by Speer Morgan
“This water’s no good,” Tom said. “There’s a herd of pigs here.”
“Get us a bed,” Jake said out of the darkness. “You can’t be very choosy. This is a rough place.”
Tom felt his way to the nearest lighted building, a saloon. A man leaning against the wall outside—the first person he talked to—directed them to a nearby hotel, and when Tom inquired about a doctor, the man said that he was one himself. He would get his bag and come over as soon as possible. Luck seemed to be with them.
***
A group of women were sitting around the hotel’s parlor, smoking cigarillos, some drinking out of stemmed glasses, and Tom thought it must be a place where the people who worked in the saloons stayed. The woman who ran the hotel wore a single purple plume in her hair and a low-cut, tightly fitting, tiger-striped dress that came all the way up to her knees. The other women, younger, were in costumes with their breasts pushed up almost out of them; one woman had a white pet rabbit in her lap. The room was a mist of perfume. A man who looked like a ranch hand was staggering around among them like a grasshopper jumping against the walls of a can, raising his front lip, showing his teeth, laughing in a high whinny. He sounded like he had a cold, as well as being drunk. “Now, why won’t you give ol Pede some free onion? No money, so what. Trade you this sombitch fer one little hunk of happy valley.” He pulled out a six-shooter and aimed it loosely at one of the women, laughing the goofy, high-lipped laugh. She sat very still and quiet, watching him, the white rabbit panting in her lap. The woman who ran the desk walked over and touched his elbow. “Time for you to leave, honey. Go on. Come back when you ain’t so drunk.” She had a gravelly, authoritative voice.
He thrust his jaw out at her like a young boy. “Whadif I doan wanna?”
“Well, hon, I have a shotgun behind this counter, and the last person that give me trouble I had to shoot and feed to the pigs. Now, you wouldn’t want me to do that to you, would you?”
The man eventually ricocheted out the door, his pistol still dangling from his hand.
Tom told the desk lady that his companions were sick.
She gave him a look. “What kind of sick?” She questioned him closely, and only after Tom convinced her that they didn’t have something catching did she take his money. “Fever season’s mostly over, but I’ve got to be careful,” she said. “I’m running a hospital around here, much sickness as I have to deal with.”
Tom helped Jake and Sam up to the room. First he helped Jake up the stairs, but Sam was completely out, and he had to carry her like a baby. The tiger-skin lady watched curiously as he lifted Sam, who was pale, her hair all loose and hanging down. Aware of his own clumsiness, Tom went up the steps extremely carefully. With Jake taking up most of the bed, and already asleep, he had to put her on the very edge of it, go around and try to pull Jake over, then run back around and push her a little farther, until he’d managed to get her safely berthed.
The hotel continued to be busy with people going in and out, up and down the single flight of stairs to the six-room corridor. Men shuffled through the halls after the costumed women, and Tom finally began to realize what kind of hotel this was. He had heard such places named: a den of prostitution, a house of ill fame, a palace of sin. He was aware, broadly, what a prostitute was: someone who gave her body to be fouled by male lust. After almost two weeks of being in the grip of male lust, Tom now had a better idea of what it was, and he understood why men went to such places. Indeed, all he had to do was look at Sam on the bed—even in her bedraggled, dirty, half-dead state—and it made him think of the unbelievable occurrences of last night. He paced the small room, and looked out the window. Where was the doctor?
He was about to go out and search when the doctor arrived, a skinny, baggy-eyed man who kept sighing and scratching himself and adjusting his hat. He appeared to be uninterested in examining Jake or Sam. He didn’t even ask any questions about them.
“My prices are good,” said the doctor, looking at him with yellow eyes. “Two hangover treatments usually cost you four dollars. I’m givin it to you for three.”
“They don’t have hangovers, sir,” Tom said. “They drank bad water.”
“Same difference,” the doctor said. “If you want a treatment, too, I’ll add it for only a dollar and fifty cent.”
“I’m not sick,” Tom said.
“Never can tell when a tone-up will help. I treat a lot of these girls right here in this hotel. You ask them about my medicine.” The doctor’s kit was strangely simple. All he carried in it was a little bottle of white powder, a flask of water, a small, flat pan in which he cooked up the powder with water, and a large syringe and needle. Tom had had a smallpox vaccination, but this was a much bigger needle. He paced back and forth by the window while the doctor cooked the medicine over the lantern—scraggly beard and wild eyebrows weird in the yellow light, casting a large shadow on the wall behind. As he approached Sam’s arm with the syringe, Tom suddenly put himself in the way, his heart crashing in his chest. “What kind of doctor are you?”
Holding the needle up, the man narrowed his eyes at him. “Why you asking me that now?”
“I want to know,” Tom said.
“They call me Dr. Pain. There used to be eight of us in this town. Now there’s only five, and I’m the best. I got people coming all the way from Guthrie fer my treatments.”
“I don’t want you to do that.”
“You’ll have to move out of the way. I got other people to see.”
“No sir,” Tom said. “I want you to leave here.”
“I’ve done got the medicine cooked up. I can’t waste it.”
Tom was not calm. All he could think was to stop the man. “Go away!” he said, taking a step closer. “Don’t touch them.”
Scowling at him, the man went over to the room’s single chair and sat down, rolled up a cuff, and stuck the needle into his own leg, slowly pushing in the syringe. As he was leaving, he snarled through his beard, “Somebody’s in town looking fer you people. I might just have to let him know where you’re at.”
Tom stood around the room wondering what to do. Both Sam and Jake remained asleep, but neither of them looked good. Sam’s skin was blanched and shiny. Jake was restless, and he kept tossing and toiling around in the bed, threatening to knock Sam onto the floor. They needed something. It was a noisy place—Tom kept hearing laughter, what sounded like moving furniture, and occasional yelling. He was overwhelmed by an urge to go to sleep. He had done this all wrong. He sank down on the floor and leaned against the wall for a moment’s rest and fell asleep.
He dreamed that he was floating under warm green water, able to see through it for some distance. Ahead of him, he saw a cross-shaped thing and swam toward it. As he approached, it kept disappearing, sometimes reappearing on the left, sometimes the right, but ever closer, until suddenly it—she—was right before him with her arms out, her hair floating wildly out from her head, her body naked and vividly white in the green water, her eyes open and fixed on him . . .
***
Popping noises. Gunshots, Tom realized as he came awake. His eyes blinked open and fixed on a lamp wick, almost burned down. He stood up, at first disoriented. How long had he slept? Sam and Jake were still on the bed. The hotel had fallen quiet. He hurried down the stairs. The tiger woman who’d rented them their room was still in the parlor, alone now, with her feet propped up on a chair. The plume had fallen from her hair onto the couch.
She yawned and stretched. “You must be a hot-blooded young man getting up in the middle of the night. Want a haircut?”
Haircut? “No ma’am. I need something for Jake and Sam. I tried to get them some water earlier, but there were pigs—”
“Don’t mention those damn things. I don’t even want to hear about em.” She waved a hand in disgust. “They’re drunkards, every one.” She sighed. “You’d think the least a hog could do would be to stay sober. They eat mash put out behind the whiskey mill over here on the b
ranch. Nighttimes, they hang around the well and go trotting around begging whiskey. People give it to em and think it’s funny. I saw one old sow out there knock a man down to get at his open bottle. Saloons selling bottle water are happy to have these hogs around to ruin the well, of course, because they make as much money selling water as whiskey. Which I call immoral.”
Tom appreciated her explanation but felt he needed to do something as soon as possible. “They were sick to their stomachs all afternoon. I never got them any water.”
“That’s two things you forgot. You left your team outside, too. I took care of it. You can fetch them at the stable when you need them.”
“Thank you, ma’am. I’m just worried about Sam and J—”
From outside came three more shots, and someone not far away screamed in what sounded like mortal pain. From somewhere else came laughter, casual sounding, as if at a slight joke. “Idiots,” the woman said. She stood up and quickly smoothed out her dress. “One of these days I’m goin back to St. Louis, before one of em shoots me. Come on, I’ll take a look-see.”
After she had looked more closely at Jake and Sam, the tiger woman suggested a cure. “Potato,” she said, looking curiously at Sam. “Both of them need to eat a raw potato with a lot of salt on it, then afterwards good drinking water. Old Missouri cure for the pukes.” She delivered this advice in a flat tone, as if reciting something she’d said many times before. Her eyes were fixed on Sam, almost as if she recognized her. There was no food in the hotel, and Tom had to go to one of the joints, looking for potatoes and fresh bottle water. “Careful out there,” she warned, glancing up at him. “They’ve been at it again tonight.”
The saloons that made up most of the town were spread around, and he found one nearby, a one-room building with no front porch and a floor low to the ground. One step up and he was in a smoky room with a kerosene chandelier suspended from the ceiling, eight or ten tables, mostly empty, wet-smelling sawdust-covered floor, and a piano player dully pounding out the same ragtime sound that he’d heard coming from saloons in Fort Smith. On the wall behind the bar, obscure in the smoke, hung a large picture of a naked woman, reclining on a red couch with her legs intriguingly separated. A man was patrolling around with an ax handle in his hand, and he came over to Tom.
“Got a gun on you?”
“No sir.” He cleared his throat. “Do you have any potatoes?”
The man looked not directly at Tom but just to the side of him, like Tom had seen Indians doing, although this was a very large and ugly white man. Slapping the ax handle in his paw, he said, “Give you five seconds to be out the door, asswipe. I had enough crazy flatheads in here.”
Flush with embarrassment, Tom retreated. Flatheads? Unconsciously he felt the top of his head. He had done something wrong, but there was no time to worry about it. He stumbled through darkness to the next saloon, where another piano player was banging away. Here the naked woman on the wall, while as large as the one in the previous saloon, was standing by a lamp rather than lying on a couch, and striking a pose with her bottom cocked up, looking over her shoulder, hair past her waist. This saloon had more people than the other. Women moved around the room, some of them getting drinks from behind the bar, sitting in laps of card players, lighting cigars with big lucifer matches that they scratched slowly under the tables. Tom noticed that Indian bloods and whites played at separate tables. There was a big man patrolling this saloon, too, and Tom avoided him and went straight to the bartender. No food for sale, he said, but he did have water for fifty cents a bottle. He put a bottle on the bar and Tom drank the entire thing without pausing. Watching him with hooded, impersonal eyes, the bartender seemed to remember something and asked, “You ain’t with them from Fort Smith, are you?”
“Yes.”
“Better clear out of here.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Go on, git out! Go on! I don’t want no more trouble tonight.” Tom backed out of the place, startled, and stood outside listening to the plink-plinking of pianos and the pig noises. He was beginning to wonder if he’d find any potatoes. The next saloon had a porch, which he discovered in the darkness by hitting it, shin-high, and sprawling across it. Not moving until the spasm in his leg receded, he took a minute to think. He was getting nowhere. Apparently he’d never find what he was looking for by just going in and innocently asking for it. He got up, took a deep breath, and entered the saloon. This time he acted less timid. He paid no attention to the naked woman on the wall or anything else about the place. He went right up to the bar and said to a bearded bartender, “I want six potatoes, a little salt, and three bottles of water. I’ll pay you three dollars.”
The bartender looked at him with a moment’s consternation, but when Tom took out three dollars and put it on the bar, he got results. A woman was sent out and soon returned with potatoes. He put them with a salt shaker into his pockets and went outside in the first hint of morning light, clutching the bottles. Squinting through the darkness, he was hurrying toward the hotel when someone came toward him riding what at first looked like a strangely disfigured horse that became more disfigured the closer it came. It passed him at no more than ten feet, and he could not believe what he saw: a man in a bowler hat sitting on what looked like a gigantic fat bird with a tiny head on a hugely long neck. The bird trotted by smartly on two long, thick bird legs, a saddle strapped around its body. Tom was looking over his shoulder at this mirage when he tripped over something and hit the ground, number two for the night.
The pigs were on him out of nowhere. He had no warning, heard no sound—they were merely there, instantly, snuffling at his head and at his pockets with their flat, wet, stinking noses. He scrambled around to get the bottles, and all the way to the hotel they were as close on his heels as a pack of dogs. A couple of them followed him through the door, to the extreme aggravation of the tiger lady. She got a broom and cursed and whacked them toward the door. She finally chased them out and slammed the door, and pointed at him. “Them things have been drunk so long they don’t know inside from outside. They come in here again, and I’m going to invite em all to a goddamn barbecue. You git your potatoes?”
“I saw a man outside riding—”
“A bird?” she finished for him. “That’s old Bobby Joe Dyer. He’s got him a saddle ostrich. Watch out, though, he’s been known to kill a man for making fun of that bird. This town is full of the most peculiar people this side of the Barnum and Bailey.”
The lady got a pocketknife from a drawer, and the two of them went upstairs. She gave Tom the knife and told him to peel the potatoes while she woke up Sam and Jake. When they had been gotten awake enough, the lady coaxed them to eat. “Make you feel better right away,” she said in a rough but soothing voice. “I can guarantee the potato cure.” Propped up on the bed, side by side, they took little nibbles at first and after a while had downed a half bottle of water apiece. Tom was surprised at how well it worked. They didn’t get sick to their stomachs again. Tom munched on his own salted potato and felt better. The tiger lady was in and out of the room, checking on them, over the couple of hours it took. Tom noticed that she kept exchanging odd looks with Sam. Jake had gone off to the outhouse when the tiger lady finally asked, “Where you from, hon?”
Sam hesitated before saying, “St. Louis.”
The lady sniffed and looked away, one brief gesture that again seemed to Tom like a recognition. She looked out the window into the blue sky, her gaze fixing far away.
11
JAKE EVENTUALLY rallied, got dressed, and went to see about the mules. After parking them beside the building, he squatted against the wall in the sun, gathering his strength for the day. He didn’t feel all that poorly considering he’d been poisoned yesterday. His bunkmate appeared to be doing pretty well, too. Earlier this morning, he’d looked over at her and realized that she didn’t look at all bad.
Dandy had a couple of customers here they had told Jake to hit, but he didn’t intend to spend
another hour in this worthless place. McMurphy had told him that this was one of the “preferred areas” for collection, but he’d about had it with customers treating him like he had the typhoid fever, not saying hello or goodbye, committing suicide or trying to poison him. This mortgage-collecting business was strictly for the birds.
Someone rode up to the hotel, and Jake happened to step around the corner of the building just in time to see him go in the front door. If the man had turned his head, he’d have seen Jake.
Yesterday at the river, Tom had pointed out that someone was following them, and this close up Jake realized who he was.
Over the years, he had seen Deacon Jim Miller around the saloons in Fort Smith and heard more stories about him than he cared to recall. Half of what was said about him was Saturday afternoon drunk talk, and Jake disdained both the man and the conversation about him. But here he was, all duded up, strict and tidy, just like you always heard he dressed when he was on a job.
And he had been following them.
Jake went to a side window, glanced in, and saw that the madam, still standing at her desk, looked like her plug had been pulled, and the floozie with the rabbit had put her face into her hands. Jake started thinking real hard. He had no gun. He had a couple of old guns back home but generally avoided them except for occasional hunting—which some called peculiar for a salesman in the territory. Deacon Jim Miller used a gun with as much reticence as most men used a toothpick.
He talked in a high, tight voice that Jake could hear through the open window. “Somebody I need to talk to? Name of Jaycox? Would you happen to know where he is?”
Miller stood there, utterly still. A surge of anger shot through Jake like electricity out of a dynamo, the feeling of outrage and disbelief that he’d experienced before only on those few occasions when his life had been threatened.