—Western Tales, Volume 23
—JANE—
Chapter 31
In Which I Am Flummoxed
The dank saloon in which I found Perry has shuttered its doors for the time being, with good reason, so Salty and I make our way out of town, merrily kicking up dust as we go. If I want to find David Johnson, I’m going to have to rustle him out of hiding. Knowing I’m on his tail is liable to do that—and there’s no better place for gossip than a crossroads tavern.
Half a day’s walk from Monterey is the small town of Kearneyville. The place ain’t much of anything, but it boasts two boardinghouses and a large hacienda, a fine oasis for travelers making the trek north from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Callie and I had spent a week in Kearneyville while tracking Perry, and I’d rather liked the small place. It was the kind of dusty little town where Californios, Indians, Negroes, and whites all seemed to get along because they all knew how to mind their own damn business. As long as you had funds to spend, you were welcome in Kearneyville.
The lone tavern, which takes up the front of the hacienda, is named Reckless Rosie’s, and the establishment’s namesake pours drinks behind the bar. Her boisterous laugh and generous bosoms are rather memorable. Callie and I had stopped in to ask about Perry on our way into Monterey and had quickly learned that there ain’t one shady enterprise going down in these parts that she doesn’t know about. She is a Californio married to a white man she calls “hon” who is both large enough to dissuade most folks with a lick of sense from fighting, and friendly enough to not scare away more respectable folks. The joint featured a lively bar area as well as a quieter dining room, and it was one of the few places I’d been since leaving Nicodemus that didn’t make me tense as a bowstring.
Without a nickel to my name, I know it’s pointless to step through her front door. Instead, I slip through a small orange grove and head for the back of the building, Salty panting and wagging his tail in excitement. Singing comes from the kitchen area, and despite the joyful colors of the red-clay bricks and brightly painted glazed tiles, I feel a pang of homesickness.
Rosie’s mother, a tiny Indian woman called Maria, does the cooking. As I approach the outdoor area I find the door propped open and Maria outside working the firepit, pointing and yelling at a few younger boys as they wrestle a pig onto a spit. A handful of other women cut peppers and onions and oranges around a low trestle table. Even though it’s more than half a continent away from Kentucky, it could be Rose Hill.
Like Rosie, Maria is happy to dish, but her price tended to be more in the line of a story than gold or silver. Just last week when I was here I’d seen her trying to draw water up through an ancient hand pump and had made the happy mistake of trying to help her. That had earned me an afternoon of helping out in the kitchen and a passel of tamales as payment. Rosie had laughingly explained to me that her mother had taken me for one of the girls the nearby landowners sometimes sent around to help as a sign of respect for the elderly woman.
“Your skin is the same as some of the Southern peoples,” Rosie said, shrugging. “Your hair is just a little curlier, but who can tell about these things? Mama just thought you were sorda, since you just shrugged and smiled when she spoke to you.” She shook her head and pointed to her ears to clarify her point.
“I don’t speak Spanish,” I said, not at all put out. The tamales had been delicious, and the expectation of help had never made me feel lesser than Maria or any of her other women who worked the kitchen. Honestly, it had been nice to spend an afternoon helping those ladies cook up some food rather than tracking down a man to kill.
I’m pretty good with a knife either way.
Today when I walk into the kitchen area, Maria waves to me and yells something in Spanish.
I smile sheepishly. “Hola,” I call. “¿Cómo estás, Señora Maria?” That just about exhausts my knowledge of Spanish.
“Jane McKeene,” Maria says, giving me a toothless grin and saying my name very slowly. There is a shrewd look in her eyes, and I have the feeling that she knows more about me now than she did before last week’s mishap. “Sit. Eat.” She hustles over to a trestle table and makes a show of brushing off a spot. I sit while Salty snuffles at the ground near the boys. They laugh and chase him, half trying to pet him and half grabbing for his tail. He runs under the table and growls. No one appreciates the difficulty of poor Salty’s life.
A plate of food appears in front of me and I hold out my hands in the universal sign for being poor, but she waves me off.
“No dinero,” I say, insisting.
“Eat, eat,” she insists. “You must be hungry.” And then she mimics cutting with a knife to the other women in the kitchen, coupled with a spate of rapid-fire Spanish. The women gasp and a few cross themselves in the manner of Catholics. I now have no doubt that Maria knows exactly who I am. News travels fast.
“Diabla,” one whispers at me.
I raise an eyebrow. “What’s a diabla?” I ask no one in particular.
“She-devil,” a small boy says from under the table. I lean down to peer at him where he’s snuggled up to Salty. The boy has the lean look of someone used to being hungry.
“You know Spanish?” I ask him.
“Yes. My momma used to talk to me in Spanish, but she’s dead now.” His tone is matter-of-fact, and his gaze slides away from mine. “She-devil. It’s not a nice thing to say about someone.”
I shrug. “I’m not a nice person.” I dig into the plate of food, still half watching the boy. The meal consists of some kind of meat, beans, a couple of corn tortillas, and an orange. It’s a feast, and the boy scoots a bit closer as though the scent pulls him to me. I roll up a tortilla and hold it out to him. When he reaches for it I pull it back. “I’ll share this with you if you stay here and tell me what everyone is saying.”
He nods and then clambers up onto the bench to my left. He notices my arm only after he’s already sat next to me, and his eyes widen when he sees my sleeve, tucked up messily. “You don’t have an arm.”
I shake my head. “Nope. Lost it.”
“How?”
“Bit by a shambler,” I say, telling the truth for once.
“But shouldn’t you be dead, then?”
I nod and grin. “But I’m a she-devil, and we dance with the dead for fun.”
I share the plate of food with the boy, letting him eat his fill while I pick. He tells me his name is Tomás, and it brings me back to the last time I saw the Spencer boy, so long ago now; hearing that name again feels like an omen. From what I glean he’s a true orphan. His father is in the wind; his mother used to help Maria out in the kitchen here in exchange for room and board, but when she died a few months ago, he stuck around and Maria kept feeding him. Not enough, though. He’s skin and bones. But he’s not half bad at translating; he repeats for me everything said in a murmur, and if anyone but Maria notices, they are aces at pretending not to care.
Or, maybe, they actually don’t care. I’ve read the fraught history of this place, what I could find, and there is nothing easy about life here, even if the dead are fewer in number than in the East; I cannot be the only hard woman to stumble into this kitchen yard. The West is full of girls like me, victims of circumstance, or poor choices, or good old-fashioned bad luck. We harden into diamonds under the pressure, keeping our chins up and soldiering on. It’s one of the things I love about this wild land. In the East, the dead could get you just as surely as pneumonia or yellow fever—quick, quiet, hard deaths. But in California it would be bears or bobcats or maybe a claim jumper, all noisy, violent ways to go. California was a wild land full of strong, ferocious people, and I liked that.