by Ian Weir
I stood and hurried after him, strewing some coins onto the table to pay for the pork chop. He was ahead of me, tramping gaunt and resolute up one of San Francisco’s sloping streets. It took awhile to catch up to him, in fact; I was halfway winded when I did.
“I misspoke,” I said, huffing. “Sorry. We’ll forget all that writing-about-you business.”
He kept on tramping, giving no indication that he’d heard. I’d come up on his blind side, too, which didn’t help in reading his expression. The milky eye was blank and unblinking.
“What I really want to say ... If you’re looking for a place to stay—I’ve got one. It’s not much, just a room. Hardly even big enough for me. But I’d share it, if you’re so inclined.”
“I’m not.”
That came as a relief, tell the truth. But I was feeling distinctly better about myself, having made the offer. And a new idea had suddenly started to glimmer, as bright as a new silver dollar.
“I don’t suppose you could use some work?” I said.
The old man slowed, a little. “Work? What kind of work?”
“The kind that calls for a man of your size,” I told him. “And your skills, too, and experience.”
He slowed just a little more.
“There’s a woman and her sister,” I told him. “They need help. It’s a paying proposition.”
*
Prairie Rose was surprised to hear it. “Help?” she demanded. “Who told you I need help?”
“No one did.”
“That’s right. ’Cause I don’t need it.”
“Yes, you do.” I summoned my dead-earnest expression. “You just don’t want to admit it.”
“Barry?” said Rose. “Do me a favour, an’ fuck off.”
You recollect my friend Prairie Rose—the Mormon whore who slung drinks at the concert saloon on Dupont Street. The gal whose honour I had defended against Ichabod Rourke, on the ill-fated night of my forty-fifth birthday celebrations.
We were at the concert saloon now. It was mid-afternoon. This did not show the establishment—nor Prairie Rose herself—to best advantage. Too many windows, and through them daylight spilling without remorse. Items of human flotsam scattered about, and Prairie Rose wan and worn-out amongst them.
“What I’m proposing, see—he’d keep his eye out for you.”
“His eye out for what?”
“For such men as might come up your stairs in the night, Rose. Men with grievance in their heart, and violent inclinations. I won’t name names.”
A shadow crossed her face. “And in return?” she said. “I mean, just assuming I’m still listening to you at all...”
“In return, you pay him two dollars a day.”
“Chrissake, Barry. If I had two spare dollars, every day—”
“A dollar, then. Or fifty cents, even.”
“Nope.”
“A flat rate, then—three dollars a week. I can’t say fairer than that.”
“Barry...”
“...And I’ll pay it myself.”
That stopped her. Stopped me, too. I hadn’t been intending to make any such offer—but there it was, burbling out of my mouth.
“Why the fuck would you do that?” Rose demanded.
“I don’t know. I just know he needs some help. So let’s just try it for a week or two—all right? Give him a chance to earn an honest dollar. Feel good about himself, or some damn thing.”
“And what’s your real reason?”
“That’s it. I just told you.”
Rose didn’t believe me. I’m not sure I completely believed myself. But I kept talking. “He’s a sort of a friend, Rose. I want to help him out. And maybe helping him can help you, too—you and your sister, both. Christ, you don’t think I’m capable of one unselfish deed?”
She was looking at me closely, with a queer uncertain expression on her face. Then she looked across the room.
“Jesus, Barry. I dunno...”
We had chosen a quiet corner for our tête-à-tête. The old man was inside the door: the colossal wreck of him, standing ragged and oneeyed and half a head taller than anyone else in the place, like some derelict Lemuel Gulliver washed up amongst Lilliputians. A creature from an older dispensation, when men were taller and stronger and more terrible.
Such was my own impression. I am susceptible to a poetic cast of thought, as you will have noticed. Rose’s gaze tended more to flat-out disbelief.
“I mean, look at him. Who is he?”
“A good man fallen,” I said, “upon evil times.”
“That’s not a fucking answer.”
And it wasn’t. The problem was, what answer should I give? The old man had made it clear enough: he didn’t want his real name to be known. And I didn’t want that either—for his sake, and also because...well, you know. Because there was always a chance, wasn’t there? That he might change his mind, and decide that he did want his life story told. The last great untold tale of the American Frontier, with all the elements that Deadeye Ned never had to offer—obsession and heartbreak and fratricide, by God, and a Retribution Ride across half a continent. And it would hardly serve anyone’s best interests—the old man’s least of all—to let on that Strother Purcell was still alive and here, right here, in San Francisco. A city full of hucksters and hustlers and snake-oil promoters, and two-bit scribblers who would swoop like crows to exploit the old man’s saga in horrible and self-serving ways.
“He’s a drifter,” I said. “But I have reason to believe he was a lawman, years ago. He doesn’t talk about it.”
“A lawman? Where?”
“He doesn’t talk about that either.”
“Fucksake, Barry. Does he have a name?”
Another half-second of silence ticked past.
“His name,” I told her, “is Lemuel. He calls himself Old Lem.”
2.
Prairie Rose lived in a flat on Pacific Street. It was a long way down from Nob Hill, but neither was it some crib alley such as you’d find on Morton Street, where the lowest class of prostitutes clustered in shanties. On Morton Street you’d see them leaned out windows naked to the waist: a dime to touch a bubby, fifteen cents to touch ’em both—consecutively or both at once, strictly up to you and your personal preference, this being America and in America the customer being king. For two bits you could go right inside and follow where nature and inclination led.
Rose had been able to afford two rooms, on the third floor of a tenement. I can’t say how she managed that, entirely. You’d hear wild speculation about Mormon gold, stolen from her husband the Utah Brute. Such talk never made sense to me—why would a Mormon gal with gold be whoring in a concert saloon to begin with?—though the rumours never left off swarming around poor Rose. I suspected the answer had more to do with an arrangement she’d made with the man who owned the tenement—or the bastard at least who came to collect the rent.
It was hardly uncommon for agreements to exist between Rent Collectors and women like Prairie Rose. Certain favours sought, and supplied; not an exclusive arrangement, exactly, for Rose still trudged to Dupont Street most evenings of the week. But she had agreed—wholeheartedly—that no trade of that nature would be transacted at the flat. The flat was for Prairie Rose to live in, with periodic visits from the Rent Collector. Three days in a row might pass between such visits—whole weeks, even—leaving Rose with entire afternoons to work with needle and thread. She had talent as a seamstress, and aspirations in that line. She was taking in piece-work for the present, but daring to take on outside employment in the back room of a shop, and beginning to imagine a time when she could support herself wholly in this manner.
But—life being life—complications had commenced.
Rose’s Rent Collector had begun to chafe at the terms of their arrangement. A Sicilian, ape-shouldered and oleaginous, with a gold tooth front-and-centre in a predatory smile. Like all Sicilians of a certain demeanour he had been rumoured into la maffia, a secret brotherhood bound
by dreadful oaths—like the Freemasons, with more garlic and less geometry—which had recently been much twittered about in the press. Whether or not this was true, he was exacting when it came to debts and obligations, and had formed the opinion that his friends had a right to Rose’s favours on days when he himself was otherwise engaged. This had led to unpleasantness already, and tensions had only increased after Little Em’ly came to stay.
Little Em’ly was Rose’s sister, more or less. She had turned up out of a rainstorm at the concert saloon a few weeks previous, half-dead in the dead of night, desperately seeking Prairie Rose, who duly took her home, where Em’ly collapsed of fever and exhaustion. For three days and nights thereafter she lay at death’s dark portal, moaning to be let through. So I had learned from the quack who had been called to attend her. She was bad, he said, very bad indeed; as bad as a child can be and still recover.
But pull through she did, though she stayed in Rose’s day-bed for another week straight, and scarcely set foot outside even after that. A tiny dark slip of a thing, with hollow cheeks and huge, dark, hunted eyes. The closest she’d come to the outside world was to sit in Rose’s window. She’d do so for hours on end, sometimes, now that she’d come through the fever. Eerily composed, with her dark hair tied up tight in a bun and her face deep inside the shadows of a bonnet, so still that you could almost think she was sitting for a portrait. She never spoke, either—not even to Prairie Rose. I knew this because Rose told me. And I knew something else as well: the two of them were not exactly sisters. Little Em’ly was more as you might say a Sister-Wife, the youngest in the household of the Utah Brute, whom Rose herself had fled those three years previous.
Prairie Rose never said this, exactly. Not in so many words. She never would answer straight when asked about her past or that Mormon bastard. Her expression grew taut and she’d flinch away, as if that shadow was so long and so dark that she could not bear to let it touch her, even in recollection—and this was a gal who could cope with the clientele on Dupont Street. But from what little she did say, it was clear enough. Little Em’ly had arrived in that godforsaken household a few months before Rose herself had decamped. This had been long enough for the two of them to form a bond—and for Em’ly to have fled in search of Rose when she herself had reached the breaking point. Fled all the way to San Francisco, where she did not know another human soul and had no lantern to light her way, beyond a desperate hope that her sister-wife was in the city somewhere, and must surely take her in.
“She’s terrified he’ll follow,” Rose said to me. “Terrified he’s on his way this minute.”
This had been some weeks previous, before the other events I’ve been telling you about. She was well into the gin that evening, and crept right up to the edge of speaking plain.
“What, the Mormon?” I said. “All the way from Utah?”
“Fucksake, Barry!” She hissed it through her teeth. We were in the back of the concert saloon. None of the rabble was glancing our way, but she’d gone five shades paler nonetheless. “I never said that word, all right? Never said Mormon, an’ never said Utah. I never said fuck-all—so don’t you fucking say it!” She peered round through the haze of smoke as if I might have conjured him already.
Em’ly was seventeen years old. She’d been married to that Mormon for three years. When you totted up the arithmetic, you began to see why the gal had stopped talking.
*
Em’ly would have to meet the old man first, Rose said, before anything could be decided. Rose herself was looking decidedly inclined just to say no. But I might bring him to the flat on Pacific Street that evening, she agreed, in order for a decision to be made.
So I did. We stopped at a stand-pipe in the street and he made ablutions: “Old Lem,” as he was henceforth to be known. He had accepted the name without comment—had eyed me sidelong as I said it, but let the moment pass.
“Three dollars a week?” He’d asked this several times already.
“Three dollars,” I confirmed. I hadn’t mentioned that the money would come from me.
“Just to—what—keep a sort o’ watch?”
“That’s it.”
The Utah Brute, I said to him. The Mormon who haunted poor Em’ly’s nightmares—not to mention the Sicilian Rent Collector with his secret brothers. Here were two women beset; they needed him. “You’d be taking up your old calling. A sacred trust.”
That was evidently a mistake.
“No,” he said. “Don’t you say that.”
“Why shouldn’t they trust you?” I protested. “I trust in you.”
“D’you know who I am? Don’t you know what I done?”
He began to shake his head. I’d come to recognize this already: a sure sign that Old Lem was in dispute with his inner demons. Now he commenced to shake more violently: back and forth, like some baited carnival bear. “Don’t you see? There is nothing in me you can trust in!”
Passersby had begun to accelerate: giving us wide berth, eyeing us warily. I noticed a pair of constables on the corner, exchanging glances and reaching very casually for their truncheons. In one more moment this was liable to turn very sour, with the flat-feet commencing their ominous waddle toward us and all God only knows breaking out when they arrived.
“Let me ask you a question instead.” I kept my voice as low as I could, and urgent. “Can you trust me?”
“The devil do I know?”
“Can you try? Just this once, and see what happens?”
And he hesitated. Just long enough for me to make one final attempt.
“We’ve come all this way,” I said to him. “Look—there’s Pacific Street, just ahead. So just take the last few steps, and meet her. Meet Rose’s poor sister, and then decide.”
It sufficed to set him in motion again. Through the leery stream of passersby; past those sidelong-scowling constables. Down the street and through the doors of Rose’s tenement building. Up three rickety flights of stairs, with all the joy of a man ascending the gallows.
When I knocked at the door, Rose opened it. I stepped aside to clear the way for the old man, who was on the landing behind me.
Little Em’ly stood within. It was my first sight of her, up close—though “close” is not the word I want, exactly. A wisp of a creature, standing in the doorway to an inner chamber, across the expanse of an impossibly clean parlour—Em’ly’s own doing, as we would learn. Prairie Rose was an indifferent housekeeper, but Little Em’ly was fanatical about it. She would scrub and straighten and sweep at all hours, as if by dint of unceasing exertion she might scour all stain and filth from the world around her, and set straight again all the pillars of order.
Rose cast a nervous look up—way up—at the old man in her doorway. She summoned something that resembled a smile. “Em’ly,” she said, looking back over her shoulder. “This is Mr. Lem.”
He’d taken off his hat. His grey hair hung in tangles. “’Evening, ma’am,” he said.
Little Em’ly, neat as a pin, made no response. She was wearing a cloak and that incongruous Sunday bonnet. A thin, sharp face in shadow, peering out, like some sketch of a dread-filled Victorian orphan: Jane Eyre plucking up her nerve to step out of the study. Her hands were in front of her inside a lady’s muff, God help us—a ragamuffin shabby thing that might have been skinned from a long-dead raccoon. It might also have concealed a knife, for use in an emergency; something sharp to stab with. This was something that only occurred to me later.
“Mr. Lem is offering his services,” I said. I’d worked up a smile, and enunciated carefully, as you do to a child or a half-wit.
“I b’lieve the young lady knows that,” the old man rumbled.
“Yes,” I said. “Well, just in case—”
“I b’lieve she wants a moment to decide.”
And still she made no response. But something had passed between the old man and that girl—I swear it must have done, though I had no idea what it was. A glimmer of nascent recognition, as when
one lost soul sees another?
“I’ll not come inside, ma’am,” the old man rumbled. “But p’raps I’ll sorta loiter, hereabouts. Hour or so—see how it goes. If you’ll tolerate me? Lock the door, and I’ll be outside it, for awhile. In case you need me.”
Little Em’ly made no reply to this, either. But inside the bonnet—the damnedest thing—her head gave an infinitesimal nod.
The old man was there when Prairie Rose left again later that same evening, bound for Dupont Street and the concert saloon. She told me all about it, the following day. He was sitting on the stairs in front of her door, she said. As she came out, he stood and tipped his hat, then sat back down again as she went past.
This was not ideal, Rose thought. The neighbours, and all. But on balance she decided to think about it later.
He was still there when she straggled back in the first grey light of dawn. She felt soiled and soul-sick, as she often did. And she was trying to ignore the drunken badgerings of the two men who had been following her, the past quarter-mile or so. They were an aggravation, but harmless; so Rose had been telling herself. Just boys. Apprentices, reeling home at the end of a spree and egging each other on. But they’d followed her inside the tenement, which wasn’t good. Followed her up three flights of stairs, which was worse. So all things considered she felt both startled and relieved to see that long shape in shadow on the landing.
He was no longer against the door, but right beside it. He sat slouched in slumber against the wall: knees up-jutting, the brim of his hat tugged low across his forehead.
“Lem,” she exclaimed. “G’morning.”
He was dead-drunk, or asleep. So she thought at first. The apprentices evidently thought so too.
“Fuck ’im,” one of them muttered, behind her.
“Sooner fuck her,” said the other.
“G’morning, ma’am,” Strother said.
His solitary eye had slitted open. The apprentices stopped, three steps below.