Savage Girl

by Jean Zimmerman

  With all my talking, I am perhaps overtired, since I don’t feel like sleeping but rather exist in a sort of in-between twilight of mind and memory. I still have blood on my clothes, random spatters from the corpse in the Gramercy Park mansion.

  One of the cars wasn’t our own, I say. We were transporting Lincoln’s car back to the East as a favor to Huntington.

  Huntington, Howe says. That would be the Central Pacific man.

  Yes.

  Lincoln’s car. Of the martyred president.

  One made for his use, I say. Unfortunately, he only ever occupied it in death. It carried his casket from Washington, D.C., to Springfield.

  Howe asks, This car was in your train on the siding at Virginia City?

  I didn’t wonder at his special interest. The Lincoln car holds great significance for many people. Stories, myths and tall tales are linked with it in the popular mind.

  Do you mark it, Mr. Hummel?

  Hummel nods and produces a soft sound such as “Uh-hmmn.” His first verbal communication of the morning, I believe, although he is a furious note taker.

  I see the thought wheels turning in their massive brains. A possible defense strategy. On his trip across the country, the Delegate boy becomes inhabited by the ghost that haunts the Lincoln car. He (that is, me) is driven mad. The late murders are to be assigned not to me, not to her, but to some disembodied ectoplasm. The spook of John Wilkes Booth himself, perhaps.

  I am found innocent by reason of demonic possession.

  A ludicrous strategy, but William Howe is known for putting over all sorts of ludicrousness to juries.

  An anecdote they tell of him: When Howe was once rehearsing his dramatic closing speech to the jury in a capital case, his partner, Hummel, suggested that at a precise climactic moment in the oration some sign of emotion might be appropriate.

  A tear, perhaps, said Hummel.

  Howe considered, then asked, From which eye?

  Had he been on the boards, Bill Howe could have been the greatest actor of the day.

  I will order lunch, he says now. But pray continue on.

  • • •

  Tahktoo had upon first meeting struck me as an incredible grotesque, either laughable or sneerable, his craggy form appearing ridiculous, draped in a dress. But the longer I associated with him, the more I came to recognize his beauty.

  Lhamana, the Zuni called them. The twin-spirited ones. Members of the tribe, both women and men, who crossed boundaries to take up the costume, behavior and activities of the opposite sex. “Berdache” was a name the Spanish saddled them with, meaning “slave.”

  Eventually I came to realize that Tahktoo had a greater aura of personal dignity than anyone I had ever known. His appearance tended to trigger instant fury on the part of outsiders. But somehow he kept himself (she kept herself? pronouns went funny around him) immune to ridicule, raillery, intimidation, insinuation, humiliation and the other sundry slings and arrows with which we humans sometimes assault each other.

  Freddy had collected him in San Francisco. He had been abandoned there by an Office of Indian Affairs Quaker who with the best intentions had lured the berdache away from his homeland in the mountain desert of the Southwest. In order to show him the superiority of the white man’s habits.

  When Tahktoo failed to be sufficiently impressed by our national culture, the Quaker became miffed and sailed home to Washington, D.C.

  The berdache wandered, bereft. Almost everyone he met heaped abuse upon him, some of it violent. But he didn’t seem at all wounded by the experience.

  When I asked him, or when Freddy did, what it was like, those days he spent alone in the hugger-mugger of the Bay, he pronounced the Zuni word “Uhepono.”

  The ruler of what his tribe called “the fourth world.” Hell.

  I sometimes tried to see our American world through Tahktoo’s eyes. Something out of Bosch or Bruegel. One nightmare after another, rolling through the misty red night. He contained within herself both Aeneas and Dido. Or Tiresias, the perfect witness, who although blind is able to see all sides.

  What are those demons up to now? Tahktoo would wonder, gazing at one drunk hammering at another as they both tumbled down Telegraph Hill. How long will you rape one another’s lives? It doesn’t matter to me, but I’m just curious. The berdache had seen in his lifetime Zuni babies impaled alive on Navajo lances. So the sins of San Francisco didn’t impress him much.

  His homeland in the Arizona and New Mexico territories was, to Tahktoo, the true paradise. His people gardened diligently, producing a surplus every year. All our American virtues, all ambition, all endeavor, all thrusting oneself forward—were looked upon as negatives in Zuni culture. The community worked by a relaxed consensus.

  In San Francisco my father had discovered the berdache at a meeting of railroad men, a huge social affair, cigars and brandy and backslapping. Later, the girls. During coffee, after the meal, Tahktoo was brought forward and introduced as entertainment, displayed as a freak.

  The sight of him, a male dressed as a female, elicited the usual reaction of robust disgust from the men. The eminences at the party began to toss wadded-up bits of dinner roll at him. They shouted phrases, meaningless, of course, to Tahktoo himself: “invert,” “homogene,” “fairy.”

  The scene turned more and more unpleasant. The railroad men began to demand that Tahktoo undress. They wished to ascertain his sex physically.

  Show it! they shouted.

  Freddy should have tried to stop it there. But he was aghast at the sheer ugliness of it, the howls of the American businessman when an unfamiliar element entered his world.

  Show it! the men began to chant, stamping their feet rhythmically. They were ready to rip the berdache’s clothes off themselves.

  What’s she got under there? Show it!

  So Tahktoo did.

  She lifted the flap of her dress and peeled down his underclothes. Stunning the room to silence.

  The man-woman had an organ the size of a blacksmith’s forearm.

  One of the drunken railroaders, John Beese, stared, and stared, and then vomited all over himself.

  Freddy departed the gathering when Tahktoo did, tracking him down and proposing a retainer relationship, something between a ward, a servant and a long-term guest.

  The berdache joined our family. I had known him since I was eighteen. He was my teacher, and her unsoothing lessons stung my soul.

  That afternoon, as I sat alone with him in Sandobar’s parlor car, Tahktoo gestured out the window. There had come another one of them, Savage Girl’s faithful followers, heaving rocks at our train. A ginger-bearded drunk.

  Where is she? the man cried. You won’t take her!

  A few such fools had come out to confront us at the siding, a couple every day or so. At first we thought they had been put up to it by Dr. Scott, but this was not the case. The whole town had heard about the kidnapping of Savage Girl and considered it an uncharitable act of betrayal by rank outsiders. We had robbed Virginia of a local treasure.

  Although in fact we had not. The story of the Delegates’ taking the girl made the rounds, but the sequel of her vanishing failed to keep pace.

  One of the dejected drunk’s rocks banged into the side of the train. “Oh, for pity’s sake,” I said.

  I went up front to ask Dowler, our steward, to chase the idiot away. The poor tortured soul outside had progressed to where he leaned his cheek against the varnished wood of the galley car, weeping and muttering. He knew what love was.

  A couple days before, a trio of cowboys had shot up our engine tender a bit, demanding the release of Savage Girl into their care. And though I had been asleep for this incident, Freddy told me that the Sage Hen had been nabbed trying to slip inside the engineer’s cab with a hammer, intending to spike the boiler.

  “That lady’s a devil,” Freddy said. “Bit Dowler good as he escorted her off.”

  While I was at the front of the train seeking out the steward, I stumble
d into something peculiar. Third back from the locomotive was the baggage car, Black Diamond, stuffed to the ceiling with our impedimenta.

  It had been partitioned off. In one corner our hired carpenters made a small room. In that space, still in the process of being installed, was a gigantic bathtub that resembled the one in Dr. Scott’s sideshow.

  I would have to ask Freddy what was going on.

  When I returned back to the parlor car, Tahktoo had begun a game with Tu-Li, employing the ivory gambling tiles from China with pictures of animals on them. The two of them played it incessantly. Another dreary day on the tracks.

  By that time I just wanted to get the hell out of there, out of the dust and wind and away from the whiskey-bitten, lovelorn fools, back to New York and civilization.

  6

  A night later, while I slept, Sandobar left the Washoe forever. She traveled south to Carson City, north to Reno, and joined the Central Pacific tracks east toward the States. During this I was all unknowing, locked within a dreamless sleep.

  No doubt the rhythm of the train soothed me, and also perhaps some deep interior awareness that we were leaving behind the dust and upsets of the Washoe Valley.

  I have never been particularly well or healthy. My unsettled mind was beset by delusions and fancies of the most vile sort. For a period in my youth, I dwelled repeatedly and uncontrollably upon self-murder, developing an elaborate fantasy of plunging a knife into my own heart. I found myself locked in a recurring thought loop, in which suicide appeared to me to be the only true expression of human free will.

  My dreams took me into violence against others, too. When I was sixteen and at St. Paul’s School, headmaster Henry Coit expelled me after I was discovered, during one particular four A.M. bout of sleepwalking, standing over a sleeping freshman boy with a ball-peen hammer in my hand. I had to take Coit’s word for it, since I had no memory of the incident myself. I dodged a sanatorium only by pleading amnesia, but I had secured my reputation as a thoroughly demented soul.

  Even now, years later, I had my tics. I was a quiet man, but one dogged by a fascination with knives, bayonets, blades of any sort. Search among my pockets and you would turn up some kind of cutter. My compulsion helped draw me to the anatomical profession, with its well-honed scalpels and lancets, alongside an innate curiosity about what lay beneath the human skin.

  Also, in any room I entered, I had the habit of casting about with my gaze until I located every bit of the color red—rugs, paintings, chinaware, anything. Red, the color of blood. I didn’t wish myself to be so beset, but the obsession had gripped me ever since my teenage years.

  “What is your connection to these specks of red you force yourself to catalog?” asked my physiology professor at Harvard, posing an obvious question. “Isn’t the relation simply between an observer and the observed, nothing more diabolical than that?”

  Such calming words helped but did not cure.

  So I probably should not have been exposed to Virginia City, a town steeped in murderous red as the earth below gave up its silver blue. I needed peace, not savagery. Even Harvard at times proved too much in the way of contention and competition. The groves of academe, red in tooth and claw.

  At any rate, I remained asleep as we left the Washoe and stayed that way until we were well into the great flat wastes of the Humboldt Basin. I remember waking, realizing we were moving and putting up my shade. Four A.M., by the watch on my bedside table. The deserted hour.

  Outside, the landscape gleamed with unearthly light. Well, of course it was unearthly—it was the moon! Bright as the sun that night, as though we inhabited a different reality, spectral white instead of daylight yellow.

  In the reflection in my window, I saw my own face, haggard and drawn. The effects of my recent illness had not, perhaps, totally receded. Our adventures in the Comstock exhausted me.

  And then, just for an instant, beside my own, I saw the face of Savage Girl. A fierce and feral apparition. Teeth bared, eyes raging, brows arched. She looked as though she would eat me. Frightened, I gave a cry of alarm and turned to look.

  Nothing there.

  After that, when I tried to return to sleep, I found myself restless, shaken by my vision. I dressed and walked back past the servants’ car, past the master sleeper and the parlor car, into what Freddy termed the shooting car, which everyone else called the den. The last in the consist, it had an open deck hanging off its back and racks of shotguns and rifles arranged along its bulkheads.

  I rang for tea and felt peckish by the time it came, served by a sleepy-eyed Petey, our waiter.

  While the light came up over what’s marked on maps as the Great American Desert, some of the most unhappy landscape in the world, I sat alone, musing. Meanwhile, the somnolent Sandobar slowly woke.

  A private train represents a mansion on wheels, a small community, a mobile caravansary, population twenty. “Drone cages,” the railroad workers called luxury carriages such as ours, a laborer’s sneer, or “private varnish,” in tribute to the naval-like finish on the exteriors. Privileged worlds, rolling past the track layers as they sweated and heaved. They were the worker bees, we were the drones.

  I remember being introduced to railroading in general and Sandobar in particular by a locomotive engineer named Walter Siemonds, a boyhood hero of mine. I was a child of ten and enamored of all things mechanical. An earlier version of Sandobar idled in the West Side yards, a six-car consist back then, Freddy’s brand-new toy. All around us were trains of different lengths and sizes, some of them having just come in and still belching smoke.

  Our locomotive in those days was a 4-0-0 hog in the American style, a behemoth to my young eyes. Walter Siemonds brought me up onto the engineer’s deck, where I swooned over the boiler and the red-hot firebox, the blast pipe that caused the engine’s chuff-chuffing sounds.

  Is there anything a man can do more to please a boy than to let him blow the whistle on a train? With a V-shaped cowcatcher, a massive headlight, an elegant diamond stack with a screen that destroyed sparks by pulverizing them, the steam locomotive was an amazing machine.

  “The smokestack has a thing that kills sparks by pulverizing them!” I shouted to Freddy, my ten-year-old voice lost in the whoosh of the boiler as Walter got up steam.

  I fell in love with the microcosmic world of it, not only the power plant but the whole train. “Consist” came into my vocabulary, which meant the order of the cars, along with phrases like “jerk a lung” (to disconnect an air hose) and “gandy dancer” (a track worker). I remember thinking of Sandobar as a kind of human body, with a locomotive head, a galley belly and parlor-car arms and legs.

  Walter ran me up along the Hudson River to Tappan Reach and back. The main fact about a locomotive (that particular one, Mercury, was decorated with a painted brass cartouche of winged sandals) is that a child can drive it, or at least be safely allowed to pretend to drive it. While I might run a buggy off a road, I would have to err pretty badly to derail Mercury.

  “Pound her out!” I’d scream, and Walter would help me notch up the throttle, the Palisades flashing by across the river like stone sentinels.

  Over the years Freddy had added to the original until our train was a full dozen cars long, all “bogies,” eighty-foot monster steam cars fitted with Westinghouse air brakes. They all had names, too: Anna Maria, Black Diamond, Evening Star, The Brave, Topaz, Nighthawk, Porpoise, United States, Fury, The Bruce, Crucible and The Globe.

  Sandobar had come a long way from her beginnings at the West Side yards. She was now crossing the pan-flat Nevada wastelands, aimed directly at the dawn.

  Sitting alone in the shooting car (The Globe), I thought that the first servants had to be waking by now, up front in the galley, Cookie Lewis and her two Irish girl helpers, Rose Devlin and Annie Heffernan. I imagined them firing the stoves, rooting in the ice closets for breakfast supplies, bickering amiably.

  Always, on a long journey, the early days are taken up with settling in, gettin
g straight on schedules, activities and duties, the bustle of leave-taking before the lapse into routine.

  I suppose I could have gone up front and participated in some of that lively commotion, but I preferred solitude. It is usually as difficult to be alone on a train as it is on a ship. Even on Sandobar, where I had my own sleeping compartment.

  Everything irritated me—the splendid desolation of the landscape, the clickety-clacking of the carriage, the steady, nauseating rock of the train. Like a child, I wished to sulk by myself and at the same time wondered peevishly why I was being ignored.

  I picked up a two-day-old newspaper from Virginia City, reading without interest until I came to this:

  GOLD HILL NEWS, JUNE 12, 1875

  The most cruel, outrageous and revolting murder ever committed in this city was that of Hank Monk on Friday morning last. At breakfast in the club dining room of International Hotel, he found himself surprised by the scoundrel Butler Fince, a disgraced Reno lawman, recently of Deadwood, in the Dakota Territory. Monk, a stage coach dispatcher esteemed by all, sat at repast when Fince stalked into his presence, and the two had words.

  Fince pulled iron and summarily assassinated Hank Monk, found with his head lying on the dining table at which he so late had et, a napkin over his head and face, the tablecloth beneath his head being saturated with blood. There was a single wound in his chest, and the back of his left hand was somewhat lacerated in his struggle to free himself from the grasp of the fiend who had him in his power. The murderer took himself off and even today walks free on the streets of Virginia, seemingly immune to prosecution.

  From the testimony of witnesses, including Bay financier Hon. Oliver Stringfist, Fince accused Monk of perpetrating the cowardly murder of his brother, Peter, a wildcatter, in a cabin in the Washoe, whose mutilated and headless corpse was found 27th last, cold and stiff with death. Sheriff Dick Tolle and a board of coroners inquiry found Peter Fince’s death to be the work of wild beasts, as plentiful animal sign was found at scene.