Dust girl

6

Mrs. Hopper, of course, found the rooms charming. She strutted about the sitting room with its old-fashioned mahogany and burgundy velvet furniture as if she was in the Waldorf-Astoria. I opened the doors off the sitter to show the two bedrooms and the private bath. The smile on her perfectly-done-up mouth never once wavered. Of course, she also hadn’t taken off her tinted spectacles, so I couldn’t exactly be sure how much she really saw.

Mr. Hopper only seemed to notice the brass, cannon-shaped lighter on the mantel. He lit himself a cigarette and blew a fat cloud of smoke at the ceiling, his whole frame relaxing instantly.

The older girl, Letitia, seemed less enthusiastic. She prodded suspiciously at the sofa cushion before she sat down. Clarinda, on the other hand, saw the big bed in the master bedroom. She made a beeline for it, climbed aboard, and started bouncing up and down. I grinned. It was the most normal thing I’d seen any of those kids do.

William came charging in from across the hall. “Pa, I’m hungry!” he shouted as he barreled through the sitting room to join his sister in jumping on the bed.

“Me too!” cried little Clarinda. “I’m hungry!”

“Hungry, hungry!” chanted both kids, bouncing hard enough now to make the brass headboard bang against the wall.

“Yeah, Pop.” Hunter strolled in and flopped down on the sofa next to his sister. “It’s about time for something, isn’t it?”

“I have to say, I’m famished as well.” Letitia looked over the rims of her spectacles at me. Her eyes looked big and black in the dim room. “There must be something here.”

Mr. Hopper blew out another big cloud of smoke. “Well, Miss Callie, what about it?”

“Yes, sir.” I tried to sound brisk, but I was tired. Hauling all the big sheets and blankets and making up all the beds in the thick heat had already been a lot of work. My arms felt like lead. I had a hundred and fifty dollars to earn, though, and I’d known it wasn’t going to be easy. “I’ll have to get to the store, but I’ll be back shortly. If you’d like to wash up…?” I gestured toward the bath and the stack of clean towels.

“Fine idea. Be off with you then.” He waved his cigarette toward the door and I was off with me.

I tried to tell myself I didn’t have to hurry that much. It wasn’t like they could up and leave. They were stuck here until the roads got dug out. With a big duster, that could take days. But something inside me didn’t think getting the Hoppers mad would be any kind of good idea.

Outside, I squinted into the wind and got my bearings down the line of dust that had been Front Street. What few people still lived in town must have sealed themselves into their shuddering houses. Alone, I waded through sand up to my ankles, and I passed drifts that would have been up to my knees. I could breathe and see just fine, but that wasn’t a comfort anymore, because it wasn’t right. There was no way I should be able to walk through this. Nothing human could.

I gritted my teeth and bent double into the wind. I couldn’t think like that. I had to keep moving.

I hadn’t forgotten the voices from this morning. My ears strained, waiting for them. I wanted to hear them. If I heard them, maybe I could follow them, find out who they belonged to.

But it wasn’t those dusty wind voices I heard.

“Take this hammer…”

I stopped and immediately sank halfway up my shins. Somewhere, a muffled, distant, draggy voice was singing.

“Take this hammer, carry it to the captain!” THUMP! The line ended in a crash like somebody kicking a door.

“Take this hammer, carry it to the captain!” THUMP!

“Tell him I’m gone, tell him I’m gone.” THUMP!

The verse dissolved into a bout of coughing. I turned slowly, trying to pick out where the voice was coming from.

“If he ask you, was I running?” THUMP!

It was hard to tell over the wind, but it started to sound like the jailhouse.

“If he ask you, was I running?” THUMP!

It sure didn’t sound like Sheriff Davis making all that noise, not that I’d ever heard him sing.

“If he ask you, was I running?” THUMP!

So if it wasn’t the sheriff singing in the jailhouse, who was it?

“Tell him I was flyin’, tell him I was flyin’.” THUMP!

The jail was the only building on Front Street besides the post office that was made of actual brick. It was small, just a box big enough to hold two desks and a cell with two cots.

“Hello?” I kicked a tumbleweed back from the jailhouse door. The front room with its two desks was empty. Nobody had sealed it up. Dust had made a desert out of the floor and piled itself high in all the corners.

“Hello?” called a boy’s voice from the back. “Is somebody there? Help!”

The Slow Run cell didn’t have barred walls like the ones in the movies. The solid steel door had just one little window at the top. Right now, the window also had the top of a boy’s tousled head and two blue eyes peering through.

“Help! Please! I can’t get out!”

Which kinda seemed like the point of being in jail. “How’d you get in?”

“I was too slow hopping a reefer and they locked me up.” I didn’t know for sure what a reefer was, but I guessed it had something to do with train cars. Sheriff Davis didn’t like hobos and bindle stiffs in his town any more than he liked Indians or Negroes or Mexicans. Everybody knew if he caught a vagrant, no matter how young, he shipped them out to work off the fines by chopping cotton or digging ditches.

“This fella ran in and yelled something about a God Almighty big duster kicking up out there, and the sheriff took off. I don’t think he’s coming back. Please, let me out.”

It was hard to tell from just the top of his head, but the boy didn’t look much older than me. Still, he might have been a thief, or worse. Some of them were. Then I thought how there wasn’t a window in there. I thought about being locked up alone in the hot dark, with the storm going on, and about being on the other side of that door having somebody turn around and walk out.

I didn’t know what this kid had done, but right then I knew it wasn’t enough to deserve that.

The big iron key still hung on a hook behind Sheriff Davis’s desk, so I had the door open in a few seconds. The boy tumbled out, kicking through the dust drifts.

“Thank you,” he mumbled, then ducked past me to the little sink. He drank down a tin cup full of water, gasped, and drank down another. It must have been an oven in there. His face was flushed under all the dirt, and he was shaking. He didn’t smell so good either. I didn’t look in the cell to see if they had a toilet in there, ’cause I had a feeling I didn’t want to know.

“You okay?” I asked.

He nodded, but then his face kind of twisted up and he coughed hard and spat brown into the sink. He stayed there, hanging on tight to the sides of the basin, until he wasn’t shaking so much. Then he straightened up so I could get a better look.

He was a tall, skinny white kid with big blue eyes, his ears sticking out beneath a bird’s nest of brown hair, the kind of boy who gets nicknamed Beanpole. His knobby knees pressed against his worn knickerbockers, and the wrists above his too-big hands stuck out from the too-short sleeves of his dirty shirt. His hands and face were streaked with storm dust and coal dust mixed together. His shoes had split at the toes, and one black stocking had a big hole in it.

He started trying to smooth his shirt down but gave it up pretty quick. “Have you got anything to eat? I’m sorry to ask, but I haven’t had a single bite since yesterday and… I’d work for it, you know, if you had a job…”

I thought about the Hoppers back at the Imperial. But truth to tell, this boy didn’t look like he could do anything right now, and I sure didn’t want a hobo in the hotel while I had paying guests, even a kid. Kids off the road could be hard and mean. One little boy Mama had put up for the night stole two of our chickens when he lit out. Some of the girls had done a whole lot worse when they were supposed to be cleaning rooms in exchange for meals. All the chickens were gone now, and I didn’t have anything else worth stealing, but the Hoppers sure did.

I bit my lip. The storm was still going on, and there was no telling how long it would be before it let up. This boy would fill up with dust if he walked out there now. Maybe get the fever and the dust pneumonia, and I didn’t think Baya would be around to help him any.

“You ever wash dishes?” I asked him. “I mean in a real kitchen?”

“Sure.” He cracked a big grin. Somehow he didn’t look so knobby and skinny when he was smiling. “I been a pearl diver in roadhouses, and worked the flat top, and swept up.” Pearl diver, that was a dishwasher, and the flat top was the grill. So he’d been a cook too.

“Okay, then. I got a load of guests at the hotel. I need help in the kitchen and with fetching and carrying. You gotta be able to give ’em the yes, sir and yes, ma’am, and do what I say.”

He nodded immediately. “Sure. I can do that.”

“Okay, then…” I remembered something important. “What’s your name?”

“Jack. Jack Holland, Miss…?”

“Callie… Callie LeRoux.” I don’t know why I said it. It was like since I’d told Baya the truth, I didn’t have to bother with hiding behind the “McGinty” that had never really fooled anyone anyway.

“Pleased to meet you, Callie LeRoux.” Jack Holland stuck out his hand.

“Pleased to meet you, Jack Holland.” His palm was hard, and his fingernails were stained black. He’d worked a lot with those hands, and they felt strong and warm. My insides gave a little squirm and I let go. I didn’t need anything else strange to think about.

“I heard you singing,” I said. “That’s how I found you.”

“I was hoping that’d happen.” He pulled a battered newsboy cap out of his back pocket. “I been singing since the sheriff left. Kept me from going crazy. Shall we?” He bowed and swept his cap like a hotel doorman in the movies.

I giggled. “Let’s do.” I held out my skirt hem and put my nose in the air and tried to mince out the door. He chuckled, and that made me feel kind of good. At the same time, I thought to myself Jack Holland was a boy who could make people do what he wanted. He had the kind of face that could look all sweet while hiding a world of secrets. I’d have to watch him close while he was in the Imperial.

My insides did that squirmy thing again. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea, but I couldn’t go back on my word.

“God Almighty,” Jack whispered.

I stopped. He’d been stuck in that cell and hadn’t seen the storm. He was getting his first look at what it had done.

“I seen dusters before, but not like this…”

“Don’t think there’s ever been one like this.” And it was my fault. No matter what Baya said. I knew, somehow, I’d done this. Now I was standing around instead of working for the money I needed to go find Mama. “Come on. We gotta get to the store.”

We waded through the dust to Van Iykes’s Mercantile. The sky still boiled black, and the dust tried to needle its way into my skin. Jack kept his nose pressed to his sleeve. I kept one eye on the street out of town, looking for cars or people. There was nothing, just the houses hunkering down under the storm. There had to be people behind the curtains, all sealed into their rooms. The town only looked empty; it wasn’t really.

The dust swirled around and chuckled in my ears.

The mercantile door was unlocked. The bell rang when I pushed it open.

“Mr. Van Iykes?” I called. “Mrs. Van Iykes?”

No answer. Fresh dust snaked inside around our ankles. I blinked hard while my eyes adjusted to the twilight filling the store’s front room.

Then I wished they hadn’t.

“God Almighty,” croaked Jack, just like he had when he saw the storm.

The mercantile was an old-time general store-one big room with the groceries on the left side, dry goods on the right, and hardware at the back. Right then, it looked like it had been hit by a cyclone. The racks of dime novels and magazines were flopped on their sides next to empty barrels. The butcher’s case was busted open, and sharp bits of glass lay glittering on the dusty floorboards. Heaps of cans lay behind the counter on one side, and shredded bolts of cloth on the other. The fridge door flapped open, and the smashed milk bottles lay in stinking white pools. A green trail leaked down from the icebox, where the pistachio ice cream had melted. Flies had gotten trapped in the sticky green puddle on the floorboards and died.

“Mr. Van Iykes?” I called again. “Mrs. Van Iykes?”

“I’ll go look upstairs.” Jack vanished up the back steps. I heard him clumping around over my head. I just kept turning in a circle, trying to understand. Then I noticed the books were torn like the cloth was. No. Not torn, chewed. They had holes right through them, and big crescent-shaped chunks taken out of the spines-just like the chunk taken out of the door frame where little Clarinda Hopper had been spying on me.

That was when I saw how the bones lay on top of the broken glass-pork bones, beef bones, lamb bones, all picked as clean and white as if they’d been in the desert for years.

Staring at those bones, I barely heard Jack Holland thumping back down the stairs.

“There’s nobody up there,” he said. “Doesn’t look like it’s been robbed or anything…”

“What am I gonna do?” I tore my eyes away from the bones. I couldn’t understand what I was seeing. No, I didn’t want to understand it. So I told myself, all I really understood was that the Hoppers were back at the hotel, hungry and impatient, and I had their fifty in my pocket. “They’re expecting me to feed them. What am I gonna do?”

“Whoa. Wait.” Jack held up both too-big hands. “Who’s expecting you?”

I told him about the Hoppers, and the hundred and fifty dollars. “We need the money,” I said. “I can’t not feed them. They’ll leave and I’ll have nothing.” I knew what I must sound like, worrying about money when it was plain the Van Iykeses had been wiped out by… by something. Wild coyotes, maybe, or crazy people. People went crazy in dust storms sometimes. But I needed that money if I was going to find Mama.

“Okay.” Jack wiped his hands on his pants. “Okay. Look. There’s still the cans, right? You can make plenty out of cans.”

I rubbed my eyes. “Yeah. Yeah.”

“So you see what you can find. I’ll go look for a wheelbarrow or something we can load up.”

I didn’t want him to leave me alone in that ruined place, but I nodded. There were a couple of crates behind the grocery counter. I knocked the dust out and started sorting cans. All the boxes had been torn open. Heaps of cornflakes, shredded wheat, and Jell-O powder were vanishing under a coat of dust. I picked out cans of beans and creamed corn and tomato soup and condensed milk and set them on the counter. I added tins of deviled ham, tuna fish, sardines, and Ovaltine. There were even some tinned clams.

The battered metal bread box on the counter held treasure: two long, squared-off Pullman loaves, still mostly fresh and only a little dusty. I wrapped them in brown paper from the big roll bolted to the counter and added the bread to my rows of salvaged canned goods. For a wonder, the ham and salami hanging over the busted-up meat case were untouched.

They only took the fresh, my brain said.

Shut up, I said back to my brain.

But the barrel of salt pork hadn’t been touched either. I wrapped up some slabs of that too and tried not to feel my hands shaking. I pulled my nerve together and headed down into the cellar. More luck. There was homemade jam on the shelf, and potatoes, onions, and carrots in the bins. Maybe Mr. Van Iykes had been able to chase off whoever robbed the place before they made it to the cellar. Maybe he and Sheriff Davis had gone to round up the robbers and were caught out by the storm and they’d be back soon. They’d be glad to see the money then.

That idea made me feel better as I helped myself to what I could carry of vegetables and preserves and took it all back upstairs.

Jack dragged a wheelbarrow inside and started loading groceries. He must have been dog-tired, but he’d said he would work and he was. That spoke better for him than any easy smile. Maybe this would be all right after all.

While Jack tied a tarp over the barrow, I grabbed the pad of order blanks from the drawer under the cash register and added up the prices for all we’d taken, making guesses on the jam and vegetables. The total was fifteen dollars and eleven cents. I punched the keys on the register. The bells chimed, and the cash drawer shot open.

I stared.

There was all of fifteen cents in the drawer, along with a stack of IOUs.

I’d always thought the Van Iykeses had plenty of money. After all, they ran the only store left in Slow Run. But nobody in the whole town had money to buy anything, so I guess Mr. Van Iykes did what the rest of us did, take the promises and hope.

I felt bad about leaving another IOU, but I didn’t know what else to do. So at the bottom of the order blank I wrote:

Mr. Van Iykes:

I needed some groceries for guests at the Imperial. I will come by tomorrow and pay you for what I took and bring your barrow back.

Callie

Writing that down helped me believe the Van Iykeses would be back tomorrow to see my promise bundled with all the others. I shut the order blank in the drawer so it wouldn’t blow away. The register chimed as if for an actual sale. It didn’t know the difference.

“Let’s go,” I said to Jack. I didn’t want to stay there with the bones and broken glass a minute longer. I wanted to be back in my own home, where there was still a chance I could do something to make a difference.

Jack looked at me like he understood, grabbed up the handles of the wheelbarrow, and followed me out the back door into the storm.