by Blake Crouch
There were only four of them in the saloon tonight. He saw Lana Hartman across the room, seated at the upright piano by the front window, playing “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” She was always here, as much a part of the place as the bar stools. He’d never seen her in this dress—dark green, with red piping on the collar and cuffs.
Jocelyn Maddox sat on a stool behind the bar, watching Lana play, a cigarette burning in her hand, eyes glazed with boredom.
The young deputy tasked with guarding her had passed out in a chair beside the stove. A raging high lonesome, he snored, a line of tobacco-colored drool creeping down his chin.
Bart stepped to the bar, said, “Evening, Joss. Lively tonight.”
“Merry Christmas, you big fuckin walrus. Come to wet your dry?” She smiled and hopped off the chair, dressed tonight, as always, like a man—high-back canvas trousers and a cotton dress shirt with suspenders. The disparity between her masculine outfits and the pitch-black hair that fell in waves down her back and the dark liquid pools of her big eyes drove men mad. She looked Spanish, exotic. The chain between her leg irons dragged across the floor as she set up a glass and uncorked a bottle of whiskey, poured Bart a full tumbler.
“I’m afraid you’re drinking with me tonight,” he said.
“That so?”
“Reckon Miss Hartman would hoist a glass with our ilk?”
“I never seen her take a drink,” Joss said, “and as you well know, many a man, present company included, have sent a whiskey over to that piano.”
“How about our man by the stove?”
Joss’s dark eyes cut to the sleeping deputy, then back to Bart.
“Let that coffee cooler alone,” she whispered. “And keep it down. He sees me drinkin, I’ll hear about it all fuckin night.”
She got a glass for herself, and when she’d filled it, Bart raised his, said, “Joss, here’s how. May the coming year—”
“For Chrissakes.” She swallowed her whiskey—one long, deliberate tilting of the glass. Bart drained his. She poured again.
“Joss, love, wish you could’ve seen Abandon when it was a roaring camp. In ’89, night like this, there’d of been fifty men here, miners coming off shift, card games, whole flock of whores.”
“It’s all over now, huh?”
“Yeah. All over. All gone. The whores, the opium, the fun.” He clinked his glass against hers and they drank. He replenished their tumblers and they drank and he refilled them again. Soon his face had flushed and gone blotchy and the burst capillaries stood out like tiny red worms, so that his nose resembled a rotting strawberry. Lines of sweat rolled down the dome of his great bald head.
Bart was not a man to stand when there were chairs on the premises. He installed himself on a bar stool and he and Joss worked their way through the bottle while Lana played Christmas carols and the deputy snored. He said things he’d already said ten times before on nights just as quiet, about the town in its heyday, the art of following a rich vein deep into a mountain, and how he meant to close the mill next year and make a new fortune in Montana.
“Hey, how ’bout shuttin the fuck up for a spell? You’re makin my head hurt.”
Bart attended to his whiskey. Looking through the window behind the bar, he could see it snowing harder than before. The walls strained against the wind.
After awhile, he got up, staggered over to the piano. He stood beside Lana, watching the spill of her blond hair, her tiny gloved fingers moving across the keys. The piano had been out of tune ever since a miner had shot it two years ago in a fight, mistaking it for an adversary. When she’d finished the song, he said, “That was very pleasant, Miss Hartman,” and reached into his pocket. He withdrew a burlap sack that fit in his palm and placed it on the piano.
Lana picked up the sack, her hand dipping with the weight. She untied the string and peeked inside, saw the dull gleam of dust and tiny slugs, probably two hundred dollars’ worth.
She looked up at Bart and shook her head.
“Oh no, it has been my greatest joy this year to watch you play. You’re too good for this deadfall.” He started to lay his hand on her shoulder but then stopped himself. He’d never touched her. Instead, he allowed himself a long drink of what he thought was far and away the softest face ever to grace the streets of Abandon.
Bart returned to his seat at the bar. “One more for the cold road home,” he said, and Joss poured the last of the bottle into his tumbler. Lana had begun to play again.
When he finished his whiskey, Bart dropped another poke on the bar. “And a merry Christmas to you, Joss,” he said. She weighed the sack in her hand, as if it might not serve, then smiled and leaned across the bar.
“You love her, don’t you?” she whispered.
“Excuse me?”
“You’re a seldom fuckin hombre. Come in here ever goddamn night, skip your own Christmas shindig just to listen to her bang—”
“Well, that don’t mean—”
“Calm the fuck down, Bartholomew, and listen. You never know when it’s your time. Mine’s comin in the spring, and I guess this is just the long way around the barn a sayin I hope you won’t leave this world with any regret.”
“I don’t understand what you—”
“Before you hive off, do what you been meanin to ever since you laid eyes on that filly.”
“What in hell are you—”
“I want you to kiss her.”
“I couldn’t.”
“What’s the worst she’ll do? Slap you? I’m sure you been slapped plenty. Hell, you ever tried somethin like that on me, I’d fuckin shoot you, but that’s neither here nor there. I reckon you love her, and this is my Christmas gift to you. Kiss her on your way out.”
Bart stepped down off the stool and walked toward the door. He put on his overcoat and his hat and reached for the doorknob.
He stopped. He walked back to the piano. His weak heart pounding, he leaned down and kissed Lana on the cheek.
She stopped playing and bowed her head. They both trembled.
“I apologize,” Bart said. “It’s just that . . .”
He hurried outside and shut the door.
Lana took a deep breath, then looked out the window, up to the second floor of the hotel across the street, at the woman sitting in the bay window.
You could hear the noise from the dance hall down the street, where most of the town had gathered for Christmas Eve. She started “Silent Night” on the discordant keys.
Joss took a candle out from under the bar, went over to the stove, opened it, and held the wick to a flame. She set the burning candle in the windowsill behind the bar, stood there watching torrents of snow fall through the darkness, wondering if they could see her signal in the blizzard.
EIGHT
S
tephen Cole buttoned his black frock coat and stepped onto the musicians’ platform, tall, pale, thin to the brink of fragility. His brown hair, parted down the middle, fell in greasy strings to his shoulders, and the only facial hair he could grow was a lean mustache more befitting a teenager than a twenty-seven-year-old man. It wasn’t the snipe-gutted appearance people noticed, however, but his large eyes—brown, gentle, occasionally radiant.
“Let us pray,” he said. “Dear Lord. Redeemer. Maker of all that is good. We thank You for the bounty of that which we are about to eat, for the hands that prepared it, for the generous Mr. Packer, who allowed his boardinghouse cooks to make this feast for the town. We thank You for Your perfect and loving Son, Jesus Christ, Who You sent to save this despicable world. Let us remember the Child born in a manger as we celebrate His birth this night and on the morrow.
“Finally, dear Lord, I ask that You pour out Your protection upon Abandon. Protect us from the cold and snow, the deadly slides, the beasts of the mountains, the heathens, and, above all, from the wickedness in our own hearts. Kyrie eleison. Amen.” As Stephen stepped down from the stage, the fiddlers took up their instruments and plucked at the strings, turning the
tiny hardwood pegs.
Two years ago, this hurdy-gurdy would have been lined with whores of every make and model in threadbare peignoirs, bright stockings, some only children, others topless, a handful naked entirely, all painted up like lewd clowns, and the miners staggering drunk through the horde of dancers, the room redolent of a foul ambrosia—whiskey, sweat, and tobacco smoke com-mingling.
But the mine had pinched out, the revelers departed, though their nights in the dance hall stood memorialized in the bullet-holed walls, stains of vomit, tobacco juice, and blood on the floorboards.
This night, half a dozen tables had been arranged in the center of the room, decorated with ribbon, spruce saplings cut from the hillsides above town, and a whole multitude of candles.
Ezekiel and Gloria Curtice sat at the end of the table nearest the sheet-iron stove, a silence descending as the residents of Abandon filled their plates from the pans of corn bread, vegetables, fried potatoes, sop, and whole roasts. The hanging lamps did little to illumine the hall, the faces an indistinct canvas for shadow and candlelight. Gloria sat across from Harriet McCabe, watching the little girl devour her supper, dripping sauce on her white pinafore.
“Are you ready for Santa Claus?” Gloria said. “I hear he’s on his way to Abandon this hour.” Harriet glanced at her mother, as if to confirm the validity of the claim. Tears slid down Bessie McCabe’s face. “Bessie?” Gloria whispered. “What is it? Are you poorly?”
Barely twenty, Bessie’s pink cotton work dress was her best, stained and torn across the front from countless trips to the woodpile, hardly warm enough for a Rocky Mountain winter. Bessie had come from Tennessee ten months ago to join her husband, found him quite changed from the fifteen-year-old boy she’d married. She carried the dull burn of poverty in her eyes, and the stress of living this high in the dead of winter, with a man losing his mind, was causing her straw-colored hair to fall out in clumps.
“It’s Billy,” Bessie whispered, covering her mouth with her hand to mask rotten teeth.
Gloria reached across the table and held Bessie’s hand. “Where is he?”
“Where you reckon?” Bessie’s voice broke on the last word.
“With Mr. Wallace?”
“Sometimes, I suspect they go to the cribs.”
“Mr. McCabe loves you,” Gloria said, then felt a pinch under the table.
She turned and met her husband’s disapproving eyes.
“So, Mrs. McCabe,” Ezekiel said, “how’s Mr. McCabe finding his job at the mine?”
“Still just a mucker, but him and Mr. Wallace been dirt washin on Billy’s day off. Lookin for someone to grubstake ’em.”
“Well, here’s hoping he sees some color in his pan.” He raised his glass of water, and when he’d taken a sip, turned his attention to the little girl. As he quizzed Harriet on her studies, Gloria nibbled on a piece of corn bread and stole glances at her husband. She was still wildly in love with him, this solid, gorgeous man with a thick mustache, long sideburns, and the most ardent eyes she’d ever seen, especially when in a state of passion—anger or otherwise—as if there were lava at his core. She’d convinced him to wear his four-button sack coat for the occasion, an outfit he despised, and which, in his words, made him look like “a feathered-out got-damn banker.”
At length, Gloria’s attention drifted away from their table, and she picked out pieces of other conversations about towns that were booming, towns that were busting. As she eavesdropped, she noticed the table closest to the musicians’ platform. Ten people occupied one side, but at the far end, a woman ate by herself, completely ignored. She estimated the woman to be in her mid-forties, and even from across the room, Gloria could tell that she’d been striking years ago. Now she just looked tired, ragged out in a burgundy bustle ball dress with white lace at the ends of the sleeves and intricate beading of a style fashionable in the seventies.
“Would you excuse me?” Before Ezekiel could reply, she was on her way, stopping finally across the table from the woman in the outdated dress. “May I sit here, Rosalyn?” Gloria asked. The woman smirked, her hair pinned up in a mass of garnet curls, her cheeks rouged.
“If you don’t care what all these hypocrites think, I sure don’t.” As Gloria set her food on the table and pulled out the chair, she couldn’t help but note the thrill of hearing a woman speak her true mind again.
In proximity, Gloria saw that the woman was even more striking but even more ruined. It broke her heart. She thought of her mother, what she might have become had the syphilis not claimed her. “How are you likin the—”
“I don’t do pity too well. What possessed you to come over here?”
“I seen you around.”
“So’ve half the men in this room. And they feign outrage that I dare partake of this feast in their presence, laughing up their sleeves. You know I used to be loved in this town? Like royalty.”
“Look, I just saw you were alone.”
“Well, you done your good deed, so why don’t you head back over—” Rosalyn stopped herself, reached out, touched the long blanched scar under Gloria’s bottom lip. “Where’d you work, honey?”
Gloria flushed, took a sip of water. “I don’t . . . anymore.”
“I said when you did.”
“Leadville.”
Rosalyn smiled. “Hell of a place. You’re stunning. Bet the men loved you. What happened to your chin?”
“I had a customer who went insane. Thought we were married, and that I was cheatin on him.”
Rosalyn laughed out loud. Heads turned.
“This town’s in high water,” Gloria said. “Don’t mind my asking, why’ve you stayed? Thought you might’ve gone to Cripple Creek.”
Rosalyn smiled, wisdom and a lifetime of buried rage in her eyes. “Been a whore all my life. I’ll finish out in Abandon and, when it goes, take what money I got, go somewhere where nobody knows me. Where it don’t snow. Buy a house. Tend a garden.”
“Marriage?”
“I’m afraid man’s a species that’s been ruined for me.”
Gloria sliced through a piece of roast.
“How’d you become so respectable?” Rosalyn asked.
“Fell in love with a good man.”
“Not many a those left, are there?”
Now they Black Hawk waltzed, the fiddlers sawing away, the clack of high-top lace-ups and stovepipe boots slamming the floorboards. Looking over her husband’s shoulder, Gloria saw Rosalyn sitting by herself in a rocking chair beside the stove.
“It’s shameful,” she said to him.
“You know who that woman is?” Ezekiel spoke into his wife’s ear.
“Wipe that feature off your face. She’s a human being.”
“Would you have people unriddle your past?”
“Would you have people treat me like I didn’t exist?”
They bumped into the Ilgs. “Excuse us, Sawbones.”
“Merry Christmas, Sheriff. Look at you in full war paint. Ma’am.” The doctor doffed his bowler.
When they’d broken from the crowd, Ezekiel said, “That woman ain’t my concern.”
“Is decent human behavior? You’re gonna dance with her.”
“Damn if I will.”
“Zeke!”
He glanced over her shoulder, whispered, “God bless that man.”
Gloria turned, saw Rosalyn rise to accept the hand of Stephen Cole. Soon the preacher and the whore were stomping together.
NINE
E
zekiel and Gloria walked down the plank sidewalk. It had been shoveled that morning, but a foot and a half of powder had fallen since then. Gloria tucked her gloved hands under the wool of her hooded cape. Aside from the ruckus of the dance hall, Abandon stood in that kind of mad silence that set in during the worst of blizzards. There appeared to be no one else out, and the snow fell so hard, they could see only the nearest streetlamp. Beyond lay only faint suggestions of lantern light.
They arrived at the entrance
to the hotel, the door starred with snowballs—the handiwork of bored children. Across the street, there was light in the saloon and they could hear the sound of Christmas carols being played on a broken piano. They entered the dark lobby. There hadn’t been anyone at the front desk since the own er had left town three months ago. Gloria brushed the snow off her cape and followed Ezekiel up the staircase.
The corridor was empty, completely dark. They stopped at number six, the only room with light sliding under the door.
Ezekiel knocked. They waited. He knocked again.
“I don’t reckon she’s gonna answer,” Gloria whispered.
“Mrs. Madsen,” Ezekiel said through the door. “It’s Zeke and Glori Curtice. We’re leaving something for you. Merry Christmas.”
Gloria set the basket on the floor. It contained two oranges, a can of sardines, and a piece of chocolate cake from the town feast. On a scrap of parchment, Gloria had written, “Merry Christmas and a happy New Year from your friends the Curtices.”
They went back outside and trudged on through the snow.
“Saw Oatha Wallace today,” Ezekiel said. “He was in the benzinery this morning. Told him my brother’s over two months short now.”
“What’d he say?”
“What he says every time. That Nathan and the others decided not to go last minute, since the weather looked ominous. I called him a black liar.”
“What do you think happened?”
“Don’t know, Glori, it’s past me, but that man’s bad medicine. Snaky.”
“What if it turns out Nathan was with him?”
“I may be sheriff, but it won’t be settled in no goddamn court a law.” They turned onto a side street and followed a path beaten down in the snow, saw families huddled before fireplaces in those cabins on the hillside that were still inhabited—tiny islands of warmth and light in the storm.