39. Strolling in the Park One Day

Mateo was starting to get used to the weird clothes. He was learning the language, too. Anybody who said the Brits back now spoke the same English as he was raised with had never been offered a smoke by one. He also hadn’t believed the sneaker guys that “toad in the hole” was a real thing until he’d checked with Nigel. Turned out it was some kind of corndog casserole, which sounded delicious. They didn’t have enough flour or fat or meat to make it as much as they wanted to, and they were missing it. Even the guys stationed in the UK were obviously missing regular home life. Well, join the friggin’ club.

He wondered if this was how his mom felt when she moved to Minnesota, and decided it was probably different. For one thing, she’d decided to move. That had to make a difference. And she called and later even visited home. He was ... he sighed.

Christmas and New Year’s had passed. Some sneaker guys he’d hit off with, plus Nigel, had met in the canteen the morning of the 25th and partied as best they could. They were all homesick, which was great and terrible, and nobody had a rank north of corporal, which was just great. The food sucked but that was just life back now. Nigel had come up with some slices of turkey — since they didn’t have a Thanksgiving they ate it at Christmas, apparently — and they all loved him for it and yakked about food the whole time and asked Mateo about American stuff.

He told them about both sides of the family, sneaking around stuff like jello that probably didn’t exist yet, and they sighed over the bounty they couldn’t have. He was pretty sure they were carrying around pinups of cookies — biscuits — by this point. It was a pretty great party, still.

But it was hard to sleep that night. The door wasn’t locked now — they’d even given him the key. Normally that helped. He could even go outside at will if he stayed on the property and kept quiet in the halls. And being able to opt when to bail and when the light was on was the best thing over. Tonight it wasn’t helping, though. He missed home. He missed it like some stupid little kid. He was glad nobody was around to see him. He’d lose all his hall cred. Eventually he conked out.

Nigel was away again, after New Year’s, at Something Park where the codebreakers kicked it. He was pretty sure what Station X was was supposed to be a big secret back now, so he didn’t tell them he’d seen a documentary that mentioned it.

When daydreaming about Turing reading his (probably censored and retyped) notes got boring, Mateo taught some sneaker guys to play Texas Hold ‘Em, and a few got so good he was lucky he didn’t have any money. He did a lot of pushups and lost some more weight. That had been kinda cool at first, but now he was getting too stringy. He missed Oreos and Fantas and beef pepián.

He read the paper for something to do. It was great to have something to read, but it scared the hell out of him. He’d never been so close to a war. What if he was the extra ounce on the seesaw that tipped things over? What if he nudged things so Turing or Flowers ate a bomb? They had to keep them protected from stuff like that, right? What if Nigel got killed on one of those trips? That wouldn’t be the (possibly literal) end of the world, but it would suck. He also felt kind of like a dog left behind on a vacation that all this crazy stuff was going on and he was kept out of the way like a dish too nice to eat off of.

On the flipside, he’d heard weird sirens pretty often and seem smoke on the horizon some days which was just as freaky as hell. This kind of stuff just didn’t happen in Minnesota. It scared him. War was supposed to be way off there somewhere if you were American, not like a few miles away. The fact that his mom had survived a real war in her backyard as a kid — never talked about it — freaked him out more, not less. It was like the monster you never got a good look at and it was coming for him now. He knew (from reading Wikipedia on the sly, not from asking her) that she could've been killed just for being Mayan and in the way. Americans had chipped in, but this American was going to do the opposite here. Nobody needed to die just for being alive. Yeah, the Brits probably did some pretty sucky stuff too, but what about randos who were just in the way of the armies, and kids like his mom had been?

He started to feel superstitiously like since death had just missed his mom it was gunning for him, and he might as well go down fighting. Dumb, probably. He also sure didn’t want to fight.

Tineye had told him sternly, when he handed over his key, that if he left the light on without seriously using blackout curtains then he, Tineye, would throw him back into a real cell. Mateo couldn’t really blame him. It was just self-preservation at this point.

Next