Frog Music

  “Saddle slipping on you?” Jenny asks when they’ve been riding a few minutes.

  “I feel as if I’m wallowing in a basket,” complains Blanche.

  “Ah, you must have ridden English-style at your circus.”

  “French-style,” Blanche corrects her.

  “Well, better learn to ride Western or this poor palomino’s going to flick you off into the nearest gulch,” says Jenny. “Leave her mouth alone, for starters.”

  “Then how’s she going to know who’s boss?”

  “Let her have life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, I say, so long as she gets you up the hill.”

  Blanche rolls her eyes but transfers both reins to her left hand and leaves them slack, like Jenny does. And John’s pony does seem to know what she’s doing; she must have been up this way before.

  They skirt around dairy farms, going past a mountain that Jenny says is named San Bruno. “So how about a few tricks, now the pony’s used to you?”

  Blanche glances sideways at her, incredulous.

  “Go on, I’ve never known a genuine equestrienne.”

  “A genuine putain, these days.”

  Jenny gives her a look so fierce that Blanche yanks on the bridle without meaning to, making the palomino shake her creamy head furiously. “What?” Blanche demands. “Why be squeamish about the word?”

  “You’re more than that,” Jenny insists. “Don’t let those sons of bitches reduce you to that.”

  Blanche is startled.

  “The way you dance, the goddamn artistry of it—there’s not a one can touch you.”

  Blanche decides to be droll. “They can afterward, if they pay extra,” she mutters.

  Jenny ignores that.

  They ride on for a minute. Something’s puzzling Blanche. “You’ve never seen me dance.”

  “Ain’t I, though?”

  Blanche stares at her. “At the House of Mirrors?” It’s never occurred to her to scan the faces under the top hats and bowlers or wonder if all the audience is male. And why would it matter, exactly? she asks herself in some confusion. Hard to explain the prickling feeling it gives her to know Jenny was among the watchers one time. Jenny, slouched on one of the Grand Saloon’s red velvet chairs with her hat tipped over her eyes, unnoticed, because everyone was ogling the little festooned stage where Blanche la Danseuse was giving it her all. “What took you there?”

  Jenny shrugs. “What takes me anywhere?”

  A drink, Blanche supposes. For novelty, for fun. Blanche hasn’t even done a leg show since she met Jenny, she realizes, calculating. So the Lively Flea must have been the first Jenny knew of her, long before the collision on Kearny Street. (And never breathed a word of it either. Who are you and what’s your story? Jenny asked that first night; a question with a lie wrapped in it.) “The night you came. Was I good?” Blanche finds herself asking, though before the words are out of her mouth they embarrass her.

  “Good?” Jenny shakes her head.

  Blanche looks down, hot-cheeked.

  Quoting Blanche’s own phrase back at her, Jenny says, “You’re the goddamn crème de la crème.”

  Blanche angles her face away to hide her smile.

  They’re moving up onto Sweeney Ridge now. Every blue curve turns to scrubby brown, seen up close.

  Jenny’s different on this ride, Blanche notices: peaceful as she sways in the saddle, quiet for long stretches. It’s a side of her friend Blanche has never had the opportunity to glimpse before. As if Jenny has a prickly city self who gets into slanging matches in bars and a country self who’s at rest, somehow. Blanche couldn’t stomach living in the middle of nowhere, but she can see that something in the air here makes Jenny breathe easier.

  It’s getting steep. Jenny jumps down and hitches the rented hack to a lightning-cracked thorn tree. “Bring you back some water in a while, all right?” she murmurs in his pointed ear.

  “Don’t tell me we’ve got to walk now?”

  “Just a little farther.”

  The heat’s a rug hanging in Blanche’s face, and with each loud breath, she pushes it away.

  Jenny heads off along a humid stretch of fern-lined trail.

  “Looks as if it’s been raining up here,” Blanche hazards.

  Jenny shakes her head. “Fog drip. That’s what the plants live on.”

  An orange-and-black butterfly goes right by Blanche’s cheek, making her jump. Jenny points out figwort, poison oak’s red leaves, and a sticky coyote brush that she claims can survive anything, even fire. The air’s sickeningly heavy with lilac, like boiling honey. A couple of black-tailed deer go by, foraging in the tangled evergreen. “Seen porcupines up here,” says Jenny, “snakes, miner’s cats … I once almost stood on a coyote’s paw, and it leaped ten feet in the air.”

  “And you?”

  “Nearly as high,” she admits with a chuckle.

  Blanche has to stop talking as they close in on the summit. When they finally come to a halt, she heaves the scorching air out of her lungs. Her left calf’s cramping. They stand looking down the parched slopes. Ocean on two sides, as if the women are balancing on the spine of some colossal whale with scarred flanks. “The land looks scraped bare.”

  Jenny nods. “When I had a flock down there in San Mateo, you could still stumble across the odd redwood, three hundred feet high. Not anymore.”

  “What made you leave off herding?”

  She makes a face. “Got to feeling too shackled.”

  Blanche laughs breathlessly at that.

  “You try sticking with fifteen hundred sheep for months on end,” Jenny protests. “I’d rather be footloose.” She turns, suddenly businesslike, and points to a little creek some distance away, edged with saplings. “Now, here we go, this is prime frog territory.”

  “Why don’t I hear any croaking?” asks Blanche as they walk toward the water.

  “They’re probably tuckered out from the heat,” says Jenny. “Besides, some kinds make more of a whistle or a chirp.”

  “The red-legs you’re hunting, what do they say?”

  “Depends what they mean.”

  “What do you mean, what they mean?” asks Blanche.

  “Well, they don’t make their music just to pass the time,” says Jenny, grinning. “Got to want something to sing about it, no?”

  Blanche supposes so.

  “They might be shouting out, Here comes the rain, or Predator nearby, or Help! The females have a special low call for Get off my back, I ain’t in the mood.”

  Blanche laughs. “You speak frog!”

  “Well, I’ve been known to try,” says Jenny, rueful, “but they don’t seem to understand my accent. I do like to come up here after a winter rainstorm to listen to the chorus. Like some crazy orchestra.”

  “What’s the chorus?” asks Blanche.

  “A bunch of frogs.”

  “A family, you mean?”

  Jenny shakes her head. “Just the males. Frogs aren’t what you’d call family-minded. When the males are keen to breed, they’d deafen you.” She lets out a series of short grunts, then a final growl: “Uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-grrrr.”

  Blanche giggles, reminded of an expressionless banker who never thrusts more than a dozen times before he collapses across her body.

  Jenny grins, reading her mind.

  “So what do you call a bunch of female frogs?”

  “No such thing.” From her satchel, Jenny pulls out a burlap bag, and creeps up to the bank of the creek. “Now let’s hush, or they’ll hear us coming.”

  She dips to wet her bag. Then stands wide-legged in the rushes, keeping her eyes on the water.

  “Ain’t you got a net even?”

  Jenny puts her finger to her lips, stern all of a sudden. “An old Frenchman taught me the knack,” she murmurs under her breath. She stoops, graceful, fingering apart the dense cattails. Her brown cupped hands plunge—

  A small splash. She shakes off a handful of slime.

  “Did you just m
iss one?” whispers Blanche.

  “Getting a touch late in the season now,” mutters Jenny with a hint of melancholy.

  “Excuses, excuses!”

  Blanche is soon bored. The stink of water hanging on the humid air; frogs themselves might not smell, but their creeks sure do. She slaps her ear to dislodge a mosquito. Wonders about snakes. Her whole body’s slick with sweat.

  Jenny dips and comes up holding one lashing, squirming leg. “Good-size hopper, must be five inches.” She tosses it into her burlap sack and folds the top over. “Care to hold the bag for me?”

  “You must be kidding.”

  Jenny gets into the rhythm of it now, pincering frogs by the waist one by one. Sometimes she strokes their little stomachs.

  “You cuddling them now?” Blanche scoffs under her breath.

  “Stops them going loco in the bag.” Jenny is almost unrecognizably calm, shin-deep in muck.

  The day’s softening to dusk by the time she packs up. “Well, I’m damned if I’m going to chop-chop all the way into town tonight,” says Jenny with a great stretch.

  It hadn’t occurred to Blanche—but of course, Jenny would have to go back into the City to sell what she’s caught.

  “Durand’s customers are just going to have to wait a bit longer for their cuisses de grenouille.”

  “But won’t the creatures die if you keep them in that sack?”

  “Nah, they’ll mostly just sleep.”

  “What do they eat, anyhow?” Blanche wonders.

  “Anything the greedy bastards can fit in their mouths. I threw in a few worms so they’ll be less inclined to chew on each other tonight.”

  “Is this where you always hunt?” Blanche asks as they walk back in the direction of the horses.

  Jenny shakes her head. “I go all over. Sometimes as far down as the Seventeen Mile House. There’s a sag pond hereabouts I wouldn’t mind trying before we turn back …”

  “All right.” Blanche follows her down a side trail. But when it rounds a corner, the slope before them is gouged away. Horses churn the earth up with huge machines. “Loggers?” she wonders.

  Tight-lipped, Jenny shakes her head, pointing to one of the enormous bonfires in which trunks are turning to ash. “Hey”—she stops a man walking by with an ax on his shoulder—“what’s going on here?”

  “Spring Valley Water Company’s damming the pond. Putting up an earthen wall a hundred feet high,” he says with laconic pride.

  “The hell you are!”

  Blanche groans inwardly; Jenny can lose her temper in a heartbeat.

  “Who gave you the blasted right to—”

  “Whoever sold us the blasted pond, that’s who,” the workman interrupts, turning his ax in a faintly menacing way. “You want the City to choke of thirst?” He looks Blanche up and down, and it seems as if he’s more disgusted by her mud-flecked polka-dot skirt than by her friend’s denim overalls.

  She finds herself blushing. “I’m beat,” she says to Jenny in a pleading undertone. “Let’s head back to San Miguel Station.”

  Jenny’s two days’ dead, and Blanche is in a basement noodle house on Dupont, a few doors away from the undertaker’s, gulping down some kind of fishy stew the waiter brought her.

  She can’t remember all she just said at the inquest, or even how she said it. If Blanche had put things better, a little more eloquently, moved those jurymen to tears—if she’d given one of her legendary performances—might they have ended up finding Arthur and Ernest guilty of conspiracy to commit murder, instead of merely concluding that the evidence points to their involvement?

  P’tit. P’tit. The tiny weight of him, a bullet lodged in Blanche’s lung. By denouncing the macs in such vehement detail this morning, she’s thrown away her last chance of persuading them to give her son back. All she can do is try to stay out of their way and wait for a miracle, for the City’s famous detectives to solve the case and carry P’tit back to her, safe. Blanche does know how childish that dream sounds. But what else can she do? It’s impossible to make plans for herself as if P’tit doesn’t exist. She can’t decide anything, go anywhere, without knowing what’s happened to her baby. (That wretched, ugly, beloved baby.)

  In the meantime, she needs some substantial funds. Having blown so much of the money Lamantia gave her yesterday on this pink costume, she can’t live for long on the rest. Blanche is supposed to clear three hundred by dancing at the House of Mirrors on Saturday—that’s tonight, she realizes with a jerk. But she can’t quite imagine summoning it up, whatever knack Blanche la Danseuse once possessed for leaving hundreds of men roused and rapt.

  She asked Lamantia to come and see the show, Blanche remembers now. She hasn’t said no to his offer to take her into keeping; it seems she can’t afford to say no. The question may be moot, though. By this evening the businessman might have found the time to read an afternoon paper, which will enlighten him about his little white flower. The child Blanche never mentioned; the French thugs she’s been living with; the obvious conclusion (the most alarming thing to such a man as Lamantia) that she can’t keep hold of her tongue. He might not think her a suitable candidate for a mistress anymore. This fills Blanche with a curious mixture of disappointment and relief.

  Her head’s full of the detritis of the inquest: everyone’s lies, half lies, evasions, pontifications. Claims that, when Blanche tries to grasp them and knot them into a narrative that holds together, prove as slippery as pondweed.

  And Swan—whatever was the coroner getting at when he kept going on about how it strained credulity that Blanche bent down just as the killer fired?

  Suddenly she can’t swallow. Nausea grips her. She lets the piece of miscellaneous shellfish in her mouth drop back discreetly into her wide ceramic spoon and pushes the dish away.

  Blanche tries to remember how she became convinced as she sat on McNamara’s barrel sticky with Jenny’s blood—no, how she convinced herself—that she, Blanche, must have been the target. It seemed to make an awful sense at the time. She couldn’t believe that it was only luck that saved her, the fluke of doubling over to struggle with that knotted lace just as the killer’s finger squeezed the trigger. It was guilt, too, that made her decide she was the one those bullets were meant for; she was crushed by a feeling of responsibility for all this horror. And a strange sort of vanity, perhaps; Blanche can see that now. Everyone puts herself at the center of the story, imagines the world giddily spinning on her own axis. Blanche couldn’t believe that she was just playing a walk-on part in Jenny’s bloody drama.

  But here in the noodle house it occurs to her that there’s another explanation, much simpler than the one-in-a-million fluke of Blanche being spared by an accident of timing. Arthur or Ernest—she can’t be sure which, and their dark faces have melted into a single monstrous mask in her mind’s eye—perhaps they came to San Miguel Station to kill Jenny, not Blanche, and that’s just what they did. Whichever of them held the shotgun and looked through the sight, he chose not to shoot Blanche. She doesn’t know why, but she’s pretty sure she knows what happened. He waited calmly until Blanche, struggling with her laces, bent out of his line of fire, and then he blew Jenny to pieces.

  Her gaze snags on a clock on the restaurant’s mantelpiece. Almost one already. The funeral’s at two.

  The fact is, it would be considerably safer for Blanche to skip the ceremony. What she said about the macs in that courtroom will have provoked such wrath in Ernest—he may have refrained from killing Blanche on Thursday night, for his own obscure reasons, but that doesn’t mean he won’t do it today. If Blanche is going to walk behind Jenny’s coffin, she might as well have a bull’s-eye painted on her forehead.

  But she finds she simply can’t do it, can’t stay away from the funeral. And she has to see Jenny’s face one more time, it occurs to her, before they nail the lid down.

  The placard outside Gray’s says Memento Mori. Blanche stares at the boy holding it up. “What’s a—”

  ??
?Photograph of the victim, fresh took,” he rattles off, “thirty cents for a cabinet card, gilt-ruled, carte de visite only a quarter or five for a dollar …”

  He’s lifting the top off his box with enthusiasm, but Blanche averts her eyes from the glossy images and makes for the front door of Gray’s.

  What if she’s too late already? In the marble-floored lobby, a man’s going by in some kind of white uniform. “Pardon me, sir, but where do you keep the … the bodies?”

  “Mortuary,” he answers, jerking his thumb downward.

  That must be a fancy word for deadhouse. She speeds down the granite steps, her heels clacking.

  Somehow she assumed the room would be empty, but it’s crammed: doves, miscellaneous men, grubby street kids of both sexes … The mortuary has the air of a high-class fishmonger’s, decorated for a festival. Flowers on stands all around, but there’s a tang in the air, something faintly off underneath the perfume. Three coffins, each lying on a bed of chunked ice, but only one of them is open. It’s ringed with gawkers, five-deep.

  “Excuse me.” Outrage flares up in Blanche when she can’t get through. “Let me by.”

  “Don’t push so,” cries a woman.

  “I was with her,” snaps Blanche. “I was there, at San Miguel Station.”

  This wins her a little elbow room. People stare, mutter, even smirk at her as if she’s some kind of star. “Blanche la Danseuse,” she hears somebody say.

  She ignores all that and shoves her way to the front.

  Jenny’s corpse looks infinitely strange. Partly because the short hair’s been combed back neatly—more neatly than Blanche ever saw her wear it. The dieners have made her look like … a girl. A crop-haired, weather-beaten girl, head resting on a small white pillow. Somehow pale under her dark tan: exsanguination, wasn’t that Crook’s word? All the blood’s been wiped away. Just a girl, swollen around the left eye with bruising showing through the paint, because somebody punched her in the face just a few hours before somebody else shot her dead.