Devil and the Bluebird

by Jennifer Mason-Black

  More nodding. Her hand over the mouthpiece. “Is there anything personal that you can tell me that will help them know it’s you?”

  She thought about Nellie’s Place, the piano, the warmth.

  Javier shaved my head. He gave me his coat, too, and a hat. He said families could be made, that romance wasn’t the only kind of .

  Tish paused, gripped Blue’s hand in hers before continuing. After she shared everything Blue had told her, she nodded, said, “Hold on, you can say it to her.”

  She handed the receiver over. Blue clutched it to her ear.

  “Interstate, right?” The voice on the phone was deep, lush. “This is Liza. I took Steve to the hospital the night you were here. I’m so glad to hear from you, darling. Can you give me some kind of sign, tap or something, to let me know you’re okay?”

  She tapped her nails against the phone, as hard as she could.

  “Okay. Well, Steve’s just fine, too. He’s staying with Javier for now. You two took such good care of each other. He told us all about it.”

  He was okay. He’d known her name, but she’d left quickly enough. Not everyone was lucky enough to live in a temporal puddle like Tish. Rat hadn’t found him again, and Javier was taking care of him, and he was okay.

  “He’s doing really well, sweetheart. I wish he was here to talk to you, but he’s not. He’s got a job, just a little part-time thing until he’s got a better idea of what he’s doing. I’ll tell him you called and that you’re okay. He’s been worried. You think you can call back later?”

  She clicked off, quiet as she could. Steve was okay. Homes could be found. New families could be made. And girls who lost their voices would have the chance to find them again.

  Exactly one week into March, Blue walked out the door into air that smelled of spring. She couldn’t have described it any other way. Meltwater, maybe, and sunlight, and the hint of earth even through the blanket of snow.

  That would have been enough to make up her mind, but when she walked down the drive, her footsteps sloshing in the soft snow, it took her no more than five minutes to reach the road, a minute longer for the implication to sink in. She stood there and watched a truck go by, its wheels throwing up water, then turned and ran.

  Tish wasn’t home. That made it easier.

  She’d kept almost everything stored in her pack. Now, all that was left to do was to stuff a few more pairs of underwear in, a couple of peanut butter–and–jelly sandwiches, and she’d be ready to go.

  Almost.

  It was much harder to leave a note for Tish than it had been to leave one for Lynne. Again, she had that sense of not knowing how to make everything fit, only this time the optimism had been stripped from her. What do you say to someone when you know you might never see her again? What if you’d already been lost to her once?

  Tish,

  I don’t understand why Mama did the things she did. I’m sorry. I wish you’d been with us. I wish you’d been with her. I ran away at the end because I was scared, and I wish I hadn’t. I know you wouldn’t have. You would have loved her then just like you loved her before, and that would have been the best thing for her.

  If I make it to Cass, I’ll come back here again.

  Thank you.

  Blue

  She started out walking. She’d told herself that hitching would be easy, but every passing car made her jump to the side. The Traveler’s face looked out at her from the sun glinting off every window.

  Walking felt good. She’d missed her boots, at least when she was moving. The clop of them against the pavement, their solidity, the height. She could walk forever, just keep on going.

  She kept thinking about what Dill had said about hopping trains. Missoula: that name stuck with her from when he’d talked about freight yards. The workers would be okay, he’d said, most of them. Friendly, even. Everyone else, she needed to size up carefully. Some folks hopped because it was the way they lived, their own Beyond. Others were looking for a thrill, and some of those thrills involved hurting people.

  She’d be okay, though. She wasn’t Blue out here, she was Interstate. She’d survived Rat and the Traveler. She’d survived being left, by her mom, by Cass, by Teena. She’d survived leaving Steve and Dill, and now Tish.

  She was through with all that. From this point on, she’d be arriving, and there wasn’t a force anywhere that could stop her from surviving that.

  She didn’t choose the VW bus. It chose her. One second, it was speeding past; the next, it gave a loud bang and wiggled to the side of the road on a very flat tire. A woman got out, ran a hand through straggly bleached hair. “Do you know how to change a fucking flat?” she called into the bus. The answer was clear enough when she kicked the offending tire.

  Blue paused, considered her options. Teena’s dad had spent an afternoon teaching them to change flats. He didn’t ever want his girls left on the side of the road, counting on the kindness of God knows who to help them out, he’d said. His girls. Teena and her.

  Another woman got out, this one in ridiculous heels and a fur coat so fake it might have been made from skinned teddy bears. She gave a low whistle. One more minute, and a sailor emerged. At least, he was dressed as a sailor: white-and-blue uniform, hat in his hand. The sun glinted off his electric-blue hair.

  The first woman lit into a string of profanity so detailed that Blue couldn’t help but grin. Whatever they were doing, they hadn’t blown their own tire just to try to get her in their car.

  She hurried forward. The three of them looked at her expectantly. She set the guitar down on her feet and unzipped the pocket in her backpack that held her notebook.

  “You think she’s got a gun in there?” The second woman, High Heels, talked with an accent straight out of Boston.

  Blue touched a finger to her lips, pulled out the notebook and held it up.

  “Nah, she’s gonna rob us with words.” The sailor. The bright blue of his hair made the red freckles on his nose stand out even more. “Maybe she’s got a bomb. Maybe she’s practicing her bank robbery skills.”

  “Listen, babe, I can almost guarantee that whatever guitar you’ve got in that case is worth more than the piece-of-shit instruments we’ve got, so don’t even bother trying to get something from us.” The blonde had a Janis Joplin voice, so raspy that the inside of her throat had to be made of crushed glass.

  Musicians. It was her duty to help them out, theirs to give her a ride. Right? That was what Lou had said all the way back in Maine.

  Have a spare?

  The blonde squinted at the note, one eye closed. “You know what to do with it?”

  Blue nodded.

  “Well, aren’t you my brand-new very best friend?” The sailor and the woman in heels burst into applause.

  The three of them gathered in a semicircle around her as she took off the old tire and put on the spare, the sailor holding her guitar for her. When she finished, they gave another round of applause, as hearty as what she’d received at the bar with Tish.

  “Suppose you might need a lift, right?” The sailor held out her guitar. He had to be four inches shorter than Blue, but the lines on his face suggested he was older by a few decades. Good lines, the kind that pointed out where his eyes would crinkle with laughter.

  Where ya headed?

  Not that it made a difference. They’d been driving the same direction she was walking. That was enough for her.

  “Missoula. Got a gig tonight.”

  “Speaking of which, we gotta motor.” High Heels, flashing a gap-toothed smile. “You coming or not?”

  She gave her best grin and climbed into the bus.

  By the time they got to Missoula, it was dark. They stopped on the outskirts of town, at a little roadhouse flanked on either side by old boxcars.

  “Listen,” the sailor said as he pulled a bass taller than he was out of the back and handed it to the blonde. “You can sleep in one of those cars if you don’t have a place to go. No one’ll bother you.”
>
  They left, hurrying through the door, the noise from inside loud and uninviting. Blue thought about following them, then thought about her empty pockets and her belongings and decided against it.

  The interior of the boxcar was very dark. She turned on her flashlight and shone it across the empty floor, the walls mostly free of graffiti. The space was empty, aside from a couple of tin cans in the corner. She picked them up, looked inside at the smooth clean surfaces. Back outside, she collected gravel from the parking lot in the cans and poured it out on the lip of the boxcar doorway. It wasn’t much, but it might warn her if someone came. Tin cans on a string would be better, but she didn’t have any string, other than the ones on the guitar, and those were too precious to waste. She unrolled her sleeping bag in the corner, slithered into it, and propped herself up against the wall. The sounds of the bar—doors opening and closing, the faint music—soothed her. The way they had when she was little, listening to Mama and Tish talking between sets, everything warm, safe, and happy.

  Blue woke with a start. The sunlight shone in from the crack of the door. There was frost on her sleeping bag, and her nose was cold; but the rest of her was warm. Too warm to want to get up. From somewhere farther off came the rumble of a train. She couldn’t believe she’d actually slept in a boxcar outside a bar. Might as well sleep on a sidewalk, all her things laid out for people to take.

  No one had taken anything, though. Blue rose from the sleeping bag into the cold with a rumbling stomach. The stream of sunlight drew her to the door. She rubbed her eyes and stared out.

  Nothing.

  The only things to break the surface of the snow were her tracks, the tips of grass, the corner of an old foundation. There was no parking lot. No roadhouse.

  The band had driven her. She had been in their bus, had breathed in the scent of their perfume, heard the heater working overtime to warm all the way to the backseat.

  Was their bus the same as the city bus in Chicago? Was the woman in the fake furs kin to the blues-singing bus driver?

  Instruments, voices, musicians . . . Musicians play in the midst of ghosts every day. Did they travel with ghosts, as well? She looked around again, taking in snow, sun, a dark snake of a road farther away. A musician, then. That’s what she had become.

  Blue didn’t have to walk long on the road before someone stopped for her. The weathered pickup that pulled over had two bumper stickers affixed to the back: “NDN Pride” and “My Heroes Have Always Killed Cowboys.” Two teenage girls looked out at her.

  “Need a lift?” the girl driving asked.

  She nodded, dropped her gear in the truck bed, and climbed in. The passenger gave her a thorough once-over. Blue looked back. The driver had straight brown hair in a long braid, a thin, straight nose, dark eyes. The other girl had black hair, black eyes, dark skin.

  “Where you headed?”

  Blue opened her notebook.

  This is Missoula, right? The freight yard?

  “What’s he writing?” the driver asked, glancing over.

  “He’s looking for a train.”

  “Figures.” She grinned. “No one wants to hang out in Missoula for long. What’s your name, train guy?”

  Interstate. You grow up here?

  The passenger read the question out loud, and both of the girls giggled. Their closeness made her ache a little. She used to giggle with Teena in the same way. No need for words sometimes—they’d just look at each other and know what the other was thinking.

  “On the rez. Evie’s going to start school in the fall. Wildlife management.” The driver sighed wistfully.

  What about you?

  Blue showed the question to the passenger, pointed to the driver. Instead of reading it, the girl answered. “She’s going to be working with her auntie. They cut hair. She’s really good at it.”

  How do you know each other?

  More giggles. “We’re cousins.”

  “Where were you coming from?” The passenger nudged her with her knee. “Not much out there for folks like you.”

  Like you. Girls pretending to be boys? Girls who left everything they knew and wandered through the country like water trying to find its way to the ocean? Children who weren’t children anymore; orphans looking for love; innocents robbed of their money, their certainty, sometimes their lives?

  It wasn’t the places where Blue didn’t fit that were important anymore. It was the places she did. Traveler. Musician. Sister.

  Sister. The boots were urging her forward again. She could feel the clock ticking: Time to go, time to go.

  She drew a deep breath, listening for a moment. The music inside the girls flowed together. Drum and flute, sharing the beat. Cass, she thought. She and Cass shared music that no one else did.

  Passing through. A friend told me Missoula was a good place to hop a train.

  “Sure . . . if you’re nuts. You know people die and stuff when they do that, right?”

  Not me. I’m pretty tough.

  They dropped her up the road from the freight yard. Dill had told her not to walk straight through the middle carrying a pack. Best not to call attention to herself, not from the workers or anyone else traveling.

  She’d thought it would be easy. Once there, though, she recognized her mistake. The trains were massive up close, the air smelled of iron and grease, and everything clanged and groaned. Nowhere were there signs pointing out which engines were headed east and which were headed west. As she stood there contemplating her options, a hand settled on her shoulder.

  Fighting panic, she turned to find a gray wool hat with longish black hair sticking out from under it. She stared into brown eyes so brown they seemed like tunnels to another place—somewhere she wanted to be.

  Dill.

  “Thought roads were your thing, Interstate.”

  She couldn’t tell if he looked happy or mad or just indifferent. It couldn’t be the last. Not him. She fumbled for paper.

  Thought you’d be gone already.

  “I stayed to help through the winter. Now it’s time to head home. My family’s expecting me.”

  Beyond?

  He shook his head. “All filled in. We got some of them places to stay.”

  Andrea?

  She raised her eyes hesitantly.

  Another shake. “Doesn’t look good.”

  Blue tore the page from her notebook, crumpled it, blinking away the tears that pooled in her eyes. Her fault. All of it.

  Dill touched her hand. He took the paper from it, smoothed it out. “It sucks. It’s wrong, and I don’t know what to do other than just keep telling people how wrong it is. Someone’s gotta listen, right?”

  She shrugged.

  “Gonna hop a train, huh?” Dill’s smile didn’t just tell her life went on—it said life was beautiful. Was that true? Did life have enough room in it for broken hearts and magic both?

  She knew the answer. All she had to do was remember the faces lit by lantern light at Barn Magic.

  Thought so. Headed for the coast.

  “Why the coast? What are you looking for?

  Good question.

  Family. Home. Same as you. Same as anyone, right?

  He grinned, looked along the closest track. Somewhere farther off, a whistle sounded.

  “Well I happen to be traveling to the coast, too, dear Interstate. I’d love your company. Would you do me the honor of traveling with me?” He gave a bow, his eyes never moving from her face.

  She couldn’t stop the grin that started near the middle of her mouth and spread outward. In case that wasn’t answer enough, she took his hand in hers and squeezed it.

  “Come on, then. We don’t want to be late.”

  Dill had already picked out a car before he’d spotted her. It looked like a boxcar would if someone had sliced off its top half. They had to climb a ladder on the side to get up, and inside were a few boards and a rusty piece of metal.

  “Come on,” Dill said. “We’ll be happier if we snuggle in
a corner.”

  She gave him a look, wondering for a minute if he really thought she had come to Missoula and climbed on a train just to fool around with him. He raised his hands.

  “It just gets really windy. Promise. You don’t have to sit with me at all if you don’t want.”

  She grinned. She hadn’t been looking for him, but she was happy she’d found him. She followed him to a corner, settled in next to him, one hand on her guitar case.

  The train started to move. It jerked at first, then picked up speed. The wind blew against her face and the sun shone down as the dirt and slush and noise of the train yard faded away into roads, then roads and trees, and then just trees.

  Had someone told her back in Maine that they rode on freight trains, she would have thought they were freaks. Hoboes rode them: guys from the last century with dirty caps and dirty hands and nowhere special to go. Blue studied the chapped skin of her hands, the grease streaks from where she’d gripped the metal climbing on, and thought about her own lack of a destination.

  Dill didn’t say much as the hours tumbled by. Not that she could do much better. Still, it felt as if a conversation was going on around them, the clatter of the train speaking to the blue of the sky and the arc of the mountains. The air she breathed in continued through her, sweeping away everything but the things she could see, smell, taste, and hear right then.

  Feel. Don’t forget that one. Warmth flowed in the places where Dill’s shoulder touched hers, where his hand rested next to her thigh. Dill felt different than Beck, like an adventure, not an obligation.

  “Tunnel’s coming.” Dill shifted. “Oh, crap. Tunnel.”

  Ahead she could see the black mouth in the mountain. She shaped her shoulders into a question.

  He answered by opening his bag and pulling out a mask. “Respirator.”

  She drew a question mark in the air with her finger.