Dust girl

“Oh, hush. It’s a fine idea.”

“You’ll be sendin’ ’em straight to…”

“The movies.” Shimmy cut him off firmly and laid the tickets down on the table.

Jack and I glanced at each other. Did we have our own current that Shimmy and Shake could feel?

“I don’t…,” I started.

“Go on, go on, take them.” She pushed the tickets toward me, and I remembered how I’d pushed that bread pudding toward Letitia Hopper, just before I tried to lay her out with Mama’s silver tray. “Enjoy yourselves for a change. It’ll be good for you. We can talk more later.”

To my surprise, Jack picked up those tickets and slipped them into his coat pocket. “Thank you kindly, Miss Shimmy,” he said. “We were just talking about how much fun it would be to get to the picture show, weren’t we, Callie?”

Sometimes you don’t need a kick in the ankle to get the hint. “That’s right. We were talking about that.”

“Well then!” Shimmy spread her hands and beamed.

Shake frowned hard, shook his head, and lit a fresh cigarette. The smell of all that smoke made my stomach churn.

Shimmy grabbed Shake’s new cigarette from his fingers and took a long drag. “Have fun, Callie LeRoux,” she said, exhaling smoke with her words. “And we’ll see you around.”

“Yeah, yeah, sure.”

And that was that. With Shimmy and Shake grinning like Christmas morning and the Fourth of July, Jack and I walked out the door into the twilight that had fallen across Constantinople. The door swung shut behind us. Jack grabbed my hand and hustled us both off the porch. He didn’t stop until we were a good twenty yards down the street.

“What do you think?” Jack asked, jerking his chin back in the direction we’d come.

There were a thousand answers to that, but none of them were any good. “I think she wanted us to go to the movies awful bad, but Shake didn’t. Why do you suppose that was?”

Jack shoved his hands in his pockets. “That was a con game if ever I saw one.”

“What do you mean?”

“You want to get a mark, I mean a person, to do something they shouldn’t. So you and your partner, you stage an argument. Make out like one of you is telling the mark something they shouldn’t know. Your partner says, ‘No, no, don’t tell him that!’ which makes the mark think he’s on to something, that maybe he’s outsmarted you. Next thing you know, that mark’s doing exactly what you want.”

“Like in the story when Brer Rabbit says to Brer Fox, ‘Don’t throw me in that briar patch,’ when that’s exactly what he wants to have happen.” I did not like the sound of it. I did not like the smile on Shake’s face or the light in his glittery eyes.

Jack glowered hard back toward Shimmy’s. The dark was lowering slowly, covering the clapboard houses and all the world around them. “Besides, they were lying to your face about what they want with you.”

“What?”

“They didn’t say a word about the prophecy. It was all about Princess Callie and how your family wants you back so bad. Nothing about gates or worlds or choices.”

He was right, of course, and I could have kicked myself for forgetting. I’d been all caught up in the idea that I had kin who might actually want to see me. Part of me started wondering if it was Letitia Hopper who’d been lying, but I shook that off. She’d been too far gone with her own hunger to fool anybody. I knew what that felt like now.

“So what do we do?”

“We don’t go into that briar patch,” said Jack firmly.

“What else are we gonna do?” Shimmy wanted us-wanted me-to see something, that much was certain, and I was already wondering what that something might be. Shimmy had played it smart. She’d told me just enough of the truth to get me thinking about what else I could find out from her. It was a con game, all right. Just like Jack said.

“We get to the rail yard and hop the first train west. When we find your parents, they’ll be able to tell us what’s really going on.”

He was right. Of course he was right. We couldn’t do what Shimmy and Shake wanted because we couldn’t trust them. Probably that whole princess thing was a kind of fairy story, just to try to get me to come along quietly. Probably I didn’t even have grandparents.

Jack set his face toward the rail yard, pulled his hat down low against the spreading dark, and started walking. The only thing I could think to do was follow, never mind that I felt like I was leaving bits of myself in the dust with every step.

13

What Is a Vigilante Man?

I used to like trains. I’d watch them go by out my window and wave to the people. I’d even envied the hobos. At least they were on their way somewhere, while I was stuck in the dust. The train songs were my favorite, whether Mama sang them to me or we listened on the radio: “Rock Island Line,” “This Train,” “Chattanooga Choo Choo,” even “Little Black Train.” And of course “The Midnight Special.”

But I’ll tell you what, now that I was in the middle of all those trains, I didn’t want anything more than to find my way out again. Nothing makes sense in a rail yard at night, and there’s no way to see where you’re going or what’s coming toward you. Huge sheds rose up to our right like giants’ caves, with steam engines bigger than any storybook troll squatting inside. The lines of train cars-Pullman cars, refrigerators, tankers, open-top coal cars, flatbeds-rose up on every side, cutting off any easy way forward or out. We had to squeeze between or under those silent, empty cars to get anywhere. But even then, the only place we were getting was deeper into the dark, broken maze. A wind stinking of oil, diesel, metal, and sawdust wormed its way between the cars, following us. Things clanked and creaked, but I couldn’t tell where any of the sounds came from or what they belonged to. Anything could be hiding here, and we’d never know until it was right behind us.

Jack held my hand so we’d keep together, and I didn’t mind at all. I startled and tripped on the rails and the ties as I tried to cross. I wished a thousand times we’d just gone to the movies. Whatever waited inside the Bijoux could not have been scarier than all these shadows. Jack acted like he knew where he was going, but nobody could in all this dark, with all these giant cars and all these sounds coming from nowhere. Part of me knew this was just fear shunting my brains around, but it surely made a good job of it.

Finally, Jack pointed to a bunch of dark bundles beside a stack of railroad ties. I thought they were coal sacks until I saw one unfold itself and arch back to stretch its shoulders. Those bundles were all people, huddled close in the dark.

I wanted to hang back, but Jack squeezed my hand and marched us forward. As we got closer, I could see there were dozens of people, maybe as many as a hundred. All of them hobos, bums, Dust Bowl refugees hunkered down together because as bad as it was here, being here alone would have been worse.

Jack picked out one man from all the others, a wiry fella in overalls and a loose undershirt, his thin hair brushed back. He wasn’t huddled on the ground. This man leaned against the stack of ties, staring hard at the dark, his big, crooked nose making him look like a hawk. Jack walked us both into a patch of floodlight and went straight up to him.

“How do?” Jack asked politely. The man nodded.

“Been here long?”

The man shrugged. “Few days.”

“All right we set down too?”

That man’s eyes were sharp and clear as he looked us over. I would have bet money he could see in the dark. Not because he was a magic man or anything; just because he’d been watching so hard and so long.

He shrugged again. “It’s a free country.”