There’s a scrap protruding under the door; Blanche thinks at first it’s just a square of light, but no, it’s the torn-off margin of a newspaper, and it bears an unfamiliar scrawl: Heading to the Eight Mile House for a couple days (San Miguel Station). Blanche has heard the name before; a saloon of some kind, on the frayed southern edge of the City, where Jenny sometimes puts up if she’s stayed out late frog-hunting. So the note must be Jenny’s way of saying good-bye after the unsettling encounter with Ernest and the Specials on Waverly Place. Or, rather, her way of saying Count me out. Nice knowing you. Places to be, frogs to catch … Anger flares in Blanche like a match.
And then she reads it again and remembers that Jenny rarely volunteers information. Perhaps it’s meant as an invitation of a most nonchalant kind. Why would it be any of Blanche’s business where Jenny was heading unless Jenny was suggesting Blanche come along?
So here’s Blanche in a rented buggy an hour later making for San Miguel Station, because she can’t think of anything else to do, and her instincts tell her it’s best to stay out of Ernest and Arthur’s way as long as they’re in such a crazy rage. Since setting a pair of Specials on Jenny led to nothing worse than a ten-dollar fine, next time the macs might come with their knives: fix you for good and all. Blanche shudders, feelings Ernest’s thumbprint on her lip. Just talk, that’s all it was, probably, the kind of bluster men resort to in a row. But still. Time to get out of town.
After settling her bill on Commercial Street, Blanche doesn’t have much in the way of cash left, but there’s no point fretting, she tells herself. She could have taken the train but she fancied a ride, for once, hence the buggy. The speed of her motion stirs the parched air, making a sort of breeze. It’s been so long, Blanche has forgotten how good it feels to have wind moving over her, still hot but not half so stale. Why doesn’t everyone flee from the City who can?
It seems like years since Blanche has held a pair of reins. In the hack’s head-down, put-upon way, he’s got something in common with the circus horses who used to bear her balancings and flips. Wonderful to be up above the crowd, rattling over the cobbles of Stockton Street, making people hustle out of the way. She’s overshot Mission before she knows it, so she makes a sharp right on Howard to ensure she avoids Folsom, because the thought of the weeklies and the paid-ups is bad enough but that leads to P’tit, to what kind of room he might be shut in right now and what he might be gnawing on for lack of his doorknob, which rolls heavily from side to side in the bottom of Blanche’s carpetbag … Abandoning the City feels like giving up hope of finding P’tit. Not for long, Blanche swears to herself. What’s the old proverb about running away? Live to fight another day.
She cracks the reins to hurry the old horse on. Just as the stable boy at Marshall’s told her to, she’s following the single train track right across the Mission District. The horse slows as they climb the grade. From up here Blanche can glimpse the sea’s glittering tongue.
Through the Bernal Cut into Glen Canyon, and soon the bleak silhouette of what must be the Industrial School rears up on her right, with its scores of little windows winking through their bars; the stable boy told her to watch out for it, so she’d know she was almost at San Miguel Station. Fellows locked up in that place as old as twenty and as young as three, he mentioned—which disgusted Blanche. “Whips and gags for the troublemakers,” the stable boy added with relish. When Blanche mocked him for crediting every rumor he heard, he insisted that it had all come out before a grand jury.
“Gagged and whipped is what you’ll end up if you tell such lies,” Blanche said to him, but with a smile and a dime to tip him for the directions.
The hills are arid, pink. Out in the brunt of the sun, Italian-looking families haul water from their rickety windmills and spread horseshit.
Then even the farms come to an end. Nothing but the County Road and the train line beside it, the last two exhausted runners in a race. A sign that’s off one hinge: VARIETY OF LOTS NOW AVAILABLE FROM THE RAILROAD HOMESTEAD ASSOCIATION. A low wooden depot, silvery lettering faded almost past the point of legibility—SAN MIGUEL STATION—with a scattering of shacks around it. It barely deserves to be called a village. But then again, Jenny knows this part of the Bay, and some little nowhere’s probably the safest spot to hide in till the macs calm down.
The dogs of the settlement yip at the horse as Blanche reins it in. One of the buildings is standing on blocks like wobbling stilts. How did it ever get through the last quake? A sign tacked up unevenly near the roof proclaims, in large, childish lettering, that this is the San Miguel Saloon and Hotel. Is that the official name of what Jenny calls the Eight Mile House?
A whoop of greeting from the shady part of the unrailed porch, where—Blanche squints against the light—Jenny’s lolling in a weather-beaten chair. “Ladies and gentlemen,” cries Jenny, “for your delectation, we have the honor to present that queen of motion, that eminence of equestrian elegance—”
“Did you come by train?” interrupts Blanche.
“Shin power,” Jenny informs her, nodding at the bicycle that leans against the building’s gappy foundations.
The windows are stuffed with rags in places. “High-class locale,” mutters Blanche, getting down from the buggy and looping the reins over a post where a little palomino pony already stands.
“Ah, it’ll grow on you.”
The scrawny mongrel’s hackles rise as Blanche comes up the steps, but Jenny makes the introductions. “Friend! Friend!” She’s done a ragamuffin darning job on Arthur’s green shirt, Blanche notices.
The screen door squeals open and a mousy boy bursts out, wiping his mouth.
“Mr. John McNamara Jr.,” Jenny says, addressing him, “may I present Miss Blanche Beunon?”
Blanche automatically puts a hip a little to one side, makes her smile dazzle.
The boy’s eyes go big as he nods at her.
“Had a bash at Tom Sawyer yet?” Jenny’s asking him.
He nods fervently. “Reckon it even beats Roughing It.”
Jenny whistles.
Blanche notices that John Jr.’s eyes have strayed to the high-wheeler. “I shudder to think of Jenny bumping out here on that contraption,” she remarks.
“Oh, she knows her way,” he tells Blanche. “Got her educating out hereabouts and all.”
“Really?” She turns to Jenny.
Who’s already springing off the porch to show off her bicycle. “Fancy a go, John Jr.?”
“Me too,” whines a small girl, emerging around the door with another screech of hinges, a tinier boy behind her.
“Yiz’ll stay away from that yoke before it snaps your legs to bits,” orders their mother, stepping out with arms crossed on her flat bust.
“I wouldn’t get up on it if you paid me a dollar,” remarks an older girl, smirking in the doorway.
Jenny introduces Blanche to Mrs. Ellen McNamara and Mary Jane, Kate, and Jeremiah. (Why, Blanche wonders, must Irish families always have a John and a Mary?)
Then Jenny offers to give a demonstration. “Let’s start with the coward’s option—lean it against a wall. See this mounting step?” She taps a piece of metal sticking out just above the little rear wheel.
“Out of the way,” says Blanche, surprising herself. She’s already got her mauve skirt halfway up and tucked into her sash in three places.
Jenny just smiles.
The Irishwoman looks disapproving but she’s such a slattern herself, who’s she to frown?
Blanche takes hold of the gigantic handlebars and leads the machine away from the wall. Coward’s option! Its cruelly tapered saddle is so high, she can barely see over it. But skill trumps size.
The McNamaras scatter at her approach. Jenny does a drumroll on her thighs. Does she believe Blanche can do it or is she just enjoying the prospect of seeing her friend make a fool of herself? Blanche runs a little to get the machine moving, puts her right foot on the mounting step, and stands up. But she’s losing momentum al
ready. Hops down, tries it again, sweating like a beast. Ducking, she gives a couple of scoots with her left foot, then—can she make it to the saddle in one jump? No, too high for her. She claws at the passing pedal with her left foot till it’s at the top of its arc, then straightens up on that for an instant and throws herself into the saddle.
Jenny yodels with glee.
Blanche flails, her legs barely long enough to press the pedals with the balls of her feet, her toes stretching fit to rip at the bottom of each orbit. Wild zigzags—but then she begins to get the hang of the steering. Cuts a wide circle across the sandy ground between the Eight Mile House, the store, and the pond (probably deeper than it looks, she warns herself). She risks a turn of the head toward what she can’t help thinking of as the crowd, all six of them.
The McNamaras are open-mouthed. John Jr. claps as if his life depends on it.
“My oh my,” crows Jenny. “Enjoying yourself up there, are you?”
“Vastly,” calls Blanche, breathless.
“Now there’s only the dismount, which is considerably harder than the mount. Want a tip about how to get down in one piece?”
“Va te faire foutre,” Blanche says rudely, trusting the McNamaras don’t know French.
A little later, she’s sponging her sweat and dust off in the guest chamber. Well, that’s the title with which Ellen McNamara dignifies the front left of the shack’s four rooms. The bedstead—imitation black walnut—faces the window, as if there were a view to look at, not just the dusty scrape of the County Road. Instead of a curtain, a square of green baize, nailed at the top, hangs down to block the sun.
A needlework sampler with slightly jagged letters reads:
Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam,
Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home!
Blanche thinks she recognizes that from a song. Humble is an understatement. She fingers the sheets uneasily. “I wonder how many of the brats share this bed when the McNamaras don’t have lodgers?”
“Packed sardine-style,” says Jenny, nodding.
Blanche mustn’t think about P’tit, cribbed tight with who knows how many others. She arranges her few possessions on the dilapidated bureau beside the washstand. “The elder boy—you give him books?”
“Pass them on,” Jenny corrects her. “It’s that or use the pages to wipe my ass.”
“Doesn’t he go to school?”
A shrug. “As the fellow says, never let schooling interfere with your education.”
“He likes you.”
“Don’t everybody?” A flash of a grin.
“Except the ones who want to fix you for good and all,” Blanche says in her best manly growl, which makes them both giggle.
The older girl’s hovering in the doorway. “Mary Jane,” says Blanche with a civil nod. “I know we must be crowding you some …”
“That’s all right. Mammy and Dadda’d put us to sleep in the pond to make a dime.”
Jenny laughs at the image. “One of these days you’ll be grown and gone, Mary Jane.”
A toss of the head. “Gone where?”
“Take a job in the City, maybe. You’ll have a fine time, and your pick of the fellows too.”
“Oh, indeed!” Flushing, the girl disappears into the saloon.
In the evening, McNamara Senior comes back from a laboring job, soaked through with sweat. Blanche and Jenny sit down with the family for some salt cod. (Blanche has already steeled herself, knowing that the Irish can’t cook.) Jenny talks mostly to the little girl, Kate, who’s teaching her some nonsensical song. Jenny repeats after her: “‘You don’t have an arm—’”
“‘Ye haven’t an arm,’” Kate corrects her in her whispery voice, “‘ye haven’t a leg, ahoo—’”
“‘Ye haven’t a leg, ahoo—’” Jenny breaks off. “What’s ahoo?”
The small girl shrugs and sings on.
You’re a noseless eyeless chickenless egg
Ye’ll have to be put in a bowl to beg
Och! Johnny, I hardly knew ye.
“What are you saying, child?” Her father breaks his silence. “It’s ‘Ye’ll have to be put with a bowl out to beg.’ He’s lost all his limbs in the wars, and the bowl’s for the money he’s begging.”
“Once you’ve passed on a song, it’s out of your hands,” Jenny tells McNamara. “I favor the kid’s version.”
“Her version, is it? She’s making a dog’s dinner of it.”
“Well, this Johnny sounds like something of a dog’s dinner himself, so—”
“He’s like a chickenless egg,” insists Kate softly, “that’s why he needs a big bowl to sit in or he’ll roll away.”
P’tit, rolling across the floorboards of the apartment, panting with effort … Blanche shuts her mind like a door, locking him out.
Later on, she and Jenny go over to Phil Jordan’s grogshop, because he’s got a better range of spirits than McNamara. Jenny treats them all to a rendition of something with dozens of verses called “Rye Whiskey,” or maybe “Jack o’ Diamonds,” she can’t quite remember.
After three cocktails, Blanche is distinctly cheerfuller. She trips back to the Eight Mile House and finds that the waning moon lends the ramshackle silhouette of San Miguel Station a certain charm. Her throat is aglow with liquor, even if her lip still hurts where Ernest’s hand crushed it yesterday, on Waverly Place. The hem of her mauve skirt is brown with dust, but what does it matter when no one’s looking? No need to dress up here, or match the City’s arduous rhythms. San Miguel Station’s a two-bit place between real places, an anonymous dirt spot on the map where, for the first time in weeks, Blanche can fall into bed without a thought in her head.
The morning of Saturday, the sixteenth of September, Blanche stands outside Gray’s Undertakers and Music Shop. She’s passed this bland yellow brick building probably a thousand times but never noticed it before. It’s only two blocks west of her own building. (Blanche still thinks of number 815 as that, despite Low Long’s sticky-painted sign that she saw as she was passing just now: enormous Chinese letters above smaller English ones reading GOOD LUCK ROOMING HOUSE.) After a long night alone between the cool sheets of the Palace Hotel, she’s as ready for this inquest as she can make herself. Presentable, at least, because she’s spent some of Lamantia’s money on a costume that’s sober by her lights, a pale pink-and-white pattern from high neck to flounced hem.
She’s gathering her nerve to step inside when out of the corner of her eye, she sees something move. A house. An actual two-story frame building going by, creaking down the middle of Sacramento Street. Blanche stares. It’s on rollers, hauled by a team of eight gasping horses. Pedestrians dive to one side or another. Someone’s moving without having to change houses, she supposes; what a Californian shortcut! Jenny would be so tickled to see that, Blanche thinks. Abruptly missing her friend so much her stomach cramps.
A pair of bony arms suddenly wraps Blanche up. She recoils from maroon ruffles. The death’s-head, that old ravaged dove Jenny had a soft spot for. “Maria,” says Blanche, as politely as she can.
“Ma pauvre,” sobs the old woman, mopping at her single eye with a scrunched handkerchief. “You really stuck it to those goddamn macs in the paper yesterday!”
Blanche nods uneasily.
“Fleas living off our asses,” Maria pronounces. “Though I did get my own back on my Thomas,” she adds, reminiscent.
“You did?” says Blanche, because it seems expected of her.
“He was just like your Albert—a dog in the manger.”
Arthur, Blanche wants to correct her, absurdly.
“Took half my face off with acid. I could hear my own skin sizzle,” says Maria with ghastly exuberance.
Blanche feels her gorge rise.
“Some splashed on Thomas, I knew, because I could hear him cursing about holes in his pants.” Maria grins. The woman still has all her teeth, Blanche notices, even if they are yellow. “It was the pants that did for hi
m, though. Captain Lees found where Thomas had stashed them under the bar, you see?”
Blanche is oddly impressed by that piece of detective work.
“The connard escaped from the pen after a year, but still,” says Maria, sighing, “I’d had the satisfaction. Poor Jenny, though … Maybe we’ll see those sons of bitches hang for it after this inquest?”
Blanche nods, trying to smile, but her face is contorted with guilt. Thinking, Not if it’s up to me. She’s committed herself to her devilish bargain with Ernest. She’s going to walk in there and testify that he and Arthur could have had nothing to do with Jenny’s mysterious death. Almost ten by the clock over the door of Gray’s. Get inside, Blanche scolds herself, before the detectives come looking for you.
Maria walks beside her. “Not to speak ill and all that, but Jenny was such a hothead. Should have known to stay clear of fancy men,” she laments. “Didn’t the last time nearly finish her off?”
“The last time …” Blanche is confused.
Maria puts her head to one side. “When the girl had to be pumped out with asafetida and warm water, must be five years back—”
Blanche swallows as people push past them into Gray’s. So the police files were right about that much: an overdose. Could it have been accidental? “What had she taken?”
The old woman shrugs. “Laudanum, probably—isn’t that our usual poison? Topping ourselves, it’s an epidemic these days—a teaspoon can do it if you ain’t habituated. Adrien wasn’t the worst, as they go, but not the best neither.”
Frog Music Page 24
