by Brian Hart
He’d see the banker first, Hayes, the twerp. Not long ago the little man had slammed his hand in a door and broken his fifth metacarpal, and when he’d straightened the finger to splint it the banker had wept like a child. He’d seemed hard behind his desk, but with the tears he went instantly wainable. There are degrees of toughness, and from the doctor’s experience he judged women to be generally about three orders above men. Give them a reason to weep and pat their heads. And isn’t life hard. And isn’t pain painful. Your wife gave birth to a ten-pounder and didn’t so much as whimper. Not that you can compare that to the pain of a man, particularly the pinkie finger of a banker. Tearful slints, their bravery so easily abandoned, as a pocketwatch left upon the dresser.
The inside of his derby was dry, and for this the doctor was thankful; without this he would be wrecked. Women, God, and hats. His wife’s umbrella was there behind the door, and every time he noticed it, he wanted to take his scalpel and cut hundreds of tiny slits in it and send it to her in Seattle or wherever she was now, California. He went out the door into the wet with the picture of his wife’s face sizzling on his mind. She’d stopped the world for him the first time he saw her, that’s how he chose to remember it, but in his heart he felt duped somehow. She’d set him up for this. She’d known that she would do this all along. Then it occurred to him that his children were being raised as Californians; illiterate gold chasers, opium-addicted carpet vendors. Thoughtless little brutes who would someday be arrested and hung for stabbing a store clerk with a penknife. He’d rather they be raised by wolves. But they were, weren’t they? Katherine, if nothing else, was a wolfish bitch, wasn’t she? He smiled and his blood went hot as if he’d been standing too close to the train tracks when it passed by. She scared him, his wife. She’d weakened all the parts of him that mattered. She was his bad weather, and even when she was hundreds of miles away she beat him down, eroded him like the sandcliffs on the coast.
He went to cross Heron Street but had to wait for a goatherd to push his animals by, more goats lately and more people. The whole Harbor was filling up. He’d heard there was another doctor in town, that made four. But minus Ellstrom, well, still four, three and a half.
He checked the Alaska Bar first, had a shot of bourbon with Persimon the choker setter gone double amputee. No news from him or the bartender, Meigs, but he didn’t have to pay for his drink. Not a bad stop. Good day, gents. Velchoff the doorman asked him about a goiter.
“Come see me next week.”
“Why not sooner? It really hurts.”
“Don’t whine, it causes goiters.”
Going out the door, he replaced the hat on his head and was thankful again for silk because the silk lining of his hat reassured him and caressed him like a nurse he’d had as a child mending his fever. Sweet memories, silk kerchief. Explains why your wife walks all over you. He understood love to be glacial; it’s bigger than anything and it grinds you to bits and leaves a big hole.
Daisy at Ed Dolan’s Eagle Dance Hall had seen Dr. Ellstrom three, maybe four days ago, post-leaning drunk, said he was drooling a little.
“You clean him out?”
“Not me, but somebody was gonna if they hadn’t already. Why don’t you come upstairs and let me rub your feet.”
“Another time.”
“I didn’t really mean your feet, Doc,” she whispered.
A raised hand, unspoken promise, and back in the street, three bourbons down. There are limits to what is allowed, the doctor thought. Each man according to his fate, like barefoot height and eye color. You can’t push against the great mass of things. Life so often calls for burrowing and sliding and forgetting, and foot rubs. Helplessness is a choice made when you can’t stand against the immovable.
Jacob Ellstrom was a lucky man, and like most lucky men he probably disdained to admit his luck, and if he did he loathed it, felt he didn’t deserve it, hadn’t asked anyway. He didn’t seem particularly clever, and he was far from being handsome; he was quite unattractive, really, ugly even. Says the walrus. He’d heard rumors that Ellstrom’s father was a wealthy man, but he must’ve turned off the spigot now. They always give you something, if you can manage not to nod off, or plot patricide, as they ramble, as they go on. Like dogs beg, so do we. Young men so often think pride repairable. How wrong they are. Some debts call for marrow.
Or it could be that Jacob Ellstrom, the fraud, was kind and loving or even a comedian when he and his wife were safely behind walls, a big laugh, a good Heath. No, it was something else. Perhaps he shouldn’t be looking at Jacob at all but at Nell. She could’ve been the one that chose him, but she had to be, didn’t she? What kind of woman, not much more than a girl really, settles on such a mess to be unmade? Oh, she was the best kind, the very best. Above all the saints and martyrs, God loves a beautiful woman who of her own choice weds an ugly man.
The liquor in his belly made him feel unsettled, so he skipped the bank. Hayes wouldn’t know anything anyway, and no one he asked at the docks had seen Ellstrom around either. He’d left his cigars at home. He went to the Coast Sailor’s Union.
Hank Bellhouse was behind his desk working his pugio over a stone, oil glistening on his fingers and on the backs of his hands. The room was large and open, with a spruce slab table and a bank of windows that looked out over the harbor. Leaflets and posters adorned the wall along with random taxidermy; animals and fishes, a flower made of the carapaces of Dungeness crabs. The union seal painted eight feet tall and lopsided. He’d only just opened shop.
“Look at you, physician, all fuss and feathers. Fucking rumpled tissue in a widow’s palm.” Bellhouse was febrile, sanguinary, every part of him. His eyelids were muscle.
“What do you know of Dr. Ellstrom?”
“I know his degree says it comes from Brown.”
“Besides that.”
“Didn’t you tell me and everyone else at Dolan’s that night that they don’t turn out doctors at Brown?”
“So I did.”
“Strange his degree says it, then.”
“Letters aside, he was here before me, and what I hear speaks of a moderate competence.”
“You weren’t saying that at Dolan’s.”
“No, I wasn’t.”
Bellhouse held the knife up to inspect the blade and then dragged it over his thumbnail to test it. Back to the stone, working as he spoke. “You were talking like we should run him out of town.”
“Looking back, I think I shouldn’t drink so much, but looking forward—you don’t have any whiskey, do you? I’ve got a chill.”
Bellhouse smiled and shook his head, his arm moving without break. The stone took its measure from the blade equally, three passes to a side. “I’ve met my share of physicians, and none of them are any good to drink with. More fun to drink with a dead sailor than a live physician.”
“Don’t blame the trade, it’s the rain that does it to me, the gray gloom.”
The blade stopped with the doctor’s last syllable, and Bellhouse raised his eyes. “All I can say is, we’re all just plain lucky you arrived and saved us from Ellstrom’s inadequacies. Who knows what kind of injury he could’ve visited on us?”
“I’ve apologized to you enough.”
“A stack of nothing is still nothing.”
“If you’d give me a drink, I could better suffer your insults.”
“What use is it to keep liquor on hand if everyone arrives at my door already drunk?”
“I’m not drunk.”
Bellhouse set the knife down, leaned back and reached into his desk drawer. He produced a puny, dented oil can, spurted oil onto the stone, and spread it with the edge of his thumb. He weighted the knife in his palm and then continued sharpening.
“I thought you were going to pull out a bottle.”
“I know you did.”
“Give me a cigar, then, would you? Mine are at home.”
With his chin Bellhouse motioned to the box of cigars and the matches beside it. T
he blade coughed out one after another of its lonely dying breaths.
Dr. Haslett lit the cigar and dropped the spent match in the ashtray. “I should tell you that whoever you’re sharpening that blade for, don’t send them to me. I don’t have time.”
“A farmer complains about the dirt and a sailor the wind.”
He liked Bellhouse despite himself. “And a logger the trees.”
“A logger the fucking trees, right?” The short-necked German was like a bulldog that had been trained to act like a man, but not stupid. The muscle ended at the mouth, fleshy lips. It would be folly to confuse his strength with simplemindedness, his rigidity with an unwillingness to act or slowness.
“A boy of seven had his hand cut off in Boyerton’s mill this morning.” Dr. Haslett leaned back and admired his cloud of smoke.
“I heard.”
“His mother asked what they paid for a lost hand.”
“I think I know this one.”
“They don’t pay, Hank. Not a dime.”
“Half a pair of mittens must cost half as much. He’s looking at some savings long-term.”
“Is that the compassion we can expect from your union? Which, I should say, I think is bullshit. I don’t believe you even have a charter. I think you’re running a game against that lot in San Francisco. These are fine little cigars, aren’t they?”
“I got cases of them.” He opened the box on his desk and with a flicked wrist, a flourish of pageantry, offered them up. “Help yourself.” Less an invitation than a dare. His eyes narrowed, and he grinned as if strings were pulling on his lips.
The doctor puffed away and met Bellhouse’s eyes through the smoke, had a flash of memory of being caught in a stall behind a mean mule when he was a boy, remembered thinking: If I don’t move, I won’t be kicked. But he was kicked anyway, broke ribs. Just stood there and waited for it.
“They’d never allow me to flub a charter, Doc. No way. How many ships come up this coast? Don’t you think they’d shut me down if I was fraudulent, as you say, or somehow misrepresenting my union brothers to the south? If I were anything save impeccable I’d wager they’d steam north and throw me off the fucking pier.”
“I don’t want any more bloodshed. Hear me? I don’t care who ends up on top.”
Bellhouse winked. “The one doing the fucking is usually on top.”
The doctor forced a smile and leaned forward, filled his coat pocket with cigars, leaving the box empty.
Bellhouse stabbed the knife into his desktop. “If we’re critiquing each other’s professions. If that’s what we’re doing. I don’t want to have to get up in the night three times over to piss, but you haven’t been able to help me with that, have you?”
“Maybe you should’ve seen Ellstrom.”
“Fuck Ellstrom.”
“I did what I could, Hank. You showed up two days after the fact. I think you should be grateful to Chacartegui for sticking you with a clean blade, might’ve saved your life.”
“Promises were made, you understand. Oaths were uttered.” He held up his hands; the knife stayed in the table, barely moving. “I’ll never sleep through the night.”
“Dying will solve it.”
“Yours or mine?”
“Don’t threaten me.”
“You’ll know when you’re threatened.” Bellhouse slapped the knife free and went back to sharpening. “It’s never a change of subject with you. Never a ‘Did you hear what happened with the Russian dancer and that Tlingit fella they call Jameson?’”
“Fine, why don’t you tell me?”
“The way I hear it, they had to tie him down to free the slipper from where she’d crammed it up his asshole.”
“News of the Harbor.”
“It is fucking news. More than your tin-pail stump speeches.”
“Jameson isn’t Tlingit. He’s Quinault.”
“I fucking care.” His eyes brightened, knife raised. Haslett didn’t want him to stand up; he might need to leave if he stood. “It must take a big heart to pump blood to all that fat.”
“It’s the same as yours, Hank, about the size of a fist and going all the time.”
“I’d like to train mine to turn off while I’m sleeping so it’ll last longer.”
“If you trained it to listen, you’d never sleep again.”
“You are a fucking slint, aren’t you?”
“I am something.” He sucked his cigar till it wore a ripe orange ember. “Did you hear about the corpses found bobbing in the slough last Tuesday?”
“Dead men?” Bellhouse faked a bout of shivering.
“They were yours. I put them on the slab, and I know it was you.”
“No, you don’t.”
“I’d tell you you can’t murder your way into power, but I’d be lying.”
“Yes, you would.”
“Beware of the starving masses.”
“I am the starving masses, Sawbones, fucking mutt-hungry.”
“Sure you are, except it’s not food you’re after.”
“Wisdom might be your salvation.”
“For all of us, as it should be.” The doctor dropped the cigar on the floor and ground it out with his heel. “Send someone over to my place if you see Ellstrom, would you? His wife and child are camped out there for now.”
“She’s a pretty lady, that one. Haven’t I heard Tartan talk about her sometimes? Will that be available? Will the shelves be stocked with the wives of doctors?”
Dr. Haslett couldn’t stop the smile that crept onto his face.
“And you’re watching over them? Huzza huzza. Lions and lambs.”
“Hardly.”
“Sly old devil, all wrapped in lard.”
“Says Lucifer. Thanks for the cigars.”
Back in the rain, the doctor’s feet were squishing around in his boots. The light was failing behind the clouds.
He stopped and had another shot with Persimon before he went home.
“My feet itch, Doc. Where’d you put em, so I can go and give em a scratch?”
“Worms ate them by now, Persimon. Sorry.”
Persimon, as if he’d spilled a drink in his lap, leaned back and studied the stumps of his legs. “Sometimes I feel like I could get up and walk.”
“We all do.” And with that the doctor got up and left. He’d had enough, enough watery liquor and dogged bar top. Enough of the hard harbor. He wanted his comfortable home and to see the woman waiting for him there.
As he walked in the rain, his thoughts returned to Hank Bellhouse. Society wasn’t uplifted by men like him, but eventually he’d bury his chisels and pry and move the population along just the same. A slow grind. With killers comes progress, and with progress come new, more insidious killers to replace the rougher and more real ones that preceded them. This wasn’t the doctor’s first boomtown. The real trouble would set up camp on Bellhouse’s grave, but here he was a sailing man who didn’t even care that the steamers were coming up behind him. To have blind guts like that must be lovely. To know your throat’s slit and keep smiling.
Nell
1889
Dr. Haslett helped me organize the sale of Jacob’s equipment. It was crated and shipped to Seattle, all of it. In order to keep the bank away I held nothing as precious and got rid of everything I could.
I found work in the bakery and it kept us fed, but the hours were difficult. There was no sympathy for me because of what Jacob had done, how he had lied. Women treated me as if I’d stolen their husbands, and most men just laughed in my face. I wasn’t anything to them. I had to lock Duncan in the apartment when I went to work because no one would watch him for me.
Eventually Mr. Hayes sent boys over to post notice on the apartment door. I was so angry, with my last dollars I hired men from the livery to freight our few belongings to Matius’s claim. I’d tried to sell it before but had no legal right to do so. Moving there, it was the end, where I never wanted to be.
Nearly two hours by wagon, an hour
if we took the ferry, and another to walk the mud road from the Wynooche dock to the house. The direction was east, northeast. I found a map with the deed in Jacob’s desk. We took the ferry. It was a new ship operated by a husband and wife from Minnesota. We were alone on deck. The freighters had taken the road.
I’d heard people complain about the noise of steam engines, but I’ve always found them calming. As we chugged upriver on the shoulder of the tide, we passed by the sloughs of various legend; corpse farms, keepers of lost children, sad and desultory mires. At one point I thought I could see the shadow of the arch of a bridge through the trees. No sign of the freighters. They were well ahead. All this circumnavigation, as if anything would ever be easy or nearby. I was told ours was the second to the last stop on the ferry route. The dock was new and well tended, just on the lee side of the unsure mouth of the Wynooche. When we gained the road, the workmen bid us good day and I asked if any freighters had passed and they said yes and pointed at the wagon ruts.
The walk was pleasant and we saw deer through the trees, so I ducked down and held on to Duncan and we watched them until they wandered off. They never saw us, or if they did, they didn’t care. In time we came to a road that branched, but the freighter’s tracks continued. I led Duncan down the lane. There was a homestead there, but it had been abandoned. The door was nailed shut and the windows boarded over. Some of the chimney stones had fallen and sat jumbled in the tall grass. There was a grave in the trees, with a wooden marker that was soaked through and mossy. Back on the road we could hear men logging in the distance, the thud and ring of an ax, the breaking timbers. Duncan hadn’t said a word since we got off the ferry. I touched his cheek and kissed his head and he smiled at me.
“We’re kings,” he said.
“How do you mean?”
“Who else is here?”
“Nobody, but it doesn’t make us kings.”
“What would?”
“There are no kings here, and there never will be.”
“What about a queen?”
“A queen and a prince maybe, but no kings. The kings are all gone.”