ahead and I’m sweating running into that yard bull again. The train is moving at a crawl because the train in front of the train I’m on has derailed. I look at the wreckage, boxcars crushed like beer cans. These boxcars are made of heavy gauge steel, and it seems impossible you could get crushed in one. Then you see a derailment and the fragility of life comes at you full face. Bob warned me to take cars near the front or rear of the train if possible. The middle cars not only give a much bumpier ride, they also get crushed in a derailment. He was right.

Suddenly a head pops into the lower corner of the doorway. It says its name is Ed, and can he come aboard. Boxcar etiquette. I say, “Of course.”

Ed says he was on that derailment, second one of his life, the first was back in 1957.

“I’m generally not a drinking man, but I got off that train and went to the nearest liquor store.” He drinks from a pint bottle and offers me some.

Ed has two teeth in his head, one just above the other. They look like goners, but he won’t have them pulled, because “I like my steak.”

The whole time I travel with Ed he cooks. We eat like kings. Full breakfasts. Dinners. He has learned every dumpster in the state and knows when everything is thrown away. Doughnuts for breakfast. Salads for lunch. Soups and stews at night.

Ed has a small bag, about the size of one of my mother’s purses, with everything he owns in it. A hatchet is strapped to the top “for self-defense.” Ed gives me a look that says, “I like you, but don’t try anything.”

One day we’re passing through a freight yard. Ed says, “Gonna be a recession.”

I say, “What?’

He says, “Look at them cigarette butts. Last time they were smoked down that far we had a recession.” Sure enough, three months later, I’m back in Minneapolis, boom, we have a recession. Hobo economics.

Another day we see an eagle flying overhead. Ed says, “There is an inner spirit and an outer spirit in us all, the spirit as the world sees us and the way we see ourselves. That’s why people judge us on what we can’t do, instead of what we can do. They see us in terms of our limitations. But our inner spirit knows different.”

I think, “Dang, man, there’s more to this guy than meets the eye,” then I think, “Wait a minute, that’s what he just said.”

He says he has a brother in Minneapolis, and I should look him up if I have time. Tell him Ed is fine. He never gives me his brother’s name.

I say, “Don’t you want to live in a house, Ed? Sure seems like you could.”

“Oh,” he says, “I gave it a try once in the fifties, but I kept getting antsy.”

Later, he confided, “I did fall in love, once. But it never worked. Never could. Somebody has to love you, they have to love you morally, spiritually, and physically. Best I ever did was two outta three. So I hopped the freights and been here ever since, where I know how I fit in my world.”

Before we part ways, Ed gives me a name of a man written on a scrap of paper. Along with the name come social security and union cards and other IDs. I say, “Won’t this guy miss this stuff?”

“No,” Ed says quietly, “no, he won’t miss it.”

Then I remember something Ed said earlier, when I’d asked if he ever worried about dying out here on the rails: “Nobody dies on the rails. Ever.”

Ed was giving me another persona, a means to money or food stamps, a safety net. This was one of the most precious gifts I ever received. “Say hi to my brother for me.” And the next morning he was gone.

I still think of Ed on bitter cold nights. He told me he winters in the Fargo freight yards. It’s thirty below and he’s in a box. Wouldn’t have it any other way. He said he was rich. I imagine he was. But I bet whatever he had sat just below that hatchet.

When I got off the boxcar for the last time in the St. Paul freight yards I cried. Not because I was hungry or broke or filthy or tired, but because it was over. I knew it was over and I would never return to the rails. I’m not of that stuff.

I would find someone to love me, someone I could love—morally, spiritually, and physically—and try to figure out how I fit in this world.

MOTHER’S DAY  

The Celtic scholar John O’Donohue says that because humans were originally formed out of clay, we naturally take on the characteristics of the earth that was used to create us. Its terrain determines our personalities. Are you from a craggy cliff or peaceful meadow?

O’Donohue also claims we have an inner as well as an outer landscape. Often they are close in nature, but at times the two terrains couldn’t be more diverse. When someone thinks they know me, they are surprised when subjected to hidden drop-offs, gorges, deep pools, quicksand—to my shifting topography.

My mom is not one of these people. When I was growing up, she was way ahead of my inner and outer landscapes. I tried to use my disability as an advantage, to gain favor through “pathos and pity,” but she never bought into it. I often wondered why my mom, of all people, couldn’t see what others clearly saw. With others, I could get my brother in trouble in a heartbeat by saying, “Owwww,” then holding my arm and simply looking at him with a wounded expression. Adults especially came down hard on him. But not my mom. “Nice try,” she said.

Mom’s treatment would pay off later in grade school. If I was shunned, it really didn’t get to me. I knew I was essentially the same as everyone else. There were things the other kids could do that I couldn’t do, the monkey bars for instance, as there were things I could do that they couldn’t, a spectacularly disturbing lip-curl trick. But as far as these being criteria for a subjective rating of worthiness … no, it never flew. My dad traveled a lot for business, so much of the raising of my brother and sister and me fell upon Mom. This was a role her outer landscape was well suited to—she looked the perfect young, attractive housewife—but her inner landscape was not. Her interior was designed for a less cultivated crop.

Mom tried all the established artistic outlets for the seventies. Every time a craze hit, she was on it: decoupage, collage, fondue, Barbra Streisand. One day she found an advertisement in the
TV Guide
for an artist’s colony you could join from home. The ad said in bold letters, “You Might Already Have Talent!” and then gave you the option of reproducing drawings of Tippy the Turtle, Pete the Pirate, or a split-level condominium. An instructor from the school would then evaluate your rendering and determine if you did, in fact, already have talent. He spotted Mom’s, and soon the basement smelled of paint and linseed oil.

When my parents divorced, my mom had a sudden and drastic shift. She would need to make a living. Both her mother and father had worked. Grandmother was in banking, the only woman in her business school at the time, and Grandfather was a county treasurer. Drawing on her pragmatic Scots ancestry, Mom decided to become a court reporter. She enrolled in community college and started taking courses to learn the basic requirements. But one day she sat us down and said, “Boys,”—my sister was by now in college—“Boys, I don’t know what this will mean, but I want to become an artist.” I think she thought this proclamation would be met with, “No! An artist? Are you insane? We forbid it. Think of the children, your future, what will people say?” But in truth we didn’t understand, or care, what it would mean; we wanted Mom to be happy. We knew if we had approached her with the news that we wanted to be artists, which I did years later, there was no doubt she would have been all for it. Both my brother and I said, “Okay,” and went back to the TV.

Mom took courses in photography, sculpture, graphic design. Left unsupervised, my brother and I would explore our own artistic avenues, mine in theater and his in the form of taxidermy. When I went to the refrigerator for a snack, I found one half of it filled with feathers and eyes, claws, teeth, and hooves, and the other half with dyes and fiber concoctions. I knew there was food in there somewhere, but I really didn’t want to reach in and find out. My kingdom for a potpie.

Mom began bringing her friends home, bohemian types, hippies and flower children. Some smoked pot and tried to convince me that littering was bad. A few were radical idealists, passionate and angry and ready to bring down The Man, after another helping of pot roast. Mom flourished, happier than I had ever known her, even though finances were always a bit iffy. Somehow she kept earning a living working in dress shops, silkscreen stores, making rock-and-roll T-shirts. She taught a college class while she was still in college, sitting at the dining room table at night, reading each chapter just ahead of her students.