Dust girl

17

Something nudged my leg. I swatted it away, but it came right back. Nudge, nudge.

With the fight and the fear all done, and Shimmy not showing signs of taking us off anywhere more terrible than the dust fields east of Constantinople, I’d fallen into a doze and was looking for a way deeper into sleep. But that little nudge kept on, and reluctantly, I opened my eyes.

The sun was up, and we were still driving. The fields passing by had been ridged and plowed in an effort to stop the blow dirt, in case maybe this year a crop could be saved. Jack leaned against the other door and stared out the window on his side, but his hand was nudging his battered black notebook at me. It was open, and the page read:

She watching us?

I glanced at Shimmy. She had both hands on the wheel and hummed random bits of tune as she took us down that highway straight toward the orange sunrise. It wasn’t just a song; she was working some kind of wish with it. I couldn’t tell what kind, but I could feel how that constant wishing took up most of her attention.

My stomach squirmed, trying to get comfortable around this new way of knowing. But the feeling was too lumpy to allow that, and my stomach finally gave it up as a bad job.

Jack’s pencil stub lay in the fold of his notebook. I picked it up and, moving as carefully as I could, wrote

Don’t think so

on the page and pushed the book back to him. He flicked his eyes briefly down to read.

We went back and forth like that for the next few miles, both pretending to stare out the side windows, letting Shimmy drive us farther away from where we wanted to be, and all the while writing our notes.

What do we do now?

What can we? Morgan’s never going to stop looking for us.

Was it true? In the mirror?

You saw Morgan in the theater. What’s it matter if the mirror showed true?

It matters.

My face wanted to screw up tight when I read that.

Because they can bring back dead folks?

Because the mirror can show us stuff. You can work it.

BAD IDEA. Every time I do magic, they find me.

Jack read this, made a face, and stared out the window for a while.

A mule cart took shape in the dusty distance, coming toward us. Shimmy’s hum changed pitch, and the wordless tune slowed down. As we passed the cart, I saw a black man in dungarees slouched in the driver’s seat, with about a ton of baled cotton piled high behind him. We drove by slow and easy, but he didn’t look up. I would have bet all the money I didn’t have that he didn’t even see us.

Shimmy’s hum picked up tempo and turned all happy again. I pulled Jack’s notebook back toward me.

You think they’ve got your sister, don’t you?

Jack read it, and his face went funny and tight.

Do you?

I don’t know.

For a second, I thought he was going to tear the book in two, he looked so angry.

We have to find out. If they’ve got Hannah somehow like they got your folks, we have to get her away.

I thought about this. Hannah was dead; how could anybody be holding her prisoner? But then, Bull Morgan was dead and they had him up and walking around. But then, the Seelie were liars. But then, Letitia Hopper was one of them and she’d told me some true things.

It was just too many thoughts, spinning too fast. I tried to sort out the one that was really important. Jack wanted me to find out whether the Seelie had Hannah like they said they did.

HOW?

Jack thought about this.

Get her talking.

He drew an arrow to point between Shimmy’s shoulders.

She already likes you. Find out what you can.

Then what?

He glanced at Shimmy to make extra sure she was still watching the road, then wrote four words slowly and carefully.

We steal this car.

I nodded once. Jack erased the last line, closed the book, and stashed it in his coat. The movement caught Shimmy’s eye and she glanced back at us. Jack yawned and wiggled like he was trying to scratch an itch between his shoulder blades.

“Miss Shimmy, are we gonna stop soon? I gotta”-he glanced at me like he didn’t want to offend my delicate sensibilities-“stretch my legs.”

“Yeah, me too,” I said. “And I’m hungry.”

Shimmy sighed, short and sharp. “All right, all right. Next roadside stand, we stop. But no funny business. I ain’t got enough juice to be chasin’ the pair of you all over hell and creation, you hear me?”

“Yes, ma’am,” we chorused.

Shimmy snorted at our docile agreement and kept driving.

We’d reached a county where the spikes of sunburned cotton stems still stuck up above the dunes. The broken bolls trailed sad streamers of white fluff that combed the blow dirt out of the wind. The road sign said BURDEN. The cluster of gray houses and one lonely gray church were behind us almost before we saw them coming. But on the far side of Burden, Kansas, there was a low white building all on its own. Gas pumps and picnic tables stood watch in front of it, and a peeling sign read FLORA’S.

Shimmy eased the car to a stop on the patch of dusty dried grass beside the fry shack.

“Here, young man, you go and make yourself useful.” Shimmy pulled a beaded purse out of her handbag and laid two fifty-cent pieces on Jack’s palm. “You go in and buy us some food, and be sure you bring me all the change.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Jack pushed his cap back on his head and put his wide-eyed young boy look on. He walked into the shack, jingling the coins in his pocket the whole way. I could see him through the window as he stepped up to the counter. Somebody had worked hard to keep that glass clean. The fry cook, a skinny man in a white shirt, glowered at Jack, his face as hard and ugly as grease at the bottom of a jar. Jack pushed those coins across the counter, and the fry cook nodded. But then he looked through that sparkling-clean window at me and Shimmy, and his face tightened up into ugly again.

Shimmy didn’t seem to notice. She just took a white hankie out of her handbag, dusted down a spot on the picnic table, and sat. The fry cook nodded, turned back to his flat top, and began cracking eggs from a big carton onto the grill.

“Well, I suppose there’s some use having that boy around after all.” Shimmy got out her compact and looked herself up and down in the mirror. But I wasn’t really watching. Shame curdled through me from the cold suspicion on the fry cook’s face. I’d been out in the sun for days now, without a hat or gloves. I looked down at my hands, and to my shock, I barely recognized them, they were so brown. Mama would’ve had a fit. I touched my tangled hair, which had come loose from its braids days ago. If I went in there, would that man let me sit beside Jack on one of his stools? Or would he throw me right out again?

I didn’t want to think about that. I had enough problems. Starting with how to get Shimmy talking. Jack wanted me to find out about Hannah, but I had a whole heap of my own questions I wanted to tuck into.

“Shimmy?”

“Mmm-hmm?” She dabbed at the corner of her mouth with one fingertip.

“Why didn’t you say anything about the prophecy?”

“Prophecy?” She snapped the compact shut and stowed it in her handbag. “What prophecy?”

“See her now, daughter of three worlds,” I recited, trying not to see Letitia Hopper’s bug eyes while I did. “See her now, three roads to choose. Where she goes, where she stays, where she stands, there shall the gates be closed.”

“Oh, that!” Shimmy laughed, but for the first time her laugh sounded thin, like she was stretching it too far. “That’s been around for donkey’s years. Some fool’ll trot it out every time a half-fairy girl gets herself born, and pretty soon everybody’s in a tizzy.” She held her hand up to her mouth like she was whispering sideways to some other body leaning in close. “ ‘Is it her? Is she the one? Oh, my stars, I think it’s got to be her.’ ” Shimmy laughed again and waved all those invisible folks away. “They even said it about me when I was still an itty-skinny thing. It’s why Their Majesties didn’t want anybody marrying outside the fold. Gets folk all worked up.” She frowned at the shack. Jack was sitting on a stool at the counter now, swinging his legs. “What is takin’ that boy so long?”

But I wasn’t ready to let it go so easily. I couldn’t forget the turning-key feeling, the way I’d opened the time window to show the railroad work camp, and how I’d felt it again when I opened the doors between the theater and the normal world. “Can all of… us open gates?”

“Oh, sure, sure,” Shimmy said breezily. “Ain’t nothin’ to it.”

Then why couldn’t you get into the Bijoux? But I knew. She couldn’t open that door. That was a door between the regular world and whatever kind of world the Seelie lived in, and Shimmy didn’t have the right kind of magic to get through.

I was going to ask more questions, but Jack was shouldering open the shack’s screen door. He carried white paper bags filled with fried egg sandwiches and fat slices of apple pie. Jack and I shared a bottle of milk between us, and he’d gotten Shimmy a coffee, which she thanked him all pretty for and drank down like she’d never tasted anything so good.

Jack watched Shimmy closely as he took another swallow of milk, wiped the bottle rim with his sleeve, and passed it to me. “You know, Miss Shimmy, you must be tired by now. Why don’t you ride shotgun a ways? I can drive.”

“Nice try, Mr. Jack. But I’d rather keep things as they are. Now”-she picked up her purse-“I’m going to make use of the outhouse. Don’t you let Mr. Jack here get any ideas, Callie. I’ve made sure no one can move that car but me.”

She left me and Jack sitting there with a mess of paper wrappers and the remains of our breakfast.

“You think that’s true?” Jack picked at the pie crumbs and kept an eye on the direction Shimmy’d gone.

“Can’t say.” I frowned at the car. From where we sat, it was just a car. “But it could be.”

“Might make the rest of this trickier.” Jack measured up the Packard with his eyes. I got the idea he was seeing through the hood to the motor and the wires, figuring how long it would take him to start the engine without the key.

“Might.” Then I screwed up my nerve to ask something that had been bothering me since Constantinople. “Jack, are you really a Jew?”

“Yeah. So?”

“Nothing,” I said. “But if you’re a Jacob Hollander, shouldn’t we be callin’ you Jake?”

“Sometimes it’s not so good for people to find out what you really are.” Jack crumpled the sandwich wrappers together and stuffed them into one of the sacks. “Like, for instance, are you really a Negro?” he asked without looking at me.

I’d known that was coming. But my answer didn’t have such a straight road to travel. “I think my papa had brown skin, but he was a fairy too, so I don’t rightly know what I am.”

Jack was quiet for a minute. “Well, from what I seen so far, being a Callie LeRoux is plenty good enough. Maybe you should just stick to that.”

I found myself liking Jack a whole lot right then, no matter what name he chose. I’d never really looked at a boy before. The ones I knew in Slow Run all seemed small and mean, nothing you’d ever want to stop and pay attention to. But as frustrating as he could be, I truly did want to pay attention to Jack. Maybe it was because he was older and had been places and seen all kinds of things I never had. And, of course, with those other boys, if I looked at them too close, they might look back at me and see something I couldn’t afford to show.

But Jack already knew.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“What for?”

“You had a plan. You were going to Los Angeles, get a newspaper job…” The corner of my apron had three threads hanging off it. I pulled at the longest one. “And then I got you all caught up in… this. I’m just sorry, that’s all.”

“It’s okay, Callie. Just think of the story I’m going to have when we get there!” Jack grinned, and his whole face lit up. “You know, it’d make a great Sunday serial, maybe for a magazine.”

“Sure would.” I made myself smile back. I was faking, but I started to feel a little better all the same.

Jack stuffed the trash into a can beside the table and settled the lid down tight. “So, what are you gonna do?”

“Do?”

“Yeah, after this is over?”

My brain went blank, like a blackboard when the eraser swipes across it. I’d never thought about doing anything. My life had been the Imperial and taking care of Mama. I kind of knew other kids had plans about what they were gonna do and where they were gonna go when they grew up. There’d just never seemed to be any world outside Slow Run for me.

But I was out of Slow Run now, and there was a world. In fact, there was more than one world. But I still couldn’t see past what was happening right this minute. I wasn’t used to looking ahead. Not like Jack. Maybe that was why he had that ready grin. I could see through the dust, but he could see through time, and he didn’t even need magic to do it.

Before I could answer, Shimmy came marching around the corner of the shack, her face set in hard lines like she wanted to level some kind of curse on the outhouse.

It would have deserved it.