A Tyranny of Petticoats by Jessica Spotswood
With a hollow whoosh, we’re sucked into a profound darkness. The noise of the train is magnified, ringing back at us from all directions, like living inside the engine itself.
Billy wraps himself around me.
“It’s a tunnel!” I shout, trying to disentangle him. He’s been through tunnels before. They terrify him. I lean farther over, hoping Lloyd can hear me too. “We’ll be out soon!”
But we’re not. The train slows, still going up the mountain, but we’re inside it. The air thickens with smoke and soot.
I reach into my back pocket for my bandanna. “Cover your face!” I shout to Lloyd. He scrambles beside us. I’m sure he has a handkerchief. He’s just the type. I wonder if it’s monogrammed. “Breathe through your bandanna!” I call into Billy’s ear.
He lets go of me long enough to search for it, his movements getting more and more frantic. It’s like a tunnel in a nightmare, deceitful and never-ending.
“I don’t know where it is!” Billy screams. He’s panicking, his little lungs like bellows beneath my hand.
I pat him down, searching his pockets, feeling through his bindle, fingers stumbling.
“Here!” I shove my bandanna over his nose as I crawl around him, finding dirt and sawdust, the paper-thin skins of onions that must have filled the boxcar before, the slick leather of Lloyd’s shoe.
Lloyd’s hand wraps around my wrist and drags me toward him. I pull back, but I’m off balance and I fall into his lap, a tangle of limbs and humiliation. I sit up quick and haul off to punch him when he covers my mouth with his handkerchief.
It smells like sandalwood. Like home.
“I’ll be fine!” I push it back at him. “We’ll be out before we know it.”
He pulls me closer so he can talk in my ear without Billy hearing. “We’re in the Cascade Tunnel.” His voice is tight — no arrogance or judgment — and there’s no smile in it at all. “It’s the longest rail tunnel in North America.”
A chill wraps around me.
“How long?”
He doesn’t answer.
“Tell me!”
“Eight miles.”
At the rate we’re going, that could take a lifetime.
“Keep that over your face, Billy!” I shout, and pull him into me, as if my body will protect him. He’s still coughing. Not wheezing yet.
Lloyd thrusts his handkerchief at me again, and this time I take it. I can’t see him in the dark, but he’s jostling, all elbows and quick movements. It’s only when his shirt flaps against my face that I realize he’s taken it off.
I’m reminded of It Happened One Night. Billy and I sneaked into the cinema somewhere in Idaho to see it. The real Clark Gable takes off his shirt, and the crowd was shocked into raucous outrage, which made me and Billy laugh like loons. We’d seen that and more in the jungles.
This is different.
Intimate.
Lloyd leans into me, his bare arm kissing my cheek.
“Use this instead!” he shouts. “It’s thicker!”
He presses his shirt to my nose. It’s warm and smells like coffee and Oxydol laundry soap — like radio serials and better times. I want to bury myself in it.
I cradle Billy between my knees, pressing the shirt to his face as well. Each breath he takes is a struggle I feel in my own chest. They come in time with the chug of the train, like the effort it takes is what’s pulling us up the mountain. I count them, hoping to tick away the miles, feeling more helpless than I did the day the bank came knocking. More helpless than when I found my dad with the straight razor at his own throat.
Billy starts to wheeze.
“What’s the matter with him?” Lloyd shouts.
“Asthma.”
“Oh, God,” Lloyd curses. “He’s going to die in here.”
He drops his forehead to my knee. Just another scared kid.
“He is not!” I shout.
I wrap my arms around both of them. Billy chokes on each teaspoon of air. The train shudders, howling with the effort to crawl its way out of this hole.
I think of the kids who came into Dad’s shop for their first haircuts, screaming bloody murder in his cracked leather chair.
My dad talked to them the way you would a wild animal. Sat them still. Made them trust him.
That’s the voice I find inside me.
“Breathe.”
And we do.
“Breathe.”
Even Billy.
The train launches from the mouth of the tunnel with a gasp like a drowning man, and the air freshens between gusts of soot and brimstone.
In the light of the fresh-risen moon, I can see Billy’s face, the dark hollows of his eyes.
“Am I going to die?” He gasps.
“Not if I can help it.”
And he believes me. He believes me enough to keep breathing.
I hold him close until the tension fades and he takes a long draft without it catching. I swipe at my eyes, my fingers gritty with soot and cinders.
“Well.” I look at Lloyd. “I guess you’ve got the perfect string to pull for your story.”
“It’s your story.”
“Yeah.” I take a deep breath, my lungs no longer scalded by ash. “But you’re the one getting paid to write it.”
I give him back his shirt — smudged and blackened — and try not to watch as he puts it on. Try not to think about the clean, familiar scent of him pressed against me.
That’s another thing these hard times have taken from me. The chance to have a beau.
“I won’t get paid.”
That snaps my attention back to his face. The corner of his mouth lifts in not-quite-a-smile.
“This is just a trial. To see if I can do it.” Lloyd looks down at the notepad in his lap. “To see if I can write the story he wants.”
“He wants you to write that the jungle is dangerous,” I say. “That we’re all criminals.”
“I can’t do that now.” He flips over a page of notes, a long scrawl of Billy’s words — and mine — across the paper. “I don’t want to tell untruths because it’s convenient or expected. I want to dig deep into the truth and aerate it so roots can take hold.”
I try to believe in a world where the truth is fertile soil and not hot, dry dust spread fine by the winds.
He smiles again. “I’ve been looking for a chance to get out of Wenatchee, and I guess you gave it to me.”
I start cramming things back into my bindle. Bandanna. A crust of bread. My enameled tin cup. I look over at Billy, sound asleep and snoring, still a wheeze in his chest.
“You don’t want to leave a good thing, Lloyd. This isn’t any kind of life.” I glare at him. “Don’t you dare romanticize it.”
He holds up both hands like I’m Public Enemy Number One, waving a pistol.
“I may be leaving bed and board,” he says, “but I’m not leaving a good thing.”
“Bed and board are a good thing!” I get up, unsteady in the sway of the train. “Don’t you get that? A place to sleep and a guaranteed meal are all those million ‘migrant workers’ ask for. That and the satisfaction of a job well done — and the respect hard work deserves.”
Lloyd looks up at me from where he sits against the wall, forearms resting on his knees. His eyes look black in the darkness.
“What if that respect and satisfaction are withheld?” he asks. “Are bed and board still worth it? Are times so hard we have to give up our dreams of making a better life?”
I thought I had. I thought the Depression had stolen the dreams I never knew existed because I had always taken them for granted — a warm bed, good food, friends, trust. Something to run toward instead of always running away.
A gust blows into the boxcar, thick with fog and a rich, humid, salty perfume. I walk shakily to the door and look out. Far in the distance, the earth flattens onto the horizon, the moon’s glow doubled.
The ocean.
The end of the line.
That hope is still
I glance behind me, and Lloyd stands too. A hard rock of the boxcar throws him sideways, but he catches himself. Keeps his gaze on me.
He moves to stand beside me. Not touching.
“What are you looking for, Rosie?”
He says my name — my real name — and it cracks my chest open. For the first time in what seems like a lifetime, I feel like the girl I once was. Rose Marie Weaver. Book-smart and world-scared. Soft, maybe, but also optimistic.
Back then I believed that hard work moves you forward. Now I know you also have to grab luck before it passes you by.
I muster a deep breath because it takes a lungful to ask a favor.
“Would you introduce me to your aunt?”
“Yes,” he says quickly, without even thinking. He ducks his chin to his chest. Embarrassed. “You trusted me, and I want . . . I’d like to know where to find you.”
My heart stills.
He lifts his head. “I’d like to see you again.”
“What about me?” Billy murmurs from the corner.
The quaver in my chest is like the flicker of a flame, and I laugh.
“Of course I’d want to see you, Billy,” Lloyd says, but he’s looking right at me. “If you think you can trust me too.”
I can’t speak. There are too many negatives. Too many questions. I’ve only just met this boy. I have to think of Billy. And Mama. And all the things these hard times have taken from me. All the things I’ve had to give up.
Except, perhaps, my dreams.
I was obsessed with movies and film history when I was young — spending hours in front of the television, watching classics like It Happened One Night, The Thin Man, and The Gay Divorcee. To me, it seemed the world of the thirties was populated by quick-witted detectives, rich heiresses, and honorable journalists. It was only after reading John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath that I pictured a completely different scenario.
Two years ago, I came across a documentary film and accompanying book titled Riding the Rails: Teenagers on the Move During the Great Depression by Errol Lincoln Uys. I was captivated by the idea of the nearly quarter million teens who for many reasons left home and braved the dangers of the freight trains during the 1930s. The men and women who shared their stories decades later inspired me with their courage and resilience.
It seemed a natural progression to create a train-jumping teenager influenced by the very same movies I had watched and immerse her in a world of deprivation and danger. But I wanted to make sure it was a world still lit by hope, because that was something Hollywood offered during those dark times.
I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN FRANKIE WAS a liar from the day I met her. She turned up at the Douglas airplane factory with pearls in her ears and a mouth that wouldn’t quit running, even when she jammed up her rivet gun and cost me my lunch break having to redo the panel she’d messed up. “This is just a temporary assignment,” she told me, leaning against the B-17’s half-built hull and smoking a cigarette while I corrected her work. “I’m actually a spy for the OSS. They’re going to drop me into France soon to rescue my fella.”
She looked so tiny propped up against that beast, not at all like a weapon to be tossed out behind enemy lines. I wouldn’t have minded tossing her out of a plane myself after that first day. But I knew how it was. She sounded as confident as all the rest of us once sounded, fresh from the Los Angeles bus terminal, face not yet scalded by the endless sunshine, still clinging to a drawl and a by-golly or two. Most girls learned to file their words and nails and teeth to sharp points after a few rounds at central casting, to shed the confidence for cutthroat common sense. Frankie, though, still hadn’t lost the conviction that the world was going to bend her way.
Well, I was in no mood to bend.
I went to the shift mother first thing the next morning, asked her for a new assignment. Said Frankie would just slow me down. “Nonsense, Evie, you’re our best riveter,” she said, never meeting my eyes — no one ever met my eyes, like I was just some ghost. “Just work with her. Show her how it’s done.”
I tried. I showed her how to make a straight line, how to set her jaw to keep her teeth from rattling. But her attention was like a moth, always in search of a new light source: gossip with the other girls, each day’s newspaper (which she skimmed for news from the European front), or the battered book of plays she pored over like a holy text.
Too often, she flitted toward me too. Endless questions, like I was some jigsaw puzzle someone had left out that she was determined to finish. Frankie was relieved, the way people always are, when I told her I hadn’t come west to be a movie star. Was it my uneven gait from a too-short leg? (“Breech birth,” Mama always said, like when she diagnosed cattle on the Steadmans’ ranch.) Maybe just my family tree, ensuring I’d only ever be cast whooping around a stagecoach in feathers and hides. No, I wasn’t here to be in front of the lens. I wanted to be the puppet master, pulling the starlets’ strings. Hearing my words from their mouths.
“I’ve already done a few radio gigs,” Frankie’d say to anyone who’d listen. “My Danny’s assistant to one of the big directors down at Warner Brothers — I can’t tell you his name. Soon as Danny’s back from the war, he’s promised to get me a screen test.”
She had the looks, I’d give her that — glossy chestnut curls, lips quick to smirk. But like all the girls in this town, she knew it, and it soured everything about it. The great playwright Anton Chekhov said if you’ve got a gun onstage in act one, you better fire it by act three. That was how Frankie wielded her beauty in those early days, and I was just waiting for the recoil.
“I’ve got a fella too,” I found myself saying. Like my James was a golden frame I’ve put around myself — Look at me, I may not be a starlet, but I’m worthy. Someone thinks I’m worthy. I never gossiped with the other girls, but I had to shut Frankie up somehow. “He’s a petty officer in the Pacific fleet. We’re gonna get married when he comes back home.”
Frankie’s eyebrows raised at that, and for once she looked at her work. But a few minutes later, she was chatting away again — recounting all the directors she dreamed of working with, the roles she wanted to play, the exhilarating life she led. But I knew it couldn’t be as exciting as all that. She was here for the same reason all the rest of us were here, turning victory scraps into airplanes and spending ten percent of our earnings on war bonds so we’d earn our Minuteman flags. Hollywood didn’t want us, and without a studio paycheck, without our boys to win the bread for us, we had to feed ourselves somehow.
Didn’t stop Frankie from spinning her yarns all over the plant. Once I’d heard her stories, she stopped trying to impress me — or maybe the shift mother said something to her, I don’t know — but every time I passed her and another cluster of girls, I heard the lies fluttering from her mouth, weightless as butterflies. “Well, as I was just saying to Vivien Leigh . . .” “I gotta leave early today, gonna read for the boys down at Paramount . . .” I’d hurry past, grateful for a few moments’ work without her at my shoulder, and I’d let my rivet gun sing.
For a few blessed minutes, it was like it was before Frankie came. I’d clutch that rivet gun and pretend I was Kitty Cohen, the main character in my screenplay, City of Angels. Kitty was a gun moll who fought her way up to being the mob boss while all the men were off at war. Kitty was all curves and sweet poison; she never missed a beat, a word, a whisper, a frown. No one put anything over on Kitty, not even Detective Perry, though Lord knows he tried. Kitty wove a wondrous web around him and snared him so close he couldn’t see the forest of her machinations for her silk-stockinged trees.
It was easier than thinking about James, across that stretch of glassy blue sea. About how our life would be when he returned. I loved him — of course I did. He believed in my writing and he worked hard and made me smile. But it wasn’t like — well, like the movies, as foolish as that seemed.
I should have known better th
But I could do it. It was worth it, for the security he would bring. “Better find a man,” Mama said, just before I left. “I ain’t carin’ for you no more.”
I didn’t like dwelling on that — and when Frankie returned from her sixth cigarette break of the morning, I took it out on her.
“You seem awfully chipper for someone whose boy’s missing in action.” I tossed her thick welder’s mitts right at her gut; she flinched before catching them.
“He’s — he’s safe.” She peered around the B-17’s frame. “He’s in a hospital in France.”
“Is that so? Then why were you telling Maude you’re goin’ on some rescue mission with the Office of Strategic Services?” In my hands, the rivet gun spat out a perfect line. “Spy work, screen tests, cast parties with Bogie and Bacall . . . you’re one busy girl.”
Frankie paused in the middle of pulling on her mitts. I’d never seen her without her smile before, that big mess of lips smeared on thick as butter on toast. She looked so much smaller without it. Her whole face was soft and fragile. That’s when I knew it wasn’t just her natural good looks that made her who she was. She was always working, always performing, always forcing herself to shine like a spotlight. And I’d just burned it out.
She dropped the mitts on the floor and ran from the hangar, the dull thud of her worn-out oxfords ringing on concrete.
I swore to myself, went through the safety checks to shut down the rivet gun, replaced it safely, pulled off my goggles and mitts, and scrubbed at the grease I could feel smeared on my cheek. I took a deep breath and waited. I’d wanted to be cold like Kitty Cohen, like a scalpel peeling back Frankie’s skin of lies so I could find out who she really was beneath. Instead I’d gone about it like a sledgehammer.