“I just mean, how much of this is the thrill?” His hands were moving on my legs.
“I guess we’ll never know.”
So, yeah, that was the second time. Probably Alexei was the one I was really sticking it to when I made a spectacle of myself with Jones.
House of Virtue
Missoula
March 1929
A year and a half after Marian’s haircut
The day had been warm, and a sense (not quite a sound) of buried melting had prevailed, of subterranean trickling beneath the snow. The river, open at its middle, flowed black and narrow between broad white banks.
But in the evening the city had contracted and hardened again. Clouds came over the mountains, promising more snow.
A delivery truck rattled across the railroad tracks, away from downtown, its side panels advertising stanley’s bread and cake. At the wheel, Marian kept to the low gears, followed frozen ruts packed by earlier wheels, calmly countering slips and slides. She must not get stuck in snow or mud, must generally avoid drawing attention to what an unusual delivery driver she made, a girl of fourteen, tall now as some men but skinny in overalls and a sheepskin jacket and a brown muffler knitted by Berit, cap pulled low over her cropped hair. The police got their cut to leave her alone, but no good came from indiscretion. She delivered bread and cakes, yes, but also, tucked under Mr. Stanley’s signature calico covers in the delivery baskets, were bottles.
Bottles had been the answer.
After she’d cut off her hair and could be taken for a boy (voice kept to a mumble, face turned to her shoes), farmers sometimes hired her as a cheap hand, but picking apples and sawing pumpkin stems brought little income. Shelving books brought less. Her only ideas for making the kind of money she needed (opening up an auto mechanic’s shop, for example) were not the kinds of things a fourteen-year-old girl, no matter how audacious, could do.
As she lay on the sleeping porch after a day of farmwork, sunburned and with aching arms, a wisp of recollection had come to her. Caleb had once sold empty bottles to a moonshiner up the valley. He’d earned enough to keep himself in candy for weeks, but the work had struck him as drudgery. I’m not digging around in the garbage for that old coot, Caleb had said. But Marian didn’t mind digging.
Potshot Norman, the moonshiner was called. She knew his cabin and the shed where he kept his still. Walking in the woods, she’d smelled the hot mash. So she had gathered her nerve and knocked on his door, which cracked open to reveal a profusion of wild white hair and beard around startled, darting eyes.
“Eh?” he said as though she’d already spoken and he’d misheard.
“Need any bottles, mister? I can bring you bottles if you need them.”
He nodded, chewing his lips. “Always need bottles, don’t I.”
Dimes for gallons, nickels for quarts, two and a half cents for pints. She rustled in the alleys behind the speakeasies and soda shops and pharmacies, around the city dump, in the chaotic backyards of drunks. She filled sacks with empties, green and amber and clear. Some had labels stuck on them. Premium Canadian whiskey. Premium English gin. Most were probably counterfeit printed by bootleggers, but some were likely authentic, even if the booze would have been cut with water and grain alcohol. Potshot, scrupulous in his way, boiled off the labels before he poured in his white lightning. Marian traded her sacks for bills and coins. Eventually Potshot told her he didn’t need any more bottles for a while and sent her to see Mr. Stanley, the baker, who bought what she had, amused.
One day Mr. Stanley stood smoking in the back door of his bakery while she pulled her clattering sacks from Wallace’s car. (Baking bread, cooking mash—smells that might reasonably be confused, though Stanley had other stills squirreled away around the valley.) Stanley said, “How’d you like to expand your business, boyo?”
“I’m always looking for business,” she said. A small crisis of conscience: “But you know I’m not a boy.”
“It’s a girl under there?” He bent to peer beneath her cap brim. Narrowed eyes, a cloud of smoke, flour dust on hairy forearms. She was sure he was putting her on, indulging her disguise. “All right, well, how’d you like to expand your business, girly?”
* * *
—
By the time she crossed the railroad tracks, Marian had visited six houses, a veterans’ club, two doctors’ offices, and four restaurants. The dusk sky sagged with unfallen snow. At each stop she delivered baskets, some with only baked goods, some only liquor, some both. She knocked on doors; she descended into cellars; she took money from inside certain birdhouses and certain hollow trees and left bottles behind. Stanley didn’t let her make the big deliveries to speakeasies and roadhouses, which required more stealth and odder hours and ran the risk of hijacking. He kept her to the small orders. A pouch strung on a cord around her neck slowly filled with bills and coins, and after each round she handed the cash to Stanley, who peeled off a few bills for her, which she took home and deposited in one of her hiding places in the cottage (hollowed-out books, a pouch buttoned to the underside of the armchair). Stanley didn’t mind she was a girl. His other bottle men had stolen booze, tried to steal business. She didn’t.
The previous summer, she’d told Wallace she intended to leave school after her fourteenth birthday.
He’d been in his studio. He set down his brush, wiped his hands with a rag. “But why, Marian?” he said. “There is so much to learn.”
“I want to work. I’ve already started driving Mr. Stanley’s delivery truck.”
Wallace settled into an armchair, gesturing her into the other. “I’d heard.”
He wouldn’t interrogate her about what she delivered. He wouldn’t want to know; he’d already know anyway. She said, “The law says I only have to finish eighth grade, and it’s not fair you’re still having to take care of us when you didn’t want us. I’ll pay you good money for room and board.”
He blinked as though she had clapped her hands in front of his face, waking him from a hypnotized state. “What do you mean I didn’t want you?”
“You’ve been doing a good deed. You didn’t choose to live this way.”
“But it’s not true. Marian, you are wanted.”
“You didn’t want the responsibility.”
He gazed around at his unfinished paintings, his mess of brushes and paint tubes. Unconsciously, he checked his watch as though in hopes of remembering a conflicting appointment. “And what do you imagine doing without an education? Driving Stanley’s truck forever?”
She’d told him a thousand times already. “I’m going to be a pilot.”
He drooped. “Still this?”
“I have to save up for flying lessons, but I’ll pay you five dollars a week for room and board. If I don’t, if I come up short even once, I’ll go back to school.” She didn’t tell him she’d already asked all the pilots in town if they would give her lessons and none would. There was a real airfield now, out by the fairgrounds, with a few small hangars and offices and a fuel pump.
Her teacher had not arrived yet, but he would. She knew he would.
She could see the promise of five dollars a week had snagged Wallace’s interest, but he only echoed, “A pilot.” He thought for a minute, his paint-flecked hands resting on his knees. “I know you like planes, but, Marian—I don’t mean to be unkind, but even if you learn to fly…to what end? You want to be like that Brayfogle woman, living hand to mouth? Getting old with no house, no children, nothing settled? That swell of a husband of hers—if they were even married, and I doubt it—will run off at some point, and then where will she be? What do you think becomes of a woman like that?”
“I have to be a pilot. I’ll do it whether I go to school or not.”
“Then go to school.”
“You ran away to be an artist even though it wasn’t practical.”
�
�It was different for me.”
“Why should it be?”
“Don’t be obtuse, Marian. Because I’m a man.”
“Don’t worry about me. You never have. Why start now?”
He was looking at one of his canvases: a hillside of flaxen grass, a band of cloud. “If you and Jamie hadn’t come…” He trailed off, started again. “Maybe sometimes I wished I were completely unencumbered, but I would have been worse off if I were. I’m trying to say I think it was a good thing you came, that I had to be responsible for someone, even if I wasn’t always…attentive.” He sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose, closing his eyes. “Marian, the truth is, I’m ashamed, but I don’t have it in me to make you go to school next year if you’re set against it.”
“You don’t?”
“No.”
She jumped up, bent to embrace him, kiss his cheek. “Thank you, Wallace. Thank you so much.”
“Don’t thank me, child. I’m failing you.”
In Stanley’s truck she was on her way to Miss Dolly’s parlor house. The first few lazy snowflakes sifted through the headlights.
Miss Dolly, a glum, melted candle of a woman, had dug in and kept her bordello running on West Front Street after the cleanup of 1916 shut down almost all the others, her soiled dovecote cooing discreetly for some years on a block otherwise gone dark and quiet. Girls from the other houses, houses that closed, had to work out of sooty, lightless basement cribs, poking their heads up into the alleys like lascivious gophers. Miss Dolly’s girls would have done anything to avoid going to cribs and worked hard, though they resented the debt Dolly kept them in for rent and meals, even for laundry and bathwater and heating their curling irons on the stove and every other thing she could think of.
Miss Dolly held on downtown even after the Chinese left and took with them their noodle shops and laundries and the herbalists who kept buns out of the girls’ ovens. She held on after mechanics and upholsterers and the Salvation Army moved in down the block, after the once-fine parlor house next door was bought by a sausage maker. She kept her girls out of the front windows where they’d been accustomed to sit and rap on the glass at passersby with knitting needles or thimbles. (In the good old days, what a marvelous rattle went up on payday nights, as loud as miners’ hammers and even more profitable. Miss Dolly could get misty-eyed just at the sound of glasses clinking or dice in a cup.) A fire, for which she at times darkly blamed the police and at times a bankrupted rival and at times the anti-liquor, anti-vice women, finally brought about her relocation to an unobtrusive brick house on the north side of the tracks. There was no sign out front to advertise female boarding, let alone female companionship. Customers knew to come in the back.
Near as she could get to Miss Dolly’s, Marian parked the truck and unloaded a runnered sled from the back that she piled with the two baskets containing the weekly order. Down the darkening street she trudged, pulling the sled behind her.
One of the girls, Belle, opened the kitchen door. “You!” she said to Marian. “Come in!” She was not done up for callers but wore a plain blue drop-waisted dress with wool stockings and a gray shawl, her hair pulled into a low knot. Only her heavy rouge and kohl gave any suggestion of her profession.
Marian had one of the baskets in her arms. “There’s another one on the sled.” Belle scooted outside in her slippers, came chasing back in with the second basket, herding Marian into the kitchen.
“Good thing you came. We’d almost run out,” Belle said. She said this every time, apparently oblivious to the precision with which Miss Dolly doled out each week’s supply. Miss Dolly also bought imported booze from a real legger, actual premium Scotch and gin for the big spenders, but most of her customers were happy enough to drink Mr. Stanley’s cheap moon. “Sit and visit for a while. Dolly’s not here.”
Marian should have been on her way, but she was always flattered by the attentions of Miss Dolly’s girls. She took off her coat and hat and sat at the table. “Did Dolly leave money for the order?”
“I’m sure I don’t know.” Belle peeked into one of the baskets and squealed, flinging back the calico cover. A custard tart rested on top of the bottles. In the other basket, with even greater delight, she discovered half a dozen cream puffs, each sealed in its own envelope of waxed paper. Presents for the girls from Mr. Stanley, who came around from time to time. “Let’s have one,” Belle said. “Just one, we’ll split it.” She was already up, fetching a knife. Once she’d sliced the puff in two, she pushed her half greedily into her mouth with manicured fingers. Marian took a bite of hers. Both the pastry and the cream, cold from the truck, were firm and delicious.
Belle, still chewing, squinted at her. Miss Dolly’s girls were so accustomed to done-up faces and curled hair that Marian’s boyishness struck them as improper and troubling. Belle reached out and brushed at Marian’s hair, trying to part it with her fingertips. “I’ve told you, you ought to quit chopping this so short,” she said. “It looks funny.”
“I like it.”
“Your uncle doesn’t mind you cutting it?” Wallace was known at Miss Dolly’s.
“He doesn’t try to stop me. Our housekeeper does. She hides the scissors.”
“You cut it yourself?”
“No, my friend Caleb does.”
Belle hitched one shoulder flirtatiously. “Must be a good friend if you let him cut your hair. I don’t let anyone touch mine except Cora. She has a way. I keep telling her she should quit and become a hairdresser.”
Marian thought of her last haircut, of Caleb looking at her naked torso afterward while her neck and shoulders were still itchy with trimmings.
Around Miss Dolly’s girls, she was all sharp curiosity. She observed how they fussed with their cobbled-together little frilly outfits, how they switched in a blink from coquettish posing and vamping to bored slumping and lounging. The pull, the density of their femaleness intrigued her, even if she preferred pretending, more or less, to be a boy. Dolly’s girls were gossipy and lazy and hard, but something about them seemed important. They were a clue to a mystery she had not quite identified.
For a time, Caleb’s price had been only to kiss her. She had let in his tongue, the odd muscular wetness of it. After her most recent haircut, he had calmly unbuttoned her shirt and pushed it off her shoulders, gazed at her naked chest. She’d felt like those paintings of Jesus where he was flayed open, his heart exposed and radiating light. When Caleb had reached out and brushed her nipple with his thumb, though, she’d shoved him away, and he’d laughed the way he did after he’d picked a pocket.
Belle got up and went to the kitchen sink, wetted her hands before working more forcefully at Marian’s hair, parting and smoothing. “It’s no good,” she said. “I need a comb and some brilliantine. Wait a minute.”
Alone in the kitchen, Marian listened to Belle’s footsteps retreat up the stairs. She heard a distant murmur of voices. A pot on the stove gave off oniony steam. Beside the stove, a door led to the basement stairs, and this opened. Mrs. Wu came in. She was very thin with a small, round face and hair shot through with gray. She glanced at Marian without surprise, crossed to the stove, and stirred the stew with a wooden spoon. Then she drew a few bills from the pocket of her apron and handed them over, saying, “From Miss Dolly,” before she disappeared back down to the basement.
Footsteps tumbled chaotically from above. Belle burst into the kitchen. “Come upstairs. No one’s here but a couple girls. We’ll do you over, dress you up, just for fun. What do you say? Say yes.”
“Yes,” Marian said. Stanley’s truck could wait. She only had a few more stops to make.
“Good!” Belle dug a bottle out from under the custard tart. Two inches of moon went into a tumbler. She topped off the bottle with water, corked it, nestled it back in place.
Upstairs, Belle pulled Marian along a dark hallway. She shoved open a door i
nto a cramped box of rosy light: a pink scarf over a lamp, pink wallpaper spun through with roses and lilies. Cora lay on her stomach on an unmade bed in a robe, reading a book with her ankles up and crossed. A girl who called herself Desirée was sitting at a vanity in her step-ins, tiny but plump, her face puckered tight like a bud, black hair loose down her back as she brushed it. There was barely room for all of them. Bits of lace and silk dangled like vines from the drawers of a small dresser.
“Whatever shall we do with her?” Belle said about Marian.
They set upon her, had her clothes off in a heartbeat. They were used to nakedness and were not bothered, so neither was she, though they laughed at her for wearing boys’ drawers. Belle took a gulp of moon and handed the tumbler to Desirée, who drank and handed it to Cora, who passed the dregs to Marian, who swallowed them. When she was younger, before Caleb started cutting her hair, she’d often swum naked with him and Jamie, but while that’d had a prelapsarian purity, this felt like a ritual stripping down, an assumption of blankness. She clutched her money pouch against her bare chest. “You think we’re after your money?” said Desirée. “Pardon me while I laugh.”
“I can’t lose it, that’s all.”
“We make our own money.”
“How much?”
“Depends. More than you, I bet.”
Theirs was a form of income Marian had never considered. Gilda, Caleb’s mother, always seemed dirt poor, but who knew how she’d fare without the booze.
“Getting diddies, aren’t you finally?” said Cora. Irish accent.
“Where?” said Desirée. “I don’t see any.”
“They’re there,” said Cora. “Fetch your magnifying glass.” To Marian, she said, “Are you bleeding yet?”
Great Circle: A Novel Page 13