Page 17 of Boy Blue
“What’re those?” I asked, pointing like a distracted small child at the stack of small boxes, the top one crumpled in the corner, and the clipboard of papers on top.
“Gimp string,” he said. His shoulders went down as though he was defeated. “For lanyards.”
Oddly, I knew what a lanyard was. Lanyards were strips of colorful cloth that held clear plastic sleeves for name tags. But I couldn’t see the problem. Was he supposed to make name tags? I could help. I had pretty good handwriting, or at least I thought I did.
He looked at me. I could see right away by his expression that I simply didn’t get it. With a deep sigh, he put the clipboard on the edge of the table he used as his desk, and put the topmost box on top of that. The box looked heavy, a dense cube of something. He tore open the box, though by the edge of the lid I could see it’d been torn open before. By a hasty hand. A careless hand.
Inside the box were spools of what looked like flat plastic thread, all colors of the rainbow. One of each. The other boxes must contain the same, which meant that there were miles and miles of bright plastic thread. Which seemed out of place in his treasure cave of leather and oil and shiny steel needles.
“They want lanyards,” he said. He didn’t touch the spools, but he glared at them. “Lanyards for the Christmas bazaar.” He picked up the clipboard, shoving the box roughly aside, and showed me a piece of paper that had light sketches on it. “Woven lanyards.”
That’s when I got it, what he meant by lanyards, rather than what I meant. He meant things woven out of flat plastic thread to hold keychains and ID holders and so forth, into square or round—lanyards. One of the sketches had been drawn to look like Santa Claus’s face had been woven into the lanyard, but the effect was muddied by many erasures.
The insight into what this meant was written on Wolfe’s face. Gone was the concern I had seen when he’d tended to me. Gone was the mindless pleasure of the physicality of shoveling the path between the cabin and the workshop. Gone was the half-lidded attention on his breakfast or the dishes. Instead, was a pained, focused awareness that he was being asked to work with plastic rather than the supple, more visceral feel of leather beneath his fingers.
I could have wagered that the influential Mabel herself had asked him to do this thing. For the church. For the town. And he was going to do it, even if it killed him. Because maybe he had no other choice.
“I could help,” I said, an offer so spontaneous it surprised me. “I could weave or braid or whatever.”
With a wave of his hand, he dismissed my offer. “I’ve been contracted to do this, not you.”
“But why not?” I asked.
I stepped up to him because that was the way I dealt with things. With people. With ideas I didn’t like. It had gotten me in trouble before; I sensed this. He could have swatted me away like a fly. But he didn’t. He stood his ground, looking down atme from beneath his dark brows, as if contemplating how fast he could get rid of me before he actually had to answer.
“I’m eating your food. Causing you extra work.”
Something in my memory laughed at me for even wanting to help because, in an older life, a dreamy gray-edged memory of a life, if I wanted something I’d called down to Bettina. In my former life. In a big house. Me, the golden prince with nary a concern in the world except whether or not it was worth it to expend the energy to even call down for what I wanted.
“I’d like to help,” I said, brushing all of that away. “I can learn. I can make them. Then you won’t have to touch the plastic at all.”
To my surprise, this made him laugh, a short, high sound in his throat. “That’s the truth of it,” he said. “When I was—” Then he stopped, and I sensed he’d been about to tell me a story about himself. Which might have been good to know because I had the wild idea that if I knew more about him, then I could find out more about myself.
“I was an apprentice to a man named Ricky Patterson,” Wolfe said as he began reassembling the box, placing it on top of the stack of cubes of plastic thread. “He taught me everything I know. Plastic just doesn’t belong.”
As to his reasons for not explaining this to Mabel, they were his own. I knew this because he changed the subject.
“On Wednesday, I need to go into Hysham. For food. To drop off some sketches to Mabel.” He looked at me, eyes stern. “We’ll zip into Billings to get you some boots. No, don’t argue.” He raised his hand to stop me. “I was also supposed to have finished samples of the lanyards. Also for Mabel. Maybe you can help me with that.”
“Okay,” I said, the word coming out of my chest, throaty and deep, as though it had been rescued from oblivion by his simpleapproval and the idea of having a purpose. Maybe not forever. But for now. And that was better than nothing.
CHAPTER 8
blue
On Tuesday, the weather took a break from itself. The wind died down to a standstill, and the clouds were gone. The sky was a brassy blue, and the sunlight reflected so hard on the waves of snow beyond the window that I had to squint against as I sat at the table in the kitchen across from Wolfe.
I watched very closely as Wolfe made the tea: five tea bags, a whistling kettle, a blue teapot. He also made oatmeal in a pot on the stove. Made bacon in a pan; there were only three pieces.
He served up the food, and when we sat down, he sliced up a single banana on top of the oatmeal in the bowls. His bowl contained less than mine and had only a pat of butter and some cinnamon because the rest of the butter was in my bowl, along with the last of the milk.
“Are we out of food?” I asked, looking at the way the steam rose from the cups of tea, waves scattered in sunlight.
Part of my brain attempted to dredge up names as to who to complain to, who could fix the situation. The other part of my brain drew back in horror. The kitchen was small, and I never sensed that it was packed to the brim with food. I didn’t sense it now, but I did know that I’d been eating between sleeping.
I’d never gone hungry the whole time I’d been there, not even for a second, and yet here we were, sharing a single banana and three pieces of bacon that waited on the plate to be evenly divided up. If I had been Wolfe and I knew a storm was coming, I would have purchased enough food for one man, not two. Hence, the limited food supply meant for one man, not one man and a greedy guest.
“No,” Wolfe said. He shook his head, sipped his tea, and started eating his oatmeal. “I have a small freezer. It has meat in it. And bags of frozen blueberries.” He looked at me, then shifted his gaze to those bits of steam coming off the tea, fading in the warmth of the kitchen. “I don’t like blueberries, but they were on sale.”
