Chapter Text
A ROAD, SOMEWHERE ALONG THE MISSOURI RIVER
1951
“Kid, you need to get rid of the dog.”
“My real dad would let me keep her.”
Rabbi shakes his head minutely, keeping his eyes on the road. Satchel’s cheeks deflate and his lips vibrate with a heavy, irritated sigh. He rolls his eyes, holding the little white dog close to his chest, letting his head fall against the window.
It took the two of them - and Rabbit, the dog - a week to leave Liberal, Kansas after the gas station incident. In the year since, they’ve been hopping between states and cities, living for short amounts of time in cheap motels and the run-down apartments God forgot. In fear of being recognized and caught, Rabbi has - on top of using temporary names for himself and the boy - worked outside of the law’s borders and avoided putting Satchel in school - he is however still adamant that the boy should receive an education, and has bought a number of books on mathematics, language, and history to keep Satchel occupied during the weeks and months that in total have become a year on the road.
Some days have seemed to last forever - for one, there was the nightmarish half-week in Farwell, Nebraska, during which Satchel laid sick with fever and Rabbi near worried himself to death about the boy’s health. Or, the first - and only - afternoon they spent in Tulsa, when an angry white mob shouting murder charged the streets after a group of black teenagers - which guardian and ward spent isolated in their hotel room, the blinds pulled down over hinged windows as Rabbi stood by the locked door with the gun in his hand. Worst of the worst, however, would be the Saturday night they had to flee their at-the-time South Dakota residence helter-skelter when the apartment above theirs was set on fire.
That last night in the little town of Faith, when orange flames licked their way up the black sky and covered the stars with fire, as permanent residents leapt out of the building with their children, pets, and belongings in their arms, Satchel and Rabbi watched.
Sweat forced itself out of every crevice of the boy’s body, laid shining in the light the flames cast upon his dark skin. Heat pummelled its fists into him, left him out of breath, carved a crease into his forehead - yet when he glanced into the car and found the back seats empty, his whole body turned cold.
Wide-eyed, dark brown irises vermillion in the firelight, he turned to Rabbi.
“Where’s Rabbit?” He whispered hoarsely, stiff like a dead man.
Rabbi took one look at Satchel, another at the building, and without a word he bolted for the main door. Satchel watched, horrified, as the silhouette of the thin man moved between windows, holding his hat about the mouth and nose. He hadn’t even had the time to put all his shirts on as they fled the room, nor to button the coat he had flung into the car, but he’d be damned if he didn’t have the hat with him.
Flames exploded through the windows and Satchel instinctively took a step back, nearly tripping over his own feet. A baby's high-pitched wailing and crying voices were heard somewhere in the background as the wooden roof broke into a criss-cross of individual planks and caved into itself with a loud boom.
For a brief moment, the world stopped spinning.
And Rabbi stumbled out of the building, holding the little white dog in his arms, coughing violently as he tripped his way down the stone path. He sank to the ground a few feet in front of the car, crawling towards Satchel, who hurried over to support him and help him away from the flames. Propped up against his Volkswagen Beetle, Rabbi fought to breathe, and passed Rabbit over to Satchel.
“Come here,” Rabbi wheezed, intermittently coughing and gasping for air, “come here, kid.”
He lifted one of his arms and Satchel took a seat beside him, feeling the warmth of Rabbi’s pale, sinewy hand on his shoulder in a swift squeeze. Rabbi drew a deep breath through his nose, his eyes closed, his head leaned back against the car door, wiping a sweat-drenched side-parted dark fringe away from his forehead. His face bathed in orange, the high cheekbones and the tip of his nose white in the light. One of his suspenders slipped to the side, revealing the original alabaster shade of a long-sleeved shirt that had been coloured black with soot.
His fingers flicked up from his palm, one by one, until all of them were in the air; then, he folded them, repeating this process a number of times as the rising and falling of his chest became rhythmic. It took Satchel a moment to realize that he was measuring his breaths.
“The dog’s fine,” Rabbi mumbled, then coughed again, “but you need to give her a new name. She’s not responding to Rabbit. I called out every- every single word in the bloody dictionary, every name in the United States, and she- Connor. Connor, kid. I said Connor, and she came running.”
Satchel furrowed his eyebrows, raised his upper lip slightly and blurted out;
“But she’s a girl?”
Rabbi huffed.
“I know she is. She’s a girl that only responds to Connor.”
A long silence followed between the two, a mutual non-exchange of words, though not of the world at large. The crackling of the fire, the roaring wind, the thuds of the building collapsing and bricks hitting the ground, the dry wood planks splitting in two all kept taking place, as did the twinkling of the stars, the cloud migration across the moon, the growing fire.
Rabbi was the first to speak.
“Kid,” he breathed, pausing to cough, “promise me one thing.”
His temple made a small thumping noise against the door of the car when he turned his head to look at Satchel.
“Promise me to do as I say, not as I do.”
Satchel watched him with those big, brown eyes, naturally curious and brimming with questions. He shifted his back against the door of the car, stroking Rabbit - Connor? - over the head, and asked;
“Why?”
Rabbi shook his head and looked away down the dark street, replying only in thought;
‘Because I would do anything for you, Satchel Cannon, and there are no levels in hell that could do my soul justice for executing what that ‘anything’ entails.’