IGMS Issue 17 (12 page)

I always ran down to the Depot at 3:37 p.m. to see if the Central Florida Express brought persons of interest to Duster. Also, I liked to visualize myself boarding a Pullman and steaming out into the world -- I would achieve éclat, then extricate my mother from the Ascending Angel and provide her with fine dining and wholesome activities.

Éclat, if you've never looked it up, means "brilliance of success or reputation." I imagined crowds at newspaper kiosks clamoring to read the latest scintillating dispatch from Budapest or Marrakech or Rangoon or Cincinnati, penned by the lustrous Susanna Entwhistle, who is I.

So, that momentous afternoon, guess who disembarked! Nellie Bly! The most famous reporter in the world!

She was precisely as attractive as in her pictures, with her hair pulled back at the sides, but down over her forehead, and her eyes set wide apart and intensely observant. Her plush blue dress had a white embroidered collar, like a many-rayed star. She stood beside her two valises, deciding which way to go, so I ran right up and told her I would be enthused to proffer my assistance.

She said: "Why do you dress like a boy?"

"It is my idiosyncrasy," I said. "I am eleven, but I know everything about Duster, including an impending crisis involving a spellslinger-for-hire, so I can help you."

"Where did you learn a word like idiosyncrasy?" she asked.

"I read lots of books, in preparation for my future career, which will be of a literary nature," I told her.

"Fewer words are better," she said. "I'm seeking a reputable hotel -- what do you suggest?"

I told her Duster had four hotels, all owned by Phosphate Extraction Enterprises, meaning Daryl "Sweetie" Hieronymus, and that the least disreputable, in terms of bowie knifings and smashed glassware, also profane shouting, was the Ascending Angel, in which I resided myself.

"Lead the way," she said.

I made sure her room had laundered sheets, and a good view -- she looked out on Main Street, and the Okie Livery Stable's corral. Then I ran to my own room, since I did not share quarters with my mother, Marigold. I had borrowed books piled everywhere on the floor, and newspaper clippings tacked onto the walls. I untacked one and rushed back to her room to show her.

"What's this?" she said, looking at the clipping.

"That," I said, "is you!"

On top was her picture, just under the headline: "Ace Reporter Nellie Bly Bests Jules Verne's fictional
Around the World in Eighty Days
, Performing the Same Feat in 72 Days, 6 hours, 11 minutes, and 14 Seconds."

She rode, the story said, ships, trains, jinrikishas, sampans, horses and burros. And it recapped her previous scoops for
The Pittsburgh Dispatch
and the New York
World
, such as reports on divorce, slums, and the situation in Mexico. Once, she pretended to be insane to get committed to the Blackwell's Island asylum, her exposés leading to reforms. She wrote about tenement conditions. Also -- this was particularly relevant to subsequent events during her Duster stay -- she exposed the techniques of mashers!

"What will it take for you not to give me away?" she asked.

"I'll be your secret assistant," I said.

"Done," she said.

Nellie and I conferred, in her room and mine, for her exposé of conditions in Duster's mines. She took notes while I explained how Sweetie Hieronymus had gripped the town so tight. For one thing, besides the saloons, Phosphate Extraction Enterprises owned the general store and every other store, and their prices sank workers ever deeper into the company's debt.

Nellie: "Why don't they just run off in the night?"

Me: "Because of Sheriff Fitzpatrick Duprey and his three deputies."

Those "deputies" actually were gunslingers, and Fitzpatrick Duprey was a spellslinger-for-hire, and the whole sorry bunch really worked for Sweetie, just like the "mayor" and practically everybody else in Duster. And this is a solemn fact: if you irritated Sweetie Hieronymus, you'd wind up dead in the dirt on Main Street, because I've seen a lot of that.

Nellie took notes on everything I told her. But I wanted to maintain my usefulness, so I kept back about Sweetie's brother, Placido Hieronymus, a story breaking even as Nellie and I conferred.

That very next afternoon, when I ran down to the Depot to perform surveillance upon the incoming train, two strangers disembarked.

First, a woman stepped onto the platform: a short thing, shapeless in her baggy gray dress, face pear-shaped, with a curtain of dark hair hanging down on either side. Her only interesting features were a lack of expression and smoked glasses. From inside the train, a long arm handed down her valise, and then a man stepped down, looking around and seeing me.

I was unenthusiastic about the male gender, based on what I saw in Duster, but he was lean, with slicked-back yellow hair and a trimmed yellow mustache and sky-blue eyes, and he looked glowingly elegant and urbane. Also, he had stunningly long legs. He reached into the train and pulled out his own valise, and then a guitar case. I guessed right away who he must be.

He said, "Hey, gorgeous -- that's right, you, the little cutie in pants -- will you advise me?"

I worried his mousy companion might create a jealous scene, but she just stood there, saying nothing. What, I wondered, did so handsome a man, quite charming, actually, see in such a clot?

He was, he told me, seeking work as a musician, ideally with the possibility of off-hours poker. I said I might know of an opening, but I couldn't recommend him without hearing him perform.

"I must evaluate your suitability," I told him.

"Hey," he said, giving his silent lady friend a wink. "She's sharp -- will she give me good marks?"

With that, he opened his guitar case, which seemed empty. But he reached in and carefully took out his invisible instrument. Then I saw that it had one visible component, which was a mouth, complete with lips, teeth, and a pink tongue.

It was the first air guitar I'd ever seen. He put the invisible strap over his shoulder and got a grip on the invisible neck, and started to move his fingers over the invisible strings: first that mouth yawned, like it was just waking up. Suddenly its lips puckered and let out a clear note, like a thrush at dawn, and then -- in response to his fingers strumming and plucking its invisible strings, that air guitar made soulful music, to which he sang in a thrilling baritone, looking into his companion's eyes, or at least into her smoked glasses. He sang about how every morning he saw her face on the pillow beside him and fell in love all over again, and so on, and she looked up at him, now quietly smiling, until the air guitar hit the song's last note and he stopped singing.

"Frankie, you're my only love," he whispered to her.

"You're my man, Johnny," she said. "You are my man."

I found this public display of affection moving, but also -- to be honest -- annoying. What did he see in this troll, hiding behind smoked glasses? I also thought I'd never heard such music, being accustomed to tinny pianos and the occasional accordion.

"Here's how it is," I told him. "Last night, at the Ascending Angel, there was a disagreement over too many aces, and the aggrieved person hurled his beer mug, but the cheater ducked, and the mug beaned the Ascending Angel's elderly piano player on the forehead, and he dropped dead, face-down on the keys, so there's a job opening."

"Lead the way, gorgeous," he said.

Frankie and Johnny got settled in their room, a few doors down from mine and across the hall from Nellie Bly's, and that evening there was an ill-starred encounter as Nellie and I left her room so I could show her Duster's nighttime dangers, which resulted from the miners' grumpiness over their virtual enslavement, plus lots of them were on the run, anyway, from sheriffs in other states, and -- being naturally hot-tempered, and willful -- they tended to settle their disputes with fists or bullets, although bludgeoning also was popular, and I did once see a man murdered, quite completely, by the tossing of a lit dynamite stick.

Nellie meant to take notes on all that, from safe vantage points I would show her. But just as we left her room, the opposite door opened and Johnny stepped out, smoking a cheroot. I saw his sky-blue eyes fasten right on Nellie Bly, who looked away and started to walk along with me toward the stairs.

"Say, Miss," Johnny said to Nellie, stepping fast so he could walk beside her. "You inspire me, and I mean to compose a song just for you, downstairs in the cabaret."

"Cabaret?" Nellie said. "That's a saloon."

"Sweet music," he said. "Either way."

All the way down the stairs he talked to Nellie, clearly taken with her, understandably, especially since his own Frankie was such a donkey. However, I did not find it edifying. Also, considering I was right there, given our previous involvement, he might at least have said hello. Besides, I caught Nellie looking at him out of the corner of her eye, which disappointed me.

Outside on the streets, Nellie and I saw no shooting that evening. But we did, at least, witness five fistfights, and an instance of one drunk accusing another of wearing a "cess-pool-smelling bandana around his chicken neck," causing the slandered man to snatch up a stray tomcat to hurl at his opponent's face, claws out, with results gratifying to the tosser.

Finally we returned to the Ascending Angel, passing through the saloon, where Johnny Duncan stood on the little stage, strumming his air guitar and tapping his foot and singing, while the hotel's women employees -- it being too early for their business to pick up -- stood in back in a row, clapping in time and laughing, among them my mother, Marigold. I was glad to see her having enjoyment, since I knew her current work mostly made her melancholy. She had taught school in Ohio, but -- because of events leading to my existence in this world, involving the school's cad of a principal -- she lost that profession and drifted until she finally found the only way to support herself and me, and I have never reviled her in my heart, although I did often wish her life took a different road. However, I disliked the way Johnny, even while he sang, grinned at the various ladies, including Marigold, and winked at them.

As soon as Johnny saw us come into the saloon, he ended that song and started another, now gazing soulfully at Nellie Bly. It had a lilting tune, and it told of an irresistible stranger who set a fire smoldering in his heart, and so on, quite nauseating. Nellie pretended not to hear, but I could see her peeking sideways at Johnny and looking amused. Just then, Frankie came down the stairs and stopped, taking it all in, but showing no expression. I was glad Nellie did not stop in the saloon but walked directly upstairs past Frankie, whose smoked glasses hid her eyes and whatever they might have revealed.

"I'll say goodnight, Susanna, and thank you for being my guide," Nellie said at her door. "I have to transcribe my notes."

"I plan to be an ace reporter myself," I confided. "It will, I'm sure, be a thoroughly stimulating career."

She looked at me, and sadness came over her features.

"Yes, it is stimulating, Susanna," she said. "But it is lonely."

"Do you find Johnny Duncan attractive?" I blurted out.

She stopped, with her door open, and looked at me.

"Yes, he's handsome," she said. "But he has a wicked wandering eye, Susanna, and attractiveness, in itself, including long-leggedness, doesn't mean a man isn't a baboon."

Usually in the evening I roamed Duster, to absorb information and insights. Tonight, though, I lay on my bed staring at the ceiling and pondered: if I dwell on yellow hair and long legs, am I shallow and feckless? I decided, finally, to put myself under observation and, if necessary, to institute a program of character strengthening. With that resolved, I thought about how things in general were trending, which was toward extreme violence.

I had not yet told Nellie Bly that my mother's sole patron these days was Placido Hieronymus, younger brother of Sweetie, a revolting sniveler, who constantly whined that Sweetie stole his share of the family business, and that Sweetie was their mother's favorite, although you'd think Placido would exult she nicknamed his brother Sweetie and not him! But I kept mum, just a big ear, which is how I got my sensational scoop: Placido had sent out word for the notorious spell-slinger J.F. Payne to come to Duster and cut down Sheriff Fitzpatrick Duprey and his deputies. Then, with Sweetie defanged, Placido would get back his "fair share," meaning he'd get to do all the rotten stuff Sweetie did.

Of course, when Johnny Duncan stepped off that train, I assumed he must be the spellslinger J.F. Payne, because he looked so dashing. You, no doubt, figured it correctly.

Noon, the following day, in the Ascending Angel's saloon, Nellie Bly and I sat at a table, lunching on terrapin stew. Across the room, Frankie and Johnny sat at a table of their own, not talking. I could see Johnny looking across the room at us, and Nellie avoiding his eye, and Frankie watching, expressionless. Then my mother walked into the saloon, to pick up some lunch to bring upstairs, and I saw Johnnie wink at her. I believe I mentioned my lack of enthusiasm for the male gender.

"That man currently gives me gallstones!" I told Nellie.

But just then the saloon's conversational hum stopped because the doors swung open and in walked Duster's three deputies followed by Sheriff Fitzpatrick Duprey, all four stepping back against the wall, two on one side of the door and two on the other. After that, Sweetie Hieronymus slithered in, darting out his forked tongue and hissing, which is a metaphor expressing his character with precision. He probably meant to calculate the lunch-hour take, but he saw Nellie Bly right off, she being a stranger, and came to our table and made a show of doffing the porkpie hat he always wore to hide his scalp, bald as a white egg, with the red hair on his head's sides clipped so short you could see white skin through it.