Russell opened his eyes and winced at the hard white light that fell over him in a brilliant slant. He felt the wooden floor of the railway car beneath him, smelled the hotdogs a hobo named Hank was cooking over a homemade fire a few feet away.
“Breakfast. Compliments of Irish Dave and the others,” Hank said with a grin.
Russell struggled to his feet and staggered over to the fire, his head still aching from the beating Irish Dave had given him.
Hank reached into his pocket and took out a piece of fabric hung with medals. “Dave wanted you to have these back. Said to say he was sorry, and if he ever saw you again, which he hoped he didn’t, please forgive him.”
Russell took the medals, then glanced about, looking for the duffel bag. “I had a map,” he said.
“In the bag,” Hank told him.
Russell quickly rifled through the bag, found the map and brought it out into the light.
“Seems like you care more about that old map than you do your medals,” Hank said. He eyed the map Russell clutched tightly. “What is it, secret treasure?”
Russell shook his head. “It’s just a topographical map.”
“So what makes it so special?”
Russell didn’t know how to answer. He knew that if he told Hank what made the map special, he would be dismissed as just another hobo lunatic. And yet something rose in him despite the fear of once again being thought crazy. A need to tell, or perhaps only a need to communicate the desperate nature of his search to at least one other human being.
“I was a pilot in the war,” he began softly, like a broken man trying to explain himself, trace the dark and downward trajectory of his life, reveal the meaning of his rags. “Twenty-three missions. All with the same crew.”
Hank nodded toward the medals. “Guess you earned those the hard way.”
“Nine men,” Russell added. “All dead.” He stared at the medals. “Something like what happened last night. We were taken.”
He glanced up toward the sky. “Whatever they did to us, it killed my men. I know that for a fact. What I don’t know… what I can’t understand… why am I alive?”
Hank considered what he’d been told, took it seriously and turned it over in his mind. “Maybe the fact that you didn’t die, maybe that’s why they keep… taking you. Maybe they want to know what makes you special.”
Special, Russell thought, and felt some distant piece of an even more distant puzzle fall softly into place. In what way was he special, he wondered. He considered his life, but found nothing particularly special about it.
He had grown up a small-town American boy, then gone off to war, fought… survived. The word caught in his mind. Hank was right. Out of all his crew, he alone had survived… being taken. If that were what made him special, then it was something in his makeup, he reasoned, sheer physical stamina, perhaps, or an unexpected form of immunity, some characteristic he’d inherited from his parents and which he might have passed on to…
A chill passed over him.
To Jesse.
Russell saw the carolers through a concealing veil of snow, and the strangeness of the scene, himself hidden behind the great oak on Kate’s front lawn on Christmas Eve while carolers moved freely down the wintry street, once again reminded him of the terrible journey of his life, the loneliness which now enclosed him and set him apart and made him a creature of the shadows.
He waited for the carolers to leave, then made his way to the front door, knocked softly and waited.
The boy who opened the door was thirteen, and he saw himself in the boy’s large eyes, the angle of his jaw, the width of his shoulder.
“Jesse,” he said.
Suddenly Bill appeared at the door.
“Hello, Russell,” he said evenly. He placed his hands on Jesse’s shoulder and turned him back toward the inside of the house. “Your mother needs you in the living room, son.”
Jesse obeyed instantly, and the two men faced each other alone.
“You’re not welcome here, Russell,” Bill told him.
“I have something to tell Jesse,” Russell said urgently.
“You lost that right a long time ago,” Bill said. He looked at Russell’s worn-out clothes and scraggly beard and seemed to see the vagrant life he’d lived, a bum among bums, homeless and bedraggled. “You can stay at the station,” he said. “I’ll call ahead so…”
“Jesse is in danger,” Russell interrupted. “I need to talk to him.”
Bill stepped back from the door and steadied himself, as if he expected Russell to charge him. “That’s not going to happen,” he said, then abruptly closed the door.
For a moment, Russell stood, facing the closed door, unable to leave, yet knowing that he had to leave. He had tried to act openly and honestly to save his son. Now that way was closed to him, and Jesse was still in danger, and he alone knew the real nature of that danger, that the ones who’d taken him had also come to take his son. He had to be protected from them, hidden from them, taken somewhere from which he could not be… taken.
Russell stepped away from the door and made his way through a lightly falling snow, his mind already searching for a plan.
Chapter Two
Russell peered at his son, and remembered the look in Jesse’s eyes when he’d stepped into his path a few hours before. His son had been in the woods near his house, gathering sticks for a snowman. Watching him, Russell had known that this was his only chance to save him. The odd thing was that Jesse had seemed to sense why his father had come for him, and gone with him immediately and without question.
Now they were father and son again, both on the run, hobos together, huddled in a boxcar.
“What are you looking at?” Jesse asked.
“You look like your mother.”
“Everyone says I look more like you.”
Russell reached into his pocket and drew out the medals. “I want you to have these.”
Jesse took them from his hand and stared at them in amazement. “Your war medals.”
Russell indicated the silver star. “I got that after my last mission.”
“The one where you got shot down and captured and saved your whole crew?”
“Yes,” Russell said softly. He could see that something in his tone, the overarching sadness, had registered with his son.
“Mom said it was the war that made you go away,” Jesse said.
“But you know it wasn’t that, don’t you?”
Jesse nodded very slowly. He seemed to be thinking about all the things Russell had told him during the last few hours. His eyes roamed the interior of the railroad car. “Is this what you’ve been doing all this time? Is this where you live?”
“I live where I can,” Russell answered. “What was happening to me… I didn’t want to bring it home to you and your mother.”
Again, Jesse seemed to go deep inside himself. “Who are they?” he asked finally.
“I don’t know, son.”
“Can you keep them from coming back for me again?”
“I don’t know that either,” Russell answered, drawing his son into his arms. “I’m sure as hell going to try.”
Jacob parted the curtains and looked out the window as a brand-new Buick Special pulled into the driveway, Tom at the wheel, Becky on the passenger side.
He waited for them to come inside, his eyes utterly still, like two small stones at the bottom of an impossibly deep lake.
“Hey, little brother,” Tom said happily as he came through the door.