Cottonwood (30 page)

“Go right ahead,” Mrs. Naylor replied lackadaisically. “Just make sure those two don’t climb on, too, out of habit.”

“Cuntrag!” the old lady yelled, picking up a pincushion from a sewing basket to hurl at Mrs. Naylor, who ducked it as easily as if she had been expecting it.

She shook her head. “Assaulting the matron, and right in front of witnesses. You’ll have no pecan pie this evening.”

“I don’t care a steamin’ pile of shit about your fuckin’ pie!”

I believe Ed was genuinely shocked at the language used, and even I was hard-pressed to recall when I’d last heard the mother tongue abused so colorfully by a member of the gentler sex. The daughter was laughing hard, full of joy at seeing Mrs. Naylor get the best of her mother.

“I hope you’ll put that in your paper,” Mrs. Naylor said. “Let people around here find out what they’re like.”

Ed looked at me, then at the old lady. “Tell Mr. Ogden how many husbands you’ve had.”

The old woman looked as if she was trying to remember her multiplication tables, squinting at the ceiling and humming, before she finally spoke. “I ain’t telling you anything without Mr. Lassiter here.”

“She’s been married six times,” the daughter chimed in. “Widowed four times and then two of ’em up and run out on her, including my papa.”

“Shut your hole, Eliza,” the old woman yelled.

Eliza showed a certain amount of confusion, but her fear of her mother won out, and she kept still until the baby made a noise about something outside the window in the failing light of day. On a tree limb in the backyard was a squirrel, its long curved puff of a tail undulating jerkily, and Eliza Davis let out a squeal of excitement as happy as the baby’s. “Looky there, it’s ol’ Handy.”

“They have names?” I asked.

“That one does, we saw him yesterday. See? He’s short a hand.” On close examination the squirrel, barely six feet from the window, proved to be missing its left forepaw. She held her little girl up for a better look. “See how he’s just got one hand, Nattie? Somebody must’ve cut it off with a knife.” The child burbled with delight as Ed and I made our exit.

In the front room I was introduced to Mrs. Naylor’s husband, who had just returned home. “Never had a lady prisoner like them. I don’t know how we’ll manage, I really don’t. Becky’s a woman of very delicate sensibilities and it isn’t fair to expose her to that kind of language.”

Mrs. Naylor stood beside him looking quite unconcerned, but she nodded her head. “That’s right, and I’d be obliged if you’d put that in your newspaper.”

“I certainly will, madame,” Ed said, and we got our coats and hats and left. The snow was blowing still, and it was now dark. Ed didn’t say much until we were nearing downtown.

“You remember a whore named Lottie, showed up around the time of the boom?”

“I do,” I said. “Didn’t she operate out of a big tent right around where the Naylors’ house is now?”

“That’s it, all right, she and a few others. Now Lottie, there was a woman who could cuss. One time I was down there with another one of the soiled doves, one by the name of Lulubelle, and a couple doors down we heard Lottie cry out ‘Stop, thief.’ I’d just finished up my business with Lulubelle, so I hiked up my drawers and took off after him, and pretty soon there was three or four of us chasing the poor fellow down. We caught him pretty quick and held him down, and old Lottie came over and kicked him right in the balls. She was barefoot, so it didn’t hurt him as much as it might have, and so she grabbed ’em and squoze.”

I winced at the thought. “What then?”

“She let out a string of violent obscenities the likes of which I’d never heard from the lips of a woman. Never have since, either, until this afternoon. Boy, she called him a cock-sucker and a fuckhead and a shit-heel and every other vulgar compound noun in the American vernacular. People were gathered around by then, and they started encouraging her to hurt him, and of course there were still men holding him down. I’d let go of the poor bastard by then. It got ugly after that.”

We rode in silence again for a block or two; I watched the vapor blowing out the horse’s flaring nostrils in long bursts and tried to connect the two women I’d just seen with Katie and Ma Bender. Finally Ed spoke again. “I miss those days, when the town was a little wilder.”

“It’s calmed down somewhat,” I said.

“I suppose it could erupt again if those two are acquitted.”

“You think they will be?”

He shrugged. “That depends. But if the public decides they’re the Bender women and then the court finds otherwise, it’ll be hard to get those two out of town with their necks intact.”

“I don’t see how anybody who knew the Benders could honestly say those two are they,” I said, finally.

“Nope,” he said. He stopped the buggy in front of the
Optic
’s offices. Inside a pair of young men worked at the press, and Ed shook his head at the sight of them. “Look at those two, like molasses. Well, I guess I’d better go show ’em how it’s supposed to be done.”

I could hear him yelling at the two apprentices, even once he’d shut the door and over the muffling effects of the snowfall. In a bleak mood I trudged through the snow to Herbert’s, where the smell of Madame Renée’s cooking was detectable even before I entered the front door. Herbert sat in the parlor reading the morning
Free Press
, and he waved me into the room.

“Say, Renée’s cooking beef tonight. Bergy-own. You don’t look too good, Bill.”

“I just found out Maggie had a baby.”

“She sure as hell did. Little Marc Leval. Not so little now.”

“That’s why she came back, isn’t it?”

“You were gone and not answering her letters, is what I understand.”

“And everybody knows he’s my son?”

“A lot of people think so. Baby was born maybe five, six months after she got here, and she made sure people didn’t get to see him right away, so she could say he’d come early. Well, hell, Renée was just about the only female in town who’d talk to her, so we saw him the day he was born. I’ll bet the little fucker weighed ten pounds.”

The clock on the mantle chimed six times. “I went to see the Benders today, at the deputy’s house.”

“That so?” He was momentarily apprehensive, as though expecting a pronouncement he didn’t think he’d like. When I didn’t express an opinion he relaxed. “Well, soon enough we’ll see them two dangling.”

“Where do you think the men are?”

“Dead, probably. And probably it was these two did it.”

“You think it’s really them?”

“ ’Course I do.”

“I’m not so sure, especially the young one. Give Katie her due, she was sharp as a tack; in fact if you ask me she was the ringleader. That woman over at the deputy’s house is damn near a moron.”

“Yeah, but she wasn’t always. You see that scar on her head? One of her husbands did that with a brick, caught her fucking a railroad man. She’s been half-idjit ever since, according to one of her sisters in Michigan.”

“The young one’s a lot heavier than Katie ever was.”

“Since you saw her last she’s had four husbands and six kids.”

“Where are the other five?”

“Oldest two are already working, the other three had to go into the almshouse after they arrested her.” That seemed to bother Herbert, and he shook his head. “Well, the tykes are probably better off away from the likes of that one.”

A screech erupted from the kitchen. Hurrying there we found Madame Renée pounding with a tenderizing hammer at the wall where it met the floor and cursing in French at something with a vulgarity and vehemence that would have done Mrs. Griffith proud. Herbert bent down and pulled her away from the wall. The boards were visible where she’d hit, through the torn paper and broken plaster.

“Now goddamnit Renée, you’re not going to get at it that way. You’re just going to punch up the wall and make it easier for it to get up here.”

She had calmed down a little, but the look of outrage persisted on her face. “Rats,” she said. “Goddamn rats.”

“I only ever seen one,” Herbert said, “but it’s a great big bastard.” He patted her on the back. “Me and Bill, we’ll go down and kill it.”

“It’s about goddamn time,” she said. “Son of a beetch got into the flour.”

She showed us a bag of flour in the pantry, the sack chewed through at the bottom and spilling a goodly amount. Dainty white rodentine footprints led from the sack to the spot where Madame Renée had gone after it with the hammer, with the larger floured impressions of her kitchen slippers blurring them at intervals.

“Supper about ready?” Herbert asked, sniffing.

She let loose another burst of Gallic obscenities, and Herbert discreetly backed out of the room. I followed him to his den, where he sat down at his writing desk.

“Jesus, that’s some temper she’s got. You’d think I’d bred the rat myself and trained it just to get that flour.”

We could still hear her banging drawers and cabinets and yelling, and the younger servant girl appeared in the doorway. “It’s that rat again, isn’t it?” she asked.

“Mr. Ogden and me are going down there to kill it, Sally.”

“Yes sir,” she said, and curtsying, she left.

“The girls are all scared of the damned thing. He’s a big old bastard, like I said.” He opened a locked drawer and took from it a Colt Dragoon and handed it to me.

“Here you go,” he said. “This used to be yours.”

Loading it I indeed recognized it as the same iron I’d taken off Harticourt the drummer so many years previous. “Where’d you get this?” I asked him, rather pleased at the sight of that relic of my frontier days.

“Your saddle bag, the day you left,” he said, loading an old Colt Peacemaker of his own. He lit two big lamps and, taking one each, our guns stuffed into our belts, we put on our overcoats and then proceeded to the kitchen, where Herbert loaded a plate with a small quantity of
bœuf bourguignon
. Madame Renée scowled but said nothing, and we exited the house via the side door.

The storm cellar was entered from the side of the house. I set down my lamp, since Herbert also carried the plate of stew, and dusted the snow off the heavy wooden trap doors before lifting them. I went down first, the stairs creaking so badly I was sure one of them would snap, but I reached the bottom safely and set the lamp down on the concrete floor. Behind me the stairs labored under Herbert’s boots, and I took the plate from him, too. Herbert then returned to the top to close the trap doors. It wasn’t as cold as I would have expected.

“Turn the lamps all the way up and set that stew on the floor,” he said, and I did it. He got a couple of raggedy chairs from a corner of the room and we sat together near the west wall. In the poor light I could make out around the periphery pieces of derelict furniture, footlockers and valises, and what appeared to be a stack of paintings in gilded frames. Against the east wall was an enormous rack of wine bottles, numbering perhaps two hundred, with room for that many again.

“That’s a lot of wine,” I said.

“Well, Renée likes it with dinner, and it looks like it’s going to be outlawed here pretty quick if we’re not careful, so I bought a whole slew of it. I got more on the way.”

“Outlawed?”

“Outlawed, all throughout the state.”

“Not too cold down here.”

“No, stays nice and fresh in the summer, too. Lots of days I’ll sneak down here just to cool off.”

“That rat won’t come out if we’re talking,” I said; having killed several thousand rats in my day I considered myself an expert on the subject.

“Not this one, he’s a bold son of a bitch. He steals food right out from under Renée’s nose. This beef’ll get him out in the open.”

The smell of the beef and its thick, soupy gravy was making my mouth water, and I wanted that rat dead so I could eat. Herbert, however, persisted in his jawing.

“Last five years or so we’ve had two, three times as many rats as we used to. It’s a hell of a problem at the mill, I got a man on it full-time. You ask me, they come in on the trains.” He looked over at me, and in the harsh light of the lamp I noticed that his glass eye had gone considerably askew. Its pupil was oriented toward the floor, as if he were looking at me with the good one and watching for the rat with the bad.

We were quiet for a minute, and sure enough the rat, or a rat anyway, poked his head into the light of the lamps and gingerly approached the fragrant, steaming plate of
bœuf bourguignon
. It raised its head in our direction as Herbert raised his Colt, but I touched his arm to make him stop. He looked quizzically at me but held his fire.

As the rat began feeding a second rat of almost equal size cautiously made itself visible and crept up to the plate. Now I raised my weapon and Herbert his. The clicking back of the hammers merited only the slightest glances from the first rat, but the second turned tail and bolted for its hiding place. I fired and sent a bloody cascade of its various parts in all directions, and Herbert discharged his own a moment later, demolishing rat and plate both. The sound of gunfire in the cramped basement caused my ears to ring for some minutes afterward, and it took me a moment to realize that I was giggling ecstatically along with Herbert at the ghastly pile of fur, scales and entrails that confronted us.