by Tim Sandlin
The next day was free Friday at the government museums all over town, and I spent the day studying Renoir, Lautrec, and Matisse. I looked at van Gogh and Gauguin too, but they weren’t right for my needs. What I needed was a way to paint cowboys and Indians and Western landscapes seen from afar by someone who needed glasses but wasn’t wearing them.
That night, by lantern light, I painted a grizzly bear treeing a mountain man; only instead of Russell, I pretended I was Renoir. It looked good to me.
Thirty minutes on the quay the next morning and a tourist from Chicago bought that griz for forty francs. I was in. I had me a product that looked French but was familiar to Americans with money.
Renoir, Lautrec, and Matisse were big in Paris thirty, forty years back, but the artists along the river and up on top of Montmarte considered them ancient. I was the only artist on the Left Bank with velvet Impressionist pictures of cavalry officers on parade and worn-out Indian braves in a blizzard. Americans snapped up my output fast as I could put it out. The galleries wouldn’t touch me. I hand-sold every painting. And the artists drawing flower pots from six different directions at once, so you couldn’t tell what you were looking at, were jealous no end. Half my profits went into buying drinks and meals for the competition, or I’m certain they would have dry-gulched me and knifed my velvets. Even so, there was enough for me to stay drunk as a skunk, which was the extent of my needs at the time.
I was an artist.
***
One night at the carriage house I showed Josef a new painting I’d done of a Cheyenne maiden washing authentic Indian leggings in a mountain stream. I had cottonwoods and willows and a beaver paddling around a beaver lodge. It was the last scene I hadn’t yet copied from the Western Story Magazine, and I was fretting over getting hold of another magazine with Russells inside. They didn’t sell them at every corner newsstand in Montparnasse.
I was explaining my situation to Josef as he perused my piece, when he said something that caught my attention.
He said, “I have seen this woman.”
I said, “I made her up. Or Charlie Russell found her in Montana, and I adapted him, pretending to be Lautrec. How could you know her?”
“There are a band of people like her living in a field out north of Clignancourt.”
“What people like her?”
“Red savages. They rode in a wild west show, I think.”
I studied the girl in the painting. There was no way Josef could know that exact girl. For one, the convenient fact that made me happy to copy Lautrec was, sometimes he used a smudge of paint for a face. Impressionism was the best style if you couldn’t draw faces any better than I could. But my maiden was noticeably Indian, with furs, an Indian dress, and moccasins. To a Polish poet, all Cheyenne girls looked alike.
He went on. “The owners of the show abandoned the cast at a circus ground. They are trapped by circumstance. You should visit their camp. I would think you could find a model for your paintings.”
“I don’t use live models. I use magazine pictures.”
“Models often sleep with the artists, I think. At least, Picasso’s do. And Man Ray’s. He takes the photographs of women and they couple with him. You cannot couple with a magazine.”
I considered the options. The last thing I needed was another faithless woman, but then it might be interesting to be amongst people I had a common background with. That hadn’t happened in a while.
“I think you should go see these people,” Josef said. “They might need your help.”
***
I walked all the way to Clignancourt, which in 1922, was a whole different town away from Paris. You went off around Montmarte, up through flea markets that are beyond belief to regular Americans. Imagine a city built from its own dump. History lesson: the flea market was invented in Clignancourt—first in the world—and it was so called because all the clothes and bedding and practically everything sold there were infested. To my mind, it should have been called a lice market, but I suppose fleas sound romantic.
My route took me by a number of bars. On a muggy day, I had to rest often, and it didn’t feel polite to take advantage of the hospitality without tasting their libations.
Tell the truth, I needed a nip before meeting folks from home. Looking back years later, I think I had a premonition of change. It had been five years of emptiness since Agatha’s letter. Despair gets tedious if it lasts long enough. My velvet creations had been a child’s step back to life, even though I didn’t admit it, and while part of me knew it was time to take a second step, most of me would rather get sodden and avoid expectation. By the time I found the circus grounds way out the far side of Clignancourt, I fear I wasn’t in the best shape for a social call.
The grounds were dried ruts and mostly empty. A set of tipi poles stuck up from the petrified slop—a four-pole base, so they must have been a mountain tribe as opposed to plains—but there wasn’t a cover. There were two wall tents and an old French Army truck type ambulance set up on bricks. They had an outside fire ring for cooking.
Two decrepit women sat on upturned buckets at the fire ring, which was smoking from the ash but not giving any heat. Very old Indian women look older than very old white women. I don’t mean this as prejudice, I mean it as fact. Indian women spend more time out in the weather, be it sun or rain. White women get out of the sun and rain soon as they feel discomfort.
I lurched, drunk, up to the women and said, “Is there an appropriate place for a man to pass water?”
They looked at one another and talked a language I wasn’t familiar with, then they looked at me and talked overlapping, so quick and bird-like I wouldn’t have picked up their meaning even if I knew the language. They both were short a high portion of teeth. One had a nose you could hang a nightshirt on. The other’s face was wide, round, and flat as a hubcap.
The long-nosed woman raised a claw of a hand and pointed toward the ambulance. I should have known she hadn’t understood the question, but in my inebrious and pained state, I took her to mean, Potty’s in there.
I walked across the ruts in that bent fashion a man adopts when the need to go is paramount, took the single step, ducked, and burst through the door in on a girl giving a man older than the two women a haircut.
The ambulance had four bunks—two lower, two upper—on each side and a three-legged stool for the old man smack center. The girl stood behind him, facing me, with a comb in one hand and scissors in the other.
I said, “Excuse me, Miss.”
A light sparked in her eyes like she recognized me. She lifted the scissors off the man’s scalp and said, “Good day.”
I admit her saying, Good day, instead of, What the hell are you doing? charmed me. The girl was nineteen, maybe, or younger, not a full-blood and possibly not even half. Over time, I’ve found women of more than one racial background tend to be striking in appearance, which this girl was. Her eyes were deep, dark brown, yet not so Oriental as full Indian. Her mouth was small, with a strongly delineated upper lip. The neck is where you cull the beautiful from the merely pretty, and this girl had a long, smooth neck the color of bourbon. Her hair was in braids wrapped in fur, and she wore dangling earrings of silver and turquoise.
I stared at her as long as it just took me to tell you what she looked like. In spite of my staring, she didn’t seem uncomfortable.
“May I assist in some way?” she asked.
“Toilet.”
She pointed with the comb. “We have a closet behind the tent, over there. You are welcome to it.”
The old Indian on his stool hadn’t so much as twitched when I came in. I learned later he was deaf as a post, but at the time, I took him as stoic.
I turned and started out, then I stopped. “Will you still be here when I come back?”
The girl shrugged—lips flat, eyes into and out of a quick squint, shoulders lifted,
hands palm out—in what seemed both a comment on and an evasion of my question. It was a vastly feminine gesture. “Where else would I go?”
***
Her name was Evangeline, and the Indian in her was Crow. The Bradley Brothers Wild West and Equine Extravaganza had come to ground in Austria for the war years. By Armistice, they’d eaten the horses, and those performers who could slip away had slipped. Still, the Bradleys held the troupe together for a tour of Italy, Switzerland, and some of France, but in Paris, they went belly up. The brothers—who weren’t brothers any more than they were Bradleys—took what money and equipment was left and absconded. All but Evangeline, two old Flathead sisters, the deaf Navajo whose hair she’d been cutting, and two Cossacks the Indians didn’t care for had filtered off—some back to the States, others absorbed into Europe.
The Cossacks were over in Paris, looking for work. They’d said they’d be back soon, but they took their saddles, so Evangeline didn’t expect to see them again.
She did not take it as a loss. “The Russians had bad habits. Drink. And Samuel says they fornicated with horses.”
“Samuel?”
She nodded toward the old man. “They tried to fornicate with me, but I threatened to cut them. I hope you aren’t looking for fornication too. Most men are.”
I assured her fornication was the last thing on my mind, although it wasn’t. “Speaking of drink, would you be interested in going out for one?”
She stared at me in infinite disappointment. “No. Thank you.”
I should have figured. In Paris, in the ’20s, those who weren’t drunk didn’t drink. It was all-or-nothing, and the ones who drank nothing looked down on us who drank all. Evangeline made motions like I’d overstayed my welcome. She put away her barbering implements and brushed past me, going outside. I followed, like a puppy. She was so pleasing to the eye, compared to the flappers, hookers, and dope addicts I was used to, that I wanted to put off the moment of being away from her.
I caught up at the fire ring. “Is there anything I can do to help you out?” I asked.
Her eyes flashed anger and her upper lip drew up in a snarl. “You can feed me.”
The suddenness of emotion startled me, but then her eyes and face kind of closed off, not wanting to appear needful.
I said, “Okay.” I know it’s not fair getting a date by offering food to a famished woman, but the whys of her coming with me didn’t matter so much. If all courtship has to be fair, there wouldn’t be any courtship.
***
When Evangeline was ready to go off on our date, I discovered the old Flatheads and the Navajo were coming with us.
“This is France,” I said. “We don’t need chaperones.”
She slipped on a pair of moccasins. I didn’t mention earlier she’d been barefoot and wearing her wild west show Indian princess costume up to that point. I got so wrapped up in her face, hair, and neck, I forgot to tell about her on down below.
She said, “The old ones are hungry.”
I could tell if I didn’t take the lot, Evangeline wasn’t going to come, so I fell back on graciousness. “Sure. I meant for all of us to go together all along.”
***
I treated the bunch to a brasserie, which is a cross between a café and a restaurant. Those are two separate businesses in France, not like here, where you can name an eating place anything you please. The brasserie served croques—sandwiches made from French toast—and a meat pie and some sort of Brunswick stew concoction. It also sold marc. That’s where my interest lay.
The Flathead sisters buzzed to themselves over the stew that they ate with spoons, while Samuel shoveled down a blood sausage big as an artillery shell. Evangeline ate a remarkable number of eggs scrambled with bacon and smelly cheese. I drank my lunch.
Evangeline said, “You are unhappy.”
“Not that I know of.”
She touched a napkin to her lips, blotting the tiniest bit of egg yolk. “Alcohol hides misery, first. Soon, it causes it.”
“How old are you?”
She gave the shrug I’d seen earlier, which meant I don’t answer questions if they are meaningless. “Old enough to know what drink does to ambition.”
“Odd word choice there.” I watched her over my marc glass. In her pigtails and earrings, she could of passed for a child dressed for Halloween.
I said, “Every man was in the war is either dead or unhappy. I’m amongst the lucky ones.”
For emphasis, I set my drink on the table with a firm click, only I hit the ash tin and my marc spilled. It annoyed me no end. I’ve always been known as a careful drunkard, at least with the alcohol itself. I may break furniture, but I rarely spill a drop of what counts. Evangeline sopped up my mess with her cloth napkin while I flagged down the waitress for another round. The waitress pretended not to see me. Then she pretended not to understand my French. I had to stand in front of her, waving my glass, before she agreed to meet my needs.
Finally, when we were back where we started, Evangeline said, “You do not behave like a lucky one.”
“You should see the fellows who drew the alternative.”
“They died many years ago. I think there is more to your unhappiness than the killing.” Her brown eyes were on me like a hawk on a prairie dog. It dawned on me that this was a point in my life where I could either lie like usual and go on the way I’d been going on, or tell the truth and let the results fall where they might.
“There is more.”
She nodded—she’d known all along—and suddenly, I discovered myself telling her about Agatha. I told how we met and our lengthy engagement and what I did to ruin it. The night before I left for the war. All those letters coming and going both ways, then the last letter and how it turned me into a ghost who hadn’t died yet.
I hadn’t told anyone in Paris the Agatha story, not even Josef at my drunkest. I hadn’t uttered the name Agatha in front of Bill or Shad, not after the letter and my failed attempt to bayonet Bill. Something came over me in the brasserie. It must of been the time and place to let go. And Evangeline must have been the person.
I finally wound down. She sipped her coffee and asked, “How long ago?”
“Five years.” I searched the brasserie walls for a calendar, but there was none. “A couple months ago.”
She stared at me with pity in those big eyes. Normally, I don’t want pity from others. Being so full of it for myself, it seemed anti-cowboy to accept it from a female. But right then, I was more than open to pity from that girl.
She said, “This Agatha must be stupid. Only a selfish slattern would send that letter to a man in the middle of a battlefield.”
Affecting a tragic demeanor, I downed more marc. I wasn’t sure what slattern meant, and it intrigued me to wonder where this young Indian girl would have picked it up. “Agatha was selfish, all right, as the next girl, but she wasn’t stupid. It was my own fault what she did, for patronizing the crazy whore in the sheep wagon.”
Evangeline carefully, delicately, placed her fork across the top of the little china plate her eggs had come on. She folded her hands, one across the other, on the tablecloth. She looked from her hands to me. “How do you think the prostitute felt?”
That stopped me short. I’d spent my energy working out how I felt and how Agatha might feel. I never considered Swamp Fox.
“I was one of dozens,” I said. “I doubt if she felt an iota when it came to me.”
The room was falling into a clockwise spin. I concentrated on Evangeline’s eyes at the hub of the turning wheel. Her eyes stayed upright and even, not rotating like the ceiling or the walls. If she’d blinked, I would have been sick.
She said, “All women feel. Even those who give their bodies for money.”
“Yes, well, I spoiled my future prospects over that diseased degenerate. I can’t claim to care much what
became of her. She caused me no end of pain, and it’s my wish that she died and went to hell.”
Evangeline grew calm. Her fingers stopped moving. Her eyes closed. It was as if her body folded in on itself. Nothing but a tiny pulse in the throat showed she was alive. The old Flatheads and the Navajo stopped chewing to look at her, no doubt wondering what was up. They knew her and I didn’t, so they may have seen her turn placid before. I had no idea what to think, except I needed her eyes open to keep me from whirling off in the air.
Then her eyes opened, gazing into mine. She said, “I’m thinking you deserve Agatha.”
I leaped to my feet and sent my chair smashing to the floor. I wasn’t so drunken not to catch her meaning. She’d shown nothing but scorn for Agatha before, and now saying I deserved Agatha, meant Evangeline felt the same scorn for me. I’d opened my deepest secrets to this girl, and she’d responded with an insult. What did it matter to her that I thought more of me than the whore that brought my ruin? I was the put-upon, tragic figure in my story. Who was this girl to say I deserved Agatha?
“I’m buying food for you and your starving tribe. You got no call to—”
Here, I leaned forward to get close to her face, only I kept going, leaning on through the plates and silver and the table itself. There was a terrible crash.
***
One of three things happened next: I either knocked myself out or I passed out or I blacked out. I never was told which. I suppose it doesn’t matter, except the first two are bad and the last is awful. In any event, I cannot record the immediate aftermath.
***
I came to my wits on a cot under a blanket, but not between sheets, in one of the wall tents I mentioned earlier. Right off, I noticed my nakedness followed by the discovery of my clothes in a folded pile on a chair by the door. Evangeline sat at a low table before a mirror, brushing her hair and humming what I took as a show tune—“Swanee,” maybe, but she was so quiet, it was hard to tell. She’d changed out of her Indian princess costume into a pair of breeches and a white blouse. Her long dark brown hair was the most beautiful sight I’d seen since before the war.