by Sean Munger
Once in Julian’s bedroom Shoop heaved him onto the bed. His head swam and the room spun uncomfortably around him. “Get my shoes off,” Julian said. Somewhat awkwardly Shoop knelt at the foot of the bed, untied his shoes and removed them. Then the boy stood and lingered for no apparent reason. There was a feeling of expectation in the air.
“I want another drink,” said Julian. “Go downstairs and bring me a brandy.”
“Are you sure you want to drink any more? We had quite a lot at that last tavern.”
“Do it,” he said harshly. “And turn down the gas on your way out. It’s too bright in here.”
Shoop did as he was told, dimming the gas so the overhead fixture gave little more than a feeble gold-colored glow. While he was gone fetching the drink Julian took off the rest of his clothes, flinging them unceremoniously onto the floor. I’m drunk. It feels good. I should do it more often. He was on the verge of passing out when the bedroom door opened again and Shoop came in, bearing a tumbler of brandy on a silver tray. He set it on the bedside table.
“Good night, Mr.—I mean, Julian.”
“No, wait.” Julian lifted his head from the pillow. “You don’t have to go.” He turned and reached for the drink, and was suddenly aware that he was totally exposed to the young man. He also realized that Shoop was looking at him and did not seem to be displeased at what he saw.
Julian looked down. He was surprised to find himself in a state of arousal. Okay. So that’s how it is, is it? He laughed. A moment earlier he’d almost taken a drink from the tumbler of brandy, but now he leaned over and handed it to Shoop.
“Here,” he said. “You may need this more than I do.”
The next day, terribly hung over, Julian did not go to the office. In the afternoon after he rose and bathed he sent a message to Roman Chenowerth at the office, asking him to make his apologies to Margolis, the senior partner. “Just a bout of something,” Julian wrote. “I’ll be back tomorrow.” He spent a quiet afternoon in the billiard room and later the Red Parlor, where he read up on the political news, and he rather enjoyed his unscheduled vacation.
In the evening he went out and dined at his club, mainly to avoid Anine. Sitting in the smoking room after dinner he considered summoning Shoop—for a quick drink, not a binge like last night—but decided against it. The boy had been understandably bashful all day. Best not to push him, Julian reasoned. Whatever happened last night—and I probably don’t remember the most important parts—it’s best for both of us to accept it gradually. He remained at the club as late as he dared, and counted himself fortunate to return home after everyone else had gone to bed.
Tonight he got his own drink, carrying it up the carpeted stairs to the second-floor hallway. Just outside the door to his bedroom Julian thought he heard something. It sounded like a rustling sound of some kind, but when he stopped to listen for it more intently he heard only silence, save for the distant ticking of the grandfather clock down in the entryway.
Nonsense, he thought. I’m letting Anine’s delusions drag me down too.
He went into the bedroom, lit a single gas jet and began taking off his suit. The brandy snifter sat on the edge of the dressing-table, its red-amber liquid reflecting the one soft glowing bulb of the overhead gas fixture. Julian threw the various pieces of his suit on the carpet, half in jest; it would be amusing to see Shoop pick them up in the morning. When he was naked he reached for the brandy snifter, took a lazy sip, and turned toward the bed. In doing so his gaze swept the mirror above the dressing-table—and suddenly he froze.
There was a figure visible in the mirror. It was a man sitting in the overstuffed Louis XVI chair against the wall of the bedroom, staring not into the mirror but somewhere off to the side. He was about thirty, had copper-colored skin and a long mane of silky black hair falling down his back. He wore a blue wool suit with a plaid waistcoat and a watch-fob chain. He sat totally still, his dark eyes immobile.
Julian gasped. The snifter fell from his grasp and bounced on the floor, spilling the brandy, but it did not break. He whirled around, looking at the chair, but of course there was no one there.
Dear God—what in hell was that?
Suddenly shamed by his own nakedness, Julian bolted for the wardrobe and snatched up a silk dressing-gown. He wound it around him and turned back to the chair. It was still empty. Gingerly he approached—the spilled brandy on the carpet was wet against his bare feet—and he reached out to touch the air where the apparition had been.
His heart pounded. This could not be blamed on drunkenness; he’d recovered from the hangover hours ago and since then had taken one sip of the brandy. Nor was it a mere hallucination. He had seen the Indian in the mirror. He was certain of it.
With great trepidation Julian stepped back over toward the dressing-table. Quivering, his eyes shut, he slowly swiveled his head toward the mirror. At last he opened his eyes. In reflection the chair was mercifully empty, but he still felt the strong presence of someone else in the room.
Finally he seized a box of matches and lit all the remaining gas jets. Then he went to the dimmer switch on the wall and turned them up full. The lights of the overhead fixture grew in intensity until they were a blaze of comforting yellow-white light. Now it all looked so silly: the clothes on the floor, the empty snifter, the glistening puddle of brandy and the empty chair.
The Indian. It can’t really be, can it? He’s been dead for years. Strangely Julian was not thinking of Anine’s spectral creaking and laughing in the night. He was thinking that he no longer felt safe in his own bedroom.
He went to the bureau, opened a drawer and removed the revolver. Stepping back over to the bed, he pulled back the covers and climbed in, dressing-gown and all, making sure the pistol was sitting on the bedside table. With the gas on full-blast and the lights blazing it would be difficult to sleep but Julian was determined not to turn them down. Perhaps it was an irrational hope but he thought keeping the lights on might prevent a recurrence of the apparition.
No one must know of this, he decided firmly. Not Shoop, not Anine—absolutely no one.
For the first time Julian felt the fear himself.
The image of the Indian was a powerful one for Julian and an unmistakable indication of hostility. After seeing it he felt violated, as if someone had been rooting about inside his head. If his mind was playing tricks on him it was definitely a cruel and underhanded trick. He’d endeavored for a long time to forget about the Indian entirely, and thought he had largely succeeded until he saw him sitting in his bedroom.
The incident happened four years ago. Julian was finishing his second year of study at Harvard—it was to be his second-to-last, for with his father’s connections he ended up matriculating early—and he’d grown terribly bored with reading law, with letters, with education of any kind. It was 1876 and his father was campaigning heavily for Rutherford B. Hayes, the Republican presidential candidate. At age nineteen Julian cared nothing about politics but he saw in his father’s connections an opportunity for at least something more diverting than reading law, so he wrote to Cornelius. “I want to join the campaign,” he told his father. “Reading law here is stupefying. Please let me leave Harvard and find a place for me in politics.”
Cornelius wouldn’t have it, and he told Julian, who was then quite naïve, that a political career of any substance depended on him completing law and practicing for at least a little while. But he did offer a consolation prize. “Take the summer months off,” Cornelius suggested. “See the country. Go West on the transcontinental railroad. I’ll put some money at your disposal. Consider it part of your education. It might turn out to be an important one.”
Julian was thrilled at the suggestion and leapt voraciously at the adventure. He left Harvard quite suddenly, packing little more than a portmanteau with a few clothes, a writing journal (which he ended up not using at all) and a flask, and spent the next wee
k at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. There he met a young man named Homer Flynn, the son of a Lowell, Massachusetts textile tycoon, who was also headed West. “What say we travel together?” Julian suggested while he and Flynn drank at a Philadelphia tavern. “I’m headed for San Francisco myself. Could be quite an adventure.”
Thus for several weeks he and Flynn rode the rails, slept in seedy inns and flophouses as well as expensive hotels, visited the occasional brothel and consumed staggering amounts of liquor. In St. Louis they fell in with another young traveler, Jesse Parmenter, a bold but penniless youth from lower Mississippi who was chasing rumors of a gold strike in the mountains near some place Julian had never heard of called Seattle. Parmenter could out-drink, out-smoke and out-shoot Julian and Flynn put together, and he quickly became the dominant personality of the trio. He conned both Julian and Flynn into giving him money so he could buy shovels and mining equipment when he reached Seattle. On the Union Pacific train across the lonely panhandle of Nebraska Julian drew up papers for the “Par-Ath-Fly Mining Company”—for Parmenter-Atherton-Flynn—of which each of the young men owned one share. “We’re going to be rich, boys!” Parmenter whooped, as he passed around one of the many flasks the three carried. “You two can forget your daddies’ Eastern money. You gonna have your own Western gold money soon enough, and all the pretty whores it can buy in San Francisco.”
The locomotive pulling the train on which they were traveling broke down midway through the journey. The three shareholders of Par-Ath-Fly were stranded in the desolate rail and cow town of Laramie, Wyoming Territory for two intensely hot and infuriating days. During those two days the news crackled over the telegraphs of the great battle—or massacre, as most of the papers referred to it—at the Little Bighorn River in Dakota Territory, in which General George Armstrong Custer and the U.S. 7th Cavalry Regiment were wiped out by Lakota warriors. Coming as it did in the centennial summer of triumph, the news of Little Bighorn was depressing and shocking.
It seemed to bother Jesse Parmenter most of all. “Damn Injuns,” he spat at the paper as they sat in Laramie’s one saloon. “Every single one of them ought to be wiped out. I hope Grant comes at ’em with everything we’ve got. The West has got to be pacified. It’s our country, not theirs. Goddamn reds should’ve learned that by now.”
The train resumed its journey the next morning, but the passenger cars were now quite crowded with travelers whose westbound trains had piled up in Laramie while the locomotive was being repaired. Nearly every seat was taken and Julian rode for many hours squished against the wall of the train by a foul-smelling man from Kansas City, his irritable wife and two restive children. He soon came to detest the journey, sore from sitting on the hard wooden bench, hungry, unable to sleep and disgusted with the whole thing. I don’t care about the adventure of the West anymore, he thought. I just want to get to San Francisco and find a soft bed and a good meal.
At one lonely stop—Julian wasn’t sure where it was, perhaps somewhere in Utah—even more passengers piled on. One of them was a Native American man. He was unusually well-dressed for an Indian, wearing a brand new store-bought blue suit, a plaid waistcoat and a bowler hat. When he got on Jesse Parmenter happened to be at the rear of one of the cars, smoking and taking a respite from the heat and the crowd. As the train began moving again Parmenter returned and found the Indian in his seat. Immediately his mood soured and his countenance turned hostile. “What the hell is this Injun doing in my seat?” he bellowed, drawing the attention of everyone in the car. “What the hell is an Injun doing on this train? Get out of here, you fucking savage! Get out, before I scalp you!”
A woman sitting in the bench behind the contested seat tried to defuse the situation by offering Parmenter her own seat. “I don’t want your seat, ma’am,” he replied contemptuously. “I want this fucking Injun off the goddamn train. He knows he don’t belong here!”
The Native American himself said nothing but made no effort to move. He reached into his waistcoat pocket and took out his watch, as if nothing at all was the matter, but Julian noticed his hands quivering.
The conductor soon entered the car. “What seems to be the problem, sir?” Parmenter fulminated again about the presence of the Native American, and the conductor asked for the man’s ticket. “It’s a valid ticket, bought and paid for,” the conductor shrugged, passing it back to the Indian. “There’s no law against an Injun buying a train ticket.”
The other passengers were growing annoyed at the fracas. “Find a seat in another car!” one man snapped. Parmenter retorted by challenging him to a duel. “You love Injuns enough to kill a white man for one?”
“I should shoot you for being a loud-mouthed idiot,” the man replied. “But I don’t want to waste a bullet on you.”
Julian was becoming increasingly tense—and he could tell that Homer Flynn was particularly uncomfortable at the situation—but he didn’t want to enter the fray and turn Parmenter against him. The conductor might throw all three of us off the train, he worried. The notion of being stranded at some desolate rail junction in the middle of Utah Territory, surrounded by Indians who were probably a good deal more hostile than the man in Parmenter’s seat, terrified him.
At long last the Indian himself acted. He took his carpetbag from under his feet, snapped the bowler on his head and stood up. He faced Parmenter, staring deeply into his eyes and said softly: “When babies cry loudly in the middle of the night, they usually get milk. It’s not because they deserve it. Sometimes their mothers just want to go back to sleep.” He then turned away, walked up the aisle and entered the adjoining car.
No one said anything. The sense of shame hanging in the air was almost palpable. Parmenter took the vacated seat, put his foot up on the back of the seat in front of him and reached into his dusty coat for his flask.
It was deep in the middle of the night when the train pulled into the station at Ogden. Here they were to change to a Central Pacific train that would depart in the morning for points west. Hot, exhausted and weary, Julian stumbled off the train lugging his suitcase, following Parmenter and Flynn. Parmenter paused on the platform to light a cigarette. As he did so his eye caught something up ahead. “There’s that goddamn red son of a bitch,” he sneered. He glanced back at Julian and Flynn. “What say we go teach that Injun a lesson he won’t forget?”
“Forget him,” said Homer. “Let’s just find a place to sleep, all right?”
“Not all right. That son of a bitch insulted me with his stupid Injun talk. He ought to know he can’t talk to a white man that way.” Parmenter dropped his cigarette to the ground—he’d only taken two puffs from it—and crushed it with his boot. A moment later he took off through the crowd after the Indian, who Julian couldn’t even see.
“No! Wait!” Julian ran after him, mainly frightened that Parmenter would do something that would land all three of them in jail. Flynn, never one to go against the herd, quickly followed.
The Indian was walking away from the station around the side of the two-story plank terminal building and into the muddy, almost pitch-black streets of the settlement that to Julian’s eye barely counted as a town at all. Parmenter shouted after the man. “Hey you! Fucking savage! You owe me an apology, you piece of shit!”
Julian ran too, now suddenly desperate—he was not sure why—to stop what he suspected Parmenter was about to do. The young Mississippian carried a gun which he’d shown Julian and Homer. It was a Derringer, a “poker-playin’ pistol,” as Parmenter had colorfully referred to it. He also boasted with evident relish that it was the same kind of gun that killed Abraham Lincoln. Privately Julian doubted the young man had ever fired it at another person, but there was a first time for everything.
It was so dark in the muddy street that Julian could barely see anything. He thought they were behind a livery stable of some kind for he could hear the braying of horses and the stench of manure was strong. All he
could see were two barely discernible outlines.
“You owe me an apology, red man,” Parmenter sneered.
“I apologize for nothing,” the Indian replied. “Leave me alone.”
“Where’d you get them clothes? You get them off a white man?”
“That is none of your business.”
“It is my business. Awful fancy clothes for an Injun. You kill a white man for those clothes?”
“I said, leave me alone. I’ve done nothing to you.”
Julian came up to him. “Come on, Jesse. Let’s just find a place to sleep, all right?”
“Why are you taking his side?” Parmenter snapped.
“I’m not taking anybody’s side. I’m just saying—”
The Indian seized the opportunity to turn and begin to walk away. For some reason this angered Parmenter. “Hey! Don’t you walk away from me! We got unfinished business, Injun!”
The man said nothing. He continued walking.
Julian saw the tiny Derringer flash in the dim light as Parmenter brought it out of his pocket. Aiming it at the back of the Indian’s head he hastened to catch up. “I said, we got unfinished business! You don’t dare turn your back to a white man, you uppity savage!”
It happened with a soft pop. Julian wasn’t sure Parmenter even intended to fire; perhaps his finger slipped on the gun’s tiny brass trigger. Probably the Indian never even knew Parmenter had a gun pointed at him. But he suddenly dropped into the mud. Julian did not see the wound but he was sure the bullet caught the Native American at the base of the skull. He probably died instantly.
“Dear God!” Homer Flynn gasped. He was standing several paces behind, clutching his own bag; he let go of it and it fell to the mud at his feet.
“What are you doing?” said Julian, grabbing Parmenter’s arm. The barrel of the Derringer smoked faintly. “You crazy son of a bitch, what are you doing?” He knelt down and shook the Indian. “Hey, mister. Mister. Answer me!” Parmenter stood over the body, looking stunned, and as Julian glanced up at him he could tell that even he was shocked at what had just happened.