The room’s only furniture consisted of a bed, two ladderback
chairs on which hung the woman’s dress and Bill’s clothes and gunbelt, and two small tables, one holding a washbasin and some folded
towels, the other an oil lamp with the burning wick turned down low
so that the room was cast in dim amber light. The girl Bill had
bought for the night was named Amanda. She was plumper than he
preferred and she talked too much, but she had a pretty face and a
pleasant disposition and he liked her well enough. She didn’t like to
be in a completely enclosed room and had asked if she might leave
the window sash slightly open despite the cold weather. He’d said all
right and was glad he did. He liked hearing the rainwater spattering
on the ground below the window, liked the cold earth smell mingling
with the warm scents of camphor and the girl’s perfume. The blanket
slid off his shoulders as he joined himself to her, and the chill air on
his back was not unpleasant as they rocked together in the ancient
rhythm.
They afterward sat propped against the pillowed headrail with
the blankets pulled up to their chests and Bill smoked a thin cigar
and shared his bottle with her. Except when she’d pause to take a
drink, she kept up a steady patter about various subjects of little
interest to him. She lived on the premises—only a few of the girls did
not—and as usual she was complaining about the greedy Prestons
and the high room rent they charged on top of the thirty percent they
took from each girl’s nightly income.
The rain was falling with a harder clatter now and when there
came a rapping on the door they barely heard it for the rain and the
raucousness downstairs.
“Who’s there?” Amanda called. The door partly opened to admit
a narrow cast of brighter light from the hallway and show a portion
of silhouetted woman in a shimmy who said, “It’s me, Mandy.” She
slipped inside and shut the door.
Amanda got out of bed and went to her. “Honey, what is it?”
The woman stood against the far wall, and palely naked
Amanda put an arm around her shoulders and held her close. Bill
could not clearly make out her features in the dim lamplight. She
said a big drunk jasper might be coming after her. The fella had been
too drunk to get it up, and after about fifteen minutes of trying to
help him out, she’d told him that was enough, there were other fellas
waiting to come up and he’d have to leave now. But the fella
wouldn’t go, and when she insisted, he shoved her back on the bed
and climbed on top of her, holding her down with one hand and trying to put his limp thing in her with the other. She reached down
beside the bed and got hold of the chamber pot and swung it up
against the side of his head.
“You should’ve
heard
it,” she said. Her voice was slightly raspy
but Bill heard no fear in it. She knocked him clean off the bed, and
when he rose up on his knees she let him have it again, harder, on the
same ear, and down he went. She jumped over him and snatched up
her shimmy and ran out into the hall and couldn’t think what to do
but come in here to hide.
“You did right, honey,” Amanda said—then heard Bill laughing
low and both women looked his way. He could not see their expressions in the dim light. “It ain’t funny,” Amanda said. “He might’ve
hurt her.”
“I’d say he’s lucky she didn’t beat him to death,” Bill said—and
grinned wide when he heard the girl chuckle.
Now a man in the hallway was shouting, “Where you at, bitch?”
There was laughter and somebody yelled, “Quit that damn hollering
and go down and get another one!” There was a succession of banging doors and various voices swearing at the intrusions. Bill slipped a
hand under the pillow and gripped his Navy.
Their door abruptly swung inward and hit hard against the wall
and the doorway showed the silhouette of a large man holding his
pants up with one hand and gripping a pistol in the other.
“You little cunt!” the man said. He pointed the gun at the
woman and cocked it and Amanda jumped aside.
The room shook with the flaring blast of Bill’s Colt and the man
lurched sideways against the door jamb and his knees almost buckled but he held upright. He turned toward the bed and started to
bring his gun up again and Bill shot him again and the man fell out
of view into the hall and his pistol clattered on the floor.
Bill flung the blanket off the bed, swirling the gunsmoke haze,
and got up and went to the door and saw the man sitting spraddlelegged with his back against the hallway wall, his palms turned up at
his sides, his chin on his chest. There was little blood, only a thin
streak from a hole in his side and a thicker one from the wound over
his heart. Bill stepped into the hall and pulled the man’s head up by
the hair to look at his face in the light of the hallway lamps. He recognized him but didn’t know his name. A recent recruit to Todd’s
bunch. His eyes were half-closed as if he were puzzling over some
difficult question. His left ear looked like a flattened plum. Bill let go
the man’s hair and his head dropped forward and he slid over onto
his side.
Men and women in various states of undress had come rushing
our of their rooms all along the hall and bunched up around Bill and
the dead man, all of them talking at once and wanting to know who
it was and asking Bill what happened. Some of the girls to the rear of
the crowd were saying let me see, let me see, and others were saying
quit shoving, goddammit. One girl said, “I like your outfit, Bill.” All
the men were holding guns and most wearing only pants and boots
and all of them pale-skinned as ghosts. The hallway air was woven
with cloying perfumes and a rankness of sweat and sex. Amanda had
put on her shimmy and pulled a sheet off the bed and now helped
Bill to secure it around his nakedness.
The clamor of the revelry downstairs was undiminished. Bill
thought it unlikely the gunshots had even been heard down there.
His brother eased up beside him and whispered, “You hit?” Bill
shook his head.
He heard George Todd say, “Make way,” and the crowd hushed
a little and opened up to let him pass. Quantrill had as usual not
come to town, and Todd was in charge of the reveling bunch. He
was in his undershirt and had a revolver tucked in the front of his
pants. He stood beside Bill and looked on the upturned face of the
dead man.
“Mick McCourt,” Todd said. “Deserter from the regulars.
Showed up in camp two weeks ago and seemed to have sufficient
sand, so I took him on. What happened?”
Bill told him. Todd nodded and said, “Well, he had it coming.”
He told two of the recent recruits to bear the dead man to the
undertaker’s. As the body was lugged away, the others started back
to their various rooms, the women chittering excitedly, the men once
more giving them their full attention, fondling their asses, every man
and woman of them feeling more pleasurably alive for Mick
McCourt’s reminder of how abruptly life might take its leave.
Todd started away too, then looked back at Bill and the sheet he
was wearing. He grinned and said, “Hail, Caesar.”
Bill had to grin back. “The hail with you too, George.”
Amanda tugged on Bill’s arm and said, “Come on, sugarboy.”
They went back in the room and closed the door. The chilly air
smelled of gunsmoke. The other girl was standing by the window
and looking out at the falling rain. “Say, girl,” Amanda said as she
went to the oil lamp to raise the wick. “You know who this is just
saved your pretty ass?”
The other girl turned from the window just as the room brightened with yellow light, and Bill saw her clearly for the first time.
Imagine Josephine Anderson as she might have appeared had she
lived another three years. True, the eyes are green rather than violet,
and the hair is so much lighter it is almost blonde. But Josie might
well have grown these three inches or so taller, and might well have
rounded thus in the hips and gone this much fuller of breast. Might
have somewhere acquired the white scar indenting her lower lip. But
see how the cast of mouth is hardly unchanged, is poised as always
to smile or go wry in displeasure, to make sharp mock or to laugh in
delight, to give or receive a kiss. And see the familiar intensity and
fearlessness of her gaze. Just so—granting the impossible difference
in eye color—might she have come to look in face and form had she
lived to age nineteen.
Just so did Bill behold this girl. He felt the beat of his heart in his
throat. Her own eyes widened at the way he was looking at her, but
she did not seem uneasy, only curious about what might be in his
head and what might come next.
Amanda finally got the wick just where she wanted it, and now
turned to the woman and said, “This here, I’ll have you know, is
none other than Bloody Bill Anderson.” Then she saw how they
were looking at each other. “Say . . . you two met already?”
The girl smiled at Bill and his chest went tight in a way it had not
since he’d last looked on Josephine’s smile.
“I can’t speak for the captain,” the girl said, her eyes moving
quick and bright in the way Josie’s did when she was mischief-bent,
“but maybe we have. What do you think, Captain?”
“Hey, girl!” Amanda said. “You can just quit making those eyes.
Matter of fact, you can just get your ass back to your own room.”
“Amanda, honey,” Bill said, “I want you to go over to my poke
and take another ten from it and go someplace and have yourself a
time.”
“Aw, Bill,” Amanda said. “We were having a good time.”
“Do it now, Amanda.”
“Aw, Billy . . .
damn
.” She went to the chair where Bill’s clothes
lay and dug into his poke and extracted ten dollars. Then folded her
dress over her arm and went to the door and looked back at them.
“Say, Bill, how about the
both
of us?”
“Good night, Amanda,” Bill said. He and the other girl had not
stopped looking at each other.
“You can use my room if you want, Mandy,” the girl said.
“Goddamn you, Bush Smith!” Amanda said. “I wish the son of a
bitch shot you!” She slammed the door so hard behind her the lamplight wavered on the walls.
“Bush Smith?”
Bill said.
“That would be me,” she said.
“Nor a real likely name, if you don’t mind my saying so.”
“Is that so? Maybe I ought to change it to something more
likely—to
Bloody Bill,
maybe.”
“Maybe you should take off that shimmy.”
“Maybe you should take off that silly-looking sheet.”
They both did as they should. Then stood looking at each other
for a long moment. Then were in each other’s arms and could not
kiss deeply enough as they staggered toward the bed and fell into it.
They made love through the night, pausing now and then to sit up
crosslegged on the bed and puff Bill’s pipe and have a sip or two of
whiskey and sometimes they talked and laughed softly and sometimes they simply stared hard at each other before again joining
together. Now the window was showing the first gray hint of dawnlight and the room was cold enough to show their breath and the
Purple Moon had at last fallen quiet. They were moving together
very slowly and tenderly, both of them worn and sore but in no way
that called for complaint, and when they climaxed this time, it was
with soft sighs and the gentlest archings and flexions.
His weight rose off her and she opened her eyes and saw him
braced on his arms and staring down at her. He was crying without
sound, tears running down his face, dripping from his beard.
“Oh honey,
what
?” she said. And pulled him down to her and
rocked him and crooned to him as he clung and clung to her and surrendered to all his pent grief.
After a time he was done with it and they lay facing each other and
he told her of his sisters. Told of Mary and Jenny who were yet prisoners in a Yankee hospital at Fort Leavenworth and both crippled
and both to be exiled from Missouri. Then told of Josephine. Killed
because of his failure to protect her. Told of the bad dreams that
woke him every night feeling like he could not breathe for the hot
tightness in his throat. He told everything. About the special closeness he and Joey had shared since her babyhood, about the ways
they’d touched each other from the time she’d grown to be a girl,
about the becrazing circumstance of being unable to love each other
as fully as they wanted to. And about her black silk ribbon and the
three dozen knots he had so far put in it.
She listened with no hint on her face of what she might be thinking, not until he remarked on the resemblance she bore to Joey, and
then he saw her eyes go uncertain. He put a hand to her face and
said, “Hey girl, I’m not crazy. You’re not her and I know it as sure as
I know she’s dead. It’s just that, when I saw you, I saw her too—for
just a second. Then I knew I wasn’t looking at her but at somebody
just as special in a lot of the same ways.”
“What was she like?”
He saw her in a hundred different moments in the span of a few
heartbeats. “She had a way of carrying herself. A way of looking at
things, of
seeing
things. She had a gentle heart but she was tough as
a chain. She never shied at a damn thing the world showed her. The
way she’d look at me made me feel ...I don’t know . . . like she was
seeing me for who I really am. Like she knew me even better than
I do.”
Her gaze searched every region of his. “That’s just exactly how
I
felt when you looked at
me,
” she said. “You think I’m crazy or I’m
lying, but it’s true. And I’ll tell you right now, mister, I—”
The last thing he would have thought to do just then was break
out laughing—but that’s what he did.