For one thing, he’s not no giant of a man and he doesn’t look particularly strong. The way a lot of people talk about him, you’d never recognize him if you met him on the streets. Truth of the matter is, he’s short and looks kind of scrawny. Not weak, mind you, just skinny, wiry, if you like. I’m not saying he’s not srong, ‘cause he is, strongest fellow I’ve ever had the pleasure to meet, he just don’t look it, but then, you know how it can be with the short, wiry ones.

He’s none too handsome, either, although he’s not the deformed ogre some make him out to be. It’s just that Hillbilly don’t much care for convention. I guess you might call him a free thinker these days, plain fact of the matter is that he don’t much like to trim his hair, neither on his face nor his head, and he’s not one for wearing clothes as are appropriate for the occasion, unless that occasion involves hard labor or mud wrestling.

Yeah, ol’ Hillbilly does things in his own way and in his own time. Those of as don’t know, his Christian name is Kevin Higgs, but he ain’t ever called himself anything but Hillbilly, since he was first able to talk. Of course, he didn’t start talking until about age four, but that’s neither here nor there. Some people, they’d hear that and think it must mean that Hillbilly’s a pretty low watt bulb, if you take my meaning, and certainly some that talk to him get the same impression, but in truth he’s a fairly sharp fellow. Walks his own path at his own pace, does what he needs to when he needs to, and the way I figure he just didn’t bother talking until he had something to say.

From an early age, Hillbilly had a great love for destruction. Not that he was a cruel boy or a violent boy, he just liked taking things apart. At age five he earned himself a month’s hard labor at the hands of his pa for leveling the family buick with nothing more than a phillips head screwdriver and a wrench. No two pieces of that car were left attached and some as saw it claimed that even some of those weren’t entirely attached to themselves.

Which is probably why he ended up landing a job over at the scrap mill. All you could take apart, all day. His first day there, they handed him a cutting torch and his eyes lit up as if he’d seen the face of god hisself in the narrow, searing flame. He set to work and the folks there said that they’d never seen someone so natural. Of course, that’s where Hillbilly also came face to face with his first train.

Now we all know that when trains turn rogue, they have to be brought in and put down. Thing is, this usually takes a posse of fifteen to twenty strong men, and even then there’s always a high risk that someone’s not going to walk out of that scrap yard. It’s dangerous work, but Hillbilly, the first time he saw one of those box cars brought it, just seemed to take it as a personal challenge. He grabbed his cutting torch and before anyone even had any idea what he was going to do, much less stop him from doing it, he’d walked into the cage alone.

I know you’ve all heard this part, so I won’t bore you with the details, suffice to say that he took that boxcar apart. What a fight it was, too, with joints popping and gears screeching, but when the din died down, there stood Hillbilly atop the train, cutting torch burning brightly, biggest grin you ever saw on his face. He’d found his calling.

‘Course, the men at the scrap yard didn’t mind. If it meant they didn’t have to risk life and limb taking down train cars, well, that was fine with them, and in the meantime Hillbilly became a local hero, the train killer, the freight wrestler. It got to where he’d leave the torch behind on the weaker ones, the passenger cars and the cabooses, going at them with his bare hands.

It figures word would get around, until even the trains knew about him, and feared him. For awhile the crime rate even went down, as fewer train cars turned rogue for fear they’d be caught and shipped to ol’ Hillbilly. But then they started to talk, and damned if they didn’t decide to bring Hillbilly to his knees, one way or the other.

So it was a dark night some seven, eight weeks ago that they struck. It’d been a hard day’s train skinning and Hillbilly had perhaps had a little too much to drink that night. There are some as say that someone in the bar had been bought out by the trains and had slipped something into his drink, something to make him a little less perky, but I think those kind of tales are best kept to yourself. Don’t need to be making accusations you can’t back up, getting everyone all het up and ready to lynch someone. Regardless, he left ol’ Roger’s in a sorry state, so sorry that he forgot his cutting torch, left it sitting next to the bar stool.

It must have been about midnight when he crossed the tracks, and there weren’t no witnesses, but as he tells it, he had just hit the tracks when suddenly a great black locomotive jumps out from under the bridge and slams into him from behind, a cowardly attack if ever there was one. It then ran over poor Hillbilly’s legs a couple of times for good measure, and took off, thinking the job done.

Well, ol’ Hillbilly’s made of somewhat sterner stuff than that. The police found him the next morning, bruised and bloody and barely able to stand, but alive for all that. They got him to a hospital and pretty much got him patched up, and before any of you start shaking your heads let me tell you that I him walking around myself just last night. He’s just a tough hombre, which is why all these crazy tales get told in the first place. You put your thinking caps on, you’d realize that people wouldn’t be getting so outlandish unless they had something pretty darn extraordinary to talk about in the first place.

Yup, I saw him walking around just last night, still drunk as a priest, carrying his torch. He had a bit of a limp, mind you, but his eyes were aglow. Seems he’d caught the number of the coal black loco, the notorious Engine 60, possibly one of the biggest, meanest rogue locomotives to ever run the rails, and if you think Hillbilly’s gonna take that kind of cowardly attack sitting down, well, you sure don’t know much about the man. The hunt’s on, and I already feel sorry for Engine 60.

From what I hear, that train’s gone to ground, hiding out somewhere down south, probably in Columbia or something, but that ain’t gonna save it. Hillbilly’s got that fire in his eyes, and he’ll track that engine to the fire boiler rooms of hell itself, if need be, and I pity anyone, train or person, who gets caught up in the whole mess before he’s done.

Yeah, he had to quit his job, but the way I figure it, the bounty on that engine is enough that when he’s done, should he live through it, he’ll be set up for life. Still, before any of you starts getting the idea that you might ‘help out’ and get a little bit of that reward money yourselves, take my advice. Stay away from the whole affair. It makes a good story, but a plain harsh reality, when someone gets that blood lust in ‘em. That kind of story almost never has a happy ending, especially as for the people on the sidelines. You think of Cap’n Ahab, you’ll know what I’m talking about. Once a man gets a taste of revenge, well, like I said, they’ll go to the ends of hell to quench it, but they’ll tear down the walls of heaven to get there. There are two worlds now, the one as we all live in and work in and raise families in, and another, smaller world that just has two people in it, Hillbilly and Engine 60, always at each others’ throats, rolling over the tracks of our world like some overloaded coal car, spittin’ dust and gravel every which way until one day their world just comes to a sudden and violent end.

No sir, it’s a wonderful thing to know someone like Hillbilly, a man that may as well be a giant, some ferocious angel sent from heaven, but it’s another thing entirely to try and be one, and me, I’ll take living as I have it now, a little hardship, a little pleasure, a little work, a little drink, one day at a time, in my own way and at my own pace.