“I’ll be fine!” I push it back at him. “We’ll be out before we know it.”
He pulls me closer so he can talk in my ear without Billy hearing. “We’re in the Cascade Tunnel.” His voice is tight — no arrogance or judgment — and there’s no smile in it at all. “It’s the longest rail tunnel in North America.”
A chill wraps around me.
“How long?”
He doesn’t answer.
“Tell me!”
“Eight miles.”
At the rate we’re going, that could take a lifetime.
“Keep that over your face, Billy!” I shout, and pull him into me, as if my body will protect him. He’s still coughing. Not wheezing yet.
Lloyd thrusts his handkerchief at me again, and this time I take it. I can’t see him in the dark, but he’s jostling, all elbows and quick movements. It’s only when his shirt flaps against my face that I realize he’s taken it off.
I’m reminded of It Happened One Night. Billy and I sneaked into the cinema somewhere in Idaho to see it. The real Clark Gable takes off his shirt, and the crowd was shocked into raucous outrage, which made me and Billy laugh like loons. We’d seen that and more in the jungles.
This is different.
Intimate.
Lloyd leans into me, his bare arm kissing my cheek.
“Use this instead!” he shouts. “It’s thicker!”
He presses his shirt to my nose. It’s warm and smells like coffee and Oxydol laundry soap — like radio serials and better times. I want to bury myself in it.
I cradle Billy between my knees, pressing the shirt to his face as well. Each breath he takes is a struggle I feel in my own chest. They come in time with the chug of the train, like the effort it takes is what’s pulling us up the mountain. I count them, hoping to tick away the miles, feeling more helpless than I did the day the bank came knocking. More helpless than when I found my dad with the straight razor at his own throat.
Billy starts to wheeze.
“What’s the matter with him?” Lloyd shouts.
“Asthma.”
“Oh, God,” Lloyd curses. “He’s going to die in here.”
He drops his forehead to my knee. Just another scared kid.
“He is not!” I shout.
I wrap my arms around both of them. Billy chokes on each teaspoon of air. The train shudders, howling with the effort to crawl its way out of this hole.
I think of the kids who came into Dad’s shop for their first haircuts, screaming bloody murder in his cracked leather chair.
My dad talked to them the way you would a wild animal. Sat them still. Made them trust him.
That’s the voice I find inside me.
“Breathe.”
And we do.
“Breathe.”
Even Billy.
The train launches from the mouth of the tunnel with a gasp like a drowning man, and the air freshens between gusts of soot and brimstone.
In the light of the fresh-risen moon, I can see Billy’s face, the dark hollows of his eyes.
“Am I going to die?” He gasps.
“Not if I can help it.”
And he believes me. He believes me enough to keep breathing.
I hold him close until the tension fades and he takes a long draft without it catching. I swipe at my eyes, my fingers gritty with soot and cinders.
“Well.” I look at Lloyd. “I guess you’ve got the perfect string to pull for your story.”
“It’s your story.”
“Yeah.” I take a deep breath, my lungs no longer scalded by ash. “But you’re the one getting paid to write it.”
I give him back his shirt — smudged and blackened — and try not to watch as he puts it on. Try not to think about the clean, familiar scent of him pressed against me.
That’s another thing these hard times have taken from me. The chance to have a beau.
“I won’t get paid.”
That snaps my attention back to his face. The corner of his mouth lifts in not-quite-a-smile.
“This is just a trial. To see if I can do it.” Lloyd looks down at the notepad in his lap. “To see if I can write the story he wants.”
“He wants you to write that the jungle is dangerous,” I say. “That we’re all criminals.”
“I can’t do that now.” He flips over a page of notes, a long scrawl of Billy’s words — and mine — across the paper. “I don’t want to tell untruths because it’s convenient or expected. I want to dig deep into the truth and aerate it so roots can take hold.”
I try to believe in a world where the truth is fertile soil and not hot, dry dust spread fine by the winds.
He smiles again. “I’ve been looking for a chance to get out of Wenatchee, and I guess you gave it to me.”
I start cramming things back into my bindle. Bandanna. A crust of bread. My enameled tin cup. I look over at Billy, sound asleep and snoring, still a wheeze in his chest.
“You don’t want to leave a good thing, Lloyd. This isn’t any kind of life.” I glare at him. “Don’t you dare romanticize it.”
He holds up both hands like I’m Public Enemy Number One, waving a pistol.