Dust girl

9

An arm smacked me on the ear. I shouted and sat up. Jack’s coat slid off my head.

“Hannah! Hannah, stop!” Jack rolled back and forth, his eyes squeezed tight and his arms flailing in every direction.

“Wake up!” I hollered. “Jack, wake up!”

His eyes snapped open, and for a minute, it was plain he didn’t know where he was, or why his arms were stretched out like that. Slowly, blinking hard, he sat up. Sweat streamed down his brow, and he wiped it away with the back of his shaking hand.

“Nightmares?” I said, and he nodded. His face was so pale under the dirt, I figured it was better to change the subject. “Thanks for getting us out of there. Where’d you learn to drive like that?”

Jack fiddled with his shoelaces for a second. “Before they repealed Prohibition, my folks were bootleggers-bathtub gin, moonshine, stuff like that. Sometimes I had to drive the car on the deliveries.” He didn’t look too proud of that, which should have been a clue about how he felt about the rest of his time at home, and probably should have stopped me from asking my next question. “Who’s Hannah?”

“My sister. She’s dead.” Jack got to his feet without looking at me.

“I’m sorry.”

Jack shrugged and kept on not looking at me. Instead, he wiped his hands on his pants and walked over to the door to turn the handle. When the door didn’t open, he leaned on it. It didn’t budge.

“We’re drifted in solid,” he said.

The shack had two windows, one beside the door and one at the back. I tried squinting out the one beside the door, but it was too grimy to let me see much. From the sound of things, the wind had died down, but dust still pattered and pecked as it settled onto the shack’s tin roof, a sound enough like rain to make you cry.

Jack came to stand beside me, looking through the dust-covered glass. He grunted, wrapped his coat around his fist, and punched each of those glass panes in a no-nonsense way. He swept his arm around, clearing out the glass and splintering the mullions, which were already half gone from dry rot. As soon as the window hole was clear, we both climbed out onto the drift that had piled up level with the sill. Standing on that shifting dust pile, we looked at what the storm had made of Kansas.

I was used to being alone, but never like this. Hills and ripples of red sand spread under the glare of a pink-and-white sky. Nothing broke the smoky horizon, not so much as a fence post, let alone any sign of road or railroad track.

“Let’s get back in,” said Jack.

I nodded. The shack was rickety and the dust was piled in every corner, but its rusted roof shut out that empty country.

“So.” Jack rested his arms against his bent knees. “You gonna tell me what all that was with the Hoppers back there?”

“I don’t know.”

“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.

“Just try,” Jack said. “You brought Hoppers last time; maybe this time you can… I don’t know, bring us breakfast.”

You know how in a cartoon when somebody’s got to make a choice, they’ll get a little angel on one shoulder and a little devil on the other? That was how I felt right then. Half of me was saying: Don’t do it, don’t do it, something bad will happen. The other half was saying: Do it, do it, you gotta find out what will happen.

But the word breakfast had its own magic, and the little devil won. “What do I sing?”

Jack made a face like he knew I was stalling. “How about ‘I Been Workin’ on the Railroad’?” he said. “Everybody knows that one. Come on.” He started clapping to set the time and sang. “I been workin’ on the railroad…”

“All the live-long day…” It was a kids’ song. I didn’t like it, but he was right, I did know it. Its tune flowed into my brain and I started clapping along. Jack and I set up a strong, steady rhythm, like a chorus of hammers, like men keeping time as they swung those hammers down on the iron spikes, pinning the great black rails to the wooden ties, binding the country together and opening it wide up at the same time.

“Can’t you hear the whistle blowin’? Rise up so early in the morn…”

I forgot about being thirsty, about being lost, and about everything else except this stupid little kids’ song with its driving rhythm and its memories of work gangs so long gone nobody knew what it was about anymore.

“Can’t you hear the captain shouting, ‘Dinah, blow your horn…’ ”

I felt it happen. Everything shifted, though my eyes couldn’t see what or how. The whole world just twisted as if we were inside a lock while somebody was turning the key. The feeling lasted less than a second, but when it finished, the air all around us had changed, as if a fresh breeze was blowing in.

“Dinah, won’t you blow?” we sang. “Dinah…”

“Drill, ye tarriers, drill!”

A new voice cut across mine. Jack’s hands froze between one clap and the next, and his mouth gaped.

“Drill, ye tarriers, drill!”

It wasn’t just one voice; it was a full-throated chorus of men. Their rough and ragged singing soared in from the ruined prairie, where a minute ago there had been nothing at all.

“For it’s WORK all DAY for the SUGAR in your TAY, DOWN on the OLD rail-WAY!”

Jack scrambled to his feet and ran for the window hole. I followed, slow and afraid.

“And drill, ye tarriers, drill! And BLAST! And FIRE!”

Sun-bleached grass rippled beneath a pure blue sky. It smelled sweet, sweeter than my bread pudding. Bees buzzed among the cornflowers and Queen Anne’s lace. A hawk wheeled overhead, and sparrows clung nervously to the nodding grass stems. All at once I remembered being a little girl and running through grass like this, up to the hogback ridge to watch rain clouds pile up on the horizon.

A great gash had been cut in the grass for the iron rails. Shirtless men stood carefully spaced on either side of those black lines. Each man held a long-handled hammer. The hammers swung up and the hammers swung down, in time with their song.

“Every morning at seven o’clock

There’s twenty tarriers workin’ on the rock!

Boss comes round and yells, ‘Keep still!

And come down heavy on the cast-iron drill!’ ”

“Look.” Jack tugged at my sleeve. I turned, and he pointed to the shanty’s back window. Through that other window, there was still the silent, empty desert.

Out front, the men laying the rails across the lush green grassland kept right on singing. It was like something out of a pulp magazine, Astounding Stories or Weird Tales. Jack had punched open the glass window, but somehow I’d punched open a… a time window.

Or maybe it wasn’t a window at all. Maybe it was a gate.

Whatever it was, it was wrong. I felt that down to the soles of my feet. It was completely wrong and I was responsible. Again.

“We gotta get out of here.” I started for the desert window.

“Wait! They got a cook wagon.” Jack leaned out the broken window across the living prairie. I couldn’t help but look. A little, old-timey steam engine with a big red cowcatcher jutting out front waited on the track that had already been laid. That engine was hooked up to a full-fledged railcar with a trickle of smoke coming out of its chimney. The breeze blew through the window again. This time, it carried the smell of cooking bacon. My stomach growled and cramped up. Another breath and I could smell baking bread as well. My stomach didn’t so much growl as roar.

“We can go bum a meal!” Jack had his foot up on the sill, but I hauled him back.

“No! We can’t go out there!”

“Why?”

“Because what if we can’t get back?”

That stopped him. He saw it now. If it was a gate, and if somehow I’d opened it, somebody else could shut it. Or I might accidentally shut it, because sure as sure, I didn’t know what I was doing or how I was doing it.

If my gate shut while we were in that other time, we might never be able to get back.

Jack looked toward the cook car and the smoke coming out its tin chimney. “We have to try.”

“We can’t!”

The face he turned toward me was nothing I’d seen on him yet. Anger and desperation were knotted up together with his hunger. “You stay here if you want,” he said soft and slow, so each word dropped separately between us. “I’m going after something to eat.”

He was out the window and running through the grass while I was still opening my mouth to yell “No!” I grabbed the windowsill and leaned out as far as I could. I felt the strange, shifting parts of the invisible lock all around me. I felt them wobble, and I felt the key begin to turn. I tried to grab it, but it slipped free.

“Jack!” I screamed. “Jack! It’s closing!”

He stopped and turned. “You’re just saying that!”

“No! I’m not! I swear!” It was turning, turning. The barrel and the tumbler were shifting. The hinges were straining, and I was in the middle. I felt the pressure inside my brain and inside my heart. “Hurry!”

Jack looked at the cook car and the singing men, and at me. He cussed loud and angry and came pelting back. I shook. I didn’t know where these feelings were coming from, and I didn’t know how to stop that twisting I could only think of as the key.

Jack slapped both hands on the windowsill and vaulted through. I shuddered and screamed. SNAP! The sound rocked the shack, and even Jack reeled.

Hot, dusty wind blew across the windowsill into our faces as we stood there, panting and shaking and staring out at the unbroken Kansas desert.

Jack wiped his dusty sleeve across his mouth. “You swear to me you didn’t do that on purpose?”

I shook my head. “It started to close on its own. I couldn’t hold it. I tried, I promise I did.”

He took off his hat and rubbed his head. “What do we do, then?”

“Start walking, I guess.”

So we climbed out into our own time to trudge hungry and thirsty over the blowing dunes. We kept our eyes straight ahead so we both had something like privacy while we cried for the smell of growing grass and baking bread.