Cottonwood (15 page)

Cornan surprised them by pulling his revolver and waving it at them. “Them days are over here,” he said as they backed away. Then he turned back toward me. “You hear? Over.”

They backed into the crib, and a minute later one of its occupants leaned out the front door wearing nothing but a chemise. Her name was Lottie, and I knew her a little from the bar. She came in to drink and didn’t conduct any business transactions on the premises, though that would have been fine with me. “Well, hello, gentlemen. Got a few minutes at liberty, have we?”

Cornan was flustered, and he put the gun back in its holster, a fancy one of tooled leather. “Not for the likes of you, you dirty harlot,” he said, though I suspected it was no coincidence that I’d found him here.

“No need to be unkind, Mike,” Lottie said. “I thought to relieve some of your burden, is all.”

“My burden won’t be relieved through sins of the flesh,” he yelled, and he hurried away from us.

“How about you, bartender? You feel like keeping me company for a few minutes?” Fact is I did feel like it; Lottie was a good-looking woman, despite small eyes and a mean little mouth. I was sore at Maggie, too, since I knew she’d lain with her husband the night before, and probably that morning, too. I had money in my pocket and more on the way, and some free time as well, since Cornan had rejected my help in seeking new coppers, so I stepped inside. There were four rough doors on leather hinges in a short hallway, each leading to an individual crib; three of the doors were shut, with noises coming from inside. As I stepped into Lottie’s room one of them opened, and out of it stepped one of the men I had just seen entering. He was buttoning the top of his trousers, looking dazed and happy; I estimated that not three minutes had passed since he’d gone in.

Lottie’s crib contained a narrow iron bed with a thin, lumpy mattress, wide enough for two occupants only if they were stacked vertically, a washing basin and a small trunk. She sat upon the bed, opened my trousers and extracted my prick, which she examined with an air of clinical detachment. I saw then a bottle of carbolic acid next to her washbasin, and that got me thinking about all the men who’d passed through that room in the past month or so. That in turn led to memories of wartime camp followers and the ravages their diseases had wrought upon some of my fellow soldiers, and I began to question the hygienic wisdom of inserting into Lottie the part of me she was in the process of examining.

“Looks clean to me,” she pronounced. Outside I could hear some of the other girls, finished now with their clients, soliciting passersby. “What’s your pleasure?”

“Maybe just a little bit of oral stimulation today, Lottie.”

“A little bit of what?” she asked, squinting, head tilted to her left.

“The French way,” I explained, and she nodded, brightening.

“A cocksucking. That’s easy enough, I don’t even have to wash up after.”

I slipped it into her mouth, and she worked at it with such skill that I was finished as quickly as the fellow down the hall had done. Having swallowed, Lottie wiped her lips with her long chemise, which she raised to show me her sex, tufted with hair as blond as that on her head. “You’ll have to stick around for some of this next time,” she said. I gave her two dollars and got ready to go.

“How come you’re friends with that son-of-a-bitch, anyway?”

For a second I thought she meant Marc. “Which son-of-a-bitch is that?”

“Mike Cornan. He’s got balls, calling me a harlot and stomping off like that just ’cause you was with him.”

I laughed at the notion of Cornan being my pal. “He’s no friend of mine.”

“He just wants you to think he never comes around here. Well, he does, half the time preaching hellfire and damnation, the rest of the time earning it.”

“I think he’s going to be the new chief of police.”

She nodded. “The kind who’ll want a free piece of ass every day, plus a cut of everybody’s take. One good thing about this town so far is the only one we have to fuck for free is old Tiny Rector.”

That didn’t sound so great to me, but I didn’t say it. She hustled me out onto the street ahead of her and called out to a group of laborers across the street. As a couple of them approached looking eager for fleshly contact I bid Lottie good-day and headed for the saloon.

If Cornan had shown fear at the sight of Lottie that afternoon, he betrayed absolute terror in the face of Maggie Leval. Dressed in a stiff brown suit in a style predating the war and stinking of mold, he stammered and choked when addressed by her, and when he spoke to me or Marc it was in a stentorian bark like a sergeant’s, as if no woman was present. Maggie concentrated on the impossible task of putting him at his ease; in doing so she was able to fairly ignore me, and so our interactions had little of the guilty or furtive about them. At one point Marc and Cornan retired to the library to discuss some sort of constabulary business, and upon leaving us alone Marc looked over his shoulder with a particularly sour set to his mouth. “We’ll be just a few minutes, so enjoy yourselves.”

As soon as the library door was shut I hastened to Maggie’s side. “He knows,” I hissed.

“How would he? Anyway, he gets himself into spells where he acts like that. It’s all about business, not about you and me. Now go and sit down before he finds you whispering in my ear.”

As the soup was served Marc was reading aloud a particularly unflattering account from an eastern newspaper of the riot, a declamation full of theatrical bombast; I was uncertain how to react to it, because his dramatic reading combined with the absurd claims made by the columnist, supposedly an eyewitness to the hangings, suggested a certain bleak comedy:

“ ‘Our Prairie Correspondent reports that in the town of Cottonwood, in Kansas, a crowd of drunken ruffians spilled out of the town saloon’—that’s nice, Bill—‘in a murderous mood, the cause of which no one seems sure.’ ” He paused and looked around as we began lapping up the soup. “ ‘Having hanged one innocent passerby from one of the trees that gave the village its name, the bloodthirsty mob then forced its way into the offices of the City Hall, where it found Police Chief Paul Doughty’—that’s d-o-u-g-h-t-y, couldn’t even be bothered to get the man’s right name—‘standing guard. Upon his order to break up the assembly, the leaders thereof disarmed him forcibly and compelled him to disrobe.’ ” Having bellowed this last word for emphasis, Marc again looked up at us before resuming his reading. “ ‘At this point the mayor of Cottonwood exited his own chambers and demanded to know what was meant by the disruption to the business of the city. He and the remainder of the city’s police force were then similarly ordered to remove their clothing, and the mob, which by this time had grown to include fifty or sixty men, marched the lot of them outside to the same tree from which their luckless fellow citizen swung. From its branches and those of several others in its immediate vicinity the mayor and the town’s entire police force were strung, to the applause and raucous laughter of perhaps the lowest group of villains this part of the country has seen. With officers of the peace no longer an impediment, the lawless element has taken over the town completely and chaos reigns.’ ”

I couldn’t help myself; I laughed.

“You find that amusing, Bill?”

“Just picturing Tiny in the raw,” I said, and I saw Maggie’s hand race to her mouth to suppress a smile.

“That’s our town being described there, for anyone to read that cares to. You don’t think that’s to the detriment of our reputation? Of the future of Cottonwood?”

“There’s hardly a grain of truth to it.”

“That doesn’t matter to some easterner who might otherwise be tempted to come here, or to invest money in the town.”

“Seems like we have all the investment we need for the time being.”

“We never have enough, Bill. We’re going to need more, and if we get the reputation of a Sodom on the plains we won’t get it.”

“If we’re going to get the drivers up here, there’s going to be some wildness.”

“Wildness is one thing. Debauchery’s another. Listen to this: ‘The town’s fancy ladies, estimated at a hundred and fifty or more in number, now conduct their business openly in the out-of-doors, and think nothing of importuning strolling citizens even when accompanied by wives and babes.’ ”

Cornan leaned forward and hollered, “Begging your pardon, Mister Leval, but that last is just about the case.”

“Prostitutes in the streets? Not downtown, surely?” Maggie asked, her eyes wide and credulous, leaning over her soup.

Cornan reddened at her addressing him directly, and responded without meeting her eyes. “Not in the decent part of town, not yet anyway. In the shanty-town, though, they’re whoring openly without regard for decency or the laws of God or man. And we have to face the fact that the shanty-town is a part of this city.”

He leaned forward and stared at Marc, who nodded. “I’ve been thinking about that. Maybe something should be done.”

“It’s a terrible idea,” I said. “Get rid of the whores and you’ll have a town full of men with one thing on their minds, and the lack of it will make them as wild as the mob in that newspaper article.”

Cornan didn’t appreciate being contradicted. “I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised at your attitude regarding the town whores, Mr. Ogden, after what I witnessed today south of Lincoln.”

Marc and Maggie raised their eyebrows as one and turned to Cornan, riveted.

“You didn’t see anything, Cornan.”

“I saw you talking to a painted lady that stuck her half-naked body out into the street to see if you could be lured in. By the looks of things as I was hurrying off you were negotiating a price with her.”

Before I could respond, Maggie turned sideways and buried her face in her hands, retching. She waved us off with her right hand as Marc and I each rose to her aid, and when she could get a word out she whispered, “Something went down wrong.” Her eyes were wet and rimmed with red, and she didn’t address me directly for the rest of the evening.

The next morning I rode out to the farm as usual, where Garth and the new hired man were hard at work with the plowing. I pitched in for a while, which left me determined to hire a third man immediately, and when it came time to leave for town I stopped into the house if just to get out of the cold for a moment.

“You been having your way with that woman,” Ninna said without accusation or anger, a simple statement of fact.

“What makes you say that?” I asked, considerably surprised.

“Heard he was gone to Chicago for two, three weeks, and I seen the way you looked at her Christmastime.”

“ ‘Saw,’ not ‘seen.’ ” It was a constant irritant to me that her English, as it grew over the years, became more and more colloquial and incorrect, but that was what I got for abandoning her to the field hands. “Anyway, that doesn’t mean anything.”

“Seen how she was looking at you, too, when she thought her man and me wasn’t looking.”

“But you haven’t heard any talk?”

She laid down her knitting for a second and looked straight at me with her big, pale blue eyes. “How would I hear talk? I don’t see nobody but Garth and that damned hunky you hired, and Clyde. Once a month I see the neighbors and they know less than me. They’re real farmers, do all the work themselves. No time to go to town and gossip.” She took up the needles again, and I went out. I hadn’t seen Clyde that morning, though I knew he was home, and I wanted to say hello.

I found the boy up in the barn, nestled in the straw for warmth and trying to read Herodotus. “Making any progress?” I asked, and he looked up and shrugged slightly.

“Some.” Then he looked back down at the page and scowled, much the way I used to when I was at that stage of puzzling out the Greek letters one by one, constructing them into words, and then reassembling the words to form sentences. I remembered the pride and pleasure I took from that experience, and I hoped that it was the same for him, and would soon become for him as it had for me so long ago, an escape from the day’s drudgery into the world of the ancients. I sensed that further interruption from me would break the spell and so crept out quietly, remounted the chestnut mare and rode back to town, calculating as I rode the amount of ill-will to be generated with Garth when Ninna took the new man to bed.

The day was humid and cold without being foggy, exactly. I stopped in at the bank before I opened the saloon and found Marc in conference with a prosperous-looking fellow, beefy in the face and with a striking roll of fat around his neck like a pink collar. His hair was black, going gray in spots, and his muttonchop whiskers had gone white altogether. His little eyes bulged like a salamander’s, and his mouth remained open the entire time I was in his presence. Marc introduced the man as Silas Henniston of Kansas City.

“Mr. Henniston’s gone and lost his business partner somewhere around here, Bill,” he said. He was in no sunnier a mood than he’d been since his return, and he didn’t bother to disguise his slightly contemptuous smile. “He thought perhaps we could help him out.”

Henniston, oblivious, leaned forward. “He was traveling between Topeka and Independence, and his presence can be established at Osage Mission as of the middle of March.” His quavering hand plucked from his vest pocket a handkerchief that badly needed cleaning and pressed it to his brow, replacing it wet into the pocket.

“What makes you think he’s been here?” I asked.