by Vicki Lane
The days and nights all run together in this place and I can’t keep track of how long it is I’ve been here. Every time a train passes and hoots out its lonesome whistle call, I tell myself I must find a way to leave—and the trains run six and seven times a day.
But then I think I’ll wait another week—the money is coming in and the dancing is like strong drink and me always wanting more. Besides, I am fearful of the questions that folk might ask if it was known who I am … and I am fearful of a reckoning to come. And, the boss has laid out money for my clothes and such and he’ll not let me leave.
Oh, sometimes I feel like the yard dog on his chain and sometimes that I am a rabbit in a snare, here in this house that never sleeps, where the hungry eyes of the traveling men follow me and the loud wild music and the dancing of a night swirl like blackbirds in my head, confusing my thoughts and wiping away memory. I can’t be Least anymore, but if Least is gone, who will meet up with Young David when the snow flies?
From the window of my room I look down to the train tracks, shining silver and curving out of sight, and watch the cars rolling by like long dusty snakes. Where they are in such a hurry to go, I can’t tell, no more than I can guess where the river ends up. It don’t matter for I dare not stray too far from this place—the river and the bridge and the road to Dark Holler and the burying ground. If I can hold out till winter, till Young David comes back, I’ll find a way. Even now, I watch every train that stops, watch the folks alighting to see if he might be amongst them. Every now and again there’s a tall man who, for a moment, makes me hold my breath in hope, but it’s never him.
The smoke and cinders of the locomotive have scorched the grass to either side of the silver rails. Nothing can grow there, but beyond the tracks grassy fields stretch down to the river and far to the right are the great heaped rocks the girls call the Injun Grave. I remember the story of John Goingsnake’s Nancy and I wonder if she lays there.
On the slope below my window stands a single apple tree, its branches bent low with greeny-yellow fruit. That apple tree helps me track the time—when its fruit is fallen and only a last few swiveled-up apples hang from the bare branches, I will know it’s time to go.
In the room next door, Lola and Francine are waking up and getting ready for the night. I never knew there was women like them but they have been good to me, in their way, and have kept the boss from bothering me. They say they don’t like the things they have to do but they don’t try to leave.
“It’s a bum life, kiddo,” said Francine, the first time I asked her if she liked laying with all those different men, any who had the money to pay for her, “but you get used to it. Besides, times are tough—at least here I’m sure of three squares and a flop. And I can put some by—the boss don’t get it all. Me and Lo are saving our tips and in another year we’ll get away from Gudger’s Stand and buy us a little farm in another state where no one knows how we got our money. We’ll let on to be widowed sisters and we’ll pick up a nice place cheap at a bank sale and go to raising chickens and teaching Sunday school.”
She waved a little booklet with a tan cover at me. “This here government pamphlet explains how it works. With an initial investment of $150 and fifty White Leghorns …”
The evening I first come here, and told them my name was Redbird, them two women, Francine and Lola, come downstairs and talked to me a little more and Francine asked where was my home and how old was I. Some of what I told was the truth—that I didn’t have no people nearby and that I needed work. But I said that I was eighteen and that was a bald-faced lie for I’ll not be sixteen till October though my bosoms make me look like a woman. I told them that my sweetheart had gone off to work on the roads and that we wanted to marry but my mother was agin it.
“Are you in the family way?” Francine had asked right out, her eyes going to my belly. Francine is sharp as a tack and I was thankful I could tell her no, my period had come on me just the day before.
“But you’re on the run from someone, ain’t you?” and afore I could answer, she took my hand in hers. “Never you mind, Redbird; we’ll help you hide till your feller comes back.”
She looked at my shape again, drawing her eyebrows together till they made a V just at the top of her nose. It seemed like she was trying to make up her mind about something, but then Lola spoke up.
“No, Francie, not right off, anyway. Vergie’s short-handed in the kitchen and will be glad of a girl to help. Besides, look at her face.” And with that, Lola reached out and real gentle-like pulled off my hat.
Francine’s mouth fell open. “Good God almighty, Redbird Ray, what the hell happened to you?”
I knowed my face was still some swole and that the bruises and cuts, though healing, was ugly, for I had heard Lilah’s mama talking about how dreadful I looked. But I figured it was all to the good for hadn’t none of those folks back at the house seen me except with my face so awful-looking—and I thought that maybe when it went back to the way it had been, they’d never know me at all. And I had it planned what to say, if someone asked about my face, so I was ready.
“A few days back of this,” I said, “I stepped on a bee nest and fell down right hard in the middle of some rocks. I reckon I look a sight.”
It’s time for me to get downstairs, so I throw off my wrapper and step into the bright blue rayon dress. It is cool and sliding against my skin—almost like I was wearing the sky. The cracked looking-glass on the wall above the washbasin is cloudy but I can see that, though my face is long since healed up, even so, I am so changed I hardly know myself. The henna rinse that Francine put on my hair—the red suits your name, she said—has made it as bright as sumac in October and it stands out in great puffs on account of the way Lola fixed it. Them girls has had their fun, fiddling and fussing with my hair and painting my face like theirs.
At first it didn’t matter what I looked like. When Francine took me to the boss and asked could he give me work in the kitchen, he took one look at my face, all bruised and scratched, and said, “She can work for her room and board. Give it a few months. Then we’ll see if she’s worth any more than that,” and he went back to the ledger books he was writing in. He is a fine-looking, black-haired man, Mr. Revis is, and not so very old, but he seems to be of a sour disposition.
I liked working in the kitchen. Vergie is the one who does all the cooking—the big plain meals, beans and cornbread and stews and such for all us help—and the fried chicken or beefsteak or pork chops for the paying gents. She is a widow and she was glad of my help and of my company too, I believe, for she talked to me from the morning—while she rolled out the biscuit dough, her arms jiggling and white with flour, as I parched and ground the coffee—till night, when we were both kept hopping as the drummers off the trains put in their supper orders.
When I was working in the kitchen, I didn’t set foot into the public room and no one ever saw me but those who belonged to Gudger’s Stand. Oh, now and then a farmer would come to the kitchen door with produce to sell or more likely barter, or a blockader with some of the white liquor that Mr. Revis poured into bottles and sold by the dram after he had put something in it to give it a brown color. “Finest Scotch whisky,” I heard him tell one feller, and “Mr. Jack’s genuine Kentucky sourmash,” he told another, though both bottles had been filled from the same fruit jar to begin with. But it was Vergie and Mr. Revis who traded with the farmers and paid the blockaders. For fear that one of them might be a neighbor who would remember me from Mama’s burying, I always managed to keep busy with my head turned away whilst they were there.
Out in the public room things got right lively of a night, and when I could find a spare moment, I would watch from behind the door. There was usually some musicianers—a feller with a fiddle and another with a banjo—and Francine and Lola and the other girls, for there was seven of them in all, would dance with one another or with any of the fellers who would pay for a turn. Now and again a girl would take a feller upstairs but they’d both be back down in
fifteen or twenty minutes, him with a foolish grin on his face and her already looking for another somebody to dance with.
The dancing … the dancing and the music seemed to bring back something I’d left behind. It would set my blood to rollicking beneath my skin, and as I watched the couples jigging about the floor, my foot would begin to tap and I would think of Brother and his girl dancing on the porch when Mama wasn’t looking.
My favorite was the buck dancing contests they held on Saturday nights when the men and girls would dance alone, slapping their shoes on the floor in time to the music, which got louder and faster and louder and faster till one by one the dancers would drop out, fanning their faces, their clothes all sweat-soaked. “Dancing down,” they called it and the music would go on and on till only one was left still dancing. If it was a customer, he would get a bottle of whichever of those fruit jar whiskies he cared to name. But mostly it was one of the girls what won or sometimes Mr. Revis himself if all the girls was busy upstairs.
I watched how they did it, and when the music was loud and all the feet pecking at the floor, raising the dust and rattling the plates and glasses on the tables, I would dance behind the kitchen door while Vergie looked on and laughed fit to kill, her big bosom shaking beneath her apron. The ringing of the banjo told my feet what to do and I danced my hopes and wants and dreams.
I lean in close to the mirror to see can I find Least but all there is looking at me is a face like the girls in the Love and Romance magazines that Lola buys whenever she can talk Francine into letting her spend a dime. Bright red lips, cheeks pink with rouge, blue on my eyelids, black on my eyelashes, and my eyebrows dark and curving like birds taking wing. I don’t look like myself at all and I wonder, was Young David to see me now, would he know me.
It ain’t likely, I think. For the wide-eyed, trembling woods creature that he lay down with all those times up on the hogback ridge is gone and in her place is Redbird Ray, the flat-footing floozy, the buck-dancing barmaid, the talk of the county all round. They say there has been sermons preached against me and that I have been called a snare for simple men and that my shoes are tapping on the path to Hell.
Chapter 21
Dancing
Gudger’s Stand, 1938
It began in late June. I had been working in the kitchen for some months, feeling safer day by day and getting bolder too, when it happened. The dance down was bigger than usual for, with crops laid by, there was more fellers able to go loafering of a Saturday night and a good many of them come to the Stand to drink themselves silly and look at the girls. The floor had been packed with drunken fools trying for that prize of whisky but one after another had dropped out till all that was left was the boss Mr. Revis and a logger from the camp downriver. They was going at it like one thing. The musicianers was picking and sawing for all they was worth and the two men still dancing hard, glaring at one another like dogs commencing to fight and throwing off sweat in spite of the cooler air coming up from the river. From the cracked kitchen door I could see the folks all clustered round and the heads of the dancers jerking up and down like a pair of limberjacks.
Like always, I had started dancing when the set begun and they was plenty of hoo-rahing to cover the sound of my shoes rapping on the kitchen floor. On and on the dance down went, and as folks dropped out, the music picked up steam till it was driving me and I could no more have quit than a waterwheel can stop while the creek flows. I was behind the door, eyes squeezed shut, dancing like it was for my life and feeling I could most take wing, when all of a sudden the music and the noise of the crowd stopped and the only sound I could hear was my own shoe soles clapping.
I pulled myself to a stop and opened my eyes to see the kitchen door standing wide and Mr. Revis there, staring like he’d never set eyes on me afore. His shirt was soaked through and a piece of his black hair was hanging over his eyes. Breathing heavy, he slicked his hair back with his fingers, never taking his gaze offen me.
“She been dancing this whole round, Vergie?” he asked, coming in and shutting the door behind him but not before I had seen all the folks in the public room looking my way.
“She started in right at the very beginning of the dance down and didn’t stop—she’d likely be going yet iffen you hadn’t come in. This young un’s a dancing fool.”
Vergie was laughing when she said that—she ain’t afraid of Mr. Revis on account of she knows he couldn’t never get another cook as good as her. But I hung my head, waiting to hear his anger, expecting him to curse and ask why I was wasting my time when I should have been at my work.
He just stepped closer and eyed me pretty thorough. “Put your head up, girl,” he said, and looked me in the face like he was studying on something. At last he said, “I believe it’s time for you to move on to waiting tables and dancing with the customers. It’ll mean cash money for you, so I reckon you don’t have no objections.”
Mr. Revis didn’t wait for an answer but turned to leave. His hand was on the swinging door when he stopped and looked back at Vergie. “Tell the girls to do something about her clothes and show her how to wait tables before tomorrow night. If she can handle the tables and the dancing all right, I’ll see about getting you some more kitchen help.”
That’s how it began. At first I was shy of being seen and would only carry trays and put down plates and clean off tables, but afore long, during the afternoons when we closed, Francine taught me to do partner dancing to where I could step about the floor, following her lead in a two-step or a waltz without no trouble at all. And she showed me a fancy dance called a tango.
“Ain’t none of these hicks round here going to know this one,” said she, dipping me backward till my new-red hair brushed against the boards, “but it’ll put lead in their pencils just to watch you and me do it—I got a pin-striped gent’s suit I can wear and I’ll slick my hair back … just you wait, Redbird, there’ll be some business done that night after we do our exhibition dance; most men get all worked up thinking about two women together.”
As the music ended and the needle begun to skitter, Francine let loose of me and went over and turned off the Victrola. She leaned against one of the tables and lit up a cigarette.
“You know, you could make a sight more money, Redbird—fresh young thing like yourself. They’d be fighting over you.”
The blue smoke come out of her nose in two great clouds and she let the cigarette hang from her lips where it wiggled as she talked.
“You’re not a virgin, are you?” she asked and I had to say I didn’t know what she meant by that word. When she told me, I felt my face heat up and all I could do was to look away and shake my head.
“Hmm,” says she, narrowing her eyes against the smoke, “that’s too bad for you’d make extra-good money for that first time. Still, I bet we could pass you off as one.”
I spoke up and told her that I didn’t want to do anything but wait tables and dance with the customers, and that besides, my sweetheart was coming back afore long and I’d be leaving.
“I thank you, Francine,” I told her, picking my words careful-like, not wanting to seem proud or choosy, “you’ve already been awful good to me. Nothing against you and Lola and the other girls but I don’t reckon my sweetheart would like me earning money that way.”
Not another word did she say, just mashed the end of her cigarette against the wooden tabletop and left it laying there for me to clean up. She started for the stairs in the hall between the public room and Mr. Revis’s quarters, but as she went through the doorway, she stopped and turned to point a finger at me.
“We don’t always have our druthers in these things, Redbird. I want you to remember that.”
Tonight at Gudger’s Stand
Introducing
A Fourth of July Firecracker!
That Fiery Dancing Sensation!!
!!!LITTLE REDBIRD!!!
Dance Down at 10 P.M.
Special Prize
Chapter 22
The Attr
action
Gudger’s Stand, 1938
The next Saturday night was my first time as what they called an attraction. It was the second of July and a holiday feeling was everywhere. The boss had bought fireworks to shoot off and they was a great coming and going down at the depot. One of the girls had made a fancy sign on a chalkboard at the door and on it in colored chalk was my name. I must of gone and looked at it a dozen times that day.
I had been out all week, serving in the public room, waiting tables and such, and a couple of times had even stepped around the floor with a few of the regular customers. But mostly, the fellers wanted to dance with the girls that would go upstairs with them. Mr. Revis watched this for a while and that was when he got the idea for the special show with me and Francine doing the tango.
The girls ran me up the fanciest dress you ever seen. Hit was of shiny red-orange cloth and it fit as close as my own skin. It come down way low in the back and the hem was kindly jagged all around and there was a great long slit up one side. When I asked wasn’t that a mistake, they just laughed.
“You really think a greenhorn like Redbird is going to put this over? Tango is for a woman—and a woman with some experience.”
That was Lola. She was some put out that it would be me and not her dancing the tango with Francine, but Francine put an arm around her and jollied her along.
“No need to be sore, lover—it’s just a dance. Besides, you know me—I like a big, fluffy girl with lots of soft flesh in my bed.”
She stuck her face in between Lola’s big bosoms, making a kindly gobbling sound, and we all had to laugh, even Lola. This was the way Francine did and I hardly thought a thing of it anymore.
Francine looked up and grinned. “C’mon, Lo—Redbird’ll do just fine. And little as she is, I’ll be able to fling her around like them Apache dancers we used to see back in the Chicago clubs.”
