Dust girl

by Sarah Zettel

  Hungry as we were, though, Jack and I eventually had to slow down. Even with Shimmy and Shake digging in alongside us, we couldn’t polish off half of what was on the table. I looked at all that leftover food and thought about all the people we’d seen on the road and felt guilty.

  Shimmy must have seen my look, because she waved her hands and the remaining food vanished. All that was left were the crumbs on our cheeks and the stains on our napkins. Now that my belly was full, I felt ready to take on anything. Starting with Miss Shimmy.

  “So how come you knew my name?” I asked. Jack nodded, to let me know he agreed this was a good place to start. “Were you looking for me?”

  “All of us are looking for you, Callie,” Shimmy said. “Especially now that you’re finally outta that moldy-oldie hotel.”

  “Who’s us?” asked Jack.

  “Us,” Shake said. “The Midnight People, the deep ground people, the secret people.” He looked me right in the eye, and I saw those golden sparks shine. “Your papa’s people.”

  “Don’t start up with that again,” I told him. “You don’t know nothing about my papa.”

  That just made Shake smile. “I know he fell in love with your mama even though she was just a common human woman and he was a prince of his people. I know he stood up in front of the council and said he was leaving, and they could all fight it out who would be the next king, because he was through.” Shake changed as he said those words. He became more solid, like he was rooted tight to the ground. I felt the blood drain out of my face, and I remembered what Baya had told me. He stands up in the council tent and he says he won’t stay with his tribe anymore.

  “We were both there.” Shake took a drag on his cigarette and puffed out a long white smoke plume toward Shimmy. “I must say, for a man doing something so stupid as turning down a kingdom, he did it up right. Broke his sword across his knee, kicked his crown across the floor.”

  “Swore three times he’d never sit on your granddaddy’s throne.” Shimmy shook her head. “Then he walked out, leavin’ all of us with our jaws flappin’ right down to our knees.”

  It took a while for these new words to settle in and make their manners with all the other impossible ideas that had set up housekeeping inside me over the past few days. But once they did, I knew they were staying for good.

  “My papa’s a prince?”

  Shake examined the burning end of his cigarette. “That he is. Now ask the next question, Callie.” My heart was knocking against my ribs. Jack touched my wrist, to back me up or to warn me away, I couldn’t tell. It didn’t matter. I had to ask.

  “What does that make me?”

  Shimmy looked to Shake, and Shake nodded. Shimmy smiled broad and slow, and she got to her feet.

  “Never thought I’d be the first to say it.” She put one foot behind the other and bent her knees, sinking low. It took a second to realize she was making a curtsy to me. “Welcome home, Your Highness.”

  12

  They May Beg You to Go with Them

  “No. No. This ain’t right.” I looked to Jack for some kind of help, but he was just sitting there with his jaw hanging open like it had come unhinged. “This can’t be right.”

  “It is right.” Shimmy straightened up, smoothing her skirt.

  “You, Callie LeRoux, are the heir to the Midnight Throne.” Shake smiled and blew another big cloud of smoke. His gold-and-silver eyes glittered on the other side of the cloud, and I shivered.

  “Your grandparents have had us out looking for you for the last thirteen years,” Shimmy went on.

  Jack finally managed to pull himself back together a little bit. “If it’s what you say… why’d her papa leave? Why didn’t he bring her mama to the… her grandparents’ kingdom?”

  Shimmy probably would have ignored him, but I folded my arms and cocked my head, because it was a really good question. Shimmy saw my stubborn face and sighed. “Your papa was supposed to marry the Seelie princess, but he’d already fallen in love with your mama. So he decided to run off and be a mortal man with a mortal wife.” Shimmy plucked Shake’s cigarette out of his fingers and took a drag. “As if Their Majesties were ever gonna let that happen.” She blew the smoke toward the ceiling and handed the cigarette back to Shake.

  He runs for that other woman, but he can’t run fast enough. The Shining Ones capture him and lock him away, but he still won’t marry their woman. The room tried to start spinning. I knotted my fists and dug in my heels. There was no telling how much longer these two would feel like talking. I would just have to get dizzy later.

  “So where is he?”

  Shimmy shrugged. “If you don’t know, nobody does.”

  “Do you know?” Shake looked at the glowing tip of that cigarette, but I could feel him watching me.

  I shook my head and tried hard to think about the taste of the barbeque we’d just finished, instead of what Baya had told me. Just in case they could read minds or something. If they were… were… fairies, they just might.

  Shimmy frowned, and I felt something bunch up tight inside her.

  “Well, that’s all right,” said Shake. “We’ve got you here and that’s what counts. Your grandparents are gonna be real happy when we take you to them.” His eyes sparkled through the smoke again.

  I was beginning to wish I hadn’t eaten so much, because my stomach and heart were both flipping back and forth, not sure which way to settle. On the one hand, I did not like Shake. I did not like the way he looked at me with those glittery gold-and-silver eyes, as if he hadn’t had enough dessert.

  But at the same time, he’d said I had grandparents. Grandparents. Mama’s parents were dead. I’d never really let myself think about my papa having family. Longing rose up in me as strong as the hunger had been. Right then I didn’t care if they were a king and a queen; what mattered was that they were alive and I could talk to them.

  “If her grandparents want to find her so bad, why aren’t they here?” prompted Jack. It was funny: he was the one who’d wanted all this fairy stuff to be true, but now that it was, he couldn’t seem to believe a word they said.

  Shimmy rolled her eyes. “Since when does the king run his own errands?”

  I thought that made sense, but there was no way to be sure. Too much had piled up in my mind. I needed room to breathe and clear it all out.

  “I know it’s tough, honey.” Shimmy laid her hand over mine. It was cool and soft. Shimmy was not somebody who did a lot of work. “And we’ll help you all we can.”

  “That’s right.” Shake nodded and stubbed out his cigarette. I felt a current between them so strong that if I’d thrown a rock at it, I’d have struck sparks.

  “I ain’t staying with you.”

  “None of us is staying here. Too many of them around.” Shake jerked his chin toward the window. “Looking for you, may I add. We gotta head for the city gates and get you safe inside.”

  “No.” I shook my head again. “I gotta find Mama. When that’s done, I’ll come see my… whoever wants to talk to me.”

  “Your mama.” Shake made a face like he wanted to spit. “They got your mama.”

  “Who?”

  “Them,” snapped Shimmy. “The pretty, shiny ones. The bright, light, straight, and uptight.”

  “You mean the Seelie court,” said Jack.

  Shake tilted his head toward Jack, like he was just seeing him properly for the first time. I edged a little closer to Jack, because something way down inside me said he didn’t want Shake to see him, not really. “That’s right, young man. They got her but good,” Shake said, all slow and thoughtful.

  “Then I’ll get her back,” I said, trying to sound like it was no big deal.

  “Ha!” laughed Shake. “You don’t understand, do you? They got her. She won’t want to leave now.”

  “Don’t listen to him, Callie,” said Jack. “He’s just trying to get you all mixed up.”

  He was right. I shouldn’t listen. They’d already tried to fo
ol me twice that I knew about.

  “You trust this boy over one of your kin?” Shake asked softly. “Callie girl, you ain’t even begun to find out what kind of liar he is.”

  I was glad he said that, because it reminded me who my friends really were. “You leave Jack alone!”

  “You’re the one who should leave him alone.” Shimmy leaned forward, her brown eyes shimmering, her voice low and urgent. “You come with me and Shake. We’ll take you to your grandparents. They’re the ones who want you. They’re the ones who will teach you who you really are, Your Highness,” she added.

  I felt the current rolling between Shake and Shimmy again. It was almost like the feeling of the magic when it shot through my blood. All at once, Shimmy shifted gears.

  “Poor Callie,” she said suddenly. “You’ve had a bad time, haven’t you? And so much to wrap your head around. You deserve a treat. Both of you.” She tossed a smile toward Jack. “I tell you what. Why don’t the pair of you go to the pictures?” She got her purse from where it sat on the back of the piano and pulled out two green cardboard stubs.

  “Shimmy…,” said Shake. “That is not a good idea.”

  “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 a
lone 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.”

  “Thank you kindly,” said Jack.

  I’d seen plenty of hobos. They came to the Imperial looking for work almost every time a train pulled into the station. But I’d never been in a whole camp of them like this. All these people were dried out and wrinkled by sun and wind, and then starved down so far that their bones rode right under their skin. Even the babies looked old. The families clustered together. Women sat with skinny children around their knees and in their arms, their men standing watch while they dozed. The boys traveling on their own hunkered down a little ways away. Some of those boys with their hats pulled low and their hands shoved in their jacket pockets might have been girls, but their faces were just as hard and exhausted as any of the others.

  All of them waiting to hop a train. All of them trying to get someplace, anyplace where there might be work and a chance at keeping body and soul together just a little bit longer. They watched us settle down between them with hollow, hungry eyes. I remembered the barbeque, and guilt squirmed around inside me, making itself all comfortable.

  “So, what now?” I said to Jack. “We wait for the Midnight Special?”