Dust girl

by Sarah Zettel

  “What’s happening, Desmond? Is there a problem?”

  “The girl says they’re not open for business, Irma.”

  “What? Nonsense. Have you told her we can pay?”

  “Well? What of it?” the man snapped at me. “We’re not a passel of Okies, as you can see. How much for your best rooms?” With that, he yanked a roll of bills bigger than my fist out of his pocket. “Will this be sufficient?” Those thick fingers peeled off a fifty.

  “I…”

  He peeled off a second bill and slapped both down onto my palm. “That should be more than enough.”

  A hundred dollars. My fingers curled over the bills to protect them from the wind. That was a hundred dollars in my hand. I’d never seen that much money, let alone touched it, not even when I was a little kid back before the Crash.

  What I did next was about the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life.

  “Sir, I’m sorry. There’s only me here. I couldn’t give you the kind of service you expect for a hundred dollars.” I held the bills out. Can your hand feel like it’s going to cry? ’Cause I swear mine did. “But you’re welcome to stay till the storm’s over.” You didn’t send anybody away in a duster, not strange Indians, not rich folks in big cars.

  “Hmph!” He took those fifties back. “I’ll have you know, girl, I’m a businessman and I don’t take charity. I’m giving you a chance to make something. You give us the best you’ve got for one night, food and rooms complete, and you’ll get not one hundred, not one-twenty, but one hundred and fifty dollars.” He held up the bills. “What do you say?”

  What did I say? A hundred and fifty dollars could get me to California and back again and keep me fine while I was out there. Maybe I could even hire a detective like in the movies, to help find Mama.

  My shoulders squared. If this man didn’t want charity, he wouldn’t get it. “I’ll need fifty up front so I can lay in supplies for the night.”

  “That’s the spirit!” The man slapped a fifty into my palm and shook my hand doing it. The bill was new and crisp. It crackled as my fist closed around it.

  “Irma!” He opened the front passenger-side door of that shiny car. “Children! Come, my dears! We’re staying.”

  The entire family piled out, every last one of them done up as fine as could be. There was a tall, fair-haired boy in a white suit and straw hat, just like his father. After him came a thin, willowy girl, wearing a summer dress with a bright green sash and a pleated skirt. Her hat and shoes matched the sash. The next-in-line boy wasn’t out of short pants yet. His blond curls peeked out from under his flat-brimmed cap, and he had freckles all across his stubby nose. The youngest girl held tight to her sister with one hand. In the other, she clutched a blue-eyed doll in an emerald satin dress nicer than anything I’d ever owned. Every last one of them wore the same kind of thick, round spectacles that made their eyes too big and too dark for their sharp faces.

  The man’s chest swelled with pride at the sight of them. “Now, young lady, you see before you the proud Hopper clan. My wife, Irma. My heir apparent, Hunter. That fine strapping lad with him is William. This lovely lady is Letitia, and this is our little Clarinda.” Mr. Hopper waved his hand at me. “My own, this plucky young lady is offering us the run of her fine establishment for the night, and hot, home-cooked meals in the bargain.”

  I looked at the Hopper kids, and the kids looked back at me, their spectacles glittering even in the dust-filtered light. I saw their tidy white-and-green clothing and tried not to tug at my own too-small, dirt-smeared, used-to-be-yellow dress.

  “Won’t you come in?” I led the Hopper family into the lobby and shut the door tight behind them. I hoped they didn’t notice how the dust had already drifted up against the registration desk and the foot of the stairs.

  But it looked like I didn’t have to worry. “Well, this will be charming. Just charming.” Mrs. Hopper smiled at the carpet and the curving staircase and the chandelier under its cloth cover. “We certainly didn’t expect to find such a lovely hotel. We were getting ready to sleep in a hay barn, weren’t we, Desmond?”

  “Exactly!” he cried. I tried to picture these clean, rich folks bedding down like hobos and couldn’t do it. It wasn’t right. I mean, it was okay for people who were used to it, but not folks like this. “But we are all rescued. Now… Miss…?”

  “Callie.” I ran around the desk, opened the registration book, and rummaged in the drawer for the fountain pen. If I was going to do this, I was going to do it right. Mama would expect it. “If you’ll just sign in, Mr. Hopper?”

  “Excellent!” Mr. Hopper signed the book with a flourish.

  Little Clarinda was staring all around at the stairs and the lobby and the covered chandelier, inching closer and closer to her sister the whole time. “I’m hungry!” she announced in a high, piping voice.

  “Yes, honey pie.” Her mama smoothed her yellow corkscrew curls and idly straightened her big green hair bow. “We’ll be eating soon. I promise.”

  I swallowed, wondering how I was going to feed the Hopper tribe, and tried to keep my brain on the job right in front of me.

  “If you’ll follow me? You can wait in the parlor while I get your rooms ready.”

  All six Hoppers followed me down the carpeted hallway, with Mrs. Hopper murmuring “Charming, charming” every few feet. I pushed open the door to the ladies’ parlor.

  “Please, make yourselves at home.” I hurried around, pulling dustcovers off the furniture and piling the dishes from my lunch with Baya on the tray. It felt like he’d left a million years ago. The Hoppers filling the parlor seemed to wipe out all sense of him, like the sun wipes out a dream. “I’ll go see about those rooms.”

  Mrs. Hopper looked around with bright eyes, taking in all the details. “Charming,” she said again, and gave me her warm smile. I’d never seen a lady like her, not in real life anyway. She was so neat and pretty, like a movie star. She carried herself as if she’d never had to worry about anything and didn’t want you to have to either. “So unexpected and so charming.”

  I blushed and hurried out.

  It was a kind of relief to have my head fill up with details of taking care of guests. It pushed out all the weird things that had happened and made everything real and everyday again. Even the rattling windows and the groaning walls were familiar. It was the season for high winds, after all.

  The best suites were on the second floor. Those had their own sitting rooms and baths. Mr. and Mrs. Hopper could have one room and share the bath and sitter with the girls, while the boys could have the suite across the hall. I pulled tape off doors and the heavy dust cloths off furniture. I had to run to the linen cupboard to get the big laundry bag to stuff the cloths in. None of the beds were made, so it was back to the linen cupboard for pillows, sheets, and blankets. Perspiration poured off me by the time I finished with the last bed, and I had to keep wiping my face on the maid’s apron I’d wrapped around me, to keep from dripping on everything. It must have been almost nighttime, but the air wasn’t getting any cooler, and I didn’t dare open a window for the breeze because it would bring the dust in.

  As I tucked in the last hospital corner on what I figured would be the boys’ beds, I heard a scraping noise and whirled around. Clarinda Hopper peered in the door from the sitting room. She’d tilted her head all the way sideways like little kids can, so I could just see her spectacles, nose, and upper lip around the door frame.

  “Can I get you something, Miss Clarinda?”

  Her upper lip twitched, like she was maybe trying to smile. Then she was gone except for the sound of her patent-leather shoes thudding on the carpet.

  Probably shy. I smoothed down the bedcovers. The Hoppers would want to wash up, I realized. So they needed towels. I started out again, thinking about what we had left in the linen cupboard, but something caught my eye and I stopped.

  The Imperial’s thresholds and doors all had a dark walnut varnish that was still smooth despite being
nearly fifty years old. On the doorjamb, though, right at waist height, a pale crescent had been gouged out of the wood.

  I straightened up and hurried down the hall. I tried hard not to think about how that fresh crescent-shaped, splintery gouge was at the same height as little Clarinda Hopper’s twitchy upper lip.

  6

  Layin’ in That Hard Rock Jail

  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…”

&nbs
p; 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.