Chapter 12 #2
The question felt shocking because he thought about home as little as possible. Practically never. Home was a void. A blank space that existed behind him and never anything he turned to look at, even as it followed him everywhere.
He didn’t want to answer, but Morgan was looking at him, eyebrows raised. Those blue eyes were watching and waiting, and there was kindness in his expression. As if he already felt sorry for Nimble.
Or maybe he was just curious, as anybody would be, having taken a stranger under their roof. Maybe Nimble should say something about his home life. Maybe he owed Morgan at least that. A short story to entertain.
“Just my folks,” Nimble said. “My two brothers.”
He watched Morgan take a breath as if to ask for more specifics, so Nimble dragged memories to the surface, trimmed them back so he wouldn’t give away too much, and wondered how he’d come to this point. Sitting with Morgan as the storm wound down, living like roommates, at least for a few days.
“Back east,” he said. “That’s where I come from.” He didn’t want to say he was from Lawndale; that felt like he’d be revealing too much. “My dad was—” He swallowed, considering how to put it. “Kind of a jerk. Or maybe I just needed a change, and my little neighborhood got boring.”
“Boring enough to hop a multiton freight with brakes that take a mile to kick in?”
“Read about it, I guess,” Nimble said. “There are a lot of trains back east.” He shrugged, shaking off the memories. “Seemed like an easy way to get away.”
“What about your mom?” Morgan asked. “Even if your dad’s a jerk, surely she’s worried about you.”
“My mom?”
His mom had been the last person in a long line of no one to protect him, to defend him from his dad. Her active nonparticipation in his life after they’d found out who he was had stung almost as much as his dad’s belt.
“Maybe you should call them, just to let them know you’re all right,” Morgan said. “Maybe they’d send you bus fare so you can go home for the holidays. For the winter. I could take you to the Greyhound station in Billings. Be happy to.”
Nimble went still. This was the announcement he’d been dreading, though he’d not realized how much until that moment: Morgan wanted him gone.
Maybe not because he was annoying to have around; Morgan had all but said that Nimble was the least annoying person he’d ever met.
But that didn’t mean Morgan wanted Nimble there permanently.
Nimble had no right to be there. Morgan had invited him to stay until the blizzard passed. And now it was passing.
“Guess I could borrow your phone,” Nimble said, mentally pushing against the idea of speaking to anyone he was related to.
“You could,” Morgan said. “It’s in the office, plugged in.”
Everyone in the regular world was attached to their phones, and here this guy was, saying his phone was a whole floor away. It was weird, so Nimble focused on that as he shoved his wooden chair back, got up, and went down the stairs on numb feet.
The first floor was colder than the warm kitchen, and still, with only whispers of movement against the row of glass windows.
Nimble went into the office, flicked on the light, and grabbed the phone with icy fingers.
His heart pounded against his rib cage, sharp taps that felt hard enough to break bone.
His dad wouldn’t want to hear from him.
He hadn’t called or written, nor sent a telegram from the old-fashioned Western Union office near the train tracks in Overland Park, Kansas—though, according to Star, telegrams weren’t a thing anymore. They just wired money or whatever.
Standing there, clutching Morgan’s cell phone, Nimble dialed the number. It was two hours earlier in Montana, so it’d be around eight o’clock in Lawndale. Not too late, right?
The phone rang twice, and then someone answered.
“This is Ben.” His dad’s voice, the words clipped and hard, like he was drinking and trying to hide it.
Maybe Nimble’s mom was with him, and they’d been in the living room watching TV. Or maybe Mom was out with her friends, playing bingo in the Bethel Mar church basement, smoking and talking. Not giving a damn how drunk her husband was, or that one of her three sons had left home and never come back.
“Is anyone there? Listen, buddy, I don’t got time to play games. Gotta check the races at Parx.” There was a clinking sound, like ice in a glass.
Parx was the casino way north of Lawndale where his dad would go to hang out with his buddies, though sometimes he’d use the phone app and make bets that way. Horse races happened all over the world, every hour of the day. There was money to be made on them, though Ben Foxley never made any.
When Nimble had been home, betting on the races had been a weekend event. Now, evidently, it was an everyday thing, and as the memories flickered up inside him like hard, flinty sparks, Nimble clutched the phone even tighter.
“Dad?”
“Danny?” his dad asked. “Or is this Evan? Speak up. Can’t abide a mumbler.”
“It’s Jack, Dad,” Nimble said, his own name rough on his lips. More memories, these ones summer-laced, being called home to dinner because Mr. Bao had left food for them and it was time to eat. Jack. Jack. Come home, Jaaaaaaack.
“Jack?” his dad asked. “Who?”
“It’s Jack,” he said again. “Your youngest. I left home. I’m calling.”
“Oh.”
More sounds of liquid, and Nimble could imagine the ice in the glass and the brown liquor. Wild Turkey, maybe, or Jim Beam, whatever had been on sale at Express Cold Beer down the street.
“What do you want?” his dad asked in a way that informed Nimble in no uncertain terms that his dad didn’t give a rat’s ass what Jack wanted. Where he’d been. Why he’d left home. Any of it.
“Asking—” Nimble gulped and clutched the phone even more tightly, till his fingers started turning numb. Swallowing, he tried again. Morgan wanted him gone, so maybe this was the fastest way. “For bus fare home.”
“Bus fare?” his dad asked, as if he’d suddenly grown hard of hearing.
“Bus fare home,” Nimble repeated. His mouth felt stiff, and the small office crowded in all around him, growing colder by the minute. “Couple hundred bucks. Wired to Western Union.”
There was a long silence filled with growing darkness, and Nimble braced himself. Even if he preferred to forget, his body knew what was coming.
And, sure enough, it came.
“What makes you think I’d send any money to a low-down, shitty, selfish son of a bitch who ran off?” His dad drew a breath, raspy and thickened by the liquor. “Your mom had a fit, ended up in the hospital for anxiety. Anxiety.”
His dad repeated the word as if it satisfied some inner urge to cut and slice, a hard message along the phone signal meant only for Nimble.
Meant to make him feel bad, even though Nimble knew, as his dad knew, that Mom liked to check herself into the hospital—or, at the very least, the local urgent care—once in a while, just to have someone fuss over her for an hour or so.
“Guess I want to come home, Dad,” Nimble said, hardly believing the words that were coming out of his mouth.
His jaw trembled. He didn’t want to go home. He’d left for a reason.
He wanted to stay with Morgan, but Morgan didn’t want him to stay. The idea to call home for bus fare hadn't been a suggestion. It had been a command.
“Well, you can’t,” his dad said, the words coming out crisp and hard, as though he wasn’t drunk at all and still wasn’t holding anything back. “You left, and that’s your problem. Why would I want a faggot to dirty my doorstep?”
His dad took another breath and blasted the same words again, like he was satisfied with the rhythm and wanted to feel it one more time, wanted Nimble to feel flayed open. Wanted to hurt him, like he’d hurt him all those other times: hard looks, cruel words, beatings.
“You come back and it’ll be all over Lawndale that I let a filthy fag into my house. No sir. No sir.” His dad hung up like he was signing a contract in blood.
Nimble pulled the cell phone from his ear, the words ringing through his head, his chest. He was cold all over, like he’d been dunked in a freezing river, sheets of thick, snow-laced ice forming over his head.
Of course, he could never go home. He’d known from the second Morgan suggested Nimble call his family that it was a mistake.
I’ll drive you to Billings, Morgan had said. Like it didn’t matter. Like Nimble could walk into the nearest snowdrift and freeze to death, and it was nothing to him.
Morgan wouldn’t care, just like his dad didn’t care. Or his mom or his brothers. Or Blue and Star. No one in the whole wide world cared whether Nimble lived or died. What his real name was. What he wanted.
Nobody cared, and acknowledging it cut so deep into him his whole body reverberated with shock.
He couldn’t stay, no matter how much he wanted to. And he couldn’t dredge up the energy to ask—to beg—Morgan to let him stay. What was the point?
There was only one thing to do: Wait until after midnight, put on his leather coat and his boots, and walk to the railroad crossing that was so close to the house, the train’s whistle pounded the wooden siding of the feed and grain night after night.
Sank into it and echoed a lonely sound into the cold air.
He shivered his way up the stairs, then went into the warm, cozy parlor and handed Morgan his phone.
“What’d they say?” Morgan asked. He placed the phone carelessly on the coffee table.
“My dad’s a jerk.” Nimble gave a low laugh, a lift of his shoulders. Like it didn’t matter. Like it didn’t feel as if acid was soaking into him like antifreeze gone wrong. “He said no.”
“But he knows you’re okay,” Morgan said, as if that mattered. “That you’re alive.”
“Sure,” Nimble said. “He knows.”
After a pause, Morgan said, “I could loan—I could give you bus fare.”
“Don’t want your charity.”
It was hard to enjoy the warm fire in the cast-iron stove or the starlit glow that shone through the window to dance on the patterned carpet and wooden floorboards.
At least the night would be clear. He’d be able to see his way as he waited for the train, waited to jump for the ladder. Which would be ice cold and maybe slippery. But he was used to not having a solid footing or a handhold.
He’d been riding the rails alone before he’d met up with Blue and Star in Chicago. He could be alone again, and away from Morgan. Who didn’t want him. Just like everyone else.
“Need more wood?” Nimble asked pleasantly, as though nothing was wrong.
“It’s good for now,” Morgan said. Not wanting to be under obligation, obviously. “I poked it up. Stuck a few twigs in there. It’s fine.”
All right. Nimble might as well do the dishes and finish what he’d started before he left.
With that decision ringing in his head, he went into the bright kitchen, and went to the sink. Turned on the hot water, and before it got too hot, he stuck his hands beneath the flow. To remember what it felt like to be warm.