The Book of Lost Friends(80)

“No reason for to be so skeert and skitterish.” The woman smiles, her tongue working the holes where teeth are gone. “We’s right friendsome folk.”

“We have no need of friends,” Juneau Jane says and moves away to let the woman pass.

The man down the hill stays watching. We wait till the women round the courthouse, then we turn and go that way, too. Back up the hill.

I remember what Pete said. There’s good people, and there’s bad people. Here in Fort Worth town, round every corner we turn, seems like somebody’s looking us over, seeing if we’re worth the trouble to steal from. This is a place of plenty and none, this Fort Worth. A town you’ve got to know the way of to be safe in it, and so we go to the blacksmith shop to find John Pratt. I leave Missy and Juneau Jane outside, and step in just myself. He’s kindly, but can’t say about Mr. Washburn.

“Been many folk leave the town since the railroad didn’t come on,” he says. “Lot of people had been speculatin’ on that. Shucked out when the news come. Hard times, right now. But there’s some who moved in to grab up what can be bought cheap. Could be your Mr. Washburn is that kind.” He tells us how to get to the bathhouses and the hotels, where most folk new to town would go if they had money. “You ask around there, you’ll likely find news of him, if there’s any to be had.”

We go along as he told us, asking anybody that’s willing to talk to three wandering boys.

A yellow-haired woman in a red dress calls us to the side door of a building, says she runs the bathhouse, and she offers a bath cheap. They got hot water ready and nobody to use it.

“Slim times, right now, boys,” she tells us.

The sign in the window says my kind ain’t welcome there and Indians ain’t, either. I know that because Juneau Jane points and whispers it in my ear.

Lady in the doorway looks us over good. “What’s wrong with the big boy?” She folds her arms and leans closer. “What’s wrong with you, big’un?”

“He simple, Missus. Simpleminded,” I say. “Ain’t dangerous, though.”

“Didn’t ask you, boy,” she snaps, then looks in Juneau Jane’s face. “What about you? You simple? You got Indian blood in you? You a breed or you a white boy? Don’t take no coloreds ner Indians in here. And no Irish.”

“He a Frenchy,” I say, and the lady hisses air to shut me up, then turns to Juneau Jane. “You don’t talk for yourself? Kind of a pretty little boy, ain’t ya? How old are you?”

“Sixteen years,” Juneau Jane says.

The lady throws back her head and laughs. “More like twelve years, I’d say. You ain’t even shavin’ yet. But you sure sound like the Frenchies, all right. You got the money? I’ll take it. I don’t got nothin’ against a Frenchman. Long’s you’re a payin’ customer.”

Juneau Jane and me move off from her. “I don’t like the look of it,” I whisper, but Juneau Jane’s got her mind made up. She takes the coins she needs and the bundle with her woman clothes and lets me keep the rest.

“We’ll be out here. Right here, waiting,” I say, loud enough for the lady to hear. Then whisper behind Juneau Jane’s head, “You get inside, you look for where there’s another door. See that steam rising out behind the building? They got to be emptying buckets and washing clothes back there. You slip out that way when you’re done, so she don’t see you in your lady clothes.”

I grab Missy Lavinia’s arm, steer her away and figure I might as well look for some of my own kind to ask after Mr. Washburn. Down the boardwalk, a boy’s hollering for boots to shine. He’s a skinny brown thing maybe about Juneau Jane’s age. I work my way over there and ask him my question.

“Might know,” he says. “But I don’t give answers free, ’less I’m shinin’ shoes at the same time. Them shoes you got ain’t worth shinin’, but you gimme five cents, want it done, I’d do it, but back in the alley, though. Can’t have the white folk think I do colored shoes. Won’t let me to use my brushes on them after.”

Nothing comes free in this town. “Reckon I can find out someplace else to ask…unless you want to trade for it.”

The eyes go to slits in his tan-brown face. “What you wantin’ to trade?”

“Got a book,” I say. “Book to write the names of people you lost in the war, or who was sold from you before the freedom. You missing any of your people? We can put their names in the book. Ask after them all the places we go. You got three cents for a stamp, and fifty cents for the advertisement, we can write up a whole note about your people, and send it to the Southwestern newspaper. It goes by delivery all over Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Arkansas, to the churches where they can call it out from the pulpit, case your people are there. You missing any people?”

“Ain’t got none at all,” the boy says. “My mam and pap’s both killed by the fever. Never remembered neither one of ’em. Got no people to look for.”

Something tugs my pants, and I look down, and there’s a old colored woman, sitting cross-legged against the wall. She’s wrapped in a blanket, her back so humped she can scarce turn her face up to get a look at me. Her eyes are cloudy and dull. A basket of pralines sits in her lap, with a sign I can’t read, except some of the letters. Her skin is dark and cracked as dry leather.