5. Nimble
nimble
Now that Nimble was inside and moving, he was growing warm, and his clothes seemed wetter and heavier than they had been when he’d been cold. His boots weighed a ton, and the snow melting from his hair kept dripping into his eyes.
With the danger of the sheriff and his deputy gone, the idea that Morgan had not given him up pushed Nimble toward the edge of confusion. What now? Well, do what Morgan had asked him to do and earn himself a place to sleep for the night.
When he got upstairs with two more bags of groceries, Morgan was still sitting in the same chair, slumped forward, his cane in both hands.
“Were you stealing in town?” Morgan asked. “Is that why you hid from the sheriff?”
“Not exactly.” Nimble was used to playing it close to his chest, not sharing his secrets, not spilling the contents of his heart. He shrugged. “Just took some waters.”
“Well, you were trying to steal from me, it looked like,” Morgan said. An accusation.
Nimble had met guys like this before, where the judgment was almost instant. He had maybe ten bucks in bills and change. Morgan was looking at him as if being poor was a crime.
Nimble longed to be back on the train with Blue and Star, even as anger rippled through him. He’d not done anything to them, nothing to warrant that kind of betrayal.
“I was thinking about it,” he said.
Morgan didn’t seem like a guy who would be living over a store half stocked with all kinds of unrelated items: boxes of birdseed, dog food, bins of screws, coils of wire, sacks of what looked like grain, saddles on long arms sticking out from the wall.
A country store for country people who needed odd things like that. He was as out of place as Nimble was.
Nimble’s leather jacket was sticking to his neck, tacky with damp, the collar of the flannel shirt beneath it starting to itch.
When he pulled at the fabric with his fingers, he saw Morgan’s expression change, his gaze focusing sharply on Nimble.
Then he shifted, moving his cane from one hand to the other.
“Why didn’t you just ask?” Morgan snapped.
He got up, as though to start putting away the groceries, like he’d said he would. He leaned heavily on the counter, one hand planted flat, the other gripping the hard rubber handle of the cane. Like his body was going to give out on him without warning, and he wanted to be ready.
“Ask?” Nimble replied, startled. He shivered as he felt a cold draft from somewhere and jumped when a whomp of wind hit the bank of windows that looked out over the yard.
“For a place to stay.” Morgan sighed heavily, as though Nimble had been irritating him for hours. “I could ask around town on your behalf, but that’d mean I’d get dragged into yet more conversations and probably have to endure questions from Mabel and Ambrose, and all those other small-town—”
Morgan, for all his height and seeming strength, looked like he was on the verge of collapse. He stared at Nimble with hard blue eyes, his annoyance at Nimble, at everything, sparking off him like thin spikes of metal.
His mouth went tight, like he wanted to use strong words to describe a level of frustration so high it was coloring his cheeks bright pink.
“It’s just too much.” Morgan sliced a hand through the air. “Too much talking. Too much of other people getting up in my business.” With a shake of his head, he took a long breath.
Then he looked at Nimble as though Nimble might turn out to be the least irritating thing in town, or at least an irritation of short duration.
“I don’t have a spare room,” he said. “But there’s a couch in the parlor, and I’ve plenty of food, as you can see.” He waved at the four bags of groceries on the counter.
“I could just make a bed out of bags of grain, down in the shop,” Nimble said. It wouldn’t be much more comfortable than sleeping on the floor, but at least he’d be dry.
“A bed on the bags of grain?” Morgan asked, as fiercely as if Nimble had just spat at him.
“And if Mabel were to come by with her stupid little dog and start asking questions? Or the sheriff, or, God forbid, those old geezers? How am I supposed to explain that to them? I can be hospitable. There’s a couch.
A nice, long one. Plenty wide. You’ll sleep there. And in the morning—”
Morgan stopped his tirade suddenly. “Maybe it’ll stop snowing and you can be on your way.”
Morgan was freaking him out. Nimble would have happily been on his way then and there if the snow weren’t coming down so hard; a white blanket was all that could be seen through the large windows.
“Couch is fine,” Nimble said. He didn’t move from where he was standing, waiting for Morgan to move so he could take a cue from that.
With a heavy sigh, Morgan looked him over, head to toe, and said, “After you bring up the last bag, could you put out the fire in the office?” He frowned. “I’d do it, but the stairs are steep, definitely not to code, though nobody in this town probably cares about building regulations or permits.”
“Sure,” Nimble said.
He made one more trip to put out the fire, which was something he knew how to do, at least. Then he went into the store, making sure the front door was latched and the door into the yard was shut, even if the handle had fallen off.
Now, on his own, he could take his time.
Part of him felt like he was still in motion, still on the train, swaying to the clacks, jerking to the clicks of the trucks along the rails, even though he was inside, in a building with walls and a ceiling that, in spite of the growing storm, was quiet and on the edge of being warm.
He lowered the blinds on all the windows, then wandered the aisles, absorbing the fact that there were so many different kinds of things for sale. Everything from tools to towels. Then again, this was a small rural town, so the store was part feed and grain and part hardware and tack shop.
With one final look around, he grabbed the last bag, trotted up the stairs, and turned into the kitchen.
Morgan was sitting again and had put nothing away. The three amber bottles were on the table next to his elbow, all with their caps back on. The water glass was empty.
“Just here on the table is fine,” Morgan said. He pulled the cane to him as Nimble placed the last bag in the center of the old-fashioned wooden table.
Nimble shivered in his still-sopping-wet clothes. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t want to get involved in a conversation. Just as Morgan didn’t want the people in town asking questions, Nimble didn’t want Morgan asking him any.
It was enough that he had shelter, even if only for one night. Maybe Morgan would let him take a shower and eat something, too.
“Nimble?” Morgan asked, irritated all over again for some reason. “What kind of name is that? Why do you call yourself that?”
“I’m on the move,” Nimble said, confused, because he’d already told Morgan this. “I don’t give out my real name.”
“Oh.” For some reason, that didn’t piss Morgan off as much as Nimble would have expected. Maybe Morgan liked it that Nimble was keeping himself to himself.
“I locked up.” Nimble jerked his thumb at the doorway behind him and the stairs beyond. “Put the fire out. Anything else?”
“No.” Morgan laughed, low, as if dismissing the idea. “Doesn’t matter. Nobody’s going to break in during a blizzard.” He looked up at Nimble. “I’m not from here, and this is my first storm in Montana.”
“Where exactly in Montana are we?” Nimble asked.
He remembered Star saying something about the northern Wyoming border but hadn’t listened beyond that, because Star would go on and on, sometimes, when all Nimble needed to know was how long they’d be riding for and when the train would stop so they could get off for supplies.
They usually took turns, and this time, Nimble had gotten the short straw.
“We’re in a town called Hysham.” Morgan quirked his brow, like he was puzzling over Nimble’s lack of awareness. “About an hour from Billings, if you know where that is. We could be a thousand miles away, for all it matters, though. There’s not even a movie theater in this Podunk town.”
Nimble didn’t know the last time he’d gone to a movie theater, but he just nodded, shivering.
“I’ve got spare clothes you can change into,” Morgan said without getting up. He was rubbing his left thigh, and it looked like he was trying to make his body relax, but it wasn’t working. “In my room. You can take a shower, and I’ll make us some soup or whatever.”
Morgan was beyond tired; he was exhausted, that much was obvious. Now, in the brightly lit kitchen, since Nimble didn't have to wonder where he was going to lay his head when it got fully dark, he could focus on the man in front of him.
Beneath the thin, loose sweatpants Morgan had on, he wore a brace of some kind around his left knee. The whole of him, from his strong face and broad shoulders to his sneaker-clad feet, looked as though someone had come at him with a battering ram. Those blue eyes watched Nimble looking him over.
“I was in a car accident,” Morgan said. “Hence all the pills and the knee brace and the cane.”
“It’s purple,” Nimble said.
“It’s an old-lady color,” Morgan said. “But it was the only one they had available.”
“Okay.”
“You can grab some clothes from my room and take a shower,” Morgan repeated. He gestured with his cane. “The bedroom is beyond the bathroom. I’ll get going on the soup if I can figure out which bag it’s in. I mean, I don’t know, but I’m sure they bought some, even if it’s canned.”
“Can’t you get—” Nimble cut himself off, but still said, “I don’t want to go through your things.”
“It doesn’t matter; I’ve barely unpacked as it is. My suitcases are on the floor.” Morgan paused to squint at Nimble, blurry-eyed and pale. “Do I need to take my pills?”