The Best Bad Things

by Katrina Carrasco

  “All right. Finished.”

  Wheeler takes his collar from her mouth, takes his hand from her back, his palm unsticking from her sweaty skin. The wall cold against her good shoulder, against the side of her forehead, the front of her body cold where it pressed into Wheeler’s. Corkscrews of pain as Nell fishes out glass chips that dug deep through her shirt: back, armpit, upper rib. Fingers on her binding cloth, but they do not linger. Nell pours more whiskey onto a cloth and packs it against the side of Alma’s shoulder, then wraps clean cloth around her arm. The belt left in place to thump against her ribs. Wheeler brings a clean shirt. Nell helps Alma into it, buttoning her up like a child.

  “We’ll go to my house,” Nell says, pulling on her shawl at the door.

  “No. I’ve called a hansom, to the boardinghouse.”

  “A boardinghouse? Freezing cold, with slop buckets stinking up the place?”

  Wheeler steps away from Alma, raises an eyebrow. She nods; she can stand on her own. Just about.

  “This is not your concern—” Wheeler says.

  “I don’t mind Nell’s house.” Alma elbows away from the wall, grunting. Words slurry. Legs rubber-boned as if she just stepped off a rough-water boat. “She’s going to make me a cake.”

  Fingers dragging over blue paper. Her left arm thumping useless at her side. At the door and Wheeler’s teeth are clenched, Nell is frowning, Conaway is on the other side of the wood and knocking, calling out, “Cab’s here, sir.”

  “Money for the driver,” Wheeler says, hand to Nell’s. “And for some food.”

  In the hall and Nell guides her into the cold circle of Conaway’s arm, his bearskin smell. Alma looks back at Wheeler, knot-browed in the doorway, his vest and sleeve stained, his body outlined with firelight.

  “Is Loomis still alive?” she says.

  He nods from the door.

  “Is he going to stay that way?”

  He shrugs.

  “I want to be the one to do it,” she says. “Wait for me—”

  Conaway steers her around the dogleg turn and Wheeler is out of sight, Nell hurrying before them in a flurry of skirts and honeysuckle perfume, out onto the steps and toward the carriage waiting in the snow.

  23

  JANUARY 20, 1887

  Alma rears awake, breath stinging, pulse hard. A purple wall. Sunlight behind a lace curtain. She moves to sit up, and a kicking pain reminds her of her shoulder. She is in Nell’s bed, the sheets sweet with perfume, a knit blanket soft under her forearms.

  She tries to shift her left shoulder—wheezes, fails. That deltoid is no good, full of barbs and splinters, her left arm dead. A moment of panic, grappling at the bandage, then finding her elbow and feeling her own touch, feeling it move down to her hand. The nerves in her arm can still be made to sing. She stares up at the pale wood slats of the ceiling, thinking of kneading the blanket’s wool, little movements in her left fingers though they feel fattish, clumsy. She is still wearing Wheeler’s shirt. Her own filthy trousers.

  “Did I wake you?”

  Alma dips her chin, exhaling hard, and there’s Nell in the doorway. Wrapped in a shawl. Her face bare, her eyes tired.

  “What time is it?”

  “Two o’clock,” Nell says. “Can you eat?”

  “I might not try just yet. Something warm to drink?”

  “I’ll make coffee.”

  When Nell leaves the room, Alma starts the painful process of sitting up, wanting to wince and grimace when Nell is not there to witness, not there to see how she clutches at her right kneecap under the blanket, contracts her abdomen, breathes through the pain to pull herself upright, her left hand dragging over the wool. Its numbness alarms her. In the night she’d written it off as shock, blood loss, tourniquet choke, but it is still slow, still tingling. Her whole body hurts in a way it should not, an allover aching, but maybe this is the result of waiting an extra fifteen minutes to see to the wound: the cost of waiting for Nell and preserving her cover. Or maybe she’s just getting old. When she was shot before, she was twenty—quicker to her feet, quicker to form new flesh over the wound.

  She has her left hand in her lap, massaging the pin-filled littlest finger, when Nell comes back in with a tray. Rich dark scent, the sweetness of cream.

  “Oh, no.” Nell sets the coffee things on the bureau at the foot of the bed. “You should have waited.”

  Alma looks down, straining her eyes as low as they’ll angle without her neck muscles pulling at her shoulder. Bright red pools on the cloth of Wheeler’s shirt.

  “Shit,” she says.

  “I’ll change the bandage.”

  “It’s fine. I can’t feel it.”

  Something in her recoils from showing the binding cloth again.

  “Come on.” Nell drapes her shawl on the bedpost and sits beside Alma. Her eyes, in this light, are honey brown. A strand of hair sticks to her lower lip.

  “You’ll have to help me,” Alma says, and here’s another thing made no good—she’s in Nell’s house, in Nell’s god damn bed, and she can barely sit up. Their game over now that Nell’s seen too much of Jack Camp. “My arm’s not working right.”

  Nell unbuttons the shirt. Air cool on her stomach, Nell’s eyes on her shoulder, air cool on her back as they peel the cotton away and Nell bundles it onto the floor. Alma is bared to the waist, her binding cloth stiff with dried blood along her side. Fingers on her skin. Nell’s weight shifting the mattress. A draft of cold air, a trickle of heat.

  “I don’t like how much you’re bleeding,” Nell says. “Hold still. I’m going to wrap it tighter.”

  A deep press of pain—Alma exhales hard through her nose—and then little spasms as Nell winds a fresh length of cloth around her shoulder, looping it over and under, her hands brushing the bound side of Alma’s left breast.

  “I didn’t want you to see me like this.” Alma’s voice, grooved into Camp’s deeper register, takes on an uncertain waver. How are you going to play it? She wants to be Camp for Nell, but she is peeled down to her own body, peeled down to woman skin.

  “I’m not angry, Jack.”

  “Why are you calling me that?” she says, harsh.

  Nell might be toying with her, to take everything in stride like this. But maybe Nell guessed from the start. Maybe Delphine tipped her off. And if she already knew, she still invited Alma over for cake. If she already knew, she might still be game.

  “It’s your name.” Nell scoots off the bed, dropping the bloody bandage onto Wheeler’s bloody shirt and bundling all the soiled cotton together. “Unless you tell me otherwise.”

  Maybe waking up half-naked in Nell’s bed is going to work out right.

  She comes back with clean hands, pink from scrubbing. Pours coffee into a china cup, adds cream at Alma’s nod.

  It doesn’t hurt to swallow. As the liquid drains down her throat, her gut wakes. Wrenched empty the night before, it’s now ready for steak or pan biscuits or a whole pot of lamb stew.

  “I could eat,” Alma says. “Have you got anything?”

  “There’s a bakery a few doors down. I’ll see if they have some pies.”

  “You’re an angel,” Alma calls. The more they talk, the more her voice is settling back into Camp’s low drawl.

  As soon as the front door sounds, she kicks down the blanket, her trousers wretched against the clean sheets. The floorboards cold under her bare feet. When she tries to stand, her knees buckle and she hits the ground hard, right hip, right elbow, the impact jarring a hot burst of blood from her shoulder into the bandage, the pain jarring a yelp from her throat.

  “God damn it.”

  Weak as a new colt, her legs uncooperative, her left arm useless, she fights her way up using the bedpost. That fifteen minutes of blood lost to keep her cover is not seeming like such a good trade now, when it’s left her too shaky to stand, her head pounding, the punctured meat of her deltoid screaming.

  Focus.

  First: the toilet. All that whiskey�
�s run through her and she’ll take a bucket, a grass patch, anything near. Toward the door, walking crabwise to lean against the bed frame with her right hand, then staggering into the purple hall, pushing hard off the wall, palm dragging over the ridged paper with a trailing squeak. There’s a ribbon of daylight: a little enclosure off the kitchen, two steps down to a dirt square fenced in with boards man-height. The air so cold it stings. Alma jolts down the stairs, learning the new way her body is moving, dead-weighted on the upper left, but her left leg sturdier than the right—some bad fall in the blurred night has beat her right knee and shin into shaking. There’s no bucket here so she unbuttons her trousers clumsily, one-handed, works them down the same, says a prayer peppered with oaths as she lowers into a squat, her thighs unsteady. Sun on her bare back: a rarity. Icy air between her legs, hot splashing onto the dirt, onto her bunched trousers, but what can she do? It’s taking everything to grip the lip of the top step and keep her balance.

  Then levering up, piss-spattered but relieved, jouncing on her trousers, trying to use her left hand on the buttons but it’s like a brick, all edges and heavy. Up the steps—up, damn it—and back into the kitchen, closing the door, the iron kettle on the stove seeping heat. The January page of a Wakefield’s farmers’ almanac pinned to one wall. A bowl of green apples on the table, weighing down a thin newspaper. Alma eats an apple in huge bites down to the seeds, spitting pith into her palm. The paper’s main headline reads, “Macaulay-Dobbs Match Ends in Misery.” No mention of Driscoll in the write-up; Alma’s throat tightens when she realizes she’s looking for his name.

  A wave of sickness. Driscoll is dead. She knew this last night, but the knowledge was blurred by pain, by liquor. Now she knows it. The knowing is hard and sharp as a blade pressed into her midsection. Breathe too hard, push too hard against it, and something will burst. Blood, or tears. She fucked up again. Starting the fight with McManus that went so bad, so fast. And where is that bastard? Did he come back to the office? She remembers Wheeler, and Conaway. Nell. She remembers telling Wheeler that McManus is their thief, but she can’t remember what Wheeler said.

  Alma doesn’t want to think of McManus, or Driscoll, or blood on the bar floor, so she pages slowly through the paper, reading all the vessel lists in the shipping news, the prices in sketched advertisements for shoes. On the third page is a large advertisement for Elliot & Co. Brickworks. The sunburst logo. The memory of Frank Elliot at the Seattle docks, smirking at her poor dress, asking if she’d given up on finding a man of her own after years of skulking after other women’s wayward husbands. That son of a bitch. Joe’s welcome to tear him to pieces. But Loretta Elliot comes to mind, next, along with Delphine’s wish for a female-run operation in Tacoma. Elliot said Loretta was doing the brickworks’ bookkeeping. She has a head for business, he’d said. Loretta was always fascinated by Alma’s underworld ties, by the idea of slumming it with a bunch of smuggler lowlifes. If Frank Elliot was put out of the picture, Loretta might be worth bringing in.

  Alma hobbles into the bedroom, blinking away vertigo. Ripples of unsteadiness run hot across her skin. She wraps the blanket around her upper body and leans against the wall by the window, the lace curtain brushing her cheek, her closed eyes.

  Finally, the front latch rattles. Alma hopes for something hot: a meat pie, or a turnover, sugar-sprinkled and crisp from the oven. But when Nell comes into the doorway, her hands are empty. She is pale, her green shawl slipping off one shoulder.

  “You all right?”

  “Yes,” Nell says. “The bakeshop was closed.”

  “That’s a damn shame.”

  “I heard about Driscoll.” Nell’s wide eyes, her quick errand drawn long, start to make sense. “From the neighbor women. That poor boy.”

  Alma makes a fist so hard her knuckles pop. That blade of knowing back at her gut: Driscoll’s face frozen next to hers, his glass-laced blood in thick spatters on the floor. It was nobody’s fault, but she can say that a hundred times and it doesn’t get any truer. She and McManus started that spark, that pocket of violence that swallowed Driscoll whole.

  “He wasn’t a child,” Alma says. “He was drunk and stupid. If he’d been able to stand up on his own, that never would have happened.”

  “What a thing to say.”

  “I’ll say worse if you keep talking about it.”

  Alma’s shoulder hurts. Her neck. She is angry at the pulped slowness of her body, angry that she is still so dizzy, so dependent on the wall.

  “I need to eat.” She pushes away from the window, limps toward the kitchen. “I can barely stand, I’m so hungry.”

  “There’s half a loaf in the breadbox,” Nell says. “Some eggs.”

  “And my shirt?”

  “It’s soaking. To get the blood out.”

  “What am I supposed to do without it?” Alma says, sharp. “I don’t have all day to sit around.”

  Nell stops in the kitchen doorway. Alma lurches past, the blanket wrapped around her shoulders catching at Nell’s dress. She can’t afford to lose a whole day. She needs to find out what happened with McManus. He disappeared too quick, and she doesn’t trust him. Not that she can track him down in this state.

  “You’re difficult to love,” Nell says.

  “Nobody asked you to.”

  Alma sits down hard, the chair jarring her shoulder, not even trying to tear the loaf with her bad hand, just bringing the whole wheaten mass to her mouth and biting off a chunk.

  “Fry me three eggs,” she says, her mouth full of bread, not looking at Nell.

  “Do it yourself.”

  When Alma looks up again, the doorway is empty.

  She eats all the bread, though by halfway through she’s not hungry anymore. It is dry and sticks in her throat. The coffee Nell brewed comes to mind. Leaving crumbs scattered on the table, Alma shoves to her feet, no better off for having eaten and sat down. Her left hand is tingling. She bangs it against the edge of the table twice, to knock some sense back into it. The pain is dull. Wrong.

  Worry sets in once more. The gunshot wound’s not that deep. It shouldn’t be enough to cause such damage. Then there are her fists: fast, accurate. She is proud of her jabs, her head hooks, the speed of her strikes. A bad arm is a deadweight, a problem. She thinks of McManus and his bad leg. He is slow. He is ineffective. She does not want her wings clipped like that. And how does it look? A stab of vanity. She likes to watch her muscles shift in the mirror. The raised caps of her deltoids, the ripple of hardness under smooth skin. Now one is punctured. Her pride punctured, too.

  Shrugging off the prickly wool of the blanket, she moves into the hallway, where cold air nips her bare skin.

  Nell is mending by the bedroom window. Her needle catches sunlight in its short, sharp twists. Alma leans against the doorframe, the coffee she came in search of forgotten. The other woman’s hair a gold swirl around her ears, around the edges of her neck. She really does look like Hannah in some lights. It’s a confusion.

  “Everything I say to you comes out wrong,” Alma tells her.

  Nell sighs. Lets the cloth she’s holding sink into her lap. Her lips curve into a half smile.

  “You didn’t make the eggs, did you?” she says.

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Your shoulder is bleeding again.”

  Nell comes out of her chair, walks across the squares of sunlight on the floor.

  “I’ll make the eggs,” Nell says when they are standing close, her warm hands on Alma’s bandages. “If you ask me nicely.”

  “What about the cake you promised? Can I still have that?”

  Alma lifts her hand, slow. Trails the backs of her fingers along Nell’s jaw, so light that their skins are barely touching. Nell’s hands go quiet at her shoulder.

  “I ought to wash your trousers,” she says. “They’re too filthy to wear to bed.”

  Either Nell is blushing or Alma’s vision is darkening, both possible given the way her heart is speeding up. She drops he
r hand from Nell’s cheek to the buttons of her trousers. One. Two, undone. Her fingers close to her sex, and it is tight, heating, drawing some of the pain out of her shoulder and draining it into a different kind of ache.

  “This is about to be no fair.” She’s almost naked but moving like Camp, speaking like Camp just the same, and here is a new gray area in which to dwell. Quieter than what twists between her and Wheeler, softer than what links her to Delphine. “I’ll have nothing on, but you have that dress.”

  Three buttons. The band of Alma’s trousers droops around her hips. She looks up into Nell’s eyes, the gold-flecked deepness of them. Nell has been drinking coffee; her breath smells of it, and sweet cream. She puts the tips of her fingers on Alma’s bare stomach. Five points of fire, tracing a slow sweep across her low ribs, up to the raw underside of her binding cloth.

  “Don’t touch that.” Alma’s muscles clench. “It stays.”

  Nell shrugs, a little lift of one shoulder that moves her body closer.

  “All right,” she says.

  “Keep doing the rest, though.” Alma slides her hand up Nell’s neck, the most of her she’s touched openhanded, velvet flesh, hair soft on her knuckles. Pulls them together, slow, like they’re moving through water, and puts her mouth to Nell’s ear. “I’ve been thinking about you, honey. All the ways I’m going to please you.”

  A catch in Nell’s breath. Soft press of her breasts against Alma’s front. Alma tilts her head, sore neck muscles be damned, and tongues salt and heat from under Nell’s ear.

  “Jack—”

  Soft hair in Alma’s eyes, soft skin on her lips. She wants to hear Nell say her name again, loud, pleading. She wants Nell to take off her dress and show all the pinks and browns and shadows of her body, that honeysuckle musk scenting Wheeler’s hallway on Alma’s fingers, in her mouth.