Long after supper was eaten and dishes were cleaned, once all of the kids were in bed, Spot, Marta and Eli sat on the farmhouse porch. "Out with it Trout," Marta ordered after a few moments of peaceful silence. "Something is not right with you and I've pussyfooted around it long enough." In the dim lamplight on the porch, she could still see him look up at her through his eyelashes at her as he sat sideways on the steps. "That doesn't work on me and you know it. Are you sick? Are you dying? What is going on?"
"Marta, shut up for two seconds and let the man talk," Spot said quietly.
"I'm…I'm…not sick. Not d-d-d-dying," he answered. "I nnnneeded my ffffffamily...and thats you." He was silent for another minute. He'd spent the whole train ride trying to figure out how he would answer this line of questioning. The truth was just too pathetic, but Marta would know if he made something up.
"Seemed like you really liked teaching them kids," Spot said carefully, watching his old friend with those eyes like mercury. Eli nodded and let out a deep sigh. Spot whistled, long and low. "That ain't good."
"Yup, thats the deep shit sigh," Marta agreed with a smile in her voice.
"That's the go stare at the island for hours sigh," Spot added and Trout winced. He had stopped at the bridge. Even though he'd been hundreds of times since she left, every time brought back the memory of the last time he was with JoAnna. The stop on the way to what ended up as a drinking binge at Moriarty's was no different.
Standing there, he could hear her voice. "Mother will be by later to collect me and my things. She's booked she and I passage on the SS City of New York and we leave in the morning. She wants to keep me busy until spring when she'll start forcing me to every loathsome ball in all of creation." She stared down at the water. "She tried to cheer me up, tell me I was going to see the world, but it's the same world on every ship and every continent. Same boring people, same conversation, same food, same dances. Over and over and over." She sighed and tucked herself into his side. "Maybe I should run away, be a newsgirl like Marta was."
"No," he answered stonily, gripping her hand tightly.
"Why not?" she whined, burying her face in the sling that held his broken arm, the broken arm that brought them together.
He wrapped his arm around her shoulders and held her close. He couldn't lie to her. She needed him to be real with her so he pulled her away and freed his hand from her grip. 'Because I couldn't stand for you to live that way.' he answered her in perfect sign language. He'd taken to the gestures easily, relieved to have others understand him for the first time. 'I didn't tell you about the boys that died because they got sick, or the ones who just disappeared in the night because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, or that I've had to steal, or eat out of the trash because I was so hungry, and that I get into fights all the time. We went on strike over a tenth of a cent, because that was the difference between eating or starving."
She clenched her jaw, drumming her fingers on the rail. "You've done it since you were seven, what makes you think that I wouldn't make it? Won't I ever prove that I'm more than 'Miss Park Avenue'?"
He sighed and rubbed the back of his neck. He had no starry-eyed illusions about how their world worked. His life would destroy the beautiful creature she was. 'You could make it, but I don't want you to.' Her brow furrowed and he caressed her cheek before going on. 'I don't want you to be hungry or cold or in jail. I want you safe, because I love you.'
She gasped, staring wide eyed at his hands for a moment and then lifted her eyes to his face. "I love you too, that's why I want to be with you, even if it means we're not safe."
He let out a little huff of sad laughter as he reached out to tip her chin up. 'Go with your mother. Write to me everyday and I'll save every penny I can, and we'll go after you get back. We'll take a train and go west somewhere. Somewhere with lots of sky.' She looked worriedly out at the water. 'I have two dollars to my name, Jo. Not even enough for a train ticket. We need tickets, food and money for somewhere to stay when we get somewhere else. I don't have that.'
She nodded reluctantly and he took her hands and wrapped them around his notepad. "You need that, Eli. Until you teach someone else sign thats all you have to talk to your friends. You can't give it away."
He waved that off and held his hands around hers, staring deep into her eyes. He patted it, pointed at her and then himself. "Thhhhhis uh-uh-us," he stammered.
"This is us?" He nodded, looking down and gently moving her hands and his words towards her chest.
'Our words. For when you think no one hears you. I always do.'
"I know you do," she said, hanging her head. "I don't want to go." He leaned in and pressed his lips to hers and felt her tears slide into the creases where their mouths fit together like puzzle pieces. His hand reached up to cup her face and his thumb wiped the tears away, their salt burning his tongue. She pulled away just enough to say, "I have to go. She'll be waiting for me by now." He shook his head and closed the distance between the two of them again. His kisses and her own tears left her weak at the knees.
"Mmm-mine," he hummed, tilting his forehead to press against hers. She nodded with a small sob. "My Jo."
"Yours," she whispered. "Always yours." She pressed her lips to his, parting them to let him in and they spent one last blissful moment kissing before she pulled away and wiped her eyes.
He looked down weaving his fingers with hers for a few moments before letting go to use his hand. 'Don't forget me and fall for some guy in tails and a top hat.'
She tucked her middle three fingers in, leaving her thumb and pinky out and touched her heart with her thumb, drawing the line to his with her pinky. "I won't be able to. I'll be feeling the pull on that the whole time I'm gone. It will hurt too bad to even notice anyone else is there."
He shuddered in the cool night air and looked up at Marta through his eyelashes with a sad, sheepish smile. "I'm sorry for w-w-w-worrying you," he mumbled. "You were so happy here, and I wanted that. I don't want... I can't find... I want…"
"You want JoAnna," Spot answered flatly . Eli had him shoved against the house by his shoulders in moments. They glared at each other and Eli found himself wishing for the old, volatile Spot. The one who would hit and keep on hitting. It would let him feel something besides jealousy and loneliness and sucking, devouring emptiness that Jo left in her wake. Spot and Jo were always at odds, somehow managing to draw out Spot's cruelty and a boldness that JoAnna didn't know she had. "She's the only girl I ever seen turn your head at all. But she's gone, Trout. She was always gonna be gone. Even if she stayed, she wouldn't have been around! You've got to let it go!"
Marta rested her hand gently on Eli's broad shoulder, "Let him down, Eli." Her voice was soft, comforting and quiet as she waited, never moving her hand. He turned his head to her, watching her calm, freckled face out of the corner of his bright blue eye. "You don't have to let go of her. Someone else will make you feel that way, maybe better." He dropped Spot roughly and shoved him away with a huff. Her arm slid down his bicep and snaked around his elbow, gently tugging him back to the steps where she sat down next to him. "You know I understand. You have to know that. You were there while I waited for Scat all those years, waiting for my first love to come back. But he wasn't coming back, and JoAnna isn't either." She felt him slump a few inches and smiled sadly. He felt loss so profoundly in that tender heart of his. "You have plenty more chances for that great love."
Spot sat down on the step in front of them. "Stick around here. See if we can't find you a nice farm girl," he agreed.
The opportunity arose to lighten the mood and take the focus off of himself and he ran with it. "Sssssssso, you mmmmmmmmmarried a g-g-g-g…..mmmmmmmmmman who r-r-r-roped you like a c-c-c-cow?" His bright blue eyes sparkled as Spot stifled a laugh.
Her hazel eyes flashed as they looked between him and the door before she erupted out of her seat, stamping her foot against the floorboards. "Fletcher!" she yelled.
The two newsboys chuckled as she stormed into the house to chastise her husband. They enjoyed the quiet, companionable silence, the clean, sweet, sootless breeze and the cold night air. "We ok, Trout?" Spot asked quietly, as they stared up at the stars that were so bright and plentiful away from the lights of the city.
They hadn't parted ways well. Not many friendships, even ones as lengthy and close as the one between Trout and Spot could have survived the horrors they faced in the tenement that the leader of The Dockside Boys set up to test Spot. Spot wasn't supposed to make it out at all, and the person who came out of the fire that night was not the same boy who led Brooklyn. Spot did things that Trout couldn't see past in that nightmare building. With the guise of sympathy, empathy and even humanity stripped away, Trout couldn't avoid the other cruel things his friend had done over the course of the years anymore. There was no good side of Spot to make up for the shortcomings. All of the times he'd been berated or held back for the sake of Spot's over-inflated ego came bubbling up. The worst of which was one of those times where the worst side of Spot brought out the best in JoAnna. Something about his cocky, rude nature made her brave. Her mother had caught wind of their sweet, young romance and brought her home for an emergency dinner party with a more " suitable young man. Worried about her, Trout had begged Spot to wait outside her Gramercy Park home in case she needed someone to walk home with, only thinking the Spot was scarier than what lurked in the shadows. He had glossed over a lot of the horrible things Spot had said over the years, but the conversation that JoAnna relayed to him in tears when she got back to the school went too far.
Spot leaned against the window frame, looking sour and displeased. It didn't even register that anything was off, because Spot's neutral was sour and displeased. Jo slipped into the room and it took him a moment to realize that she was wearing nothing but her drawers and corset. He jumped up from the armchair, yanked the blanket off of his bed and wrapped it around her shoulders, but she pushed it back off and walked towards Spot, like a woman in a trance. He actually looked a little frightened, and she smirked at him through her tears . "Get. Out," she whispered, opening the window. She grabbed him by the ear and he yelped as she shoved his head out the window, forcing his body to follow onto the fire escape.
"Hey!" he cried indignantly as she released him.
"Good night, Spot. Have a lovely walk back across the bridge." Her voice was cordial, but biting as she shut and locked the window and pulled the paper shade down to block his view.
Eli touched her. "Jo?" he asked aloud, before signing, 'You're scaring me.' She looked up at him, studying his worried face and reaching up to brush his wild hair aside, combing her fingers into the mess and caressing his scalp. He leaned into it and her brows furrowed, but she still pushed his rough palm downward until it rested on top of the bulge of her breast. He pulled his hand away and pushed her back gently. 'What are you doing?' he signed.
"Giving you what you want," she answered meekly, unable to make her eyes meet his.
'Says who?' Her mouth opened and closed unwittingly a few times as she tried to chose her words. Tears were in her eyes again and she brushed them away angrily. 'Tell me, go on,' he pressed. 'What did Spot do?'
She swallowed and pinched the muslin of his sling between her fingers, running them up and down. "He said that you were only waiting around for Marta to bail you out of here and for...this." She gestured vaguely at her swollen bosoms. "He said you think with your heart and not your head, that he thought I could see reason. He told me that it would be kinder of me to break your heart now instead of waiting for our different lives to force us apart." Anger surged up inside of him. 'Part of me thinks he's right. I'd rather leave knowing that what we had here was too good and too pure for that horrible world out there where he is." He gripped her tightly, feeling sick to his stomach. Her hand covered her breasts again and he had to force his eyes to stay up, even though they didn't want to. "But my heart," she whimpered, "my heart only wants you." Large, heavy tears fell down her beautiful cheeks. "I really am sure that fate tied it to yours. The thought of never seeing you again...it hurts."
She was so different from anyone he'd encountered in eight years on the streets or the seven before either. She was a cluster of hopes and dreams and fancies somehow trapped inside a human form. He began to chuckle and she looked up at him, hurt and betrayed, but he kissed her, every inch of her face, and soothed the hurt he caused before asking, 'Do you even know what you were offering me?'
She blushed and shook her head, sniffling and chuckling wetly. "Spot pointed at these...I figured that you could show me the rest." His laugh was warm and round and filled the quiet room as he pulled her in and kissed the top of her head and squeezed her tightly to him.
His face darkened. 'I don't like what he said. I don't want anything you don't want to give me.'
She put her hand over his. "I'm sorry I didn't trust you. I should have known. I said so many times that you and he aren't the same, but then I believed him when he said you were." She wouldn't have thought it was possible, but his brow furrowed even deeper. "He said such awful things, Eli, and I was already so worked up from my mother that I just let him bully me right into fighting with him some more!" She paused, smiling a bit, but trying to hide it. "But I did slap him!"
'Good.' He stared stonily at the window and she couldn't pull him back out of his head, so she just leaned in, resting her ear over his heart. Spot went to far.
Trout sighed and looked up at the sky one more time. Those nights in Brooklyn, and the ones in Manhattan, the stars were never so bright or so many. Instead of a few dim points of light, they were like the sun reflecting off of water on a windy, too many and too bright to focus on any one of them. Those days were gone though. JoAnna was gone, and it seemed like, in the aftermath of the tenement, Spot had really grown up into a man who was actually capable of friendship and feeling. Eli came to Kiowa to have a new life with the only family he'd ever acknowledged, and that meant he needed to turn over new leaves as well. This sky was big enough to make him feel small. He spat in his palm and held it out to Spot without removing his eyes from the sky. "Mmhmm. We're g-g-good."