Christian kept looking at him, to see if he was kidding, his hand starting to hurt from the pressure Inge was putting on it.
“Don’t just stare at me and do nothing. You best figure something out for you and the girl. Quickly,” Klimek warned. “It was an INS agent who gave them to me. He had a gun and everything. Bet the train will be crawling with them and I wouldn’t want to get on their wrong side by not having your tag on a string. Pretty simple request that you can’t seem to follow.”
Instead of arguing, or asking how he should have intuited that he bring string, Christian reached into his bag and took out Jack’s shoe. He took Inge’s tag and tied each end of the lace to a little hole on either side. He leaned down, took the shoelace out of one of his own shoes, and did the same thing. On Inge, the tag fell where it should, but his barely made it around his neck.
Once the tags were straightened, Klimek reached out his hand for Christian’s and gave it a firm shake. “Could be worse, kid,” he said with a forced smile. “And don’t forget all your friends at the Home.”
“Right. I won’t. Thanks,” said Christian, thinking of everyone but Klimek.
“I’ll wait until you are both safely on. But you better go talk to the agents now and figure out the details. You’re almost eighteen. You should start doing these things on your own.”
Christian wanted to remind Klimek that he had only been at the Home for seven weeks, and not for ten years, but he held back. He was aware that he was far more babied by his mother than any of the children at the Home had been by Klimek or even the kindly Braque.
He wasn’t sure if it was the shoe constantly thrown against his cheek, Jack’s fist against his nose, or his concussion, but he knew that the punches he endured in the Home had done him some good. Tucked in between the snoring of orphans, Christian had realized how much his parents coddled him. He knew they doted on him, but he hadn’t fully understood the extent of it, since that was the norm in River Hills. Perhaps now, Christian thought, he was more prepared to be a man who fended for himself, who might one day make love under a canopy of monarch butterflies and whose spirit didn’t break from having to share a room with others. Even someone like Jack Walter.
On the train platform were other children, all with mothers, who were going to the camp, too. Christian stopped and asked one of the mothers whom he should speak to before he boarded the train, and she pointed to a young man flirting with one of the teenage daughters about to be shipped off.
“He doesn’t seem to mind her German background, does he?” she said, holding her own little boy by the hand.
Christian shrugged and headed over to the agent, who looked barely older than he did.
“Names,” said the agent, his brown hair glued to his head with so much pomade that it resisted the winter wind like a helmet.
He looked right at their name tags but waited for Christian to say their names.
“How old are you?” he asked Christian after checking his list.
“I’m seventeen. Doesn’t it say so there?”
“Yeah, it does. I was just hoping you’d lie and say eighteen so I wouldn’t have to check on you two the entire train ride down.” He flipped the pages of his list back over. “But I guess you didn’t think about me, did you? Fine. You don’t have seat assignments, but you’ll be in car twelve. It’s full of mother hens, so I won’t bother to check on you very often. Just make sure that she,” he said, pointing at Inge, “gets to San Antonio looking happier than that.” He looked down at Inge’s tear-and mucus-streaked face disapprovingly.
Christian said he’d do his best and moved down the train.
“Will you sit with me? The whole time?” Inge asked. “I don’t want to be alone. Not for one second. Will you stay with me? Do you promise? Say promise.”
“I promise,” Christian said with a compassion that surprised him.
In front of car 12, it was the same scene as in front of car 4: women and children, and INS agents wrangling them. They all wore tags that had been affixed with string instead of shoelaces. No one had boarded yet, and Christian could no longer see Klimek, who he was sure had gone back to the Home the second they were out of his sight.
Christian tried to make small talk with Inge, but she was more interested in crying than talking, so they stood there, letting themselves slowly freeze from the toes up. After fifteen minutes, their breath was forming clouds so thick they lingered in front of them like cigarette smoke before dissipating, and Christian’s hands, his right still intertwined with Inge’s bare left one, had gone numb.
“Sorry we don’t have gloves,” said Christian. “Braque asked us to leave them for the other children since we’re going to Texas. We won’t need them there. It’s very hot.”
“I didn’t have gloves anyway,” Inge admitted. “I did when I arrived, but I traded them to Nadia Sitko for her jelly bears.”
Christian was going to ask what a jelly bear was and how Nadia Sitko had smuggled them into the Home, but Inge’s lip was already wobbling.
When an INS agent finally directed them to, they boarded the train, which smelled like sweat even though it was still empty and 26 degrees outside.
Inge and Christian were the only ones not laden down with suitcases and trunks, so for the first hour they just sat and watched the chaos, trying to stay out of the way, sitting tightly together on the dirty cloth seats. Women screamed in German at their children, who ran through the train banging into the luggage and each other. Before anyone was settled, the train was well out of Milwaukee, heading southwest for the trip through Illinois, Missouri, Arkansas, and then into East Texas before turning due south.
For another hour, Inge continued to sit next to Christian, not talking, not answering him anymore, but still holding his hand tightly. Then, finally, when they were approaching Springfield, Illinois, and the still beauty of Lake Michigan was far behind them, she leaned over and fell asleep against his shoulder. She would stay like that for the next three hours, her mouth slightly open, her head bobbing off him only to be placed gently back on by Christian’s careful hands.
As the landscape turned from snowy and wet to just cold and then less cold, Christian’s thoughts returned to how easy his life had been until then. He’d been preternaturally good at everything a teenager in Wisconsin needed to be good at. He was book-smart enough, but not too smart to draw attention, he drove a nice car that he worked on with his dad even when it didn’t need work, he excelled in sports, and he was very well liked by girls and their mothers. And because of the success of Franz Lange, usually by their fathers, too.