I got in the car and laid my hands on the wheel. For a moment, I felt happy.
The last thing I remember before the rag hit my face was my father saying, “Good morning, Cowboy.”
—16—
When I awoke, I was slumped in the passenger seat, my wrists handcuffed to the steering wheel. My tongue tasted of bitter chemicals and my nose felt like it had lost all its hairs and was rubbed bare. My head hurt worse than any hangover I’ve ever had.
I sat up—Miss Constance was at my feet, thank God.
The car sat on a low hillside overlooking an abandoned mine shaft two miles east of town. I knew the place. A few weeks before my father shot Big Hank, the miners had been digging here when a cave-in killed six, injuring a dozen others, including Clyde, who’d lost his eye. My uncle said it was just bad luck. The temperature whiplashed between hot and cold that winter, as it so often does on the Front Range, and it made the rock brittle.
My father materialized from a nearby ravine. When he came to me, he leaned into the car. “Smells something awful, don’t it?”
I reached for his throat, but the handcuffs stopped me.
“You son of a bitch.”
“First time I was ethered was back in ’82. Sawbones Sam, this old gray doc who’d said he’d been the one to liberate Stonewall Jackson from his arm, well, he came at me one day thinking I’d fancied his horse—a man can get awful testy about his own mare—and he got me, oh, did he ever. Lucky for me, my partner came in just in the nick of time, otherwise I’d be down a limb.”
“You could have just asked to talk.”
“You’d have turned me in.”
“They’ve got Tillie,” I said. “How can you involve your own fucking daughter in this mess?”
“I know, Cowboy. I’m working on that.”
I heard the long horn of the train and saw, out to the east, the Queen of Isles chugging toward Kansas City.
“You want to be on that train?”
I wasn’t going to answer him.
“Wait,” I said. “You had a partner in ’82?”
“And back then Chester Arthur was really president. Chronology, cowboy. It’s all in the order of numbers. Remember that.”
“You were already an anarchist?”
“Cowboy, I’ve been an anarchist since the morning I left my mama’s womb. I was an anarchist long before I came here, and I’ll be one ’til the day I turn to dirt, when my power and dominion over this world ceases to be.”
I don’t remember saying anything, not for a while. Maybe it was the shock of knowing my father had always lied about himself, or maybe it was just the raging ether hangover, but I sat there for a long time, his voice harmonizing with the prairie wind.
“You know what dead work is?” he asked. “That’s what they were striking over back in ’04. We paid them by the pounds of coal each brought up because we figured it made them more efficient, or at least, we extrapolated more from their labor. But we all knew a miner’s job isn’t just with a pickaxe because you got to maintain the cart tracks and put up the timber in the shafts and make sure the hole is ventilated, otherwise you ain’t walking out the same man and that sort of work, the drudgery of keeping the shaft alive, sucks in hours of a man’s time, and we weren’t paying them a dime for that work because it didn’t make us any gold if you know what I mean, but they’re dead if they don’t do it. The yoke of their labors is really just a noose. But the point is we were getting them the timber and everyone knew it was the cheap sort of lumber you can scrounge from the foothills and it’s what brought that mine down, sure of that as I’m sure of anything, and that’s what set the whole mess in motion because I’d bought Big Hank for years, giving him coin to keep the union pacified and he did his best to hide the money, but for some reason he sent his boy down there, hoping it made him look like any other man who needed his son’s labors to survive, though he didn’t because we’d made him a rich man, a damned capitalist himself. Guess seeing his boy hurt like that resurrected the proletarian in him. But, shit, you don’t care about that. Not really. That ain’t the history you’re wanting to hear. What do you want to know, Cowboy?”
I looked down at the valley of the forgotten mine. I had a lot of questions I wanted answered, but sometimes you got to pick the story you want to hear, just in case you never get another chance with the narrator.
“Who is Mattie Longstreet?”
My father pulled a drink from his bottle, and then gave me a sip. It did nothing for my headache. “Alright, Cowboy. I’ll tell you. But don’t blame me if you don’t like the answers.”
Jesse
I’ve always hated dentists, Cowboy. Hate ‘em. They’re meaner than coppers, more corrupt than bankers, and even lack the generosity of the taxman. Only men of petrified hearts choose to spend their days wrenching teeth from another man’s jaw. They find solace in the screams of women. They seek their daily sustenance in children’s tears. Their artistry is in the appliance of pain. It’s a low profession, one Dante failed to cosign a level because not even corrupters of young virtue tolerate the tooth-puller. Believe me, Cowboy, when I say that if you ever meet a dentist in an alley, run the other way because their intentions are nefarious, their soul’s a snake masquerading as a withered vine from the tree of life. Yet in our vanity, our ruthless designs upon perfection, we keep creating these men, believing their trade honorable, necessary, when in fact they steal the very souls from our damned mouths, then seal the wound in gold. You want an example of exploitation: find a dentist.
Well, it started for me the summer of my fifteenth birthday, and I was working shifts as a butcher’s assistant in that awful Kansas town, my father casting me out into the world to earn the keep he couldn’t harvest from his meager soil, and it was from my perch between two hanging carcasses that I spotted our new tooth-puller riding into town, the infamous Benjamin Straun, a fat-headed sadist known for his clumsy thumbs and his executioner’s heart. He, a cretin of gangly mutton-chops, carried his instruments of torture like they were the riches of Solomon, and I understood he’d be trouble, because I knew, despite my poor lot, that it would be I, the magnificent Jesse Stephens, who would become his lifelong nemesis. It was that slithering snot, that fiendish fraud, who’d yanked from my very skull my four back teeth. He used a witch’s brew and the grin of a charlatan to seduce me into submitting to his torture and I shan’t ever forget the joyous parting of his lips, the guillotine quickness of his tongue, the dandyish cackle of that ivory-haired sadist. Afterwards, blood pouring from my beautiful mouth, my looks irrevocably damaged—and at the time, I was without a doubt the handsomest man in the Americas—I vowed to seek my revenge in the only way a gunless, beautiful boy can. I bedded his wife.
That’s right, Cowboy. Mattie was the dentist’s wife.
Now, to be the cuckold is a tragedy. It eats at a man, tearing out his guts and drying them for the public to traipse about with glee. But to be the cuckolder, or maybe it’s best to say the cuckolding party, or, hell, the man inside the cuckold’s wife, is nothing but pure damn anarchy. It cuts at the fabric of our capitalist culture, diluting the slavery of marriage, the illusions of ownership, until there ain’t nothing left then what there should be: man and woman entwined. And isn’t that a beautiful sight? Now, Cowboy, you got to understand that marriage ain’t nothing but servitude, the unwilling selling of your own body to another, and it’s even worse for the woman involved. And I know what your God says about it, but it ain’t nothing but a way to keep poor folks from reaching their potentials, finding their own notion of self-reliance, realizing their capacity as denizens of this great Earth. At least that’s what poor Emma Goldman used to say before we had that falling out over her cocker spaniel.
Yes, I’m getting to the point, Cowboy. Trust me.
Now, imagine it: Decoration Day of ’79, the town parading its blues and grays through the main drag at a
cripple’s pace, while thunderclouds taunt overhead, and locust mate in the fields, and women cry for their lost lovers and amidst all this commotion, all these revisions of capitalist crimes, there she stood, like a rose petal floating in a piss pot, the Magdalene of my loins, my Mattie. You can’t understand what a sight she was, unless you grew up in world without beauty, without art, because Cowboy that was my Kansas, and I imagine that when I saw my raven-haired darling, it was like how Adam felt when Eve erupted from his rib and he understood that the world ain’t made for the lonesome. It broke my heart to think of her suffering under the cruel ministrations of that evil tusk-taker and I knew it was my duty as resident gentleman, town arbiter for the care of pretty ladies, to rescue my damsel.
And what did she think of me? Hell, I was Beethoven symphoning off her brassiere, Shakespeare sonneting loose her corset, Caruso tenoring open her knees. Christ, I was the handsomest man she’d ever come across and ever would, a spry buck of a boy who made women shake with concupiscence, for I was the stuff of poor women’s fantasies, the Incubus of their dreams, a spectacle worthy of Baudelaire.
She came to me in an alley, cigarette parting her lips.
—Break my heart, she whispered. Keep the good half.
—Yes, ma’am.
—We’ll die together, she promised. Just you and me, sailor.
—I’m here to serve, ma’am.
—Now lift my dress.
—Of course, ma’am.
—Like you mean it.
And it ain’t hyperbole, Cowboy. Just truth shaded with imagery. You’d know that if you could write a lick.
But you want facts, you say? Well, she’d married that dentist five years before our meeting, just a tender girl of thirteen, lost in a poker game from her father’s poor bluff. Her grandfather, the irascible General Longstreet, sought her until his death, but she had a way of disappearing into the world, becoming whatever was needed, except in my arms, where she existed for the present, for me alone. That summer and all the way through the autumn until the last leaf had fallen, until the water turned to ice, we took to meeting in barns, and out in the fields, and hell, any place where we weren’t likely to run up against her husband, for men of that age did not look kindly upon being the cuckold, but even as a child I cared not a lick for the rules of man. Cowboy, you got to understand, she called me her shepherd, but it was she who got me to run off, it was Mattie with whom I fled Kansas that Christmas Eve of ’79, my darling girl. We left for many reasons, too many to recount, but let me quickly sum it up as this: there wasn’t a man or beast in our existence that would have stopped our union, not for long, so we fled toward our Canaan, our salvation, and the dentist chased us with his pliers, but he died long before he could reap his revenge.
We went South into the dusty plains of Indian Territory, then, after the horse came up lame, we hoofed it to Kentucky, through rolling hills of tobacco and starvation, and we walked clear up to New York, dancing into our brave new world, seeking out solitude, finding refuge from our histories, wanting nothing but each other’s bodies in that haven of vice and debasement, my beautiful city, the home of my dreams and nightmares.
Were we anarchists, then? Well, in a way, I’d been an anarchist since birth, breaking the bounds of childhood, the social cuffs upon my wrists, the constraints of time and authority. But, no, we weren’t anarchists in the classical sense. I’d never read Thoreau or Kropotkin, never laid eyes upon the poetry of Paine. Not until we reached that dark labyrinth of a metropolis and found a home in the basement of a great library and read the words of our betters and understood why our lot was so poor did my mind catch up to my actions. Soon enough we began running with men of our ilk, like-minded Romans and Bavarians and even an itinerant Dubliner, and it was in those early years that I felt the weight of my poverty lifted from my heart, transformed into a piece of revolutionary steel along my trigger finger.
How’d we survive? Well, shit, Cowboy, we stole everything that wasn’t nailed down.
We picked pockets, held up bagmen, cracked safes, marked cards, and even hijacked one of Vanderbilt’s carriages on a bet. Mattie was my green-eyed second-story girl, a natural thief and gun moll, who’d clean out the crown jewels of his royal highness if she didn’t have a preternatural fear of English cuisine. You had to see it, Cowboy. The girl had Mozart’s fingers but her instrument wasn’t the piano but the lock pick. She was born for it, a prodigy of the dark arts. We did that. We stole. We robbed. We hoisted. But mostly we rolled travelers with the Woman of Easy Virtue scam. Mattie was the lure, our tight-framed, long-legged bait and I was her jealous husband who’d bust into the flophouses just before consummation and I’d demand my reparations as a cuckold, and that poor sap, whomever he was that particular night, always paid. And Mattie and I ate like Turks and drank like Prussians and we made love like Spaniards and we talked, oh, Cowboy, we talked like two people who know nothing of the future talked. We debated Godwin, scoffed at Engels, and fell in love with Bakunin. I get choked up for that lost time. That time of light and gaiety because the dark crashed down upon us so quick, I can barely recollect how it happened.
Though I know it started with Fat Hershel. Now, here’s what you need to understand to really know Fat Hershel, a man without irony: he was our fence and tip-off man, but he always fancied Mattie and I knew I shouldn’t trust him, but he came to us during a spell in my life where I thought the only good people, the only trustworthy of our kind, were crooks. Anarchist crooks. I believed Fat Hershel when he introduced us to Charming Rudolf, and when he said Rudolf was a crack thief and no turncoat and a man of the cause, I took that word as divined. But you can already guess it wasn’t true.
Rudolf robbed banks. He also acted in an anarchist theater troupe, and I should have known to walk away, because actors, like dentists and child buggers, have no conscience, only gravitating toward men to suck them of their marrow. Rudolf planned on cleaning out the Bank of Murray Hill, a despicable business owned by a real cretin named Maynard Smythe, a man responsible for rendering thousands roofless, for filching from the public trust, for being a leach upon humanity. Robbing him and blowing his bank to kingdom come was his punishment, the only form of justice I yet knew how to mete out. Well, Rudolf needed a gun girl and a dynamite man and that was Mattie and me, and since he talked the game well, and had a reputation, according to Fat Hershel, for forthrightness and intelligence, we agreed.
We met the morning of June 12, 1886. I remember the date like it’s your birthday. I remember everything about it and you can look it up in the records because that’s the day Rudolf murdered a policeman and even though the scribblers say Mattie did it, she didn’t. And hell, the date’s important because Haymarket happened a month earlier and the coppers were rousting anyone who’d even perused the cover of an anarchist title and things were tight and closing in on us, but we figured one last score and we could lay low for a year and things might get better for our kind.
In the morning, Mattie put my hand to her breast and said that I’d rescued her from purgatory and no matter what happened that I was her savior and she’d love me until the stars burned away their wicks. And I told her to stop foolin’ around because we’d be reposing near Brighton Beach by sundown. Shit, Cowboy, if I could go back in time and kick my younger self’s ass, I’d beat myself unconscious that day. Wish I didn’t remember it so well.
The plan was simple enough: I set off a series of explosions on the roof of the bank, distracting the guards, while Mattie and Rudolf slipped behind the tellers, held up the bank manager, and cleaned out the tills. At a quarter to noon, I’d pull up in front of the bank with three horses, the rest of the dynamite set to explode, and we’d disappear, leaving a crater where that bank once stood. Simple.
We met Rudolf outside of a tavern on Lexington. He took Mattie’s arm.
—See you soon my little lamb, she told me.
Her last words for a long time.
I’d like to think I spent some time memorizing her image as she walked away, that I savored every last sight of her, but I didn’t think anything of it. Never been good with foresight, Cowboy, but I guess that’s in our blood, ain’t it?
I won’t bore you with the details, Just know that before I even got to the roof, fifteen coppers already lay in waiting outside the bank and bullets were flying like bats at sunset and I found myself hiding beneath a livery cab, sobbing something fierce, when I saw them pull Rudolf’s body from the bank and they took Mattie away in handcuffs.
Later, when I found Fat Hershel and put a gun in his mouth, he told me that Rudolf got drunk a night earlier in a beauty of a tavern called The Swill and performed a soliloquy atop a barroom table on how we were going to do the job, complete with a couplet rhyming dynamite and ignite. Well, someone saw it and snitched and that’s how Mattie ended up getting a life sentence. Actors, shit, the vermin of humanity.
You know the rest, Cowboy. You know I walked away and started a new life and tried to forget about her, about my complicity in Mattie’s poor fate, and you know how hard that complicity is to live with because you do it all day long.
You’re like me, Cowboy. You ruined a woman too.
—17—
“You keep telling yourself that,” I said.
“Oh, you’re a lot more like me then you think.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m law-abiding. I got a job.”
My wrists were still cuffed and my back and shoulders felt sore. My father leaned into the car and shook his head.
“You can’t lie to me like that,” he said. “I know your secrets. Wrote that limerick telling you as much.”
The Trench Angel Page 12