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 Talismanby 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, theworn 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 nowJack was on my horizon. Within reach. The question was, what was I going to do about it?
CHAPTER 25
blue
We’d made it to Port Aransas, a place that smelled like sea salt and engine oil, the sky hazed blue-gray with sea mist in an ever-present low wind, and got off the train to go to the docks. And found that even for a shitcrap job like baiting hooks with hunks of raw chum, thawing in the sunshine into a bright, pulpy, smelly mess, we were underqualified.
The serious fishing charters turned us away inside of a heartbeat. The party boats looked us up and down and declared us stupid for even trying. We didn’t have enough calluses. We couldn’t reassure them we wouldn’t get seasick all the way out in the middle of that blue body of water, tied up to an oil derrick, the waves going up and down, up and down. They wanted deckhands with names like Willie and Mack and Bud, and laughed and waved us away.
We were too young, or we looked too young, though I remembered feeling old as I saw the sad expression on Star’s face because one of his plans had not worked out. Most of his plans had worked out just fine, almost always better than fine, so I didn’t want him to feel bad about it.
Nimble had tried to cheer him up and asked him to pick a new destination we could head to. Like the Narrows Bridge up in Tacoma, though I expect Nimble had pulled that one out of his ass because Star had been talking about it two nights prior.
We’d ended up getting back on the train to head west, chugging across the desert landscape on a flatcar with no shade, into temperatures that, in April, had no business being as warm as they were. New Mexico, also, was prettier than I thought it would be. Arizona was an arid wasteland full of scrub and even more full of emptiness.
We headed north from there, thankfully, the fresh air in Utah suiting me better, the landscape more varied. Train bulls less adamant about throwing us off trains, seeing us but not chasing us, for reasons that, to this day, still puzzled me.
And now Jack. Not Nimble, Jack. Jack be Nimble. My friend. My frenemy. He’d been close all this while. Living at the feed and grain. I needed to see him, but it was an obligation I was not quite up to.
The air was cold, this close to the Yellowstone River, the sluggish water seeming to stir the air, whipping it even colder. The back of my neck was cold. I pulled up the hood of the parka, Wolfe’s scent around me: leather oil, tea, warmth. Bringing to me a sense of place, one where I belonged.
