“Can I help you?” An old woman with every other tooth missing or awry, hair neatly combed into a thin bun, and wearing a patched apron, sat in a rocker amid barrels and boxes.
“Do you have dried apples?”
“Nope. Wintered out. Dry grapes, though. A little moldy, so I give a good price.”
“Bread?”
“Oh, yeah.” She leaned from her chair to a shelf, patted a hard brown loaf proudly. “Make it myself. Where are you from?”
“Georgia. My ma’s waiting in Boston.”
She nodded. “Getting close now. You on the train?”
I shook my head. “Nah, hoofing it, picking up rides when I get lucky.”
“Train’s frightful expensive. You want coffee?”
“No. Salt pork? Pickles?”
“Sure. Good cheese, too. My boy raises the goats.” She stood from the rocker with a groan and commenced placing goods in a slat box.
I nodded. “Been on the road a while, wondering what the world’s doing. You got a paper in this town?”
She pointed. “Yestiday’s Boston Globe. Gotta read it in here, though. Town shares it, and not everbody’s been in.”
I took the paper, nonchalantly. “Anything interesting happening?”
“Always is.”
I scanned the front page: nothing, but when I turned to the second my heart sank. A story on the bombing, and an artist’s rendition of the three responsible. Two cowboys, one like a dwarf, the big one with dark beetling brows and a long nose. The woman was depicted in a low-cut gown with ostrich feathers stuck in her curly hair.
“Ain’t that something? See that one?” The old woman pointed at the one I supposed was me.
“Built his bomb in a rooming house. Snookered the coal company and a Yale professor to boot.” She cackled.
“With a bomb?”
“Carved coal lumps. Duped the educated fool who took ’im in. The scoundrel almos’ ruint the fellow; lucky he weren’t killed. The thief held up the professor with his fancy silver pistol, stole a important rock. They say he may’ve killed the professor’s wife. She’s missing.”
I managed to wrestle the impulse to shout innocence, decry the reporters, Quillan, and the cops as miserable liars. I swallowed my panicked anger and, still disbelieving, I read on. Sure enough, Quillan blamed Mrs. Quillan’s disappearance and the entire coal fiasco on me. Said I had stolen a priceless fossil. A chemist found lead and traces of antimony, iron and tin in the bomb casing and Quillan verified one of his pewter candlesticks had gone missing as well as the spyglass Mrs. Quillan had given me. The police figured I had melted down stolen goods to cast the sphere. Two of the boarders to whom I had proudly shown my gun reported that I was armed and dangerous and described my pistol in detail. The pawnshop turned in my watch, and the police had found my real name inside and were now calling me the blueblood bandit, Phaegin my harlot, and Curly our bastard child.
“My God.” I put the paper down.
The old woman tsked. “Evil, ain’t it? Anarchists, foreigners. The ringleader, he looks Italian to me, or Oriental even.” She turned the paper, found her place, and pointed to a number. “You keep yer eyes peeled, out there on the road. Come across the three of ’em and you can make some money. First class in red velvet with that reward.”
A thousand-dollar bounty on our heads.
“’Course, you might get killed sooner than you get the cash. They’s carrying dynamite, pistols, rifles. Bad news.”
I cracked a weak smile. “I just want to get home.”
“You’re a good boy, then. Grocery’s three dollar ’n two bits.”
* * *
I didn’t share the particulars with Phaegin and Curly, at least not the harlot/bastard characterization, but gave them the general dismal scope of things. Phaegin took a moment from pushing bread and cheese into her mouth and dug her fists into her eyes. I thought she might start crying all over again, but she looked up. “The pictures don’t look like us?”
“No.” I gestured toward Curly. “They drew him like a miniature deformed cowboy and I look like evil incarnate.”
She raised her eyebrow. “You said they didn’t capture a likeness.”
Curly didn’t flinch, but smiled. “I look like a cowboy?” He stuck his thumbs in his vest.
I glared at him. “Thing is, there’s a reward. People are going to be looking for anything close to those pictures. We have to make sure we don’t resemble our descriptions at all. Disguise ourselves.”
Curly sat up. “I’ll get chaps.”
Phaegin shook her head at him. “You are a deformed elf with a tiny deformed brain.”
Curly turned to me. “Did the pitcher show me with chaps, Ned? No. So it’s a disguise.”
I took Tilfert’s hat and stuffed it in my bag. “Keep your mouth closed, Curly. It’ll hide the gap in your teeth. Take off your vest, boots too.”
“Won’t!”
I turned to Phaegin. “You got those scissors?”
She pulled them out of her bag and handed them to me. I motioned to a downed tree. “Have a seat.”
“Why?”
“Scarlet fever. You’ve been sick, barely over it. All your hair fell out.”
“You’re not cutting my hair!”
“Phaegin. In your picture you looked … very healthy.”
She crossed her arms, worked her mouth back and forth, then flounced over and sat on the log. “I had scarlet fever two months ago at least, Ned. Don’t cut it too short.”
Curly sank to the ground and, sitting cross-legged, watched me snip Phaegin’s hair, groaning as the long locks dropped to the ground. His eyes welled. A few more snips and tears coursed down his grimy cheeks. When I moved to cut the front, he commenced sobbing.
Phaegin snapped, “What’s wrong with you?”
He hiccuped. Snot dripped from his nose. “I’m sorry, Phaegin. I’m so, so sorry.”
She pivoted and looked at me. “Do I look that bad, Ned?”
“No.” And in fact she did not. Her hair, released from its long weight, waved about her face, giving her a girlish demeanor.
Phaegin wagged her finger at Curly. “Stop it. You’re making me feel bad.”
Curly hid his face in his hands. His shoulders shook. I cut the last lock of Phaegin’s hair. Phaegin brushed industriously at her skirt, strode over to Curly, and nudged him with her toe. “What’s this about, then?”
Curly looked up, streaked, slimy, and abject. “You had the purtiest hair I ever ever seen.”
Phaegin crossed her arms and looked away. “Well, it’ll grow back.” He sniveled loudly and she wheeled on him. “I said, Stop!”
Curly jumped to his feet, peeled off his hat, his vest, struggled to extricate his feet from the still-damp boots. “Here! You kin have ’em, Phaegin. I don’ deserve to be a cowboy. I’ll walk to Kansas in my socks.”
Phaegin looked at me, rolling her brown eyes, and stuffed Curly’s gear into my bag. “You can wear ’em when we get to the wild, Curly. By then, my hair’ll be longer. Now, enough caterwaulin’.”
Curly took her hand. “I’m sorry, really, Phaegin.”
She sighed loudly and deeply. “All right. Fine. You’re sorry.” She glanced at me again and jerked her hand from his. “Just … let off.”
My disguise was to keep a smile on my face and try not to look dangerous. Phaegin suggested I grow a beard. I laughed. “In a week I’d have seventeen really long hairs.”
“I think you’ve got the making of a good beard, here.” She took my face in her hands, looked at my chin critically, petted my upper lip. “You’ll definitely have a mustache in no time. Get yourself a different hat, a bowler, say, and you’ll be transformed.”
I patted the change remaining from the ten in my pocket. “This is getting awful thin to buy tickets, shoes for Curly, and a hat for me.”
Curly grinned. “I can pinch the shoes.”
“A thief and a menace,” Phaegin snarled. “Paying for that one’s shoes
is like buying the devil a stick. We should drown him.” She shook her head and counted on her fingers. “Shoes for him, a jacket and hat for you, and a kerchief for my head. What’s left we can only pray will buy three train tickets to—God knows where we’ll be safe. Do you have any idea where that could be?”
I was a-sail on a friendless sea, with no safe harbors in sight. The only place to go was the big nowhere. Every soul I counted an ally was dead or missing—but one. “Brill!” With great relief I answered Phaegin’s look. “My old tutor—he’ll help—the smartest man I know. We’ll take the train to Hammond, Indiana. I’ll send a telegram in the morning. He’ll meet us and we’ll straighten all this out.” The train was dear, the telegraph cash-hungry as well. “But six dollars isn’t going to cover it.”
Phaegin gave me an incredulous look. “A tutor. Straighten all this out? Uh-huh.” She turned her back and went through her bag. When she turned back, she handed me ten dollars.
I eyed the money. Twenty dollars in two days, a preposterous sum for a shopgirl. “How much were you going to spend on that dress?”
“You’ll wish it was more before we’re done.”
I walked to her bag and peered in. “What’s really in those cigar boxes?”
She shoved me back. “Cigars. I told you.”
“Twenty bucks out of thin air.”
“I had a little saved.”
“Let’s see.”
“What?”
I grabbed for the bag. “The boxes.”
She slapped at me. “Get off!”
Her lack of trust infuriated me. “So high and mighty with Curly, and yet you cleaned Mr. Cordassa out.” I threw my hands in the air. “Now, even if the bombing gets cleared up we’ll be jailed for burglary. How much are we in for, petty theft or grand larceny?”
“I didn’t steal anything. I’m no thief.”
I stared at her. Phaegin tightened her lips to white. Gave an exasperated “Oh!” and upended her bag at my feet. “Matches, knife, my ma’s picture, scissors, blanket, stocking, another stocking—”
I put out a hand. “The boxes.”
She opened one with a flourish. Inside, a dozen beautifully wrapped umber cigars. I poked through them, sniffed them, knocked on the bottom of the box.
I nodded. “The other.”
Phaegin opened the other box practically on my nose. Another dozen cigars, redolent of Cordassa’s shop. “You want to go through my pockets now, Ned?”
“I’m sorry. You keep pulling out money.”
“Don’t worry, it won’t happen again!”
I looked away. Curly was euphorically slashing the bushes with a stick, making leaves fly as if he were on a camping excursion. “I really am sorry. I’m so good at being wrong, I don’t know why I would believe my stomach growling. And you’ve been right. Especially about him.” Curly stooped and used the stick to draw in the dirt. Puffy face intent, tongue stuck out from his pink lips. “Trouble and just can’t help it.”
“Too bad you didn’t listen first bloom. Now we’re good and stuck.”
“Keep your money.” I held up the pistol. “I’ll sell this, pawn it maybe.”
“Are you crazy? It’s been described in the paper. Besides—” she smiled for the first time in three days—“you’re going to need it in Nebraska. All those buffalo needing killing.”
“I never actually killed a buffalo,” I admitted. “I was a skinner, and not a very good one.”
She shook her head. “Can you even shoot that thing?”
I smiled back at her. “I have saved lives with my pistol. Though I never shot a buffalo, I am a true western hero.”
“Then, for God’s sake, Ned, don’t pawn it. That gun might be our only hope.”
CHAPTER 26
At first light I made my second foray into Mercator and, as if by divine intervention, found a pile of clothing inviting its own theft, drying over a chair on the porch of a house, the result, perhaps, of a child’s foray into a pond. I transferred the blouse, breeches, and shoes under a bush to be retrieved later and continued into town to purchase a kerchief and hat from the same merchant who’d lent me the newspaper.
She seemed glad to see me and, after taking my money, sent me off with a card for my waiting mother imprinted with roses and the Lord’s Prayer. “You’re a good boy, wish’t that my boy could come home. He’s a sailor. Ever’ storm, I’m on my knees, even though I know if it’s blowin’ here, he’s likely lodged in sunshine.”
From there I headed to the train station, a sleepy place. From twenty yards away I could see the bright white of a new poster tacked to the door. I looked around, but no one seemed to be giving me any untoward looks, yet I still approached obliquely, trying to read the notice as if I were hardly interested.
It gave me the shivers to see our odd simulacra gazing boldly from the paper. Names, descriptions of our crimes, the immense thousand-dollar reward printed in lurid red.
I ducked into the station house: another poster on the cage. It would be madness to buy passage for three now, tipping the station agent for sure. I rubbed my chin, checking my camouflage, mastered my breathing, plastered a big friendly grin on my face, and purchased one ticket. Phaegin would ride as Delores Reed, scarlet fever victim, journeying to recuperate with her sister in Chicago. Curly and I would have to hobo.
After I pocketed the ticket I sojourned to the telegraph office. I sent Brill a simple message: ARRIVE MAY 15, 10 A.M. IMPERATIVE TO MEET. I prayed he would get it.
That afternoon, Phaegin boarded the train.
Curly and I waited on the outskirts of Mercator, listening for the train’s whistle, the hiss of brakes, the dim shout of the engineer. After a time the locomotive pulled out, chugged carefully into its next leg. As it turned the corner into our sight, Curly and I crouched like sprinters, waited until the engine passed, the passenger cars huffed by, saw Phaegin’s strained face in the train window. When the freight cars came alongside, Curly and I commenced running. I overtook one of the rear cars in a hundred yards. Curly raced behind me.
Had he been six feet tall, Curly would easily have been the fastest man I ever had or would meet. He barreled along the tracks with the power of a train himself, pumping his arms, his legs chugging into a blur, face constricted, teeth clenched.
But he hardly made four feet six inches, and Curly powered along on his stubby gams for a hundred yards, barely making headway. I lay on my belly on the rough freight platform, reaching for him, shouting encouragement. I became convinced he would burst before he managed to catch up with the freight car. The blood already congesting in his head colored his face from red to purple.
Phaegin was ensconced in the passenger car. If I were forced to jump off and join him, how would we let her know we hadn’t made it? How would we ever catch up with her again?
“Come on, Curly!” I screamed. “Run! Run! You’re gaining!”
Curly’s eyes were bugged and wild. His mouth yawed for breath. His white fists pummeled the air. I stretched my hands toward him. “Almost there, almost there! Come on!”
Just as I thought Curly might actually make it, his outstretched fingers nearing my own, not six inches between them, the train picked up an iota of speed or Curly slowed.
The train and he fell into a horribly long moment of stasis, and then the six inches between us grew to eight, then a foot.
We were lost. I dropped my head in defeat, grabbed my valise. I would have to jump before there was any more speed on or I’d break my neck.
Curly squawked, “Corner!”
We’d come to a bend. Curly cut across the inside curve, leaping over berms, flying over the stuttered grasses, to meet the car on the other side, three feet to spare. He grabbed my hand, I took hold of the back of his shirt. He kicked, I wrested him up, imagining his feet catching in the iron wheels, dragged him slowly along the threshold, and finally lifted him into the car.
Curly lay gasping like a landed fish. He put a hand to his throat and glared at me. �
�You … almos’… hung me … on my own collar.”
I leaned, panting, against a crate and grinned at him.
For hours, for a day, all went well. The train rolled west, stopping and starting in half a dozen stations with nothing amiss. At each stop, Phaegin, Curly, and I would step out and stretch our legs, give each other a cursory nod of all’s well before re-boarding. Curly and I napped on the hard boards, relieved ourselves out the door—a particular pleasure for Curly, who claimed he had a half mile bladder. The knot had begun to loosen in my belly as the eastern forests and knots of habitation eased into open spaces. The stops became often nothing more than a platform and a stationmaster’s house. There was no way to get provisions, so Curly and I chewed stale bread and more than a few moldy raisins.
Curly grimaced. “I ain’t eatin’ any more rot.” He turned to me with a tortured expression on his face. “Ned, I gotta have some real food. I gotta have some taters, or maybe some meat, or”—his face grew dreamy—“a blueberry pie like Mother Fenton made. She did it real nice.”
The train whistled a stop and began groaning slow.
“I’ll betcha Phaegin’s havin’ chicken ’n biscuits in the dining car.” He pulled at his hair. “I cain’t stand it. I gotta have something good to eat.”
I laughed at his theatrics. “Calm down, Curly. You’re not starving.” He gave me such a pleading look I relented. “All right, we’ll meander down when the train stops and see if we can get something from Phaegin.”
We jumped from the platform and wandered nonchalantly down the line toward the passenger seating. About the time Phaegin stepped out, however, a man in a dark suit exited one of the further cars and gave Curly and me, then Phaegin, a searching look. I pushed Curly back toward the cars. The man tipped his hat to Phaegin, who inclined her head. And then the man came our way.
I didn’t know if he was just stretching his legs, but something about him seemed worrisome. As soon as we had rounded the bend I shoved open a freight car door and gave Curly a boost in. I followed and closed the door.
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