Authors: Elizabeth Bear
Half what a man half as handy at it could, probably.
Well, two half wages was one living, and folk were always saying that two could live as cheaply as one. I waited for a smile to reflect what I was thinking on Priya’s face, but Priya only had eyes for Miss Lizzie.
“Finish greasing those bits,” Miss Lizzie said to Priya’s questioning look, “and you can go down. Thank you, Karen.”
“Welcome,” I said, and shut the door. I knowed my feeling stung was just the raw flinching skin of infatuation, where every gesture feels six times as important as it should. And I knowed that Priya was thinking of nothing but her sister and getting away from Miss Lizzie as fast as she could and maybe hiding our conspiracy and the reason for that eagerness—and that’s why she stared at Miss Lizzie. She hadn’t
kissed
Miss Lizzie, after all. She’d kissed
me.
I still felt it. These feelings ain’t nohow sensible. They just is.
I had to glance in the mirror to smooth the thoughts off my face before I went back down to the parlor. Men don’t like women with too many thoughts.
At least, the men such as come into whorehouses doesn’t.
* * *
It weren’t no good night, neither.
I mean, it started off just fine—typical weekday evening, with the trade slow and steady. A few of the men just came to sit at Miss Bethel’s bar and drink and order a plate of oysters from Connie’s kitchen. Most of ’em, though, sooner or later they wanted a tumble, though that’s not the only service parlor houses offer. In addition to the gamblers, and a few that comes to hear the Professor play piano, and the eaters, well. We get some gold miners in for a bath, too, and some of ’em want a bath attendant. Or two.
I got one of those to start the evening off, and then a little lull. Miss Francina gets almost nothing but regulars and special requests, and Miss Francina’s requests don’t want any of the other girls. Pollywog was in demand, as she always is, and Effie too—redheads is popular. By the time they were pretty busy, my own trade started to pick up some and Effie was on an all-nighter. So I did my share, and took care of two regulars—both of ’em, for a giggle, named Adam. Though the second one could have gone by Goliath: he had rusty hair and furry, freckled arms and might of made another half a Crispin stacked on top of the first. Scots and Swedish, I think, and come out west as a convert to one of them new religions. Though he tipped well.
When the trouble started, I’d just come downstairs from fixing my stays after the second one. I was nibbling on a little sandwich at the bar while flirting with an easterner just off the Overland Route from the old states. I didn’t think he’d be spending any money on a girl that night—he had the rail-carriage-glazed look of a tourist and the wide eyes of a man who’s never been in a nanny shop before and just wants to take it all in. We get those sometimes, men who just want to claim as they’ve seen inside a real Wild West gold rush vaulting-house saloon like the Hôtel Mon Cherie—without actually getting inside it, if you take my meaning—and they’re easy work. We keep ’em company, drink pay-mes (which are mostly unsugared cold tea) while Miss Bethel serves them the real stuff, and encourage ’em to talk about their sweethearts back home.
Not that I’m one to judge.
Hell, I ain’t in no position to. And that’s possibly the
only
position I ain’t been in.
So I was soft-selling all my soft soap: “Is this your first time, honey?” to this easterner with his slick boots and slick togs, and his name, for a wonder, weren’t Adam. He claimed Jonathan Smith, but don’t they all? I thought the Jonathan was a nice touch, anyway. Showed a little creativity. He’d been sneaking up on grilling me about my job—out of curiosity and prurience both, I reckoned, like most of ’em. And I was engaged in weaving him what Miss Bethel refers to as The Usual Tissue of Pleasing Lies. You can hear the capital letters when she says it.
Anyway, he was on his fourth whiskey and I was on my third cold, bitter tea. I was actually starting to think I might unwind him enough to get him upstairs—or at least that I was making a close enough friend that when he came back—and about half of ’em do, pluck up their courage and come back—he might ask for me special. And he was clean and smelled fine, so I didn’t mind none.
My house name’s Prairie Dove, on account of being deep bosomed and having that Hay Camp accent. I was trying to make sure he’d remember it when he woke up the next morning with the inevitable hangover. I leaned my head back on his shoulder, careful of the curls Bea had slaved over and also not to stab him in the neck or the eye with a hair comb or a pin.
I had just about gotten comfortable perched on his bony knee—the petticoats help, thank Jesus—when with no more warning than a snaky-mean horse biting, he jumped up, dumped me to the floor, and roared.
I don’t mind saying it knocked the wind out of me. I landed flat on my butt and banged my tailbone on Mr. Jonathan Smith’s boot toe, which is an exquisite sort of agony I can’t even begin to describe. I lay there—well, half-lay, half-sat, propped on my elbows and wheezing with pain and disbelief—as Smith yanked his foot out from under me and snatched up the tufted bar stool he’d been sitting on. I had the clearest view ever of the red velvet seat dented under his smooth white hands, and I couldn’t even raise up a hand to shield my face.
And that sound he was making! Sweetness, half roar and half wail, like a bear crossed with a panther.
I won’t lie. I thought I was dead. Dead, or crippled. I thought he was going to break that chair over my head, and I couldn’t even scream. I knowed Crispin would be coming, and Miss Francina too, and Miss Bethel diving under the bar for her gun—and I knowed weren’t none of them going to be fast enough to stop him doing whatever he was going to do to me. It was like a time I went out to halter Da’s new sorrel gelding and nobody told me he was head shy on account of having been twitched and beat, and when I pulled the noseband over his lip he went straight up on me and I was too surprised to let go and wound up dangling from the lead rope between his legs while his hooves beat the air to batter around my head. I was too surprised to be scared, though I think Da was scared enough for the both of us, from the way he hugged me when I got back down.
This time I had the time to be scared, though. Because Mr. Smith stood over me for long enough for me to think real hard about that stool, and how solid it was joined together.
Then, with a grunt, he turned and hurled it over the bar. I heard Miss Bethel yelp—I couldn’t see much from the floor—and then I heard it hit, and the crash of all the glass in the world.
“Son of a bitch!” somebody yelled, and Mr. Smith was suddenly airborne as the second Adam, who hadn’t headed home yet—and who, being Mormon, was sober as a preacher—reached right over me, picked him up by the forearms, and threw him across the parlor with his arms pinwheeling like the legs of an upturned bug.
Well, some men can’t resist a slice of cake and some can’t resist tobacco and some can’t say no to a glass of whiskey. Or a cup of coffee for that matter. And then there’s some who just can’t turn down a fight.
A peculiar number of that sort of men wind up working lumber, running traplines, or panning gold. In preference to the kinds of jobs, you understand, such as come with garters to keep your sleeves out of the ink and visors to keep the light out of your eyes. Or in preference to the kinds of jobs where you have to show up punctual for a sixteen-hour shift and try to keep your fingers on your hands and not raise your voice to the overseer all day. And such as requires you to be polite to a job lot of strangers all day long. Or in preference likewise to farming, which takes a steady hand and a kind of patience with slow-growing things and cantankerous weather and slow-shifting seasons that’s in short supply in Rapid City. As you might guess by the name.
My da had that patience, and it’s why his horses was tamed more than broken. Crispin has it, to sit by the door quiet and attentive and calming and always be ready when Miss Bethel needs a hand with a customer as has overindulged in the fruit of the whiskey tree. And I see it in Bass Reeves, too. I suppose you have to have some such, to trail such men as you’ve got writs for until you find ’em, and then to stalk ’em until you get the opportunity to take ’em in safe. The Professor? He ain’t got it at all. He’ll cut a man soon as look at him, if he feels he’s being trifled with. But he’s always kind to us girls.
Women have more of that patience, as a class. That ain’t because we’re born with it, though. It’s because we’re schooled to it and taught early that if we don’t have it we won’t never win. I think Crispin was the only man in that room that night with any such patience. Because before I even collected my wits and got my feet under me, the whole room was throwing furniture and insults—with none of the usual windup.
I dragged myself up on the next stool over, wincing and shaking but determined to get off the floor before somebody up and trampled me. The Professor was standing between the mob and his piano, brandishing a pool cue. No one was spoiling to challenge him, neither. By the time I was up on the stool, Miss Bethel had grabbed her shotgun, straightened up, and shaken the shards of broken bottles and shattered looking glass off her shoulders. I heard them crunch under her boots as she stepped forward, craning her neck this way and that to get the lay of the battle.
Most of the girls was in full flight, making their escape to the corners of the room. Crispin was wading in, and so was Miss Francina. Which meant Miss Bethel couldn’t shoot into the crowd even if she wanted to. And despite their best efforts, the melee was spreading. I ducked a thrown chair, so it thudded into the front of the bar and missed me entire.
The funny thing was, they seemed to be concentrating their efforts on property damage. Smashing furniture and the like. For example, I saw one of them taking the fireplace poker to that striped divan, which seemed like an odd waste of time in a brawl.
Miss Bethel glanced dubiously upward. I wouldn’t want to shoot a second load into Madame’s ceiling in the same month, neither, but I wasn’t sure what her other options were.
Then her gaze crossed mine. She said, “Karen honey, give me your hand.”
I held it up, steadying myself on the bar with the other one. She grabbed it, and—still holding on to the shotgun southpaw—used my support to lever herself up onto the polished top of the bar.
Her little boot came down on it as if it were a dance hall stage. She shucked that shotgun with a sound that cut through the crowd like a snake’s mad rattle. And she yelled out—my hand to God—“
What the Sam Hill do you all think you’re doing?!
”
You’ve never seen a room that noisy get quiet that fast. The man taking the hot poker to the divan turned around; I saw coils of smoke curling up from the batting.
Fire.
Nothing terrified me more, I tell you frankly. Fire in a largely wood-frame city like Rapid …
It was a horrifying idea.
Then I saw that the man with the poker was Adam. My less-sober Adam. You learn not to get attached, but … it was a hoof in the breadbasket, and no mistake.
And worse, when he brandished that poker with the smoking wool bat seared on the tip and yelled, “Peter Bantle sends his regards!”
I was so mad I hopped up onto that bar, right behind Miss Bethel, and I looked him in the eyes, and I yelled, “Adam Wainwright, what on God’s earth do you think you are doing?”
Well, he blinked. And he gave me a look I purely recognized from the inside out: confusion, and shame, and wild-eyed something-or-other. The poker sagged; he realized a second before it scorched the rug what he was about to do and jerked it up again.
All around him, other men were glancing about with dazed expressions, like they were just realizing where they were and couldn’t imagine how they’d gotten there or what they thought they were about. Beatrice darted out of the library and tossed a wool shawl over the smoldering divan. I imagined I heard the shawl emit a small sigh like a sleeping kitten as the smoke was quenched. The burning wool smelled like a festival in Hell. Crispin had one miner off the ground by his shirt collar and braces and just held him there dangling as if waiting to see if he was going to take another kick or swing.
I was minded of a mother dog scruffing a puppy, using no more force than is necessary.
The silence was thick and heavy, and it lasted until it was punctuated by Madame’s unmistakable boot on the stair.
She stopped there and surveyed the damage. I felt her eye tick across me, even though I couldn’t bear to meet it. Then she took the kind of deep breath that plumped her battleship prow up over the top of her stays, and let it out again. Say what you will about the formidable Madame Damnable, but I can see how she made her money in Anchorage. She’s got to be fifty-nine, and she’s still got a balcony you could do Shakespeare from.
“We’re fucking closed,” she said in a voice that was heavy and tired and still brooked no argument. “If you don’t work here, get the ever-loving black bastard Jesus
fuck
off my property.”
There followed a general exodus, and Crispin waited to bar the door behind them while Miss Francina climbed the flights to roust a few customers who might still be in upstairs rooms. Madame came the rest of the way down the stairs and then she just waited, hands folded over her cane. Pollywog fetched her a bar stool, which was like Polly, and Madame leaned back on it gratefully, easing her bad foot, and said, “Thank you, darling.”
When at last we were all assembled—all us girls, at least, and Crispin; Connie stayed back in the kitchen, and I think Priya was still out visiting her sister with Merry Lee, for which I was more grateful than I can say—Madame looked us all over, from Beatrice clutching Signor to her like a rag doll big as her chest to Miss Francina, whose face was as stubborn and stern as I have ever seen it. Then she sighed and twirled her cane. “I believe I overheard something about that no-account Peter Bantle?”
I stepped forward before Miss Francina could and shot her a look that said, plain as day,
This was my doing and it’s my problem.
At least, that were the message I meant to put in it. Miss Francina’s scowl in return told me it weren’t too well received.