Dust girl

“Right, and I’m the king of England.”

“I don’t know! It just…” I flapped my hands, like I could shoo the question away. “It just happened.”

I told him about the voices I’d heard, and how Mama made me play Papa’s piano and then vanished in the dust storm. I told him how I went looking for her but found Baya instead; how I got three wishes, then got the Hoppers. Finally, I told him what Letitia Hopper had said about the prophecy: See her now, daughter of three worlds. See her now, with three roads to choose. Where she goes, where she stays, where she stands, there shall the gates be closed.

Jack took off his cap, knocked the dust off, rubbed his brushy hair, and put his hat back on. Then he leaned his head against the wall and stared up at the tin roof for a long time.

“That Apache you pulled out of the dust…,” he said to the roof. “I think you met Coyote.”

“Baya was a coyote?” I shouldn’t have been surprised, but part of me just would not give up the idea that something still had to be impossible.

“Not a coyote.” Jack sat up straight and folded his long legs. “Coyote. He’s a big Indian spirit, and there’s a ton of stories about him. There’s one about how he hung the stars, and another about how he named all the animals, all kinds of stuff like that.”

I was quiet for a little while, because I was remembering the shape I’d thought was a dog in the dust storm, and how I’d seen the stars in Baya’s black eyes.

“You got any idea what the Hoppers were?” I asked. “Besides really big bugs?”

Jack’s face scrunched up as he considered that one. “I think they’re fairies.”

Now I knew he was crazy, and I guess that showed on my face. “What else are they gonna be?” Jack demanded. “Besides big bugs?” He started ticking points off on his fingers. “They’re magic. They don’t like iron…”

“How do you know they don’t like iron?”

“You said you clobbered Letitia with the silver tray and she got right back up, but when you hit her with a cast- iron frying pan, she stayed down.”

“Couldn’t that just be because the pan’s stone-dead heavy?” I gave him my best fish eye, but at the same time, I was thinking how the Duesenberg changed into a rickety Model A as soon as the pan banged against the door.

“Could be, but I don’t think so. See, iron’s poison to fairies, so I think they’re fairies.” Jack took off his hat and rubbed his head again. “And I think you are too.”

My train of thought screeched to a stop so hard it nearly jumped the track.

“Me?” I said, hoping I’d heard him wrong. “I’m a fairy?”

“Well, what did Baya tell you? About your pa?”

I didn’t have to think about it. Every word had carved itself right into me. “ ‘There’s a spirit man, tall and fine. He’s full of love and mischief. He’s promised to a spirit woman of his enemies, but he doesn’t want her.’ ”

“See? ‘Spirit man.’ That could mean fairies.” Jack leaned forward, his hands talking as much as his mouth. “The Irish say there’re two kinds of fairies. There’s the Seelie. They’re bright and beautiful. Then there’s the Unseelie, and they’re all dark and ugly, like trolls and goblins and stuff. Each side has their own kings and their own territory, and they’re always at war with each other and…”

Jack kept on talking, but I was hearing a very different voice.

“The Seelie King will reward us all,” I whispered.

“What?” Jack frowned.

“Letitia said that, when we were in the kitchen. She said, now that they… the Hoppers had found me, the Seelie King would reward them.”

“See! I’m right!” Jack shouted.

I felt sick anger crawl up out of my stomach to glower at him. I did not like Jack knowing more about what was going on than I did. The whole world had turned upside down and shaken us out into this lonesome place. I wanted him to be just as confused and lost as I was, though for the life of me I couldn’t have said why.

“How can you know all this stuff?”

Jack shrugged. “That wasn’t the first time I got took up for vagrancy. I got caught coming through Texas once, and they put me on a road crew. I spent thirty days chained to this mick kid from Brooklyn, and he told me a bunch of stories his grandma told him.”

“You said iron’s poison to fairies. If I’m a fairy, how come I could hold on to the frying pan?”

I figured I had him there, but not for long. “Maybe it’s because you’re only part fairy,” said Jack. “Daughter of three worlds, right? Your mama’s a regular human being, right? So you can handle iron and salt and stuff because of your human blood.”

“I can’t be a fairy. They’re little girls in puffy skirts and they’ve got wings…” They’re all white. “I don’t feel like a fairy.”

“How do you know? If you’ve always felt like you, you wouldn’t know if that was how a fairy felt or not.”

“It doesn’t matter.” I was not going to talk about this anymore. I was not even going to think about this. There were all kinds of more important things to think about. Like how we were going to stay alive without food or water or any idea which way town was. “I still gotta get to California. That’s where Baya said Mama is.”

I got to my feet and went over to the broken window again. I stared and stared until I felt the veins standing out in my forehead, and I still couldn’t see anything.

“I can get you to California,” said Jack.

“How’re you going to do that?”

He shrugged. “We can ride the rails out. I’m going that way anyhow, and two’s better than one when you’re bummin’.” He cocked his head at me, and those big blue eyes turned all sly. “I won’t do it for free, though.”

“But I don’t have any…” I stopped. “Wait! I still got…” I shoved my hand in my apron pocket, but when I brought it out, all I had was a single dead leaf. I opened my fist, and the tired-out wind brushed leaf crumbs across the floor. The fifty hadn’t been any more real than Mrs. Hopper’s pretty face. “I got nothing.”

“You got your story. You tell it to me, and I can write it up and sell it to the magazines.” The way Jack said it, I was sure that was what he had been thinking of all along.

“Who’d believe any of this?”

“Not like news, dopey. I’d do it up like a story. You ever read The Wonderful Wizard of Oz?”

As if there was a girl alive in Kansas who hadn’t read that book.

“Oz made L. Frank Baum rich.” Jack’s face lit up like it had when he talked about getting a newspaper job in Los Angeles. “You can make a fortune with just one book, especially if Hollywood decides they want to make a movie out of it. What do you say?”

I hated the idea. But what could I say? Without Jack Holland I’d have been a Hopper supper already. “Okay, but you gotta get me to California first.”

“Deal!” He stuck out his hand, and there in the middle of the biggest nowhere ever created, we shook on it. “This is gonna work out swell. I can just see it: my journey with a fairy girl to the Golden State…”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said, just to shut him up. I wasn’t a fairy, but there was no way I was going to get him to believe that. I’d have to prove it somehow, but how do you prove a thing’s not so? “What do we do now?”

Jack shoved his hands into his breeches pockets and looked me over. “You sing.”

“What?”

“We have to find out what you can do. From what you said, it all started when you played your father’s piano…”

“Played, not sang,” I pointed out.

He shrugged. “So we have to find out if you need an instrument, or if you can make magic with any music.”

I gawked at him. If there had been any flies around, I would have caught them. How could he be so calm?

“It’s not safe,” I reminded him. “Last time my mama vanished and the Hoppers found me.” I was starting to like Jack less and less, but I didn’t want him vanishing, and I sure as sure didn’t want any more Hoppers, not when I didn’t even have so much as a frying pan.