Two days later, when she was again dressing for work, Denby came back, tired and dragging. She guessed he hadn’t been able to pay for a cot and feed himself too, even with shoveling and panning the heavy beach sand all day.
“Roxanne,” he said, sitting down wearily. “Why don’t you find decent work like you did at Bonanza?” Roxanne, in the red satin dress, adjusted her garters and gave him a cold look. “Denby, at Bonanza I washed half the dirty clothes in the Klondike. I am not going to do that ever again.”
Denby grumbled, but he stayed. She supposed it was because he had no place else to go.
Late one evening a man paid his dollar and stepped up to the platform. Roxanne, weary, hardly looked at him.
“I remember you, Missy,” he whispered. That voice, so close to her ear, was strangely familiar. Roxanne took a good look at him. She knew that rat-face, that big gold watch with the huge fake ruby watchfob.
This was the man who had accosted her on the train from Kansas to Baltimore, the man who had threatened her and accused her of killing poor old Mary Willis.
Roxanne broke free of his arms and, to the amazement of the ogling watchers around the platform, she drew back one white arm and delivered a stinging slap to Ratface’s surprised mouth.
“Mike,” she called angrily, “this man insulted me.” Even though it was a frontier saloon, women were protected after a fashion. Surging through the crowd, Big Mike found the platform edge, grabbed Ratface by the legs and pulled him off. As he sprawled in the sawdust, several enraged miners—enamored of the lustrous Dawson blond—kicked him. Cursing, Ratface staggered away and stumbled into the arms of a reporter from a New York tabloid. “What happened up there, man?” cried the reporter, who was just off the boat and looking for a story.
“That goddamn wench nearly got me killed,” howled Ratface. “Because I recognized her.”
“Recognized her?”
Bruised and shaken, Ratface was glad to accompany the reporter to a nearby bar. There, he downed a whiskey and said in an ugly voice, “I was on a train when a woman died—an old woman with money, name of Mary Willis. I seen this girl steal from her purse and”—his eyes narrowed—“I seen her slip something into the old woman’s drink.”
“Did you report it?”
“No . . . she were young,” mumbled Ratface. “I didn’t want to believe it of her.”
“But when you recognized her tonight, she struck you,” mused the reporter. “Sounds like an admission of guilt, doesn’t it?”
Ratface nodded and drank another whiskey.
After that the New York reporter began making discreet inquiries about the Dawson blond.
Roxanne was not aware of this unwelcome attention. She was making money fast, but of course, it cost a lot to live. And the northern summer days were flying by. She danced her feet off; her partners became a blur of faces. She bought another dress from Flo— this one of orange satin trimmed in black lace, cut very low. She decided to shorten the skirt. The glimpse of trim legs in black mesh stockings kept the miners, eyes focused on her.
But as she danced, she worried.
Denby was in trouble.
Along with many others, Denby had decided the strip of beach sand he was working was too crowded, and he had moved his diggings some distance from town. The new beach diggings were adjacent to a claim called “tundra rights”; the original claimant had sold out to a mining company, and the mining company, insisting it owned the shoreline, ordered the diggers to pay royalties or leave. The tired, bearded men shoveling up the beach sand had ignored the order. The mining company had called in the troops, and Denby, along with hundreds of others, had been arrested. Roxanne had tried to see him, but the soldiers had refused to let her.
Now as she danced, she considered the problem. She must go to see the commandant tomorrow. Army men were notoriously susceptible; she would use all her wiles to get Denby released. Smiling mechanically as she was whirled around the platform, she planned how she would do it.
To her surprise, Denby woke her from an exhausted sleep the next morning, grinning broadly. There was no jail in Nome, no civil judge—the commandant had decided to release them. Along with the rest, Denby went back to digging up the beach sand. And Roxanne with a sigh went back to sleep, ignoring the insistent hammering outside.
The sound of hammering was constant in Nome, a kind of background noise that went on around the clock. Shacks were made of imported lumber, for the driftwood had long since been exhausted and the little stunted willow along the streams was used mainly for fuel. The hovels were going up at an alarming rate, and, with space at a premium, they were being constructed right onto the beach where the first hard gale would wash them away. Despite the construction, much of Nome was still an insubstantial tent city with the air of a carnival.
Roxanne’s life was a round of dancing and exhaustion, high prices, bad food, honky tonk music and tired feet. Most of the men who danced with her were discouraged men. They’d tried Dawson, they’d tried Nome; they hadn’t made it. They wanted to hold a girl in their arms, if only for a minute. During those short dances, they could imagine themselves back in the States, in better times, with girls of their own. Roxanne understood that. Resplendent in her orange satin dress, she smiled at them and gave them dreams. In return, they were giving her the money to go home and start a new life.
Some of them fell in love with her. It was inevitable. They looked at her with big soulful eyes and stumbled over her feet and would have spent their last dollars dancing with her, but she gently refused to let them. Roxanne liked the miners. Sometimes she loaned them money, small amounts to keep them going. Her popularity increased. Any man in Nome who dared to speak out against the Dawson blond in those days would have found his mouth silenced by a large and purposeful fist—as the New York reporter found out to his sorrow. One night he made a disparaging remark about Roxanne and found himself spitting out teeth. And it made him vengeful. He watched her from then on with ferocious interest, hanging around Big Mike’s almost nightly noting those who came to see her.
Serenely unaware of this, Roxanne whirled about the platform night after night. Eventually she managed to save nearly a thousand dollars, which was being held for her by the hotel owner, whom she trusted Soon she’d be going home. She was dreaming about it when, looking down into the crowd of avid faces below the platform she saw Buck Wentworth, looking much as he had in Kansas, only older and wearing a red mackinaw. The big farm boy stared back at her, his mouth gaping open. Roxanne finished her dance and hurried down the steps. She signaled to Big Mike that she was taking a break and pushed her way through to Buck, hugging him impulsively—to the envy of the watching miners, who could hope for no more than a dance bought for a dollar. Quickly, she guided Buck to the little bar.
“Roxanne, I couldn’t believe it when I saw you up there on that platform.” He looked at her satin dress in amazement, averted his eyes quickly from her deep decolletage. “What are you doing in Nome?”
“I might ask you the same question,” she smiled, nodding to the bartender to bring them drinks.
Buck’s ruddy face saddened. “Well, after you left, Julie and I got married and she—she lived a year, Roxanne. I think she was happy.”
Roxanne’s face clouded. Poor Julie, poor wonderful generous Julie. At least she had had a year with the man she loved.
“And after she was gone, I”—he looked sheepish—“I married Nadine.”
So flirtatious little Nadine had got him after all. “What did Nadine think of your coming to the Klondike?” she asked curiously when he fell to silently studying his glass.
He looked up. “Oh, it was Nadine that wanted to come. She kept after me until I sold everything I had. We took the boat from San Francisco, came up the inland waterway. We got to Alaska too late in the year, awful weather, blizzards every day. Spent a couple of months just trying to get our stuff over the Chilkoot Pass.”
The Chilkoot . . . how well Roxanne remembered that high
white notch in the towering wall of mountains that shut off the mighty upper Yukon Valley from the outside.
Buck seemed to be laboring under great emotional stress. He downed his drink at a gulp. Roxanne signaled for another one.
“We’d been snowed in for so long,” he said, “waiting there at Sheep Camp. Nadine was just rarin’ to go. She’d never let nothing stop her, you know that. And people warned us about that six feet of new wet snow that had fallen on that big glacier that overhung the pass.”
Roxanne’s blue eyes widened. With a shudder .she recalled how that glacier had looked suspended above her, glittering in the sunlight, beautiful and deadly and diamond bright.
“It was on Palm Sunday. The blizzard had stopped. About a hundred people started up the pass, and Nadine wanted to go. So we did. We were about halfway up when there was this awful noise. ... It was—it was like the sound of a tornado, Roxanne. Just fearful!” Roxanne could still recall that sound; her ears rang with it.
“And the wind seemed to rush out of the east at us, and all this snow and ice came down. At first we were lifted up and tossed around and then it came down like a wall falling and buried us under about twelve feet of snow.”
She was afraid of what he was going to say. “But you fought your way out?”
“No, it held you like cement. Like concrete. You couldn’t move at all.” Roxanne looked at Buck, so big with his sturdy farm-boy frame, and asked, “Then how did you get out, Buck?”
“They dug us out. They could hear us groaning and calling out from under the snow. And they dug some of us out, but it took a long time. There was so much snow. I was under there three hours. They thought I was dead when they got me out, but they were able to revive me.”
“And Nadine?”
Buck’s eyes were haunted. He gripped his glass. “It was awful, Roxanne. The people who were buried, we could hear each other. We could talk to each other under the snow, and we could hear the people up there shouting at each other and trying to find us. We could talk to them too. It was the carbon dioxide that got us. After a while you got sort of numb. You got drowsy and just went to sleep. I was talking to Nadine, and she was begging me to get her out, and I—I couldn’t move, Roxanne. I couldn’t move a muscle, the weight was so great. The last thing I remember was calling out to them to save her, and then I don’t remember anything until they brought me to. It was seven hours before they got Nadine out . . . she was dead by then.”
Wordlessly, Roxanne patted his hand. Poor Buck, he’d been through so much.
“I didn’t know what to do then.” He sounded bewildered, beaten. “I thought I might as well go on. On the upper lakes I went snowblind from all that glitter on the. ice. And when I got to Dawson, everything was staked. I spent all my time out on the Stewart River, but never found nothing.”
It was strange, she thought. Buck might have met Denby there along the Stewart, might even have talked to him, and never have known Denby was her husband.
“After a while I got a job working for a fellow who had a claim on French Hill, and saved enough money to come up here to Nome. I been working the beach sands, but it doesn’t pay much.”
Roxanne squeezed Buck’s hand. “Buck,” she said, “why don’t you go home to Kansas?”
He sighed, a big deep sigh that shook his chest. “I would, Roxanne, but I got no money.”
At a dollar a dance—and sometimes with big chunky nuggets for tips—money was easy for Roxanne to come by. And ship passages didn’t cost as much as they had at the height of the Klondike boom.
“Wait here,” she told Buck. “I’ll go talk to the boss.”
While she waited to talk to Big Mike, who was busy arguing with two heavyset drunks at the bar, Roxanne studied Buck. The Klondike had aged him, wearied him. She supposed it had done that to them all.
Memory flowed over her like a wave. How she had wanted him once! And when he had taken her, wordlessly, there on the Kansas prairie as the great tornado raged above them, how thunderous it had seemed to her. She looked at those big defeated shoulders and remembered how strong he had been, remembered the feel of his arms about her, his muscular body straining, demanding, against her own—and her own sudden, impassioned response. At that moment, she knew that he too was thinking of those wild moments beneath the storm-tossed Kansas sky, knew he was waiting for some sign from her that she remembered. She had had her first wild fling with Buck, but she did not yearn to resume where she had left off.
It came to her suddenly, in a dispassionate sort of way, that Buck was not the man she cared to grow old beside, that his were not the features she desired to see in her children. Her desire for him had been a young desire, based on inexperience and rebellion. Now that she was older, her feeling for him was warm but maternal. She had had a young girl’s crush on Buck, but she was over it now.
By the time she got back to the table, after she had persuaded Big Mike to give her a loan against her wages, she was sure of her feelings. Handing Buck the money, she said, “This will get you to Seattle, Buck. From there you can work your way home.”
His face flushed. “Gee, I can’t take money from you, Roxanne.”
“Why not?” she said. “I took money from you once and—you’d do the same for me, Buck, right now if you had it.”
“Yes,” he said sheepishly. “I sure would.” He looked wistful. “I’ve missed you, Roxanne.”
She gave him an appreciative smile, and said, “I have to get back on that platform and dance. It’s what I’m paid to do. Listen, don’t even go to sleep tonight, Buck. Somebody might roll you. Just stay up and don’t drink—walk around until morning. There’s a boat leaving for Seattle in the morning. Be on it.” With a quick, affectionate kiss she told him goodbye. There was longing in his eyes as she left him. Longing . . . but hope too. He was going home.
Briskly, Roxanne stepped up to join the other girls on the platform. She put her hands saucily on her hips and stood so that her figure in the satin dress was displayed to its best advantage. Beside her Sal, a buxom brunette, said, “What’s with you, Rox? You look like the cat that et the cream.”
Roxanne gave Sal a big smile. She felt good, having paid off an old debt. Buck could go back to Kansas now. Back to where he belonged. There he’d find some other girl. A fellow with Buck’s good looks and strong physique would always find another girl.
Chapter 28
Several days later, Roxanne decided that she had had enough of Nome. The brief northern summer was ending, and the swift transition to the dread arctic winter was imminent.
Fearfully, she watched the weather. It was chancy to delay. She had almost enough money saved up to pay off the loan from Big Mike and to buy their tickets home. Two or three more evenings would give her the rest. She had already decided to forget the plan of waiting until she had enough money to tide them over for a bit in the States. What she wanted was to get out while it was still possible.
She didn’t make it. On what was almost her last evening, a violent storm roared in from the Bering Sea across Norton Sound. Their hotel was swept away and with it all their possessions save the clothes on their backs. Roxanne would never forget that first wild storm in Nome. The lashing sea spilled into the streets and turned the shanty town into a northern Venice. People lashed their shacks with ropes to the bulkheads to keep them from being swept away. Sometimes, the ropes broke and the shacks were lifted up and carried into the sea, riding the surf until they broke up and their debris joined the broken sluice boxes and mining gear that littered the beach.
After the storm, Big Mike let Roxanne and Denby move into a tiny cubbyhole at the back of his dance hall. From there Roxanne watched bitterly as the sea became a solid ice sheet. They were frozen in, stuck for the winter. Despondent, Denby came down with typhoid. Nome’s bad sanitation had gotten to him at last. As Roxanne nursed him through it, she tried to comfort herself with the thought that once her nursing stint was over, if she danced all winter at Big Mike’s, she’d return to
the States a rich woman. It didn’t help much.
She was almost ill herself when, finally, she got Denby through the crisis and fell into an exhausted sleep to recover. She woke up to realize she’d missed a lot of dancing hours on the platform, but Big Mike hadn’t said a word. Believing in fairness, she danced free for a week and then went back to fifty percent; Big Mike glowed. But people hadn’t as much heart to dance in the bleak winter weather, so Mike expanded his bar in a makeshift way from wreckage left by the storm and salvaged from the beach, and during certain hours Roxanne became a barmaid. Mike’s business boomed. Roxanne was not only beautiful to look upon; she had a strange rapport with these rough men, for had she not endured as they had, sticking it out with back-breaking work so near the riches of Bonanza and coming away, as they had, with nothing? It was a society of the lost, the overlooked, the unwanted—all those Lady Luck had passed by, this winter crew.
Lady Luck had bypassed a good many that year, and there was trouble abroad in Nome. United States law decreed that no foreigner could stake a claim on United States soil, and Nome was part of Alaska. Many claims had been made there by Scandinavians.
The Scandinavians were especially bitter, for three of their number had made the first discovery on Anvil Creek. Claim-jumping and murder were commonplace, and only the military managed to keep an uneasy peace among the turbulent miners of Nome—sometimes by the use of fixed bayonets. The Scandinavians, feeling dispossessed, smoldered. Lars Nelgren was one of these.
He was a big man, utterly devoid of humor. Night after night he came into Big Mike’s and stared silently at Roxanne as he drank his whiskey. The way he watched her with those blank pale blue eyes made Roxanne uneasy. Lars wasn’t like the others—those who pinched her when no one was looking, or gave her sheepish admiring glances, or told her drunkenly about the girls they’d left back home. His rigid countenance never melted into a smile, and for some reason that frightened her.
These Golden Pleasures Page 34