BURYING ZIMMERMAN (The River Trilogy, book 2) (34 page)

"Max says all the packers is booked up and
nobody can start hauling his lumber out to Grand Forks for three
weeks, and he don't want to wait that long. If Gig says I'm all
right, Max will grubstake me three hundred dollars to buy and feed
a team, 'cause that's what the packing companies was going to
charge him. Horses, mules, dogs, whatever critters will haul his
lumber and nails. When I'm done I can sell 'em and keep what they
fetch or hold onto the ones that's worth feeding. Max don't care –
he just wants to get his lumber out to Grand Forks and start
building.

"So after that first night with Gig at the
Monte Carlo, I got back in the packing business. I done it at
Skagway and Dyea, so I figured I could do it again. Gig told me
there was as much gear to move in Dawson as I seen on the coast,
only it was lumber and hardware and grub going out to the creeks
instead of outfits going over the passes. And there was a lot more
dust to push things along. After the spring and summer cleanups,
Gig says, most of them miners on Bonanza and Eldorado was going to
need a pack train just to haul their gold down to Dawson.

"Greenhorns been leading horses off the boats
all summer, then steaming home when they found out prospecting
wasn't just riding around the gold fields and scooping up nuggets
with a net. So there was more horses in town than men that knowed
how to handle 'em. Most of 'em got sold or given to a trader in
Lousetown or another one in Bear Creek, and that's where I went
with Max Endleman's money the next day. Took me a few days to find
four I could use, and one of 'em was a packer pony I bought for ten
dollars from the Mounties. They was done building their garrison
and got no more use for it."

"You said meeting Wylie came later. You mean
later that night at the Monte Carlo?"

Zimmerman nods. "I played faro at Gig's table
until I lost the chips he gave me. When he was done dealing his
shift, we went to the bar for whiskey and sat at a table in the
back near the dance floor. I ain't seen much in the way of women
for months, and nothing like the girls that was twirling around on
that floor. Wrapped down to their toes in dresses of all different
colors, with ribbons and feathers and bows in their hair. Some had
lace pulled around their shoulders or across their chest. A few of
'em would get up to sing songs or act a skit, and the ones that
fellers loved best had a necklace or a belt made of gold nuggets
that sourdoughs tossed at 'em when they was on stage. The rest was
just there to dance all night and take home twenty dollars worth of
dust. Put any one of them girls under the lights in Baltimore or
Philadelphia and she'd get hooted off the stage and sent back to
the kitchen, but in Dawson they was angels.

"So I'm talking with Gig and thinking maybe I
could ask the girl with the big smile and red hair for a dance when
Gig pulls his hat off one of the empty chairs and stands up. I do
the same, and he introduces me to a feller with straight dark hair,
eyes like a otter, and a gap between his front teeth.

"Gig says 'this is Penson Wylie, and here's
Henry Zimmerman,' and we shake hands. But I can hardly notice
Wylie, 'cause the girl standing next to him and looking at me must
be the prettiest one I ever seen. She has blue eyes and pale skin
and lips like Lillian Gish, with thick blond hair pinned up in
back, and loose curls twisting down across her temples.

"Wylie says 'this is Miss Alice Maine,' and I
mumble my name and say 'pleased to meet you,' and she smiles at me
and holds out her hand. I feel drops of sweat break out on my scalp
and my chest starts drumming like a woodpecker."

Zimmerman stops to raise his cup and take a
sip. "You know that feeling, Owen? When your heart starts hammering
and everything closes in around you?" He puts his cup down and
shoots a glance at the knife lying flat beside me on the table.

I don't answer, but my eyes slide toward the
orange coals in the open stove and I remember the dream where I'm
trapped in the culvert by a wall of driftwood, and Gig Garrett is
on the other side, lighting the pile on fire. Now I'm aware that my
heart is thumping faster, and sweat is pooling in the well at the
base of my neck. I lean forward to get my bearings and throw back a
sip of whiskey.

Glancing at Zimmerman I see something like a
sparkle in his eyes. I wonder if he knows he's identified my
weakness, and if that recognition has restored his confidence. He
resumes his story.

"Gig says 'you looking for someone, Alice?',
but Wylie scans the room and says 'he ain't here, let's try the
Flora Dora.' Then he tips his hat and tells Gig he'll be back in an
hour. He takes Alice by the hand and they walk toward the door. Gig
and I sit down as the music stops and the couples start moving
toward the bar, and I ask him who they was.

"He says he met Wylie at Miles Canyon, and
the two of 'em was mining partners at Circle, then they come up to
Dawson together over the ice. He says they worked as hired hands on
48 Eldorado and dug their own claims on Skookum Gulch. They sold
Skookum, the Swedes sold Eldorado, and Gig and Wylie moved down to
Lousetown a year ago. They missed out on the stampede to the
benches in the spring, and once them hillsides was all claimed,
there wasn't no ground left in the Klondike or Indian districts
worth staking. So they was going to wait for the next big strike in
a new district and be ready to move when it happened.

"But during '98, Gig says, he and Wylie been
going in different directions. Gig was set on making an honest
living in Dawson, dealing cards and tending bar. But Wylie was
drifting toward the edges of the law, and sooner or later that was
going to lead to trouble. Gig said Dawson wasn't like Skagway. With
Sam Steele and his Mounties garrisoned in the middle of town,
sidearms wasn't allowed, and there wasn't no tolerance for con-men
or thieves."

"Was Wylie a thief?"

"Depends how you look at it," Zimmerman says.
"Wylie found the marks, set 'em up, and got 'em drunk. But it was
Alice that done the thieving."

Chapter 40

Zimmerman relates what Gig told him about
Alice Maine. He says she was from Vancouver, no older than twenty,
and set out for Dawson with a friend named Hazel in the spring of
'98. They were chasing gold that had already been liberated from
the ground, so they proclaimed themselves actresses and assembled
outfits that consisted entirely of clothing, food, and a few
essentials for cooking and camping.

Alice and Hazel landed in Dyea with a hazy
understanding of the Yukon Trail, but they were lucky to catch the
eye of a man named Barrington, who had just come up from Juneau
with four young women he'd recruited to sing and dance. Barrington
was in business with 'Arkansas Jim' Hall, who made his fortune on
17 Eldorado. Now Hall was building the Palace Grand Theater in
Dawson, and he and Barrington needed starlets to lure the
sourdoughs.

One of Barrington's recruits had taken ill on
the ship and decided to return to Juneau. So Barrington talked both
Alice and Hazel into replacing her. He'd already outfitted the
group and arranged packing to Bennett and passage across the lakes
and downriver on a series of ferries and steamers.

It seems strange to me that Zimmerman rattles
off this recollection shortly after neglecting to mention seeing
steamers on the upper Yukon during his own descent from the lakes
to Dawson.

He says that Alice, Kate, and the rest of
Barrington's ensemble left Sheep Camp in early June and reached
Dawson in late July, at the height of the rousing summer of '98. It
never occurred to Barrington to ask how well Alice and Hazel could
sing.

"At the Palace, Hazel and the other girls
might make twenty or thirty dollars on a good night, singing on
stage and lining up a dozen fellers to dance with. But Alice quit
when she met Wylie. She started making much more just taking one
feller home every night. She had a crib at the end of Paradise
Alley, where it was easy to come and go. You could get to Front
Street or Princess Street in just a few steps, so you wasn't going
to be caught in the middle of the alley when a constable come
through. But Sam Steele knowed that most of the men in Dawson was
starved for female company, so that first year the Mounties just
let Paradise Alley be."

"Are you saying Wylie made Alice a
prostitute?"

"The Klondike made her a prostitute,"
Zimmerman says, "just like everyone else. You could get rich in a
hurry, but you got to give up your old life and sell whatever you
got to sell. Alice done that, same as the miners burning shafts out
on the creeks."

"You just said she was a thief."

"I said she done the thieving. It was Alice's
hands, but Wylie was pulling the strings."

"What do you mean?"

"There was plenty of girls turning tricks in
Dawson. Streetwalkers would take a feller back to their tent and
screw for three dollars. On Paradise Alley the girls got four
ounces of dust – that's sixty-four dollars. And most of 'em rigged
their scales to get more than that.

"Wylie seen that Alice made them other girls
looks like barmaids. He told her he could introduce her to the high
rollers in Dawson, the ones that could afford to treat her like a
queen. So that's what he done, and almost every night he set up a
rich feller to meet her at one of the best places in town.
Fairview, the Orpheum, Palace, Monte Carlo, Flora Dora, never the
same place as the night before.

"He would leave Alice with the mark around
midnight, and after a couple of drinks and dances they'd be off to
her crib for a rum-and-ginger cocktail. That was something Wylie
showed her how to make, and he gave it a special ingredient he
brung downriver in his medicine kit."

"Ether?"

"Morphine. It don't take much, and you can't
taste it under the ginger. Maybe if the feller was lucky, Alice
would show off her charms before the cocktail done its job.
Sometimes they'd lie down together and he'd fall asleep before he
got his pants off.

"Then Alice knocks on the window and Wylie
slips in the front door. They empty the feller's poke onto a plate
and take half the gold. Weigh out the same amount of black sand and
gravel and dump it in the bottom of the poke, then cover it with
what's left of the gold. If the mark was carrying two pounds of
dust, Alice and Wylie would split a pound. That's a hundred and
thirty dollars for a night's work.

"Then Wylie loads him onto a horse cart and
takes him back to his hotel or cabin. When the feller wakes up,
Wylie says the lady felt ill and sent a neighbor to fetch him. If
the mark's still sleeping, Wylie props him against his door."

***

Zimmerman says he was packing his first load
of lumber for Max Endleman within a week. He could make the trip in
a long day, after which he'd rest his horses for a day at Grand
Forks. Then back down to Dawson to set up for another load. Max
didn't need his roofing materials right away, so Henry asked around
in Grand Forks and found a couple of miners who needed logs pulled
down from the hillside above their Bonanza claim, and that work
brought him his first taste of Klondike gold dust. Word spread, and
by the time Henry finished packing for Endleman, he'd found
customers on Bonanza and Eldorado and negotiated a two-day trip out
to Independence Creek.

When he was between jobs, Henry would hole up
with Gig and Wylie in Lousetown. A Yukon stove burnt coal and wood
all day and most of the night to keep the tent's spacious interior
warm. It was during these interim hours that he and Garrett
exchanged stories about their travels since leaving Cabin John.

"The old bridge over the Klondike got washed
away in the spring of '98," Zimmerman says. "So they built a better
one that summer, and the newspapers said 'stroll the Eighth Avenue
Bridge across the river to Klondike City.' But all the oldtimers
still called it Lousetown.

"I was sipping whiskey with Gig one night
outside the tent, sometime in January. It was cold and clear, but
the wind was down and we had a fire going. There's a berm around
the pit and we was sitting with our backs to it, stretching our
legs to the fire. The northern lights come dancing around midnight,
so we leaned back and rested our heads on the berm to watch. Gig
was saying it won't be long before someone finds the next Klondike.
He said all the sourdoughs wanted the strike to be somewhere across
the border, maybe a couple hundred miles past Circle, where the
Tanana River come into the Yukon. Not many white men been up that
river, and it drains the wildest and steepest part of Alaska. I
ain't even started prospecting in the Klondike district, but it
sounded like Gig was already done with it and thinking about what
come next. Too many cheechakos wandering around Dawson and the rich
ground was already staked.

"After he said that we heared someone
running. We looked up and Wylie turned off the path and come down
the slope to our tent. He dropped into the fire pit and sat back
against the berm with us, breathing too heavy to talk right away.
Took off his hat and fanned himself with cold air.

"'What's going on?' Gig says and Wylie says
'I seen her again!' When he catches his breath he says it was the
Indian girl – the one he knowed was trying to kill him. He says she
was waiting for him across the street from Alice Maine's crib, and
when he come out the door she started walking toward him, holding
out the necklace with the wolf tooth and the rabbit ear. Wylie says
it spooked him half to death, so he turned and run. Six blocks down
to Eighth Avenue, then south and over the bridge. Coming up along
the waterfront through Lousetown he knowed she wasn't following,
but he kept running all the way back to the tent.

"That was the first time I heared his story
about the girl. He told me how she flipped his boat in Miles Canyon
and drownded his partner Timmons. And how he seen her for the first
time when he was fording the Dyea River, and then again when he and
Gig was sledding up from Circle. He says she held him down when he
fell into Quartz Creek, and that was worse than riding a flipped
boat through the rapids in the canyon.