Page 54 of Boy Blue
Blue sat to lace up his new boots and borrowed my parka, which swamped his slender frame, the dark blue even darker against his fair hair. And my gloves, which were right there in the pockets. He zipped up, left the hood back, pushing the dark blue fake fur back with a black-gloved hand. Then he went out into the sunshiny day, balmy at ten degrees compared to what we’d been having.
I wanted to go with him, but he deserved his minute. I would wait and watch and make a pot of tea in the cherry-red teapot. Watch the steam rising from the spout as the pot sat on thecounter in front of the kitchen window. We’d figure it out, but he needed his minute. I intended to give it to him.
CHAPTER 24
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 atie. 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 hadhis 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, adiverse 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 awhile, 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.
