Lone Star (46 page)

“I'm backing nobody,” Blake said. “And don't tell me to stand down. I just want my fucking money. You know you're not getting out of here without giving it up, so why are you being such an asswipe?”

“Emil,” Johnny said, “don't look at him. Look at
me
. This has nothing to do with him.”

“Then why'd you involve him, toe rag?”

“Shut the fuck up and give them their money.” Johnny leaned to Blake. “Blake,
please
.” Not taking his eyes off Emil, he gestured sideways with his head. “
Chloe
.”

Blake stepped away from Emil and Johnny and toward Chloe.

“Chloe, move back,” he hissed, blocking her with his body. “I won't be able to do this if I'm worrying about you.”

Chloe pressed her small self against the wall, but didn't move far.

Emil and Johnny circled each other like wolves. Emil's fists were clenched. Not Johnny's.

“You stole thousands of dollars,” Johnny said. “You sold their passports for another two thousand dollars. You'll get ten years for that alone. And I don't owe you two grand total.”

“You're so right about that, mate. Spot on. You owe me forty-seven hundred dollars. So I'm still fucking short. And
Rolando wants either his passports back or his money. So there's that.”

“Since they're not his passports, he's fucked because he's getting neither.”

“Oh, he is.”

“So pay him. Stop thieving. Pay somebody.”

“
You
pay somebody!”

“I don't owe you forty-seven hundred fucking dollars!” Now Johnny was yelling.

“Did you forget penalties and interest?”

“What are you, a fucking bank?”

“Worse than that, old chap. I'm the connected guy you owe money to.”

“You're a thief!” Chloe yelled. “You're going to jail for this!”

“Chloe, shh!” Blake stood in front of her.

“Ask your boy here about jail. He knows all about—”

Johnny's fist flew out. Emil tried to weave out of the way, but Johnny was quick. There was a dull thump, and Emil was on his back on the ground, holding his face. Blood streamed from his nose through his fingers. Blake tried to shield Chloe so she wouldn't see. But she saw. Clutching Blake's arm, she gaped at Emil's broken face in fascinated revulsion.

Emil wasn't safe. But he didn't know it. Or maybe he knew it and didn't care. Grunting, guttural, livid, he struggled up, his nose gushing blood, and took a boxing stance against Johnny, who was taller but thinner. They weren't in the same weight class. In Emil's hands flicked a long thin switchblade.

Johnny opened his steady hands to show Emil what was in his. He also wielded a knife, this one much more intimidating, with a long double-edged black blade.

“A World War II military fighting knife,” Johnny said. “The sharpest, strongest, the best. You think you can throw your little pocket job?” He moved into a throwing stance. “Go ahead. But if you miss, mine is going straight into your throat.”

Chloe choked back a scream.

Emil hesitated for only a second. Then he threw his knife. Johnny jerked his head back, and the knife flew past his face, landing on the stones.

“Now what are you going to do, you dumb fuck?” said Johnny. But he didn't throw his knife. He took two long strides to Emil, turned his body sideways and kicked out his leg. Emil was ready. He tried to grab it, but the alligator boot caught Emil in his throat between his clenched fists. This time Emil went down and stayed down.

Chloe was gasping for breath. She and Blake stood stunned, staring at the limp man on the ground. Johnny studied Emil for a few moments and then flipped him over onto his stomach, face planted him into the stone, and yanked off his backpack. He rummaged around until he found what he was looking for: a wad of cash, a wallet, a lighter, cigarettes. Johnny took everything. He even took Emil's ring of keys and dropped it into a sewer grate. He also took some small ziplock bags filled with things Chloe couldn't quite see. He pulled both sets of shoelaces out of Emil's Adidas sneakers, made a quick but elaborate handcuff knot, slipped Emil's wrists into the loops, yanked them tight and then tied the ends together in a gunner's knot over a pipe in the wall. Emil stayed unconscious. Chloe couldn't tell if he was breathing. Blake remained by her side; they were both silent as they watched Johnny. Chloe had never witnessed such violence. It alternately terrified and thrilled her. It was electrifying to be in the presence of someone who could make his body into a weapon that knocked a two-hundred-pound man flat to the concrete.

“Blake, you okay?” she whispered, reaching out to touch the cut in his cheek.

“I'm better than he is,” Blake said, gesturing to Emil. “I'm fine. It's a scratch.”

Finally Johnny slid the knife under his jeans and back into his boot, and jumped up. Facing them, he appraised Blake's face.
He wasn't panting or even heavily breathing. His face wasn't red like Chloe's felt. He was somber and utterly calm.

“Let's go,” he said. “You did good, Blake. But he's not dead. If I'd thrown my knife, he'd be dead, and we'd be safe for a second, but then there'd be a manhunt. Too many people saw us chase him. As it is, we have very little time.”

“To do what?”

“To leave Warsaw. Once he comes to, he'll try to scream. He won't be able to with his throat injury, but guaranteed some nosy passersby will get the cops, and the rest will all be shit. First place they'll look for us is the train station. So come on. Chloe, you okay? You ran so fast before. Why dawdle now?”

Chloe didn't think she was dawdling. She thought she was hurrying. “Leave Warsaw? But it's night.”

“We'll take the midnight train to Krakow.”

“We have no money.”

“You have two Eurail tickets. And I'll give you money.” He ran ahead. For Chloe there was no choice. She raced after him, Blake on her heels.

“Every single thing you get us into turns to shit,” Blake said into Johnny's back when they had almost caught up. Johnny had slowed to a fast walk as they entered the more crowded streets. “Even this. We're fugitives now, is that it?”

“I'd love to chat with you about all the things you think are wrong with me,” Johnny replied, “but I can't. Unless you want to leave them, you still have to get your suitcases from the hotel. Emil is going to wake up. You do understand that you and I beat him and robbed him, right?”

Chloe gave Blake an angry shove. “What's wrong with you?” she whispered. “He got our money back. Be happy.”

“Happy? He's the reason it was stolen to begin with!” Blake didn't care if Johnny heard.

“Tonight we acquitted ourselves well,” Johnny said, striding fast. “I still have to pay my man Chris. He totally saved my ass. Whatever I'm short, I'll make up to you in Krakow.”

“You're always coming up a little fucking short, aren't you?”

Johnny didn't glance back. “I'm trying to make good on a lot of shit, Blake,” he said. “Cut me some fucking slack.”

Slack was something Blake had none of. Chloe saw that. The pace with which Johnny was walking told Chloe that they needed to get out of Warsaw stat, and that he would leave them all behind if he had to. He would leave Chloe behind. He would go his own way, leave nothing but smoke on the water. Whatever happened, Chloe would not be left behind. The gallows awaited. She sped up.

T
HE NIGHT TRAIN TO
K
RAKOW WAS ABOMINABLE.
I
T WAS
loud, lurching, and smelled of fermented alcohol and fermented people. It was a crossroads on the River Styx. Every which way was hell.

To make matters worse, their sliding door wouldn't stay latched. It kept popping open. They would hear chaos from down the corridor, wailing dogs and children, fighting adults, unrestrained laughter, maniacal sermons, all in a foreign tongue, which made it all the more frightening because it left Chloe to imagine the reasons for the purgatory fires.

Inside the compartment was not a walk in the park either.

“So what did Emil mean,” Blake asked Johnny after they settled in, “about you knowing jail?”

“I dunno.” Johnny leaned back, pulling his beret down over his eyes. “I don't remember him saying it.”

“Really? It was the last thing the douchebag said before you gave him an injury that might permanently stop him from talking. It's rather surprising that you can't remember why you wanted to knife him in the throat.”

“It wasn't because of his words, that's for fucking sure,” Johnny said.

“So was there jail or wasn't there? Is that why you didn't want the police involved?” Blake held a cold can of Coke to his swelling face.

“I didn't know this was an interrogation cell,” Johnny said, less mildly. “I thought I was on a train, trying to sleep. I was awake all night last night, you know, getting your shit back.”

“Didn't get my shit back,” interjected Mason.

“Mase, what did you have in there?” asked Chloe.

“Nothing. Just things. My journal.” Mason sighed and stopped speaking.

“Or mine,” Blake said. “And I'm just asking a question, Johnny, trying to have a conversation.”

Johnny refused to explain his connection to Emil, refused to elaborate on their history, or why he owed Emil money, or where he had vanished for twelve months, leaving Chloe to imagine the rest, the worst. She wanted to ask Johnny if he was sure he left Emil alive, if he was
sure
.
She was afraid he would lie and say yes. What was more frightening, to be lied to or to not know? Chloe decided to be lied to was worse, so she didn't ask. She wished someone would start talking about something light, but no one did, not even Johnny. She wished the unreliable lights would go out for just a minute, so Johnny could lean across and kiss her lips like before. But they didn't. And he didn't.

The five of them were alone in the fluorescently lit-up compartment, alone with themselves, alone with their thoughts. No one was writing in journals that no longer existed. Blake, his eye and cheek turning black and blue, looked as if he would never write another word in his life. Mason was lost somewhere far beyond the train to Krakow. He was spread out on the seats next to Chloe, his head away from her, his eyes closed. Chloe knew what Hannah was thinking. Hannah's expression was but a poor mask to the torment inside her, both physical and eternal. Hannah had barely reacted to any of it: to the story of Emil, to their escape from Warsaw, or even to the injury to Blake's face. She looked happy only when Johnny counted out Emil's stack of dollars, which numbered in the twelve hundreds, before giving Chris seven hundred of it. How Hannah protested! “Without him, you'd have no passports,” Johnny explained. “I owe him
more than this.” Though the way Chris genuflected, agog before the inadequate greenbacks, made Chloe think the boy had never held more than a twenty in his hopeless life.

Chloe wondered aloud why Emil would carry the stolen money on his person. Johnny replied that Emil carried it on himself for the same reason they had carried it on themselves.

“What's the moral here?” Mason asked.

“That you can be robbed anywhere,” said Johnny. “By anyone. So be meek like sheep but wise like serpents. Never leave behind what you can't part with.”

Mason made a throaty noise that surprised Chloe; he sounded as if he was about to cry.

“Mason, what's the matter?”

“Nothing. Just tired.”

Blake pointed out that they had never, not once, been robbed in Fryeburg.

“Duh,” Johnny said. “That's because no one gets robbed in the Garden of Eden.”

For an hour Chloe thought about what Johnny said, while Johnny slept, and Hannah and Mason pretended to sleep. So did Blake. Only Chloe's eyes were open, engraving the sleeping Johnny Rainbow onto the walls of her lungs so that later on, with every breath, she could exhale him.

She wanted to be far away from all the trouble, and for Johnny to be far from it, and for both of them to be far from it together. Whenever she thought ahead to Krakow, her heart stopped in her chest, for it didn't take her long to remember that after Krakow there was no more of anything. He was headed to Italy, and they to Spain. She sat and prayed for the train to break down, to become lost in the untrammeled wilderness. Johnny slept at the window across from her, next to Hannah. His head bobbed back and forth. With every lurch his feet bumped against Chloe's feet. She wanted to cry, to park on a bench, to ask him to sing, to beg for faith that it would all work out all right in the end, for him, for her, for them. She wanted to climb into his
sleeping lap and hold his chocolate head to her breasts. Oh God. You and me, Johnny Rainbow. What else is left? Nothing. Just you and me.

He woke up after a particularly rough jolt, woke up refreshed and smiling. He stepped out for a minute, and when he returned, he was sociable, friendly, all his cares put away, all the dark days forgotten.

“It's amazing what a little sleep can do for a person's disposition,” he said cheerfully.

“Maybe
that's
what's wrong. Blake hasn't slept,” Chloe quipped, and Blake opened his eyes, one of them bruised, and scowled at her as if she had betrayed him. She flushed and was guilty, but also wanted to giggle. She just wanted everything to be normal, to be like it was. She wanted to tickle Blake out of his bad mood that had lasted half of Europe, wanted to shake and joke Mason out of his stupor. Only poor Hannah's plight continued to confound her. It was unsaveable by comedy.

Blake asked if Johnny was
ever
going to give them their money. Johnny handed Blake almost six hundred dollars over Hannah's lap.

“We're still short by more than five hundred,” said Hannah, who was always awake and alert when money was changing hands.

“Whatever, Hannah, this is fine,” Blake said. “He doesn't have to get us the rest. We'll be fine.”

“No, no,” said Johnny. “I know I'm a little short. I'll get it for you by tomorrow night.”

“How? By robbing somebody else?”

“Nice,” Johnny said. His disposition soured.

“Blake, stop!” That was Chloe.

“Yeah, Blakie, I know you think you're being funny, but you're not funny,” said Hannah. “Johnny will sing.” She half smiled,
listing sideways against Johnny. “Johnny, I wish you could make everything else in the world all right by your singing, like you did today.”

Well, yes, singing. Also by high-kicking a fiend in the throat. But by singing, too, sure.

Amiably Johnny straightened Hannah out.

“Some things you can't fix with a song,” he said. “Not many. But
some
.”

“That is so true,” said Hannah.

Chloe watched Johnny watching Hannah. It was as if he knew.

“Hey, dudes, dudettes, cheer up,” Johnny said with an unperturbed smile. “It has all worked out. We're out of Warsaw. You still have nearly two weeks left. Everything is almost back to its old self again.”

“Really?” Hannah said eagerly, and then more skeptically, “You think so?” As if he were a palm reader.

“I said almost. Wait till you see Krakow. You'll forget everything. I'll take you to Oskar Schindler's factory, if we have time. And the following day, after Auschwitz, maybe you'll have a chance to visit Katowice.”

“Won't be time,” Blake said curtly.

“Well, true. But if you have half a day, you should visit the great war museum there. There used to be a German prison camp in Katowice. For Soviet officers. Quite a place. Only photographs remain of it.”

“I think we're done with many things,” Blake said, “among them war museums.”

“Except for Auschwitz.”

Hannah groaned. “Do we
have
to? Blake is right. I feel like we've seen everything in Treblinka.”

“Auschwitz is not a field,” Johnny said. “There are things there that once you see, you will never unsee.”

“That's true of many things on this joy trip,” Blake said.

“You decide what's best,” Johnny said, unbaited. “You have a long haul ahead of you to Barcelona. Krakow is a fantastic city,
but you're right, you might want to limit your time there and maximize your time in Spain.” He didn't look at Chloe when he spoke, and she didn't look at him. “When you're in Barcelona, don't forget to compare your travails to Saint Eulalia,” he went on. “Eulalia was a thirteen-year-old virgin who was put in a barrel by the Romans. The inside of the barrel was lined with knives, and they rolled this barrel around the city. Which is why the tortured girl is the city's patron saint. Because her innocent blood runs on every street.”

“Sometimes I feel a little like Saint Eulalia,” said Hannah.

And Chloe thought, hmm, really? And when she glanced across at Johnny, she saw he was thinking it, too. He knows! He absolutely knows. She almost smiled, but Blake was watching her, and she didn't. She stared away into the darkness past the window.

Why was it, she wondered, that in books love was the only thread stitching together a narrative, but in real life, it was only part of the tapestry? In real life there was hunger and irritation. There was rejoicing. There was anger, a desire to read, to sleep, to sing, a quest for revenge, physical ailments, much discomfort. Mosquito bites and runny noses, fainting at the worst times, missing trains and buses, being robbed, fighting in alleys, being stoned. There was terror, real and imagined, and a meadow full of ghostly dread. There was living with a baby inside you fathered by a man you didn't love, riding trains next to another man you didn't love.

And there was love, too, galloping like a paladin through the boggy bayou. There was love.

“Blake,” Hannah said, “why are you so grumpy? Is Johnny right? Do you just need a little nap and you'll feel better?”

“Johnny is not right.”

“So what is it, then? Is it your face?”

“It's not my face. Not a lot to be happy about, that's all.”

Hannah said nothing. Hannah could hardly disagree. She and Chloe shared a blink, a dim nod.

“Chloe,” Johnny said, “I noticed that Blake stopped calling you Haiku. Am I wrong?”

“I don't know.” She wouldn't acknowledge either man with a glance that signaled admission or confession. And Blake didn't justify his lack of teasing-moniker usage, which only signaled both admission and confession to everyone. Good thing no one cared.

“Chloe, did your mother ever tell you any scary Eastern fables as bedtime stories?” Johnny draped one leg over the other, stretching his arms across the long seat.

“No. Do you mean fables from Pembina? Also no.”

“Did you ever hear of a fable from the Orient about a traveler chased by a wild beast?”

She shook her head. The others pretended not to hear, but everyone was listening.

“Escaping from the beast, the man jumps into the deadfall, a hole in the ground dug out as a trap for bears. But at the bottom of this well, there is a dragon that opens its fiery jaws to swallow him. The traveler clings to the side of the ditch, afraid to climb out and be torn apart by the beast, and afraid to jump down, where the mouth of the dragon awaits him. He grabs on to a root in the earth and hangs on for his life. After a while his hands grow tired, and he knows that soon he will have to let go and surrender to the destruction above or below. Still he hangs on. And then he sees that two mice have settled on the stem of the twig he clings to and are going round and round, gnawing at it. Soon the twig will snap, and he will fall. Desperate and doomed, he hangs on and glances around. He sees nearby a few drops of honey on the leaves of the twig. Leaning sideways, he reaches them with his tongue, licks them and murmurs, ‘Ah! How
sweet
!'”

Chloe, heart thumping, waited. The others waited, less patiently. Johnny smiled.

“My grandfather,” he said, “tells this story once a year at Christmas dinner. He raises his glass in a toast and says
to all forty of us, your mother and grandmother, the only woman I have shared my life with, is my drop of honey. Merry Christmas.”

There was a silence filled with screeching wheels, moaning old women, belches, sniffles, and out-of-tune laments. Someone was crying as if they were dying.