The hobo encampment called Ditchway was out by the interstate in Jackson, Mississippi. The hardscrabble men who swamped the area from the hardware store parking lot to the highway tolerated him because he brought food, but it didn’t stop them from demanding other things. Mainly malt liquor, sometimes just plain cash. They lived in tents and cardboard boxes, strewn with radios and clothes hung up to dry like in a prison cell. Interspersed here and there were overturned shopping carts, municipal trash cans and legions of scavenged buckets, barrels and crates of all kinds.
Tommy at on the dirt in the woody copse of trees by the highway. Just twenty yards to the east was the onramp, and maybe fifty yards to the north was the highway itself. Cars whizzed by. The foliage was dense along the road though, with forsythia bushes in full bloom providing dense cover and rendering this piece of wilderness cut off from the outside world. A couple dozen tents and sleeping bags were scattered around, and the remains of two campfires. Empty bottles of liquor and abandoned crackpipes lay scattered like headstones after a tornado.
From The Hobo