Guest Post: Runaways and Vagabonds by Barbara Nickless

In wake of the recent publication of the anthology, Denver Noir, a number of authors with short stories in the book will be making guest blog appearances here discussing their stories. First up is Barbara Nickless who is the author of the  Sydney Parnell series as well as the new Dr. Evan Wilding series that began last December with At First Light.  Please welcome author Barbara Nickless to the blog today… 

 

Runaways and Vagabonds

 

I once read a great bit of writerly advice: every time you go out, bring home a face. Someone who catches your eye when she walks by. An old man with oily hair and a once-fine suit, crouched on the grass to scratch behind a pug’s ears. A girl in pigtails and a yellow sequin-covered shirt, bouncing on her toes in front of an ice cream stand. If you’re a writer, then next time you venture out, look for someone with unique features or a uniquely poignant expression. A person who, quickly glimpsed and soon gone, might serve as a model for a character in your novel.

I’ve brought home a lot of faces since I started writing. But a face that made me stop in my tracks was that of a teenager I spotted leaving a hobo camp. A rail rider with a backpack, a scrawny dog, and a world of grief in the set of his shoulders.

Maybe you’ve seen one of these train-hopping kids. Cruising through city parks. Hanging out at the bus station. Panhandling on street corners. They’re young—teens and twenty-somethings. Filthy with the kind of dirt that will take a long soak and plenty of elbow grease to remove. Their clothes and fingernails are torn. Their hair is tangled into dreads. Their skin is pierced with homemade tats and studded with metal in their eyebrows and noses and tongues. Black grit from the trains coats their teeth. They have a permanent squint from facing into the wind. The ragged backpack they carry might have once been blue. Or pink. It might have boasted a drawing of kittens or of Superman—a former innocence now scuffed out of existence. 

Sometimes they’re stoned. Sometimes they’re filled with a rage that startles those of us with homes and loved ones and jobs. Too often, their eyes look simply lost, their expression desolate. 

Who are these kids? The world has lots of names for them. Gutter punks, rubber trampers, crusties and train-hoppers, railroaders, Dirty Kids. They take on nicknames like Soup and Bambi and Smerph. Purple and NoMan and Devil Boy. 

They’re running from something. And since you can’t build anything—especially not a future—when you’re on the rails, whatever they’ve left behind must have been pretty bad. The younger ones remind me of the boys in the 1972 musical Oliver! Waifs. Runaways. Kids who might as well be orphans, even if mom and dad still wait at home. Sometimes they end up in the hospital, a leg lost to a train or teeth lost in a fight. Sometimes they end up dead.

When they turn to violence, I have to wonder—how does life carry us from being the victim to being the villain? How far does life have to push us before we step over that line? 

These runaways are part of a nomad subculture. They’re looking to opt out of a society that has betrayed them or let them down. They’ve fled domestic violence or broken foster homes or absentee parents or societal conventions that don’t make sense to them. Sometimes they’re headed to music festivals. More often, they have no real destination in mind other than away. They’re Gen Z hippies, searching for themselves. But the drugs and the world are harsher now, more dangerous than they were in the 1960s. It’s easier to get lost, harder to find your way back. 

I watched a video shot by one of these kids. In the footage, we see a mom sitting in her car, caught in traffic. She rolls down her window and offers a kid who is panhandling a slim fold of cash. “Just don’t use it on drugs,” she begs the young man. “Drugs killed my son.” 

The young rail rider I glimpsed that day made his way into my story “Ways of Escape” included in the anthology, Denver Noir. Every face has a story, and sometimes those stories haunt us. As they should.

 

 

Barbara Nickless ©2022 

Barbara Nickless is the Wall Street Journal and Amazon Charts bestselling author of the award-winning Sydney Parnell novels featuring a former Marine and her K9 partner. Her new series introduces a sleuth whose gift for interpreting the words and symbols left behind by killers has led him to consult on some of Chicago’s grisliest cases. Barbara lives at the foot of the Rocky Mountains where she loves to hike, cave, snowshoe, and drink single malt Scotch. Connect with her at www.barbaranickless.com.