“Sorry about the ride.”
“What?! Are you trying to kill us der, boy?”
Calvin looked at the woman, and then she smiled at him. It was all the thanks he needed, her smile. There was something poetic in it, the same quality that made people stand in front of the Mona Lisa and stare.
Stephen looked at his mother. He’d noticed that her accent was coming out with the stress of the travel. He looked at the guy who had just saved them, and they both broke into a grin. Stephen jabbed his mom in the ribs. “Kill us der… Mom? Der? Really?”
Stephen smiled at Calvin again and nodded his head to the older youth. He did it in a way that said Hey, nice rescue and stuff. Calvin looked at the two of them, these yellow suits, whom he’d just rescued from a gunfight in a snowfield… and he screwed up his face. It should have been an awkward moment, but it wasn’t.
He looked at them with his most inquisitive look… and asked, “Hey… got anything to eat?”
“You looked like those guys on Breaking Bad,” Calvin said. There he was again, referring to a television show. The two of them just laughed.
“Yeah, I guess we did,” Stephen answered. “Good thing, too. I was about to go all Heisenberg on them.” Calvin and Stephen laughed again. They were sitting with their backs against the truck while Veronica scouted out an area to see if she could find some little nook or cranny where they might hide throughout the night.
“We’ll attend to the vehicle in the morning,” she said. And then she’d gone to scout.
She’d only been gone fifteen minutes, and the two teens were already talking like old friends, remembering what that other world was like, as if it weren’t really gone.
“Dude… did you see that one show that was going to come out on F/X?” Stephen paused. That was one way to tell that the boys were beginning to reckon with the new world. They’d begun to talk about the old life in tenses that showed they’d once thought for a moment that it might return, but now they no longer did.
“Yeah … that show that was gonna be about Russian spies in America? What was it gonna to be called?”
“Oh yeahyeahyeah. That one from the Cold War, with Reagan and Michael Jackson and stuff. Ummm, The Americans?” Stephen said, nodding his head. “I saw the preview. It looked like it was going to be good.”
“Dude, that chick on that show was hot,” Calvin said, looking at Stephen and smiling. “She looked like she could kick some butt.”
“Yeah,” Stephen said. He smiled and thought of a girl in a bodega in that other world. “I’d betray my country for a chick like that.”
“Yeah… a chick like that, or…” Calvin made a little mock motion of sniffing the air, “some French fries.”
Veronica could hear their guffaws from several hundred yards away as she walked toward them in silence through the night.
Veronica stayed up through the night, watching. She had her pistol and she hoped she’d never be forced to use it. They’d walked a good quarter-mile into the forest before bedding down for the night. Stephen and Calvin slept in fits and starts. Before morning broke, she roused them, and they put on their clothes while she put out some food for them. She hummed a song under her breath, and occasionally she’d break out into a small bit of lyric. She sang the line in its lilting, sing-song herkyjerkyness. She swung her head to the side when she did it, her long ropy braids whipping over her shoulder. Then she stopped, and caught herself. She’d thought she was humming under her breath, but she’d actually sung out loud. She stopped, and the boys looked at her. She was caught like a deer in the headlights.
“What’s that song, Mrs. D?” Calvin was already fitting in the way that kids like Calvin do, seamlessly. He was already calling her “Mrs. D.” He looked at her, expectantly.
“Oh, just a song that I was listening to before,” Veronica said. As she did so, she waved out into the nothingness, as if to say all this. Stephen rolled his eyes. “Oh, again, with the Clay stuff.” Veronica cut him a sharp glance. It was clear that whatever “the Clay stuff” was had been a topic of some conversation between them. Calvin looked at them both, wondering what he’d stepped into.
“There was this guy that came by our house during the storm.” Stephen indicated with his hand somewhere back there. “He was cool. He and my mom connected. They listened to this group called the Mountain Goats, and…,” He rolled his eyes at his mom.
“What? It’s a good song,” Veronica said.
“I agree,” Calvin said. Stephen looked at him sideways like a sibling who realizes he has competition. Stephen made a mock look of pain.
“No, really. They’re cool,” Calvin said. “I mean, I haven’t heard the new new stuff, but they are always good.” Stephen stepped back as if to say You’re killing me.
Veronica laughed at their antics. “The thing that really bothers Stephen about the Clay situation,” Veronica said, nodding her head to Stephen as if they’d had this conversation before, “I may have overstepped my bounds when the man stayed with us. I took some poems of his and had them bound without his permission. Stephen thought that what I did was a horrible breach of privacy. But I couldn’t help myself.” She looked at Stephen and he looked at Calvin. “Well, some of them were…” she searched through the air to find the word, “…lovely.”
They were walking low along a hedge at the edge of a paddock, keeping their eyes peeled across the pristine field of white. The boys could tell that she was bound to go on and so they let her.
“There was this one poem that described a Van Gogh painting. And I loveVan Gogh. It was partly him who inspired me to paint! Anyway, the poem described the lush fields and broken doors on their hinges, and the sea, and the sea of faces that are found in his paintings. But it was more than just about the color. It was also about the loneliness of being Van Gogh, in his brilliance, and his madness. We almost never knew him, you know? It was only through the support and the promotion of his brother that he became well-known. Otherwise, he was an outcast. In Gauguin, he had a friend who seemed to understand him, but Gauguin was always promising to come and see him. He rarely did.”
Veronica and the boys walked circumspectly as they talked. She indicated to the wider world with her hand, the white of the field, the hint of blue invading the gray of the morning sky. “Anyway,” she said, “it was a lovely poem.”
With that, Calvin, Stephen, and Veronica found themselves standing at the back bumper of the rusted red pickup truck in the brown-white slush of the accident. “It was a nail strip,” Veronica told them. “I found it last night when I was out on patrol. Whoever put it there will be around soon enough to check it. We have to work quickly.”
Standing in the thin blue light of morning, their breath rose up before them. It rose in little puffs against the coldness of the air.
From the Poems of C.L. Richter