The Elementals (13 page)

Ringing the bell at the counter, he tried to hide the crutches by leaning forward. A young woman came to the front, probably not much older than he was. Even though she’d bound her black hair tight, little wisps escaped in a halo round her head. Her face was pink from heat, and beads of water clung to her skin.

“What can I do for you?”

“I’m looking for work,” Julian said, but didn’t leave it at that. “I know how to scrub on a washboard and crank a wringer. Don’t imagine you have clotheslines out back, but I can hang and fold and even iron.”

The girl smoothed a hand down her apron and looked into the back. “Well, this isn’t like doing the wash at home. It’s linens for hotels and restaurants. We’ve got all sorts of machines. Do you know how to use any of them?”

Julian shook his head. “No, but I’m willing to learn.”

“All right, um . . .” She pointed to a chair by the door. “Let me go get my father; he’s the one you should talk to.”

So Julian did as she said, and out of habit, he slid the crutches under the chair and tucked his bad leg behind the good one. He couldn’t see into the back, but he heard the machinery quite clearly. A drone underscored metal banging against metal. At regular intervals, a steam hiss would erupt. In reply, someone yelled. Julian couldn’t tell if it was a curse or an exclamation.

Finally, an older man stalked up front. His skin was scalded crimson—not only his face. His arms and hands, too, were raw, and sweat shone through his thinning hair. He got all the way to the counter, then stopped to look Julian over. Drying his arms on his apron, he frowned. “Sadie says you’re looking for work?”

Julian stood eagerly. “Yes, sir. And I could start today. Mr. Zweifel?”

“Yeah. How old are you?”

“Seventeen,” Julian said.

“All right.” Shrugging, Mr. Zweifel turned on his heel. “Come on.”

Julian wanted to whoop, but instead, he grabbed his crutches and followed the man back. A blast of wet heat soaked him in an instant, but it couldn’t weigh him down. It was a small victory, but sweet all the same.

In the back, a high ceiling rose above a huge room with concrete floors. Boys stood beside a row of belt-turned barrels, laundry sloshing away inside them. Never had Julian seen a barrel that big. He could have climbed into one and had room to spare.

At the end of the barrel row, Sadie hauled soaking linens from one of the open wash barrels. Separating out a sheet, she fed it into the rollers of a monstrous machine. It came out the other side, the water squeezed out of it. And there, another girl snatched it up and hung it on a rack. It had multiple arms, all of them draped with damp linens.

“Grab one,” Mr. Zweifel said.

Sliding an arm through his crutch, Julian did as he was told. The rack had rollers, so he could use it as his second support. After each new step, he dragged the rack forward and took another. He didn’t move as quickly as Mr. Zweifel, but he kept up all right. Turning a corner, he pushed the rack ahead of him. Then he tucked his crutch under his arm again and waited for more directions.

“What’s the matter with you?” Mr. Zweifel asked. He didn’t bother with subtlety; he pointed right at Julian’s leg.

Everything inside Julian wound tight at once. “I had polio when I was a baby. It’s not catching.”

Mr. Zweifel put his hands on his hips, considering Julian for a long time. Then he turned his attention to a huge wooden box. It took up an entire wall; chimneys jutted from its top and disappeared into the ceiling. Throwing open the door, Mr. Zweifel said, “The whole rack goes inside.”

Heat spilled from the inside of the box, ravenous and dry. Julian dutifully pushed the rack inside. Then he locked the wheels down, as Mr. Zweifel instructed, and stepped out. His hair felt crisped after that, and his clothes burned for a moment on his skin.

“All right, close the door. Lock that, too,” Mr. Zweifel said. He pointed to a huge crank on the side. “The belt is broken, so you’re doing it by hand. Go for twenty minutes, then pull the rack out with that hook.”

Julian pulled out his watch to check the time, then took his place at the crank. “How fast?”

Mr. Zweifel waved a hand at him. “Steady. Make some noise so the ironers know when the rack is done. They’ll come get it, and you can go get more. I don’t want anybody back here helping. If you can’t do it, I don’t need you.”

“Fair enough,” Julian said. He set one of his crutches aside to lean on the other. Taking the crank in hand, he turned it—not easily, but smoothly. He kept time in his head:
one-one thousand, two-one thousand, three
 . . . After a moment, the man walked away, leaving him to crank the dryer on his own.

It was hard and hot, but Julian smiled all the same. He’d found his way west. He’d gotten a place to live; now he had a job. He was his own man, and it felt
amazing
.

***

Pushing his chair back on two legs, Caleb considered his cards, then the faces around him. He didn’t necessarily get along with all the maintenance fellas, but playing euchre was something to do to pass the time.

Holed up after hours in one of the old green rooms at Clune’s, they drank tepid beer and let the call go around the table before someone named trump. A bright ember dangled from Jimmy’s cigarette; Oscar kept waving his hand like that would clear the smoke somehow. Every so often, Silas threw out his arms in a long stretch. That maneuver revealed the pistol on his belt, and the fact that he was trying to look at everyone else’s cards.

After the third time, Caleb flipped a pretzel at him. “We’re not playing for money, so knock it off.”

Silas’ nostrils flared slightly. “A man can’t stretch?”

“Don’t you get enough stretching at work?”

Leading with a low trump, Oscar mouthed his beer while he waited for the others to play. He didn’t join in the conversation; he didn’t during work, either. For a couple of days, Caleb thought he might be deaf. But he turned when somebody called his name, and jumped when Jimmy dropped a box of light bulbs. He simply didn’t care to socialize.

Silas cursed and threw the highest trump in the deck. “I don’t know why I play with you, none of you. I could be down at Rosie’s right now.”

Laughing, Jimmy flicked a card in. “Doing what? Peeking in her windows?”

“I’ll punch you square in the mouth.”

“Let’s see you try it.” Silas boxed at the air, punching holes through the curtain of smoke. Little swirls of it trailed around his fists, and followed when he swept the cards in the middle of the table toward himself. With a snap, he threw down his next card and said, “That’s how I make my money on the side. Pow, pow!”

Washing his mouth with a bitter swallow of beer, Caleb flung in a card. “Then why are you working here?”

“I said on the side.”

“Mm hmm.” Oscar tossed in his next card and raked.

Rather than let Silas blather on, Jimmy pointedly talked over him. “Where d’ya hail from, Virgil?”

“Annapolis,” Caleb said. It was a good lie; easy to remember, and hard to get caught in. Baltimore was close enough that he could answer questions when he ran up on somebody who really did come from Annapolis.

“Bet you miss those crab cakes.”

“Not really.” Caleb played his card, then rolled out of his chair to get another beer. His boots echoed on the floor, which made everyone go still for a moment. They weren’t supposed to be in the theatre after closing. Though they were up two long flights of stairs, and hidden behind the old catwalk, they could still get caught.

Jimmy waited for Caleb to come back to ask, “Why’d you leave?”

Sinking into his seat again, Caleb bared his teeth with an ugly smile. “On account of a girl.”

“What’d you do?” Silas fanned his cards. “Get her in a family way?”

Carefully selecting his next play, Caleb tossed down a jack of hearts and pushed his chair on two legs again. His dark eyes cut through the smoke, seemingly lit from within. There was fire under his skin; it seared through his veins with every heartbeat. “I buried one, and I didn’t get to bury the other.”

A chill rippled through the room. Jimmy’s cigarette hissed, burning away in the quiet. For once, even Silas closed his mouth, because it wasn’t so much what Caleb said but the way he said it. Too smooth, too sharp, like a filet knife across flesh.

Oscar flipped his last two cards onto the table. “Sorry, Jimmy, I’m set.” It was the longest sentence anyone could remember him saying. And with that, he grabbed his hat and slipped down the echoing iron stairs.

“Guess that’s a night,” Jimmy said.

He was already out of his chair and cast a funny look in Silas’ direction. Caleb simply watched, rubbing his thumb against his bottle’s open mouth. It sighed softly, an eerie whisper in the old green room. Jimmy shook his head and hit the stairs alone.

Unperturbed, Silas took another swallow of beer, then gathered the cards. “Couple hands of twenty-one, Virgil?”

The room at The Ems had become far too small for two.

Three, counting Handsome. He perched on the foot of the bed and shook his wings out. Switching from voice to voice, he carried on a steady monologue made of a single question. “I can talk. Can you fly?”

“Why don’t you shut up?” Mollie muttered.

She’d pulled a chair over to sit beneath the open window. Drawing a needle through silk, she mended her only pair of stockings in silence. Likewise, the night before, she’d spoken only enough to insist Kate sleep on the floor.

Kate didn’t know how she felt—the acid etching away at her stomach could have been guilt for upsetting Mollie as much as she had. Or it might have been anger that Mollie misunderstood her so completely. There was an extremely healthy possibility that it was lovesickness of the terminal sort: both revealed and unrequited.

Trying to polish her shoes with coffee and an old rag, Kate stole a look over at Mollie and finally said, “Please don’t be angry with me.”

“I’m not.” Mollie drew her thread out long, then stitched it through again. For such a wonderful actress, she didn’t sound the least bit convincing.

Kate dipped the rag in the cold coffee again. “I didn’t mean to be awful. You were gone so long, I worried.”

“Fine.”

Single words fell like shards of ice, precise and frigid. The cold extended throughout the room; Mollie kept her eyes on her mending, and Kate sat frozen on her side of the bed. Only Handsome went untouched. His talons clinked on the brass bed frame as he skittered back and forth, a feathered crab.

“I was thinking,” Kate said hopefully “we could probably afford a matinee tomorrow.”

Unmoved, Mollie said, “I’ve got to work. So do you.”

Finally giving into frustration, Kate put her shoes aside and slid from the bed. Coming round it, she stood behind Mollie’s chair. Clasping her hands together, she leaned down, trying to look her in the eye. “Couldn’t we please go back again?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Mollie said.

Kate sank to her knees beside the chair. “Tell me about your night out. I’m sorry I didn’t listen before; I’d like to hear about it now.”

Darning two more stitches, Mollie seemed poised to keep her silence. But slowly, she melted. Turning her head ever so slightly, she narrowed her eyes and asked, “Do you?”

“More than anything,” Kate swore.

Mollie folded the stocking over her hand. As if experimenting, calculating, her brows went up, and her lips formed a shape before she finally spoke. It was like she had to devise a test, the solution of which only she knew. “The tall fella, his name was Harold. And it was very unfortunate when he took off his hat. He was handsome until I saw him half-shaved. He had red hair, Kate. He looked ridiculous.”

Expectation hung between them, and Kate rushed to fulfill it. “Oh, how disappointing. I can’t bear a boy who looks like a skinned rabbit.”

“That’s exactly what he looked like,” Mollie said. She laughed, forgetting to be wary. “Though he was much freer with his money than Ollie was.”

Kate nodded. “I knew that straight off. Ollie gave me a dime, but Harold offered up a quarter. So he paid for everything, then?”

Nodding broadly, Mollie launched into a vividly detailed account of her night out with the sailors. She demonstrated the way each one chewed, critiqued their respective abilities to fox-trot. Distilling the smell of their sweat and the nervous dampness of their hands, she waxed all but rhapsodic about dear Ollie and darling Harold.

When she ran out of things to say, she held up her hands. “So they were perfectly fine, but nothing to get exercised about. That’s why I didn’t let them walk me home. If they’d been even a little interesting, we could have had them in for a nightcap.”

With a smile, Kate glanced around the room. “Something delicious from our imaginary bar.”

“Oh, I would have asked them to buy,” Mollie said. Taking a deep breath, she slumped in the chair and closed her eyes. “I do still think we should buy you a dress.”

Kate’s heart sank. “We can’t possibly. I have a combination, but I left my corset and my stockings behind. Not to mention shoes and hairpins and the like.”

Slowly folding her arms, Mollie turned toward the breeze from the window. “Can I be frank with you?”

“Only if you let me be Harry.”

At that, Mollie peeked at Kate. “What?”

“Forget it, it’s a joke,” Kate explained weakly. She turned her hand over and put it on the arm of the chair.
Take it,
Kate thought as hard as she could. “Go on. What were you saying?”

Handsome cackled, “Come here, pretty boy.”

Stuffing her hands under her own arms, Mollie turned to look down at Kate. She didn’t accuse or shout, but she was very, very plainspoken. “You
make
things happen. You wanted a star and you found one. You wanted to make a motion picture, and you did. You even willed us to Hollywood in the middle of the night.”

Confused, Kate said, “Right.”

“Kate, if you
wanted
a dress, you’d have one.”

Kate said nothing. Her lips felt cold, and the rest of her flesh entirely numb. If she’d had an argument, she would have offered it. But it was true, completely true, and they both knew it.