“I’m sorry,” she said. “Fathers can be cruel. But the rest of your family, they’re proud of you, Neal. They just don’t understand what the war did to that brain of yours.”
“I’m fine,” I said.
“Your uncle, he’s proud of you.”
“No.”
“Oh, that’s troubling. I imagine if you two sorted through your differences, you’d be, what’s the word, simpatico.”
“Not likely.”
“Oh, don’t be so hard on him, Neal. He just wants the best for you.”
“And what’s best for me?”
“Don’t get cross. Let me help. Gertie has an idea. And you know why you should trust Gertie?”
“I haven’t a clue.”
She reached into her bag and pulled out a small, two-shot Derringer with an ivory handle. She laid it on the table. I think she expected gratitude.
“Take out the bullets,” she said. “Go ahead and do it.”
I did as she asked, and, afterwards, she slid the pistol into her purse.
“Good,” she said. “Now, do you trust Gertie?”
“Are you kidding?”
“I understand,” she said. “You feel powerless like the Indians looking at big bad Christopher Columbus. Well, Gertie can make you powerful.”
“How?”
“It’s so simple, Neal. Just tell Gertie what to do. I’m your genie in the bottle. Just a quick rub and the world is yours.”
If I’d been right of mind, I’d gone to sleep on a street corner with the other war cripples.
“Take off your stockings.”
“Yes, Neal.”
Gertie hiked up her skirt, wiggling it up her hips, and then, like a Parisian burlesque dancer I’d once applauded, she stretched out her legs, one at a time, and gloriously unfastened her stockings, rolling them off her heel and onto the table. She put them in her bag, in the buttoned compartment where she kept her gun.
“Can’t be too careful,” she said. “They tear easily.”
“Don’t talk.”
She nodded.
It took time: skirt, blouse, slip, brassiere, corset, garters, and underwear. After I shed my own suit, I led her to the bedroom, where we paused in the dark and I lifted her against the door.
“You can talk, now.”
She bit my ear.
“Your blood tastes like taffy.”
It happened quickly. I pulled her on top in a graceful, Douglas Fairbanks motion that seemed suave and experienced, but then I fumbled in the dark, and she laughed.
“A girl needs petting.”
“You’ll manage.”
“Right-o.”
Her body felt musty and alien, and after a while, as she tugged and clawed, I yielded. I closed my eyes and tried thinking of frivolities—airplanes and moving pictures and Mary Jane’s—but only saw Lorraine’s Negro face haunting me. She was the antithesis of Gertie, with fuller breasts and shyer hands, softer skin and politer sounds, a lady with no hint of violence. After a while, I felt Lorraine as well. Gertie’s concave hips rounded out and her broomstick hair curled: for a moment, I was peaceful.
After she went to sleep, I snuck down to the basement, to my darkroom, and I went to work on the pictures I’d taken that day. There was nothing special in them—just a couple of cripples—but once in a while photographs show up and surprise me. The Trench Angel had. Sometimes they just appear and I have art on my hands and that is the miracle that keeps me going because something mysterious happens in the darkroom, something that echoed in my chest, masking the shame I was feeling most nights back then. There was a purpose in the darkroom, a task I could feel in my fingers. Without it, I’d just float. On those nights when the wind howled through the house and whiskey flooded my head, I found myself content amongst the chemicals and the paper and the still images of the recent past. There, you could forget the war, with its images of men lining up to die, and of wives, burnt alive, in Red Cross tents.
—7—
When I got out of bed, I found Gertie sitting on my sofa, wearing my shirt, drinking my rye, and flipping through a book of my most recent photos.
“You don’t have any food.”
“Been meaning to take care of that.” I sat beside her, lit a cigarette.
“You have a lot of tree pictures here.”
I shrugged. “Metaphors of something.”
“And cripples. Actually is that the same cripple over and over again?”
“Might be.”
“And these ones.” She pointed at a picture full of strangers. “Don’t people mind that you take pictures when they ain’t looking?”
“Imagine they do.”
“So why do it?”
“Pictures need taking. Can’t help it if the subject looks away.”
“I guess, but it seems dirty.”
Her Pinkerton face was serious.
“Christ.”
“You know you shouldn’t talk that way,” she said. “I go to church sometimes.”
“No, you don’t.”
She shrugged. “You know Neal, when I find your father.”
Her attention wandered to a photo of my uncle’s appaloosas drinking from a trough. “These look familiar.”
“You steal them?”
“Might have,” she said. “They’ve been stolen?”
I told her about the escaped prisoners, the Mexicans arrested without proof.
“Just horses,” she said. “What are they worth now?”
“Two grand a piece.”
She whistled. “I could get a nag for five bucks these days.”
Not one of those. My uncle bought their sire from an old Nez Perce Indian right before Big Hank died. The stallion, Sherman, was a direct blood relation to one of Chief Joseph’s horses, most of which had been shot by the army after the tribe surrendered.
“My father?” I said. “You were saying about my father?”
“Yes, sorry. I’m hoping, you know, that when I finally find him, I’ll get to shoot him in his face.”
My chest felt hard and I didn’t want another drink.
“It’s not personal,” Gertie said. “Just work. You know I’ve always liked you, but times are hard for a girl like me. By the way, you look terrible. Did I do that to your pretty face?”
In the bathroom mirror, I saw that my jaw was dark and swollen and my eyes red like the hot end of a cigarette.
A knock at the door sent me to the bedroom for a shirt.
“Someone’s here,” Gertie called out. “You want me to get it?”
“No.”
“You sure? I don’t mind.”
“I’m coming.”
I dressed and splashed some water on my face, but still my eyes cried sin. When I went to the living room, I saw my sister Tillie and I felt meek.
“I still can’t believe you’re twins,” Gertie said. “You two don’t look identical.”
“Why is she here?” Tillie asked.
“I’m right here,” Gertie said. “I can answer—”
“She’s here to kill our father,” I said.
My sister took off her hat—red hair plastered to her skull—and looked for a place to sit, but the sofa and chair were covered with Gertie’s undergarments, wares that looked much more sordid in the light of my sister’s presence.
“You should have called.”
“I didn’t think I had to make an appointment to see my brother,” she said. “Besides, I called all day yesterday and you didn’t pick up.”
“I was out covering Clyde’s death.”
Her expression didn’t change.
“Besides,” I said. “My car’s gone.”
She looked toward the kitchen and I could tell my distance, my reluctance to spend time with her, hurt her fe
elings.
“What do you need, Tillie? Is something wrong?”
She paused, perhaps looking for the right tack. It didn’t come easy for her because she had a sledgehammer for a mouth. “I was making sure you were healthy.”
She showed me the morning’s Eagle. The headline: Boot Baron Boots Boot Boob! There was a file photo of me beneath it.
She handed me two pills; I swallowed them.
“I wanted to make sure he didn’t knock loose the working parts of your brain,” she said.
Gertie coughed. She was suddenly dressed, shoes on. “I’m leaving.”
She came over, closed her eyes, and leaned in like an addled starlet, kissing me on the mouth, her tongue, somehow, making its way behind my teeth. It felt like she’d stolen something from me.
When she left, Tillie went on to the porch. “It smells in there.”
“Like what?”
“Syphilis.”
I put on my brown suit, brushed off my hat, then went to the kitchen and gurgled soap and water. I found Miss Constance’s case beneath the dining table and slung her over my shoulder, and then walked outside, locking the door. It felt like winter in the porch shade, and I wanted to fetch my coat, but didn’t because I’d look weak.
When I stepped into the sunlight, it felt like summer. I loosened my tie, took off my hat and got in the car, readying myself. While most of the town just laughed off my antics, my sister found nothing I did amusing.
“What kind of flowers do you want at your service?” she asked. “I think daisies. They’re appropriate for ne’er do wells. Hearty, resilient, but ultimately just a weed, something that could have been beautiful, but—”
“Stop it.”
“Or do you want an Irish wake? McGuffey’s could host it. We’ll prop you on the bar, spill whiskey along your corpse, cry and sing songs of the homeland. We could feed you to the hogs afterward.”
“Stop it,” I said. “I’m fine.”
“Neal, you’ve got the screwiest definition of fine I’ve ever seen. Now get out and crank the engine, will you? What use is it having a brother if he won’t do that for me?”
I did as she asked.
As Tillie drove toward town at the same controlled, strict pace with which she did everything, I waited for her to say something.
Finally, “Have you seen our father?”
I was surprised she went for such nonsense. I told her so.
“The town’s not going mad,” she said. “There’s no collective insanity happening. You’ve been reading too many books.”
That certainly wasn’t the case. I didn’t even look at the Eagle.
“So you think he’s coming back?” I asked. “I bet you think he shot Clyde.”
“Would you care?”
“I don’t know.”
It seemed unusually quiet for a Monday, but then again, the union’s contract was ending at midnight: that was why no one walked the streets on one those last warm autumn days; it was why the Victorian homes, remnants of the town’s late 19th century building boom, had shuddered windows, like a big snow was coming.
“You should probably take a trip,” I said. “Maybe head back east to see some old friends.”
“Our father doesn’t scare me,” she said. “If he thinks about me at all, it’s only fleeting.”
“I wasn’t talking about him.”
“Forest doesn’t scare me either.”
She was Seamus Rahill’s niece, and, according to the town, a practitioner of an ungodly profession who was also probably one of the leading suspects in Clyde’s murder. She should have been scared.
“Are you scared?” she asked.
I thought about it for a second, running through all the scenarios I could imagine, but I wasn’t an imaginative guy. “No.”
When she turned down Tenth Street, I opened the paper and saw, just below the fold, an obituary for Old Padraig Kavanaugh, one of the original New Sligo settlers who’d come over from Western Ireland back in the 1870s. He’d lived on the town’s southern outskirts since I was a boy. It wasn’t by choice. At first, he’d had a wife and family in town, but then he’d fallen in love with a Chinese woman, fathering a pair of children. The town chose to ignore it until he moved out of his wife’s home to live in common law with his mistress. That couldn’t be condoned: a mob hanged the Chinese woman and her family and then beat Old Padraig with a branding iron before exiling him.
I pointed out the article. “You used to doctor him, right?”
“Not much I could do for insanity.”
“Didn’t know he was crazy.”
“What he did—well—can only be diagnosed as a mental illness,” she said.
—8—
Despite her medical objections, Tillie drove me to McGuffey’s. It was the kind of medicine I needed. McGuffey’s didn’t change. McGuffey’s didn’t break into my house, and then make love to me afterwards. McGuffey’s didn’t keep a ledger. McGuffey’s didn’t write limericks hinting at blackmail, and then steal my car. McGuffey’s just existed. It loved all men equally—black and white, young and old, rich and poor. Blood dripped from the ceiling and smoke soaked the skin so that it seemed like you had to douse yourself in lye to erase the smell, but no matter color or creed, Lazy Eye Norris greeted you with a bottle.
“You sound like your old man, just ranting and raving like a damn dope head,” Lazy Eye said. “People been asking for him.”
“What kind of people?” Blood splattered against my slicker; it ran down my back like rain. “Paranoids?”
“All kinds of people. Mostly Pinkertons.” Lazy Eye dried a mug, and then pointed at me. “I don’t like them cocksuckers coming around here. Gonna have to shoot one of them and then I got to clean up dead Pinkerton.”
“I haven’t seen him since the day he rode off into the mountains,” I said. “Decades, since before McKinley got himself shot.”
“You hardly decades old and McKinley been dead years before Jesse left. I know my chronology.”
“Fifteen years. I haven’t seen the great Jesse Stephens in fifteen fucking years.”
“Fine.” Lazy Eye threw his rag at me, and then kicked the garbage can like it was a mean dog. “Believe what you want, but you don’t have to be cussing at me. You ain’t the only one here with troubles, Pinkertons or otherwise. And you know what else? Your troubles are bullshit. You know what a real gyp is? No, let me tell you. My father got sold. Hear me? Sold. As a little boy. They took him from his mama and sold him to some cracker down in Alabama. And you know what else? I only got one good eye. And you know what else? I got to look through that one eye at crying drunks like you and Sam and put up with pigs like him.”
“Thanks,” Jacob said. “Thought we were friends.”
Lazy Eye was right. Sure, I had some troubles. No, not even troubles—quandaries. Yet, on the bright side, I had a whiskey in front of me. And Sam Bailey. How much worse did Sam Bailey have it? Just look at him. Poor Sam slumped at the end of the bar trying his damnedest to get a sentence out between sips.
“How you doing, Neal?”
“Fine, Sam. Fine.”
Sam’s eyes lit up like the Holy Spirit suddenly flowed through him. “Won’t be for long. You got a lynching party coming for your red bottom. Yes, you do.”
“Leave it alone, Pop,” Jacob said. “Bad enough he got beat up by an old man and no one bought his pictures last night. Sorry, Neal. But he don’t need a pickled preacher riding him.”
“Whores, all of them.” Sam swept his arm across the bar like he was exorcising the devil, but instead knocked over his beer. “No. No. No.”
“I got you, Sam,” Lazy Eye said. “I got you.”
The group of us sat quietly for a long time, the dripping of calf blood serenading us. Sam started to say something—I think about the toils of Job—but then he
lost his words in his beer. We were mostly alone, the bar empty save for Swift Mickey sleeping at a back table, his surviving leg twitching against his crutches. All of us, for one reason or another, often sought McGuffey’s for its silence. It might seem lonesome, but we were just mourning together.
I ordered another drink and then went down the hall and out to the jakes. When I returned, I found Sam and Jacob engaged in a familiar debate: how my father killed Big Hank.
“Stop it, Pop,” Jacob said. “Not how it happened.”
“And how did it happen, Mr. Detective?” Sam said. “You get yourself a shiny badge and you think you know more than the rest of us good praying folk.”
Jacob spit his snuff into an ashtray, and then took a sip from his gin.
“Well, here’s what I heard,” Jacob said.
“Christ, do you have to?” I asked. “I’m sick of hearing it.”
“Man challenged me.” Jacob said. “What can I do?”
Jacob recounted how old Sheriff Corrigan believed it was suicide. In this version, Big Hank entered Seamus’ office begging for mercy, crying that his children would go hungry, but my uncle and father weren’t feeling magnanimous. Distraught, Big Hank shot Seamus then shot himself. I’d heard this version before, just another tale among the glut of fables told about that day, some mentioning a gambling debt, others alluding to a woman or a horse. Even fifteen years later, people never got tired of hearing it. Except me.
“If that so,” Lazy Eye snorted. “Why the story?”
Jacob shrugged. “Jesse felt guilty over it. Wanted to be sure Big Hank got buried in a Catholic way.”
“Nice story,” Lazy Eye said. “Except I knew Jesse Stephens and that bastard wasn’t noble for shit. And besides, how’s someone shoot themselves in the back of the head? That’s insane man shit.”
“Didn’t say it was my own particular belief. Personally I think Seamus plugged Big Hank. Hear me out, Neal.”
He went over the evidence: the bullet in Big Hank’s head went up through his skull. It meant that he was shot by a shorter man, a man like Seamus. Jesse was six feet three inches or even taller in boots. Moreover, there were no signs of struggle: no blood on Jesse, no knocked-over furniture, no sounds heard from the office until the shots rang out. So, according to Jacob, the shooting happened like this: Big Hank comes to the office bearing blackmail; Seamus and my father agree; as Big Hank goes to leave, Seamus shoots him in the back of the skull; and my father takes the blame, because, as the stronger man, it’s logical that he was the one who killed Big Hank.
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