Sarah Zettel - Dust girl

It was like a whole sack of stones rolled off my back. I could stand. I could back away.

Shimmy rose up from the mud. She was tall and solid, more real than the storm overhead or the mud underfoot.

“Bull Morgan!” she shouted. “Bull Morgan! Come here!”

Jack pulled me deeper into the corn and the rain.

We heard Morgan shout. We heard Shimmy laugh.

We broke through the edge of the corn, and there was the Packard, parked crooked on the side of the road. Jack had known where he was going after all.

A shot split the air like thunder, and another.

I dove into the passenger side of the Packard while Jack cranked the engine to life. I dug into Shimmy’s handbag for her compact. The tires spun and squelched in the mud as Jack forced the car forward, rocking and bumping across the dirt road’s ruts. I flipped the compact open.

Show me , I demanded of the mirror. Show me!

The mirror went black again, then gray and shimmery with rain. Then the rain cleared away.

Bull Morgan was squinting, turning drunkenly in place, waving his revolver. Looking for us. For me. Shimmy lay in the mud at his feet, and she wasn’t moving.

“Where are they?” he shouted like she could still answer him. “Where?”

The wind blew until the cornstalks bent almost double. Then, slowly, the light began to change. It grew clean, bright, and hard. The rain slowed, then stopped. The white light turned Morgan’s sagging skin the color of chalk, like he’d walked off the screen from some old silent film.

“You have failed us, Samuel Morgan.” The voice came from nowhere and everywhere. There were no beautiful beings this time, just this voice that belonged to Judgment Day.

“No…”

“We gave you our trust and our favor, and you have failed!”

“No! No! I can still find her. I know where she’s gone!”

“Your time is over, Samuel Morgan.”

The light faded. Bull Morgan cried out and staggered forward, but he collapsed to his knees. He sagged slowly, deflating like a tire with a slow leak. I watched, my heart in my mouth, as Morgan slumped forward until his hands pressed into the dirt.

“No. No. Don’t leave me! I can find them. I will find them.”

But the magic was gone. The light was only the bloody twilight over the ruined prairie. The long stripes of the cornstalk shadows fell across him like bars. Morgan’s elbows buckled until his forehead touched his hands.

“They ain’t gonna escape. They ain’t. I ain’t givin’ up. Bull Morgan don’t. Give. UP.”

Ever seen a movie that’s been run through the projector in reverse? The cars and the people all head backward, and anything that has broken apart flies into one piece again. That was what this was like. Morgan’s head lifted, and his neck drew back into his collar. His hands lifted themselves up, and first one knee straightened, then the other, and he stood.

But the strength that had puffed him up before was gone, along with the light in his eyes. His colorless skin sagged against his bones, like all the juice had been sucked out of him. It even puckered unevenly around his flat, dry eyeballs as he stared into the twilight. One hand, the skin loose and rumpled around the finger bones, felt for his club, then his gun, then his badge.

Morgan turned from where Shimmy lay and blundered through the rain-drenched corn.

My hand went cold and curled into a fist, snapping the compact closed.

“What is it?” shouted Jack. “What did you see?”

“Drive,” I told him as the tears ran down my face to mix with the last of the rain that had saved our lives. Ours, but not Shimmy’s. “Just drive.”

The next town we came to was Madison. We sold Shimmy’s Packard for seventy-five dollars to the one auto dealer, and bought two tickets for the bus to Kansas City. I kept Shimmy’s handbag with her compact and her wallet. There was a paper in there that told me everything I needed to know about what to do once we got into the city.

There wasn’t any discussion about where we were going. I said what was going to happen and Jack agreed, and he set about dickering with the auto man, who already knew we’d take whatever he cared to offer. Jack wasn’t even looking in my direction any more than necessary, and that was just fine with me. If he hadn’t run out on me, Shimmy wouldn’t be dead. I clenched her white bag in my hand and looked out the bus window. Things were going to be different from here on out. Something had changed inside me when I’d made that wish come true, and again when I’d passed it over to Shimmy. That was all right too.

Kansas City was another world.

It was still flat, and the sky overhead was still colored by the dust. But unlike Slow Run, or Constantinople, or sad little Burden, Kansas City teemed with life. People filled the paved streets, crowding the sidewalks between stone and timber buildings. Some of those buildings were as much as ten stories tall. Cars, trucks, and wagons jostled each other in the streets. It smelled of exhaust and excitement. I wanted to plunge straight into the crowds and find out where they were going and where they were coming from. I wanted to wrap my arms around the city and hold it so close it would become part of me. Even the hard parts-the cops in blue coats and hats, with their clubs and guns on their hips, who seemed to stand on every corner; the men lounging against the walls, unshaven, cigarettes dangling; the apple sellers, with ragged families tucked in the shadows; the long line of people in front of the mission waiting for bread and soup.

Even in my excitement, there were parts I could have done without. Along with the signs for hotels and shops and cinemas and food, I saw the signs on the doors that said WHITES ONLY and NO COLORED. They hadn’t needed signs like that in Slow Run. Sheriff Davis kept anybody with brown skin from staying in town overnight. Mama kept the black hobos she put up behind closed curtains in the Imperial’s rooms. If Sheriff Davis came to inquire about who she had there, she distracted him with her cooking. But Kansas City was too big for simple tricks like that, and there were too many colored folks walking the streets. They had to be told straight-out where they weren’t welcome.

But I wasn’t going to let that matter to me. Not this time.

Jack wanted us to find some cheap boardinghouse where we could hole up, but I wasn’t having it. From the bus station we hailed a taxi. I climbed into the backseat and looked right into the eyes of the skinny white driver.

He wished we were rich folks. He needed to make the rental on his cab for the day, and he wanted a good fare, maybe somebody going to the Savoy or the Muehlebach Hotel. So I took that wish and made it come true. Just a little, just enough so he saw exactly what he wanted: a pair of rich white folks in his cab.

“Take us to the Savoy,” I said.

“Yes, miss.” He tipped his hat to me and pulled the taxi into traffic.

Jack opened his mouth, but I looked at him too, daring him to say a single word. He didn’t.

Finally, we pulled up in front of the biggest, grandest building I’d seen yet. I counted bills out of Shimmy’s purse. Of course there was enough. I should have known. There was all we needed, plus enough for a big tip.

A doorman with deep black skin, wearing a red coat with gold buttons and white gloves, opened the car door. He tipped his shining top hat to us as I marched through the front door and up to the registration desk.

The manager wore a pin-striped suit and a tight frown. He looked down at us with watery gray eyes. His name badge read WENTWORTH, and he wished that was his real name, instead of Weinstein.