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At night, the Texas desert became something else.
During the day, the heat had been shimmering off the old and cracked roads, dust coating everything they owned. The sunlight had been so bright that it bleached color from the world and made the horizon wobble like bad television reception - a completely new kind of bright, the kind with absolutely no snow in it. Mauri's eyes had ached all the way to the back of his skull by noon. His sunglasses were made for the snow glare back home, and the light of Texas was something completely different.
During the night, the temperature dropped quickly enough that Mauri could almost pretend he was home if he ignored the cactus silhouettes and the fact that home generally contained fewer armadillos and tumbleweeds. Although dinner certainly wasn't like back home, thanks to Vladimir and his long mismanagement of their meager funds - and Mauri's catastrophic attempt to buy American clothes, which the rest of the band had taken and thrown away anyways.
They had built the fire earlier before the sun set and it was still going, though lower now, the wood they'd collected running thin. Shadows shifted at the edges of their little makeshift camp, and someone lying out in the dark was snoring.
Mauri sat close to the fire with his coat pulled tightly around him and his knees drawn up, watching the pan heat over the fire.
He had nothing to put in it, other than rocks and twigs. The joy over their rebellion against Vladimir had lifted their spirits for a while - briefly, brilliantly, like a match struck in a dark room - and then the dark room (also known as reality) had reasserted itself, and now the rest of the Cowboys were scattered on the ground around the fire in attitudes ranging from miserable to quietly resigned. They all would've taken eating Vladimir's raw onions and stalks of unwashed celery again over this, Mauri thought as someone's stomach audibly growled.
Mauri used his knife to poke one of the rocks in the pan, and then looked up at the sound of rustling at the edge of their camp - bushes moving at the top of a low embankment, some distant coyote or wolf making itself known out in the dark somewhere.
After a moment, there was movement. And then a dead fish flew over the edge of the embankment and landed beside the bushes with a heavy thump.
Mauri blinked.
Someone clambered up after the fish, and it took a moment for Mauri to recognize who it was.
"Igor?" Mauri squinted, "what are you doing here?"
Igor clambered to his feet, holding the fish - that was almost as large as his torso - with both arms, the way one carries a sleeping child. It was an extraordinary fish, and Mauri did not have the slightest idea of how Igor had found a fish of that scale in the middle of the Texas desert, but as his stomach growled, he decided that it was probably not the right moment to ask.
Igor walked up to him and extended his arms, offering to fish to Mauri. For a long moment, Mauri just stared at him. Igor crouched, motioning at the fish, and then at the fire.
It was clear that Igor was giving the fish to Mauri to cook.
Mauri reached out and accepted the fish, which was so big that he had no doubt it could feed all ten of them and have a hefty portion left over. The thing weighed nearly as much as his accordion.
Holding it reminded Mauri just how hungry he was.
He leaned forward, and whispered, "thank you."
Igor looked over at him and shrugged.
"No, really," Mauri insisted. "I'm serious. Thank you very many." He paused. "We probably would have starved, you know. Another day of this and I think I would have had to eat my shoe."
Igor nodded solemnly, and motioned for Mauri to focus on cooking the fish.
Mauri reached for the knife and adjusted the edge of the fish slightly in the pan. The smell of it cooking was already doing something to the air around the fire, drawing the scattered bodies around the camp closer without anyone acknowledging they were moving, everyone's stomach growling.
"Is there something I can do for you?" Mauri asked, watching the edges of the fish begin to change color. "To pay you back."
Igor considered it for a moment, his chin down, something working across his expression. Then he looked at Mauri's feet.
Mauri looked at his feet.
Igor looked at his own feet, then back at Mauri's, and made a motion with his hands - back and forth, comparing, indicating.
"What?"
Igor did it again, more deliberately, pointing at the long winklepicker shoes on Mauri's feet, then at his own normal shoes, then back.
"My shoes?"
Igor nodded at Mauri.
"You want my shoes?"
More vigorous nodding.
Mauri looked at his shoes. He looked at Igor's normal shoes. Then he shrugged, reached down and unlaced his shoes, and pulled them off.
"Here," he said, holding them out. "I don't know if they'll fit, but... go for it."
Igor took them with both hands, almost reverently.
Mauri watched him for a moment, looking at Igor's face, then at the cardigan and vest that he always wore, and finally at the perfectly ordinary shoes that Igor had removed and left sitting in the dirt beside the fire.
"You know," Mauri said, rubbing warmth back into his sock-covered feet, "sometimes I used to envy you."
Igor looked up, surprised.
"Back home, I mean." Mauri gestured vaguely at his own head, his own silhouette. "You were the only one in the village not constantly catching your shoes on a root and tripping face-first into the mud. Not having to get your hair out of your eyes every time it rained." He paused. "I thought sometimes - it'd be nice. Just to walk around without looking like everyone else. To walk into a room and not have everyone know exactly what family you're from just because of how you look."
Igor stared at him.
Mauri thought about Igor in every barn doorway back home. Every field edge. Every fence. The only person in the village without the pompadour and the shoes, standing at the outside of everything, and wanting to be in while Mauri had wanted out.
"...huh," Mauri said.
After a minute of watching Igor somehow fit the shoes onto his feet, Mauri looked down at his own coat, and after a moment, he shrugged it off, holding it out for Igor to take.
"Here. Put it on," Mauri said. "No offense, but your vest and sweater look isn't very 'Leningrad Cowboy' inspired."
Igor took the coat and put it on. It was a bit small across the shoulders, but it worked okay to give him the look of a member of the band (if you ignored the hair situation). Igor looked down at himself, then at Mauri, then at his feet, where the pointed shoes were more or less tied onto his feet.
Then he stood up.
Igor was still for a moment, feeling the shoes. Getting the balance of them, or trying to. Even Mauri, who had been raised in the style, still tripped over his shoes to this day. They were not exactly easy to walk in. After a bit, Igor took one step. Then another, carefully.
Then he jumped up and down with a grin.
"Quiet," someone said from across the fire, without looking up. "Some of us are trying to sleep."
Igor jumped a second time, and then began to move around the edges of the firelight in something that was not quite walking and not quite dancing, lifting each foot slightly too high and stomping down harder than necessary, the coat swinging around him dramatically every time he turned. He was grinning widely and did not appear to care that he looked like an oversized child who had gotten into someone else's wardrobe.
Objectively, he looked ridiculous.
Objectively, Mauri supposed, this made him fit in better with the Leningrad Cowboys.
With a small smile, Mauri turned back to the fish.
He watched the edges of the fish cook, prodding it gently with the knife. Behind him, the sound of Igor's stomping continued, punctuated by small sounds of excitement - not words, of course. Igor's sounds were never words. But they were communicative enough, if you had spent any time learning how to listen to them.
Mauri had known Igor a long time, he thought, watching the fish. Since before the band left Siberia. Since the early days, when the band had been just a group of young boys from the village with gravity-defying haircuts and an excess of ambition and no real sense of what that ambition was for. Igor had been around then, back in the village. Igor was always around - peering through barn windows when they practiced, standing at field edges when they loaded equipment into trucks, following at enough of a distance that the rest of the band wouldn't yell at him to leave. Watching from behind fences. Watching through doorways.
Always watching. And particularly, Mauri thought now, watching him specifically.
The fire crackled, the fish sizzling quietly in the pan.
And then - Mauri heard the sound of an accordion.
Or, more accurately, his accordion, the sound of the instrument that had traveled all the way from home and been played in countless rundown bars across however many states they'd been through, the sound of the instrument that Mauri knew the way he knew his own hands.
Mauri turned so quickly that he nearly knocked the pan off the fire.
Igor was standing at the edge of the firelight with Mauri's accordion held across his chest and his features creased with concentration as he worked, albeit shakily, through the opening of Säkkijärven Polkka.
The fire crackled.
Igor reached the end of the first few phrases and looked up.
"...you can play?" Mauri asked, confounded. "How did you learn to play the accordion?"
Igor pointed at his eyes, then over to Mauri, then mimed the motion of playing.
"You learned by..." Mauri stopped. "You were always watching me play. You learned just by watching me play?"
Igor nodded enthusiastically.
Mauri thought about his memories of the village in the tundra. Of barn windows. About field edges. About every doorway and fence post and the back of tractors, and Igor in all of them, always at the edges, always watching. He had never really thought about it before - Igor had simply been a feature of the environment, a constant presence that Mauri had never thought to examine.
Mauri looked at Igor - at the coat borrowed off his back, the shoes laced onto his feet, the accordion learned in secret through barn windows because nobody had ever once thought to invite him in - and felt something move in his chest that he decided, after a moment, he would not examine too closely while other people were present.
Mauri reached out and carefully took the accordion back before Igor accidentally dropped it into the fire.
"Well," he said slowly, setting it down safely beside him. "You certainly play like a real Leningrad Cowboy."
Igor froze.
His face moved through several expressions very quickly. He eventually landed on something that was not quite a smile - too much feeling in it for a smile, too full, the face of someone who has been waiting a long time to hear something. It was almost too much to look at directly.
"I'll talk to the others," Mauri said. "Tomorrow morning. You can travel with us from here." He paused. "Don't go getting any ideas about stealing my spot in the band, though. Okay?"
Igor made a sound. Then he stepped forward, both arms thrown wide, and Mauri was suddenly being embraced.
Mauri went rigid.
The Cowboys did not embrace. They shook hands or threw arms over each other's shoulders on good days and barely tolerated being in the same room on bad ones. Hugging simply was not something that happened in the band.
Igor held on, and Mauri stood with his arms slightly out, stiff as a man who has unexpectedly found himself at the center of a situation he did not plan. Then, slowly, he put his free arm around Igor's back.
He looked out at the desert over Igor's shoulder - at the dark and the stars, the fire burning low, the extraordinary fish in the pan that had started all of this.
His stomach grumbled, reminding him of how long it had been since his last meal.
After a moment he patted Igor's back once, twice, the universal signal for please let go of me now.
"Alright," Mauri said quietly.
Igor let go. His eyes were bright as he looked at Mauri, looked at the fire, looked at the shoes on his feet, and then finally sat down heavily beside the fire.
Mauri sat down beside him, picking up the knife and turning the fish over.
Around the fire, the other Cowboys were waking properly now - drawn by the smell, or simply being awakened by the accumulated hunger of days without a real meal.
Mauri looked at Igor sideways. "You'll have to give my shoes and coat back in the morning," he said. "But once we get to Mexico and get paid for the wedding gig, maybe we can get you your own."
Igor looked down at the shoes. He looked up at Mauri. He patted the toe of the left shoe once, affectionately, as though saying goodnight to something.
Mauri handed him the knife.
"Here. Don't let it burn."
Igor took it with both hands and focused on the fish, his expression one of intense concentration.
Mauri leaned back on his hands and looked up toward the stars. They were in the wrong position for this time of year, or rather he was in the wrong position for the stars he was used to - too far south, too far from the tundra, still months from harvest time and the real work that would be waiting for them when they got back.
Beside him, Igor sat watching the fish cook while wearing Mauri's coat and shoes, smiling quietly at the fire. Mauri looked at him for a while.
Then he smiled too.