Authors: John Joseph Adams
When the water table’s high, the walks still flood out, of course. Bet you guessed
that without me.
They filled up the streets at the top of town first, because the rich folk live there—Colonel
Marsh who owns the lumber mill and such. And Skid Row they didn’t fill in at all,
because they needed it steep on account of the logs, so there’s staircases up from
it to the new streets, where the new streets are finished and sometimes where they
ain’t. The better neighborhoods got steam lifts, too, all brass and shiny, so the
rich ladies ain’t got to show their bloomers to the whole world climbing ladders.
Nobody cares if a soiled dove shows off her underthings, I guess, as long as the
underthings
is clean.
Up there some places the fill was only eight feet, and they’ve got the new sidewalks
finished over top of the old already. What they did there was use deck prisms meant
for ships, green and blue from the glass factory on the north end, set in metal gratings
so that when there’s light the light can shine down.
Down here we’ll get wood plank, I expect, and like it. And then Madam Damnable will
just keep those ruby lamps by the front door burning all the time.
The red light looks nice on the gilt, anyway.
* * *
Our business mostly ain’t sailors but gold camp men coming or going to Anchorage,
which is about the stupidest thing you ever could get to naming a harbor. I mean,
why not just call it “Harbor,” like it was the only one ever? So we get late nights,
sure, but our trade’s more late afternoon to, say, two or four, more like a saloon
than like those poor girls down under the docks who work all night, five dollar a
poke, when the neap tide keeps the ships locked in. Which means most nights ’cept
Fridays and Saturdays by three we’re down in the dining room while Miss Bethel serves
us supper. She’s the cook and barkeep. She don’t work the parlor, but she feeds us
better than we’d get at home and she keeps a sharp eye on the patrons.
Sundays, we close down for the Sabbath, and such girls as like can get their churching
in.
I don’t remember which day it was exactly that Merry Lee and Priya came staggering
into the parlor a little before three in the morning, but I can tell you it wasn’t
a Friday or Saturday, because all the punters had gone home except one who’d paid
Prudence for an all-night “alteration session” and was up in the Chinese Room with
her getting his seams ripped, if you take my meaning. The rest of us—just the girls
and Crispin, not Madam Damnable—were in our robes and slippers, faces scrubbed and
hair down, sitting in the library when it happened. We don’t use the parlor except
for working. Beatrice, who’s the only one at the hotel younger than me, was practicing
reading out loud to the rest of us, her slim dark fingers bent back holding the big
ivory-bound book of Grimm’s fairy tales.
We’d just settled in with tea and biscuits when there was a crash down the ladder
out front and the sound of somebody crying like her leg was broke. Given the sound
of the thump, I reckoned that might not be too far from the truth of it.
Crispin and Miss Francina gave one another The Look, and while Beatrice put the ribbon
in her book they both got up and moved toward the front door. Crispin I already said
about, and the thing about Miss Francina is that Miss Francina’s got a pecker under
her dress. But that ain’t nothing but God’s rude joke. She’s one of us girls every
way else, and handy for a bouncer.
I followed along just behind them, and so did Effie. Though I’m young, we’re the sturdiest
girls, and Effie can shoot well enough that Madam Damnable lets her keep a gun in
her room. Miss Bethel kept a pump shotgun under the bar, too, but she was upstairs
in bed already, so while Crispin was unlocking the door I went over and got it, working
the breech to make sure it was loaded. Beatrice grabbed Signor, the deaf white cat
who lives in the parlor—he’s got one blue eye and one yellow and he’s loud as a ghost
when he wants something—and pulled him back into the library with the rest of the
girls.
When I got up behind Crispin, it was all silence outside. Not even anymore crying,
though we all stood with our ears straining. Crispin pulled open the door and Miss
Francina went striding out into that burning cold in her negligee and marabou slippers
like she owned the night and the rest of us was just paying rent on it. I skin-flinched,
just from nerves, but it was okay because I’d had the sense to keep my finger off
the shotgun triggers.
And then Miss Francina said “Sweet child Christ!” in that breathy voice of hers and
Crispin was through the door with his truncheon, bald head shining in the red lantern
light. I heard him curse too, but it sounded worried rather than angry or fearful,
so I let the shotgun muzzle droop and walked up to the doorway just in time to grab
the arm of a pretty little Indian girl—Eastern Indian, not American Indian—who was
half-naked and in hysterics. Her clothes had never been good, or warm enough for the
night, though somewhere she’d gotten some lace-up boots and a man’s coat too big for
her. All she had on else was a ripped-up shift all stained across the bosom, and I
could tell she weren’t wearing nothing under it.
She was turned around, tugging something—another girl’s arm, poking out frontward
between Crispin and Miss Francina where they were half-dragging her. Once they got
both girls inside in the light, Effie lunged forward and slammed the door.
“Here, Karen,” Crispin said in his big slow molasses voice. “You take this little
one. Bring her after. I’ll get Miss Merry here upstairs to the sickroom.”
Miss Francina stepped back and I could see that the girl between them was somebody
I knew, at least by reputation. Not a girl, really. A woman, a Chinese woman.
“Aw, shit,” Effie said. Not only can she shoot, but Effie’s not real well-spoken.
“That’s Merry Lee.”
Merry Lee, which was as close as most American tongues could get to her real name
I guess, was half-conscious and half-fighting, batting at Crispin’s hands while he
swung her up into his arms. Miss Francina stuck her own hands in there to try to hold
her still, where they looked very white against all the red on Merry Lee’s face and
arms.
Effie said, “She’s gunshot. I guess all that running around Chinatown busting out
crib whores finally done caught up with her. You know’d it was sooner or later going
to.”
“You hush about things you know nothing about,” Miss Francina said, so Effie drew
back chastened like and said, “I didn’t mean nothing by it.”
“Go and watch the door, Effie,” Miss Francina said. I gave Effie the shotgun. Effie
took it and did, not sulking at all. Effie talks without thinking sometimes, but she’s
a good girl. Madam Damnable don’t tolerate them what ain’t.
The girl in my arms wanted to get loose of me—she pulled away once and threw herself
at Crispin, but Miss Francina caught her and gave her back, and honest she was mostly
too light and skinny to put up a good fight once I had a grip on her. I tried to talk
to her, tell her she was safe and we were going to take care of her and Merry Lee
both. I didn’t think then she understood a word of it, but I found out later her English
was pretty good so I think it was mostly that she couldn’t hardly have been more upset.
But something got through to her, because after a minute of twisting her wrists and
getting blood all over my good pink flannel she stood still, shivering, and let me
bundle her up the stairs after Crispin and Merry Lee while Miss Francina went to fetch
Miss Lizzie.
We followed them down the long rose-painted hall to the sickroom door. Crispin wanted
to take Merry Lee in without the Indian girl, but the girl weren’t having none of
it. She leaned against my arms and keened through the doorway, and finally Crispin
just looked at me helplessly and said, “Karen honey, you better bring that child in
here before she cries down the roof.”
She was better inside, sitting in a chair beside the bed while Crispin checked over
Merry Lee for where she was hurt worst. Effie was right about her being gunshot, too—she
had a graze through her long black hair showing bone, and that was where most of the
blood was from, but there was a bullet in her back too and Crispin couldn’t tell from
looking if it had gone through to a lung. It wasn’t in the spine, he said, or she
wouldn’t have been walking.
Just as he was stoking up the surgery machine—it hissed and clanked like a steam engine,
which was never too reassuring when you just needed a boil lanced or something—Miss
Lizzie came barreling up the stairs with an armload of towels and a bottle of clear
corn liquor, and I knew it was time for me to be leaving. The girl wasn’t going anywhere,
but she didn’t look like interfering anymore—she just leaned forward in the bedside
chair moaning in her throat like a hurt kitten, both hands clenched on the cane arms.
Crispin could handle her if she did anything. And he could hold down Merry Lee if
she woke up that much.
I slipped through the door while Miss Lizzie was cutting the dress off Merry Lee’s
back. I’d seen her and that machine pull a bullet before, and I didn’t feel like puking.
I got downstairs just as somebody started trying to kick in the front door.
* * *
In all the fuss, Effie hadn’t thrown the bolt, which should be second nature but you’d
be surprised what you can forget when there’s blood all over everywhere and people
are handing you guns. The good thing was that I had handed her the gun, and when the
front doors busted in on their hinges she had the presence of mind to raise up that
gun and yell at the top of her little lungs, “Stop!”
They didn’t, though. There were four of them, and they came boiling through the door
like a confusion of scalded weasels, shouting and swearing. They checked just inside,
staring from side to side and trading glances, and from halfway up the stairs I got
a real fine look at all of them. It was Peter Bantle and three of his bully boys,
all of them tricked out in gold watch-chains and brocade and carrying truncheons and
chains along with their lanterns, and you never saw a crew more looking for a fight.
The edges of the big doors were splintered where they’d busted out the latch. So maybe
they’d have broken out the bolt trying to get in anyway.
“I said
stop
,” said Effie, all alone in her nightgown in the middle of the floor, that big gun
on her shoulder looking like to tip her over.
Miss Francina wasn’t anywhere to be seen, and I could tell from the sounds through
the sickroom door that Crispin had his hands full of Merry Lee. Madam Damnable, bless
her heart, was half-deaf from working in dance halls; she might have gone up to bed
and even if Miss Francina had headed up to fetch her it would take her a minute to
find her cane and glasses, which meant a minute in which somebody had to do something.
I didn’t think on it. I just jumped over the banister, flannel gown and quilted robe
and slippers and all, exactly the way Miss Bethel was always after me about for it
not being ladylike, and thumped down on the red velvet couch below the staircase.
I stepped off the couch, swept my robe up like skirts, and stuck my chin out. “Peter
Bantle,” I said, real loud, hoping wherever Miss Francina had got off to she would
hear me and come running, “you wipe your damn muddy feet before you come into my parlor.”
Now I ain’t one of the smaller girls—like I said, I’m sturdy—and Peter Bantle is like
his name—a banty and a peckerwood—which is probably why he struts so much. I’m plump
too—the men like that—and I’m broad across the shoulders, and when I came marching
up beside Effie he had to look up to meet my eyes. I saw him frown a little on the
size I had on him.
The three in front of him were plenty big, though, and they didn’t look impressed
by two girls with a single pump shotgun between them. Bantle’s men had all kinds of
gear hung on them I didn’t even recognize, technologics and contrivances with lenses
and brass tubes and glossy black enamel. Bantle his own self had a kind of gauntlet
on his left hand, stiff boiled leather segmented so the rubber underneath showed through,
copper coils on each segment connected by bare wires.
I’d heard about that thing; I talked to a girl once he made piss herself with it.
She had burns all up her arm where he’d grabbed her. But I didn’t look at it, and
I didn’t let him see me shudder. You get to know a lot about men in my work, and men
like Peter Bantle? They’re all over seeing a woman shudder.
I don’t take to men who like to hit. If he reached out at me with that gadget, I was
afraid I’d like to kill him.
He didn’t, though. He just ignored me, and looked over at Effie, who he could get
eye to eye with. He sneered at her and through a curled lip said, “Where’s Madam Damnable?”
“She’s busy,” I said. Only reason I didn’t step in front of Effie was on account of
she had the gun, but the urge to was that strong. “Me and Effie can help you. Or escort
you out, if you’d rather.”
Miss Bethel would have cringed at my grammar, too. But right then I couldn’t afford
to stammer over it to make it pretty.
Effie settled that gun on her shoulder a little better and lowered her eye to sight
down the barrel. Bantle’s men looked unimpressed so hard I could tell they was a little
nervous. One hefted his black rubber truncheon.
“You got one of my whores in here, you little chit, and that thieving outlaw Merry
Lee.” Bantle’s voice was all out of proportion with his weedy little body. Maybe he
was wearing some kind of amplifier in that high flounced collar of his. “I aim to
have them with me when I go. And if you’re lucky and give them over nice and easy,
my boys here won’t bust up your face
or
your parlor.”
Rightly, I didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t my house, after all; Madam Damnable
gives us a lot of liberty but setting the rules of her parlor and offering sanctuary
to someone else’s girls ain’t in it. But I knew she didn’t like Peter Bantle, with
his bruised-up, hungry crib whores and his saddle shoes, and since he had come crashing
through the front door with three armed men and a world of insolence, I figured I
had a little more scope than usual.