Frog Music Read Free Page B

thumbs his mustache off his unsmiling mouth. “Portal,” he roars over his shoulder.
    “How long have you been here?” Jenny asks Blanche.
    “Since the winter before last.”
    “So why’ve you stayed?”
    Blanche blinks at the question. “You have no manners, miss.”
    “Oh, I’ve got some,” says Jenny, “they’re just not what you might call pretty. Diamond in the rough, that’s me.”
    Blanche rolls her eyes. “And why shouldn’t I have stayed, may I ask?”
    “Most move on through,” observes Jenny. “As if the City’s just a mouth, swallowing them whole, and the rest of America’s the belly where they end up.”
    Blanche winces at the image and pours herself more wine. California was Arthur’s choice, she recalls. Blanche couldn’t have found it on a map. All the French they got into conversations with on the ship were heading, like Arthur and Blanche and Ernest, to some big city—New York or Chicago if not San Francisco—where, it was said, the hospitality and entertainment trades paid well. “We came because we heard you can cock your hat as you please here,” she says, “and stayed for the same reason, I suppose.”
    “Who’s we? ”
    But Blanche has had enough of this style of questioning. “And you, when did you arrive?”
    “Portal!” roars Durand again.
    “I was three,” says Jenny, neat teeth nibbling her last frog leg, “but even then I was choosy about my food.”
    “What are you now?”
    “Still choosy.”
    “No,” says Blanche, “I mean—”
    A chuckle. “Twenty-seven.”
    Really? “Huh. That’s three years older than me, and I still look pretty fresh.”
    Jenny grins back at her, neither agreeing nor contradicting.
    “It must be your outfit,” says Blanche with a sigh, nodding at the pants. “It’s as odd as all get-out, but it does take years off you.”
    They’re bantering as if they’ve always known each other, it occurs to Blanche with a prickle of unease. She’s not one for making friends with women, as a rule.
    A mournful face looks through the hatch from the kitchen, and Durand snaps at him, “Ease up on the salt, Jeanne says.”
    This must be Portal. The cook makes a small, obscene gesture in Jenny’s direction.
    “You know I’m right, mon vieux ,” she tells Portal.
    “Stick to swamp-wading.” He mops his forehead with his sleeve and disappears again.
    “So come on now,” says Jenny to Blanche, greedily, “who are you and what’s your story?”
    “Hold on. Swamp-wading?” Blanche repeats.
    “I caught these last night, out by Lake Merced,” Jenny tells her, holding up a glistening bone.
    “That’s your trade? Hunting frogs?” Well, it would go some way to explain the young woman’s getup. “Don’t they give you warts?”
    “That’s pure dumb superstition.” Jenny offers her small hands for examination.
    They’re brown but smooth. “Couldn’t you work at something … I don’t know, less disgusting?”
    “Guess I don’t disgust easy,” says Jenny. “The City has three hundred restaurants, and all the French and Chinese ones need frogs.”
    “But they’re such ugly, clumsy creatures.”
    “Clumsy? You ever seen them swim?”
    Now that she thinks about it, Blanche realizes she’s never seen a live frog except on sale in barrels on Dupont Street. “But the smell, the slime—”
    “That’s fish you’re thinking of. Frogs don’t smell of anything,” Jenny corrects her, “and without a touch of slipperiness, you can’t have it both ways.”
    “Both ways?”
    “Live on land and in water as well. I call that crafty.”
    Blanche purses her mouth. “That’s my glass you’re drinking from, by the way.”
    Jenny blinks at it. “Sorry.” She gestures to Durand for another.
    “An apology at last,” marvels Blanche under her breath, satirical.
    When the proprietor slaps a clean glass down in front of her, she refills it and strips the last shred of garlicky meat from a delicate bone with her teeth. “Since