I’ve generally liked the Lucius Shepard stories I’ve read in Gardner Dozois’ Year’s Best collections. Some of them I’ve really liked. So when I saw a Shepard book in the piles at the Friends of the Seattle Public Library semi-annual book sale, I grabbed it.
Technically, this is a literary collection. The book starts with a non-fiction piece expanded from a story Shepard wrote for Spin magazine about hobos. Yup, actual train riding hobos. I didn’t realize people still did this, but they do. There was a kerfuffle about a hobo gang that was murdering hundreds of people, and Spin asked Shepard to investigate. I’m surprised I missed this, because the primary purveyor of the hobo gang story was a Spokane Washington detective, and I lived in the area at the time the story came out (1998), but I missed it.
For some time, Shepard rode the rails seeking to talk to members of the Freight Train Riders of America (F.T.R.A.), the gang involved in the murderous rampage. Only it turns out, of course, that the gang is mostly homeless drunks. While they do get violent sometimes, they aren’t exactly the scourge they’d been portrayed as on Americas Most Wanted and other shows.
Shepard gets philosophical about the train tramp life. Hard and short-lived in many cases, but he asserts it has many charms:
Freight routes cover portions of the country never seen by anyone apart from those who ride the trains, and there are places of great beauty that will be forgotten. With no one to look at them, even if only through drunken and corrupted eyes, it will be as if parts of our map have vanished, in a very real sense restoring that map to something resembling the unfinished depiction of the continent that was deemed accurate more than a century ago.
After Shepard’s non-fiction piece, the book includes two short stories. The first, Over Yonder
fits in very well with my impressions of Shepard’s Year’s Best stories. A hobo named Billy Long Gone (because his real name is just too prissy to tell others) catches a train out of Oregon that takes him to a magical place called Yonder. Magical, but not wonderful. Downright stupifying, in fact. Residents lose all their cares, which is not a good thing. Billy Long Gone is one of the few who retains any hopes at all, and his is to cross a distant mountain range, where rumor has it monsters abound and a fabled city exists. Very enjoyable story, though I didn’t understand the ending much at all.
The second short story was of a non-fantastic variety. Jailbait
tells a story of a romance in the railyards between Madcat and Grace. Grace is new to the hobo life. She’s a gutter punk, runaway from home and sees riding the rails as a romantic step up from life on the Ave (or Spokane’s equivalent). Madcat is a cynical type who couldn’t care less about Grace (or anything), but avails himself of Grace’s body which Grace uses in her own cynical way. Mutual symbiosis in the face of extreme violence. But it turns out really not to be as cynical as it could be.
Title: Two Trains Running
Author: Lucius Shepard
Cover creator: John Picacio
Imprint / publisher: Golden Gryphon Press
Format: Hardcover
Length: 112 p.
Publication date: 2004
ISBN-10: 1-930846-23-1
