A Tyranny of Petticoats

by Jessica Spotswood

  I spin around, keeping Billy and his treasure behind me.

  Gable stands up, all knobs and limbs, one side of his mouth turned up and his hat still riding low, and he’s slapping his hands together like he’s not applauding but condemning.

  “Excellent performance.” He touches his fingers to his hat but doesn’t tip it. Doesn’t remove it.

  He watches me to see if it stings that he didn’t acknowledge me as a lady. I don’t let him see that it does.

  I left home in skirts and saddle oxfords but quickly learned that you can’t jump a moving train with all that fabric flapping about or keep your feet warm in handsome shoes. Now I wear pilfered dungarees and a dead boy’s boots.

  Billy huddles behind me, hands on my waist, forehead dug deep into the center of my back. He tries to hide it, but Billy cries at night, trying to cuddle close because I’m quiet and soft and have never once given him a backhand smack like some of the men do. Like he’s some rangy cur trying to snatch food from under their noses.

  I can’t let him get close and I can’t let him cuddle, so I step away. Just because I’ve got soft curves doesn’t mean I can get soft.

  “It wasn’t a show.” I don’t let my gaze waver from Gable’s.

  “Oh, yes, it was,” he says with a foxy smile.

  I feel utterly exposed. I don’t look to see if the drunks with the greasy beards and hands stained pink with Sterno are watching us.

  “It’s the truth!” Billy says. “My pop was in the army. He fought in the War. And old Hoover would’ve just let him starve.”

  When Billy sticks up for himself, he sounds like me. Like he’s sixteen and already weary of the world. Shame he can’t keep his presidents straight.

  “Roosevelt’s president now,” I remind him.

  “I know that.” Billy frowns at me. “Hoover would have let us starve. It’s why we lived in a Hooverville.”

  I knew that Billy’d had it rough, but I hadn’t realized his family had lived in one of those cardboard shantytowns. It makes me wonder what else I don’t know about him.

  Gable stoops to look Billy in the eye. “Telling a true story in a way that pulls heartstrings is a fair talent.” He turns to me. “I should know. I’m a journalist.”

  The way he says it makes me laugh. All serious, like he really believes it.

  “You’re a newsboy?”

  His mouth twists. “I’m a reporter.”

  That makes me laugh harder.

  “I work for the Wenatchee World.” He steps too close, his jaw clenched like he’s ready to fight.

  I’m not afraid of this showboat, but I take a step back anyway. “There’s grown men in this jungle can’t find work breaking their backs to build a dam. And you’re telling me you earn a living with your words?”

  He bites his lip. Only for a second, but long enough to tell me I’ve caught him in a lie.

  “I have an article due next week,” he says. I don’t know if it’s me he’s trying to convince or himself.

  “Bully for you.” I raise an eyebrow to let him know I’m not impressed.

  He stills. Suddenly, like a thought just struck him. He cocks his head to one side, looking more like Clark Gable than ever, and looks at me appraisingly.

  “I’m investigating the migrant workers,” he says.

  Investigating doesn’t sound good. I can already see the slander-ridden story he’ll write for his rag, all about how we get fat and lazy on roast beef earned by sob stories while the rest of the country is hard at work.

  “Migrant workers.” I snort, trying to sound like I don’t care. “You mean hobos.”

  “My dad —” He curses under his breath. “My boss wants to know what they’re doing here.”

  There’s the lie. He doesn’t have to earn a living. But I can’t begrudge anyone getting a job from his father. I’d be washing towels and sweeping hair in my dad’s barbershop if he hadn’t lost it in this damned depression. My dad, with his badger hair shaving brush and straight razor, covering his customer’s face with sandalwood foam.

  “Better get on with it, then,” I mutter.

  “There was an article about . . . about hobos in the New York Times.”

  “And you think you can do better?”

  “It says there’s a million men out on the rails in America.” He’s nothing if not persistent.

  “A million men, eh?” I turn away. “Well, you’ve no need to talk to me.”

  “I want a different angle. You could tell me what it’s like for a girl.”

  I could. I could tell him exactly what it’s like for a girl. The lewd propositions and surreptitious pinches. The skepticism and mistrust. But that would just give him what he wants — a sordid headline with me as the poor featherheaded victim.

  “I’d like to get a quote from this little man too.” Gable ruffles Billy’s hair.

  I thought Billy was shielded behind me, but here he is, grinning up at this swindler like he’s God’s own mouthpiece. My throat pinches up tight.

  “You want to pull your readers’ heartstrings,” I say to Gable.

  He nods and shrugs, copping the blame.

  “We were just on our way out.” I push the parcel of food into Billy’s chest and keep going, clutching his elbow when he stumbles a little.

  “Don’t you want the whole world to know your story?” Gable calls. He hasn’t moved. He thinks we’ll sell our souls for a few lines of print.

  “You mean the Wenatchee World?” I turn to look him right in the eye.

  This time he colors. I’d taken him for twenty, but he can’t be more than eighteen. That little mustache is just a few well-tended hairs.

  He clears his throat. “Pull on the right heartstrings and you might change your circumstances.”

  I’d leap at the chance if it were possible. But bad luck is as much a part of chance as good. Just like a freight train, you have to trust before you leap.

  I shrug. “I have my own ways of changing my circumstances.”

  His gray eyes narrow, and the skin around them crinkles like he’s smiling — or judging. “And what are those?”

  The train answers for me — a lingering, forthright blast of the whistle.

  I nod my head in the direction of the tracks and grin. “There’s my summons.”

  I grab Billy’s hand and walk away.

  “Just let me ask you a couple of questions.”

  I’ll be John Browned if he’s not following us. “Ask away,” I toss over my shoulder.

  “Can you at least hold still?”

  “No, sir, mister!” Billy shouts, catching on to my game. “We’ve got a train to catch!”

  The westbound freight idles in the yard. The men at the orchard said it was due, and for once, luck is with me. There’s even a boxcar with its door wide open in welcome, waiting right in front of us.

  And there’s no one inside.

  Billy scrambles in and I follow, turning around to catch Gable staring, open-mouthed. “You want me to hop a train?” he asks.

  “If you want this story, you want to hop a train.” I pull a hammered spike out of my pocket and wedge it under the runners of the door.

  Gable watches me, his hands on the boxcar floor, his feet still firmly on the ground.

  “The spike keeps it from closing,” I tell him. “You never know when it will open again. Besides, a moving door could take a man’s arm off.”

  He plucks his hands back like he’s been burned and tucks his chin.

  Good.

  Though it would have been nice to talk to someone besides Billy for a change.

  I tell myself Gable’s just like the boys back home. All swagger and charm, pitying my stupidity and innocence because I’m a girl with nothing in my curly-haired head but fashion and romance. But I know more than this so-called reporter. I’m more worldly-wise. More brave.

  He doesn’t walk away. He takes a breath — I see his chest rise — and looks at me.

  “If I do this, if I take th
is train with you, I need you to agree to answer my questions.” He’s so serious. “My job depends on it.”

  But not his life. “Even if it’s your father’s paper?”

  He presses his lips together. Looks away. “He can’t afford a reporter who doesn’t pull his weight.” His chest rises again and his gaze meets mine. “He says it’s time I make my own way. I don’t get this story, I might as well stick with riding the rails.”

  I don’t know if it’s truth or if he’s spinning a tale, but two toots of the train’s whistle tell me we’re about to move, so impulsively I stick out my hand. He stares at it for a thin slice of a second, and I can read on his face the backwardness of it all. Then he takes it, warm and sure, and neatly makes the leap into my domain.

  We settle back into the dark corner of the boxcar as the engine starts to roar. I met one old hobo who said he loved the sound of the engine picking up every car, the shudder that runs the length of the train with each one. I’ve always felt like it was the footsteps of an approaching giant, thunderous and threatening.

  When the train’s under way, Gable takes out a little notepad and pen. “So what do they call you?”

  No one asks that. They ask what kind of work I do. Why such a pretty little thing is out here. Wonder in their minds if I sell myself in pieces.

  None of them ask my name.

  It’s been so long since I’ve said my own name, I can’t find the sound of it on my tongue.

  “What do they call you?” I retort.

  “Lloyd.”

  I don’t tell him he looks like Clark Gable.

  “Curls.”

  My hated hobo moniker. It calls to mind soft things. Sickly-sweet things. Like Shirley Temple and velvet ribbons. Who I was then, not who I am now.

  “It suits you.”

  I glare at him. “Unlike your mustache.”

  He lays the tips of his fingers along his upper lip, and I feel something almost like conscience.

  “I’m Billy!” He pushes himself between us. “Billy the Kid.” He stares at Lloyd’s pen and paper, waiting for his name to be written down in all its glory. Lloyd looks over Billy’s head at me and winks.

  “And why are you out here?” When Lloyd smiles, it’s like Billy’s the only person he’s ever wanted to talk to. Like he’s been waiting his whole life for it. He’s suited to his profession — his smile could make folks confess any manner of secrets.

  “Hard times, mister!” Billy says. “Hard times!”

  It’s what all of us say. Why else would you risk life and limb, blowing across the country and back? Risking railroad bulls who would throw you headfirst off a moving train and sheriffs who’d sling you in jail till even your mother forgets your name? There’s some out here who seek adventure, I suppose, though I can’t find sense in that.

  “Why are you here?” I ask. I could spend all night just tossing Gable’s questions back at him. “You’re not looking for any old story, are you?”

  “My father thinks the migrants are a menace,” Lloyd says. “That they’ll bring fighting and robbery, that the . . . the women of Wenatchee won’t be safe to walk the streets. He wants me to write a story to convince the city council to raze the campsite where you all stay.”

  “The jungle,” I correct him, fearful for the men celebrating food, unaware the town will destroy them, leaving behind nothing but a chalk-drawn symbol warning others it’s yet another place where it’s not safe to stay.

  “What do you think?” I look at him directly. His gray eyes turn blue just at the center. I find myself holding my breath.

  “I asked for the job.”

  My breath comes out in a rush. “Did you talk to the men?”

  Lloyd looks away. “No,” he says. “I was afraid of them.”

  This unvarnished truth makes me squirm. Part of me wants to reach out to comfort him, like I would with Billy. The other part knows fear is like fire. It only takes a spark — like a newspaper article — to create a conflagration.

  “They’re desperate,” I say finally. “No work. No food.”

  His pen is poised. Ready. “Are you scared?”

  All the time.

  But I can’t say it, even in the wake of his confession, because it would mean admitting that the men are dangerous, deserving of fear, when all they want is a chance.

  “No. We’re all the same.”

  Lloyd studies me and I stare back. The longer he looks, though, the softer his face gets, until suddenly his eyebrows pinch forward and he looks down at Billy.

  “I’ve heard that most ride the rails for six months,” Lloyd says. “Then they go home. How long have you been out here?”

  Billy looks up at me. Time isn’t his strongest suit.

  “I met Billy seven weeks ago,” I say. “I’ve been out here eight. I think your information is wrong. Nobody can go back to how it was. The dust bowl dried us all up bitter as seeds and spat us out all over the land, and none of us yet has taken root.”

  Lloyd looks up from his pen, eyes wide.

  “Can I use that?” he asks. “What you just said?” He clears his throat. “As a quote, of course.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s good. The way you said it. That’ll grab their attention. Make them care.”

  I shrug, but warmth grows in my chest at his praise.

  “And what is a girl doing out here?” he asks, looking up at me quick and then back down at his pen.

  I wonder if he means what kind of girl?

  I look back on the one I was — carefully modulated hair skin skirt shoes voice — and it’s like she’s not even me. The one who dreamed of being a teacher right up to the day the school ran out of money and closed its doors. There was nothing left to teach because hardship took it all.

  I want to tell him that the bank took Dad’s shop and his will to live. That Mama needed more money and fewer mouths to feed and that my leaving has only achieved one of those things. But I say nothing, because I don’t want pity.

  Out here on the rails, I’ve learned to keep my secrets close and my tongue still.

  Lloyd glances around the boxcar, and his eyebrows pinch again. He must take my silence for refusal, because his questions change direction. “Where are you going?”

  “There’s no work here, so we’re heading west.”

  “Seattle?”

  “Maybe there’s more in the city.”

  “Maybe there’s just Skid Road.”

  That’s a chance I have to take. “What do you care, as long as you get your story?”

  “What about the New Deal programs? The CCC? Building dams and bridges and national parks?”

  I snort. “It’s for young men. There’s many of us that don’t qualify.”

  Billy shifts between us. It’ll be five years before he can work for the Civilian Conservation Corps, and by then things will be better.

  We hope.

  Billy shifts again. Tugs my sleeve. “I’m hungry.”

  If we eat, we’d have to share. If not, I could spin a story, tug on Lloyd’s heartstrings. Billy’s used to hunger, but I bet Lloyd isn’t. He could take that back to his readers.

  But Billy dives into his bindle, pulling out meat and bread with a flourish, like he’s a tuxedoed waiter in a Busby Berkeley movie instead of a scruffy kid in too-short pants. He tears off a hunk of meat and stuffs it in his mouth.

  Inside, I cringe, but I keep my voice steady when I turn to Lloyd. “Join us. Hobos share when they can.”

  “You didn’t back there.” He jerks his head at the open door. At the men we left behind. To him, we’re nothing but a couple of grifters, little better than thieves.

  “Sorry, Rosie,” Billy mumbles. “Forgot to share.”

  I close my eyes. Billy revealed our treasure and my real name in one fell swoop.

  “It’s all right,” I tell him, and then mutter in Lloyd’s direction, “We haven’t eaten since yesterday.”

  Billy swallows. “No, I ate, remember? There w
as a potato left in the fire at the jungle before this one. You gave it to me this morning.”

  Now Lloyd’ll think I’m soft. Why can’t he just tell the truth in his blasted paper?

  I divide the food into threes, but Lloyd puts a hand on my arm. It’s warm, his touch gentle. “I’ve eaten.”

  I don’t look at his gray-blue eyes when I force a piece of bread at him. “You don’t know when you will again.”

  Darkness envelops us as we climb higher into the night. Billy answers all of Lloyd’s questions, elaborating on the old stories. I only correct him when he fibs outright. Lloyd must know some kind of reporter shorthand so he can scrawl in the dark. He just lets Billy talk.

  No one just lets Billy talk.

  I turn my smile to the open door. The cold October wind gets colder, biting through the thick knit of my sweater — the one Mama made for Dad last Christmas. The din of the wheels on the tracks has the rhythm of a rope-skipping rhyme.

  It builds the same kind of anticipation in me — that I’ll make it to the end. That maybe something magical will happen if I do. Perhaps it’s Lloyd’s suggestion that talking to him could change my circumstances, but I’m starting to hope we’ll find a place where I can stop moving.

  “My aunt runs a boardinghouse in Ballard,” Lloyd says. It takes me a second to realize he’s talking to me.

  “That near Seattle?” I ask. I try to sound casual. Like maybe I’ll get a job. Like maybe I can afford a boardinghouse.

  “It’s in Seattle.” Lloyd chuckles and I want to smack him. Like a girl from Nebraska would know that. “It’s a neighborhood. She rents out mostly to fishermen. Scandinavians. She says it’s . . . it’s a hard life.”

  “Sounds like the jungle.”

  “She’s getting overworked,” he says. “Arthritis. She asked my father last time they spoke if he knew of someone who might help her run the place. Keep it clean, do the shopping and the cooking. It’s not much, only room and board.”

  The thoughts stagger into my mind and I grasp at them. His aunt. Boardinghouse. Looking to hire help. It breathes life into that little spark of hope.

  I lean toward him. “What are you saying?”