Port Hazard

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Carry your bags, cap’n?” He pointed at my valise with his stick. He was holding it by the handle, a heavy-looking blob of silver shaped into the head of some animal.

  “I’ve just got the one,” I said.

  “Half a hog for my trouble? I’m past two days without gruel.”

  “What’s half a hog?”

  “A nickel, cap’n. First time in Frisco?” He showed me a gold tooth, which would have made a better impression if the one next to it weren’t black.

  “Is there a tax on that?”

  He giggled, and twisted the handle off the stick.

  He did it one-handed, with a neat, practiced flick of his wrist, but he’d have done better to use both hands, because it called attention to itself. The rest of the stick fell away from eighteen inches of bright metal narrowing to a point. I got my valise in front of it just as he underhanded it at the center of my rib cage. It sheared through the leather like a lance through a blister. Before he could pull it back out and try again, I gave the valise a twist, snapping the shaft clean in two.

  He had good reflexes. Six inches of jagged metal still stuck out of the handle, and without hesitating, he drew back to jab it at my face. I swung up the valise, but the contents shifted, throwing off the angle, and in that instant I saw myself walking through the rest of my life sideways with my empty eye socket turned to the shadow. Then something cracked, a sharp, shocking explosion like a chunk of hickory splitting in a stove. The dandy’s sombrero fell off and he followed it down to the platform. In his place stood a sad-faced stranger with black bartender’s handlebars under a leather helmet. He had a blue uniform buttoned to his chin and an oak stick in one hand, attached to his wrist by a leather thong. His expression as he examined the results of his action looked as if he’d bashed in the head of a kitten.

  However, young skulls are hard to break. The dandy pushed himself into a sitting position and blinked up through the blood in his eyes. “You can’t pinch me! I’m a Hoodlum!”

  The man in uniform appeared to consider this. Then he leaned down and tapped the young man behind the right ear. The arm the dandy was supporting himself on went out flat and he fell onto his back. His eyes rolled over white and a thread of drool slid out of one corner of his mouth. Apart from that, nothing moved.

  I remembered Beecher then and looked his way just as he pulled out his shirttail and dropped it over the butt of the Le Mat stuck under his belt. A bit more practice and he’d have it in his hand the next time a foot and a half of sword let out my intestines. He was more reliable with a chair.

  “This one ain’t much older than my sister’s boy,” the policeman muttered. His Irish was as thick as stout. “They’re getting too small to keep. Ah, me.” He stuck his stick under one arm, produced a pair of manacles from a loop on his belt, and bent to work.

  “I’m obliged, Officer,” I said when he straightened.

  He had a bulge in one cheek, which he emptied into a brown mess on the platform near where the dandy lay on his stomach now, with his hands linked behind his back. “You gents need to check those weapons first stop you make. You have run out of wilderness when you’re in San Francisco.”

  Our pistols were out of sight, but there is no overestimating a policeman’s eye. I told him my name, which meant nothing to him, and showed him my star, which meant very little more.

  “What about your man?”

  Beecher said. “I ain’t—”

  I snapped open the telegram with Arthur’s signature for the policeman to read. He grunted, shifted his plug from one cheek to the other, pursed his lips to spit, thought better of it, and mopped his mouth with the back of a broken-knuckled hand. “I voted for Hancock. Come to clean up Barbary?”

  “You seem to be doing a fair job of that all by yourself.” I put away the flimsy.

  “This?” He toed the inert man in the ribs. “This pup wandered out of his yard. Past Pacific Street I’d of wanted the militia. Just because these Hoodlums own the waterfront don’t mean they hold title to the rest.”

  Beecher asked what a Hoodlum was. The policeman appraised him, worked up a fresh head of juice, and defiled the crown of the young man’s sombrero lying on the platform.

  “Dips and thieves what like to dress up like toffs,” he said. “That poetist fellow Oscar Wilde hared through here last year, piping up beauty for its own sake and decked out in purple velvet, which is milk and sugar to these lads. Come sunup next day, you couldn’t find a bolt of brocade that wasn’t spoke for, nor an unslashed pocket to pay for it. It’s how they know each other. Going in after ’em’s the same as putting your fist through a paper nest of hornets. This far inland all you got to do is step on ’em.”

  “Are you sure he’s a Hoodlum?” I asked.

  “He ain’t Wilde. I know, because the wife dragged me down to Platt’s Hall to see him. I never wasted fifty cents worse in all my born days.”

  “Would you mind checking his pockets?”

  “What for, iron knuckles? He didn’t need ’em as long as he had that trick stick.”

  “I’m looking for a double eagle.”

  He barked a short laugh. “Twenty crackers in his pocket, and he tries to nick you for a five-cent piece?”

  “It could have been an excuse to get close.”

  The policeman spat, sighed, knelt, and performed the chore. The young man moaned when he was jostled, but didn’t wake up. He might have had a fractured skull. The policeman rose with his bounty displayed on his palm. “Two coppers and a busted watch. Fellow he nipped it from probably fell on it. If he ever had a double Ned, it’s spent. Not on soap.” He pocketed the items and mopped his palm on his trousers.

  “These coins aren’t for spending. He’s just a thief, like you said.”

  “Wheelock’s Wards, we call ’em here.”

  I perked up at that. “Daniel Webster Wheelock?”

  “If there’s more than one, it’s a bigger country than they told me when I shipped over. These lads are Cap’n Dan’s eyes and ears outside the Bella Union. Employing unfortunates, he calls it. I wouldn’t know. The only unfortunate thing I see about these lads is they’re as many as ants. I wouldn’t drop my drawers in a Donegan on Kearney without a squad to stand behind me.”

  I remembered Wheelock was a fire captain as well as a city alderman. I only half understood the rest. I thanked him again for stepping in and hoisted my valise. The broken sword-end came loose of the rent in the leather and clattered to the platform.

  “Thank Mr. Callahan,” he said, slapping his palm with his stick. “It’s the only English these lads savvy. Where you gents billeted? Magistrate might need you to swear out a complaint, on account of the fog.”

  “The fog?”

  “If he’s a Wheelock man, he might say I couldn’t see what I saw. That’s what makes these boyos so chesty when Callahan comes to call.”

  “No billet yet,” I said. “All suggestions are welcome.”

  He thought for a moment. “The Slop Chest on Davis is the crib for you. It ain’t so bad as it sounds; Nan Feeny inherited it from her husband, the Commodore, who was soft on sailors and named it after a captain’s tackle. Twelve cents the day, eighty the week if you pony up front. Either of you gents smoke tobacco?”

  Beecher said he did.

  “You’ll want to run the tip down the mattress seams. Discourages the active citizens.”

  “‘Active citizens’?” we said together.

  The policeman spat and shook his head. “That’s any with at least four legs more than you. Come morning, you’ll think you was cut up by the tongs. You frontier folk might know your Injun palaver, but if you don’t learn the local office, you’ll finish up feeding fish in the bay.”

  The Hoodlum was coming around, moaning something about taking the jolly off, or something equally enlightening. The policeman reached down and hauled him to his feet by his shackles. This brought a howl that made me feel as if my own arms were being torn from their sockets, which the police
man silenced by punching the young man in the ribs with his stick. As he was being pulled toward the end of the platform, the Hoodlum said, “My roofer,” which was the first thing he’d said that I could translate without help. The policeman bent, scooped up the tobacco-stained sombrero by its crown, and jammed it down over the prisoner’s ears. Then he led him off into the fog.

  Beecher said, “I didn’t follow but one word that man said in ten.”

  “Maybe Nan Feeny has a dictionary.” I tucked in the torn flap of my valise and started off in the path of the policeman and his captive.

  The first cabman I told to take us to the Slop Chest ordered us out of his carriage. Since he was holding his whip we didn’t argue. I told the next one in line before we got in, and we didn’t get in. The third driver, who was the most polite, pretended he was too busy getting his cigar burning to hear me. When I spoke to the next one down I held up the late Charlie Worth’s double eagle, turning it until it caught the light from the corner gas lamp. It brought no smile.

  “That’s too much.” He was a lean fifty in an old-fashioned stovepipe hat and neckstock, with the sandy complexion of someone who spent most of his time sitting out in the elements.

  I said, “I thought if I showed it, you wouldn’t think I was luring you out there to nip you.”

  I must have got the vernacular wrong, or maybe amused contempt was the only other expression he had. He pointed his chin at Beecher. “He with you?”

  I said he was. I’d already dismissed this driver and was thinking ahead toward the last carriage in the line. I wondered how long the walk was to Davis and what kind of hell the fog contained on the way.

  “Twenty-five cents. I don’t split fares.”

  We got in.

  Either the haze was lifting or my eyes were becoming accustomed to the stingy light that managed to penetrate it. We watched ornate gingerbread buildings sliding past, a stout, homely little brick box whose sign identified it as the United States Mint, which belatedly I realized was where the coin in my pocket had come from, and to where it had returned by way of circumstances unsuspected by the men who operated the stampers. Shortly after that, the gimcrackery faded out and even brick became scarce, replaced by buildings made of clapboard and scrapwood bearing unmistakable stains from exposure to the sea; ships that had sailed their last missions, broken up for what profit could be obtained from their corpses. A dozen or so blocks of that, and then the carriage came to a stop.

  “Slop Chest,” the driver said.

  “Holy Jesus,” Beecher said.

  “Home,” I said; and loosened the Deane-Adams in its holster before getting out.

  9

  The Slop Chest—this on the basis of the driver’s declaration, since there was no sign to identify it—looked at first as if it had floated in on a devastating flood, and settled on its present foundation when the waters receded. It was built to resemble an oversize flatboat, with a cabin on the deck and part of the railing removed for visitors to enter by way of three warped steps and a door that might have been cut out of the side with a bucksaw for all the attention that had been paid to plumbs and levels, and hung with leather hinges. What appeared at first to have been a hit-or-miss whitewashing of the boards turned out on examination to be a couple of decades’ worth of sea salt, washed up on deck during storms and allowed to dry into a crust as hard as limestone; seasons of rain had washed some of it onto the strip of bare earth that separated the structure from the boardwalk, forever preventing the growth of so much as a single blade of grass. A dilapidated rocking chair and glider occupied the deck—I suppose it could be called a front porch—and these, together with nearly every square inch of the floor, were covered with bodies flung about in loose-rag positions that suggested either a massacre or a bacchanal of ancient Greek proportions. These men were clad in peacoats, striped jerseys, and baggy canvas trousers, sailors’ garb. Their snores were loud enough to rock the old boat on its moorings.

  “Looks like the Little Big Horn,” said Beecher.

  “Or Hampton Roads,” I said. “Who’s minding the ships in the harbor?”

  “Twenty-five cents,” said the driver.

  I paid him. He stuck the coin between his teeth and gave the reins a flip. I stepped back just in time to save my toes.

  Beecher slung his duffel over his left shoulder, unbuttoned his shirt to clear the path to the Le Mat under his belt, and we climbed the steps.

  The interior was a saloon, better appointed than the outside would indicate. There were a couple of gaming tables covered in green baize, an iron chandelier suspended from the ceiling, beneath which a mound of pale wax from the dripping candles had begun to grow into a stalagmite on the floor, and a carved mahogany bar with a pink marble top. Behind it, above the bottles aligned on a back bar nearly as ornate, hung a canvas in a gilt frame as wide as a fainting-couch, upon which sprawled at full length a hideously fat woman amateurishly executed in thick paint. It was the lewdest thing I’d seen outside of the upstairs room of a brothel, and wouldn’t have existed half an hour in any public establishment on the frontier before the decency squads poured in with their axes and wooden truncheons.

  Beecher stared at the painting. “Man must of used up every drop of pink in town.”

  The room wasn’t as crowded as I’d expected on the evidence of the front porch. A blue-chinned tinhorn in a frayed cutaway and dirty top hat was dealing himself a hand of Patience at one of the tables and three men, two of them dressed as sailors, the third in a faded wool shirt and filthy overalls worn nearly through at the knees—a miner’s kit—leaned on the bar, nursing glasses of beer and conversing not at all. The hour was too early for celebration and too close to midday for the gainfully employed. It was a depressing time to drink. Gloom hung overhead like the chandelier, dripping dejection into a sullen mound.

  There was no sunshine to be had from the bartender, an old salt who at one time might have been cheerfully fat, but whom life had rendered down until the gray skin hung in sheets from his cheekbones and bare forearms, blue as old china with aging tattoos of indeterminate character. His bald head was as white as polished bone above the line where a hat protected it from the sun when he went outside; the first indication I’d seen that the city was not perpetually wrapped in smutty fog. I bought two beers, which he poured from a tap covered with green mold, and asked if Nan Feeny was on the premises.

  “Who for, you or your man? She don’t favor pumpernickel.”

  Beecher clapped the Le Mat on the bartop, which at close range was far from pristine. The marble was mottled all about with odd saucer-shaped depressions with cracks radiating out from the centers. I couldn’t decide what could have caused them. “Next one calls me his man won’t be one much longer,” he told the bartender.

  The old sailor looked at the pistol as if it were a fresh spill. “Hodge.”

  He barely raised his voice. I was still puzzling out where this latest new word belonged in the regional lexicon when a section of the back bar swung away from the wall and a dwarf entered the room through the opening.

  He impressed me as a dwarf. From his beltline to his bowler-topped head he was normal size, built thick as a prizefighter through the chest and shoulders, his biceps straining the sleeves of his yellow-and-black-striped sailor’s jersey. From the waist down, he was no larger than a six-year-old boy, and one stricken with rickets into the bargain. He paused this side of the opening, then came forward, swaying from side to side on shriveled bowlegs draped in black broadcloth. His feet kept going when he reached the bar, pumping him up until he was facing Beecher at eye-level. I went up on the balls of my feet and spotted the three-foot ladder nailed inside the bar. His face was unlined, late twenties at the oldest, with a closely trimmed black beard covering the lower half, grown probably to prevent strangers from mistaking him for a child.

  An explosion shook the bar, slopping beer over the rims of the glasses perched on it and draining a trickle of plaster from the ceiling. Beecher and I
jumped; the other patrons at the bar didn’t stir, except to lean on one elbow to watch a show they’d seen before. I looked down and saw a fresh depression in the marble. It was occupied by a black-enameled iron sphere half again the size of a billiard ball, attached by six inches of chain to a ring poking out of the little man’s right sleeve. There was no hand there. With a practiced gesture he’d swung the ball in a short arc ending in a loud bang when it struck the bar, just short of crushing Beecher’s hand where it rested next to the Le Mat.

  “No firearms in the Slop Chest, mate.” He had a broad cockney accent, but his voice was low and silken, unlike the bray of a small man with something to prove. He didn’t need it as long as he had that ball and chain. “Either check ’em here or leave ’em home.”

  The bartender scowled at the new dent. “Damn it, Hodge, I told you before I’m responsible for this bar. Nan said she’d dock me next time.”

  “I’ll stake the whole bloody whack. A bar oughtn’t be marble to start. It stains like cotton drawers. What’s it to be, mate?” He kept his eyes on Beecher. “Lay up the snapper or take one in the brain-box?” He twirled his wrist. The ball made a shallow orbit and landed where it had started. Slivers of marble jumped up and skittered across the bar.

  “Jesus, Hodge!” the bartender complained.

  Very slowly, Beecher slid his hand forward and nudged the revolver’s handle inside the little man’s reach. Hodge scooped it up with his good right hand and thrust it toward the bartender, who took it and placed it on a high back shelf lined with backstraps of every make and model. There were more confiscated weapons there than patrons in the saloon; evidence that the place indeed took on boarders. Hodge’s gaze slid my way. “What’s your story, mate? Try me on?”

  Using two fingers I drew the star from my shirt pocket and laid it on the bar. He barely glanced at it.

  “Tin’s cheap,” he said. “What else you got?”

  I took out the telegram and spread it on the bar. The edges were tattering. I was considering having it framed and hanging it around my neck. Beecher probably wouldn’t volunteer for that.