Free Mercy Train by Rae Meadows Page B

her mother would ever let her go anyway.
    The musicians were warming up inside. Violet went around to the front window and positioned herself in front of one of the few uncracked panes, the light inside the bar a smoky golden orange.
    â€œTwenty cents a dance,” the host called out.
    Twelve girls, their hair decorated with ribbons and flowers, their skirts barely below the knee, milled about on the side of the dance floor until the music struck up, and then they formed two lines, swaying in time. Men in the bar stood and blocked Violet’s view. Now and then she caught a glimpse of the dancers, marching, spinning, and right-about-facing in a quadrille.
    Violet marched in place to the music, even as the fiddler broke two strings. Nino came around the building. He stopped a few feet away from her.
    â€œDon’t,” he said.
    Violet stopped moving, confused by his tone and his anger shimmering just below the surface.
    â€œYou’re no cherry,” he said, spitting.
    â€œWhat’s it to you?” she said, trying to sound angry to cover up the quaver in her voice. Inside, the musicians began a Scottish reel.
    But then Jimmy and Charlie came careening out of the alley, two sailor boys in pursuit.
    â€œRun!”
    Nino and Violet took off with them, dodging and weaving until they got to the river and collapsed, choking down air and laughing.
    Li, Madam Tang’s errand boy, leaned against a lamppost near them, outside a sailor house.
    â€œWell, if it isn’t Chinkaroo,” Jimmy said, as Li approached.
    â€œDon’t you come up there no more,” Li hissed at Violet.
    â€œI thought you missed me,” Violet said.
    Nino laughed.
    Li wedged himself between two barrels next to them. A big-ended rat trundled by, and Violet tried to hit it with a stone.
    â€œWhat’s that smell?” Li asked, covering his nostrils with the tips of his two fingers.
    Nino nodded his head toward Charlie.
    â€œI don’t even smell anything,” Charlie said. “Hey, Kentucky, do you think I smell?”
    â€œYou reek,” Violet said.
    Warm with rum, she leaned back against a burlap sack and looked up at the ship masts, which shot up and disappeared into the sky. The moon hovered in a sickle. Here she was and she was happy not to be in the Home, happy not to be in Aberdeen. She wished that nothing would change. But if she thought anymore about it she would have to admit that things had already changed. Nino had told her to stop dancing, and she’d felt a shame that was new and ominous. She was a child, a girl, who soon would no longer be one.
    Li jumped up to try to sell his pipe dregs, but the young sailor he’d approached scurried away.
    â€œHave you tried it?” Violet asked Li when he returned.
    â€œIt’s for fools,” Li said. “That’s what Madam Tang say.”
    â€œShut up,” Nino said.
    â€œWhat?” Li asked, exasperated.
    â€œI done it,” Jimmy said. “It’s like tobacco but makes you drunk.”
    â€œYou’re full of shit,” Charlie said.
    Jimmy shrugged and spit.
    Li unfolded a piece of newspaper. Inside were black sticky ashes.
    â€œWho wants to smoke?” he asked, pulling a small reed pipe from his pockets and waving it in his fingers like a cigar.
    â€œAtta boy,” Jimmy said, his voice deep. He had slipped past childhood, no longer one of them, no matter how hard he pretended it wasn’t so. Nino had told Violet that Ollie was going to pull Jimmy’s papers; he had aged out of being a newsboy. A scar bisected the back of his hand.
    â€œI got a dollar,” Violet said. “What should we do with it?”
    â€œWhere’d you get a buck, kid?” Jimmy asked.
    â€œI stole it from my mother.”
    â€œThat ain’t stealing,” Nino said. “What’d she ever do for you that wasn’t really for herself?”
    A group of white-suited sailors walked by, singing a