Date: Mon, 7 Aug 2006 16:53:06 -0400
From: carl_mason@comcast.net
Subject: HOBO TEEN - 7

HOBO TEEN - 7

Copyright 2006 by Carl Mason

All rights reserved.  Other than downloading one copy for strictly personal
enjoyment, no part of this story may be reproduced or transmitted in any
form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, except for reviews, without
the written permission of the author.  However based on real events and
places, "Hobo Teen" is strictly fictional.  Any resemblance to actual
events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.  As
in real life, however, the sexual themes unfold gradually.  Comments on the
story are appreciated and may be addressed to the author at
carl_mason@comcast.net

This story contains descriptions of sexual contact between males, both
adults and teenagers.  As such, it is homoerotic fiction designed for the
personal enjoyment of legal, hopefully mature, adults.  If you are not of
legal age to read such material, if those in power and/or those whom you
trust treat it as illegal, or if it would create unresolvable moral
dilemmas in your life, please leave.  Finally, remember that maturity
generally demands safe sex.

This story is highly indebted for its inspiration and many of its details
to the book Riding the Rails; Teenagers on the Move During the Great
Depression by Errol Lincoln Uys.  New York: Routledge, 2003, and the
award-winning documentary film by Michael Uys and Lexy Lovell, Riding the
Rails, produced by WGBH Educational Foundation, Boston, 2005.


CHAPTER 7

(Revisiting Chapter 6)

Dragon Jack's "Express" rolled into Charleston at around 11:00 o'clock the
next morning.  Jack dropped them off near a small hobo jungle, a jungle
whose population was swollen because the strawberry harvest in the area was
well underway.  The long trip from Albany had been fun - and, God knows,
they had made good friends.  Even though Jack shared a few bucks with them,
they were, however, nearly broke and more than ready to assume their role
as "harvest tramps."

(Continuing Our Story - Strawberry Shortcake)

Pushing their way through a swirling mass of humanity at the morning
shape-up, Cy snarled to Cali, "I can't believe this, bro!  There's gotta be
hundreds of people here; some have been here for a month.  How are we going
to get a job?"  Cali just grunted and continued pushing his way towards the
trucks where the farm bosses were already selecting workers.

About a half hour later, as the truck in which they were standing bumped
along a dusty road towards the farm, the Gloucester teen looked at his
buddy in disbelief.  "Have you figured out what just happened, Cali?"  The
diminutive blond simply shook his shaggy mop of hair, used his right hand
to scratch his right pit, and broke into series of grunts and screeches
that ended with a flurry of wild chest thumping.  As others workers began
to look at him (very) suspiciously, Cy laughed and snorted, "Thank you,
Kong!"

Trying to be heard over the noisy truck motor, the boy returned to
human-speak, yelling, "I hate to tell you, boss, but I think I've seen this
before.  We're fresh and we're young and we look that way.  We don't have a
family pulling at us and slowing up down.  We're new, so we're less likely
to scream at the lower piecework rate they announced this morning.  These
bozos aren't interested in much beyond getting the work done as well, as
cheaply, and with as few hassles as possible. As long as the bosses saw us,
we had a good chance of being selected from the git-go."  "Maybe so," Cy
responded as the truck pulled into the farm lot.

As the other workers moved into the immense field after grabbing small
wheelbarrows and a supply of boxes, a supervisor (who walked with much the
same strut as a railroad bull) came up to the boys.  "Ok, you guys, I'm
going to tell you what to do and how to do it.  Follow the drill and you'll
make money.  Screw up and you're fired.  It's that simple."  For the next
fifteen minutes, they got the word on how to pick and pack the right
berries without bruising them and how to tend the plants as they moved
along.  They could either take short morning, noon, and afternoon breaks
during the ten-hour shift or eat and drink on the run. "Watch for a few
minutes and then get to work.  You don't make money standing around," he
concluded.

The field looked like nothing other than an industrious anthill.  Obviously
under great pressure, the workers moved down the furrows pushing the
wheelbarrows, paused, bent over, brushed away leaves to their left and
right, picked berries, placed them in boxes, checked the plants, and moved
on, all in one fluid motion. Once their boxes were filled, they rushed to
have them tallied at the end of the field, rushed back, and began the
process again.

Cy quickly discovered several things about strawberries...and his own body.
Strawberry plants are four or five inches high and grow in beds eight to
twelve inches high. You have to bend at the waist to pick the fruit, which
explains why the job is so difficult.  Within an hour, the fifteen (nearly
sixteen) year-old had a stiff back.  He now understood the 'bos who had
told him the night before that bending that way for ten to twelve hours a
day, weeks at a time, could cause excruciating pain and lifelong
disabilities.

The boys worked their asses off - and it went pretty well for the first
day.  Three of their boxes were rejected the first time they took them in
for inspection and credit, and one the second time.  After that, all of
their work was accepted.  They had to stop for a few minutes when a boy
came around with a tank of cool water strapped to his back.  In agony at
noon, they had to stand propped up against each other as they ate a meager
lunch brought around by other small children.  After deductions for lunch
(25 cents each) and "water service" (5 cents each), they found at the end
of the day that Cali had earned 95 cents, whereas Cy had earned all of a
dollar five!

Back in the jungle, covered in grime and sweat, they could do no more than
collapse, though Cali did recover enough to give the Gloucester teen a
short massage before they turned in.  There was no point in taking part in
the shape-up the second day, for they were completely wiped out and would
never have been hired.  They did buy 50 cents worth of scraps for the
mulligan and chop some firewood, but little more.  That week, they managed
to get three more days of work, each earning around a dollar a day.  Then a
rumor hit the camp that men were earning good money harvesting hay in
eastern Colorado.  Having had quite enough of strawberries, the boys
decided to catch out the next morning.  They had a total of less than eight
dollars in their pockets.

Cy "celebrated" his sixteenth birthday in the Charleston jungle.  After the
boys had returned from the fields, Cali left for a few minutes, returning
with his birthday present.  He had talked an old buzzard into baking a
shortcake and covering it with strawberries and whipped cream.  Everyone
around them seemed to think it was great.  (At least, every crumb
disappeared!)  Cy?  To tell the truth, he had a little trouble getting it
down.

(A Real Arkansas Welcome)

Following the advice of the 'bos, Cy and Cali were able to avoid the short
distance local trains and catch out on a red ball or fast freight.  Looking
outside the boxcar, however, they were already shaken.  There had to be 300
hoboes on that long train!  The gondolas were full; the boxcars seemed
loaded...both inside and on the roofs; there were even 'bos clinging to the
flatcars!  It was pretty obvious that not all of these men would be able to
get work.

The atmosphere in their boxcar also contributed to Cy's feeling of
uneasiness.  The car held a goodly number of 'bos of all ages and
conditions - but there was something of a strained silence.  The youngest
teens, in particular, were clustered together, casting nervous glances
around the car.  "What's happening, Cali?" the curly-haired one asked.
"W-e-l-l," his blond sidekick drawled, "my guess is that there are one or
two wolves in this car.  The young'uns smell 'em and that's why they're
huddled.  They shouldn't be worried.  Here in broad daylight, nothing's
going to happen to them.  The other 'bos wouldn't stand for it.  Tonight,
however, they'd be smart to stick together and keep one eye open.  There
might even be a jackroller who'd like to get his hands on whatever the kids
made in the strawberry fields.  As you know from personal experience,
they're not gentle, and they seem to be most active at nighttime."  Cy
muttered, "Happy days are here again," and resumed trying to get
comfortable on the rough planking.

All went well across the Southeast.  In fact, they were across the
Mississippi and into the northeastern corner of Arkansas before they
encountered the slightest difficulty.  It was probably outside Blytheville
that the train stopped for water.  Cy was never sure, for he had been sound
asleep.  He awakened to yelling that was going on up and down the length of
the stopped train.  Cy and a sleepy Cali crept over to the door and peered
out.  By the light of lanterns and torches, at least fifty railroad bulls
and local police armed with nightsticks and guns were rousting the 'bos
from the train, car by car.  After cutting over 100 men out of the herd,
the rest were allowed to reboard the train - and were warned never to show
their faces again in those parts.

After the freight departed, the captive 'bos were quickly transported to a
nearby town by truck and forced into a rough stockade made of wood and
barbed wire.  In the morning, they were taken before the county judge and
charged with trespassing on railroad property, vagrancy, and threatening
the public welfare.  Without further ado, they were declared guilty, fined
one-half of the money in their possession, and sentenced to not less than
30 nor more than 60 days of compensatory labor, the location to be
determined by the sheriff.  Suddenly, the judge noticed Cali.  "That fish
is too small," he barked.  "Throw him back!"  The sheriff muttered that the
little blond would be driven out of town and dumped before noon.  The
remainder of Cy's group of 24 men was stuffed into a large cell in the
courthouse basement. Before long, a clerk informed them that they had been
remanded to the DOT (Department of Transportation).  They would serve their
sentence on a chain gang assigned to heavy road construction.

Once the clerk had collected two of the four dollars in Cy's pocket and
given him a stamped receipt, the men were taken to a DOT camp near the
construction site.  There they were fed their first meal of the day - a
cornmeal mush with some traces of something with a pork taste - before
their heads were shaved and they were stripped and told to line up for
striped prison clothing.  As expected, Cy's equipment provoked a few crude
snickers and lewd glances when they made him remove his jockstrap, but he
kept his cool.  Unfortunately, by the time he reached the pants table, they
were out of anything that would conceivably fit him, and the officer in
charge told the crew to return his own pants.  They threw them in his
direction, but he never saw the jockstrap or his $2.00 again.  The
youngster knew enough not to say a word.  Before he could get his pants on,
however, the head guard snarled that he wasn't moving fast enough and hit
at him with his billy club.  Dragged out of the line, the prison-striped
shirt torn from his back, he was savagely taken by the head guard right in
front of the others.  When he had finished with the sobbing boy, the
thoroughly cowed prisoners were chained together and spent the night in
another stockade.  In the morning, after "enjoying" a bowlful of absolute
slop, the chained men were put to work under guard removing a heavy ledge
of rock from the projected roadway with sledgehammers and pickaxes.  At
night, they were given a slightly more substantial meal, but, in general,
that was the regimen.  That is, they were expected to urinate and defecate
"in place," were never allowed to wash (other than when it rained), were
given two inadequate meals a day, and were always chained together - unless
a member of the work gang died or passed out cold.  The guards were allowed
to administer punishment - and seemed to enjoy that duty immensely.

Cali was in fact driven out of town on the day he had been sentenced.
Pushed roughly out of the car, he was told that he ever returned he might
not live to regret it.  Naturally, as soon as the sheriff's car had turned
around and driven out of sight, he set off for town.  Carefully concealing
himself, he moved around town until he located a preacher's home.  When he
crept into the preacher's office, he gave a performance to end all
performances.  The tears flowed; the (real) horrors of the boys' treatment
by those who were ostensibly Christian were recounted in graphic detail; a
story of how his big brother - his only living relative - had saved his
life and now was his only protection against both natural dangers and the
snares of evil was spun.  W. C. Fields and Clarence Darrow would have been
equally proud!

Catching his breath, Cali turned to see a lovely young woman standing in
the open doorway to the preacher's office.  "Cali," she said kindly, "would
you kindly step outside...just for a minute?"  It would have been
impossible for the young lad not to have heard the ensuing conversation.
"Jonathan," she said with all of the moral fervor of a period (and a place)
much given to moral fervor, "this is wrong.  If the sheriff and the judge
only practiced a scrap of the faith they profess, this would be a
God-fearing county.  We must do something.  If you can't or won't, darling,
I will."  The young lad was promptly ushered back into the study and thence
into the parsonage, only to be treated like one of God's chosen.

Some nine days later, the preacher, a deputy sheriff, and Cali drove out to
the DOT camp where Cy, pardoned by the Governor, was to be released.  As
they approached the deserted yard, Cy rose from a bench outside the fence.
Below his shaven head, Cali noticed that he wore neither shirt nor shoes.
Also, his trousers were falling apart (which didn't hide very much), but he
was clean and managed a weak smile.

Several days after that, the boys - rested, well fed, their possessions and
money restored, and one-way passenger train tickets to Denver in their
pockets - resumed their odyssey.


To Be Continued