would ever learn to love men or live with them.
A whistle blew, a long mournful sound like all the loneliness that drove the men and the machines. The Mechanicals hissed and chuffed and came to a halt, ready to move on.
'All aboard!' someone cried.
The people of the camp groaned and stood up. The leather harnesses creaked and stretched. The adults were hauling their houses behind them. They were all moving West, to escape the past, escape the East. Why didn't they ever look behind them? Did they never wonder why they were so weary and mean? Dorothy knew and despised them. They were all pulling the East with them.
They carried guns. They shot things. They shot anything that moved. They shot a black man running toward freedom. There were flocks of deer, bounding away, white tails like the waves of the sea. Rifles crackled and the deer fell, their legs suddenly breaking under them like twigs. There were clouds of birds in the sky, darkening the sun. The men raised their rifles like thunder, and there was a rainfall of blood, blood and feathers, and pelting corpses of pigeons. People slipped on blood. Without thinking, without even knowing, the men raised their rifles and fired.
Lift the rifle. Crack. Lower the rifle. Lift the rifle. Crack.
One of them turned to Dorothy, coated in grease, grinning.
'We're civilizing the country,' he said.
Dorothy knew that by the time they got to the Territory, it would be gone, always advancing away from them like a rainbow.
They all walked on, toward Wichita.
As the settlers drew near Wichita, there was a great lowing sound and a cloud of dust ahead of them. A herd of Bad Women was being driven toward the river.
'Yee ha!' the cowboys on horseback shouted and herded the women down the banks so they could wash. The women were brown with dust and they skidded down into the water, their dirty stolen dresses billowing out on the surface of the river.
The settlers walked through a shantytown, between lean-to shelters with lace curtains and open doors with women standing in them. The Bad Women were not pretty; they were fat and sour or skinny and mean. Dorothy looked at the settlers but their eyes were fixed ahead of them and they seemed not to see.
They seemed not to see the women running races naked through the streets like horses. Men lined the course, wearing bowler hats and drinking straight from the bottle and laying down bets. The women ran with breasts swinging. Their smiles were fixed; their eyes were dim. Alongside the course, two Bad Women in all their finery got into a fight, tearing feathers and hair. Men gathered around the fight to laugh at it and to cheer them on. The women screeched in pain.
At the bridge, the gates to Wichita, the shantytown was left behind. There were bankers there to meet the settlers. The bankers were the guardians of the cowtown, with vests and rotund stomachs and extravagant whiskers. The bankers took away each man's gun. There was nothing to shoot in Wichita but people and that would be bad for business. The bankers took away the horsemen's blinders and put on blindman's glasses instead. The glasses were tinted green. They made the gray grass and the gray sky and the gray soil look alive. And the bankers sang!
Fine property, with water nearby, in balmy gentle climate!
The travelers sang too, swinging their arms out in front of them like blind people. The pilgrims stumbled through the gates, singing 'Land of Goshen.'
Wichita had streets of unpaved mud, churned up by wagons and human feet. There were wooden boardwalks and vast puddles and ramshackle tents, and cheap wooden buildings with lies painted on them. FINEST DRY GOODS, said one shack, sweltering in a puddle. FIRST NATIONAL BANK, said a sign over a tent.
Fights began to break out as people tried to camp. Women sat down in the mud and wept. Along the boardwalks, there were freak shows. One-armed men. Women with beards. Tattooed couples, all green and red and pink and lavender. There was a black man with no arms and legs, opening a box of matches with his teeth to light a cigarette. It was a show. In her vision, Dorothy knew that he had cut off his arms and legs himself, to make a living.
There were brass bands in front of the restaurants and emporia. The music they played was loud and squawking, harsh and blaring. They were in competition with each other. They had to make you hear them at the expense of the others. A man in woman's clothing lifted up his dress to step around a puddle. Dorothy peered at his face. He was Jesse James. His face was made of black lines, like an engraving. The look he gave Dorothy stilled her heart with fear.
Behind the shacks and false-front palaces, there were mounds of stinking hides, laid out, with scraps of meat still clinging to them. There were deer's heads, and bears' paws, all in mounds. There were slaughterhouses, full of cattle lowing, smelling blood, knowing they were going to die, voiding their bowels and bladders, so the stink and the flies rose up.
I want, thought Dorothy, to go home.
She didn't want to see any more, because she knew this was a truth. Would her father be here? How could she find out? Wilbur said there might be a list in the County Offices.
The County Offices were two stories high and were made out of brick, with stone arches over the windows. There was a gaslight outside them on the corner and signs by the door saying probate and law office. There was a telephone. Dorothy could hear it ringing and ringing, with no one to answer it.
Inside, the County Offices looked like a bank. Ruined, desperate men lined up in front of tellers, all in peaked caps. Everyone was shouting. A policeman bustled a howling man out of the place. Telegraph messages squeaked like a flock of birds.
Dorothy was in despair, waiting in line. In her dream, she knew no one would be able to help her. They wouldn't even be able to hear her over the din. Wilbur took her arm and led her into another room. Great doors opened, and beyond them, the County Offices looked like a church.
There were Gothic pillars and fragmented, colored-glass windows and beautiful distant singing that was forever out of reach, like a colored scarf being blown away by the wind.
