Frog Music (43 page)

Still no sign of Jenny. Where could she be?

“Is—does Jenny come down here often?” she asks Mary Jane the next time the girl steps out on the porch.

Mary Jane wipes sweat out of her eyes with the back of her hand. “Often enough.”

“On her own?” Blanche fans herself with a three-day-old copy of the
Examiner
.

“Or with friends from town.”

Which friends? wonders Blanche with a surge of perverse resentment. She fans herself harder.

Friendship. Blanche has no talent for it, she decides. Less than a month she’s known Jenny Bonnet, and what an almighty hash she’s made of it.

John Jr. is over by the pond throwing stones in, one after the other, and watching the ripples. (Funny how universal that impulse to make your mark, even on water.) Now somebody’s stopped to talk to him. The chicken farmer from the cabin to the east, is it?

A piercing pain in her leg; Blanche looks down to see what’s biting her and slaps her leg, but she’s missed it.

Nothing to do, nowhere to go. Blanche puts her head back and tries to doze.

A whirring sound. Jenny glides out of a dust cloud on her high-wheeler.

“Where did you disappear to?” calls Blanche, too accusatory.

Jenny jumps down, grinning. “Bicycling around.”

“Around where?”

“
How
, more like. Had a go at riding backward.”

“That would explain the blood trickling down your arm,” says Blanche, aiming for witty rather than irritable.

“Doing it’s the only way to learn,” says Jenny. “Thought I’d give John Jr. a turn too, but the boy’s in some class of sulk.” She glances over at the pond, where John Jr. seems to be brooding over each pebble before he flicks it into the water.

Ah, thinks Blanche, perhaps the lad’s feeling neglected by his old pal from the City. Jealous, even, that Jenny has someone else with her to talk to.

Jenny’s stashing her high-wheeler between some desiccated shrubs and the porch.

“Afraid someone will pinch it, the way you did on Market Street?” mocks Blanche.

A chuckle. “Would be a shame to lose the thing before I’ve got the knack of riding backward.” Jenny throws herself into a fraying cane chair. Drums something like a jig with her boots.

“You’re restless today,” Blanche comments.

Jenny shakes her head. “Born restless. Nothing special about today.”

Blanche looks away. So they’re pretending nothing happened in the night. Fine by her. Perhaps if she and Jenny play it this way, everything will stay more or less as it was. She squints past the lopsided
VARIETY OF LOTS NOW AVAILABLE
sign, the derelict patches between the dunes, all the way north to the nude hills of San Francisco. “These
foutu
flies keep chewing me,” she complains, rubbing at three red marks on her right foot.

“Ankle-biters, not flies,” says Jenny. “Need to get yourself a pair of gaiters.”

“Oh, you reckon I should go shopping?” says Blanche wryly.

“Maybe Mary Jane’d lend you a pair …”

The dog’s nosing around Blanche, so she pushes him away.

Jenny scratches him behind the ear. Then she looks out beyond the porch, and her gaze becomes unfocused, as if she’s been smoking opium.

“What makes your eyes go like that?”

A blink. “Like what?”

“Hazy,” Blanche specifies. “What were you thinking about?” Is that a safe question?

“Oh, you know. Volcanoes, quakes …”

“Volcanoes?” she repeats, startled.

“Doesn’t have to be volcanoes,” Jenny concedes. “Just some kind of excitement. No warning, the ground boils over like a casserole, the railroad flips, buildings tossed in the air … It’s all going to end sometime, so why not hurry that up a touch and find out what’s next?”

Blanche shakes her head at the craziness of this.

Jenny yawns. “Want a book?”

“What would I want with a book?”

“Suit yourself.” Jenny pulls one out from under her chair and turns to a page she’s marked with a stalk of wild grass. The binding’s gilt on green, with a drawing of a traveler at the end of a jetty gazing out to sea.

“What’s it about?” asks Blanche after a minute.

“What it says,” murmurs Jenny.

Blanche reads the title, then reads it once more, to make sure she has it right:
Around the World in Eighty Days
. “Is that even possible?”

Jenny shrugs without looking up. “They’re barely past San Francisco, and Indians are attacking, so I guess I’ll have to read on to find out.”

Blanche takes the hint.

It’s the quiet that’s unsettling her, she decides. Downtown, there’s always some kind of hubbub, whether street music or just the babble of tongues. Here at San Miguel Station, the still air seems to press on her ears.

It must be a quarter of an hour later when Jenny yawns and looks up at the horizon. Blanche follows her eyes. “That’s Blue Mountain,” Jenny remarks, “the highest of the City’s hills.”

Blanche examines the flat-topped cone. “Don’t see anything blue about it.”

“Ah, come down in the spring, you’ll find it one big sea of baby blue eyes.”

The spring? Blanche doesn’t even know what she’ll be doing tomorrow. She’s tempted to point out the unlikelihood of her coming back here at any season, but that might sound sour. “You’d rather be up there,” she counters.

“Blue Mountain?”

“Away in the bush, anyhow, not sitting on a porch. So what’s stopping you?”

Jenny seems not to hear the provocation. “Got to bring yesterday’s sack of wrigglers up to the City later,” she says.

Blanche’s lips tighten. “And leave me here bored out of my mind?”

“Come back up with me, if you like.”

“It’s not safe, not for either of us. Those things Ernest threatened us with on Waverly Place—do you think he was just running his mouth?”

Jenny puffs out a breath. “No lead in his pistol!”

But Jenny doesn’t know Ernest, nor Arthur, not really. She can’t see past the dandy affectations, the peacock gear. A few weeks’ acquaintance hasn’t taught her to be afraid of them.

“I reckon I can look after myself, anyhow,” she concludes.

Blanche bristles at that. “Meaning I can’t?”

A shrug. “All I say is, I’m riding back to town today.”

“Suit yourself,” says Blanche.

A pause. “It could be after dinner, if it makes any odds to you.”

Blanche sniffs.

Jenny returns to her book.

This waiting around is more than Blanche can stand. She marches into the saloon, where she finds Mary Jane behind the counter, smearing glasses with a rag. She asks to borrow some gaiters to keep off the insects.

Mary Jane supplies them without a word.

Blanche swaps her little mules for her boots and laces the gaiters up over them, right to the knee. Then asks the girl for a bottle of rye, because why the hell not, and brings it out onto the porch with two glasses.

Jenny bursts into a lively verse at the sight.

I’ll eat when I’m hungry

And drink when I’m dry
;

If a tree don’t fall on me
,

I’ll live till I die
.

“Santé.”
Blanche clinks their glasses before handing one to Jenny. “You know a lot of drinking songs.”

“Easiest ones to remember, I guess—the alcohol helps them soak in.”

McNamara comes home from his laboring a while later and accepts a glassful to get the dust out of his throat. “Would you be old enough to remember how pricey drink was in the war?” he asks Jenny.

“Would I! When the tax came down after, I went on such a spree …”

Ellen McNamara calls them in for platefuls of what Blanche reckons must be boot leather.

“Splendid stew, Mrs. Mac,” says Jenny.

More drinking afterward, at the bar. The settlement’s quiet tonight. Jordan comes in and remarks that the Canadian’s away to San Jose.

Jenny asks for a sweet cocktail.

“We’ve no bitters,” says McNamara.

“Angostura? Gentian? Orange, even? What class of a drinking establishment is this?” she teases him.

“There’s all kinds of bottles in my shop,” offers Jordan.

“Would you be poaching my feckin’ customers now?” asks McNamara.

“Ah, come on, they’re paying you rent,” Jordan points out. “Let me sell them a cocktail.”

So the women go over to Jordan’s and have a few, even treat him—and McNamara, who follows them to see what all the fuss is about, though he finds the sweet stuff hurts his teeth. He brought his fiddle too. It makes a screechy racket but there is something festive, Blanche decides, about a song played at full volume in the middle of nowhere.

“‘Who gonna shoe yo’ pretty little feet?’” they all chorus.

Who gonna comb yo’ bangs?

Who gonna kiss yo’ rose-red lips?

Who gonna be yo’ man?

“‘Lawd,’” Jenny winds it up with a raucous whoop, “‘who gonna be yo’ man?’”

But once McNamara goes back to his saloon, Jenny stands up and says, as if sober, “I’m off, folks.”

“Now? Don’t be absurd,” says Blanche.

“Off where?” asks Jordan.

“To the City, with my frogs, otherwise they’ll turn cannibal and my name will be mud with my customers.”

“You should have gone hours ago, before dark,” objects Blanche. ‘You’re so drunk now, you’re likely to ride into a ditch.”

But the young woman’s already picking her way across the sandy ground between the two buildings.

Blanche races after her.

In the saloon, McNamara’s leaning on his bar.

“Where did I hang up my coat?” Jenny wonders.

“Don’t let her have it,” Blanche tells him.

“None of my lookout,” says the Irishman.

“Come on, man,” she scolds him, “you know Jenny’s too tight to pedal that machine.”

“Give my coat here,” says Jenny sternly, clicking her fingers at McNamara. “And where are my boots?”

“She can’t even find her boots,” Blanche points out, “let alone the road.”

“Oh yes, I—”

“Let me,” she tells Jenny, with a show of exasperated helpfulness. She nips into the front bedroom and finds Jenny’s boots under the bed. She shoves them farther back, into the darkest corner. “No sign of them,” she calls as convincingly as she can. While Blanche is at it, she fishes the heavy Colt from under the mattress and hides it behind her stockings in the top drawer of the bureau.

Jenny stamps into the room behind her. “Give me my blasted boots.”

“Where could you have left them?”

“Stop playing about.”

“You’re a fine one to talk.” She ducks behind Jenny to shut the door so the others won’t hear them. “You really mean to cycle through Chinatown, with Ernest and Arthur out to tear you limb from limb?”

Jenny sighs. “I ain’t about to hide away for the rest of my days, if that’s what you mean. I never did a thing to those
connards
.”

“Didn’t you?” It bursts out of Blanche.

Jenny stares at her.

“It all began the night I met you,” says Blanche furiously, “with your harmless, just-curious sort of questions.”

“Since when is there a law against questions?” says Jenny.

“You meddled in my affairs. You got me thinking, fretting, fired up—”

A shrug. “You must have had a few things that needed thinking about.”

Rage behind Blanche’s eyes. Her life’s combusted, and this firebrand’s warming her hands at the flames. “You broke us up, me and Arthur, whether you meant to or—”

“Lady,” Jenny cuts in, “I couldn’t give a dead rat whether or not you spend the rest of your life with that louse.”

Blanche’s face is scalding. “Then how did I end up here? Less than a month ago, I was happy as a clam, living with Arthur and dancing at the House of Mirrors …”

“Happy as a clam?” repeats Jenny, ironical.

“See? See? You’re doing it again. I was happy
enough
, and then you ran me down on Kearny Street,” Blanche cries, “and everything started to topple. You, with your prying and probing—”

Jenny’s lip curls. “What, you mean I asked questions like how come you didn’t know where your own baby was living? If you could call that living?”

Blanche gasps. “Listen to yourself! Don’t pretend you didn’t have opinions from the start.”

“What did my opinions matter? If some chitchat with some stranger
toppled
everything, then everything must have been resting on a single brick.”

“You’re a pernicious troublemaker,” Blanche roars. “You zoom round picking fights, then play the innocent.
Who, me, Your Honor? No sirree, poor little frog girl who just wants to wear her little ol’ pants in peace!
”

Jenny puts her head to one side as if examining a rare species of insect. “Why are you being such a contrary bitch?”

“Because you won’t take the least goddamn responsibility for—”

“Responsibility?” She repeats the word as if it tastes sour in her mouth. “What, I fuck you once and we’re married now?”

Blanche’s fist moves before she knows it, plants itself right between Jenny’s eyes with a crack of bone on bone.

It’s Sunday morning now, Jenny’s second day in the baked ground of the Odd Fellows Cemetery. San Miguel Station is so quiet, Blanche can hear her own breath.

“You haven’t heard from him?” she asks Mrs. Louis, leaning on the jamb to stop the woman from shutting the door of her cabin.

The chicken keeper’s wife has wary eyes. “I wouldn’t usually,” she says so softly Blanche has to lean into the smoky dimness to make it out.

Bare feet. Like Blanche’s gaping-stockinged ones today. Two shabby females, Blanche thinks with a shiver, little difference between them. “Why wouldn’t you hear from him usually?”

“Louis doesn’t like to be answerable to anyone.”

Blanche considers that. Not even to a wife? Especially not to a wife, perhaps. She thinks about marriage, all those girls longing for a ring. “He had a visitor last Wednesday?”