He squeezed my hand. “Treasure a handful of dirt from your home, but love not foreign gold.”

  “Oh, I’ve got more than a handful of dirt just in my pockets,” I snapped.

  Trip released me and stood. He turned, sighing, and took a stack of baskets from atop another stool. He hooked a foot and dragged it nearer, sitting on it with the three baskets on his lap.

  “What will you find in California?” he asked gently.

  I rested my face in my hands, elbows on my knees. “I don’t know. A job. People.” I choked. “Hope.”

  “What if you found hope here?”

  I didn’t have the energy to laugh derisively or the tears to cry. I had used those all up, that well dry with the dust that was burying us.

  Peggy pushed through the half-open door. “What’s in the baskets?” she asked.

  Trip glanced down. “It’s hard to guess,” he said. “What do you think is in the baskets?”

  Peggy grinned, a child amusing herself in the middle of futility. “In the first basket is…a ruler! For measuring things!”

  Trip made a show of tipping the basket to look. “What do you know? Look at this.” He drew out a playing card, the nine of hearts. “This is exactly three and a half inches long, so now you can measure anything.” He handed the card to her.

  She clutched it like a prize. “What’s in the second basket? I think it’s a…treasure!”

  Trip drew out the reveal, making me smile a little too. “You are correct! Here is a diamond!” He handed her the ace of diamonds from a half dozen cards, all that remained of the deck.

  “The third basket has a map!”

  Trip looked inside and made a comically large frown before inverting the basket. “I think a pirate stole the map!”

  There was a ferocious crash against the roof and Peggy jumped, dropping her cards. Trip rose and scooped her into his arms in one motion, retreating to the main room. Sandy had the spade in hand, looking up. Bobby, without a weapon—who would have thought to need one against the storm?—reached to take Peggy from Trip.

  The window shattered inward and Rocky sailed in on a cloud of dust, which dissipated as he tumbled to the floor. He was badly beaten, with bruising and blood on his face beneath his indestructible hat. “He’s coming,” he gasped, spitting dirt. “He knows you’re here, he wouldn’t follow me. Get out, I’ll hold him here.”

  But the bear was already at the window, roaring with the wind and clawing into the dugout with streams of dirt. He was the bear and the storm, and we could not outrun him even if we could get out of the house.

  Bobby turned and shielded screaming Peggy. Sandy rushed forward with the spade and hacked at the reaching forelimb, slowing but not stopping it. There was a terrible sound from the horse in the attached room. The bear pushed through the window, collapsing the dugout upon itself, and a tumble of support stones fell upon Rocky, pinning him and throwing his red rod to the back wall. He screeched in pain and rage. The bear crawled forward, jaws wide like no normal bear, pushing toward us as we scrabbled backward.

  The bear ignored Sandy and Bobby for Trip and me. Trip tried to push me down and behind him but there was little room to maneuver in the fallen dugout for us or the bear. It pressed forward, snarling a pleased grin, and stretched a forelimb for Trip, dirty claws extended like scythes to hook and harvest. Trip straightened and closed his eyes, pressing his palms together at his chest.

  I snatched the short red rod flung from the stony tumble and jammed it against the ground, stepping across the end to hold it in place. “Rocky!”

  Rocky snapped a word. The red staff kicked against my instep like a shotgun and extended, stabbing deep into the hollow exposed by the reaching arm. The bear screamed and recoiled, but the staff did not break with the motion. The bear thrashed and choked blood and threw back its head, raging, and then it folded to the ground and faded to dark dust.

  We stared, except for Rocky, who was swearing at the rocks and wriggling free, somehow unharmed. Trip put a hand on my shoulder where I still crouched to hold the staff and shield myself from the bear’s convulsions. “Are you all right?”

  His voice was too loud. I could hear Rocky’s swearing clearly, and even Peggy’s crying in the far corner. The wind was slowing—still there, still blowing, but without the same ferocity.

  “I’m okay,” I said through the dirt in my mouth.

  Rocky crawled free and took the hand Sandy offered to stand.

  “Where is Tumbleweed?” Trip asked.

  We spilled out of the house by its several new routes, careful of loose stones and nails. Our feet pushed through loose dirt, making deep prints. Sandy went to a drift against the side wall and stabbed it roughly with his spade. A squeal came from within, and Tumbleweed roused himself and uncovered his head as dirt streamed off the tarp he’d made of his coat. “Is he gone?” he asked, looking only a little ashamed.

  “Dead,” Rocky confirmed with a smug grin. He did not so much as glance at me, but Trip and Bobby gave me meaningful smiles.

  An angry whinny came from inside and the wooden planks of the upper room bowed as Yulong kicked the wall. The wood splintered with the next kick, and I saw a glimpse of hooves. Then Yulong turned and leaped through the opening he’d made.

  We stepped back as the horse jumped free, and he ran about the lot in the fading wind, kicking at the lightening sky as if to punish the storm in his freedom. Sandy ran for the windmill now visible near the barn we had not reached. “The tank!” Sandy shouted. “Open the tank!”

  Rocky dashed with him and the two of them pulled back the heavy cover which shielded the enormous water tank, though nothing escaped a duster. Yulong galloped toward the wide circular tank, thirsty like all of us after the storm. But he did not slow to drop his head to the windmill’s water—he jumped the side of the tank, plunging into the water and making Sandy and Rocky turn away from the splash. Peggy shrieked a laugh and clapped her hands as he disappeared to wallow in the tank.

  I chuckled and followed the horse, more than ready for water myself, to bathe my eyes and nose and mouth clean.

  Something surged upward from the water. It was not a horse. It streamed into the sky like an enormous snake tearing free, the tank walls its old skin. My jaw dropped as I looked up, up into the yellow-gray sky and saw a serpentine dragon twisting through the remaining ribbons of dust, playing in the clouds as the horse had played on the ground. It gleamed white and iridescent, fish scales in the sun.

  Sandy punched a fist into the sky. “Yulong!” Then, grinning, he sat on the wall of the tank and threw himself backward into the water.

  I half-expected him to emerge as something else, too, but he sat up as himself, laughing joyfully. He splashed Rocky, who splashed him back, and muddy water went everywhere.

  I gaped at the sky again, looked at Bobby staring just as stupidly upward, looked at Trip who had folded his arms over his chest and was laughing. I decided that as long as I was going to be confused, I might as well feel better, and I started for the water tank.

  Trip caught my upper arm. “Wait. I think, now that Black Wind Demon no longer holds this land and he has had water, Yulong is feeling better.”

  I did not know what that meant. Yulong executed a neat convoluted loop in the sky and soared upward, and as I craned my head up to watch, a drop struck me in the cheek.

  A water drop, from the sky.

  Rain.

  No, it was merely the dragon shedding the tank’s water, of course. I took a step toward the tank, and another drop struck me. I looked up as Yulong twisted and dove.

  The sky opened, and water fell.

  “Rain!” I cried before I could help myself. “It’s raining!”

  Yulong wove his dance through the sky and falling water pelted the last of the airborne dirt to the ground. I clapped my hands and spun in place and danced in the rain, just as Bobby and Peggy were doing beside me.

  I spun and hugged Trip. “It’s raining!” I laughed and rubbed filthy water from my face.

  Bobby rushed to join us, and the thin mud running down his cheeks was the most beautiful thing. “Rain! Will it stay?”

  “Black Wind Demon is gone.” Trip put his arms about us, pulling us close. “Treasure the dirt of your home,” he said.

  Bobby nodded. “If there will be rain again….”

  “I don’t want to go to California,” I said. “I want to stay here. I have a farm.” With Uncle Edgar’s death, I was the heir.

  Bobby nodded and his joy faded a bit. “Bank’s got what we had. I still need to go west.”

  I was one person, I realized. Not enough to run a farm. “I need a hired hand,” I said. “And maybe a girl to help in the house while the hand and I replant. There’s a lot of dust to sweep out.”

  Bobby grabbed my hand and pumped it. “You’re a champ, Miss Tilly.”

  “As happy as I am for the both of you, we do have to go west.” Trip raised his hands to his mouth. “Yulong! We have a journey!”

  The dragon twisted and plunged to the ground, streaking through the rain. It pulled up just before the ground, writhed into itself, and landed as…gosh almighty. It was a Duesenberg, long and sleek and straight out of a movie. Its paint gleamed white—no, not merely white, iridescent, a flash of dragon scale.

  Trip laughed his approval and then called, “Rocky! Sandy! Tumbleweed! Let’s go!”

  They came, laughing at the car, and piled into its roomy interior without regard for how their wet and dirt spread across the creamy seats. Peggy ran up and rubbed the fender in open-mouthed awe, and Yulong gave a friendly snort which made her leap back and then giggle.

  Trip gave us a wave. “Take care. Thank you for your help.” He pointed toward where 66 waited to carry them away to California. “To the west!”

  The Duesenberg purred like the largest lion ever invented and leaped forward, spraying dust behind.

  Bobby, Peggy, and I watched until they disappeared—it did not take long with that horsepower—and then we turned to the road ourselves. We had a farm to return to.

  ***

  Laura VanArendonk Baugh loves writing with all kinds of folklore and so appreciated the chance to engage with the world’s best-known folk tale (if less familiar in the Americas), of the Monkey King and the Journey to the West. Bringing it to the Dust Bowl was a play on the westward journey she thinks Xuanzang/Tripitaka and his friends might have appreciated. She can often be found writing tales of youkai or weaving epic fantasy or eating dark chocolate. You can find more of her award-winning folklore-based and original fiction at www.LauraVAB.com.

  Bonne Chance Confidential

  Jack Bates

  Out along Long Island Sound, separated by Manhasset Bay, are the cities of Nottingham to the east and Fitzgerald Park to the west. A narrow peninsula neither community wants to claim pushes out into the bay like a gnarled pinky finger. Fitzgerald Park folks call the land Rumple’s Pinky while Nottinghammers refer to it with a much more vulgar name for an appendage. Those of us who lived there called it by its actual name.

  Rumple’s Crossing.

  At one time Rumple’s Crossing was a very pastoral place. The land was lush and the wildlife plenty. Then mansions went up to the west and east and the people living in these Edwardian castles needed a place to dump their trash. The mayor at the time took bribes from both our neighbors. Doesn’t take long for garbage to pile up. We either burned it or dumped it in Manhasset Bay.

  There used to be a two-mile stretch of dirt road full of potholes and washboard ripples everyone called Rumple Gap Road. The Queensborough Line train tracks both crossed and ran parallel to Rumple Gap Road. One mile to the east and one mile to the west the paved roads of Nottingham and Fitzgerald Park began (or ended) and smack dab in the middle was Rumple’s Crossing.

  It was the kind of community where everyone knew one another’s business without having to gossip or pry.

  Or so we thought.

  Quaint little burg for an otherwise unpleasant peninsula. Home to fewer than a thousand year-round residents. There was a market, a filling station, the train depot.

  My office.

  And Rumple Castle.

  Rumple Castle was just that, a castle. Rectangular foundation with four turret towers. Built by industrialist Ephraim Rumple in 1895 at the end of the devil’s gnarled pinky. Rumple married a much younger woman and planned to raise a family in his castle. Six years later, he and his younger wife had one child, a daughter, who mysteriously went missing on the night of her tenth birthday, taken from her room in the southernmost tower. The only clues in her abduction were a sharply tapered spindle from a spinning wheel and a ransom note the spindle pinned to a goose down pillow. The note suggested the girl would be returned if the young wife revealed the kidnapper’s name. The wife, Lydia Rumple, claimed to have no idea what the kidnapper meant, though many in Rumple’s Crossing believed she was lying. She had a reputation for entertaining men while her husband traveled the country selling his steel.

  I guess we did gossip a bit after all.

  Days became weeks became months. The daughter never returned. Rumple Steel collapsed. Ephraim Rumple went mad. A rumor persisted he had converted all his money to gold ingots he buried on his grounds. Would be treasure hunters found Ephraim living alone in his castle, surviving on small game he trapped and ate. Bones piled high in the wine cellar where Rumple lived.

  Lydia Rumple, like her daughter, was never found.

  Rumple Castle sat empty for many years until Duke Diamond, a self-made millionaire who had fought in the First World War, bought Rumple Castle for a song. Diamond’s arrival was grist for the rumor mill. War vet. Lots of money. Living in the castle. A curse, like history, is doomed to repeat itself.

  The summer Duke Diamond moved into the castle was a hot, sticky mess. Unrelenting heat. Humidity so thick it became damn near impossible to breathe. I felt like I was walking under the waters of the Long Island Sound. I wasn’t alone. My neighbors in Rumple’s Crossing complained of the same. It didn’t help that a trash fire burned almost continually just outside town in a place we called Little Hell from the first of May to the first of November.

  All of August that summer of 1925, Little Hell brimmed and burned. The smoke billowed thick and black. Five days a week Rumple’s Crossing existed in a perpetual fog, as if someone had scooped up our tiny town and put it in a glass globe filled with dirty water and soot. Tip it over, give it a shake, and abracadippity, Rumple’s Crossing disappeared.

  But not Rumple Castle.

  On summer weekends, Rumple Castle came alive with lavish parties. Duke Diamond hired locals to work for him and let them bag leftover food to take home to their families. It wasn’t long before Rumple Castle became known as The Duke’s Palace.

  I didn’t immediately jump on the Duke Diamond bandwagon. Not that I wasn’t invited. The door to the castle was always open. I’d sit in my office over the train station watching revelers shoot past along Rumple Gap Road and make the breakneck turn over the railroad tracks, pass through Little Hell on their way to the Duke’s Palace at the end of Devil’s Pinky Point where the air was pure and the sky as clear as the water from a wishing well. Some claimed the cooler air off the Sound kept the soot and smoke away, others said it was a spell.

  On Friday nights I would open my window to hear an orchestra playing syncopated jazz. By the end of the night, fireworks exploded over Manhasset Bay. Often the last car left at sunrise and I would pass the late-leaver on my way into my office.

  Towards the end of August, there was a horrible accident after one of Duke Diamond’s parties. Rumple’s Crossing didn’t have a police force or a fire department—the closest Rumple’s Crossing came to law enforcement was me and I was just a private detective. Otherwise, Fitzgerald Park sent the fire truck and Nottingham sent its sheriff, John Small who was there when I came upon the grisly scene.

  A poorly placed tarp barely covered the body of a young woman sprawled in the middle of Rumple Gap Road. The lifeless, fish belly white of her eyes stared up at the morning sun and a large shard of glass protruded from her forehead.

  Sheriff Small pushed his wide-brimmed hat back off of his eyebrows. “Hell of a way to start the morning, eh, Miriam?”

  “For me or the dead girl, Sheriff Small?”

  “All of us.”

  “Any idea who she is?”

  “Aurora Knightly.”

  “Arthur Knightly’s daughter. He owns that big place on Nottingham Beach.”

  “Right. I don’t suppose you were in your office last night?”

  “Not when this happened. Who identified her?”

  “Sam Farrow said she came into the market just before it happened to buy cigarette papers and a tin of tobacco, charged both to her old man’s account. Sam could tell she’d been drinking. Says he told her to watch for cars tearing off of Castle Lane and warned her about the incoming midnight express he could feel shaking the floorboards.”

  “Guess she didn’t heed his warning.”

  “Well, she had been to the castle.”

  “Oh, come on, John. You don’t believe in the Rumple Curse, do you?”

  “Kidnapping. Missing wife. Former millionaire living in squalor. Now this. What do you call it, Miriam?”

  “Coincidence. Besides, Duke Diamond has been having parties every Friday and Saturday night all summer long. This is the first bit of bad trouble to happen.”

  “Is it?”

  I studied Sheriff Small’s face. “That I’m aware of,” I said. “Has there been trouble out there?”

  “You tell me. You’ve got the watchful eye.”

  He meant the painting on my office window overlooking the town. A single eye inside a larger-than-life magnifying glass. Sheriff Small was right about one thing. The eye was watching. It just wasn’t watching the town.

  “When did this happen?” I asked.

  “Just before midnight.”

  “Midnight? It’s almost eight in the morning. Why isn’t she in the morgue?”

 

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