I tried not to make my hands into fists. I asked for my useless book back.
“It’ll take me,” Johnny continued, “if I’m lucky and make all my connections and don’t run into any bus delays or construction or accidents, until midnight tomorrow to reach Warsaw. And that’s with taking the bus to Vilnius. You could take several trains to get to Vilnius. First you’ll have to take a train to Daugavpils that runs only once a day, in the evening. Which means you’ll have to stay overnight in that border town. I myself don’t recommend it for a number of reasons, one being it’ll take you an extra day. Did you budget two days to go five hundred miles?” He smiled winningly. I wanted to poison him. I wanted to put salmonella in his hair.
We were deflated. We hated the bus. “Blakie, please don’t tell me we have to take the bus,” Hannah said in a whine.
“You absolutely don’t have to, Hannah,” said Johnny. “Take the train to the border. You can stay overnight in a hostel in Daugavpils. But pick a place carefully, because some have a rat problem. Also, make sure you get up in time to catch the 5:30 train to Vilnius, because the next one is not until a full day later. You will, however, have a three-hour layover in Vilnius. Blake did say yesterday he wanted to see the Gates of Dawn. Blake, you’ll have three hours to gaze at Ausros Vartai before you board the 11:20 to Warsaw. With two train changes, it’ll take you eleven more hours. I’ll be halfway done with my five-city tour, but you’ll be just getting into Poland. Welcome to Eastern European travel.”
No one had a word to say. Especially me.
“It doesn’t make sense,” said Chloe. “How can a bus be faster than the train?”
“The bus sits fifty people instead of five hundred,” Johnny explained to her, too patiently by my reckoning. “So when it stops at the border, it takes less time for passport check.”
“Isn’t it all part of the EU?” I said.
Johnny nodded slowly. “It is, my good man, it is. But so what? You’re not a member of the EU, are you? And neither are half the people on that bus. Not even me. They have to check everyone’s papers at the border. That’s how it is. They’d have to check us on the Canadian or the Mexican border, right? So a bus makes passport control faster, the train slower. But it’s up to you. Me, I must to get to Warsaw by tomorrow night. I have no choice, because the next morning at eight, me and my five world travelers are driving to Majdanek.”
What choice did we have? Clearly we had to go with him. I refused to agree to it, though. I couldn’t accept it, especially not after he started lecturing me about how early to get to Riga tomorrow to buy the bus tickets since they frequently sold out. “You can’t leave Carnikava later than five in the morning. Or you won’t make it.”
“What about you? Will you make it?” I was so fed up with him.
Johnny smiled at me and nodded. “Blake I’m gonna split, all right? I still have to get the gear back to Fabius. This was fun. Good luck with Gdansk.”
My whole group nearly had a mutiny, as if I’d screwed everything up. What is wrong with all of them? Chloe especially. We were having such a good time ganging up on poor tedious Gregor, laughing, relaxed, and they had to go and ruin everything. Not me. Them. It was finally the way it was meant to be, the way I had pictured it in my head, us together, having fun, being kids. My idea of fun is not picking up a derelict off the street and hitching our barely shining star to his fake destiny. I don’t care how well he knows Baltic travel, I don’t care how well he sings. He is not part of my story, he is not going to appear in anything I write, or in my life. No one can talk me out of my dislike for him. Not even Chloe. Especially not Chloe. Though to her credit, she was the only one who tried, the only one who came over, to try to talk some sense into me, I suppose.
“What’s the matter with you?” she said.
“Nothing. What’s the matter with you?”
“Nothing.”
She poked me lightly in the arm, in the chest. She pinched me, pretended to pull the hairs out of my forearm. Tickled me a little, though she knows I’m not ticklish. “Come on. Why is he getting up in your grill? It’ll be fine. It’s good luck.”
“Oh, it’s some kind of luck, all right.”
“Let me finish. It’s good luck to find somebody who can make the next few days a little easier for us. All we want is to get to Barcelona. And he’s helping us do that quicker. You should be pleased.”
“Do I look pleased?”
“Well, no. But he’s about to leave. And without him, what are we going to do?”
“Gee, I don’t know. What was our plan before him? Because we didn’t know this paragon of guiding excellence until yesterday, and yet as I recall we had a plan.”
“Yes, our plan was to go to Gdansk!” Chloe exclaimed, peering up at me. I felt a little ashamed, but not so much that I stopped hating him. “We were going to wander around, hoping to find someone who might point us in the direction of a mode of transport that would take us to Bialystok and Treblinka. And we did find that someone. Except we found him in Riga. That’s the only difference. And he’s telling us to go with him to Warsaw.”
“Like a demon whisperer.”
“Blake! You’d prefer to navigate blindly through Polish forests on foot, watching Barcelona vanish before our eyes, instead of taking a seat on a private bus he’s offering? A free seat, I will add.”
“Nothing is free. Guaranteed. Especially not this.”
She squeezed my arm. I sighed theatrically, like a girl. I moped. What could I do? I had to go with the majority.
I didn’t want to admit that Chloe was right, but most of all I didn’t want to admit that Johnny was right, that my strategy of going to Gdansk was clearly idiotic. I was annoyed that my own brother didn’t share my irritation; quite the contraire, he also had a schoolboy crush on the dude, even worse than my girlfriend. And his girlfriend. But I was used to Hannah making a fool of herself with other guys. I wasn’t used to my brother making a fool of himself. I especially wasn’t used to Chloe making a fool of herself. I stared at her, and she stared back, all mild and kind and beseeching. I desperately wanted at least her to be on my side, to give me balance, strength in numbers.
What an illusion. He opens his mouth, and the whole world faints. They look at him the way Carmen first looked at my brother, and now looks at Johnny. But after he shuts his trap, then what? What else has he got?
Oh, sure. He’s got a thick tome of numbers, a bus, friends in high places, a driver, and a tour all planned. How convenient. How did he engineer it? I don’t believe in coincidence. Not in my life, not in my book.
Lupe would have a lot to say about this. I can almost hear her gravelly voice in my head. There is no hate without fear, she’d say. Hate is fear crystallized, fear objectified. We hate what threatens our selves, our dreams, our plans, our freedom, our place in the world, our place in the hearts of the people we love. We fear first. Then we hate.
And I know just what I would say to her in response. Lupe, I’d say. My troubles are just beginning.
Mason
Chloe somehow made my brother see reason, and he agreed to travel to Warsaw with Johnny. We pulled the loaded red wagon a long way past the Riga University and through the now shuttered thieves’ market.
“He’s not coming back with us and sleeping on our porch again, is he?” Blake asked me.
Perhaps Chloe didn’t make him see reason enough.
“Dude, he’s got nowhere to stay.”
“He just made a thousand billz singing about love and drugs and every inch of him being inside your girlfriend. A whole lotta love he was gonna give her. You remember that, right? He could rent us a suite at the Grand Palace Hotel, if he wanted to.”
“Blake, what’s gotten into you? What do you propose, that we meet up with him tomorrow at dawn?”
“Or not. I’m good either way.”
I left Blake’s side and caught up with Johnny pulling his wagon, the girls flanking him. I hoped they were having a better time of it.
“Still, what a talent,” Hannah was saying. “Is there a school you could go to for that?”
Johnny smiled. “Like a school for talent?”
“Performing arts or something.”
“Maybe like the High School of Performing Arts?” he said.
“Something like that.”
“Exactly like that. The one in New York. Remember they made a movie about it? Fame.”
“Never heard of it.”
“I’m gonna live forever.” He opened his mouth and belted it out, holding the forever forever. It took a moment or two before Chloe and Hannah recovered.
“There you go,” Hannah said, clearing her throat. “Why didn’t you go to that place?”
“Who says I didn’t?”
“Did you?”
“Sure. Why not?”
“Well, did you or didn’t you?” Blake said, too loudly from behind.
“I did,” Johnny replied without turning around. “We’re just talking, man. No reason for the ’tude.”
“No, ’tude,” Blake said, abashed but still hostile.
The girls continued with Johnny.
“Did you have to audition?”
“The only way you can get in.”
“So you had to sing?”
“I tried a tap dance, but I was terrible.”
“You graduated from the High School of Performing Arts?” That was Chloe.
“I didn’t say that.” Johnny asked me to pull the wagon while he lit a cigarette. “I said I got accepted. It didn’t work out for me, going there.”
We all expressed strong disbelief.
He shrugged. “Not the singing. I hated their uniforms. I kept leaving the school at hours that were convenient to me but inconvenient to their curfew Gestapo. I didn’t want to live by their rules. It’s not as if I didn’t know how to sing. My mother had taught me a few tricks. Anyway, they slapped me on the wrist a couple of times. But then, I may have smoked a joint on school premises.” He chuckled. “Perhaps shared that joint with a few of my eager new friends. Perhaps received money for said joint. So … Rule B37 or something. Expulsion.”
Expulsion! We didn’t know what to say. The couple of kids who got expelled from the Academy went away for a good long time. They were so dangerous, we had seven assemblies in a row about them. How not to do the things they’d done.
“Your dad must not have been happy with you,” Chloe said. As if Johnny’s mother was inconsequential. Or maybe because mothers always forgive their sons. I know our mother does.
“My father has not been happy with me since the day I was born,” Johnny told Chloe. “I can hardly live my life trying to please him. I’ll be dead before it ever happens. I could become a general of the Third Army and have an Order of the British Empire pinned to my chest, and he’d say, but why not president and commander?”
Chloe wanted to talk more about his family, but Hannah was intrigued by other things. “So what’d you do when they expelled you?”
“I couldn’t be out on my own yet. I was only sixteen. I had tutoring at home. That didn’t go well. I had some other problems. My mother wasn’t doing great. So my father shipped me off to his parents for a while. I went. Glad not to be in his house. Thought I’d have an easier time with my grandparents. Boy, was I wrong. They were pretty sharp. Plus they weren’t working. Their whole job became keeping an eye on me.”
“And that was bad?” Hannah said thoughtfully.
“The worst.”
“Is that when you went to Europe?”
“You didn’t want to go to college or anything?” Chloe asked.
“Is there such a thing as a college for singing?” Hannah said.
“There is,” said Chloe. “Juilliard.” Johnny was quiet, his friendly smile a little withered under the barrage of questions. Chloe shrugged. “Juilliard is very competitive. Almost impossible to get into.”
“Is that so?” said Johnny.
“Yes. Your Ranger combat force is easier to get into.”
“That may be true,” he said. “But I got into Juilliard.”
“You got into Juilliard?” That came out more as, “You got into Juilliard?!!?”
“Sure, why not?” He seemed so blasé about an impossible thing.
“Did you audition for that too?”
“Well, I wanted them to take my word for it that I was awesome, but they refused. They said I had to sing.”
“What’d you sing?”
“I don’t remember.”
This time Chloe did not let it go. “You got into Juilliard last year, and you don’t remember what you sang? I don’t believe you.”
“It was two years ago, but if you must know, I sang my great uncle’s favorite song. ‘E lucevan le stelle.’ From Puccini’s Tosca. Happy?”
The girls watched him pull the wagon as if he were driving a tank through the fields.
“Are you on leave?” Hannah asked.
“Sure, why not?” said Johnny. “Permanent leave.”
“You left Juilliard?”
“It was a mutual decision,” he said evenly. “They asked me to go, and I said okay.”
“Oh goodness!” Hannah was incredulous—and disappointed for him.
“Why did they kick you out?”
“I couldn’t stand their rules. It’s a college, for God’s sake. Not kindergarten. But they were like, you can’t do this, you can’t do that. Can’t, can’t, can’t. Can’t smoke, can’t use bad language. So I said fuck you. Lit up while I said it. And left.”
“They kicked you out for cursing?”
“Nah, they kicked me out for—” He stopped talking, his Gibson bouncing on his back as he walked. “It doesn’t matter. It’s all bullshit,” Johnny said. “This is what I wanted to do. Sing on the streets. This is where I wanted to be. Europe. I don’t need to go to Juilliard. I’m in Berlin, Riga, St. Petersburg, Kaliningrad, Sofia, Prague. I’ve been to Paris, Rome, Brussels, Madrid. I’ve been everywhere. Barcelona, too. I sang in Innsbruck during an Alpian blizzard. People still stopped and put money in my box. They didn’t say, did you study at fucking Juilliard? Because if you didn’t, we won’t give you a euro. No. They hooted, whistled, asked for an encore, and snowed their foreign currency on my damned expelled head.”
I watched the pensive expression on Chloe’s face. It was less entranced. She took my hand.
“If you can’t stick it out in a light-discipline school like Juilliard,” she said to Johnny, “what makes you think you’ll make it in Ranger school? I don’t know much about either, but something tells me these rules you hate, curfew, smoking, drinking, might be a little stricter in the latter.”
Johnny nodded approvingly. “Indeed, Chloe Divine. I’m hoping the Rangers will teach me how to follow orders. It’s never too late, don’t you think?”
“Too late for what?”
“It’s never too late to be what you might have been,” said Johnny.
We walked into a narrow, foul-smelling alley. Johnny knocked three times on a rotting double door before an odd man, hairless, tattooed and strung out, cracked open one side, glimpsed Johnny through his frantic eyes and said, “I ain’t got no more. Come back tomorrow.”
“I’m returning your gear, man. I don’t want anything. I have money. You want some?”
“I don’t want your money, I ain’t got no more, I told you,” the ruined dude repeated, his inflamed eyes darting suspiciously from me to Blake to the girls.
“I don’t need anything. I’m giving you billz for borrowing your gear. Look.” Johnny stuck a handful of crumpled notes into the guy’s epileptic hand. “There’s more where that came from.” Asking us to wait a sec in the alley, he wheeled the wagon inside. The doors closed behind him. I heard a large metal lock slide across. It was quiet. The four of us stood, trying not to breathe through our noses, shifting from foot to foot.
“So this is where musicians live,” Blake said. “In alleys full of piss and crank.”
“Some m
usicians clearly live here,” Hannah said, coming to Johnny’s defense. “Because Johnny had great equipment when he played. Why are you so judgmental? You’re worse than Chloe. Writers shouldn’t be so judgmental, Blakie. Makes it hard to create real characters, to sympathize with actual people. Observe, don’t judge.”
“Ah, yes,” Blake said, “because what’s sorely needed here is for me to sympathize with a hundred-pound junkie with track marks on his arms.”
“Johnny is not a hundred pounds!” Hannah exclaimed.
“I meant the other dude,” Blake said slowly, frowning at Hannah.
Johnny was gone ten minutes or so. He reappeared alone, gear gone, bald guy gone, box of money also gone. He was flushed, happy, smiling. His guitar was now in a black velvet hard case.
“Let’s roll,” he said. “Everything’s cool.”
“Who was that guy?” Hannah asked Johnny as we filed out behind him.
“That’s Fabius. He’s an old friend. Lends me his rig when I need it. I bought the case from him.” He showed her. “Hummingbird needs a swanky cage, don’t you think?”
“He’s a musician?”
“Used to be.”
“What’s he up to now?”
“Little bit of this, little bit of that. He got his hand injured. Stopped playing bass.”
“Looks like his hand is not the only thing he injured,” Blake muttered next to me, and then louder said, “How do you know so many people in Riga?”
Johnny smiled, trying to dazzle Blake with his teeth. “This isn’t my first rodeo. How do you think I can give a tour here?”
My brother remained coldly undazzled. “I don’t know. Maybe you read up on Riga the Internet.”
Johnny almost put his friendly arm around Blake, but thought better of it. “I would’ve, my friend, you’re right,” he said. “Problem is, our bee-farming, Nazi-killing hosts don’t have Internet service.”
“Now who’s being judgmental?” Blake whispered to Hannah as they fell back.
“Well, he’s not my boyfriend,” Hannah said, taking Blake’s arm. “I can’t tell him not to be judgmental.”
We walked down the long, straight Marijas Street on our way to the train station. We were all exhausted, except for Johnny, who bounced along the pavement. We could barely keep up. The three of us walked behind him and Chloe, the two of them in front of us, side by side. We watched them. With the old Gibson slung on his back like a rifle, Johnny strolled with Chloe down the treeless city street, a spring in his step, chatting. I strained to hear, but couldn’t grasp the threads of their unspooling conversation. Blake nudged me, pointing at them.
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