by Scott Blade
The benches were half full. Looked like people had been waiting for the next train for a while. How many passenger trains passed through Eureka? He didn’t know.
He ignored them and walked on to the corner café.
A large half wall window had writing on it. It said: Tasty Lattes. To Widow, that was a lame name for a café, but some of the most successful small-town businesses came with lame titles.
Widow walked up on a sidewalk and followed the brick wall to the entrance of the café. He entered and plopped himself into a chair at the counter. A twenty-something, blonde barista with a sharp face and a big smile came by to take his order. At the last second, he decided to deviate from his usual and ordered a double espresso, not for the faint of heart, but Widow wasn’t worried about the cardiovascular effect. He figured he did his fair share of physical activity to compensate.
After a minute, the sharp-faced barista brought the espresso and asked, “Cream?”
Widow said, “No.”
He asked how much for the shot. She told him and he took out his cash, frowned at losing some of it, but he paid and told her to keep a dollar. She returned his change, minus the dollar, smiled at him and turned her attention to another customer.
Widow gazed around the café. It was bigger than he had thought. Probably a thousand square feet of front store space with rugged, dark colored tiles and a long wood-paneled countertop. The place wasn’t packed, but it was busy. A steady stream of customers was scattered about. Widow saw some opened laptops with lights reflecting off overly engaged faces and big cups of flavored coffees that Widow had zero interest in.
He took a sip of the espresso and thought about his bank account. He tried to enjoy the espresso, but was fighting a bit of anxiety over the empty account.
His double espresso came in a small cup and was basically a shot. He wanted to enjoy it slowly and sit for a while. Widow liked collecting his thoughts over caffeine.
He looked across the counter and saw a guy holding a newspaper out in front of his face. The backside of it was the headline. It was a USA Today. The headline was a story about another chemical attack in Syria, which wasn’t a theater where Widow had any experience. The country was in a civil war and had been for the better part of a presidential cycle.
The Russians had been involved, according to most intelligence reports that Widow remembered seeing. This was something that the media reported on from their own sources, but the US intel was that it was more than just diplomatic involvement, far more. The Russians had been assisting the tyrannical administration of Syria in the bombing of hospitals and killing of children. It was because of Russian involvement that the rest of the world sat on its hands.
Widow tried not to get involved in Washington too often. For Widow the buck of his civil duty had stopped at following orders back when he was in the Navy. He didn’t pay income tax or get involved in political rallies or go to protests or even vote in any elections.
Widow had zero involvement or interest in the bums in office. But he stayed up on current events whenever possible, especially crime. And he had a particular interest in stories about slow-burning children.
The headline he was staring at read: “85 Burned To Death: Another Children’s Hospital.” In the smaller subtitle print, Widow read the words: “Unknown” and “Chemical” and “Agent” and “Syria.” That was more than enough for him to know the list of suspects. With Syria and the Russians, the list was always the same two names—the presidents of both countries.
Widow wasn’t an advocate of assassinations, but he wasn’t opposed to it either. If there were two modern leaders that needed it, certainly these two men would’ve made the list. Killing children was just inhuman. Unfortunately, it was common practice in certain parts of the world and most were to the east.
Then Widow noticed something else. He saw the man reading the newspaper turn the page. The guy crumpled the top portion of the paper and turned the page over. As he did, Widow saw a train ticket sticking out of the guy’s shirt pocket.
The train station next door was for the passenger trains. The station had a bus drop-off circle and a parking lot for long-term riders. The lot was small, but it was there. Widow tried to recall the cars in it, but he couldn’t remember any. He hadn’t been paying attention.
He took a last drink of the espresso and stood up from the counter. The chair swiveled behind him and he walked out the café door. Widow looked left, back to the train station’s parking lot. He saw parked off in the corner, beyond a long plastic arm, an old red ‘77 Ford F150.
CHAPTER 17
THE PASSENGER TRAIN station had a digital message board next to the entrance that listed the times of arrivals and departures. The next train was arriving in a half hour.
Widow walked out in front of the station and gazed over the people waiting to leave. There weren’t many of them. He looked around. There was no kid in sight. No one who looked like a runaway.
Did he leave already? Widow thought.
Widow walked into the station. It was a small square room with dual colored tiles on the floor and a counter with a clerk behind it and not a glass partition, which Widow had seen more often.
Widow looked around the room. There was a single bench on the opposite wall and there were passengers waiting for their train to arrive, but they were all adults, all middle-aged.
The train station wasn’t that big and there wasn’t a big population in the town of Eureka. Hogan had told Widow that, but there were more passengers in the station awaiting the train than Widow had expected. He wondered if it was because the station was a waypoint. He dismissed this thought quickly because there was only one set of tracks that went in only two opposite directions—west and east. There was no purpose for passengers to get off and switch trains. Therefore, most of the people waiting must be trying to leave Montana. He figured they were from miles away. Maybe the train was a great way out of the state.
Most of the people had luggage and backpacks. Some only had the latter.
Widow shook his head and started to head back out the entrance, when he saw another exit from the corner of his eye. He turned and walked out. It led to a patio area, joined to the café.
It was small, with a short wrought iron fence around part of it, creating a border separating it from the parking lot of the next building, which belonged to an eye doctor’s office, a souvenir shop, and a real estate office.
In the back patio, Widow saw a gangly-looking teenage boy in a gray T-shirt with a cassette tape airbrushed on it and a pair of cut-up jeans. He had fair hair, long and unkempt like it was purposefully done that way. The boy had a backpack stuffed to the gills with what Widow assumed were clothes. He knew the contents because of the outline. Backpacks that are stuffed with clothes don’t have edges. The kid’s pack was this way.
The kid had an iPhone in one hand, a long, white wire coming out of it and stringing up to his ears. He was listening to music. But he wasn’t playing on his phone, like most people did. He stared down at the concrete. He had his feet up in the chair at the next table.
Widow walked up to him and stood over the kid. He heard the bass booming from the audio shooting out of the earbuds. He guessed it was some sort of hard rock noise, recycled crap from when he was a teenager. Music these days was mostly taken from old styles of music and recycled and recalibrated and repackaged to be disguised as original and unique and created by today’s performers. That’s how Widow saw it, which also made him wonder if that’s how the generations before his saw his music and the generation before that and so on.
The kid didn’t look up, not at first. He intentionally ignored Widow, an obvious fact because even the densest human had a sense of peripheral vision and Widow wasn’t the right size to go unnoticed in someone’s peripherals, not at this distance.
Finally, the kid looked up, a little startled, a little curious.
Widow pointed at the chair next to the kid, across the table. The kid didn’t pull his earbu
ds out. He didn’t swipe at the iPhone’s screen either. He pressed one of the few buttons on the side, the volume button, which lowered the sound so that he could hear Widow.
The breeze picked up and blew the kid’s hair aside and Widow saw both eyes. He was a good-looking kid. Clear skin. Blue eyes. Widow could see him cleaning up, getting a haircut and a different wardrobe and the kid would be fighting off the local girls. No question.
The kid said, “What gives, man?”
Widow said, “Can I join you?”
The kid looked around. No one else was there. Then he made a show of looking around again. He gave the empty chairs and the empty tables a hard look. He said, “There’s empty chairs all over the place.”
Widow said, “I want that one.” He pointed at the one across from the kid.
“Ah. Sure, man. Of course.”
Widow nodded and walked around the kid, pulled out the chair, and sat down. The metal was cold enough for him to feel through the legs of his pants. Not that it was cold outside, because it wasn’t. Widow would classify the weather as perfect. It was a cool temperature with plenty of sunlight, what most people from Montana would call short-sleeve weather, what people from the South would call cool.
After a brief pause the kid started to turn the volume back up on the iPhone, but Widow asked, “Where ya headed?”
The kid pulled out his earbuds and said, “Out of here.”
Widow looked at the backpack on the ground again and back at the kid. He said, “My name is Jack Widow.” He put his hand out to shake the kid’s and had a smile on his face.
He got a hard look, but in the end the kid took his hand and shook it.
Widow had never known his own father. He had been a drifter, supposedly in the Army at one time and supposedly a cop as well. But Widow’s mother had been a sheriff in a small town in Mississippi. She made sure that Widow had the experience of shaking hands with her deputies because shaking hands for a teenage boy is an important rite of passage.
The kid, whose real name was Casey, said, “John.”
“Nice to meet you, John.”
Widow looked around and leaned back in his chair, like Casey was. He put his feet up. He said, “Beautiful weather you got here.”
Casey said nothing.
Widow said, “Beautiful state to live in. Don’t you think?”
Casey said, “It’s all right.”
“What, you don’t think so?”
“I wouldn’t know. I’m not from here.”
“Where are you from? John?”
Casey looked up at the sky and then said, “California.”
“California?”
“Yeah.”
“Which part?”
“Sand Diego.”
Widow nodded, said, “Boy, San Diego is a beautiful place too.”
“California is beautiful.”
Widow nodded.
“That’s why I’m going back there. Far, far away from here.”
Widow smiled at him and said, “This place ain’t so bad.”
Casey said, “Oh it is.” He said it, and then tried to forget it, like it was a reaction, a misstep.
“What’s so bad about Montana?”
The kid didn’t answer that.
Widow asked, “What part of SD are you from?”
Casey looked at him sideways, his hand clamped down around the earbuds. Then he said, “SD? Like Sand Diego?”
Widow heard the “D” sound right off and said, “First, it’s not San ‘D’ Diego. It’s just ‘San.’ There’s no ‘D’ at the end. The word is ‘San’ which means ‘Saint.’ It’s named after ‘Saint Diego.’”
Casey said nothing.
Widow said, “And yeah, SD is an abbreviation. It’s West Coast vernacular.”
Casey looked at him, again, a little sideways. He didn’t say anything.
Widow said, “Vernacular. It just means vocab, like someone’s knowledge of terms.”
Casey said, “Oh, I knew that.”
Widow smiled and asked, “So? How about it?”
“How about what?”
“Which part of SD are you from?”
“What do you mean?”
“SD isn’t just a city. Not really. It’s the county too. People from there usually refer to the county, when they say San Diego. They generalize to people who have never been there before because most people don’t know about the vernacular.”
Casey asked, “You’ve been there?”
“I’ve been there. I was in the Navy for sixteen years.”
Just then, Casey looked at Widow’s forearm tattoos peeking out from under his sleeves, like he was seeing them for the first time, which Widow doubted. Teenagers normally stared at his tattoos first, many times even before noticing how tall he was.
Casey asked, “Is that where you got those?”
Widow reached down, rolled up his sleeves. He said, “Maybe. They are old now. So old I can’t remember where I got them all.”
“Don’t they mean something to you? I always thought a tattoo should mean something to the person. You know? Like a marker?”
Widow nodded and said, “A totem. That’s what they call it. Tattoos are totems to a lot of people.”
“Yours aren’t?”
“Some are. Some aren’t.”
“Why’s that? Did you get them by mistake?”
Widow stared at them. On his forearms, he had American flags, long and curvy. They meant something. Higher up his arm were other tattoos. The truth was that the sleeve tattoos he had on both arms were totems to his life experience, in some way or another. Each of them told a story about who he was, of where he had been, of who he had been—once upon a time.
None of that was the kid’s business. None of that was anyone’s business.
He said, “Some of them are from the military. You know how it is when you’re young.”
Casey smiled, like they were long-lost friends.
“What do they all mean?”
Widow ignored this question. He didn’t want to get into the topic of their stories. Some of them, he didn’t want to remember. He asked, “You got any tatts?”
Casey shook his head and said, “Nah. My mom won’t let me.”
“That’s funny. She’ll let you ride across the country alone, but no tattoos?”
Casey looked away and then he said, “Yeah. Moms are weird.”
“I bet she loves you though?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“What do you mean, maybe? She must love you. She’s your mom.”
“I don’t wanna talk about that.”
Widow stayed quiet for a long moment and then he said, “I miss my mom.”
Casey stared front and center for a moment at the outside wall of the café. He asked, “She passed away?”
Widow nodded and said, “Shot.”
“She was shot?”
“Yeah.”
“What happened?”
Widow stayed quiet, just stared away, remembering.
Casey said, “Sorry, man. I didn’t mean to bring up your business.”
“Nah, it’s okay. She was a sheriff. Killed in the line of duty.”
“How?” Casey asked. Again, he had let it slip out without meaning to.
Widow forgave the question. He figured teenagers did that a lot. He hadn’t been one in a decade and change, but he could recall saying things he regretted. He remembered saying things to his mother that he had regretted. Things that he could never take back.
He said, “I ran away from home once.”
Casey perked up, asked, “You did?”
“Yeah. I was a little older than you are, I guess.”
“How old?”
“I was seventeen. Nearly eighteen by then.”
“What happened?”
Widow had led double lives for the NCIS and the United States Navy for so long that he had to mentally sift through the blurred lives in order to see his own childhood. He said, “I got into an arg
ument with her one day.”
“About what?” Casey asked and leaned in.
Widow looked at the kid’s eyes. They were blue and curious, which made him feel responsible and committed and a little guilty before he even spoke, because he knew that already he had won the kid’s respect and admiration. Widow knew from once being a kid himself, with no father, that there was a natural longing for an adult male connection.
Widow said, “My old man. She told me that he had died, in the army, before I was born.”
“Did he?”
“No. Turned out he was just some guy. A military officer, turned drifter, like a lot of vets.”
The kid paused a long beat and then he said, “Like you.”
Widow paused too. He thought about that. He nodded and said, “Right. Like me.”
The back door to the train station swung open and a beaming, bald man walked out, talking on his cell phone and laughing. He walked past them without looking at them.
Widow smiled and said, “So, my mom lied to me and I ran away. But it was more than a fight or finding out about a lie.”
“What else?”
“Truth is I had always wanted to escape that place. I lived in a small town. Grew up there. I had the bug, the itch to see the world. I knew there was more out there than a small town with a bunch of small-minded people.”
Casey nodded and said, “I can understand that.”
Widow said, “But, you know what?”
“What?”
“I was wrong.”
“How?”
“Dead wrong. Small towns have amazing people and amazing things to do. It’s not about where you live or where you go or where you’re from.”
Casey stared at Widow, stayed quiet.
Widow said, “It’s about who you are. Life really is what you make it. And that even means that life is the decisions you make.”
“Yeah, but you ran away. Look at how your life turned out. Ex-military. Now you go where you want. You are free to do as you please.”
Widow nodded and said, “That’s true, but look at the price I paid.”