Nick

by Michael Farris Smith

  “Here,” he said.

  “This your place?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  Judah pulled his arm away from Nick and moved toward the door.

  “Come in and eat. You look hungry,” he said.

  Nick glanced into the windows and the tables were filled with curious eyes. As soon as they stepped inside the saloon the barmaid called out to Judah and said somebody just ran through here talking about Colette’s place and the whole block being on fire.

  “What fire?” Judah said.

  He pulled out the chair beside him and motioned for Nick to sit down.

  “The fire I just told you about,” the barmaid said. “Don’t act like you don’t hear me and don’t act like you don’t know. She’s probably gonna walk in here any second and ask you what you did with the match.”

  “I didn’t do nothing with it,” he said. “If her place is on fire then it deserves to be on fire. Maybe something caught up with her.”

  “Where you been?”

  “Walking.”

  “Walking where?”

  “One more question and you can go work for somebody else.”

  “You ain’t worth a shit at lying.”

  “That don’t concern me.”

  “Like hell.”

  26

  Judah finally shushed the barmaid and told her to bring them two plates of sausage and rice and bread. We’ll be in the back. Judah moved between the tables and the locals nodded and spoke to him. In the corner of the room Judah opened a door that led down a narrow and shadowy hallway, dusted in light from a single small window at the top of the wall as if put there by accident.

  They entered a windowless room at the end of the hallway. Brick walls and a brick floor. A desk and chair on one side and on the other side another chair and a round table and a lamp. A cigar box and a foot-long opium pipe and opium lamp sat on the desk. Judah lowered his cane and moved to sit on the far side of the desk.

  Nick took a cigarette from his coat pocket. Judah opened the desk drawer and took out a box of matches and slid the box toward Nick and then Judah took a clean handkerchief from the drawer and pressed it to his nostrils.

  Nick lit the cigarette and studied the man. His hair was parted stiffly down the middle. Hard eyes and a sallow face. A patchy beard camouflaged the red and scarred patches of his jawline and neck.

  “Where’d you come from?” Judah asked. As if reading Nick’s mind.

  “I just got back.”

  “You must’ve been one of the last to come home.”

  “Yeah. I didn’t get in any hurry. But this isn’t home.”

  “Where is home?”

  “Minnesota.”

  “Why ain’t you there?”

  “I’m going to be. Eventually. I needed some air.”

  “Your sniffer must be broke cause fresh air ain’t exactly one of our best qualities.”

  “Maybe air isn’t the right word.”

  “How’d you end up here?”

  “Just luck.”

  “Is it cold in Minnesota?”

  “It’s lots of things.”

  “I cannot say that I have ever had one thought about Minnesota until right now.”

  Nick nodded. Then he motioned toward Judah’s hands and wrists.

  “Looks like you got into it.”

  Judah opened a desk drawer and took out a mason jar and a tall green bottle. He set them on the desk and then he lifted the pipe, removed the ceramic pipebowl, and with the knife he scraped away the remaining ash.

  “That shit burned me up. Inside and out.”

  Footsteps thundered along the hallway and then the barmaid came into the room. She set the plates on the desk. Short spirals of hair sprang from her head and she stood with her thick hip propped out.

  “Well?” she said.

  “Well. What?” Judah answered.

  “You heard what I said about Colette?”

  “Me and the deaf.”

  “Did you do it?”

  “Do what?”

  “You know what. Burn down her place and everything close to it.”

  “Do I look capable?”

  “Hell I don’t know.”

  “Then there’s your answer. Now go on.”

  She huffed. Shifted her weight from one leg to the other. He raised his hand and pointed at the door. She gave Nick a cross look as if to make him feel included and then she left them.

  “I should go,” Nick said.

  “Go where?”

  Nick shrugged.

  “You got to eat.”

  “It looks like you have some things to deal with.”

  “I got plenty to deal with without worrying about burning down a goddamn whorehouse.”

  Judah attached the pipebowl to the bamboo stem and then he struck a match and lit the bulb. He gazed at the singular, bluetipped flame, waiting on the warmth and he sensed that warmth inside him, through his battered lungs and along his redscarred arms and hands and creeping through the layers of flesh and muscle that had carried tiny bits of shrapnel and poisonous gas molecules home. He breathed a heavy breath and his lungs seemed to rattle, so shaken for so long by the closerange explosions, explosions that had blown helmets from their heads and lifted them from their feet and peeled their eyes and sometimes delivered them to another world and sometimes inflicted the agony of having to remain in this one. He shifted in the chair and looked at the red skin of his arms and hands and he felt the burning and saw the gas explosions and the heavy green clouds that settled into a dirty yellow haze and blistered and burned everything and everyone and fumbling with his mask and fighting one of his own when there were not enough masks and the gas crawling into his eyes and ears and brutalizing his skin and killing what was left of the land. And then once the cloud was gone the gas settled into mud puddles and drinking water and a poisonous sip or a misstep and there it was again once you thought it was gone like some nightmare that chased you all the way to the other side.

  The lamp heated and he opened the cigar box and took out a folded napkin. Carefully he opened the napkin and picked up several opium seeds between his finger and thumb. He placed the seeds onto the pipebowl and he leaned to his side and guided the pipebowl over the stream of heat rising from the lamp. He rested his head close to the pipebowl and waited for the seeds to vaporize and in a moment they heated and a bluegray mist rose. He closed his eyes and inhaled and inhaled and inhaled. The vapor filled his nostrils and he sucked it into his mouth and both mind and body sensed the deadened relief that was coming. When the vapor had made its way into him he pushed the pipe and bowl to the center of the desk. Moved his hand to his face and felt the risen scar that began around his eye. He trailed his fingers along the scar line and felt the slash of the blade and he waited peacefully for the numbing.

  Nick picked up the plate and fork and ate. Judah lifted the bottle and poured half a glass of whiskey.

  “You know Colette?” Nick asked.

  “I know her.”

  “The madam.”

  “Yeah. The madam.”

  “What do you have to do with what happened?”

  “Not a goddam thing. Like I already said.”

  “Then why are you being asked about it?”

  “Because she’s my wife. Or she used to be. I don’t know what she is now.”

  Judah lifted the glass and sipped. Then he laid his head back on the chair and stared at the ceiling, his eyelids getting heavy as the drug worked through his body.

  Nick tore a piece of bread and held it between his fingers. He didn’t want to ask. He had heard the answer. And he was almost certain that he wouldn’t believe whatever Judah told him. But he asked anyway.

  “Did you do it?”

  Judah raised his head. Lowered his eyes to Nick. His placid expression was blotted out by a cloud of anguish and he seemed to become something else. Something capable of anything. He glared at Nick and in a gravelly voice he said everything that has been done or will be
done was set into motion by her.

  27

  Half of the block burned to the ground and left a fractured, charred, smoldering ruin. The other half stood crippled and desolate. The fire had burned through the night and seemed barely affected by the efforts to drown it out and almost as if it were simply bored of the festival it had created, the fire lessened at daybreak. By midmorning the tired men and women who had struggled against it sat down on the sidewalk across the street and drank beer and ate bread with smutty hands.

  Colette had watched it all night. Never sitting. Leaning against a wall half a block away. She wouldn’t answer the curious sorts who walked up beside her and asked ridiculous questions about what was going on or how long had it been going on or was anybody hurt. She wouldn’t even look at them, only stared ahead until they quit talking and walked away. The flames illuminated all of Frenchtown and caused great, shifting shadows and in the hot firelight her features became torchlike, flames dancing in her eyes, her hair down and spread wide across her shoulders and her cheekbones turned red and even her shadow behind her seeming to grow with her heated anger. All night she had stood there and felt the horror of the blackened bodies and felt the loss of her house and the loss of the adjoined buildings where mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers made their home and she felt the anxiety of those fighting against it, seemingly no way to win. And she felt the relief when the fire began to weaken at dawn and as she stood there in the morning light, staring at the devastated scene. She replayed it all.

  This is where I came when I believed I was alone, she thought. When I believed Judah was dead and gone. This is where I came and where I worked to forget and this is where I became someone of my own and this is where I tried to bury you in that faraway grave where they told me you were buried. Because this is where I became someone new because you left me no choice. Because this is where I decided to let you go, Judah. Where I decided you were dead but I wasn’t and there had to be something for me. And this is where I walked the stairway or sat at the bar or stared out of my window all hours of the night because I could not sleep because I was imagining your shadow in the doorway.

  That was that.

  She imagined the girls and the men and the tall bottles of absinthe on the slick bar and Leopold on the baby grand and the frivolity of exchange and all the ridiculous habits that precluded it. She thought of the power she had grasped by moving her hips the right way with the right men in the right offices and she thought how easy and bountiful it had been to please those who wanted pleasing and she had filled her days and nights surrounded by the beautiful ones, they all wanted the beautiful ones, the men and the women, and they paid and paid for the beautiful ones.

  And then one day she had been sitting at the end of the bar, smoking a cigarette and sipping rye when she looked across the chandelier-lit room and again saw Judah’s shadow in the doorway except that it was not the gray, murky image of him. But him. Back from the dead and staring at her not with desire or redemption of a life lost but with contempt for what he had learned she had become and what she sold and who she sold it to. And then how without a word or a gesture he had turned and walked away and through the windows she saw his broken gait as he crept with a cane and his leaning head and uneven shoulders and she had felt it all in that moment, the separation and the pain inflicted upon him and the pain inflicted upon her and the quiet space when she believed that the death which had separated them was nothing as acute as this moment of recognition.

  She moved closer to the devastation. Fire hoses continued to spray and a black soot river ran down the side of the street and men and women wanted to cross over into the ruins and search for anything but policemen wouldn’t let them. At the end of the street was a pile of bags that held what remained of the burned, mutilated bodies and a whitehaired priest knelt beside them with his head bowed in prayer and a Bible tucked under his arm. Here and there stood clusters of women holding their children and crying and then Colette saw one of her own girls standing alone, staring blankly at the space where her second floor window used to be.

  She approached her. Flakes of ash had settled in her bobbed blond hair. Her eyes pink and swollen. She held her arms wrapped as if she were cold.

  “You’ve been out all night?” Colette asked.

  “I ain’t got nowhere to go.”

  “Yeah. Me neither.”

  “Who all got burnt up?” the girl asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  The girl sniffed and wiped her nose on the back of her hand.

  “What am I supposed to do?”

  “Whatever you want. Employment won’t be a problem for you.”

  “I don’t wanna go nowhere else.”

  “You don’t have a choice.”

  “Please let me go with you,” she said and she reached out and held on to the madam’s arm. Colette let her hand stay there a moment and then she pulled away.

  “You’re gonna have to figure it out,” she said. “I got my own problems.”

  “I ain’t going to the cribs, Miss Colette,” she said. Her voice becoming shaky. “I ain’t doing that.”

  “That’s up to you.”

  “I can’t do that,” the girl said again. “Please.”

  Colette looked at her. The frantic eyes and wild hair. There was youth but she saw how rapidly it was leaving her.

  “Where are the others?” she asked.

  The girl shrugged and said some of them is already working. Jackie said no fire was gonna keep her from a good night’s work. But I don’t know where they all are.

  Colette took one more long look at the girl and then at the destruction. She lifted her dress and removed a stack of folded bills from her kneehigh stockings. She gave the girl some money and said go to the cribs or don’t go to the cribs. I don’t care.

  The girl took the money and Colette knew this would be the last she saw her. Money in their hands always led them down darker roads and in two weeks’ time the girl would have become a slave to someone or something else and once the girl sank lower the madam knew she would not want her. But that was of no concern as Frenchtown never ran out of the ready and willing and she would have a full stable again when she wanted. The young woman nodded and wiped her eyes and smiled at Colette and said I’ll see you soon and walked away. Colette watched her until she made the corner and the tinge of sympathy disappeared. She then looked across the street and noticed a particular policeman whom she had served well and knew that he would tell her all that he knew. But she never crossed the street, never made a step, as a thick and muscular arm squeezed her around the neck and a big hand covered her mouth and the big arms snatched her and dragged her into a nearby alley as the heels of her boots skittered helplessly and she disappeared from the street like the smoke into the sky.

  28

  Judah offered Nick a small apartment above the saloon. He offered him a job in the saloon but Nick said no. If I need money I’ll have it sent from my father. Judah gave him a long and blank stare and when Nick asked what was wrong, Judah said that’s the first time I’ve ever heard anybody say that.

  Nick knew the apartment offer was out of necessity more than kindness. Judah needed somebody close. He needed someone like him. The winter dark came early and he ate dinner with Judah in the saloon and then helped him to the backroom to smoke or up the stairs to lie down. When he held Judah’s arm or touched his shoulder he felt the knob of bone and halfexpected the creak of an old door when Judah stepped or reached. And Nick had noticed that Judah talked less as the day dragged on and slipped into night, seeming to retreat into his pain and into the numbing as the moon rose in the sky.

  Judah lived across the hall and Nick heard him all hours of the night, coughing and sometimes crying out from the pain or from dreams or from both. He knocked on Judah’s door and asked if he needed help but the only thing Judah ever asked for was the opium pipe and seeds and Nick would hustle down into the backroom and bring it for him. Judah would crack open the door a
nd stick out his blotchy hand and take it and close the door without a word. And then Nick would sit in the hallway. Listen to him shuffling across the floor. Listen to the bump of a chair and hacks and coughs and he would wait until it died down. When he was certain Judah had smoked and made it back to the bed he would open the door and cross through the shadows and go into Judah’s bedroom. Lean against the doorway and make sure he was sleeping in the bed and not down on the floor passed out or dead.

  When he was in the street or in a café or anywhere he heard their names. Colette and Judah. There seemed to be no mystery as to who was involved and he had gathered that some kind of rivalry or revenge or hate or all of it and more had led to the brothel being burned to the ground and taking half a city block with it. And she got burnt up with it, some argued. Hell no, others said. She took her shit and hit the trail. Don’t matter. Either way she’s gone. Ain’t nobody seen her since. The waiter told the cook that he wished all the brothels would burn to the damn ground and the cook said if you burned them all to the ground you might as well burn up the whole damn place and the waiter said I wouldn’t give a shit if we did. In the chatter in the diner he listened to the waiter and the cook and the men sitting at the counter both condemn and laud the selling of bodies and he heard the anger over the death of those who weren’t whores but who only had the misfortune of living next to them and somebody cried out that the only way to get the whores out of the neighborhood was to do just what had been done and another stood and swore that everydamnbody in here pretending to be holy as Mother Mary has spent at least one paycheck in the cathouse and the diner roared with laughter and attention returned to plates of eggs and bacon.

  Nick looked for her as he moved about. His eyes up into random upper floor windows, thinking he may catch her looking down at him. Walking along the river and moving close to figures sitting on the benches with their scarves wrapped high around their necks and their hats pulled down, thinking her eyes may peek between the fabric and find his. He looked for her in the shadows of the alley and in the red lights from brothels and he imagined her as if the disappearance was some secret between them and all he had to do was step the right way at the right time and she would be there waiting for him. Waiting to divulge what had transpired between her and Judah. She’s my wife, Judah had said. Or she used to be. I don’t know what she is now. Not who, Nick thought. But what. What is she now?