26. Blue
blue
Friday dawned bright and clear. I took a shower and wiped the dampness from the mirror with a sweep of my hand and looked at myself. Would we recognize each other? Jack had cleaned up well, Wolfe had said. I was clean all over, a state I’d been without for the past two years.
Memories sprang forward of the three of us washing up with cold water from an outdoor tap behind someone’s house.
There had been no cars in the driveway of the house near the tracks, so we stopped.
Drank their outdoor water. Went through their trashcans, coming out smelling like yesterday’s grease and old banana peels.
Jack had just laughed as if the whole thing was an adventure. Looking back, maybe it had been.
“We can put it off,” Wolfe said when I came out of the bathroom, dressed, rubbing my hair with a towel. He took over, patting my hair dry, running his fingers through it to get the tangles out. A kiss on my cheek, his soft hands cupping my face. “Whatever you want.”
What Wolfe didn’t deserve was to have to put up with me being in a foul mood because I was putting it off, so I shook my head.
Laced my boots and put on my parka and led the way into the balmy thirty-degree day.
Snow dripped from the eaves, falling into the narrow crevice the icicles had left behind, having broken from the gutters and fallen into the melting white lumps along the outside of the cabin.
Wolfe was close behind, his parka open, jingling keys in his pocket. We got into the truck. It roared to life, and Wolfe drove along the bare asphalt road to Hysham. As we pulled into the parking lot of the feed and grain, I gripped the handle, wanting to be a million miles away.
A red truck was parked at the edge of the parking lot, all on its lonesome, safe from dings of careless doors. The chrome glinted all around; the tires looked menacingly large.
I could imagine Jack driving it, the windows down, his hair flying around, him laughing. Morgan at his side. Wolfe had told me about Morgan, and I was going to meet him, too. I’d rather not meet anyone. I wanted to tell Wolfe to reverse the truck and drive back to the cabin.
Instead, I got out as Wolfe turned off the engine. And marched myself to the front door. Opened it with nerveless fingers, my ears tuned to the sound of Wolfe’s footsteps right behind me.
My heart raced. It could be nothing. Or it could be a shitshow. Maybe Jack wouldn’t care where I’d been or what had happened on top of that boxcar. But I wanted to tell him my truth. And maybe I wanted him to care.
I walked into the feed and grain through those double glass doors and looked around.
There were two people wandering in the aisles; the air was still and cold, and as I looked up, I could see the windows that Wolfe had mentioned.
Two were patched up with plywood, and the rest looked thin and old. Past their prime.
The money to fix them had bought Jack a shiny new toy, which I knew, without a doubt, he appreciated. I wished him joy driving it. I wished myself a million miles away.
“Can I help you?” asked a man, dark brown hair, gray threaded through. A tired look around his eyes. I knew he was Morgan because he was using a purple cane.
I stopped. Wolfe almost stepped on my heels.
And from behind Morgan came Jack. Glossy-haired, those green eyes I remembered, bright as though someone had fed him and cared for him.
He was wearing the kind of flannel shirt that Wolfe favored, rolled up his forearms. He carried a broom and a dustpan, displaying an air so domestic that I didn’t quite know what to think.
He recognized me instantly.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” His eyes glittered hard and dark. He laid the broom and dustpan on the counter and came at me, fists balled, mouth snarling. I’d never seen him like that, angry, bent on doing harm to another human being. “And where’s Star?”
Star had been on my mind as well, as to how far he’d gone before getting off the train. All on his own. He was resourceful, yes, but we’d come to rely on each other, and now both Jack and I had left him.
“I don’t know,” I said, clipped and short. I scraped my hair out of my eyes, taking a step back as Jack advanced.
“What do you mean you don’t know?” Another step. A growl from Jack’s throat. “You left me behind, and you decide that’s okay to do to him, too?”
“Jack.” This from Morgan, his eyes wide, as though he’d never seen Jack like this before either.
“Hear him out, Jack,” Wolfe said, moving from behind me to stand at my side.
Ice ran through my body, a rush of energy with nowhere to go. Then, a second later, I was so hot inside my parka that I wanted to yank it off my body.
“Mr. Bramwell?” asked Jack. His expression changed, flickering between the stiffness of anger and open-mouthed confusion.
A second before Jack looked like he wanted to kill me, and now he looked like he wanted to throw Wolfe out of the store.
“I beg your pardon, but this doesn’t have anything to do with you. ”
“This is Blue,” Wolfe said, his voice wrapping around my name like he was holding me in his arms. “He fell off the train just as the blizzard came. He hit his head and didn’t know where he was or who he was. I found him wandering on the road to my place.”
“I tried to give you your duffel, but the straps caught,” I said, almost stuttering.
“You’d wrapped them around the top of the ladder, and when I tried to unwind them, they caught on the broken metal.
” My mouth worked. He wasn’t going to believe me.
I had seen it in his eyes how angry he’d been that day, the snow swirling around him.
I could see it now. An explosion waiting to happen.
I wanted to turn and run, but I held my ground.
Every bad feeling between us was nothing compared to this. “They caught.”
“Caught?”
A second before, we’d been ready to rumble. Morgan moved closer to Jack, and Wolfe’s shoulder brushed mine. The two customers in the store were at the far end, and perhaps our voices were low enough that they didn’t notice that Jack had wanted to kill me, only now he didn’t. Maybe.
“Honest to God,” I said. “When we find Star, he’ll tell you. I tried untwisting those straps to get the duffel free. The train started going really fast—”
“The tracks head downhill from Hysham,” Wolfe said quickly. “It speeds up along that way, ten miles out of town.”
“You fell off.” Jack went very still, perhaps remembering Strider, who’d missed the jump, a mistake which had cost him his legs, his life. Falling off a train in motion was no less dangerous.
“I did,” I said, and my voice sounded foreign to me. Too small. Too quiet. “I lost my balance and then I fell, but I kept hold of your duffel. It’s at Wolfe’s cabin. All your things, safe and sound.”
Jack’s eyes were very wide, the green I remembered, though they were missing the smile that seemed always to be behind them. A second later his arms were around my neck and everything went still.
“Blue,” he said. His whole body hugged me, warm against mine, but the right kind of warmth. “For fuck’s sake, Blue.” He pulled back, shaking me. His hands were on my face, pushing back my hair. “You could have died. Idiot.”
The tension in my shoulders disappeared, and then he hugged me again. I hugged him back, only dimly aware that we had an audience. Two men, each of whom had taken us in when the weather was at its worst. Sheltered us. Kept us close when the rest of the world had been cruel.
“Jack,” I said, clasping my hands over his. He’d forgiven me after everything. But that was like Jack.
“How do you know my real name?” he asked, laughter beneath the words.
“So obvious,” I said, with the same scoff of disdain that I’d use when I wanted to put him in his place. “Jack be Nimble. Duh.”
“Duh,” he said in return. The curve of his mouth, the smile in his eyes, all of this washed over me, a familiar connection. Someone who knew me. Who I didn’t have to pretend with. Who liked me in spite of me. “We need to find him,” Jack said now.
“But how?” I asked, thinking of Star, the way he looked when I’d last seen him.
Standing behind me on the top of that boxcar, knees bent to keep his balance, the wind whipping around him, his burnished hair stark against the whirl of white.
A small figure against the power of that storm.
He had been on that boxcar alone as the train wended westward, though which direction it might have taken from there was a crapshoot.
“Maybe he’s reached Santa Monica and we’ll find him there.” Jack let go of me at last, his fingers drawing warm lines on my face as he pulled away.
“Maybe we can all sit and have some coffee,” Morgan said, his sensible suggestion bursting in on the balloon of ideas that had started pushing their way up. “We’ve got donuts.”
I felt Wolfe’s body start.
“Wolfe likes cake donuts,” I said, incongruous to everything else.
“We have cake,” Morgan said. “From the Donut King in Billings. Jack went to fetch them just this morning.”
“Did you see my new truck?” Jack asked, his eyes glinting happily as he curved his elbow around mine, hooking us together so he could pull me where he wanted me to go. “So red. So fucking beautiful.”
I heard Morgan laugh beneath his breath, and a glance back at him as I was being dragged showed me his smile, a quiet undertow of pleasure that his gift had been so well received.
“It reeks redneck,” I said, smiling to show I was joking, secretly hoping he’d take me for a spin in it.
“It does.” Jack’s broad smile told me, as it always did, that he didn’t care what the world thought or that I had always tried to bring him down. A habit that I wanted to stop because Jack deserved better.
Jack led me to the back of the vast store, taking me down an aisle near the bank of windows.
The store had a little bit of a lot of things, from balls of string to oil-stained boxes of nails, so many things it was hard to take it in.
But everything was clean, dusted, and organized.
Jack’s doing, since Morgan walked with a cane and probably couldn’t get on his knees to make sure even the bottom shelves were spic and span.
Jack took me to the far corner, where a coffee station was all set up with a card table, one bench seat, several folding chairs, and a buffet with a coffee maker, cream and sugar, and a half closed box of donuts, the label of which read Donut King.
At the table, sitting there like three kings waiting to give orders, were three older gentlemen. They were dunking their cake donuts in their coffee and talking a mile a minute. When we came up to them, they lifted their heads and stared at us.
“Who’s this, Jack?” said one. The other two nodded, as if they would also very much like to know.
“Old friend,” Jack said. “This is—” He turned to me and paused, and I knew why. I knew his real name, but he didn’t know mine. His raised eyebrows asked me what I wanted to be called.
“Blue,” I said firmly. Blue Bramwell, I wanted to say, because I would never again be known as Crispin Sommerville. “Just blue.”
“Blue,” the man said, blowing out air like a stamp of approval. “Sit yourself down. There’s plenty.”
Morgan made a rude sound in his throat.
“We’ll be on our way in a bit,” one of the other gentlemen said. “Then you fellows can take a turn.”
I sat in one of the folding chairs, feeling like I’d collapsed there, and Jack brought me a coffee, sweet and white, the way I liked it.
“Real mugs,” he said with a grin, looking over at Morgan like this was a long-standing joke between them. “C’mon, everybody. There’s no ceremony to this. Just the good stuff.”
Jack was the host, taking coats, which he slung over the top of an empty shelf, and making coffee in a fancy-looking machine. Bringing out paper plates and napkins, putting the sugar packets and little cream buckets within easy reach.
Wolfe sat next to me, his chair pulled close.
And perhaps he was worried that I might take off looking for Star because I could read the tenseness in his eyes.
I laid my hand on his knee. He looked at me, and what I read there was warmth and steadiness and everything that was Wolfe that I’d come to adore and rely on.
Jack squeezed in next to the older gentleman, and Morgan took the other chair to my right. He sipped his coffee. Someone coughed. And then the older gentleman who’d spoken before held out his hand for me to shake.
“I’m Ambrose,” he said. “The one with the glasses and knit cap hiding his bald head is Maurice, and the quiet one guzzling his coffee is Neville.”
“Pleased to meet you,” I said, words that I’d used at many a society gathering, but which here, I felt like I meant them.
Talk rose around the table. About the weather. About snowpack levels and how the spring thaw might cause the Yellowstone River to overflow its banks. The church bazaar.
Jack, I noticed, listened intently, while Morgan seemed only to be biding his time before he could leave and get back to work.
The conversation felt genial and warm, and I could see why Jack had stayed in town when I’d left him behind.
I saw the ring on his finger and decided I would ask him about it later, this engagement to the man who had taken him in. How that felt.
“Welp,” Ambrose said, slapping his thighs as he stood up. “We’d best be going. Nice to meet you, Blue. Jack always had nice things to say about you.”
“Nice to meet you too,” I said faintly, thinking of the things Jack might have said about me, considering he felt I betrayed him. I hadn’t. He knew that now. They all bundled into their coats and stomped joyfully out of the store.
“They ate all the chocolate-covered ones,” Morgan said with a huff as he moved to the other side of the folding table. Jack was soon seated at his side.
“We can buy more,” Jack said, patting Morgan’s arm like he was soothing a five-year-old. Morgan leaned into the touch, his smile warm. Then Jack looked at Wolfe and me. “Here’s you a question. What’s Mabel going to say?”
“Why does Mabel need to know?” I asked.
Morgan burst out laughing. “Oh, Blue,” he said, his smile wry. “Welcome to Hysham.”