Her stomach’s full but Blanche still feels awful. Her head’s in a pincer grip. No hat, no parasol, nothing to put between herself and the sun. Her nose is full of the reek of chlorine from the boxcar where they’re fumigating the outgoing luggage and mail sacks. She stares at the black silhouettes of the trains. The last time she was here, two days ago, she was coming back from San Miguel Station with a fresh graze on her cheek.
“Whoa!” There’s a busker singing, shuffling by the barrier. The same black man Blanche failed to give a coin to yesterday? No, younger, and no brand on his ashy cheek, just streaks of sweat.
When the train comes along,
When the train comes along,
I will meet you at the station
When the train comes along.
Every time Blanche hears a song now, she feels Jenny behind her shoulder, listening, commenting, memorizing.
If my mother ask for me,
Tell her death done summons me;
I will meet you at the station
When the train comes along.
“Passengers for the Espee, Espee, South Pacific to San Jose,” a ticket-seller’s calling tiredly.
A ragged line forms. A man in a top hat gives Blanche a curious glance.
She looks down at her grubby stockinged feet and feels herself flush. On an impulse, she flutters to the gentleman’s side. “Sir? Pardon me for disturbing you …”
“Move away, miss, unless you got a ticket,” the ticket-seller warns her.
But she clings to the passenger’s smooth-sleeved arm. “I’m trying to get home to San Miguel Station.” Why did Blanche say that? It just came out, as if it were true. “In all the commotion last night—my bag—”
“San Miguel Station?” the gent repeats with interest, hanging back as the other passengers push past. “The site of the murder?”
Blanche improvises. “It was … it took place in my father’s saloon,” she whispers.
His eyes bulge.
“I was called to the City to give evidence at the inquest, you see, and some awful fellows snatched my bag, and now …”
“First class for this young lady,” he calls, clicking his fingers for the ticket-seller and pulling out his wallet.
She was hoping for cash, but a ticket’s something, at least. She might as well sleep on a train as in a stinking alley.
“You must tell me all,” he says in Blanche’s ear.
Her gorge rises. She’d rather give him a below-job in the lavatory, frankly. But if it’s sordid details he wants in return for his fifty cents, fine.
She shares a cushioned bench with the man and spins him a garbled version of Mary Jane McNamara’s week; shows him the little scab on her right cheekbone and blames it on a bullet that came through two walls.
Dizzy, Blanche asks for a dipper of ice water from the refreshment cart, but the gentleman insists on pouring her a jot of whiskey from his own flask instead. Then he takes great pleasure in buying her a peach and a bag of nuts. “Sugar candy too?”
She thinks of the Industrial School, and the candy Jenny used to throw over the fence to those miserable boys. The varieties on this cart all look unappetizing to Blanche, but she supposes children’s tastes are different, especially if they’re living on a reformatory diet. So she chooses a sachet of clove-flavored wafers, brownish lozenges printed with women’s faces, and pinkish objects called Conversation Candies with cryptic messages right on them: Married in Satin, Love Will Not Be Lasting.
When she can bear no more of the kind gentleman, Blanche excuses herself “to freshen up.”
In the corridor, two of the black porters are chuckling together. They hush at Blanche’s approach and move off down the train in different directions.
She stares at the window. Spots on the sooty glass: raindrops! It’s been months. Oh, a good storm cracking this leaden sky, that would be something …
In the next carriage, an Italian’s singing a snatch of “Voi Che Sapete,” blithe and off-key. Blanche dozes for a minute, leaning again the window.
Then wakes from some muddled dream of a baby with no face. P’tit. How long will she dream of him? If Blanche just knew she’d never see him again … She almost wants it. No! It’s just that the waiting, the not knowing—that’s the worst of all.
She can’t shake off the things Madame Johanna said last night. The image she showed Blanche, like a reflection in a tarnished, buckled mirror: the Lively Flea, a thoughtless pleasure-seeker who farmed her baby out to strangers and would have been relieved to hear he was dead. No, that wasn’t how it was, Blanche wails in the privacy of her head, that was never how it was—
She can’t prove it. There’s no judge to whom she can justify her mistakes.
Here’s the question: If Blanche is such an unnatural, rotten-to-the-core bitch of a mother, shouldn’t she be able to forget P’tit now? Everyone’s replaceable, according to Madame. Forget his unsmiling face, his translucent ears, that doorknob he—goddamn it! The knob’s lost too. For nine days she’s been carrying it around in the bottom of the carpetbag the rioters pulled out of her arms last night. Blistering tears blind her.
The silhouette of the Industrial School rears up on the far left. Blanche remembers her candies and roots in her pocket for the paper sack. Wrestles with the window. Humid air blasts her face. The fence, here comes the fence, but no boys. Where are the boys? Blanche needs to throw these candies to them but—
Sunday, satané Sunday. What, do they lock the kids in their cells right through the Sabbath?
Blanche flings the fat bag anyhow, for Jenny.
Instead of sailing over the fence, it hits the wire and rebounds into the dust. What a pathetic throw. Now the boys will only be taunted by the sight of the bag. Will one of them be able to reach through with a hoe or a stick and hook it, retrieve the chalky disks and lozenges before the insects swarm them? Will the second boy punch the first, snatch his hoe from him? Will Blanche’s dumb gesture lead to nothing but fights, or will a single imprisoned boy get a taste of sweetness and know somebody cared just enough to throw him a blasted candy?
San Miguel Station coming up now. Blanche has no good reason to get down there, today or ever again. She could just stay on the train and try to nap before the conductor throws her off in some faraway town …
Instead, she hobbles down onto the tiny platform. A face in the window, the gent who bought her the ticket. His hand up in an excited gesture. Blanche doesn’t wave back.
The morning of Thursday, the fourteenth, Blanche wakes late with a sore head in the front room at the Eight Mile House. The bed empty beside her, as smooth on that side as if the sheets have never been touched. As if what happened last night between her and Jenny was just a figment of her filthy imagination.
The day’s sliding away from Blanche already.
Blanche tries to remember how drunk she was last night. About as drunk as usual. About as impulsive. About as whorish. If you can remember any of it, she’s heard it said, you weren’t that drunk.
McNamara’s nightshirt, folded on the bureau. Could Jenny have gone back to the City already? Did she leave first thing this morning, or in the middle of the night, right after Blanche lost consciousness? Could Jenny not even look her in the eye today?
But when she slides her fingers under the mattress, she finds the Colt. And when she looks under the bed, she glimpses the sack of frogs Jenny caught yesterday on Sweeney Ridge.
Blanche puts on a fresh white bodice over her mauve skirt—as if what she wears even matters here in San Miguel Station. She manages to wheedle some coffee out of Ellen McNamara, but it tastes burned. She sits in an old rocking chair on the porch, holding her cup.
“It wasn’t half this hot last summer,” she mentions to Ellen when the woman steps out with a basket of wet sheets.
A look of contempt from the Irishwoman. “Sure a summer like this has never been known.”
Still no sign of Jenny. Where could she be?
“Is—does Jenny
come down here often?” she asks Mary Jane the next time the girl steps out on the porch.
Mary Jane wipes sweat out of her eyes with the back of her hand. “Often enough.”
“On her own?” Blanche fans herself with a three-day-old copy of the Examiner.
“Or with friends from town.”
Which friends? wonders Blanche with a surge of perverse resentment. She fans herself harder.
Friendship. Blanche has no talent for it, she decides. Less than a month she’s known Jenny Bonnet, and what an almighty hash she’s made of it.
John Jr. is over by the pond throwing stones in, one after the other, and watching the ripples. (Funny how universal that impulse to make your mark, even on water.) Now somebody’s stopped to talk to him. The chicken farmer from the cabin to the east, is it?
A piercing pain in her leg; Blanche looks down to see what’s biting her and slaps her leg, but she’s missed it.
Nothing to do, nowhere to go. Blanche puts her head back and tries to doze.
A whirring sound. Jenny glides out of a dust cloud on her high-wheeler.
“Where did you disappear to?” calls Blanche, too accusatory.
Jenny jumps down, grinning. “Bicycling around.”
“Around where?”
“How, more like. Had a go at riding backward.”
“That would explain the blood trickling down your arm,” says Blanche, aiming for witty rather than irritable.
“Doing it’s the only way to learn,” says Jenny. “Thought I’d give John Jr. a turn too, but the boy’s in some class of sulk.” She glances over at the pond, where John Jr. seems to be brooding over each pebble before he flicks it into the water.
Ah, thinks Blanche, perhaps the lad’s feeling neglected by his old pal from the City. Jealous, even, that Jenny has someone else with her to talk to.
Jenny’s stashing her high-wheeler between some desiccated shrubs and the porch.
“Afraid someone will pinch it, the way you did on Market Street?” mocks Blanche.
A chuckle. “Would be a shame to lose the thing before I’ve got the knack of riding backward.” Jenny throws herself into a fraying cane chair. Drums something like a jig with her boots.
“You’re restless today,” Blanche comments.
Jenny shakes her head. “Born restless. Nothing special about today.”
Blanche looks away. So they’re pretending nothing happened in the night. Fine by her. Perhaps if she and Jenny play it this way, everything will stay more or less as it was. She squints past the lopsided VARIETY OF LOTS NOW AVAILABLE sign, the derelict patches between the dunes, all the way north to the nude hills of San Francisco. “These foutu flies keep chewing me,” she complains, rubbing at three red marks on her right foot.
“Ankle-biters, not flies,” says Jenny. “Need to get yourself a pair of gaiters.”
“Oh, you reckon I should go shopping?” says Blanche wryly.
“Maybe Mary Jane’d lend you a pair …”
The dog’s nosing around Blanche, so she pushes him away.
Jenny scratches him behind the ear. Then she looks out beyond the porch, and her gaze becomes unfocused, as if she’s been smoking opium.
“What makes your eyes go like that?”
A blink. “Like what?”
“Hazy,” Blanche specifies. “What were you thinking about?” Is that a safe question?
“Oh, you know. Volcanoes, quakes …”
“Volcanoes?” she repeats, startled.
“Doesn’t have to be volcanoes,” Jenny concedes. “Just some kind of excitement. No warning, the ground boils over like a casserole, the railroad flips, buildings tossed in the air … It’s all going to end sometime, so why not hurry that up a touch and find out what’s next?”
Blanche shakes her head at the craziness of this.
Jenny yawns. “Want a book?”
“What would I want with a book?”
“Suit yourself.” Jenny pulls one out from under her chair and turns to a page she’s marked with a stalk of wild grass. The binding’s gilt on green, with a drawing of a traveler at the end of a jetty gazing out to sea.
“What’s it about?” asks Blanche after a minute.
“What it says,” murmurs Jenny.
Blanche reads the title, then reads it once more, to make sure she has it right: Around the World in Eighty Days. “Is that even possible?”
Jenny shrugs without looking up. “They’re barely past San Francisco, and Indians are attacking, so I guess I’ll have to read on to find out.”
Blanche takes the hint.
It’s the quiet that’s unsettling her, she decides. Downtown, there’s always some kind of hubbub, whether street music or just the babble of tongues. Here at San Miguel Station, the still air seems to press on her ears.
It must be a quarter of an hour later when Jenny yawns and looks up at the horizon. Blanche follows her eyes. “That’s Blue Mountain,” Jenny remarks, “the highest of the City’s hills.”
Blanche examines the flat-topped cone. “Don’t see anything blue about it.”
“Ah, come down in the spring, you’ll find it one big sea of baby blue eyes.”
The spring? Blanche doesn’t even know what she’ll be doing tomorrow. She’s tempted to point out the unlikelihood of her coming back here at any season, but that might sound sour. “You’d rather be up there,” she counters.
“Blue Mountain?”
“Away in the bush, anyhow, not sitting on a porch. So what’s stopping you?”
Jenny seems not to hear the provocation. “Got to bring yesterday’s sack of wrigglers up to the City later,” she says.
Blanche’s lips tighten. “And leave me here bored out of my mind?”
“Come back up with me, if you like.”
“It’s not safe, not for either of us. Those things Ernest threatened us with on Waverly Place—do you think he was just running his mouth?”
Jenny puffs out a breath. “No lead in his pistol!”
But Jenny doesn’t know Ernest, nor Arthur, not really. She can’t see past the dandy affectations, the peacock gear. A few weeks’ acquaintance hasn’t taught her to be afraid of them.
“I reckon I can look after myself, anyhow,” she concludes.
Blanche bristles at that. “Meaning I can’t?”
A shrug. “All I say is, I’m riding back to town today.”
“Suit yourself,” says Blanche.
A pause. “It could be after dinner, if it makes any odds to you.”
Blanche sniffs.
Jenny returns to her book.
This waiting around is more than Blanche can stand. She marches into the saloon, where she finds Mary Jane behind the counter, smearing glasses with a rag. She asks to borrow some gaiters to keep off the insects.
Mary Jane supplies them without a word.
Blanche swaps her little mules for her boots and laces the gaiters up over them, right to the knee. Then asks the girl for a bottle of rye, because why the hell not, and brings it out onto the porch with two glasses.
Jenny bursts into a lively verse at the sight.
I’ll eat when I’m hungry
And drink when I’m dry;
If a tree don’t fall on me,
I’ll live till I die.
“Santé.” Blanche clinks their glasses before handing one to Jenny. “You know a lot of drinking songs.”
“Easiest ones to remember, I guess—the alcohol helps them soak in.”
McNamara comes home from his laboring a while later and accepts a glassful to get the dust out of his throat. “Would you be old enough to remember how pricey drink was in the war?” he asks Jenny.
“Would I! When the tax came down after, I went on such a spree …”
Ellen McNamara calls them in for platefuls of what Blanche reckons must be boot leather.
“Splendid stew, Mrs. Mac,” says Jenny.
More drinking afterward, at the bar. The settlement’s quiet tonight. Jordan comes i
n and remarks that the Canadian’s away to San Jose.
Jenny asks for a sweet cocktail.
“We’ve no bitters,” says McNamara.
“Angostura? Gentian? Orange, even? What class of a drinking establishment is this?” she teases him.
“There’s all kinds of bottles in my shop,” offers Jordan.
“Would you be poaching my feckin’ customers now?” asks McNamara.
“Ah, come on, they’re paying you rent,” Jordan points out. “Let me sell them a cocktail.”
So the women go over to Jordan’s and have a few, even treat him—and McNamara, who follows them to see what all the fuss is about, though he finds the sweet stuff hurts his teeth. He brought his fiddle too. It makes a screechy racket but there is something festive, Blanche decides, about a song played at full volume in the middle of nowhere.
“‘Who gonna shoe yo’ pretty little feet?’” they all chorus.
Who gonna comb yo’ bangs?
Who gonna kiss yo’ rose-red lips?
Who gonna be yo’ man?
“‘Lawd,’” Jenny winds it up with a raucous whoop, “‘who gonna be yo’ man?’”
But once McNamara goes back to his saloon, Jenny stands up and says, as if sober, “I’m off, folks.”
“Now? Don’t be absurd,” says Blanche.
“Off where?” asks Jordan.
“To the City, with my frogs, otherwise they’ll turn cannibal and my name will be mud with my customers.”
“You should have gone hours ago, before dark,” objects Blanche. ‘You’re so drunk now, you’re likely to ride into a ditch.”
But the young woman’s already picking her way across the sandy ground between the two buildings.
Blanche races after her.
In the saloon, McNamara’s leaning on his bar.
“Where did I hang up my coat?” Jenny wonders.
“Don’t let her have it,” Blanche tells him.
“None of my lookout,” says the Irishman.
“Come on, man,” she scolds him, “you know Jenny’s too tight to pedal that machine.”
Frog Music Page 33
