nimble
Nimble had gotten a damn fine night’s sleep on the floor in front of Aunt Oralee’s couch. Despite his initial anxiety over sleeping without Blue or Star to curl up with, the moans of the storm, combined with the knowledge that there was another human being not too far away, had sent him easily to sleep.
The high, lonely whistle of a train shortly after midnight had woken him long enough to listen to the measured signal. Two short. One long. One short. He’d fallen back asleep after that, as though the train had been singing him a lullaby.
He’d felt awkward when they sat down to breakfast, because once he’d made the bacon and eggs—so much easier on a real stove rather than a rusty coffee can or a small, unpredictable fire in a ring of stones—he’d been so hungry, he’d wanted to eat everything in sight. Luckily, Morgan hadn’t seemed to mind. He’d even given Nimble the last piece of bacon. Which was pretty nice of him.
But then, he was a nice guy underneath it all, even if, when Nimble had delivered the tray of coffee and cookies, he’d been the recipient of another of Morgan’s glowers.
Morgan was grumpy because his knee hurt him, and he was grumpy because his aunt had died and saddled him with a business he had no interest in. And he was probably grumpy because he’d felt obliged to take Nimble in, even when he’d not wanted to.
Well, he had taken Nimble in, and now Nimble had several days to wait out the storm. And then what? Hop the next freight headed west?
Except maybe it might be nice to stay in one place for a while. Where there was an amazing hot shower at the end of the hall and fresh food from the ancient fridge.
On the other hand, all he knew of Hysham was the feed and grain. Morgan’s companionship—and who knew how long that would last. He’d be better off heading to the coast as soon as he could.
He’d scooted upstairs after delivering Morgan’s coffee and now stood in the kitchen, hands on the sink, watching the white snow snap and whirl against the windowpanes. The kitchen air felt cool and still with only him in the room.
He’d gotten used to always being on the move, the train rocking beneath him, grit and diesel in his lungs, on his skin, in his hair. Being filthy all the time had become a way of life. Balancing while on a moving train was such a stark contrast to standing in this kitchen with nothing to do but figure out how to spend his day. There wasn’t a TV, but there were plenty of books.
Mostly he needed to stay busy and not obsess over what would happen when the blizzard ended. Morgan would send him out the door, and Nimble would make his way to the coast, there to bask in the sun.
He’d probably never see Blue and Star again, and that would be fine with him. They’d let him down, and now he was on his own, which was how it should have been to begin with. Accepting their invitation had been a mistake after all.
Without them, he could have taken a more direct route and could already be soaking up the sun on a California beach, rather than what had happened. The three of them gallivanting around, heading south to Jacksonville, Florida, only to decide the beach sand wasn’t fine enough. Then to Galveston Island, Texas, where the sand was like powder but the air felt gritty with dust and the smell from the oil rigs way out in the Gulf of Mexico.
From Texas, they’d lollygagged their way on a slow flatcar train back to New Orleans, where they moved around the French Quarter, picking the pockets of careless tourists to pay for beignets and muffulettas and amazing chicory coffee, and almost got themselves arrested when they’d irritated too many people.
That had been followed by a quick journey to Ludington, Michigan, on a train carrying a double-decker load of metal boxes, hugging the shoreline of the mighty Mississippi River, all because Star had a thing about lighthouses and told them it’d be beautiful there.
It had been. The sky was a hard blue without a cloud to be seen, and the sand was just about snow white and very soft. The air warm and fine and clear.
That had been a beach without an ocean. Lovely and peaceful. Though not what Nimble’d had in mind. At all.
The lighthouse had been fun, too, even though there’d been a pair of bratty young boys who felt they owned the place and kept getting in everyone’s way. Then the parents of those boys had called the cops to throw Nimble, Blue, and Star out of the small park.
Which didn’t matter. They left on their own and walked miles southward along the beach, their sturdy boots flung over their shoulders by the bootlaces, splashing through the shallow water, getting soaked up to their thighs. The walk back to the trainstation in Ludington had taken hours, but Star informed them the train would be waiting for them when they got there.
Star was funny like that. He was the smallest of the three of them, as well as the youngest, as far as Nimble could tell, but he had acted like he was the boss, telling them which freight they were going to hop and how far they’d take it. He knew where the train would stop, and when, and for how long.
He knew where in each little town they could quickly get water and food. He’d always been writing in a slender black notebook with whatever pen or pencil he could find in his pockets.
Nimble had wondered what was in that notebook, but the first time he’d taken a peek, the writing had been too small to read easily and looked to be about train timetables, anyway.
The second time, a night when they’d found shelter in a boxcar on a slow-moving train headed across the length of Iowa to the tune of a silent lightning storm, he’d idly pulled the notebook from Star’s backpack after Blue and Star had fallen asleep, and he’d read about Star’s thoughts of home and his dreams of being a cartographer. Nimble didn’t even know what that was, but figured it had something to do with maps.
There’d been some writing about Nimble and Blue, but Nimble had closed the notebook at that point and put it back where he’d found it, watching to confirm, in the white-sliced light of the storm, that Blue and Star hadn’t woken while he’d been snooping.
The train had been rocking too hard for them to build a fire in the small metal coffee can, so Nimble had ridden in the darkness, keeping watch until morning, and Star had never known that Nimble had been reading his notebook. He’d never looked after that, not wanting to see anything so personal or revealing. He liked his own secrets kept, so it was only right that he keep Star’s.
They’d all kept secrets from each other, which included Nimble knowing them only by their adventure names.
Nimble figured Star insisted on that partly because of the history behind it, plus it meant it’d be harder to trace them back to their families. If Blue and Star had families anything like Nimble’s, or they had anywhere near the reason he’d left home, then the nicknames made sense.
Still, standing there, on his own in Morgan’s kitchen with all those thoughts in his head looking for a place to land, it was hard to focus on anything beyond the yellow-and-white walls or the gray-and-white swirl of snow, the frost on the windows making jagged circles with only the middle part letting him see out into the blizzard.
At least the building seemed fairly solid amidst the storm, and Nimble knew he should be grateful and not be twisting himself up over what he couldn’t control or predict.
