Power in the Blood

by Greg Matthews

  Having heard of the cramped conditions these three lived under, Zoe invited Winnie to visit the small room she shared with Omie in a cheap boardinghouse. Winnie accepted, and brought with her some cold cuts of meat and bottled beer for a shared supper. Zoe declined the beer, and Winnie proceeded to drink the lot, without exhibiting the least sign of inebriation. After Omie had gone to bed, the women talked of personal matters, and Winnie hinted to Zoe of an extensively checkered past, despite her youth. “I’ve lost count,” she said, referring to the men she had known.

  Zoe was appalled at her casual attitude. “How can you do it, knowing they don’t love you?”

  “Oh, some of them did, for a little while anyway. There was one boy, I didn’t even sleep with him, and he said he loved me. He meant it too, I could tell.”

  “Do you hope to be married?”

  “One day, when someone who isn’t a filthy drunk asks me, or someone who isn’t a miner. I’d never marry a miner, not after dancing with our rough crowd, not me. What happened to your man?”

  “He died. A tumor of the brain, they said.” It was an easy lie.

  “You’ve got your little girl to remember him by.”

  “Yes.”

  “She’s a funny little thing. When you were down the hall in the jakes, she said to me, ‘Do you know where my brother is?’ Did you lose a baby?”

  “She’s never had a brother. I had two myself, a long time ago.”

  “Are you looking for another man to wed?”

  “No.”

  “Good, because you won’t find him where we work. No man worth the name would set foot inside there, I don’t care how lonely he is.”

  Zoe agreed.

  In her third week at Gods of the Dance, Zoe admitted that the money she earned by dancing with the customers was not enough to keep herself and Omie fed and boarded. She was already tardy with her rent for the week, and had been informed by the boardinghouse proprietress that the cash must be forthcoming in the next twenty-four hours, or she and her daughter would be out on the street, with their few belongings held in lieu of payment.

  There was only one way out of her predicament, and knowing it made Zoe feel so ill she could not eat all day. When she arrived at work, her condition was noticed by Winnie, who asked what was wrong. Zoe told her. Winnie promised to help, without specifying what it was she could do; Zoe knew Winnie was herself low on money, even though she regularly went with men to the back rooms. Zoe suspected Winnie’s wages went for drink.

  Halfway through the working evening, Zoe still had not taken the irrevocable step of selling herself. She had not been asked so far, since it had been well established among the regular clientele that Zoe did not do anything but dance. Winnie had not told Zoe that her nickname among the rest of the girls was Ironpants. Her lack of opportunity to compromise herself did nothing to ease Zoe’s mind, and she began to wonder if Winnie’s promise of aid had been sincere.

  “It’s all set.”

  Winnie was at her side, pointing across the room at a small man who was ostentatiously pretending not to look at them. “You go back with him, he won’t hurt you. He doesn’t even want to put it in, just have it pulled. I think he’s scared of catching something. Go over there and tell him you will. I’ve done him plenty of times. He’ll give you five dollars.”

  “Five dollars,” Zoe repeated mechanically.

  Winnie gave her a gentle shove. “Go on.”

  Zoe drifted awkwardly through the dancers, trying not to look at her client-in-waiting, trying to postpone the moment when she would have to speak with him. When she stood at last beside him, the little man smiled and said, “Which room?”

  Zoe noted one door without a thigh garter draped over the handle, a sign it was unoccupied. “That one,” she said huskily, and had to say it again when the little man leaned closer and bellowed “Huh?” in her ear.

  She led him inside the room, took the purple garter from a hook on the inside and hung it over the outer handle, then locked the door. The music outside came through anyway. Turning, she found her client had already unbuckled his belt and allowed his pants to drop around his boots. The fly buttons of his union suit were opened in a trice, and the man stood with legs apart, hands behind his back. His stance, with belly thrust forward, reminded Zoe of a statue, some minor political figure perhaps, captured at the instant of greatest confidence and self-satisfaction.

  “What are you laughing at, girlie? What’s there to laugh at, hey?”

  “Excuse me.”

  “You aren’t here to be wasting time like that. My time, my money. You come over here and get down on your knees, and hurry up about it, see.”

  Zoe approached him, unhappy that his tone had turned so abruptly to impatience. “Come on, come on,” she was told. “On your knees, on your knees. How else you going to get at it, hey? All right now, fish it out, fish it out, come on.”

  Zoe reached inside his underwear, and found a warm and shapeless lump she vaguely recognized as male genitalia. The little man was little all over, and probably required the service Winnie had described because he was not capable of inserting so puny a morsel of manhood into anything more commodious than a tightly closed fist. The tiny penis was coaxed from hiding at Zoe’s hesitant touch, and sprang from its flannel cave like an angry mouse, all pink and quivering.

  “Yes, yes,” encouraged the little man. “Go on, go on.”

  Zoe attempted to grasp the thing, and smothered it completely with her hand. With a feeling of numbed resignation, she pumped at her client in a lackluster fashion he evidently found stimulating in the extreme. “Yes … yes …,” he muttered, eyes clenched shut. Zoe pressed on, grateful that he appeared to find no fault in her execution of the task, and concentrated her attention on the man’s fly buttons, one of which seemed on the verge of separating itself from the cloth. Several others had been sewn with a clumsy hand and mismatched thread, probably by the straining client himself. He was producing a variety of ecstatic sounds now, and Zoe could feel his little member begin to swell and palpitate inside the tube of her fingers. She moved her head aside just in time, and daintily blotted semen from her bare shoulder while the man buttoned and buckled himself up again to face the world.

  “There you are,” he said, and dropped a five-dollar bill on the floor. “Just be more quick about it next time.”

  He unlocked the door and left. Zoe picked up the money. She wanted to shred it into tiny pieces, but could not afford such self-indulgence. The piece of paper she had humiliated herself for was folded several times, and wedged down inside her dress. She stepped outside, paused to return the garter to its hook behind the door, and made her way over to the wall of girls awaiting fresh partners.

  A dull shame covered Zoe like a cloak. She wished herself invisible, but had already seen the other girls looking in her direction and smirking. She had finally become as they were, despite a lack of true sexual intimacy in her transaction with the little man. She wondered how soon it would be before she accepted a man inside her. The thought of it brought back the queasiness she had been experiencing all day. For a minute or two she felt she might vomit in front of the hundreds of people around her.

  Winnie appeared. “A real horsecock, isn’t he?” She began to laugh, and Zoe found herself joining in. She was the next thing to a whore now, and she could either laugh about her fall, or slink away and die, and she would not do that while Omie needed her.

  Acceptance of her lot brought about changes in Zoe. She began keeping Winnie company while Winnie drank. Zoe’s room was the venue for these beery sessions. “I never drink hard liquor,” Winnie explained, “because that makes you a real drunk. Beer just makes you a tippler, that’s how I see it.” Zoe was willing to agree. Being a drunk as well as a whore would have been too much to bear.

  She had not yet consented to intercourse, but knew she would soon have to decide if that final step needed to be taken. She and Omie barely subsisted on the wage she brought home. She had sever
al times agreed to perform the sexual service her first back-room customer required, but would not use her mouth to satisfy anyone, no matter what price—sometimes as high as ten dollars—was offered. Complaints from the clientele circulated among the other girls (Zoe’s nickname was now the Handmaid) and reached the ears of Taffy, who summoned Zoe to his office.

  “Are you happy working here?”

  An honest answer would have been ludicrous. “Of course,” she said.

  “Word comes to me that you’re a woman of fastidious persuasion.”

  “I suppose I am.”

  “My business is legitimate because I don’t offer anything on these premises but dancing partners. I charge more for admission than other dance halls, and men are prepared to pay that extra cash, because they know that dancing is only where the evening starts. You’re aware that I take no cut from any gifts of cash made to my girls. That means I’m not in the whoring business, and I don’t have to pay unofficial license fees to certain persons who run this town. This is a small outfit, yet it works, and the big fellows leave me alone, but I need every man who comes in here to go out again with a smile on his face and a kind word on his lips for my little dancing establishment. Some miner goes out and tells his pals he got turned down by some snooty piece down at Taffy’s place, that’s bad for business—catch my drift?”

  “Yes.”

  “And are you prepared to play your part in keeping our customers smiling?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then go out there and prove it to me.”

  Zoe returned to the dance floor, ashamed of herself for not having told Taffy what a hypocrite he was. She had been unable to do so for the sake of keeping her job, borderline whoring though it was. That she should have to do what she did, simply because she had no money, was not fair. Zoe had never dreamed of great wealth for herself, but saw now that only riches could enable a person to do exactly as she pleased. Wealthy people did not have to guard their tongue, but could say whatever they wished. She suddenly hated the rich for their power, their ability to step over any problem, their chosen pathway paved with silver dollars and golden ingots. Zoe’s helplessness was an outrage, a crime against her human potential for advancement.

  Winnie approached her. “What happened?”

  “He says I have to fuck them.”

  Winnie saw how upset Zoe was; she had never used that word before. Zoe’s mouth was turned down at the corners with anger and shame; she was close to tears.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Fuck them.”

  “Maybe you should get out now.”

  “And do what? There isn’t anything. Even if I went somewhere else, I’d need money for a train ticket.”

  “I’ll give you some. I’ve got a little set by.”

  “I can’t take what’s yours. I’ll have to do what he wants, it’s as simple as that.”

  “Listen, you’ve already started to drink because I do, and you play five-fingered Mary for the clods who come here. Don’t be like me and go full-out whoring.”

  Zoe was taken aback. Winnie had never claimed to be anything but reconciled to her work, yet here she was, telling Zoe not to follow in her steps. Her expression was more serious than Zoe had ever seen.

  “You ladies nailed to the floor or something?”

  Tyler was beside them, displeased at their absence from the throng of paying customers.

  Winnie said, “Tyler, go put your cock in a skunk’s ass and freshen up.”

  He looked at her, then nodded. “Sure, I’ll do that, little chicken, and then you’re gonna suck it, or I tell the boss you need to get the boot, same as this one.” He jerked his thumb at Zoe.

  “I wouldn’t suck yours if you poured sugar over it,” Winnie sneered.

  “Think about it first,” Tyler advised, not in the least put out by her insults, and left them.

  “You shouldn’t have said that to him. He’s always in Taffy’s office. If he says you have to go …”

  “He won’t. I’ll give him what he wants. It wouldn’t be the first time. But you should go. Get out, I mean it, or he’ll have you sucking it too, just to be kept on here. We all do it, except you, so far. Get out, Zoe, please.… Nothing’s worth this. Do you want Omie to know what you really do in this pigsty? Do you?”

  Winnie had taken hold of Zoe’s arms and thrust her face close to hers, imploring her with eyes squinted almost shut with anguish. Zoe had never seen Winnie this way, without any of her usual brashness. The young woman before her now was the real Winnie, a soul descending, clever enough to know it, sincere enough to warn a friend away. Zoe could not refuse so nakedly heartfelt a plea, and surrendered with a sense of relief.

  “I will,” she said, and Winnie burst into tears.

  Tyler made a swift reappearance, angered by something he could not comprehend. “What goes on?” he demanded. “Get moving, both of you, and don’t let me see you talking to each other again, or it’s the boot, I’m telling you now.”

  “Oh, Tyler,” sniffed Winnie, “you big stupid galoot, go put it in a knothole, why don’t you.”

  Tyler jabbed a finger in front of Winnie’s scornful mouth. “That’s gonna cost you, I mean it.”

  “Lick my toes,” responded Winnie, and Tyler backed away, shaking his head, his smile pitying.

  “Come with me,” begged Zoe.

  Winnie shook her head. “I’m already a whore. I can pretend I’m not, but I am. There’s nowhere else for me that I haven’t already been, and been thrown out of too. You go, before it’s too late, and be a mother to Omie. Go on.”

  Winnie turned away, suddenly wearied by her outburst, and lost herself among the clumsily cavorting dancers. Zoe watched as she was whirled off in a sea of brightly colored dresses and drab miners’ clothing. Winnie did not want to be pursued; Winnie wanted to be left alone, having spoken her piece and gone. Zoe saw Tyler watching her, his expression one of gloating contempt, and wondered if all men wore this ugly mask beneath their everyday face. She knew she hadn’t the experience to pass judgment. Winnie had, but Zoe suspected that the truth according to Winnie would be too ugly, too despairing to be borne.

  She went to the dressing room, stripped off her purple gown and stepped into her own nondescript clothing. When she stepped outside, Tyler was waiting. “You’ll be back,” he predicted.

  “No,” she said, “I won’t. And you are an ugly man, down to the bedrock of your soul.”

  She left him speechless, and passed from the building through a rear door. The evening had barely begun. She would go back to their room and relieve Omie from her solitary existence after dark. She should never have chosen as she did. Winnie had made her aware of that, and Zoe would be forever grateful. Winnie, she now knew, would not prize herself free from the life she had followed since breasts grew on her. Zoe had been raped at that age, but only by one man, and the result had been Omie, blameless, blue-marked Omie, with her grandmother’s inner eye that saw more than should be allowed to anyone. Zoe would resume her role as parent and custodian. Omie’s life lay ahead; nothing should be allowed to jeopardize her future. Zoe wondered, as she passed down the street, away from Gods of the Dance, if Omie could see what was in store for herself, or only for others.

  She passed the sign before its message impinged upon her thoughts. WOMAN WANTED. HONEST JOB FOR HARD WORKER. Zoe turned and went back to be sure it read as she thought it did. The sign was carefully hand-lettered on a square of cardboard propped inside a store window. Zoe stepped closer to read a smaller message along the bottom: Apply Leo Brannan—Roelofs Hotel.

  She knew the place, and went directly to apply. The desk clerk directed her to room fourteen, with a look that told her she was not the first to arrive.

  “How many have there been so far?” she asked.

  “Dozen or so, maybe. It’s early yet.”

  She knocked on the door to room fourteen, and was told to enter. Zoe closed the door carefully and turned to meet her interviewer. She
saw him in profile, since he was staring out the window. When he faced her, Zoe saw an unremarkable man in his early thirties, neatly dressed in brand-new outdoor clothing, with a very recent growth of beard sprouting along his jaw. There was something not quite right about the way he looked at her, and Zoe decided he was slightly walleyed; it was difficult to be sure in the lamplight. She made a point not to shift her gaze from one eye to the other, in case he was self-conscious about his defect. He had the look of a man unused to mining, or any other kind of hard labor.

  “Good evening,” he said, without enthusiasm.

  “Good evening.”

  “Can you cook?”

  “I happen to be an excellent cook.”

  “Is that so.”

  “It is. I would not have said it otherwise.”

  The man made a wry face. “Then I must believe you, I suppose.”

  “That would be the correct response,” said Zoe, aware of the asperity in her voice, but unwilling to control it. She was not in the mood to be patronized by yet another inferior male, even if he had legitimate work to offer her.

  “No doubt you’re a seamstress beyond comparison.”

  “I would not make that claim for myself. I am adequate for straightforward sewing and stitching. If you need a wedding dress, I can’t help you.”

  He seemed to find this amusing. “I’m in no danger of marriage, ma’am. Are you possessed of a healthy constitution, by any chance?”

  “I am seldom sick, and I recover quickly.”

  “What line are you in currently?”

  “I am without employment, and have been so since my savings were stolen from me.”

  “Leadville is riddled with thieves, to be sure. My partners and I are of a mind to leave, and try our luck at Glory Hole. Are you able to walk with us to that place, carrying a fair share of our load?”

  “I am. Is it a cook and bottle washer you’re after?”

  “And nothing more. We have no interests other than finding a fat vein for ourselves. We are honorable persons, I assure you. I won’t offend your ears with descriptions of most of our applicants. You’ve doubtless noticed this place is a small piece of Sodom. Your duties are to be strictly domestic. We want to waste no time performing any task not directly associated with our search. Preparing food, maintaining an orderly camp, keeping the fire supplied with wood, that’ll be your job. Assuming I choose you, of course.”