Hop Alley

by Scott Phillips

  “My illusions are dead as regard prospecting,” I told her. “But there’s money to be made from them that succeed. I’ve leased a studio in Golden, and if all goes well there, I might open one in Denver.”

  Did I believe as I said it that the notion of a comfortable living—prior to taking up company with me, after all, she had lived the life of a wealthy woman—would affect a change in her outlook? Yet that had been my ostensible motivation in leaving the colony to prospect for gold, even if a desire to escape the strictures of Greeley had played a large role therein. And since my return I had been reminded of certain aspects of Maggie’s personality that had also pushed me toward a life of solitude, aspects I had allowed myself to forget during my months of trial.

  “All right, then,” she whispered, sounding quite as cold as she had earlier at our—her, rather—cottage, and she extracted herself from my embrace, slipped from between the covers, and dressed.

  “If you’ve a change of heart, stop by in the morning. Otherwise, be out of the colony by midday or I’ll have you charged with desertion and who knows what else.”

  At that she left as quickly as she could while maintaining a discreet quiet, and I fell asleep rather quickly, having come to a conclusion the moment she was out of the room.

  WHEN MORNING CAME I descended, having slept strangely well, and tucked into my grits and the single egg offered per boarder at the breakfast table, and wondered whether there was a correlation between the colony’s poor performance and its inability to properly feed its members. The local blacksmith, a reformed drunkard named Clyde MacPherson, ate with me, the other boarders having wakened earlier.

  “I never reckoned you being dead,” he said. “You never did much take to Meeker’s notions, did you?”

  “Not much,” I allowed.

  “How’d you come to land here, then? The little lady?”

  “Something like that.”

  “I don’t mind telling you she’s an awful pretty thing.”

  “That she is.”

  “But truth to tell if I was still a drinking man, I wouldn’t want to be here. Chief advantage it has for me is there’s not a drink to be had for twenty miles in any direction.” His nose was still pocked and scarred from his days as a soak, and he had once told me that his missing lower incisors had come out one night while he was passed out in an alley, yanked by a dentist he’d sucker-punched after an argument about the pope of Rome.

  I told him about my encounter with Mrs. Dunwoody, and he assured me it was nothing personal on her part. “She’s lost her reason, like as not she didn’t even know it was you. Poor old reverend, she started hearing voices and saying things that weren’t very much in line with proper Methodist thinking.”

  He finished off his breakfast and took his leave. “You’ll be leaving, then?”

  I told him that I would, and alone at that.

  “I wouldn’t worry about her, she’s been right about distraught since you’ve been gone. Just let her know where to join up with you once you get settled and you can lay odds she’ll find you.”

  I shook his hand and told him I hoped that was true, but that I doubted it. Before I left town I pilfered a sheet of paper and an envelope from the unattended room of the boardinghouse’s operator and borrowed a pencil from MacPherson.

  DEAR MAGGIE,

  I am sorry that our reunion was less than happy. If you wish to return to me, you have but to proceed to my photographic studio at Washington Avenue and 12th Street in Golden. If you do not wish to do so, I do not hold any grudge against you. Do not ask me to rejoin you in Greeley.

  With great affection,

  Your Bill

  IN JULY, HAPPILY ensconced in my new home and studio, and doing good business, I received a letter from her. Since I had instructed her to come to Golden if she wanted to reconcile, I presumed that the letter was a plea to return to Greeley, and so I burned it. I burned the one that came the week after that, and all those that followed—their frequency increasing until, by the first week of August, I received one every other day—until they stopped, abruptly and for good, the second week of August.

  A month or so later, when I had decided to move the studio from Golden to Denver, I was seized by remorse and returned to Greeley hoping to persuade her to come with me; she was long gone, however, with no forwarding address. And that, I thought, was it for me and Maggie, two stubborn souls who spent a bit less than a year in one another’s company.

  SIX

  HOP ALLEY AFLAME

  These thoughts of love’s labors lost had put me into a decidedly melancholy state on my drive back to Denver, and I was shortly distracted by the smell of smoke and the visual signs of a conflagration. The flames, or rather their glow, reflected into Denver’s heavily particulate atmosphere, were visible well before I reached town, and having no special attraction awaiting me at home I put the horse and carriage away and began wandering in the direction of the fire.

  Some distance before Hop Alley the sounds of screaming and shattering vitrines could be made out, and at Twentieth and Market, where normally I would have expected to find any number of harlots advertising their wares on the sidewalk, there was not a soul to be found excepting Miss Mary Dolan, late of Boston, who remembered me from our last meeting. Her pasty face glistened oily in the light of the moon as she took my arm in a gesture of great familiarity.

  “Look at that, Sean, fireworks, just like you promised.”

  “In a manner of speaking, Miss Mary.”

  “So I’m thinking to myself, maybe we ought to stay right here in Denver if there’s fireworks same as in Boston.”

  She still clung to my arm as if we were about to take a stroll somewhere, though we stood rooted to the spot. “I’m not Sean,” I said.

  “Sure you are,” she said with a fond laugh. A cry rose from the disturbance, a lone, sorrowful yell soaring over that of a crowd, and a shot was fired. Then the crowd’s voice swelled as the solo voice sharpened and then cut itself off.

  “Any idea of what’s drawn the crowd over there,” I asked her, though I expected I knew the answer.

  “I want to tell you something, Sean, it’s only fair and just that you know before you take me on as your wife. Since my arriving here in Colorado I have done some things of which a good girl mightn’t be proud.”

  “I’m sure it’s all right.” I was seized by a desire to return home and forget about the fire and the ruckus, read about it in the newspaper the next morning.

  “No, Sean, you don’t understand.” She squeezed my arm. “I’ve sold my virtue in the mining camps and here in the city. Oftentimes for the mere price of a drink or a dose of morphine.”

  “That’s what priests are for,” I offered, assuming that she was at least by birth a member of the Church of Rome.

  “What about our babies yet to come, Sean? How can I cradle them, knowing what I done?” She looked on the verge of tears; those yet-to-be conceived, imaginary babes were quite real to her, and feeling my pity about to dissolve into melancholy I took my leave, promising to visit her again soon.

  AS I PASSED through an alleyway leading to the Chinese Quarter I was nearly bowled over by a shaven-headed youth, moving with the speed and intensity of purpose of a tomcat with a string of sizzling petards tied to its tail. At the end of the alley he turned northward, and before I had turned back around a gang appeared at the mouth of the alley in pursuit. Several of them carried lanterns, and as they approached the man in front yelled to ask me which way he’d gone.

  “Southward,” I said as they passed, and was gratified to see that to a man they turned in that direction at the alley’s mouth, not a one of them troubling to glance over his shoulder to see if I’d lied.

  I exited to Seventeenth Street to a scene of violent depravity. Laundries stood in flames as the fire brigade strove to contain the damage, and small groups of young Chinamen brawled with those of young whites, though the numbers in these groups were uneven and mostly favored the white boys. A
midst the fighting ran individual rioters, some of them holding aloft articles looted from the various establishments of the quarter; several brandished opium pipes and what appeared to be snuffboxes, and others ran about laughing hysterically wearing comically ill-fitting clothes. That last annoyed me, imagining as I did that my own shirts and trousers might be among those being paraded mockingly through the pandemoniac scene before me.

  I saw a pair of blue-coated Denver Police patrolmen, one chasing a young Chinaman who eluded him with ease, weaving in and out of the madding throng and finally disappearing into the same alley from which I had just emerged. The other stood guard over six youthful Chinamen who sat manacled to one another, displaying the same sullen affectlessness as the young one who’d accompanied the old laundryman to my studio several days before. One of them was an exception, exhibiting extravagant rage and provoking violence from the patrolman. He snarled an indistinct but doubtless foul epithet at the copper, who replied with a blow across the face from his billy club, and at the instant he struck I recognized them both: the victim was the very nephew of the launderer, and his attacker was Patrolman Heinecker, still drunk to judge by his slow, stumbling carriage. The youth struggled not to show the pain and managed to convert the rage on his face into a semblance of the stoicism he’d shown before.

  He saw me looking at him and, recognizing me, gestured with his head to the north. The streetlamps there had all been extinguished, and I saw no animation there at all. Squinting, however, I perceived that a man hung at the corner of Wazee from a lamppost, the light of which had been extinguished; to my shock I thought I saw the man moving slightly. Getting closer I could distinguish the unconscious face of the elderly uncle, alive and slowly strangling. Though the crowd had lost interest in the hanging I was unarmed and didn’t dare risk incurring its wrath by cutting the old man down, so I hastened back to the spot where Patrolman Heinecker stood guard of the nephew and his compatriots.

  Heinecker’s face was the picture of cocksure drunkenness, and I thought it a wonder his weapon hadn’t already been taken off him. He looked at me as though we were old friends, and he made no effort to stop me as I grabbed his stick from his hand and brought it down on the side of his head. He did look surprised and confused, and he started to say something; his finger was pointed at my face as if trying to place it when I hit him a second time and he started to fall. I didn’t hit him a third time, for fear of killing him or harming him permanently, which I suspected I might already have done; he was down for the moment in any event, and I took his revolver from his belt with no resistance, cursing myself for having left the Baby Dragoon at Priscilla’s.

  I returned to the lamppost. Whoever had slung the noose over its crossbar had left a short ladder on the ground, and I propped it against the post and ascended with my jackknife open.

  I had sawn halfway through the hemp, horrified at the wet rattling sound coming from the old man’s constricted throat, when someone shouted.

  “Hey! You son of a bitch, you can’t cut down our chink! What the hell are you doing that for?” A barrel-chested fellow with various unruly strands of wet hair plastered across his forehead rose from a prone position and half crawled toward me. His shirt was drenched and so were his trousers, and I noted for the first time that this northern part of the street was all mud, and that several of the buildings were smoldering in the darkness.

  “Someone moistened you, looks like,” I said, with the amiably distracted tone of a man interrupted in the performance of an uninteresting task. I hoped he was drunk enough to be sidetracked and that I could leave the sidearm stuffed in my belt.

  “Fuckin’ fire brigade,” he said. “Ought to have been quicker to put out the fuckin’ fire and not so quick to hose us down.”

  “Is that what they did?” My jackknife was duller than I wished, and the cutting was slow.

  “Hell, they ran out of water and had to go back for more before they even started on the fire. They’s lucky we din’t fuckin’ pull ’em off that wagon and give ’em some of what we gave this here chink.” He squinted, and his thoughts returned to the matter at hand. “And what the hell you think you’re doing, anyway, cutting him down? He ain’t even dead yet.”

  “City ordinance,” I said. “What can you do?”

  “Son of a bitch’s gotta pay for the white man got killed the other night. Killed him in his bed’s what they did, his sickbed, even, and somebody’s gonna have to pay for it.”

  There was little to be gained, I thought, by explaining that if someone did indeed have to pay, then in fact it was my trusty old housekeeper that belonged at the end of the noose, rather than any member of Denver’s Chinese populace. Seeing that the conversation could serve no further useful purpose, and hoping to prevent him calling to his comrades to the south, I continued sawing and with the other hand pointed Patrolman Heinecker’s Colt at the man’s balls.

  “He’s coming down, and if I hear another sound out of you, I’m going to ventilate your ball sack, you understand?”

  I thought I might have to make good on the threat, but at the sight of the gun barrel pointed at his middle he gave a disgusted little wave and ran yelling across the muddy street to crash his fist into a window. It was hard to see but I heard the smashing of the glass, followed by a bellow of pain.

  “Ahhh, son of a bitch!”

  Then I heard him slumping down onto the planks of the sidewalk as the final strands of the rope parted and the old man fell into a heap at the foot of the lamppost, and I regretted not having plotted an easier descent for him. Except for the drunk with the bleeding fist, who sat weeping and cursing me and the old man both, my action had gone unnoticed; there was no other objection when I picked the man up and slung him over my shoulder to a nearby building, one of a number that had been spared destruction by the fire brigade’s muddying of that part of the street.

  A door opened unbidden as I reached it and the magus and I were pulled into its dark interior amidst a cacophony of voices muttering and whispering hoarsely in what I assumed to be Mandarin.

  “The old man’s still alive,” I said.

  “You go,” an angry voice shouted at me from the darkness.

  “You hear? He’s still alive. I’m going to go over and get a doctor I know,” I said, though to be honest I thought even Ernie Stickhammer might require the persuasive qualities of Patrolman Heinecker’s revolver to get him to tend to a Chinaman in the middle of the night, with a riot in progress scarcely half a block away.

  “No doctor. Chinese doctor. You go now.”

  My eyes had begun to adjust to the light of the room, and I saw that the old man had been removed, and that I was in the company of six or eight Chinese; remarkably, all of them looked as elderly as he or even older. One of them opened the door and another shoved me out.

  The door shut quietly behind me, and I saw the drunk sitting in the same spot as before, mumbling to himself and still making sad sounds. I didn’t think he’d seen me exiting the building, but as I passed by him on my way away from the disturbances he looked up.

  “Say, you son of a bitch, wha’d you do with our chink?”

  I put the revolver to his head and pulled the hammer back. “Go home,” I said, and he rose to his feet and stumbled away from me, babbling incoherently, and I looked over at the group of young Chinamen. The old man’s nephew looked at me impassively, and a different patrolman had replaced Heinecker, who still lay on the ground where he had fallen. Thinking about that as I headed back home I hoped that meant I hadn’t killed him.

  SEVEN

  HOP ALLEY, LAID WASTE AND CAPTURED ON GLASS

  I had not thought much of the girl I’d left behind to go to war since returning from that war under somewhat questionable circumstances and finding that she had married another man and died in childbed, which indicated, I suppose, that my love for her was not as eternal and pure as I’d thought. That I was secretly relieved to be free of her does not make me proud, but the fact that it had been year
s since she’d crossed my mind must have been a sign that our union would have been an unhappy and impermanent one.

  On the night of the riot, though, I dreamt of her. That she was alive in this dream and that we were standing on a Denver sidewalk was all that I recalled upon awaking, and that I was shouting, “I deserted for you,” so loud my throat was raw as I sprung from bed, winded and swinging my fists at the empty air. I would not sleep again that night.

  The house was silent but for the ticking of the grandfather clock in the foyer, which showed the time to be after four. I dressed myself and roused Lemuel.

  “What the hell?” he asked.

  “Wake up, lad,” I told him. “Time to earn your pay.” He lay there, bleary, and I did most of the work loading up the chemicals and the dark tent, then packing up the stereographic camera.

  “What’s all that for? How are you figuring to take pictures at night?”

  “Won’t be nighttime for much longer.” Before we got to the front stairs Mrs. Fenster met us in the foyer, candlestick in hand.

  “You’re awake,” I said.

  “Fancy sleeping with you howling like you were. Where are you going in the middle of the night?”

  “Going to teach the boy how to work in the field.”

  “Put all that down,” she said, “and at least get you some breakfast. Sun won’t be up for hours, and there’ll be no use in him slopping muck onto the glass before that.”