By Air Mail Ch.03

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TaLtos6
TaLtos6
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He thought the whole concept was a little amazing. It looked like a food freezer, though it was painted up red with the Coca-Cola advertising on it. You didn't even need anybody. You just put your nickel in (which was a bit stiff for a price in his opinion), and that unlocked the lid.

Then all you had to do was to reach in and move one of the many bottles – which hung by their necks in cold water – along a narrow track to the end where it was wider, enough to get that one bottle out. As soon as you pulled your bottle out, the racks would lock – as would the lid as soon as you let go so that it fell closed again.

He thought the whole thing was pretty neat – except that he hadn't been that thirsty to begin with and he still hadn't had anything to eat.

He hit another gas station and after filling up, he pulled off his prescription riding goggles and dipped them in the windshield washing bucket there by the pump for a moment and was a little amazed at how bright the day looked without them. From that, he sighed, figuring that he must be wearing quite a bit of grime, so he filled up and pretended that he always looked this way.

He noted that his intriguing aroma must be dissipating at least a little, if the diminished cloud of autumn yellowjackets buzzing around himself and his metal horse was anything to go by. He hoped that at this rate, he might be free of most of the smell by the time that he got to Horseshoe Bend.

Then he worked his way out of Boise, headed for the way north to Meridian, Horseshoe Bend, and then he'd be still hungry, but home-free all the way after that.

Craig thought about things and decided that with his stops for fuel, to get paid off, the low speed limit within the city of Boise, coupled with his rather careful passage of the forestry roads swarming with everything from arrogant skunks to love-sick elk, he was probably averaging only thirty miles an hour, overall.

He needed to pick up the pace, he decided. So he ditched the half-bottle of cola and started up again. He knew that his machine had a top speed five miles per hour faster than the Harley that it had been up against in the army competition way back when. He could make seventy miles an hour, assuming a clean, unloaded bike and probably a flyweight rider.

Well he figured that he had one part of the equation anyway, near enough. He tied everything down a little tighter and rode off, leaning forward to make what difference he could to the wind.

----------------------------

Amelia got what she'd wanted to do finished up and rather uncharacteristically for her, she decided on a late lunch as a bit if a treat since she was feeling a little peckish and it was even better for her because Rebecca was about to have hers as well, so they ate together.

"This is a heck of a way to go out for lunch," Amelia grinned, "by not going out, but I like it."

Rebecca nodded and they chatted about little to nothing for a few minutes before Rebecca looked over, "About last night,"

Amelia didn't know what might be coming so she tried to prepare herself. Her mother saw it and grinned a little, "Stop looking like you'll need to run for your life. I only wanted to say that ... well though I was nervous and felt a little strange, I came to like you there with us. Now it is a circle. I wanted to do more for you, but it was late enough already. I just want to say that it was something special, though I wanted to show you more."

Amelia smiled softly and reached out for Rebecca's arm, "It was very special thing for me too. For the first time in my life, I didn't feel like a dog's toy. I felt the love of you both and that's enough for me. It always has been, even without us doing something that nice."

Rebecca smiled and nodded as she ate and then she began to look a little thoughtful, "There is more, if you want to learn enough to ... I want to say 'impress', the girl, whoever she is and if it gets that far. It's the wrong word."

Amelia nodded, "I think I know what you mean."

"I saw her again, you know," her mother smiled, "Just as I was waking up and again, it was only a thin, quick look."

Amelia pushed her plate away and leaned forward with her chin on her crossed forearms "You have? Tell me what you can remember? Please? I want to know if this might turn into something for Tad.

Who knows what he's had all this time or how lonely he's been, more likely. I don't know if that side of things could ever work for me at all. I think I'd be doing amazingly well if I can have Craig – well, if I can even kiss him right after all that time alone on that damn mountain. I bet he'd have one of his fits right there on the spot if I tried too hard."

She squeezed her mother's arm just a little, "Tell me?"

Rebecca's face turned a little serious as she thought back, trying to remember one of the things that might come to her and be gone so quickly that one might not know that it had been there at all.

"I saw her where she lives. She is very unhappy there. Most people there don't like her. No one does, really, because no one there wants to know her. She is used to that most times.

She has no family – not like what you know for the word," Rebecca said quietly. "She had some people shouting at her as I saw her, but I don't know what was said. I know that she looked like the words hurt her as though they were whips – though she is the type who can hide it well – though not from my sight.

As I saw her, she was cold and wet to the skin from cold rain – and she was becoming frightened."

Rebecca stopped there and decided out loud that she wanted a cup of coffee and Amelia took the hint, almost jumping up to clear away the plates and cutlery. Then she was gone and back within a minute, loaded up with two steaming mugs of coffee and two pieces of apple-rhubarb pie with whipped cream on a serving tray.

"What the hell is this?" Marjorie asked in barely-masked and false outrage, as she appeared almost like magic.

But Amelia only smiled at her, "I'm paying for our lunches – AND the deserts, if you need to know."

"Well don't I get any?" the redhead asked, looking incredulous.

Amelia laughed, "Why do you think there's two pieces here? You know I don't like rhubarb. You'll just have to bring your own coffee over."

Marjorie laughed a little, "I think we should have rotated the kids out more when they were younger. They all catch on way too fast to me."

She was back in a minute, sliding in next to Amelia, "So, she's getting you to pay hoping that she'll tell you about seeing Miss Horseface again when she woke up? I wouldn't spend anything on that. I'd rather go see a gypsy woman, just sayin'."

Rebecca shrugged with a little smile, "Then you do that, Marjorie. Just make sure that you fill up the tank before you go. I'm sure that you'll be driving a long way to find just a woman who only TELLS you that she's a gypsy."

A customer sat down at a nearby table then and Marjorie got up to get her a menu, since she seemed to be looking for one, "Well, I'm sure that she'd at least have a crystal ball – unlike you."

It might have been intended to sound like a light-hearted rebuttal, but by the time that the words were on her lips, Rebecca's expression was more neutral. "You don't need a crystal ball, Marjorie. I can see just fine in only a little liquid – the darker the better. I can see – if there is anything TO see – using a cup of coffee if that is all that I have to use.

It comes from the heart and the mind – not from what it used."

Marjorie smiled a little as she stepped away, "I know all that. I was just trying to get a rise out of you is all."

Amelia looked at her mug of black coffee, "Why didn't you ever teach me to do that? Is it 'cause I'm half-white?"

Rebecca nodded a little in a careful way, "Yes and no, and that's the wrong way to think about it for this. I wanted to teach you. Your heart is there, ready. But your mind ... your mind is like mine in many ways, but it is also like your father's. When you were a child it was even more like his – fast, especially when seeking something like an opportunity."

She raised her finger, "And that is a good thing, Amelia. But for this, you need to put that part in the back seat and use slower ... ways of seeing. You need to learn to let things come to you, and not demand that they do. Wait here a minute."

She left and Amelia looked at the surface of her coffee and after a shrug, she took a long sip from it before it got too much cooler.

Rebecca came back with a curious thing, a china bowl, coal-black and full of steaming hot water. Marjorie looked over as she passed and smiled, "Well, it's the last one. If you manage to teach her a little, Amelia can have that."

She smiled at Amelia, "Old Polly gave me that – though she intended for it to be used for food."

Amelia looked at the bowl and she loved it immediately – even if this didn't work. There had been a ring of gilding right around the lip, but a lot of it was worn off now and the thing looked very old. Just inside of the lip maybe half an inch, a trio of gilded Chinese dragons chased each other's tails around the bowl.

Rebecca looked at the light fixture above the table and she moved the bowl a little. "Tell me if you can see just a little of the reflection of the inside of the lightshade up above – and not any part of the bulb at all."

Amelia looked and moved herself sideways just a bit and then she nodded.

"Look through the steam – and the steam is not the most important part. It only helps. Look at the surface, but not right at it. Let your sight see into the water at the same time. Maybe now, you are old enough to control which part of your mind is used. Tell me when it is right for you."

Amelia looked at the water for a few minutes, and gradually, she saw what her mother meant and she nodded, "Now, I think."

Rebecca sat down as carefully as she could so as not to put ripples into the water. "The one is a little taller than you. She has a good figure, but she is thicker than you as well, not fat ... solid.

She wears dark clothing and it is not fine. That one is a poor girl and she wears what might keep her warm on a cold wet day. I have seen her in a wool dress before, dark brown, almost black. Very plain."

She paused there while her daughter stared into the bowl. She thought that she saw something – someone, but the vision was intermittent, fading in and out as Amelia tried to control the way that she looked through the rising steam. It was hard to do. Very hard.

And it didn't help things any when a large man squeaked his chair back from the table to get up and almost stomp toward the cash register to pay.

Tom Forbes was just a large man and that was just the way that he walked, but Amelia didn't need any of it right then.

"The one's hair is blacker than that bowl and it shines more than mine," Rebecca said, "since she is only months younger than you – two months, I think. She has had a hard life, but she would say that she is not usually as unhappy as she is now. Something has happened to her lately, only days ago. Mostly, what she feels now is hopelessness, some despair and she regrets her actions – because she has been betrayed."

Amelia kept staring, seeing someone now more than something, but it was more of a shape than anything else.

"Her eyes," Rebecca said, "There is a stone which Polly said is valued in China. It is green and not clear."

"Jade?" Amelia asked in a whispered far-away tone as she thought that she saw something more definite.

Rebecca nodded, but said nothing for the moment. Amelia wasn't looking at her at all, but she knew that her mother had nodded – and she knew it as a certainty. She tried not to be surprised, not wanting to upset things at the moment.

"Her eyes are like that stone, though a dark shade of it. She can look with them to see when her mind questions something or someone.

She can look – in her eyes – like I can – like you can, Amelia. It makes people nervous."

Amelia gasped almost silently, seeing those eyes almost clearly for an instant.

She gasped again, a little louder this time as more came to her mind, "I see her, I think. She's ... she's very ..."

Rebecca nodded again, "Very not like a horse."

"No," Amelia nodded as much as she dared to, "Her skin ..."

"There lies my trouble," Rebecca whispered, "Her face says one thing, her skin another, though a little of her face fits the skin. It tells me something, but ...

Inside her ... it is another thing."

Amelia watched, hardly daring to breathe, but in a little while, what she saw faded and she saw the underside of the lamp shade once more.

"I don't think that I've seen anyone ever who looked like that," she said as she looked up. She reached for her mug and sipped a little. "And Jesus, that girl sure isn't ugly. But what the heck is she?"

"And where is she? It looked to me like she was packing a worn-out suitcase or something, but then it was gone. And I could see that she's poor and it made me sad for her. I don't know how I know it, but she has twenty-seven bucks to her name. She'd have more, but her mother drinks it as fast as she can save it.

And wait a minute," Amelia said as she looked back into the bowl, though she saw nothing this time, "Who's Polly?"

"An old Chinese woman," Marjorie smiled from next to Rebecca this time, "She was a friend to my parents - and to me, I'd have to say a little proudly. The last time that I saw her, she was almost seventy and hopelessly in love with Tad, who was just a toddler then. That was back in Warren – and it's a ghost town now. Not one single living soul."

Amelia's mouth began to fall open, "A Chinese woman – in Idaho ... Tad told me once that Warren was a mining town."

"It was. I was born there," Marjorie nodded, "and Polly was smuggled into the country to be a slave girl to a rich Chinese man in San Francisco. But she ran away and made her living as a whore when she had to and she ended up there, deliriously happily married to a miner. That's all gone now and Polly's long dead. Tad rode back there while he was hunting alone one time and when he knew where he was, he looked around and found old Polly's gravestone. She died at eighty-one.

And she gave me that bowl. It's yours now if you think that it's good for something. It was part of a set of four, but over time, the rest all broke."

She sat back and saw Rebecca's slightly cautious look, "Don't worry. If that's the one who shows up here, I won't hate her just because. I'll admit that I might have been a little inclined to be that way, but I heard the part about her being poor and in a bad way. She gets points from me just for that just as Rosa did when she showed up here. I know how it feels to have nothing, the same as you, Rebecca.

And I don't care what kind of skin she has."

Marjorie sipped her own coffee and sat back with a grin for a moment before she heaved a very exaggerated sigh, "So she's not ugly, huh?"

Amelia was just finishing her coffee and she set the mug back down. She didn't say anything at first. She just shook her head.

"I don't think I can imagine anyone more lovely, though her skin is what gives a lot of people some trouble."

"A lot of people are idiots," Marjorie nodded.

"Especially where she is," Rebecca agreed, "She does not live in a very good part of that place – wherever it is."

"So," Marjorie smiled over at Amelia, "Is she good enough for you to look at?"

"The more that I think about it," Amelia said, "The more that I doubt that I could ever make my fantasy work."

She sighed, silently deciding that she'd like to be alone - with another cup of Marjorie's coffee, "I'm almost of the mind that if it turns into something between that girl and Tad, well I think that I could get to like her. She might be poor and she might not have alabaster skin but –"

'Alabaster skin?" Marjorie echoed, tilting her head at the turn of phrase.

"Aw jeepers," Amelia moaned as dramatically as possible, "I'll quit reading those novels, alright?"

Some time later, Amelia sat at her table with Rosa, sipping her last coffee of the day and admiring her bowl, so pleased just to have a treasure like that, never mind that she'd been successful at something that her mother just called seeing and that European people – mostly the kind known as witches, called scrying.

She was almost sure now that she could like the mystery girl just because, and she turned the now-empty and carefully dried bowl over to stare at the Chinese characters there in the maker's mark, wondering how far that bowl had traveled in it's time.

"I really like that look on your face, "Rosa whispered as she reached for Amelia's hand to hold under the table, "I see you getting better so fast now. I almost can't believe the change in you."

She leaned against Amelia just a little, "When I first got here, you helped me a lot to get settled and you became the best friend that I've ever had. Then Bobby tore you up so bad and ever since, I've been trying to get you to feel better.

You're not the same as me," she said, "I see you coming back and it's because of Craig. I don't want guys around me much, but now I want to get to know him better just because of this. I knew he was a great guy before just from watching as he tried to help you too."

She chuckled, "Of course, I'd be happy just to make and keep a friend who's male, but I've never met any since I've been on my own who are worth more than a dirty thought – that I'd never turn into anything more."

She finished her coffee and moved to get up, "Don't worry too much about Marjorie's rabbits. If you're not up til late tomorrow morning, I'll load up and cover for you until you show up. I promise not to scare them off."

Amelia thanked Rosa and they smiled at each other, "And thanks for holding my hand the way we used to."

When Rosa walked away, Amelia picked up the bowl to look at it again for a minute.

Then she set it down very carefully and thought about Craig once more.

---------------------------------

Kansas, 20 September, 1946

The place was living up to it's legend today, she thought.

Dodge City, Kansas has always had the reputation for being the windiest town in the United States.

Emmy-Lyn Parker knew this. She could cite the figures that said that the mean windspeed at any given time on any given day was just less than 14 miles per hour. The place was prone to blizzards in the winter and for thirteen days a year on average when the ambient temperature reached 100 Fahrenheit or higher during the summer, well, it wasn't exactly the nicest place to be – given all of the cattle yards around.

Oh, and if there was a cold front then within about a hundred miles and heading in, it was also a little famous for its tornadoes. They could blow you right out of Kansas if you were a girl with the right sort of shoes.

Right now, it was autumn, and that meant shitty weather a lot of the time, drizzling rain – when it wasn't pouring – and when the sun did choose to peek out of the heavy clouds, well ...

It didn't make you feel very warm at all.

Emmy-Lyn was nobody in Dodge City, Kansas. She came from a long line of nobodies. The word was that she was descended from one of the thousands of whores who'd come to Dodge City back when it had been one of the wildest towns on the western frontier. Of course, statistically to Emmy-Lyn, there was a better than even chance that a lot of the stupid bunch who'd shouted at her over the last week came from the same stock.

If she was in fact the great-great- granddaughter of a whore, it was her preference to want to believe that her unknown relation had been working at the famous China Doll, which was about the epitome of the many, many brothels here back then. It was only small comfort right now, but to her mind the forebears of these self-proclaimed toughs had probably made their livings on their backs lying in between cattle troughs.

TaLtos6
TaLtos6
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