VIII
WHEN THE TRAIN COMES ALONG

But this Blanche stumbles on, weighed down by self-pity, and self-contempt too, because it feels as if every bad thing that’s happened to her in the last month has been her fault. The sky’s turned a strange pale gray that doesn’t make the air any cooler. Blanche wipes the humidity off her face with her sleeve. She’s walking for the sake of keeping moving, the way Jenny used to do, but with feet already beginning to blister.

As she limps along, Blanche torments herself with plans of how she’d spend those two hundred and eighty-two dollars if she had them back. (If only she’d waited another minute at the House of Mirrors and hid the money in her corset instead of carrying it in her bag, like some naive girl, for the first muscled con to grab.) Clothes, a room—no, a whole apartment of her own, with one key to the door. If she had all that, if she looked like a woman of substance, she’d sweep into Detective Bohen’s office every morning from now on, demanding to know what he’d discovered about the macs and their movements. She’d hire half a dozen sleuths of her own to comb the City for a baby boy with a turnip forehead and his father’s slim eyebrows.

She’s almost at Townsend, she notices; the South Pacific terminus.

Her stomach’s full but Blanche still feels awful. Her head’s in a pincer grip. No hat, no parasol, nothing to put between herself and the sun. Her nose is full of the reek of chlorine from the boxcar where they’re fumigating the outgoing luggage and mail sacks. She stares at the black silhouettes of the trains. The last time she was here, two days ago, she was coming back from San Miguel Station with a fresh graze on her cheek.

“Whoa!” There’s a busker singing, shuffling by the barrier. The same black man Blanche failed to give a coin to yesterday? No, younger, and no brand on his ashy cheek, just streaks of sweat.

Every time Blanche hears a song now, she feels Jenny behind her shoulder, listening, commenting, memorizing.

“Passengers for the Espee, Espee, South Pacific to San Jose,” a ticket-seller’s calling tiredly.

A ragged line forms. A man in a top hat gives Blanche a curious glance.

“Move away, miss, unless you got a ticket,” the ticket-seller warns her.

But she clings to the passenger’s smooth-sleeved arm. “I’m trying to get home to San Miguel Station.” Why did Blanche say that? It just came out, as if it were true. “In all the commotion last night—my bag—”

“San Miguel Station?” the gent repeats with interest, hanging back as the other passengers push past. “The site of the murder?”

Blanche improvises. “It was … it took place in my father’s saloon,” she whispers.

His eyes bulge.

“I was called to the City to give evidence at the inquest, you see, and some awful fellows snatched my bag, and now …”

“First class for this young lady,” he calls, clicking his fingers for the ticket-seller and pulling out his wallet.

She was hoping for cash, but a ticket’s something, at least. She might as well sleep on a train as in a stinking alley.

“You must tell me all,” he says in Blanche’s ear.

Her gorge rises. She’d rather give him a below-job in the lavatory, frankly. But if it’s sordid details he wants in return for his fifty cents, fine.

She shares a cushioned bench with the man and spins him a garbled version of Mary Jane McNamara’s week; shows him the little scab on her right cheekbone and blames it on a bullet that came through two walls.

Dizzy, Blanche asks for a dipper of ice water from the refreshment cart, but the gentleman insists on pouring her a jot of whiskey from his own flask instead. Then he takes great pleasure in buying her a peach and a bag of nuts. “Sugar candy too?”

When she can bear no more of the kind gentleman, Blanche excuses herself “to freshen up.”

In the corridor, two of the black porters are chuckling together. They hush at Blanche’s approach and move off down the train in different directions.

She stares at the window. Spots on the sooty glass: raindrops! It’s been months. Oh, a good storm cracking this leaden sky, that would be something …

In the next carriage, an Italian’s singing a snatch of “Voi Che Sapete,” blithe and off-key. Blanche dozes for a minute, leaning again the window.

Then wakes from some muddled dream of a baby with no face. P’tit. How long will she dream of him? If Blanche just knew she’d never see him again … She almost wants it. No! It’s just that the waiting, the not knowing—that’s the worst of all.

She can’t shake off the things Madame Johanna said last night. The image she showed Blanche, like a reflection in a tarnished, buckled mirror: the Lively Flea, a thoughtless pleasure-seeker who farmed her baby out to strangers and would have been relieved to hear he was dead. No, that wasn’t how it was, Blanche wails in the privacy of her head, that was never how it was—

She can’t prove it. There’s no judge to whom she can justify her mistakes.

The silhouette of the Industrial School rears up on the far left. Blanche remembers her candies and roots in her pocket for the paper sack. Wrestles with the window. Humid air blasts her face. The fence, here comes the fence, but no boys. Where are the boys? Blanche needs to throw these candies to them but—

Sunday, satané Sunday. What, do they lock the kids in their cells right through the Sabbath?

Blanche flings the fat bag anyhow, for Jenny.

Instead of sailing over the fence, it hits the wire and rebounds into the dust. What a pathetic throw. Now the boys will only be taunted by the sight of the bag. Will one of them be able to reach through with a hoe or a stick and hook it, retrieve the chalky disks and lozenges before the insects swarm them? Will the second boy punch the first, snatch his hoe from him? Will Blanche’s dumb gesture lead to nothing but fights, or will a single imprisoned boy get a taste of sweetness and know somebody cared just enough to throw him a blasted candy?

San Miguel Station coming up now. Blanche has no good reason to get down there, today or ever again. She could just stay on the train and try to nap before the conductor throws her off in some faraway town …

Instead, she hobbles down onto the tiny platform. A face in the window, the gent who bought her the ticket. His hand up in an excited gesture. Blanche doesn’t wave back.

The day’s sliding away from Blanche already.

Blanche tries to remember how drunk she was last night. About as drunk as usual. About as impulsive. About as whorish. If you can remember any of it, she’s heard it said, you weren’t that drunk.

McNamara’s nightshirt, folded on the bureau. Could Jenny have gone back to the City already? Did she leave first thing this morning, or in the middle of the night, right after Blanche lost consciousness? Could Jenny not even look her in the eye today?

But when she slides her fingers under the mattress, she finds the Colt. And when she looks under the bed, she glimpses the sack of frogs Jenny caught yesterday on Sweeney Ridge.

Blanche puts on a fresh white bodice over her mauve skirt—as if what she wears even matters here in San Miguel Station. She manages to wheedle some coffee out of Ellen McNamara, but it tastes burned. She sits in an old rocking chair on the porch, holding her cup.

“It wasn’t half this hot last summer,” she mentions to Ellen when the woman steps out with a basket of wet sheets.

A look of contempt from the Irishwoman. “Sure a summer like this has never been known.”

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.

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.

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?”

“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?”

“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.

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

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.

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?”

“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.”

“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?”

“You told that reporter. You said Louis got talking to a stranger on Wednesday, a big, dark man called Lamantia.”

The woman’s mouth trembles. “No law against that, I hope.”

“What did the fellow want?”

“He was inquiring as to buying property in the township.”

Property? Blanche frowns in confusion. Perhaps that’s just what Louis told his wife. “Did you talk to him yourself?”

“I don’t talk to men behind my husband’s back. Especially not Sicilians.”

“Why especially not—”

Mrs. Louis angles herself closer to whisper, “Cosa Nostra.”

“Oh, come.” The pompous importer, one of them?

“You don’t mess with those folks’ business,” she hisses.

So Lamantia’s a genuine mafioso who, out of some warped longing for Blanche, came down to San Miguel Station and paid the first idle man he ran into, Louis the Canadian, to murder Jenny? Whereupon Louis immediately fled town? This theory of Cartwright’s is so implausible, Blanche doesn’t know why she’s here badgering Mrs. Louis.

She turns away without another word to the woman. Drop this nonsense, she orders herself. Get out of here.

McNamara is emerging from his outhouse, pulling up his pants. He eyes Blanche, startled, and nods at her.

She knows what a sight she must be: bareheaded, in her filthy pink dress, one big toe sticking out of its stocking. She should cut straight across to the station and wait for the next train back to the City. (Though how she’s going to talk her way onto it without the price of the fare this time, she doesn’t know.) “Mr. McNamara,” says Blanche with a nod when she gets close enough to be heard. Holds up her hand to shade her eyes, like some squinting beggar woman.

“You’re back.”

“Well, now, I wish I could say the feckin’ same. This benighted spot!” The Irishman’s eyes trace the lines of the sandlots. “The fellow that foisted it on me swore blind San Miguel Station would be going great guns soon. I’m waiting and waiting, and still my best customer’s my wife, and she never pays her tab.”

Blanche manages a smile. “Well. I hope you manage to sell up one of these days.” She turns toward the depot.

“I’d a sniff the other day,” says McNamara under his breath.

She looks over her shoulder. “A sniff of …”

“A prospect, like.”

“Somebody who wanted to buy the saloon?”

McNamara nods mournfully. “A City gent, this was. Though I doubt he’ll be back, now the place is a byword for bloodshed.”

Blanche stares at McNamara. “Was this … Wednesday?”

“Could have been.”

“An Italian, was he?”

McNamara makes a face. “Don’t know about that.”

“His name—”

“Sounded more like your crowd to me.”

“His name sounded French?” says Blanche, too sharp. “Lamant, something like that?”

The Irishman’s forehead is creased. “You know this fellow?”

“I can’t tell if I do, that’s why I’m asking.”

“I forgot to ask his bloody name,” says McNamara, “but he sounded Frenchish himself.”

Her head is spinning. French, not Italian? “This was a tall man, dark, yes? Smartly dressed?”

McNamara nods.

Lamantia, it must be. Clearly this dullard can’t tell one European accent from another.

“Dropping off him,” adds the Irishman.

“His clothes, dropping off him,” says McNamara irritably. “A living skeleton.”

Blanche can’t speak for a long moment. Then she manages to ask, “Had he … a mustache?”

“Longest I’ve ever seen. So he is a friend of yours.”

She shakes her head in dread. “I don’t suppose he was pockmarked at all?”

The Irishman shakes his head. “Face like a blank page.”

Blanche turns away so McNamara won’t see her expression. Ernest Girard. Posing as Lamantia!

Having somehow found out where the women were, Ernest must have rushed to San Miguel Station like a vindictive puppet acting for his absent master. And when he found Blanche and Jenny gone to the hills, he got into conversation with the first men he encountered, and soon chanced upon one desperate enough to kill a woman for cash in hand. Louis, familiar with the settlement and all its dogs. Louis, who must know how to use a gun to keep foxes away from his paltry flock. Blanche never bothered to exchange a word with the Canadian on Tuesday or Wednesday; he was just part of the scrubby landscape. Louis must have pretended to set off for San Jose that Thursday, then snuck back in the dark to do the shooting, and fled to San Jose for real afterward, to make his alibi. But for Ernest to give his name as Lamantia, ensuring that any suspicion would fall on another tall, dark man of Blanche’s acquaintance—now, that was brilliant. If she didn’t hate the bastard so much, she’d admire his style.

Headache worse than ever, Blanche thinks she might puke. Pulse beating its crazy drum. She must get back to the City and tell the detectives what she’s figured out.

He flinches at the sight of Blanche. Pauses, tightens the reins as if to gallop off. How he must be missing Jenny, the way she’d ride into San Miguel Station with her jokes and her pistol-toting toughness and greet him like a comrade. Did she spin her awful upbringing into funny stories for John Jr.? Entertain him with tales of how she spat in the bogeymen’s eye in that prison for children just over the hill?

The pony remembers Blanche. Trots over, looking for a treat. Blanche reaches to pat her pale flank. Suddenly so dizzy she doesn’t believe she can make it to the railroad depot. The world contracts to a burning ring. Skin feels dry enough to crackle and slough off.

Blanche is on the ground. Wet suffocating cloth over her face, a winding sheet—

She fights it off.

“Just trying to sponge you some, Miss Blanche,” says the boy. “You keeled over. I reckon you took a turn from the heat.”

Blanche struggles to sit up. Sick as a dog, she shudders. She sips the jar of lukewarm water John Jr.’s holding to her lips. He’s fanning her ineffectively with his small hand. She takes the wet rag from him and presses it to her face, her throat, her chest.

“What can I—”

“Just stand between me and the sun,” she tells him in the voice of a very old woman.

The pony noses Blanche, tickling her neck.

John Jr. has a twisted look about him. “Your arm still pains you?” she asks.

She expects him to deny it, in the way of males, but he nods.

“I’m almost thirteen and that’s a man, or near as makes no difference.”

What a curious tone: pride mixed with something darker. A boy who thinks he’s a man. A boy who wanders at night, maybe, if it’s too hot for sleep. Maybe even puts his hands on what’s not his? Takes what’s there for the taking?

“John,” Blanche starts, gently, so as not to alarm him, “I don’t suppose you’d happen to know where the high-wheeler’s got to?”

He shakes his head. Not surprised by the question, though.

Maybe he couldn’t bear to let anyone have it after Jenny? Did he keep it, not to sell, even, but just for the gleaming glamour of that monstrous front wheel? To stroke sometimes, to keep hidden away so that when all the fuss is over, he can go for midnight rides along the dirt track toward the City and remember his friend Jenny?

“Tell me where it is, John Jr.” Stern, but also seductive, trying to bridge the gap between herself and this child, because Blanche must have the bicycle for the price it’ll fetch—she realizes that now.

And his arm shoots out as if it’s not part of him. One spatulate finger pointing at the pond.

Blanche stares across the sandlot at the flat water.

John Jr.’s taken off already, ahead of her, so fast she almost fears he means to throw himself in. Kids form such wild notions, it’s a wonder any of them live to be full grown. “John Jr.,” she bawls as she runs.

“Don’t matter.”

“You need to wade in for me and drag it out.”

John Jr. shakes his head. “Best put all that behind you now.”

She stares at him. All that, meaning Jenny?

The boy gnaws his lip. “It weren’t none of your doing, Miss Blanche.”

But whose fault was Jenny’s death if not Blanche’s? Who else brought Ernest on her trail like a bloodhound, all the way to San Miguel Station?

John Jr. shakes his head so hard a drop of sweat flies off. “She’d got a hold on you.”

Blanche puzzles over the phrase.

“You can’t take the blame. I saw, I saw it all.” He’s purple in the face now.

Blanche squints at him through the brutal sunlight. “Saw what, John?” Fumbling his way to the toilet in the night, could the boy have glimpsed Louis with the gun?

“Couldn’t help it, could I, with the blind all askew?”

The porch. John Jr. must have been sleeping on the porch. Goddamn it, Blanche should have thought this through before. Even the McNamaras wouldn’t be stupid enough to let a boy of his age share a bed with his sisters. Where else would John Jr. stretch out with his blanket on a summer night but on the porch? Was he there, curled up in a shadowy corner or behind a barrel, when the chicken farmer climbed up with his gun? “What did you see, exactly?” she demands.

“Bad enough to watch,” he wails. “Don’t make me say. Ain’t you got no shame at all?”

She speaks with difficulty. “Whatever you think you might have—”

“Don’t baby me! I know dirt when it’s right in my face.”

Blanche takes a ragged breath. “Listen to me.”

“Always reckoned Jenny was just eccentric in her ways,” the boy says with a sob, “something of a character. But she turned out to be some class of he-she-I-don’t-know-what, making a whore of you!”

The awful ignorance of children. “John Jr.” Blanche feels as if she’s trying to be heard from the bottom of a pit. “I’m that already.”

He shakes his head, fierce. “It turned my stomach so bad I don’t think I’ll ever be right.”

“How it may have seemed—” She clears her throat. “That’s not how it was.”

“Try and whitewash her sins now she’s gone,” roars John, “but I watched her strip you bare as a twig. She held you down and hurt you bad, used you like a beast of the field!”

Blanche shuts her eyes briefly, remembering. “No,” she whispers.

He shakes his head as if he’s got a fly in his ear. “I should have done something then and there. Shouldn’t have faltered. Dadda taught me how to see to a mule-footed calf.”

A mule-footed calf? What the hell is he talking about? “You dumb boy,” says Blanche. Sorrow in her bones now at the thought of them all getting older and no wiser. (All but Jenny.) Sorrow that makes her reach out to enfold this hurting creature …

John Jr. presses a kiss on her mouth so hard it hurts.

“It was for you.” He says it flatly, the way a man would, but with tears streaking down his face.

How was that kiss for Blanche—the kind of graceless, hungry kiss any twelve-year-old grabs from any woman, years before he’s allowed?

No.

Not the kiss; that’s not what was for Blanche.

Should have done something then and there. It’s in the boy’s face, the besotted eyes that want to tell her everything. The truth punches her in the gut.

“No.” Catches her breath. “You couldn’t have.”

“Oh, couldn’t I just?” he answers with an awful attempt at cheek.

The boy’s in some class of sulk, Jenny remarked on the last morning of her life. Had she figured out what John Jr. had seen the night before, how he felt about it? Had Jenny decided—as she decided about so many things—that it didn’t matter?

Blanche can picture it so clearly. John Jr. outside that bedroom window on Thursday night, leaning on the sill to peer through the gap where the blind had slipped away from the glass, the stock of the shotgun set irrevocably against his small shoulder. How fearful he must have been, how raging, aiming to blast away all his mortification. To expunge his weak fondness for a friend who’d turned out to be an obscenity in disguise.

Blanche’s hand clamps his shoulder so hard, he cries out. “You tell me everything,” she says in a voice she doesn’t recognize, “or I’ll drown you like a puppy.”

But the boy’s face has sealed up.

She lets go and tries mocking him. “Where’d you have got hold of a shotgun, even?”

John Jr. jerks his head in the direction of the scattered cabins. “Louis bought our varmint gun off Dadda, didn’t he?”

“It’s in the pond,” says the boy, jerking his head toward the greenish water. “I threw it in, after, before I ran to … to the necessary.”

He can kill a woman, Blanche marvels, but he can’t say toilet without faltering.

The words are spurting out of the boy now. “Louis came around on Thursday morning, asked where Jenny was. I got to cussing her.” He sobs. “He made me swear on Mammy’s life not to tell, then he said he just so happened to have learned that the same individual was pure trouble, and there was a person from the City who’d be uncommon grateful if a stop could be put to her.”

“What person?” She knows it was Ernest, acting on Arthur’s orders, but she needs to fill in the whole appalling story, put it back together, like broken glass forming a pane.

John Jr. shrugs.

“You didn’t care who wanted you to shoot your good friend Jenny? Who promised to be grateful, to the tune of what?”

The boy’s lower lip protrudes. “I wouldn’t have done it just for the money.”

The priggish tone! As if by gunning down Jenny for what he saw her do to Blanche, he was following some higher law. “How much?” Blanche shrieks.

“Two hundred in silver,” mutters John Jr. He roots in the pocket of his baggy overalls and pulls out a drawstring bag.

“You can have every penny of it, for all I care,” he assures her, his voice rusty. “I wish I never—”

And then Blanche is grabbing his wrist, shaking the bag like a rat whose neck she needs to break: “I don’t want your blood money!”

The boy pulls away and makes to throw it in the water; he’s got his busted arm bent back for a long pitch—

Blanche rips the bag out of his fingers.

Heavy in her palm. Repulsive.

“It weren’t the way I thought.” John Jr.’s wailing. “All the—” He makes a gesture in the air, and she can see the blood jetting out of Jenny all over again.

“What did you think spilled out when you shot someone?”

“I waited till you leaned right over, Miss Blanche. I only meant to save you.”

“Save me?”

“From her. I didn’t reckon the glass would fly so far.” He reaches out to touch the tiny mark on her cheek.

“Get those hands off me!”

John Jr. looks at his thin fingers as if he’s never seen them before.

“You’re going to hell,” Blanche tells him.

He nods.

She turns on her heel, clutching the moneybag tightly.

One man passed the buck to another man, who passed it to an almost-man. A flair for substitution, isn’t that what Madame called it? Guilt jumping from one to the next like a flea, a germ, a distorted whisper. Are there no children in the world anymore?

Step after step, Blanche walks to the depot.

“You’re here again,” remarks Mrs. Holt at her little window.

A train, puffing out its hot exhaust … but it’s heading the wrong way, toward San Jose. Blanche watches it, dull-eyed. She should have thought to ask Mrs. Holt when the train to San Francisco was due, but she’s not sure she could have summoned that many words.

She’s not expecting anyone to get off the train, but several do. One of them is Detective Bohen.

The two of them stare at each other as he erects his black umbrella against the sun. “Miss Beunon,” he says, pronouncing the final nasal with mocking emphasis.

Now’s her moment. What better chance to explain the whole bizarre story than right here and now at the scene of the crime, where Blanche can lead him straight to the wet-faced boy? But the soot catches in her throat. “What—what are you—”

“Our investigations are ongoing,” he declares, surveying the hamlet as if he can see right through all these thin shack walls. A few paces away from him, the other City folks don’t seem to know where they’re going. They argue in low voices and consult the newspaper one of them is carrying under his arm, then they set off toward the Eight Mile House.

Proof. Bohen will insist she provide evidence. Blanche has the bag, at least: payment for murder, wrapped in a drawstring pouch. But what does it prove? Money bears no trace of what it’s bought.

Blanche stares at him. Is the detective trying to provoke her?

“But the City’s growing up. Almost thirty years old now,” Bohen concludes with satisfaction. “And on behalf of her decent citizens, the captain and I mean to clean house.” He’s pulling out his notebook and a mechanical pencil.

Nobody can skim the scum off San Francisco for good, Blanche thinks. It’ll only come back with the tide.

No, the detective’s not waiting for an answer from her. It seems he’s forgotten Blanche already as he adds details to what looks like a complicated diagram of San Miguel Station.

Her head turns the same way as his. John Jr. is still standing by the pond, a lightning-stunted sapling. Should she tell Bohen this minute? Surely they could find the varmint gun if they dragged the pond. Fish sporting along the stock, laying their eggs in the trigger. Chasing through the spokes of the bicycle too. Wouldn’t the weapon and the high-wheeler back up her claims, if not prove them?

Bohen whistles under his breath as he sketches in a line.

The visitors from the City are outside the Eight Mile House now, pointing excitedly at the shattered window. It occurs to Blanche that they’re tourists, murder tourists. The first of many? Maybe McNamara’s going to turn a profit, after all. He’ll sell them overpriced rotgut and tall tales of the hoodlum or hatchet man who snuck into San Miguel Station one dark night and blew Jenny Bonnet apart. Having not the least idea of what his own child has done.

As Blanche’s eyes rest on John Jr. again, she’s winded by an awful sympathy. It doesn’t feel like hers. More like some foreign body lodged in her throat.

Jenny, out of the corner of her eye.

The boy shot you in your bed, Blanche growls at her.

What’s that supposed to mean? Surely this is one thing you can’t shrug off.

A hint of a grin.

They don’t hang juveniles anymore, Blanche adds furiously. The worst they’ll do is send him to a reformatory.

The Industrial School, just over the brow of the hill. The awful coincidence of it. That’s where a judge would send a murderer of twelve years old. John Jr. might end up lying down in the same cell where Jenny lay a decade ago.

Yes, then, since you’re asking, Blanche roars in her head, yes, I do want him arrested in front of his whole stupefied clan. Dragged away, whipped, gagged—good enough for young John. I want him damaged worse than you were. Locked away for the rest of his sorry goddamn life.

“Still here, Miss Beunon? My advice for you would be to head thataway, out of my jurisdiction,” says Bohen, jerking his thumb south toward San Jose.

It’s at this moment that Blanche decides not to say a word. Let Bohen pontificate and waste his Sunday here, waste any number of days, while the truth slithers away from him like a snake in a woodpile. Blanche is going back to the City to get the evidence she needs, and then she’ll hand it to Cartwright of the Chronicle, because he’s the best of a bad lot, the only one who’s paid attention. And in the end everyone who’s hurt Blanche, everyone who’s scared her or talked down to her, is going to pay.

“Her name’s Madeleine George,” she says to the pigtailed cigar maker sitting on his mat at the corner of Stockton and Clay.

“What you say?”

“Girl like you?” the cigar maker wants to know.

Do all white females look alike to a Chinaman? But Blanche is younger than Madeleine, she wants to tell him, absurdly. No, he must mean a girl dressed to advertise herself. (The first thing Blanche did after getting down at Third and Townsend was find herself a dress shop and spend a considerable amount of the silver from the little bag to get herself fitted out from head to toe in a serious black-and-white stripe. She’s painted high, too, for going on the warpath.) “Yes,” she roars over the organ’s death rattle.

Suddenly, blessedly, it stops. The Italian, eyeing an approaching Special, scuttles away to avoid arrest.

“She lodges above a grocery, I believe,” Blanche tells the cigar maker.

His expression is uncertain, but he points at a skinny four-story building: “Many Frenchie girl in there.”

It turns out to be the wrong building, but someone there knows the right one.

A quarter of an hour later, Blanche has tracked her way to Madeleine’s door. She takes a breath and wipes a stray hair out of her eyes. She’s met Ernest’s petite amie only a couple of times, but nothing in the blonde’s wide eyes intimidated her then. Blanche is going to make the woman say where Ernest is if Blanche has to rip her earrings out to do it.

She taps, softly, so as not to sound like the cops or a rent collector. Waits. Then knocks again.

Ernest’s talking over his shoulder to someone as he tugs the door open. Looking healthier than when she saw him last though a little less elegant, with some whitish stain on his lapel. He turns his head and sees Blanche.

Ernest slams the door between them.

“I’ll go straight to Detective Bohen, then, is that what you’d prefer?” Blanche calls out.

Voices inside the apartment.

“Madeleine? Madeleine, are you in there? Enjoying home life with a murderer, are you? Feel quite safe sharing his bed?” Blanche is shouting it loud and clear enough to be heard all over the building. “Did he tell you he was too much of a coward to pull the trigger on Jenny himself—so he hired a chicken farmer, who hired a twelve-year-old?”

The door’s flung open again. “Ta gueule!” growls Ernest.

But Blanche won’t shut her trap. Never mind that all she’s got is a child’s story which that child is unlikely ever to repeat. She can bluff as well as any cardsharp. “Louis and John Jr. are both in the lockup,” she announces.

His rangy body twitches. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Where’s—” To her mortification, her voice breaks. She tries again. “What have you done to P’tit?”

“He’s perfectly well, no thanks to you.” Ernest’s eyes bulge in outrage. “As if I’d ever hurt Arthur’s son.”

And for a moment Blanche can’t see, can’t hear. Relief shoots through her veins like sugar, and she realizes that she never did quite give up in the ten days since she’s seen P’tit. Hope was a cut that wouldn’t close over. “Prove it. Why should I believe a word you say? Where is he?”

A slight hesitation. “I’m afraid I have no—”

“Yes, you do, you false son of a bitch.”

“The arrangements are a matter for his father. I expect Arthur will be coming back one of these days, with his bride,” says Ernest, landing the word like a knife.

“I just received a telegraph, you see,” says Ernest, goading her. “Arthur’s in New York, and he’s married a French girl.”

“I don’t give a damn if he’s married a skunk,” Blanche manages to say, almost lightly. “But how disappointing for you, Ernest.”

The long face darkens.

“The minute he’s out of your reach, he gets hitched? Trades in la vie de bohème for bourgeois comforts? It sounds to me like your double act has had its last hurrah.”

“You understand nothing,” he says gruffly. “Arthur won’t stay away forever. He entrusted his child to me, didn’t he?”

“Entrusted?” mocks Blanche. “He dumped P’tit on you, you mean. I can’t believe you’re still willing to stand by the fellow who’s made you play second fiddle all these years. Don’t you see? He’s left you behind, his bootlicking lackey, to hang for what he told you to do.”

“Arthur’s a prince among men.” The words break out of Ernest like sweat.

She rolls her eyes.

“Willing to let you get away scot-free,” he marvels. “‘Let her go,’ he told me as he packed his trunk. ‘Women are like trains, there’ll be another along in five minutes.’”

Blanche stares. Could that really be what Arthur said about losing her?

“And when I saw you rattling that buggy down the street last Tuesday, all frills and flounces, not a care in the world—” snarls Ernest.

Ernest lets out one scornful cough of laughter.

A small sound from an inner room. What is it?

He says it so low that Blanche strains to hear: “It was because you’re the goddamn mother.”

It comes again, that muffled little sound. Ernest’s head whips around and he’s moving to shut the door but Blanche has got him by the sleeve.

The door bangs on her arm, forcing a long scream out of her. But she doesn’t let go, she won’t let go, she’ll never let go because she knows whose small wordless voice she’s hearing. “P’tit! P’tit!”

“Crazy salope—”

When Ernest opens the door enough to kick her away, Blanche thrusts her whole self through. He grabs her by the skirt and she pulls away hard enough that it rips at the waist. She’s in the apartment and here’s P’tit, wearing only a diaper—

And walking. Can this really be P’tit?

Still stubby at wrist and ankle, thick-foreheaded, but less so, somehow. His skin clearer. His eyebrows almost elegant. Up on his own two feet. P’tit, her P’tit, though he shows no sign of recognizing Blanche. He pats the wallpaper, sways like a drunk.

The blonde is behind him, in only a limp chemise and petticoat, her hair tangled. Looking her age, for the first time. “Blanche,” says Madeleine, her mouth trembling so she can hardly form the syllable. She reaches down for P’tit’s little shoulders.

“Hands off,” howls Blanche.

“I only—”

“Hands off my baby!”

“Just P’tit,” Blanche corrects him under her breath.

She should have recognized that milky stain on Ernest’s lapel. The man has a knack with the boy, she realizes. Now, there’s a joke. A natural father. When was it, over the past two weeks of harboring Arthur’s child, that Ernest began to fall in love with him? For his absent friend’s sake, at first, but it’s well beyond that now, Blanche can see. His arm hovers in a half circle behind the boy, just in case he wobbles. The tenderness.

P’tit Arthur Girard, not Deneve, that’s who P’tit could grow up to be if Blanche left him here. Because a killer might make a good parent, after all, a much better parent than the woman who pushed the baby into the world in the first place. Blanche briefly considers the gracious mothering Madeleine would give P’tit. How Ernest would shield him in a way Arthur never managed. And P’tit, well, she supposes he wouldn’t remember anything else.

No.

“He’s the price,” she growls at Ernest. “I take him now, this minute. Or I’m going straight to Bohen with what I know, and they’ll keep after you till they prove the rest, and you’ll be on a gallows by Christmas.”

At first Blanche has no idea if her improvisation’s going to work. Ernest’s face is a wooden mask.

Madeleine’s tired, delicate features contort as she looks from the man to the child. The woman will do anything to save one of them, thinks Blanche, if she can only decide which one.

Blanche runs to scoop P’tit up. He wails and flails, but she’s ready for that. She’s out on the landing and thundering down the stairs, pressing her boy to her. She feels that surge of warmth, and this time she remembers what it means: not love but piss. Or the love that’s mixed with piss and can’t be separated from it.

John Jr., who’s been reading a book by bad light at the bar, stares up at her.

In an undertone, she asks his mother for some ice.

“What for?” says Ellen.

The whole family must have heard the women’s quarrel just now, and Blanche punching Jenny in the face. The Irishwoman’s just trying to humiliate her by asking. “Jenny got a black eye earlier, riding,” Blanche lies blankly.

A sniff. “Dangerous business, riding.”

“So do you have a bit of ice?”

“I do not, so. The last cold thing in San Miguel melted a month ago.”

“A fresh steak, then?”

“Would you be having pommes frites with that, miss?” A dry laugh. “Where do you think you are?”

This isn’t a cathouse, that might be what Ellen’s hinting. Take your filthiness elsewhere.

Blanche keeps her mouth shut. She returns to the bedroom and shuts the door behind her.

Jenny’s flat on her back on the bed.

“You more than half deserved it,” says Blanche, but all the fight’s gone out of her.

“Take that as an apology, shall I?”

“I thought apologies weren’t worth the candle,” she says, risking quoting Jenny’s line back at her.

“Yours aren’t, that’s for sure.”

The flesh all around Jenny’s eyes is puffy when she sits up. It’ll be black and blue by morning, Blanche reckons.

“Guess the frogs will have to play Scheherazade,” Jenny remarks.

Blanche stares at her. “This is one of those moments when I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

“They’re reprieved for one more night,” explains Jenny.

“Ah.”

“Though, does it count, I ask myself, if they’re living in a dark sack?”

“Beggars can’t be choosers,” says Blanche.

“Well, as the fellow says, never put off till tomorrow what can be put off till the day after …”

Blanche is not sure which of them lets out the first yawn, but there seems no reason to stay up any later.

Jenny sheds her layers and shakes the dust out of them. In McNamara’s long nightshirt, she wrestles with the window shade, then calls their host in to take a look at it, and bring them a drop of cognac while he’s at it.

Mary Jane comes in with the glasses while her father’s tinkering with the blind and stays lolling on the bed after he’s gone.

“What do you mean to make of yourself, Mary Jane?” Blanche wants to know.

Her eyes narrow. “When I get out of here?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know. All I think about is the getting out.”

The distant whistle of a passing train.

Jenny opens her tobacco pouch. “Twenty-minute ride,” she says, nodding north, “you could be a whole different person.”

“What happened to your face?” Mary Jane asks in a way that shows she knows already.

“Qu’importe,” says Jenny with a grin.

“Is that French for something?”

The girl flounces out to the saloon.

Jenny watches Blanche over the pipe she’s filling.

“Take that stinky thing outside, would you?”

“It keeps off the skeeters,” says Jenny, but she steps out on the porch with her pipe and matchbox.

Blanche can hear Mary Jane in the back room talking to her mother. Jenny, just outside the window, gives the dog a good scratch and talks to him in a pretend-fierce voice. The candle flame’s straight and steady; there’s not a hint of breeze to stir the heavy air. Blanche remembers the night they met. How she sang a snatch of “Au Clair de la Lune” as they climbed up the dark stairwell. “‘Ma chandelle est morte,’” she croons now, “‘Je n’ai plus de feu.’” My candle’s dead and I’ve no more fire.

From just outside the window, the familiar refrain, in Jenny’s lighter, melodic voice:

Open up to me, for God’s sake.

Blanche would prefer to leave the window up an inch or two but the bugs are starting to whine their way in, drawn to the candle. She struggles with the frame and lowers it with a thud. Her hand brushes against the green baize and it droops on one side, goddamn it. Nails come out of these chalky walls as easily as teeth out of an old skull. Blanche peers out through the narrow gap and sees Jenny wrestling with the dog in the moonlight, everything weirdly silver.

Nearly a month since Jenny crashed into Blanche’s life and—it could be said—Blanche crashed into hers. If you meet an obstacle you can jump free, Jenny boasted. But not always. You have to allow for some damage.

“Moon’s up,” says Blanche, yawning.

“Everyone’s a moon, as the fellow says.”

“Huh?”

“With a side nobody sees,” adds Jenny. She’s leaning back on her elbows, her swollen face turned toward Blanche. Who, undoing her chemise, feels the familiar sensation of eyes on her. Something could happen or not, it could go either way, and who’s to say it much matters? Maybe the two of them came closest to each other yesterday evening. Or even tonight, at the moment when Blanche punched Jenny in the face. Maybe they’ve started to diverge again, drifting apart, two twigs in a stream.

On the edge of the bed, Blanche stoops to unlace her borrowed gaiters. A train hurtles north, close enough to shake the Eight Mile House. She bends to undo her second gaiter, ripping at the laces. Tries an old Picard air under her breath, though why is she singing a lullaby when there’s no baby to hear it?

Sleep, my little child, my little chick, my fat grape. The laces are snagged. Blanche hauls up her mauve skirt and sets her right ankle on her left knee, the canvas printing her skin with grit. The gaiter clings to her round calf like some old skin that won’t be sloughed. Mud flecking the floorboards, the dingy sheets … this whole four-room shack is probably crawling with fleas and lice, but somehow Blanche doesn’t care. Happiness as un-pin-downable as a louse: you feel the tickle of its passage but your fingers close on nothing.

Blanche plucks at the gaiter with her longest nail. One second and she’ll have it undone.

That’s Jenny joining in, her voice clean as a bird’s, her eyes wide open. “And the rest, how does it go?”

“Like this.” Blanche bends right over to wrestle with the lace, her lungs filling, stretching rib cage, muscles, seal-plump skin, corset, dress, as she sings a mother’s warning to a baby who just won’t sleep:

The cracks come so hard Blanche thinks they’re thunder. The candle’s out.

A sulfurous tang in the dark, less like a thunderstorm than fireworks, but who could be setting off fireworks? What is there to celebrate on the fourteenth of September? Outside, the dogs of San Miguel Station bark in furious chorus.

“Qu’est-ce—” Is that what Jenny says, or just a gasp, a hiss?

And Blanche says, “Wait.”

“Let’s count our silver,” she says to P’tit now in the quietest private compartment, the one at the swaying end of the slow Sunday train heading inland to Sacramento. “There’s a dollar. See Lady Liberty? And this one’s an Indian head.” Never too early for a child to learn his coinage. “Here’s a half eagle. Have a chew on that, but don’t swallow it …”

What a fraud Blanche has felt, ever since she picked him up and ran down Madeleine’s stairs this afternoon. Like a woman who’s stolen a baby.

But no looking back. No giving a rat’s ass about bygones. Blanche doesn’t intend to pronounce the name of Arthur Deneve ever again. She suited him very well for his salad days—his years in the circus, and even after the fall that ended them. She was a witty, tipsy companion who earned her own money, asked little of him, and never said no. Who made just one mistake—called P’tit—but then kept that mistake out of his sight for the best part of a year. Yes, Blanche can see now that she was never the girl Arthur would end up marrying. And though she has regrets, that’s not one of them. Good luck to this French bride of his, who can have no idea what she’s taking on. “It turns out he didn’t care enough about me to order my murder,” she remarks to P’tit.

The child glances her way.

“At least you don’t have killer’s blood in you, that’s something.” Blanche gives him her biggest grin.

His mouth twitches.

A smile. A goddamn smile! Gone as quick as a mouse, but still.

Blanche rubs her bruised arm and stares out the window at the baked land. They’ll see something of America at last. Ninety miles of it, at least. Why Sacramento, of all destinations? Perhaps simply because Jenny told her about it: booming, growing upward as well as out, almost literally pulling itself out of the mud. There should be room for enterprising newcomers there. Room for Blanche and P’tit. Or perhaps it’s simply because Blanche has spent a year and a half living on Sacramento Street, which gestures toward—and is named for—that upstart city. It seems like some kind of sign, and she doesn’t have any other to follow.

The hot air’s half water this evening; it’s as if they’re breathing in steam. P’tit’s cheeks trickle with sweat, and Blanche wipes them with a new handkerchief. Less than a hundred dollars of the silver left, because she had to buy so many things this afternoon, with no time for bargaining before the train left. A valise for each of them, bottles and clothes and diapers for him, new dresses for herself—sober by her standards, but chic, and her new bustle’s the dernier cri in fashion: high, with ramrod-flat front and sides.

Also, of course, a two-dollar gold ring as evidence of Blanche’s loss in the epidemic. (She’s got her story ready, with its sniffs and sobs. My late husband was such a good provider.) By the time she steps down in Sacramento, she means to be every inch the lovely widow. One whose dancing academy will be known from the start for its emphasis on ballroom etiquette. (Well, Blanche might as well make a feature of being a lady, if she’s to steal customers away from all those so-called Professors.) Jenny would approve of this plan, even if she was more grasshopper than ant herself. Would approve of the blood money getting spent this way.

P’tit gives her a look that strikes her as wry.

And it occurs to her that he may be smarter than he’s willing to show, too smart to laugh on cue.

Arthur stole this money and more from her in the first place and shared it with Ernest, who hired Louis with some of it, and Louis took his cut and passed two hundred of it on to John Jr. The look in that boy’s eyes when he held out the bag to her. Think what such a sum could do for the McNamaras, and yet the boy couldn’t bear to keep it.

Is that why Blanche didn’t seek out Cartwright at the Chronicle before she left? She told herself that she was too busy getting ready so she could leave San Francisco by nightfall. That the newsman wouldn’t be at his office on a Sunday evening. That Blanche can write to him as soon as she’s settled in Sacramento. But it occurs to her now that she never will.

Because Jenny wouldn’t give two bits for justice. Not that kind of justice. Not a blundering boy, whom she cared for, packed off to that grim so-called school for having let himself be bribed and pushed to the point of doing something so terrible that he’s never going to forgive himself, anyhow. Instead Blanche has paid John Jr. back with the crushing weight of his own future.

Some crimes are better not solved, maybe. Some scars better kept covered up. Blanche lets herself pretend that blurry reflection in the spattered glass is Jenny, pedaling along beside the train. I don’t forgive him, though, Blanche tells her.

A shrug.

Don’t expect me to forgive, not one single bullet.

A grin.

Blanche’s face is turned away from the past, toward the city of Sacramento, where it sounds like citizens rise above grim realities, winching their whole lives into the sky. She’s not going to drift into things anymore, because her life is no longer only her own. She’ll be a boss, but not a tyrant. She’ll rent rooms above her dancing parlor and hire a girl to mind P’tit during classes. He’s light on his feet, so maybe Blanche can teach him to dance. How do you know until you try?

She drops the coins back into the bag one by one. P’tit makes a thrusting motion that she decides to take as an attempt at doing the same. “That’s right, in the bag,” she says, putting his fist over the opening. “Now let it go. Go on, drop it.”

But P’tit keeps a hard grip on the coin. It must be easier to grab than to let go. She watches him gnaw on it. “Very good,” she says. “Cut some more teeth. You’re going to need them.”

He’s got three already, three sharp little wedges Blanche managed to count on the railroad platform in the City before he had enough and bit her finger. To think that they must have been lying in wait all these months, ready to spring up. Ten days with a murderer and his harlot have done P’tit nothing but good, Blanche has to admit. His features are still melancholic—the heavy forehead, the huge sunken eyes—but at moments he strikes her as somehow beautiful. It’s all in the eye of the beholder, of course. That’s Blanche: his beholder.

She bobs to kiss his humid forehead, one of those automatic gestures to ward off evil. That’s what Blanche is going to do whenever she gets an impulse to shake her son or smack him: kiss him instead. She means to pay P’tit back for all her past crimes, one moment at a time. Her best strength is a terrier one: bite the rope and don’t let go. She’s going to bind P’tit to her with indefatigable love. One hundred percent enamored, and more. Each day a cliff she’ll climb again from the base.

Never mind how she and her son got to this point, speeding along toward the city of Sacramento. Keep him or don’t, isn’t that what Jenny advised Arthur that night in the apartment? Fish or cut bait, but don’t gripe. Blanche has lost this child twice, but she’s damned if there’ll be a third time. She and P’tit have wreaked such havoc in each other’s lives, come through so much blood and shit, paid so high for each other—this bargain’s got to hold.

Your Maman’s a flawed jewel, she could tell him, and there’s no fixing that. There’ll be no overnight metamorphosis—but certain things about her are changing already. Perhaps, at twenty-four, she’s growing out of being so stupid. Blanche will always like her drink, but she’ll try to make big decisions in the sober light of day. She’ll probably always require a good deal of fucking, but from now on she’s going to hold on to her independence. She will be fierce in P’tit’s defense. Ambitious for his happiness, and hers.

A flash on the horizon. Blanche looks out the window. Could that have been lightning? She listens for a rumble, but all she can hear is the thunder of the wheels. Rain spits at the glass. She almost laughs to think how Maman back in Paris would scold: Stop singing, you’ll bring on a storm!

P’tit lets out a wail and kicks as if to shake off his stiff boots. He’ll be sturdy on his feet in another few weeks. Running away from Blanche, no doubt. She’ll have to race to keep up.

Water is striping the glass now, turning its glaze of dust to rich mud. “A proper rainstorm,” she marvels to P’tit.

The transparency of his small ear makes her feel like a she-wolf. But it strikes her now that it’s P’tit who’s been protecting Blanche, all this time, sketching a magic circle around her, not the other way around. It was because she was this boy’s mother that Ernest didn’t let himself instruct Louis to kill her too. What a joke! She’s alive today only because hers is the body from which this odd, unwanted, fought-over child sprang.

Rain’s whipping down hard now, hard enough to cut the autumn’s long fever and wash this foul old world clean.

Things ricochet. You can turn the weather with a song. The knack of riding backward: now, there’d be a trick to learn. Jenny wouldn’t be dead if she’d never crashed into Blanche on Kearny Street. P’tit wouldn’t exist if Blanche had never met Arthur. Facts as hard as rocks, and Blanche has to pick her way among them, find her balance, with an acrobat’s cocky smile.

She rubs at her cheek, and the tiny scab falls away.