“Yes,” I said, reaching to clasp his face in my hands, kissing him lightly, tipping our foreheads until they touched. “Of course.”
We worked all afternoon, ate dinner, slept hard, and in the morning, the air was so sharp and the sky so blue that we bundled up and went out into it. The snow had a hard, icy film over the top, making snow angels impossible, so we crunched a path down to the river and back again, getting our blood flowing hot beneath our skin.
After breakfast, we were in the workshop again. All the while, Blue would tell me bits and pieces, the story of his life in jigsaw shapes. How he’d been taken to the Reserve after his seventeenth birthday. How he escaped from there so cleverly, I was astonished. How he’d met Nimble and Star, and where he’d traveled with them, north and south, wherever the weather would be kind to them.
His memory of one Fourth of July watching fireworks from an open boxcar door, the explosions reflected in the lake below. How flat the land was in the southwest, how arid and red. How lonely the wail of a band of coyotes as they sang to the moon, while the train wended its way amidst the moonlit scrubland.
How Star had insisted they all take hobo names, which was why Blue didn’t know the real identities of his fellow boxcar boys.
“That was Star’s name for us,” Blue said, biting his lower lip as he looked at one of his sketches for the key rings. “He had all these—guidelines, he called them—that we had to follow, which we did, which was funny since he was the youngest of us.”
“Like he was in charge, maybe,” I said.
“Something like that,” Blue said. “He was good at it, so we went where he said. He had a map in his head and knew the train schedules by heart. But then it got fucked up when something happened on the tracks and the train we were on diverted onto a spur he didn’t know anything about. When the train stopped right before a crossing, Nimble got off for supplies, and before he could get back on, the train left without him.”
“Nimble’s the one with the dark hair, right?”
“Yeah.” Blue slumped in his chair, feet reaching out for the space heater as he looked at his fingers as though searching for information there. “Dark hair. Some freckles. Broad shoulders. And green eyes.” Blue lifted his head to look at me. “We never got along, you see. He was just too happy all the time. It was unnatural. Always looked on the bright side.”
“Freckles,” I said, distracted as I clicked the tracking link for our special paint order, a nagging memory pushing its way to the surface. “And green eyes.”
“He was always happy,” said Blue. “So fucking happy, and that pissed me off, so I pissed him off.” Blue shrugged. “But hewas always a guy you could count on, you know? I guess he couldn’t count on me in the end.”
“You didn’t keep his duffel on purpose,” I said.
“I’ll bet he’s still mad,” Blue said, and the idea of this, that he’d let his friend down, dragged at him, making his shoulders slump and his eyes darken. “He has a right to be.”
I might have been distracted by Blue getting his memory back. By the stories about his family, a group of four people living in the same grand house but who never really connected with each other. By the energy in his eyes, now that he knew who he was. And by the way he kissed me as though he’d been reborn.
It took me a few days, but I finally connected the dots.
Blue had described how the train had stopped right before a crossing. That Nimble had gotten off for supplies. That the train had taken off before Nimble could get back on. Nimble, with the dark hair and green eyes.
The feed and grain was next to a crossing, the very same crossing I’d passed over on my way home before the big blizzard, right before I’d found Blue walking down Diamond Willow Lane.
The day I’d gone into town for supplies in preparation for the blizzard. I’d looked to my right as I drove over that crossing. There’d been a trio of freight engines chuffing as they idled in the cold, unusual enough to remark upon, since there was only one train every twenty-four hours that went by Hysham, and that always happened after midnight. There had been a young man on the ground and two men on top of a boxcar.
After the blizzard, after Blue and I shared something so intimate I couldn’t speak of it aloud, I’d gone to visit Morgan to pick up my special order. He’d had with him, living with him in the apartment above the feed and grain, a young man named Jack.
My tongue traced the name. As I opened the tab of an online store that curated handmade bosals, needing something to keepmy fingers busy, I tested the idea. Jack. Jack be Nimble, like the poem. Of course. Nimble and Jack were one and the same person. It seemed so very obvious now how the two young men were connected.
My fingers paused on the keyboard, the pointer hovering over a six-hundred dollar handmade set, which had used two different colors of rawhide throughout. I could make something like that. I would take my time with it, and someone would buy it because it was exactly what they needed. Then I could make more, and there would always be enough milk in the fridge for Blue’s tea. I wouldn’t have to count the cost of every slice of bread.
Which was not the most important issue at hand. I closed the tab, told myself my hand wasn’t shaking, and looked at Blue, who was busy with a drawing that might be a tad too complicated for what we were working on. But it was pretty. A pine tree for Christmas, but with more definition, shaggy boughs, a shadow along the trunk, snow dappling the ground beneath. All sketched in fine pencil lines, delicate graphite on white notepaper.
I didn’t want to get Blue’s hopes up that Jack at the feed and grain was indeed his friend and traveling companion. And I didn’t know if Blue would even want to see Jack. Especially since Jack or Nimble had been wearing a ring on his left hand.
I needed to tell Blue the truth, but I needed to make sure first. Also, I was a coward and didn’t say anything about it all until Saturday morning.
“I need to go to the feed and grain for leather wax,” I said, finishing up my mug of tea, getting up, patting my pockets as I looked out the back window to the sunny cold landscape, as though I was in a hurry when, really, I had all the time in the world.
I could take Blue with me. Or, I could make sure before putting him in contact with someone he seemed to like and dislike at the same time. A frenemy of sorts.
Blue watched me with careful eyes as I laced up my boots and checked the weather app on my phone. It was ten degrees and sunny, so it was practically balmy in comparison to what we’d been experiencing. The roads had long since been cleared, so that meant I could take the truck. Which would mean there’d be plenty of room to store the two-ounce tin of leather wax that could fit in my pocket and that I didn’t even need. There was already a half-full tin in the workshop.
As I shrugged on my parka, Blue asked, very quietly, “Is this like the time you took the snowmobile?”
I looked at him, pausing, not quite knowing how to respond. I zipped up the parka, pulled my gloves out of the pockets and grabbed a toque to cover my head beneath the hood.
