24. Blue
blue
Crunching my way through the ice-topped, silver-glinting snow, I went up a rise and down the other side, going nearly all the way to the Yellowstone River that abutted Wolfe’s property.
The river was clogged with flat, pale gray sheets of ice, studded with branches that stuck up like reaching hands, curving along the banks where tall, dark gray cottonwood trunks clustered together, rubbing shoulders with scrubby, dark green lodgepole pines.
Their scent was in the air, spicy, damp earth thawing in the balmy ten degrees, patiently waiting for spring.
My hands in Wolfe’s gloves were hot, so I took them off and tucked them into the pockets, one each, the way I’d seen Wolfe do. The sun was warm on the top of my head; my ears nipped with cold.
Where so recently I’d been floating inside of a map in my head that had no distinctive marks, I now knew where I was. Somewhere north and west of where I grew up, that is to say, in the middle of nowhere. A wild country, so far from civilization, it had its own rules.
We boxcar boys had our own rules, too. A congregation of three where all delegates voted and where there was never a tie.
I wouldn’t say that Star and Nimble always voted the same way, and against me, but sometimes it felt like that.
Usually Star would say where we would go, and we went, no votes cast or counted.
Most of the time, Star’s mental maps and charts took us to nice places, like Big Sable Point lighthouse in upper Michigan on a wildly sunny day, or the low country, Pawley’s Island, where we’d gotten off the train for a few days, hitched rides, and ate fried fish and hushpuppies from plates people left behind in those tiny seaside restaurants.
One time, we’d been going across Kansas in early spring. Last April, it’d been. The temperatures had been low, chilly; the sky a cloudless, scratched-glass blue. And if someone tells you that Kansas is not as flat as a pancake, then they are deceiving themselves and lying to you.
There was nothing to look at, not for miles. I looked anyway, just to give my mind something to focus on as the boxcar swayed and the trucks clicked along the tracks and the Janney couplers struggled to hang onto each other.
I was shivering as I stood in the open doorway of an older boxcar that had seen more miles than I cared to think about, holding on to the rusted iron handle on the sliding door, kicking at half-loose nails in the wooden floorboards with the toe of my sneaker.
Star was curled inside a bundle of what looked like burlap sacks, or what might have been old meat shrouds, striped with old rust-colored bloodstains, too thin and torn to actually be used.
Someone had thrown them in the boxcar, for reasons I couldn’t figure out.
But Star was as soundly asleep as though he slept on a soft mattress with an eiderdown quilt over his shoulders.
In the far corner, in the dark, away from the chilly air coming in the open doorway, had been Nimble. Last I’d looked, he had his knees to his chest, his arms wrapped around his shins. Head against the wall of the boxcar, dark hair tangled, wood dust on his skin.
The leather jacket he’d been wearing when first I’d met him was moving itself into the too-small category, his shoulders growing, making themselves known.
He wore the jacket out of pride, I supposed, just like I wore my blue high-tops with the red paint stains.
The ones on my feet were my second pair.
The first pair had fallen apart within months of my leaving the Reserve.
Star had helped me find another pair, and also red paint to dapple them with, a signature mark.
They’d melt apart, too, eventually, so I’d have to find another pair and another after that, and on and on it would go, just like the landscape I was scanning for anything to look at.
A dead tree. A creaky oil derrick. Cows. Anything.
There was nothing. Maybe along the far edge of the western horizon, I could see clouds that could bring snow or rain, depending on the elevation we were at. Which was east Kansas, so nothing over three thousand feet.
At some point, we would hit what Star called the dry line.
There, the elevation would increase all the way to the Colorado border, where it would take us a mile high, where, certainly, there would be at the very least, slatted sideways snow and I’d have to drag the boxcar door shut to keep the weather from coming in.
Star was the reason I knew about elevation changes.
Nimble was the reason I’d shut the doors if it started to snow.
Out of courtesy. We didn’t like each other very much, and there were reasons for that, reasons we never discussed.
He was too happy. I was too quiet. But he didn’t deserve to be any colder than he already was.
Star was the reason the three of us stuck together. Star and his little Pollyanna speeches about the places we could go, a diverse itinerary in his mind that reached across every part of the country. Every proposed destination a marvel to behold. And, to be honest, he was usually right.
New Orleans had the best food in trash cans, especially the muffulettas and leftover roast beef sandwiches au jus in the dumpster behind a restaurant called Mother’s. Michigan had been pretty, almost too pretty to be real.
We were headed to Texas, along the coast, to Port Aransas, where Star mentioned we might take a break and get jobs with charter fishing companies.
Only some of the boats, Star told us, were for serious fishermen.
The majority were party boats, which took folks out into the middle of the Gulf of Mexico, baited their hooks for them, and let them drag the deep waters for red snapper while they drank beer.
The plan was to go all the way to Denver, hop on a train headed south and get off at the rail yards in Victoria, Texas, and hitch our way across one hundred miles to the docks at Port Aransas. There, we would apply to be dockhands and help drunk people fish and make some easy money.
Until then, my eyes were scratchy and dry, and I wanted nothing more than to lay my head down on the bundle of questionable cloth, right next to Star, and just sleep.
Except one of us had to keep watch, Star had said. I wanted to stick to that and leave Nimble awake. He and not me.
In the early days, I’d done that. Just leaned back and fallen asleep, not giving a fuck if it was Nimble’s turn for shuteye. Looking back, I’d been an asshole about it. And maybe that was the central reason Nimble didn’t much care for me.
But we’d been traveling around half a year together and I didn’t really feel up to him glaring at me or feeling bad, on the inside, for being so selfish.
I turned from the open door and the flat, early spring gray and green landscape and looked at him.
I opened my mouth to offer, actually, that he could sleep for a while, and I would continue to stand watch. Doing the righteous thing.
What he did in response to my silent offer was, of course, typical of him. He stretched out his legs and patted his thigh, offering it up to me as a pillow. All goodness, all kindness, all Nimble. He made me want to dislike him, to refuse, actually, out of pride.
But I didn’t.
Instead, I shut the doors halfway, grunting as I leaned into the iron handle, so he wouldn’t have the wind in his face if the train changed direction. Went over to him, hunkered down, and put my head in his lap.
The wooden floor of the boxcar swayed beneath me. Overhead, I could hear the creak of the narrow wooden laths as the train swayed and chugged along, and see bits of shaved wood floating in the air. Cold air was coming from somewhere, but then it always did.
I closed my eyes. And felt Nimble’s arm settling across my shoulders.
That became the warmest part of me, the softness of his thigh beneath my cheek.
His fingers stirred in my hair, pulling it back from my face to tuck it behind my ear.
I didn’t say anything to that, but merely shrugged deeper into a good position for sleep.
And for this kindness, and others like it, he’d been left behind.
Which was my fault, utterly. He’d looped the straps of his duffle around the top of a metal ladder, easing them between the gap that had rusted apart.
He’d lost the draw and had to disembark, as Star liked to say, and get whatever supplies he could bring us.
The train had stopped in the middle of nowhere, and certainly nowhere that Star had a map of. We didn’t know how long the train would be stay put on the rails beside a sleepy little town, so Nimble had to hustle.
Star and I watched him go into the town that was so small, I couldn’t imagine there’d be a fast-food joint or a convenience store where he could scrounge around the trash bins.
Certainly no red and white Dairy Queen sign could be seen poking its head above the single-level, lackluster town.
But Nimble was clever. He’d figure it out.
We all had our gifts. Nimble was resourceful.
When the three freight engines started chuffing, Star and I climbed on top of the boxcar we’d been riding inside of. Snow had started coming down, bang, out of nowhere, a thick flurry swirling around us as the temperature plummeted.
Nimble had come back to the train, reaching up to give me what looked like three bottles of water. Was that all the town had to offer? No, he had bundles wrapped in white paper.
I reached down, glowering at him, and he reached up. Both of us were startled as the train jerked into motion. Nimble stepped back, his eyes fearful and wide.
We’d known a guy who’d been jumping on a train, a flatbed car, and slipped, and gotten run over, the trucks slicing him right across the thighs. Nimble had every right to be jumpy. But I was irritated, even so.
We’d exchanged hard words. I wanted him to throw me the food and water; Nimble wanted me to climb down and help him.
The rails were at the top of a small slope that reached into a low ditch for drainage, which meant that as I reached down and Nimble reached up, the gap between our hands was too far.
The train jerked again. Nimble hollered at me to throw him his shit, which he’d need, a precious hoard gathered bit by bit, tools, money, earplugs, clothes, the book Star had loaned him, The Talisman by Stephen King, which I knew for a fact Nimble had never even started reading.
“My fucking stuff!” Nimble had shouted, and as I turned to yank on the straps, the train lurched forward with multiple bangs and a growl of diesel engine. The straps were tangled, the worn cloth of the left strap catching on the edge of rusted metal, digging into it.
The train sped up. I tugged, working the strap with cold fingers, snow in my eyes, my heart beating hard because we’d not only left Nimble behind with a storm starting, in a town in the middle of nowhere, he didn’t have any supplies, nothing familiar to comfort him as he sought shelter.
He was likely, and with good reason, to think I’d kept the duffle from him on purpose.
We’d never gotten along, but I would never do that. At the same time, if it’d been me on the ground, I would have thought the same of him.
And here we were. Within miles of each other this whole while, not more than ten, while I’d danced in the darkness of my own head without any memory of who I was.
Nimble—Jack—who had told me he’d come from Lawndale, during one rare moment where we’d shared with each other.
I’m from Lawndale, he’d said. I’m from Richmond, I’d replied.
Star had been from Rantoul, in Illinois.
Our homes were only pins in maps, places in the distance that each of us hoped never to see again.
I remember when the train had gone through Champagne one early autumn evening, a low-lit dusk that smelled like pumpkins, broken cornstalks spreading off into the distance in that flat farmland waiting to be frozen.
Star had pointed behind us with his thumb, and said, That’s Rantoul. We could have gone right by his house on that train and he’d never said a word until we were far enough away for it not to matter.
Nimble was Jack. Jack was Nimble. It had to be him. I had planned on staying with Wolfe forever, trouble-free, disconnected from everything that had been my old life. But now Jack was on my horizon. Within reach. The question was, what was I going to do about it?