All The Stars In Texas

by southspinner

Marco Bodt has always wanted to make the history books and has come to the conclusion that infamy looks far better on him than fame. Jean Kirschtein has always wanted to get out of Depression-ridden West Dallas. A chance meeting throws the spark that sets Texas on fire, and what started as something simple becomes a dangerous game of love, lust, and the birth of living legends.

1. Chapter 1 - Marco

July, 1934

I never did know how to apologize.

That's more of a crime than it seems when you're growing up on a lonely, sad little scrap of a farm a few miles outside of Telico and everything is church on Sundays and wearing clothes that belonged to two of your brothers before you because wastefulness is a sin along with everything else and your voice grows heavy with "Yes, Ma, yes, Pa," and "I know I should be grateful, I am grateful." The lies stick along your tongue and make every word you say feel gritty and sick. You break if you weren't broken already.

Maybe my old man was right and I've always been a lost cause. I couldn't apologize for sneaking the rifle out from above the mantle and shooting cans off fenceposts in the pasture when I was six any more than I could apologize for kissing some boy whose name I don't even remember now in the alley behind the hardware store when I was sixteen. I couldn't apologize when my little sister saw everything and ran home with her mouth shooting off before I could stop her. I couldn't apologize when I was standing in the middle of a dirt road with a hastily-packed suitcase and more bruises than I could count.

Our son is dead.

The hell he is. I lived. I'm not sorry.

Four years later, I couldn't apologize for the circumstances that led to handcuffs around my wrists and the dirty insides of a jail cell.

The thing about prison is that it's not supposed to be comfortable. Something to do with an environment that makes you regret what you did to get there. Like sending a little kid that nipped from the cookie jar to time out.

Or a twenty-year-old that robbed two or five gas stations. Semantics, really.

At any rate, the McLennan County Jail was never designed for comfort, but it's something that can be gotten used to after a few months. It doesn't really hit home until you're scrabbling around on the dusty ground in the oppressive summer heat at some ungodly hour of the night going at a steel bar with a nail file like your life depends on it.

"Would you hurry up?" The hissed whisper barely makes it over the teeth-aching drag of steel on steel. "They'll be making another round God-knows-when and if they find you messin' around down there-"

"And I'd be getting this over with faster if you'd do something other than run your yap, Connie," I snap back, knuckles rubbed raw from repeated contact against the unyielding surface of the bar. Three long nights of work and not much to show for it other than two thin lines at the bottom and top of the aged, rusting steel. The one small perk of only being a petty criminal instead of someone like Al Capone or Jesse James is that it makes busting out of jail a hell of a lot easier. The one tiny block of cells in the place is lucky to see one patrol a night if the guard's not too drunk to get out of his chair, and that's fine by me, given the fact that Connie and I would both be in deep trouble if we didn't have that lax security and Bert's snoring the next cell over to cover up the grinding sound of the file.

"Well, you're the one that told me to be the lookout," Connie grumbles, glaring down at me from his bunk.

"And the whole pretense of a lookout is that you only talk if someone's coming, you goof."

"No need to get so offended, I'm only trying to help."

"Connie. Shut up." Groaning under my breath, I lean forward until my forehead is resting against the cell door, the burning ache from my overworked arm starting to spread out across my shoulder and down my back. Most people would be regretting walking into that gas station with a .45 about now.

I can't. Not when every movie in Telico I could smooth talk my way into as a kid was about Jesse James and Billy The Kid, how the West was won and the guns in the hands of the outlaws that won it.

Our son is dead. Good luck saying that when he's staring back at you from the front page of the paper, from the insides of history books.

But maybe Connie is regretting it. Maybe that's why he's so on-edge as he watches from his bunk like a flustered little owl. I've been toting him around since we were kids, and I still remember the look on his face when the guns stopped being toys and the stakes climbed higher, remember the rush in my own veins driving down a dirt road with sirens fading steadily farther away. I never did know how to apologize.

So maybe Connie Springer was a good kid once. Maybe his bad apple of a best friend corrupted him. Maybe it should be some other idiot here in the big house with me while Connie's out living his life like an upstanding citizen, but that's just not how it played out, and I can't help but be a little glad for that as the bar finally gives way with a metallic clang and I slump back against the wall, covered in a sheen of sweat and panting.

Connie hops down from his bunk with eyes wide as saucers, shifting his weight nervously back and forth. "Oh, Christ. Oh, Christ, Marco, this was a bad idea."

"I'm the king of bad ideas," I smirk breathlessly, angling my feet through the widened space between the bars and starting to pray for all my long-time sinner's soul is worth that it'll be enough, out into the hallway up to my knees, my hips, my chest.

Up to the place where my shoulders get stuck and I can't move either forward or backward. "Oh shit."

"See, what'd I tell you?! You're gonna get stuck there and they'll come around before long and then we're both-"

"Connie! Don't blow your wig over a minor snag, all right, just get over here." Taking deep breaths to ready myself for the only solution we've got, I let my eyes drift shut for a moment before looking back at him. "I need you to dislocate my shoulder."

He looks at me like I've just told him to shoot someone. "What?"

"Just do it! You're smaller than me, you can fit through just fine, but we ain't getting me out of this thing unless my shoulder gets through." Gritting my teeth, I give one last halfhearted tug at the bars, already resigned to it. I've suffered more pain for less of a reason.

Our son is dead.

When I met up with Connie by pure coincidence two years later, he looked at me like I was a ghost. They went the whole nine yards, had a funeral and buried an empty coffin on the family plot.

Marco got caught under a tractor. Poor boy was too mangled for a wake.

Look at me now, Pa. Look at me now.

Connie sucks in a breath and kneels down next to me, bracing a hand against either side of my shoulder. "You sure about this?"

"Hell, I could do this faster than you are, get on with it."

"All right, all right. On three."

He lunges forward on 'one' with the most god-awful popping noise I've ever heard, and somewhere between the hollow of my chest and my lips the agonizing scream turns into a peal of manic laughter, bouncing off the dirty concrete. My foot stomps repeatedly against the floor like I could grind out the pain under my shoe, loud enough that we're probably damn lucky that there's the muffled strains of a radio slipping under the door at the other end of the cell block.

"You crazy bastard." For all his hesitance at the beginning, Connie doesn't seem to waste much time in shoving me the rest of the way through into the open hallway before shimmying through the open space himself and grabbing for my shoulder again. "All right, gotta make this quick, and for God's sake keep it down this time."

My shoulder goes back into place with another hideous noise and a muffled yell colliding with the backs of my clenched teeth, and two seconds later we're on our feet, looking frantically back and forth between the door at the end of the cell block and the bar-covered window a few feet over our heads. Two equally dangerous options. "All right, which way are we thinking?"

"Well, we don't have time to file the bars off the window, and the boys up front have guns," Connie deadpans, fists clenching subtly at his sides. "So I'm thinking what I've been telling you since this shit show started. We're fucked."

"No we ain't, just calm down and let me think," I mutter, starting to pace.

"Y'all better stop thinking and make tracks, or you'll be doing your thinking in a new cell with a couple extra years on your sentence," Bert deadpans from the cell next to our busted-up one, now very much awake thanks to the noise from my impromptu shoulder surgery. "Nothing around here for miles. You'll want to be up the road before sunup."

"Which is what I've been telling Connie for days, but you see where that got us." Frowning, I take one last look from the door to the window, trying to figure out some solution. When we were kids, I could talk Connie and myself out of almost anything with a winning smile and some seat-of-the-pants lie that slipped far too easily from a child's lips for grown-ups to ever believe it. It's a little hard to sweet-talk your way through concrete and steel, though. These are not our bygone days of shoplifting dime store candy and climbing up the trees in Old Man Henderson's orchard to steal apples.

Or maybe I'm wrong.

Something clicks almost audibly in my head, and I wave Connie over hurriedly, looking up at the window over our heads. "Springer, give me a leg up."

"Oh, you strong enough to bend steel now, Marco? Because that would've been dead useful when-"

"Shut up and do it!"

Even though Connie's grumbling when he finally does kneel down and lace his hands together into a sturdy resting place for my foot, it's the same practiced motion of our childhood, steady and secure enough that I don't even wobble as I lean against the cold solidity of the wall and peer through the grimy window. A few seconds of silence, and then I burst into another too-loud laugh, hopping back down to the floor and gritting my teeth against the impact jarring painfully up through my shoulder. "I'll be goddamned. The bars on the window are a grate bolted to the outside, and those bolts are rusted all to hell."

"Yeah, and?" Connie snipes.

"And," I tell him, scooping up the filed-off steel bar from the floor and twirling it around like a baton. "We're getting out of here. Hoist me up again."

Someone has the good graces to cough over the sound of me busting out the window and banging at the rusted bolts, sending the little chips of metal spinning down to the grown six or seven feet below followed by the metallic thud of the grate hitting the ground. Connie and I take a few seconds to switch places - he'll have to pull me up since my shoulder might not hold the weight - and I turn back around to look at the cell block with a shit-eating smirk, all the rest of the inmates wide awake by now. "Happy trails, boys."

"You idiots'll be back here in a week," Bert snorts, lighting a cigarette and raising it to me in some mockery of a toast. "Run fast, Bodt."

"I always do," I reply, hopping down to the dusty ground outside with another bolt of pain up through my shoulder. McClennan County was poor even before the Depression hit, and it shows in the sad state of affairs that the jail is in, one guard tower and a sagging, tired-looking fence topped with rusty, blunted barbed wire. This won't even be anything to brag about.

"So are we just taking the fence as-is?" Connie whispers as the two of us hunker down around the corner from the guard tower, but I'm too busy timing the slow back-and-forth sweep of the lone searchlight to pay attention to him. Quiet. Lackadaisical. No shouting or alarms. They don't know we're gone yet. If we're really lucky, they might not know until morning. Connie punches me in my wounded shoulder. "Marco!"

"That hurt, you little shit," I hiss back, stomping down hard on his foot and clapping a hand over his mouth when he goes to let out a yell. "We got no choice but to just go headlong over the fence. No wire cutters, no buffer to throw over the top, no time. Besides, look how blunt that stuff is. Most you'll get's a hole in your shirt."

Connie swallows hard. "I sure hope so."

"You scared?" I laugh a little breathlessly.

"Aren't you?"

"Hell, no. I'm excited." Bouncing slightly on the balls of my feet, I look back at him with a wide grin. "You hear John Dillinger busted out of an escape-proof joint up in Indiana a few months ago? This is child's play, Connie. If he can do it, so can we."

"Yeah, and John Dillinger also got gunned down in an alley last week, so forgive me for not being as jazzed as you are," he gulps, cracking his knuckles and sucking in a breath.

Silence. A warm, dusty gust of wind. The sound of crickets. The searchlight reaches the end of its cycle.

"Fifteen seconds! Go!" Taking off at a sprint, I tug Connie after me, making a break for the fence and hitting the old chain link at top speed, hands and feet scrambling for purchase.

Being smaller than me and having two fully-functioning shoulders gives Connie the advantage. He vaults gracefully over the barbed wire before I'm even halfway up, landing in a little cloud of dust on the other side. Eight more seconds until I'm smack in the middle of a searchlight. I steady myself on the wobbling metal mesh and let out a curse. Seven. Head upwards with every ounce of strength I've got left in me. Six. Five. Four. Connie whispers something frantic that I don't hear. Three.

I go to swing over the fence with two seconds left, but my shoulder gives out at the top of my arc, bringing my weight crashing down on top of the coil of barbed wire. I was right about its bluntness, but one sharp little spike of metal still manages to carve a long, shallow cut across my stomach as I tumble over to the other side, landing hard on my back enough to knock the wind painfully from my lungs. The stars are almost unnaturally bright as I stare up at them through the haze of the searchlight passing over my head. The sky as seen by a free man.

"You oughta look into Olympic gymnastics, brother," Connie snickers, and I reach up to smack him across the back of the head as I remember how to breathe again, waiting for the searchlight to complete another cycle before I roll up onto my knees.

"Run," I wheeze, waving towards the gleaming pinprick of the North star. "Run."

And we do.

The miles pass like a rabbit's heartbeat, fleeting and jumpy, skittering through the darkness with wide eyes and held breaths at every noise. We head North, away from the danger that comes with being near Waco's higher population and more concentrated police forces, but that comes at the cost of wandering dirt roads in pitch darkness. There isn't much between McClennan County and Dallas other than desolate farms and empty fields, no real cover or places to hide, but we at least have the small fortune of not encountering anyone for the first few hours, sticking to the tall, dry stalks of grass clinging to the dusty earth.

"You got any idea whereabouts we are?" Connie groans, the interruption of the quiet we've maintained making me jump. "I wanna be home already. Sleep in a real bed, have myself a hot meal, see my wife…"

"Your wife's like to skin you alive when she sees you've busted out of jail. I wouldn't want you to get your hopes up," I scoff, rubbing at my sore shoulder and finally stopping to take a breath. "And I'm not sure. We've probably made it at least ten miles."

"How many miles between Waco and Dallas?"

"Around a hundred, I figure."

Connie slumps to the ground with a defeated expression, running a hand back over his close-cropped hair. "Well, shit."

"We ain't getting there any faster by you sitting on your ass," I snap, hauling him up by the back of his shirt collar and looking around. "We need to find shelter before the sun's up, anyway. First sight someone catches of us, we're right back in the big house."

"I know, I know." He looks and sounds like a petulant child, dragging his feet along behind me as we cut across barren fields, kicking up dust in our wake and biting back coughs. Exhaustion pulls at my bones, but Connie's so dead on his feet that he runs right into me when I stop short, looking at the silhouette of a farmhouse against the gray-tinged sky of almost morning. "What? Why are we stopping?"

I don't give him a straight answer, just purse my lips and tug him forward by the wrist. "Come on."

"Marco, what in the high holy hell!"

Growling in exasperation, I finally round on him, fatigue and the pain from my shoulder driving me to one notch short of landing a right hook to his jaw. "Look at yourself, Connie! Look at the both of us! We're covered in dirt and walking around in prison clothes. We just waltz into West Dallas looking like this, what do you think'll happen?"

He blinks at me silently for a second, tilts his head to the side.

"Don't bother thinking, I can already smell something burning," I mutter, stalking off across the field without him.

Connie gets the picture after a few seconds, jogs to catch up with me. "So we break into someone's house and hope they'll be nice enough to give the passing convicts a change of clothes?"

"Look at the door, you twit." He's at least got the mental capacity to look where I'm pointing, squinting through the darkness at the stark white square of a piece of paper nailed to the door. "Eviction notice. The bank took the farm. Even if there's nothing left inside, it's still somewhere to hide out for the day."

"Oh."

"Yeah, oh." If my eyes rolled any farther, I'd be staring at the inside of my head.

Now secure in the knowledge that we won't be walking straight into someone storming out onto their porch with a shotgun to meet us, Connie practically scampers up to the house, peering in through the dirty windows. "Yup, looks like nobody's home. Couple boxes sitting in the front room by the looks of it. Maybe some clothes if we're lucky."

Since when have we been lucky? I stopped believing in luck the day my life came crashing down around my head. Something in me went bitter and cold in the wake of finding myself sixteen and staring down the gaping maw of the world with an empty stomach and empty hands. It was hard to believe that there was anything out there on my side after weeks of drifting from town to town with nothing to aim for other than survival. My lack of capacity for optimism might come from my own circumstances, but after the night we've had, I'm not about to crush Connie's hope. Instead, I just nod sleepily as he kneels down next to the door, fiddling with the knob.

"All right, looks like a simple enough lock, if we can find a pocket knife or something lying around I should be able to-"

Determination to preserve my idiot best friend's sense of childlike wonder or no, I'm tired and growing antsier the higher the sun climbs into the sky. I give him a few seconds to mess with the damn thing before shoving him out of the way, bracing myself against the porch railing, and kicking the damn thing halfway off its hinges. "Done."

As it turns out, maybe there is some luck in the world. The boxes in the living room are full of clothes - a little big on Connie and a little small on me, but better than black and white stripes any day - and more importantly, the key to our salvation sitting out back.

"So the bank took the car, too?" Connie asks as I'm poking around under the hood of the Model T, shifting his weight back and forth.

"Looks like it," I shrug, frowning and sticking my hand down beside the engine. "I sure as hell ain't complaining."

"Well, no, but…" he trails off, raising an eyebrow. "Hey, what are you doing?"

"I'm starting the car."

Connie looks almost appalled. "So we break into these folks' house and take their clothes, and now you're hot wiring their car?"

"What're they gonna do, send me to prison?" I smirk, exulting in the sound of the engine rattling to life. "Besides, Connie, I'm not doing anything too morally reprehensible."

"You don't figure?"

"No, I don't," I shake my head, grinning even wider. "Technically, I'm not stealing this car from hardworking citizens. I'm stealing it from the bank. Now get in. You wanna see your girl before the day's out or not?"

There's a certain sense of liberation inherent in the hum of the engine vibrating through the steering wheel and into my bones, dust kicking up as the two of us burn rubber up the dirt road from the foreclosed farm. Connie's been riding shotgun with me through two years of broken speed limits and rushed getaways, but that doesn't stop him from gripping the dashboard like a lifeline every time I whip around a curve. "D'you have to go so damn fast?"

"Do you have to tell me how to drive?" I counter, steering with my knee long enough to finish rolling the sleeves of my stolen shirt up around my elbows. "How many tight spots have I gotten us out of with a vehicle? Put me behind a wheel and I'm unstoppable."

The engine dies a mile outside of Dallas.

"Don't say anything," I groan, leaning forward and resting my forehead against the steering wheel.

"Wasn't planning on it," Connie says sharply, hopping out of the passenger side "I'm walking home, and you're figuring out something to do until I get the missus calmed down enough to accept your presence."

"You're joking," I gape.

"I'm as far from joking as I can possibly get," he seethes, brushing the dust off his oversized pants and trying to look dignified while hiking them up almost to his chest. "It was your idea to bust out. Your idea to steal the car. Your idea to rob the goddamned gas station in the first place. So you can lie in the bed you made for a few hours, Marco; that is the least you can do while I try to get all this shit that you started sorted out."

"Et tu, Brute?" I grumble, glaring out the window at him.

"I don't speak Spanish!" And without another word, Connie turns on his heel and stomps off up the road.

I sit there in a daze until he's nothing but a speck on the horizon, staring out the gritty windshield at the open, empty road. The sun is rising to the East, and it's not too hot yet, but within an hour or two the Texas summer will be in full swing. And I'll be sitting here. On the side of the road in a dead-as-a-doornail Model T. Fuming under my breath, I fling open the driver's side door and stalk around to the front of the car to fling up the hood. Lots of black smoke and acrid smells.

"Goddammit," I whisper almost disbelievingly, numb for a moment before the utter rage at the unfairness of it all settles in my veins and I kick hard enough at the front tire to send a bloom of pain up my leg. "Goddammit!"

A little cloud of dust kicks up in the distance, and I'm not stupid enough to hope that it's Connie having a change of heart and coming back. Despite the fact that he's an absolute bastard for leaving me out here, I can't deny that I deserve it to some extent. He was an upstanding member of society before I came along, had himself a girl and a job and a life, and maybe it was because I'd never known what it was to be that well-adjusted that it was so easy for me to drag him into a year of car chases and cash that we blew on God knows what. I had nothing to lose by getting myself thrown in prison. Connie lost more than he's been willing to admit until now. Just because I don't know how to apologize doesn't mean I can't feel remorse when it matters.

The dust cloud grows, heralding the arrival of a truck that's more rust than anything else, the brakes giving an unholy screech when it stops beside me and its driver hops out onto the road. Roughly my age, maybe a bit younger, blond hair trimmed into a shaggy undercut that could do with a touch-up, a sort of unconscious swagger in his step that matches the brassy tenor of his voice when he walks over and nods down at the abysmal wreck of the Model T's engine. "Car trouble?"

"Why on earth would you think that? I'm just stopping for a little rest," I deadpan, already on-edge. Just because I'm not dressed like a fugitive anymore doesn't make me safe, and there's something incredibly perceptive in the newcomer's tawny eyes that has my better judgement yelling at me to run. But taking off would draw more suspicion than I'm willing to risk, so I settle for evasive maneuvers instead and do what I do best - lie. "I'll be all right. My friend's up the road hunting down the nearest mechanic."

"He won't have much luck finding him," he laughs, leaning against the side of his truck and digging a cigarette and a book of matches out of the pocket of his pants.

"That so?" I mumble, guarded. "Why not?"

"Because I'm the nearest mechanic." His smile is more on the side of a smirk, lopsided but sort of endearing in its crookedness. He laughs again at the look on my face, striking the match on his thumbnail and lighting his smoke before sticking his hand in my direction. "Jean Kirschtein."

"Marco," I nod, shaking his hand and watching him intently. There's something in the way he holds himself that doesn't say blue-collar despite his claims of being a mechanic, no weary stoop to his shoulders and something the posture of someone who expects to be acknowledged, and the hand that grips mine doesn't have calluses that match my own. Whoever Jean Kirschtein is, he doesn't come from a lifetime of being up before the sun and working until you bleed. Not a farm boy for sure, but not a city boy either. He's got a solid set to his spine and strong-looking shoulders that stretch as he leans down to peer through the smoke at the busted engine, and now is not the time to be appreciating the aesthetic value of strangers, Bodt, Jesus Christ. "So, you think it's salvageable?"

Jean stands back up and runs a hand through his hair, frowning down at the car. "I can fix it, but not here, and not without parts. Tell you what, I was just on my way home to grab some things I forgot. If you can give me ten minutes or so to do that, I'll give you a lift into town to find your friend and we can tow this thing back to the shop?"

Well, Connie did tell me to find something to do. He never said what. And it's better than sitting on the side of the road waiting for death.

"I'd appreciate it," I grin, slamming the hood of the Model T shut and jumping up into the passenger side of his truck.

Jean Kirschtein the mechanic who acts more like a rich kid gives me a look that I know all too well as he climbs in the driver's side and shuts the door behind him. Down. Back up. Little quirk of a smile. He thinks he's being subtle, God bless him.

Connie can keep his picket fence and the salvageable wreckage of his life for a few more hours. There are some perks of freedom that I've been missing something awful.