Helldorado

by Peter Brandvold

  “Jesus Christ, you mean we sat here for over an hour and she didn’t even take her clothes off once?” thundered a resonant voice somewhere behind Prophet.

  Prophet felt similarly disappointed though he added no catcalls and heckles to that of the others, some of whom were also throwing spitballs made from torn handbills at the curtain quickly closing on the cast taking hurried bows. He’d just risen from his chair and was about to make his way back to the lobby when someone tapped his shoulder.

  He turned to see a skinny gent in a bowler hat and with longish, stringy red hair leaning toward him, an unctuous smile revealing two chipped front teeth. “Pardon me, Mr. Prophet?”

  The bounty hunter frowned at him.

  “Your presence has been requested backstage.” In the man’s English accent, “stage” sounded like “styge.” His breath was rife with the smell of whiskey, and his eyes seemed to glow as though a bright candle burned behind them.

  “I don’t wanna go backstage.”

  This threw the gent off, and he frowned as the seats around him and Prophet cleared and both were jostled by the exiting horde. The Englishman looked around as though for help but, finding none, returned his befuddled gaze to Prophet. “But the lidy requests your presence, Mr. Prophet.”

  “Lidy.”

  “Yessir, the lidy,” the gent repeated, jerking his head toward the closed, buffeting curtain to which spitballs clung like oversized lice.

  “Oh, you mean lady,” Prophet said.

  “Yessir. The actress, sir. Miss O’Shay.”

  Prophet looked at the curtain and his inborn caution was etched deep in his eyes as he turned once more to the nervously bowing Englishman, who was wiping his grubby hands on his grubby, brown-and-yellow-checked trousers. “I wouldn’t know her from Jehoshaphat’s cat.”

  “Well, she must know you, sir, because she asked me to come fetch you.” The little Englishman turned and beckoned. “Right this way.”

  “You better not be up to somethin’.”

  “I’m not up to anything, sir. I’m just the assistant stage manager, and I do what I’m told. The name’s Pickwick. Llewellyn Pickwick. If the actors and actresses want me to fetch ’em a chimpanzee, I hop the train for the nearest zoo, if you know what I’m sayin’, sir.” The Englishman chuckled and glanced over his shoulder as he made his way toward the stage along the far right wall, making sure Prophet was behind him.

  “If you got a bushwhack set up,” Prophet warned, striding along behind the man as the rest of the crowd was heading in the opposite direction, “just because I don’t have my gut shredder don’t mean you won’t go down screamin’.”

  As Pickwick climbed the steps along the stage’s right side, he cast a troubled look over his left shoulder, then, muttering to himself, turned forward again and pushed through the curtains.

  Prophet followed, bulling through the billowing curtains that smelled heavily of tobacco smoke, kerosene, and perfume. The heavy, smelly fabric wouldn’t let him go until he gave them a hard swipe with both arms and stumbled into the backstage area, closing his right hand around his Peacemaker’s grips and looking around carefully, half expecting to be facing grim-looking gents with pistols.

  Instead, there were only a handful of men in overalls and cloth caps sliding set furniture around while smoking and, in the case of two men lounging on one of the couches, holding beer bottles. One saw Prophet standing there with his hand on his holstered six-shooter and looking owly and raised his bottle to the bounty hunter with a reassuring wink.

  “Wasn’t all that bad—was it?” he said, chuckling.

  Chagrined, Prophet let his hand fall away from the revolver’s handle and continued following the scruffy English gent across to the rear of the stage and down a set of stairs into a dingy, candlelit basement until Pickwick stopped at a curtained doorway and doffed his hat.

  “Mr. Prophet to see you, Miss O’Shay!”

  Someone made a slight choking sound behind the door, and a strangled female voice said impatiently, “Send him in, Llewellyn. Send him in, for cryin’ in the king’s crown!”

  Pickwick stepped aside, throwing the curtain back with one hand, bowing, and gesturing Prophet through the door with a regal, exaggerated flourish of his free arm. The bounty hunter wouldn’t have been more befuddled if the queen of Timbuktu had summoned him across an ocean. There was something vaguely familiar about the woman’s voice, so it was with less trepidation and more curiosity that he tramped slowly through the door and felt the English gent drop the curtain into place behind him.

  As Pickwick’s footsteps dwindled into the distance, Prophet looked around the small, tawdry-looking dressing room that was in sharp contrast to the immaculately appointed theater above ground. A creamy-skinned redhead sat bare-legged and all but nude at a crude table appointed with a mirror that leaned back against the rough, stone wall.

  The woman smiled at him, rich, ruby lips spread wide. Her thick, red hair hung down over her shoulders and arms, and she sat with her bare knees facing Prophet, her heels lifted so that she leaned slightly forward on her tiptoes.

  “Holy shit in a nun’s privy,” Prophet muttered, his eyes growing wide with recognition as he slowly doffed his ragged hat. “Sivvy? Sivvy Hallenbach?”

  “Oh, Lou!” the girl fairly screamed, bolting up from her rickety chair and running across the cluttered room, her sheer black wrap billowing out like diaphanous wings, exposing her breasts.

  The saloon girl whom Prophet had once spent a winter with in an isolated cabin near Devil’s Lake, Dakota Territory, after their stage had been run to ground by rampaging Sioux, threw her arms around the bounty hunter’s neck and pressed her delectable breasts against his chest, hugging him tightly.

  “Oh, Lou!” she squealed, tucking her feet back against her thighs and hanging from his neck. “You don’t know how happy I was to see you out there!”

  Prophet held the girl tightly, genuinely thrilled to see her again. It had been three years since they’d parted in Bismarck after a winter that had nearly killed them but during which they’d made the best of things, not the least of which was sharing body warmth. He’d known a lot of women in his thirty-some-odd years, but none except Sivvy Hallenbach could he have spent a Dakota winter with in a two-room abandoned stage station cabin, and not killed her or been killed by her.

  “That was you out there?” he said, looking down at her as he smoothed her red hair back from her temples. He looked across the room at a long, jet wig hanging from a nail on a square-hewn ceiling post.

  “Sure was,” Sivvy said, setting her feet back down on the floor and pulling her head back away from him, grinning up at him. “I come a ways in a few years, haven’t I, Lou? How’d you like the performance?”

  Prophet said haltingly, “Sure, sure . . . well, I liked it just fine. What I could hear above the caterwauling . . .”

  “Ohh!” she cried, her face crumpling with irritation. “The men in these mountains wouldn’t know a world-class performance if it ran up between their legs and bit ’em in the balls. All they want is to see a girl naked!”

  Prophet chuckled. Sivvy might be donning wigs and performing in shows that he couldn’t understand, but she hadn’t lost the salty tongue that had kept him in stitches through that entire Dakota winter. He noticed also that she hadn’t regained her inhibitions, if she’d ever had any, for he admired her naked, pale, pink-tipped orbs rubbing against his denim shirt as her sheer wrap hung back behind her nicely rounded hips.

  “If you could have heard the words, Lou,” Sivvy said, caressing his neck with the thumbs of her entwined hands, “you’d have been right proud of your old Sivvy. I studied up with Mr. Simeon Nash Nye and Maude Granger over in Pueblo, and I traveled with them around the mountains putting on The Brook—that’s by Lord Byron—and several Shakespeare plays, and I really cut my teeth on that stuff.

  “Mr. Nash and Miss Granger told me last fall they thought I was ready to go off on my own, and I ain’t seen neither
since I took up with this show here, but I’m told by those who know about such things, that they can really see their influence in my work. I’m thinkin’, Lou, after a few more performances in these parts, I might head on over to Denver and then gradually make my way back East. Oh, wouldn’t you be so proud of your Sivvy if you heard she was performing in New York City?”

  “If you performed that high in the golden clouds, I might just ride on over and take in the show myself. I bet I could even hear the words back there amongst the civilized folk. Bet they’d be hangin’ on every word, silent as pack rats in the parson’s closet!”

  “We’d ride in hacks, and go out to all the finest restaurants, even the French ones.” Sivvy pressed her cheek against his chest once more. “Oh, it’s so good to see you again, you big saddle tramp, you! What’re you doing here, anyway? Haven’t heard from you or about you in so long, I figured you were nothin’ but a pile of big old bones bleachin’ out in the bottom of some deep canyon.”

  Prophet opened his mouth to speak, but the girl clamped her hands over his lips. “Let’s catch up later. Let me throw some duds on, then let’s you and me head on over to my first-class digs at the Golden Slipper and diddle like minks!”

  16

  “YOU NEVER KILLED anyone?” Louisa asked Miguel Encina as they sat along the gurgling, drumming creek in the twilight outside Juniper.

  “Nope.” The young banker shook his head. He was perched on a tree branch just a few feet above the ground, his back against the trunk, one leg stretched out along the branch before him. “Thank god it never came to that. I have my father and Sheriff Severin to thank for it, too.”

  The young man stopped and stared toward the creek several yards away as it slid darkly over rocks between its cottonwood- and aspen-stippled banks.

  “How so?” Louisa was perched on a broad cottonwood stump, one bootheel hooked over the stump’s edge, one arm draped over her upraised knee. They’d been talking steadily for nearly two hours. It was almost dark, stars kindling brightly in the lilac sky over the canyon.

  Miguel seemed to weigh his response before he turned to her. “After we’d held up the Laramie stage for the umpteenth time, the sheriff ran me and my gang down at an old miner’s shack up amongst the rocky ridges just west of here. The rest of my gang got away, but I was drunk and I fell off my horse. The sheriff threw a rope around me, made me walk back to town and right on up to my father’s front porch. The sheriff asked Pa what he wanted to do with me, and my father said, ‘Keep him here. I’ll saddle a horse.’ ”

  Louisa frowned as Miguel stared at her, an oblique smile on his lips, the last light showing dully in his warm eyes.

  “What do you think happened next?”

  “They threw you in jail, which is right where you belonged.”

  Miguel chuckled and shook his head. “They half dragged, half walked me up to an old mine claim on that ridge up there.” He pointed toward the peak rising on the far side of the creek, toward a jumble of boulders near the top. “They lowered me into the mine shaft and left me one canteen and a small burlap sack with jerky in it. My father told me he was going, to leave me there for four days, and during that time I was to think about what I wanted to do with the rest of my life—whether I wanted to remain a fiddle-footed firebrand who’d likely end up in jail or hanged if I kept on the way I was going, or the respected son of a banker with a nice income and a bright future. Then they went away and, true to his word, Pa rode back to the hole four days later.”

  “A tough way to come to a decision,” Louisa said. “But it looks as though you made the right one.”

  “I reckon I did. It led right on up to now, with you and me sittin’ here beside Pine Creek and,” he added with a smile, “not shooting it out in some canyon.” His eyes dropped to the pearl grips of Louisa’s Colts that shone brightly in the last light. “I got a feeling my trail would have ended in that canyon.”

  “I got a feeling it would have, too.” Louisa looked off, and they were silent for a time. “Miguel?”

  “Yes, Miss Louisa?”

  “I just got to Juniper and all, but I have no idea if I’ll stay here or not. You see, I’ve been through what Lou would call—if you’ll pardon the expression—knee-deep shit. I’d like to tell you about it someday. But for now, I don’t really trust myself to think too clearly.”

  “All right.”

  “So, what I’m saying is—I like you and all, and even though we just met a few hours ago, I think it’s very possible I might get to like you even more.”

  “My past hasn’t soured you on me?”

  “Your honesty’s made you right sweet. We’ve all got trouble behind us.”

  “So what you’re saying, Miss Louisa, is that you want to take things slow.”

  “That’s right.”

  Miguel fidgeted around on the branch for a time before turning to her again with that disarming smile of his. “Does that mean I can’t come over there and steal a quick kiss?”

  Louisa felt herself blushing and was glad the growing darkness hid it. “You wouldn’t have to steal one.”

  He slid off the branch, walked over to her, and stooped down. She remained on the tree stump, one arm still hooked around her knee, as he set his hands on her shoulders and closed his lips over her mouth.

  When he straightened, he said, “That was nice.”

  Louisa smiled. Her heart was swelling, and it felt good to just go ahead and let it swell. She suddenly felt a tingle of excitement and hope for the future. She hadn’t felt hopeful about her future in a long, long time.

  Miguel Encina offered his arm to her. “Can I interest you in a cup of coffee before turning in?”

  “Do they serve sarsaparilla in Juniper?”

  “A bounty hunter who drinks sarsaparilla . . .” Miguel laughed as they strolled off toward the town together, arm in arm. “As a matter of fact, they do.”

  Lou Prophet wasn’t all that taken with the idea of heading over to the Golden Slipper hotel to diddle like proverbial minks with Sivvy Hallenbach, aka Miss Gleneanne O’Shay, because Louisa was holed up over there. His comely partner, or former partner, was well versed in Prophet’s roguish behavior and seemed to have acquired a philosophical attitude about it, but he was just enough embarrassed by it himself that he didn’t want her to actually see him at it.

  On the other hand, he wasn’t strong enough to deny a pretty girl’s request for carnal pleasure, especially one standing right in front of him clothed in a dark silk wrap so insignificant that he could have stuffed the entire garment inside his right cheek and still had room in his mouth to chew a full meal.

  And he couldn’t very well expect Miss Gleneanne O’Shay to follow him over to the Muleskinner’s when she had her own private suite at the Golden Slipper.

  So it was to the latter, better-appointed flophouse that he followed Sivvy. The girl—Prophet still considered her a girl though she had to be twenty-six or so—was dressed in a sparkling gold gown, pearls, and mink stole fit for a queen, all of which set off her dark red hair to stupefying effect. It also showed a goodly portion of her pillowy, pale cleavage, nearly causing more than a few heads to swing her way on the route between the opera house and the hotel.

  As Prophet followed her across the lobby and up the broad, carpeted stairs, he felt humbled by his own wash-worn though relatively clean trail garb in sharp contrast to Sivvy’s queenlike elegance. She said she had to soak in a hot tub before any horsing around.

  “I’d invite you to join me, you handsome ape,” she whispered as two men dressed like wealthy cattle buyers passed them in the hall, giving the actress a cordial nod before glancing at Prophet and looking vaguely befuddled. “But the tub isn’t big enough, and you’d likely crush the daylights out of me. I have to be careful not to damage my lungs.”

  “And that’s a right fine set you got there, too, Miss O’Shay,” Prophet quipped as they stopped outside her door, marked by the gilded number 9.

  “Oh, Lou,” she
squealed, giving him her key and rubbing her shoulder coquettishly against his arm. “I don’t think you’re talking about my lungs!”

  Prophet unlocked the door and threw it open, stepping aside to let her pass ahead of him, grinning. “I don’t think I am, either.”

  She rubbed against him alluringly as she strode into the cavern-like room with a massive canopied bed and four tall windows bedecked in pleated red-and-gold drapes with bloodred roses stitched into them. There was a thick gold carpet on the floor, several beveled mirrors on the walls, and big chests and marble-topped washstands. Clothes of every shape, color, and size were strewn everywhere.

  Sivvy stepped behind a massive privacy screen adorned with more roses, denying Prophet’s request to watch her undress and bathe because: “All women worth their salt know that letting a man watch them bathe diminishes their mystery. And I’m not some harlot, you know, Lou!” As she chided him, she tossed the gold dress over the privacy screen and batted her false eyelashes.

  “No, ma’am,” Prophet said, kicking out of his boots.

  “At least, I’m not anymore, though I reckon when we first ran into each other I was plying the lesser trade.”

  “Never held it against you, Miss O’Shay. A girl’s gotta do what she can in this old world, same as a man.”

  “Don’t call me that, big man,” she said, as sounds of water emanated from behind the screen. “Miss O’Shay sounds funny coming from you, Lou. I want you to always call me Sivvy, so I’ll always remember the time we had in that frigid cabin. The good times, anyway—not the Injuns that kicked in our door in that cold, cold night and you had to blast ’em both to smithereens with that big shotgun of yours.”

  “Ah, yes,” Prophet said. “Those were simpler times.”

  Behind the screen, Sivvy splashed and laughed.

  “We were lucky to get through them, but you’re right—things were simpler back then. I was just starting out, heading for Fort Totten to perform at the officer’s theater there. Never made it, but I got an even better job in Bismarck. You know, the territorial governor even watched me perform in Forty Thieves. Didn’t visit me backstage or anything, though. He had his wife with him.”