Bladestay, p.24
Bladestay, page 24
But they didn’t. And Stella knew enough to be grateful for what she did have. She started up the stairs, holding the crate that would bring her the only thing in the world that was hers alone. The thing that, once a week, brought her closer to her dreams.
Jane had finished feeding Jasper by the time Stella finished loading the crate and laundry into her truck. When she walked back inside, Jane was burping him over her shoulder.
“Do you ever want to murder Mrs. Woodrow?” Stella asked, closing the door behind her.
Jane laughed. “I hardly notice those wind chimes anymore.”
“How? They’re maddening.”
“She thinks they ward off evil spirits.”
“They’re about to ward off my sanity.”
Jane laughed again, and Stella wiped her brow.
“How are you on ingredients?”
“I have plenty of corn and yeast, but I’m running low on sugar.”
“I’ll pick some up and bring it by afterward with the money.”
She smoothed her hair and checked to make sure the patches she’d sewn beneath the worn spots on her dress were well-concealed. “How do I look?”
Jane smiled, her dimples showing. “Like a sweet, eighteen-year-old girl.”
“Wash your mouth out with soap. There is nothing sweet about me.”
The last thing Stella wanted to be was sweet. Greta Garbo and Jean Harlow weren’t sweet. They were vixens wrapped in diamonds and furs who consumed men like champagne. Jane was a sweet girl.
Sweet girls ended up alone with a baby.
“But sweet girls aren’t bootleggers,” Jane countered. “They’ll never suspect.”
“True,” Stella agreed. “I’ll be back with some sweet, sweet dough.”
The sun had barely risen, but the inside of the truck already felt like an oven by the time Stella reached her first stop. She dabbed at her forehead with a handkerchief and checked her lipstick in the rearview. Just because she lived in a dusty prairie town didn’t mean she had to look like it. The money she would earn today could buy her powder, blush, mascara, and maybe even a new dress, but it was going straight into her Folger’s can in the attic, so lipstick alone had to do. The crimson stain was perfect, so she stepped out of the truck.
Her first client was a man named Lewis Johnston, who lived with his mother and preferred to take his deliveries at work. Stella always made his stop first because he worked at the train station, and the train-hopping bums who littered the place were mostly asleep in the morning. They camped in the hobo “jungle” in the nearby woods, and some of them liked to whistle and yell at the women who walked by.
That morning, the coast seemed clear as Stella clipped up the drive to the station, holding Lewis’s shirts, with the mason jar between the folds. But then she heard shouts, and two men tumbled out from between the trees. The first one fell onto his back, and the second leaped on top of him and punched him square in the face. Stella shrieked and jumped back. With a savage groan, the first man shoved the other man off and scrambled back to his feet. Then, he gripped the man’s shoulder and swung his fist deep into his stomach. The man doubled over, and the first seized his head and drove it down into his knee. Blood burst from his nose and splattered the pavement, as well as the other man’s pants. He crumpled to the ground, and the other man spat on him, viciously.
“You bastards always make the same mistake. You go for the face.”
“What’s going on here?”
Both men looked in Stella’s direction. She blinked and spun around. A police officer was jogging up the drive. She heard a scuffle and turned back around to see both men bolting toward the trees, the first moving like lightening, and the second stumbling and clutching his stomach.
“That’s right, get out of here,” the cop yelled, and Stella turned back to face him. He nodded and tipped his hat. “You okay, miss?”
Stella stared at him, suddenly very aware of the mason jar in her arms. “Oh, yes. They didn’t hurt me. They were fighting with each other.”
“Dirty bums,” the cop grumbled. “Why can’t they kill each other out in that jungle, away from decent folks?”
Stella nodded and started back toward the station.
“What’s a young lady like you doing here so early anyway?”
She stopped. After closing her eyes and taking a deep breath, she turned back around.
“I’m delivering laundry. To a man who works at the station.”
The cop stepped closer, glancing down at the shirts. “He doesn’t want it delivered to his house?”
He looked back up, but before he met her gaze, his eyes lingered a few other places. Her crimson lips, her dark curls, the swell of her breasts beneath her dress.
Men.
“I guess so,” Stella said with a laugh. She stepped closer, glad she’d taken the time to dab on a bit of her dwindling reserve of perfume. “You men can be so silly sometimes. I never know what you’re thinking.”
He smiled sheepishly and blushed. “I suppose we can be. Well, go ahead. I’ll make sure no more of these hobos get in your way.”
“Thank you, so much,” Stella said, flashing a smile. Then, she turned and walked up the drive, thinking Jean Harlow couldn’t have done any better.
Over the next hour, Stella made the rest of her deliveries. Not all were for moonshine; some were really laundry. When she’d finished, however, she cursed herself. She needed to get more sugar for Jane, but the general store was all the way back by the train station. She should have gotten it after her first delivery. Now, she would have to go all the way back and risk arriving home late and angering her Aunt Elsa. She sped to the store, went in, and used two of the of the eight dollars she’d made to buy fifty pounds of sugar. Then, she hoisted the two, twenty-five-pound sacks over each of her shoulders and trudged out into the heat.
“That’s a mighty amount of sugar.”
She turned around and stifled a gasp. The man who’d beat up and spat on the other man at the train station was leaning against the wall. He was more of a boy than a man, she now saw, just a year or two older than she was. His lower lip had been split by the blow he’d taken to the face, and he was picking small chunks from a stale loaf of bread, eating carefully. There was a bakery next door, and Stella guessed the loaf had been thrown out with last night’s trash. Her stomach turned, and she flopped the sacks onto the bed of her truck.
“What’s it to you?”
“Just wondering if you might have the same amount of yeast and corn somewhere.”
She froze, and then spun back to face him. He read the guilty look on her face and grinned.
“That’s what I thought.”
She stared at him. Besides the split lip, he had a yellowing bruise beneath one eye and a scar through his other eyebrow. His skin and clothes were filthy, and his hair was a rumpled mess beneath his flat cap. Her gaze slid down to the knee of his pants, stained with the other man’s blood. He followed her gaze, popped a piece of bread in his mouth, and looked back up.
“Don’t worry,” he said as he chewed. “I’d never hit a woman. You could come at me with a knife, and I’d just let you stab me, sugar.”
She flushed, determined not to let him know she’d been afraid. “How thoughtful. If you’ll excuse me.”
“Hold on.” He stood up from the wall and stepped into the sunlight. “I’m interested in becoming a customer.”
He had a backwoods, southern accent. Maybe Texas or Louisiana. Some desolate, nothing place even dustier than Kansas.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Come on, now. No girl in worn-out out heels is gonna spend that much money on sugar unless she expects some kind of return. And I watched you work that lawman this morning. Saw the fear on your face when he looked at those shirts. Saw the way you turned on the charm to fool him. Pretty impressive.”
Stella’s lips parted. Even the man who’d sold her the sugar hadn’t questioned why she’d bought it. He was just happy to make the sale. This boy talked like a hick, but he was smart. She studied his face. It was pleasant. Beneath the dirt and scars anyway.
But then she remembered what he’d said about her shoes.
“You couldn’t afford it.”
She purposefully raked her eyes over his filthy clothes as she said it. But his grin only curled, and he stepped closer.
“Ain’t you heard, sugar? We got a depression on. People trade and barter for the things all the time.”
“Stop calling me that. And you have nothing I want.”
He placed another chunk of bread in his mouth and looked her over. “We’ve only just met.” He lifted his gaze. “You don’t know what I got to offer.”
She flushed again. “You’re disgusting.”
“Disgusting?” He cocked his head to the side. “My, what dirty thoughts you’ve got in that pretty head of yours.”
Feeling a sudden kinship with the man who’d punched him in the face, she spat, “Don’t flatter yourself,” and turned away, tossing her curls.
“I see those patches in your skirt, sugar,” he called. “Don’t pretend you’re better than me.”
“At least I’ve taken a bath this century.”
She didn’t look back when she said it, but she caught sight of his face when she opened the door to the truck. His smile was gone. Guilt rose in her throat, but she swallowed it, got in her truck, and drove away.
She sped toward Jane’s house, now certain she would be facing Aunt Elsa’s wrath when she arrived home. There were six dollars in her pocket, three of which were hers, but she found herself too shaken to enjoy their comforting presence.
Because the boy had been right. Her family was barely hanging on by a thread, and though they weren’t sleeping in hobo jungles and fishing stale bread out of the garbage, that could change at any moment.
Nothing was certain. No one was safe.
Jackie Johnson, Bladestay
