Steve Cash - Time Dancers

“What became of the chieftain?” I asked.

The man on the train turned his head toward the window and gazed out at the passing fields and farms. “No one knows,” he said quietly.

Ray Ytuarte is a survivor. He never thinks of his present situation as dire, only urgent. That is the difference between those who go under in a flood of circumstance and those who find their way to shore, any shore, and survive. True survivors never look back, except to remember what not to do again, and they rarely look ahead because the future is merely a dream, a trick of the mind. They exist squarely in the present, usually with good humor and always with no illusions. And they make excellent friends.

I overheard a woman say once: “Friendship is the work of childhood.” I suppose that’s about as true a thing as anything there is. In Africa I had witnessed how effortless that work becomes, in the heart, in the moment when Ray saved my life, putting his own life in harm’s way without a thought and delighting in it.

Ray and I embraced each other while the crowd was still standing and marveling at the distance of Babe Ruth’s grand slam.

“Damn, Z,” Ray said, “are you tryin’ to break my ribs?”

I laughed and let go of him, but I could easily have broken something without much effort. It felt that good to see him in flesh and blood. Opari was staring at both of us. So were Carolina and Jack.

It was because the Meq remain unmarked, or changed in any way, that it was impossible to tell what Ray had been through. He looked the same. I wanted to know everything that had happened to him since Africa. I wanted to know right there in Sportsman’s Park, but I also knew I would have to wait.

Carolina touched Ray’s shoulder and he looked up at her. “Good to see you, Ray,” she said, “we’ve missed you terribly.”

“It’s good to be back,” Ray said. “It surely is.”

I started to introduce Opari when Jack suddenly pulled on my sleeve. “How many more are there, Z?”

“More what, Jack?”

He hesitated, glanced at his mother, and turned back to me. “Well, you know, Z…how many more like you?”

Carolina seemed embarrassed, then looked at me and shrugged. Questions about the Meq almost never surfaced when we were together. I assumed we were simply a fact of life. I didn’t quite know what to say.

Then with a grin and a mysterious wink in my direction, Ray answered, “More than you think, kid…more than you think.”

As I introduced Ray to Jack, and finally to Opari, I heard the words being exchanged between them and watched their faces laughing and smiling, but I seemed to be somewhere else. I had an odd feeling, a dreamlike feeling I had experienced once before when Solomon reappeared after years of absence. I even heard the sound of a dog barking in the distance. Was it really Ray standing next to me speaking? I didn’t fully realize until that moment how much I had truly missed my old friend.

“Why now, Ray? Why here?” I asked him.

“Well…‘here’ because I stopped off at Carolina’s first. I found out a few things from Owen, you know, about everything from Eder and Nicholas to that nasty business down at the train station. Even saw Star and the baby…man, oh, man, Z…you did it, you really did it. Then I thought I had better come on down directly, and here I am.”

“How long have you been in the States?”

“That’s the ‘now’ part of the answer. About two months ago, I hitched up as a batboy with a Venezuelan exhibition team while they were in Veracruz. That got me into the States through Miami. A couple days later I felt a kind of storm, but different…strange…in the direction of St. Louis. By the time I got a little closer, maybe five hundred miles or so, I knew it was something else.”

He stopped talking and looked at me closely, like a doctor examining his patient, then he grinned and tapped me in the middle of my forehead with the end of his finger. He said, “I think all it was, was you worrying, Z. So, as long as I was already in the area, I thought I might as well save your ass…again.”

“When are you going to tell me where you’ve been?”

“When we get gone.”

“Gone where?”

“To do this thing. Owen told me, remember? You might need some help with Unai and Usoa and the trip back to Spain, to the Pyrenees. You ought to know by now two brains are better than one.”

I stared at Ray and smiled. I couldn’t wait to see him in his bowler again. “How was it?” I asked. “I mean, over all, how was it…because you look good, Ray.”

“Well, let me just say I learned a few things, and I also didn’t see a few things coming, like Mozart, for example.”

“Mozart? The composer?”

“Yeah, same guy. I tell you, Z, I really came to love his music. Never expected that. And I like a little modern painting now and then, know what I mean, Z?”

“No,” I said, shaking my head in disbelief. What could Ray, Mozart, and modern painting possibly have in common? “No, Ray, I haven’t got a clue, but I can’t wait for you to tell me.”

“Ready to go?” It was Carolina. The game was over and the Browns had lost. Babe Ruth got the win for the Red Sox.

“Yeah,” Ray yelled back. “We’re ready. Ain’t we, Z?”

“We’re ready.”

As soon as we left Sportsman’s Park, Ray began peppering me with questions concerning Nova. I told him everything I knew about her current location, but he wanted to know more than her address and state of welfare. For some reason he never seemed to doubt that she was all right; he wanted to know what she was like, how she “turned out.” I told him about the night Eder died, and how Nova carried a Stone now, Unai’s Stone, which Sailor had thrown to her in the shadow of the “slabs” in Cornwall. I told him that Nova worried about him and added that I thought she missed him a great deal. I didn’t tell him Sailor had asked Geaxi and Opari to follow Nova’s progress and be patient. I didn’t mention her unique dress and heavy makeup, let alone her occasionally strange behavior.

“That don’t sound right,” Ray said.

“What do you mean?” I asked, knowing I’d been caught. I should have realized Ray was much too streetwise to ever swallow only half the truth.

“It just don’t sound like Nova,” he said. “You sure you’re not leavin’ something out?”

So I told him about the Egyptian mascara, the semitrances, and an attitude that I admitted I never quite understood.

“Now that’s my Nova!” Ray almost shouted. He leaned over and tapped me lightly on the temple. “What’s the matter with you, Z? How long you think I been gone?”

Then something happened that made me even more concerned about leaving St. Louis at that point in time. It took place not five minutes after we returned to Carolina’s and it involved Ray and the orphan boy. No one saw it coming. The boy was still healing from the traumatic events on the train and we should have seen the possibility, but as I said, it was unintentional. Nevertheless, because of it the boy confirmed a suspicion about Unai and Usoa’s killer that he could not have revealed in any other way.

Carolina had given the boy a name since there was no official name available. She called him Oliver Bookbinder—Oliver because she said he “looked straight out of Dickens” and Bookbinder for the Reverend who sent the two-year-old the boy had tried to save. The boy was dark and Hispanic in appearance and I thought he might someday have a few questions for Carolina about her choice of names. She told Ray no one was calling him Oliver because Ciela had nicknamed him Biscuit for the biscuit in a handkerchief that the boy would barely take out of his mouth when we first brought him home. He had already won everyone’s heart, especially Ciela’s, and Carolina thought Ray should meet him right away.