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?"
"What was that?" The question came from Charlie, a gnarled old oak tree of a man, with wrinkled eyes and a misshapen nose. Bobby could tell by his crooked frame that Charlie had lived through the pain of broken bones and cracked ribs. That, coupled with his age, suggested he was a veteran of the hobo lifestyle, riding the rails and suffering the worst indignities of America's Great Depression.
Bobby briefly wondered if they might have crossed paths before, not even realizing it, Bobby in his first class cabin and Charlie hiding out on a passing freight train. "I said, in a thousand years, who's gonna care?"
"No one," Charlie replied, as if the answer was so obvious it was stupid to even ask the question, "on account of we'll all be dead."
"Hell," nodded Marty, "we could die tomorrow and no one would care." Marty was younger, and smaller than Charlie, probably in his forties, with a rat face and rat eyes.
"That's right," agreed Charlie, and he slurped a spoonful of beans.
Marty stared at Bobby and narrowed his rat eyes suspiciously. "Where you headed?" he asked.
"Seattle," Bobby replied.
"What's in Seattle?" asked Charlie.
"A fishing boat, I hope," said Bobby.
"What's so great about a fishing boat?"
Bobby shrugged. "It's work."
Charlie laughed. "Don't need a fishing boat for work," he said. "Plenty of work these days, at least for a young fella like you. Wish I was forty years younger."
"Lay off him, Charlie."
Bobby was surprised to hear the rat-faced Marty defend him. He thought it would be the other way around.
"Like hell I will," Charlie insisted. "Back in my day we had nothing. Now all you gotta do is sign your name on a piece of paper and you're set for life. Pay, pension, the whole god-damned American dream."
"It ain't like that," said Marty.
"Like hell it ain't."
"You don't know shit," insisted Marty.
"I know I was born too soon, so now I'm too old. Missed the first war and now I'm missing the second. The unluckiest generation."
"You're luckier than you'll ever know," replied Marty, refusing to back down. Then he turned back to Bobby and nodded with understanding. "My brother fought in the first war. Never could talk about what he experienced."
Bobby didn't know what to say. "I'm sorry."
"So was he."
"Then your brother was a god-damned coward," Charlie blurted, growing more belligerent as the argument wore on.
"They don't give cowards a distinguished service cross." Marty wasn't angry, he wasn't defensive, and he wasn't boastful. He was just stating a fact.
And that fact seemed to shut Charlie up.
"What happened to him?" Bobby inquired. "Was he killed in combat?"
"No, not exactly. He died later, in 1925."
"How?"
"He hung himself."
The group fell silent again. There was nothing to say, really. Marty had just said it all.
But Marty wasn't quite finished. He felt the need to reach out to Bobby. "So you see, I don't blame you. Far as I'm concerned, you're smart. I get it."
"Get what?" Bobby was confused.
"Get what you're doing, why you're doing it."
"I don't understand," Bobby said. "I'm just going to Seattle, looking for work."
"It's okay, Marty insisted. "You don't gotta pretend. Like I said, I wish my brother had been smart like you. I wish he'd dodged the draft, too."
Bobby was shocked. That's what these men thought of him? That he was a draft-dodger? He felt compelled to defend himself, to insist that he was no dirty coward.
And then he realized...why? Why should he be ashamed to be a draft-dodger? Marty was right. Bobby had been stupid to volunteer. Even Dr. Parsons had agreed with that. It was all stupid, this war. After all, in a thousand years, who would even care?
So Bobby held his tongue, even though doing so, he knew, would be, to these men, an admission of guilt.
"Shouldn't go to Seattle, though," Charlie advised. "Too many cops in Seattle." It seemed he'd been shamed into coming around to Marty's way of thinking.
"I need a boat," Bobby insisted.
"Canada's got boats, too."
"I was thinking more like Alaska."
Charlie nodded. "Alaska's good," he said. "I've heard a man can lose himself in Alaska."
Suddenly a whistle blew.
"Run!" yelled Marty, and he bolted to Bobby's right.
An instant later Bobby heard more shrill whistles, and the screams of the other residents of this hobo jungle. He dropped his plate and leapt straight over the campfire, heading north through the camp.
Railroad police were everywhere, it seemed, blowing on whistles and throwing bottles of burning alcohol. Bobby saw one burst to his left, and a laundry line went up in flames. To his right he saw a policeman dragging a woman out of a cardboard shack by her hair. The woman kicked and screamed as the policeman smashed her bloody face with a baseball bat.
Bobby kept running, zagging around the burning laundry, judging its bright flame and billowing smoke would cover his escape.
He was right. No one followed him out of the hobo jungle into the woods. He was tired already but he kept running, kept running until he was exhausted, and then he kept running some more.
He didn't stop until his legs forced him to stop by collapsing beneath him. Only then did he finally pause to catch his breath. He strained his ears and heard the distant whistles of the police raid. Locally, he heard nothing but the hooting of an owl.
He'd made it. He'd escaped. Bobby hoped Charlie and Marty had escaped, too.
Bobby turned west and began to walk. He came to a clearing and froze.
A strange man was sitting on a fallen log. He had slicked black hair and a moustache in the style of Clark Gable. His gray suit was worn over black cowboy boots and he was whittling a stick with a pen knife. "You're a hard man to find," he said with a southern Texan accent.
"You with the police?" Bobby asked.
"No," the man said, turning the stick over, blowing on it, and admiring his work.
"But you sent the police."
The man nodded. "I tipped them off."
Bobby's face flushed with anger. "Good people were hurt tonight."
"Good people are being hurt tonight all over the world," the man said, finally looking Bobby in the eye. "Hurt in Russia, in China, in the Phillipines, in France."
"You're not here to arrest me," Bobby knew.
"I'm here to give you something." The man stood up and reached into his inside jacket pocket. He pulled out a little book. It looked kind of like a bible. He put it down on the log.
"What is it?"
"A code book. You shouldn't keep it. You'll be searched when you enter the Soviet Union. You should try and memorize it instead." The man looked right at Bobby again, and Bobby saw he had steel gray eyes. "I hear you have a good memory."
"You heard right." Bobby confirmed.
"As soon as you're confident you know it by heart burn it. We don't want it falling into the wrong hands."
"Okay," Bobby said.
"Your codename is 'Viper'," the man said. "You know what that means?"
"Yeah it's a kind of snake."
"No, do you know what it means to have a codename?"
"What is it, some kind of way to identify me, right?"
"It's more than that. If someone calls you 'Viper', that means you're activated. You do what they tell you to do. It means they work for us."
"Yeah, okay." Bobby hesitated. "Why 'Viper'?"
"You fly Airacobras, right?"
"Cobras aren't vipers."
The man frowned. "They warned me you were a smartass." He folded his pen knife. "You should probably stay off the rails tonight. The police will be checking inside every boxed car and under every flatcar for hobos who might have escaped the raid. And you should stay away from the stations and switching yards."
"You could give me a ride."
The man chuckled. "That would blow your cover. Cut back across the railroad tracks around midday tomorrow. By then it should be safe enough to hop on a passing freight train." The man put the pen knife in his pocket and settled a gray homburg on his head.
"What's your codename?" Bobby asked.
"I don't have one," the man replied, but Bobby was sure he was lying. The man whistled a tune and walked off into the woods, leaving his whittling on top of the code book.
It was a carving of a miniature cello.