by Ed Kurtz
“Ain’t anybody looking for a presentable man,” she said.
Which was a fair point.
At the St. Francis, Boon accosted the drowsy bell captain behind the front desk, whose sour face betrayed his distaste with the interruption.
“Say,” she said, “the Sydney Ducks still quacking in the pond?”
“Christ, you’ve been away,” the bell captain scoffed. “It’s the Rangers you worry about now. Vigilance Committee ran them Aussies off ages back.”
With a nod, Boon left the desk and proceeded to the stairs. I hadn’t the slightest idea what she was talking about and she wasn’t forthcoming to address my growing bewilderment at everything I saw and heard in that strange, filthy town.
“What’s a Ranger here?” I asked when we reached our room.
Boon shrugged.
“Reckon we’ll find out.”
“And all these fancy duds?”
“An investment,” she said, “in anonymity.”
“I see,” I said, though I didn’t.
Each floor of the St. Francis Hotel had a bath, and since the one on our floor was occupied, I snuck down one level to use that one instead. It was the first proper bath, not counting rinsing away the trail dust in my underclothes in a stream or just scrubbing my face and neck in a basin, that I’d had in several months. I found dirt in places I didn’t know I could store dirt and felt curiously more naked without it once it all got scrubbed off. As for the beard, I made use of a straight razor and a decorative, if cracked, mirror made available in the bathing room to trim and shape it into something resembling the Van Dyke style I’d seen on quite a few faces since entering California. On me, I thought it looked ridiculous, but I also found myself hardly recognizable, which I expected was the aim.
Like the bath, the mirror was sort of a first in a coon’s age, too. I could not help but marvel with a mix of awe and horror at how old that sunbaked face in the glass was, looking back at me. With the cheeks shaved to the skin, and the dirt scraped off, I could identify a hell of a lot more lines in that face than I could ever have imagined were there. By God, but I was starting to look like the spitting image of my old grandpappy back in Arkansas, and me only in my forties. I was far from a vain man, as my habits could attest, but the experience was alarming.
“You’re getting old before your time, Edward Splettstoesser,” I told the hoary old boy in the glass. He frowned back at me, displeased with my observation.
When next I saw my dear friend Boon, I could have dropped dead on the spot. I will never understand why I didn’t.
Her face scrubbed so clean it shone pink, she stood with her back to the window facing Grand Avenue in her pillowy new gown, pink with green embroidery at the hems of its flowing sleeves, her feet squeezed into the slippers and hair combed through and plaited into an elaborate braid that spun down and over her shoulder like a pet snake. There was a small but noticeable tear in the stitching of the gown at her right hip, but it did nothing to ruin the overall impression of the getup. I guessed the intended effect was to fool onlookers into dismissing her as any one of the city’s thousands of Chinese women, and though she would not have fooled me, I knew almost any other white man would only give her a second glance on account of her inherent loveliness.
I had only ever seen Boon in the raiment appropriate to your run-of-the-mill Texan drifter, the clothes of a man, for whom she was so often mistaken. No one would make that mistake now.
“By God, Boonsri,” I said as soon as I could breathe again. “You surely look plumb pretty.”
A smile played at the corners of her mouth, but she valiantly fought it back.
“Oh, shut up, Edward,” she said in spite of the blush on her cheeks. “Pretty is the last God damned thing I want to be.”
“Well, you are anyways.”
“And you could pert near pass for a civilized human being,” she said.
I did not bother to fight my own smile. Compliments were rare and shrouded when it came to Boon, so I took them when I could get them.
I pulled on a pair of stockings for my feet and set to sorting out the waistcoat she had purchased when I realized Boon was fighting much more than a simple smile. She was struggling not to cry.
“Boon,” I said, rising with only the one stocking on.
She waved me away, her shoulders trembling, and turned to the window for several minutes, breathing loudly through her mouth until the tremors passed. I wanted more than anything to go to her, to comfort her in some way, but I knew better than to try. There were just too many years of scar tissue encasing that heart of hers for me to ever dream of penetrating it.
And, as if reading my mind on that subject, she quietly spoke to me about a few of those scars.
“I sailed the first time I came here,” she said, surreptitiously wiping her eyes on one of those tremendous sleeves. “Forty-three days from New London to San Francisco, by way of the Isthmus of Darien in Panama. Apart from the voyage from Siam, which I don’t remember at all, it was the longest journey of my life. And bad, Edward. They were bad, bad days.”
She heaved a long sigh and dropped her chin to her bosom. I remained where I stood, half-afraid to move the way one was when they didn’t want to spook a deer in the woods.
“My mother and I were sold when we landed in New England. I told you that. But here, not a mile from this spot, I was sold again. I thought I’d escaped all that, but I didn’t. And here, in this fucking place, it was so much worse than Connecticut.
“They took me right off the sloop, bundled me up like sundries, and carried me off to some awful cellar. It was just down yonder, on Washington Street. Nothing but a shanty up top, but all of us were crammed in that cellar. You had to climb down a wobbly ladder just to get down there. It was so decrepit, I doubt it would survive the weight of a big man like you.”
Boon raised her head again and blew a snort of air through her nose. She then turned, just slightly, to meet my eyes.
“I’m sorry, Edward,” she said. “I didn’t mean it like that.”
“I know,” I said.
“It was such a queer set-up, that cellar,” she continued, pacing the length of the window to the edge of the curtains. I sat down on the edge of the bed, but let my one foot stay naked. “It was a bagnio, to be sure. Rickety cots, lined up like a barracks. I was only thirteen, but there were girls in there young as eight. Every one of them right off the boat from China—every one except me, but the slavers couldn’t tell the difference. Dressed us all up like little porcelain dolls, the bastards.”
She paused, composed herself. I could hear myself swallow. My own heartbeat in my ears.
“Some days they brought in a dozen or so Chinese men, but not for us. They were performers, if you can believe it. Some of them skulked about with knives and hatchets, others smoked tobacco in opium pipes and acted like they were hoppies, out of their heads. They brought people down to look at it all, charged them fifty cents to gawp at the depravities of the yellow man. Not any of it real, of course. Except the whores. We were real.”
My breath hitched in my trunk. She had said it. She said she was a whore, and only a child. Slaved into it. She’d never said a word about any of it until that very moment. I didn’t know if I wanted to weep or throw the lamp through the window and scream my lungs out.
Thirteen.
I went right ahead and sobbed into my hands.
“I wasn’t ever in no orphanage, Edward,” she said, her voice small and soft.
“Boon,” I said. I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
But by Christ, I grasped all that death so much better. All that killing. In a grim and gruesome way, it made more sense than ever, now.
“Boon.”
“Well,” she said, the syllable sharp and loud. “That’s a lot of years gone.”
“Gone, but not forgotten.”
“No.”
“Or we wouldn’t be here.”
“We wouldn’t,” she agreed.
<
br /> “And I ’spect we’ve a job of work to do, ain’t we?”
“My mother.”
“Your mama,” I said. “What’s the joint we’re after?”
“Willocks said they call it the Palace.”
“Nice name,” I jeered.
“Ain’t it.”
“Tonight?”
Boon set her jaw and raised her chin, her eyes dry and narrowed and dark.
She said, “Right God damned now.”
Chapter Thirty
The Palace was anything but nice, though perhaps a great deal nicer than dozens of other dives, dance-halls, and deadfalls Boon and I had visited over the years. Unlike most of what I’d ever seen in Arkansas or Texas, the Palace’s main operating area was below ground, in the cellar. Coupled with Boon’s agonizing story of her youth in the bagnio, I was coming to understand that much of San Francisco’s underworld was, in fact, under the world.
The ceiling was low and the room large, with a long mahogany bar running along one side, a platform upon which a trio of musicians played on the other, and a space cleared out in the middle for dancing. Pretty waiter girls cavorted about, as naked as the law would allow, serving drinks and sitting on the laps of sailors, pimps, and not a few very young boys in slouch hats with knives and brass knuckles on their persons. We descended by way of a narrow stairwell, and I saw as soon as my eyes adjusted to the dim light that there was a mirroring stairwell across the broad space. One of the waiter girls was leading a piss-drunk Chileno by the hand up those stairs, which was all the explanation I needed as to its purpose.
We met no resistance on the street, at the Palace’s door, when we arrived at dusk. I could hear the piano and fiddle from below, contrasting obnoxiously with a dozen other groggeries, hooch dens, concert saloons, melodeons, and flat-out whorehouses that crowded Stockton Street and its numerous alleyway tentacles. At the front of the tumbledown building under which the Palace operated, a man with an unruly nest of dark, curly hair in an oversized frock coat and purple trousers stepped between us and the door and reached a hand into his coat.
We have had it, I thought. This was for God damn sure a Pinkerton agent, and we were recognized on the spot.
“Damn,” I said, and I crouched to pull the knife from my boot.
But Boon stayed my hand.
“Go no further, friend,” said the man, and he thrust a dodger at me. “The Palace has everything you could ever want, just through that door. Fun and frolic, song and dance, fine pisco punch, and the prettiest girls in the Barbary Coast.”
I took the dodger without much thinking about it and, turning my eyes down to the paper in my hand, read:
SPICY! SPORTY!
THE THRILL OF THE BARBARY COAST!
YOU ARE INVITED TO VISIT
THE PALACE
UNIQUE OF ALL COMPETING ESTABLISHMENTS
INCOMPARABLE AND BEYOND RIVALRY
COME AND SEE
BEAUTIFUL GIRLS – PLAIN TALK – CHARMING FORMS
OR REGRET IT ALL YOUR LIFE!
“Ain’t restricted, partner,” the hawker said. “You can even bring your China girl in there with you.”
I said, “Oh,” or something to that effect, and the man turned his leering gaze on Boon.
“You likey, China girl? Likey drink and dance?”
He pantomimed both activities, raising an invisible glass to his lips as he shook his hips and waggled his eyebrows. This time around, it was me who stayed her hand, as I was sure Boon needed a gentle nudge to remind her that now was not the time to start a fracas.
Instead, she said, “Sure, partner. Me likey just fine.”
The hawker tilted his head, looking for all the world like a confused hound dog, and we pushed past him to the door, into the vestibule, and down the stairs to the Palace proper.
The only other Oriental person I could spy down there was a slight man with a long queue trailing down his back, industriously sweeping up stamped-out cigars and cigarettes between songs. Pimchan was nowhere to be seen.
“Get yourself a drink,” Boon whispered to me. “Wouldn’t do not to. And remember, I belong to you.”
I must have made a face, because she frowned at me and shook her head.
“You know what I mean, Splettstoesser.”
“I surely do, Angchuan,” I said.
She brought her hands together at her stomach, hidden in her sleeves, and dropped her head as she trailed me to the bar. Proud and tough as she was, I reckoned it must have pained her to play the role. As for me, I was just glad to be getting a little firewater in my belly.
Recalling the hawker on the street, I asked the bartender about pisco punch.
“Tastes like lemonade,” he said, “but kicks you in the ass like a bronco.”
“That right,” I said.
Boon cleared her throat.
“Ain’t for casual tipplers,” cautioned the bartender.
“Not me, friend,” I said with a wink. “I’m a lifelong dyed-in-the-wool drunk. Set me up.”
He did, with a shrug and a smile. And I was damned if it didn’t taste like lemonade, only better on account of that promised kick. For the first time since our arrival, I was starting to like San Francisco, at least a small bit. I made a sound in my throat to indicate my satisfaction with the libation.
“Remember why we’re here,” Boon said.
“We’re here,” I said. “But your mama ain’t.”
“My eyes work fine.”
“Reckon Willocks lied?”
“We’ll see.”
I knocked back the rest of the punch and set the glass on the bar. The bartender said, “Another?”
“Just beer,” I said.
He looked gravely disappointed, but waddled to a barrel, pulled the bung, and poured me a draft. I drank it happily, but I’d have preferred another punch.
“If I only had some tobacco, I’d be happy as a pig in shit.”
“This ain’t a vacation, Edward.”
“What’s the next move?”
“We wait a spell. Just keep your eyes and ears open.”
“Eyes and ears,” I agreed, and I killed the beer, too.
There was another beer after that, and then another. Nothing much happened. Men came and went, and when they went it was usually by way of the back stairs with a sporting girl on his arm. At one point, one of the pretty waiter girls dropped out cold from too much punch, and she too was carried up the back stairs. Nobody said a thing about it, but Boon looked fit to be tied, red in the face. She couldn’t do anything about it. Not if she wanted things to go the way she wanted them to go. I felt for her.
An hour or so slipped by in this way before I moved to signal the barman and Boon put her hand on my arm.
“Go with one of the girls,” she said.
“Come again?”
“Don’t bull me like you ain’t done it a hundred times before,” she said. “Only this time it’s business, not pleasure.”
“I’m going to need more instruction than that,” I said.
“Sometimes I wish I was a man so I could just take care of things my own self,” Boon groused. I shrugged. “Listen, sit down and one of those girls will sit with you. It’s what they are here to do. Flirt, play nice, but tell her you’re partial to Oriental girls. Ask if there’s any around, and you’ll pay her to set you up. You came in with me so it’s a cinch she’ll believe it.”
I nodded, not understanding at all. Boon sighed.
“One of three things will happen. She’ll tell you there ain’t any—and I doubt there are, because it’s pretty clearly a white dive. Or there is, and she’ll direct you to her, in which case you’re to go with her and try to find out about Pimchan.”
“And the third?”
“She’ll just tell you about my mother.”
“If I get me a dose from this,” I said, “you are paying for my doctoring.”
“Then keep your pecker in your trousers,” she said.
“Seems counterintuitiv
e.”
“Get to it.”
“And you?” I glanced around the dim, smoky room, full of more than a few unsettling characters.
“I can take care of myself,” Boon said.
I said, “Yes, you sure as shit can.”
She curtsied, her hands still hidden in her sleeves, and slinked away to a corner table, where she sat like she was floating down. I licked my fingers, straightened my eyebrows and mustache, and moseyed over to a table a little closer to the action. The musicians had started up again by then, the red-nosed melodeon player working the bellows like they were his own lungs and he was afraid of suffocating, and a girl in a near-transparent blouse trounced down on my lap before I knew she was there.
“Couple of us got a wager going,” she said. “Some says you’re a john and some says you’re a mack, on account of the China girl.”
“That so,” I said.
“Course I told ’em no reason he can’t be both.”
“Sure.”
“Never heard of a mack didn’t like to sample what he’s selling, matter of fact.”
“Makes good sense.”
“So what wets your whistle, Johnny Mack?”
“Bet you can guess,” I said.
The waiter girl arched her back like a cat and cast her eyes to Boon, who remained demurely perched at her table.
“You’re one of them got yellow fever,” she said.
“Not even a touch of the ague,” I countered.
She tittered. It seemed practiced.
“I mean you like to fuck yellow women,” she said. “This sure is the town for it, only not the right house.”
“No China girls here, then,” I said, acting crestfallen.
“You kidding? We’d have the Tongs and the Six Companies so far up our cabooses we’d get burned to the ground before you could turn around and spit.”
“Sounds serious.”
“It’s all a game, Johnny Mack,” she said, “and games got rules.”
“Reckon they do.”
Again, she emitted one of her patented fake titters, shaking her torso as she did so to make her titties bounce and wiggle beneath the sheer blouse. She kept her eyes on me, wide and a little wet, the whole time. It made for a disquieting effect, which I did not think was the intended outcome. The music stopped and started again, down tempo with the red-nosed gent on the melodeon warbling some sad Irish lament which was in that country’s native tongue—or else the man was just too drunk to make sense. While he sang and the pretty waiter girl tittered and jiggled, I turned my head just enough to catch sight of Boon, who was no longer assuming a slouched and submissive position.