The Undaunted (Book 2 of The Undesirables)

Chapter 12: The Choir Boy

This wasn't Bobby's first trip through America's Northwest. His family owned controlling interests in berry farms and canning factories throughout the region. His father and grandfather had taken him with them on their business trips, even when he was just a boy. They wanted him to grow comfortable with authority since they fully expected that someday he would take the reins of their lucrative business.

Those trips had been luxurious. Bobby had always had a first-class cabin on a first-rate train.

But he'd been bored. His father and grandfather spent most of the trip at the bar, drinking and discussing business. Bobby hadn't been left to himself – he was forbidden from wandering the train alone – but he'd been left to entertain himself. He spent most of the time inside his own head, daydreaming. Perhaps that experience, too, had prepared him for prison.

About the only thing Bobby remembered fondly about the trip were the giant baked potatoes the train served in the dining car.

The thought of that baked potato made Bobby's mouth water. He wasn't starving, not the way he knew Karen had in Leningrad, but he was hungry. His current method of travel prevented him from eating three square meals. He was lucky to get an occasional plateful of beans.

Apart from the lack of food, and the ever-present danger of discovery, Bobby found his current trip much more enjoyable than the ones of his boyhood. He spent days and nights sitting in the open door of a boxed car, letting his feet dangle like off the edge of a moving dock.

During the days Bobby watched America slowly transform in front of his eyes. From lake country to endless prairie to slow traverse over the granite peaks of the Rocky Mountains, Bobby felt one with the land as he never had before. He saw mule deer and elk and even buffalo.

At night he marveled at the huge dome of stars that stretched bright over the horizon. He'd only ever seen them so full in Alaska and Siberia, but then he'd been too pre-occupied to dwell on them.

He wasn't in a boxed car, now. He was sitting by a cook fire, surrounded by pine trees and cardboard shacks, sharing a can of beans with two men he didn't know, hiding from the railroad police who would beat them all up if they caught them.

The place was a "hobo jungle", the men were hobos, and Bobby, too, he realized, was a hobo just like them.

He should have been wary of those men, but it was hard to be wary of a man who was willing to share his meal.

The hobos seemed untrusting of Bobby, too, even though he was dressed in ill-fitting rags, like them, and was filthy, like them. It was an odd sort of uniform, one dictated by necessity instead of by choice, but a uniform none the less. It was by virtue of that uniform that these men had allowed Bobby to join them at the fire and share their meager meal.

He'd been accepted, but Bobby knew he hadn't yet been trusted. He knew that because these men were quiet. They eyed him, but they didn't much talk to him.

So Bobby stared up at the stars, like he had done so many times over the past few nights. He knew, from his courses in astronomy, that most of them weren't real. They were illusions, living photographs snapped in ancient times. The lights Bobby was staring at were thousands, maybe even millions of years old, since that's how long it took for the light to travel from its origin to earth. Some of those stars might not even exist anymore, and the evidence of their deaths wouldn't reach earth's skies for a millennium or more.

It made Bobby feel insignificant.

He took comfort in that insignificance. "In a thousand years," he said to himself, "Who's even gonna care?"