4
“YOU BEEN TO BILOXI’S lately?”
“To hell with Biloxi. Her place stinks, her beer stinks, and she stinks. She’s got no girls is her trouble. I’m sticking with the Twins. They take your money, but you get something for it. They’ve got the girls and they’ve got the sports, specially the big ones. What Biloxi’s got is nothing.”
“Maybe she’s put in improvements.”
“What kind of improvements?”
“That niece that got in this week.”
“Any good?”
“You couldn’t prove it by me. Biloxi’s not dating her for anything I can afford. But there she is, just the same. And there’s the stuff she brought with her, from San Francisco, Sacramento, and everywhere.
I’m telling you, Biloxi’s getting ready to give the Twins some competition.”
“What do you mean, stuff?”
“Mirrors, for one thing. Over every bed.”
“What?”
“These women know something. They’re from New Orleans.”
It was a Saturday, in the International Bar, and I don’t know how long I’d been sitting around there, but it must have been two or three days. I wanted to hit them both, but I was too sick to my stomach. I’d been hearing stuff like that everywhere, and I’d found out something I hadn’t known before: a new girl in a house, it’s all over town like a prairie fire, the biggest news of the week. But I couldn’t have hit anybody for spreading it, because I’d have been ashamed to have them find out I even cared.
That night came the news of Chancellorsville, and from the glum way everybody took it I knew it was even better than it said in the paper. I tramped around, taking drinks, trying to feel good about it, but the liquor didn’t take any effect, and after a while I knew where I was going. But when I turned into D Street I ran into something I’d never even heard of, all my life. It was what they call the Parade, about five thousand miners, cowmen, mule-skinners, mine-owners, sports, army officers, gamblers, bushwhackers, and just plain hombres with nothing to do, all shoving up one side of the street and down the other, beating on doors of houses, trying to get in. Most places had a little window, shaped like a diamond, in the front door, with a lace curtain over it, and now and then the curtain would be pulled to one side, and one, two, three, four, or five fingers would be held up, but mostly one finger, and then the riot would start. First, whoever was going had to be got out, and that took a minute of pushing and yelling and cussing. Then whoever was coming had to be got in, and that was worse, because everybody voted for theirself, so there was quite some difference of opinion. Then, finally, the door had to be shut, and that was worst of all, because arms and elbows and knees and feet were in the way, and then generally there were whiskers in the crack even after they got the key turned.
The number I wanted was 17, and when I got to it I beat on the door, but nothing happened. Then a little fellow in a Panama hat stepped up beside me and rapped with his stick, like it was a signal, but there was a terrific row going on inside, or an argument or something, and he didn’t get any action either. So he turned to me and said: “You want in?”
“No, I’m just onry.”
“Has to be this house? No other won’t do?”
“I got a reason.”
“There’s eight or ten reasons in there, some of them pretty nice. I got one too, and if she knew I was outside I’d be inside pretty quick, but I’m just back from out of town and she’s not any mind reader and there’s too much noise going on in there for her to hear me knock. But there’s one way. That is, if you’re tall enough and you don’t mind a ride.”
“I’m six feet three.”
“Then let’s go.”
We went to Union and turned uphill, and when we came to a hoisting works he unlocked the door and rolled it back. “Hold on, my young friend. Are you sure you know what you’re doing, getting into that house by way of this mine?”
“Yes, I know.”
“And the owner, he knows?”
“I’m the owner. I’m Jack Reiner.”
“... How about that ride?”
“You’ll see.”
We went inside and he lit a lantern, and it was a great big room, two or three stories high, with a rectangular opening in the middle of the floor big enough to drop a ship in. It was the mine shaft, in four parts, with lifting cages at the top of three of them, and nothing at the top of the fourth except an iron rail to keep you from falling into the meanest hole I’d ever seen in my life. So of course that was our hole. And after we’d put on a couple of suits of overalls he took out of a closet, and put on miners hats with candles in them, and lit up, we started down a ladder that ran down beside a lot of pipes and stuff that he said were connections to the pumps. It was a rocky trip down, specially for one that had had as much to drink as I’d had, but after a while we reached a level place he called a station, and stepped off the ladder, and went in a tunnel that led off from the shaft. Then we stooped and squeezed until we got past a string of little mine cars that were standing there, and he told me to get in the front one—that is, the one furtherest from the shaft. Then he lifted the coupling pin, kicked out the chock, and hopped in himself. First we rolled slow, but then we got up so much speed our candles went out. Then we went roaring through heat and steam and hot water dripping in our eyes and all of it pitch dark until I was scared so bad I didn’t think I’d live till we hit, if we ever did, We did soon enough, when we fetched up against a bumper with a bang that almost knocked my teeth out. We did some more climbing, and then I saw where we were. The argument was still going on in 17, but we were behind it now, on the downhill side, and it was above us. On D Street, on the downhill side, the houses were all built on stilts, and hung out over the mines thirty or forty feet in the air. The lowest cross brace of 17 was three or four feet above my head, and I sat him on my shoulders and he caught it and went on up. I jumped and caught it with my finger tips, and skinned the cat some kind of way and got my knees over, and then after a little pushing and pulling we were both on the back porch, peeling off the overalls, which we hung on the rail. He laughed and said: “Hell of a lot of work for just a little fun, isn’t it? Like the one they were telling at Donelson. The general and the major and the captain were arguing how much of it was work and how much fun, so they put it up to the private that was striking for them. He says: ‘It’s all fun. If there was any work attached to it, you’d have me doing it.’”
“Were you at Donelson?”
“With McClernand. Cold enough to freeze the ears off a brass monkey, too. I lost a toe. That’s how I got my discharge.”
“I had a brother with Buckner.”
“You secesh?”
“... I might be. Why?”
“Biloxi’ll love you.”
“I haven’t met her.”
“Wait till she finds out.”
She kissed me when Reiner told her, and then she really carried on. She was a dark, good-looking woman of forty, maybe not quite so old, with the same slim hips Morina had, big breasts pushed up high by her corsets, paint on her cheeks, and a funny way of talking that was half Gulf and half French. Her fellow was named Renny and he played the piano, and his friend was named Haines, and had a sweet tenor voice that made you cry. For me she had him sing Dixie and Maryland, My Maryland, and when a lieutenant hollered shut up with them goddam secesh pieces she grabbed up a sword with an ivory handle and engraving on it that had been made for a Mississippi general killed at Shiloh, stuck the point in his belly, and told him to get up and apologize. Then everybody laughed, and Reiner told him it was Biloxi’s way and he might as well get up and apologize or get the hell out. So he said he’d be damned if he’d apologize but if she’d take the frogsticker away he would sing bass. So Renny started Maryland, My Maryland again, and he sang bass, and stead of secesh words it was German words he sang, but Biloxi was satisfied and put the sword away.
Then a fellow with a heavy gold watch chain that was sitting near the
door said something to her, and she went to the foot of the stairs in the hall and started the same hollering we had heard from the outside. She kept calling Morina, and said Mr. Brewer was ready to bet and everybody was ready and to come on down and take their money from them. About the same time I placed Mr. Brewer he seemed to remember me, because he nodded and spoke. He was the one that had let the sergeant have it that night in the saloon, on whether he should enlist in the army or not. He leaned over and said he loved money all right but this was one bet he wanted to lose. I had begun feeling funny the minute I heard Morina’s name, but I asked what the bet was, and he said never mind, but to get ten dollars down, because they weren’t letting anybody look that didn’t put up some dough, and I’d be hoping to lose too. About that time Morina came downstairs with a tall hombre and she was laughing at his jokes, whatever they were. She had on some kind of black silk wrapper, with red sash, red shoes, and a red ribbon in her hair. Biloxi kept hollering about the bet, and all the others joined in, but she said to hell with the bet, she was there for a good time and it was too much like work. She came in and sat down and told Haines to sing and he started the Vacant Chair.
Her seat was no more than three feet from mine, but he was in the second chorus and they had all joined in before she noticed me. And he had started something else, and they were all around the piano before she spoke. “What did you have to come here for?”
“Did I know you’d be here?”
“Of course you did!”
“How, for instance?”
“You followed me down! You called me!”
“... I came on business.”
“I haven’t got but one business.”
Biloxi saw something was going on about that time, and came over and patted my hand and asked what it was, and tried to get something out of Morina, but she looked away toward the music and wouldn’t talk. Then when Biloxi got it out of me I had wanted to marry Morina and had come down to talk it over, she put her arm around me and kissed me, and cried a little bit, and asked Morina why she treated me so bad. It kind of stabbed into my heart that Biloxi was on my side and, even if she was a madam in a house, wanted Morina to have a happy life and be with somebody that loved her.
All this time the music was going on, and the men and the girls were laughing and singing and carrying on, except Brewer would come over every couple of minutes and shake gold in his two cupped hands at Morina, but Biloxi would wave him off. And then pretty soon Morina turned to me and said: “Why do you tell her that? You know we can’t ever be married.”
“What’s stopping us?”
“You’re just a boy.”
“I’m free, white, and twenty-one.”
“You’re nothing but a baby, and if I ever was crazy enough to marry you, you know just as well as I do you could never forgive me for what I’ve been. You’d hate me for it, and for every man that ever—”
“Went upstairs with you! Say it!”
I must have hollered that out, because all of a sudden there was no singing any more, and they were all looking at me, and Biloxi was looking at me, with kind of a little smile twitching around her mouth. “My petit Annapolitain play little bit? Until he grow up? Fall in love, yes? Have fun?”
“I guess that’s got to be it.”
It was a minute before Morina looked at me, and then I said: “You heard what she said. So all right. So what’s the price of doing business?”
She didn’t cry, but her eyes began to glitter like they were made of glass. “Why did you have to say that, Roger? Couldn’t you let Biloxi have a sweet feeling about you? Couldn’t you let me keep the three days I spent with you, and the love I feel for you? Why do you have to mess it all up?”
“I asked you your price.”
“To you, one thousand dollars.”
“You’ll get it.”
I told her there was nothing she wouldn’t be, from a thief to a whore, for a thousand dollars, and that’s how I knew I’d get her for it, and that’s why I’d be back. Biloxi asked me to go. I said how she’d like to try putting me out, and she got up and walked over to the sword, and I was hoping she’d try to use it, because I wanted to hit her, and Morina, and wreck her place. But all of a sudden Morina jumped up and waved her back and turned to me. “So you think you want to stay?” And when I still sat there, she went over to Brewer. “How much you want to bet?”
“Anything you say.”
“I’ll cover a hundred.”
“I cover five!”
Biloxi screamed it, and next off, she was covering gold that everybody was slapping down on the piano, until a pile was there that must have been seven or eight hundred dollars. Then Morina picked up a beer bottle, emptied the beer out the window, and climbed on top of the piano. “Roger, I’ve bet this gentleman here I can do something he’s never seen done, something he thinks can’t be done, something nobody thinks can be done. But we don’t have deadheads looking at me. If you want to stay, put up some money. If you’re not going to bet, now is the time to get out.”
She whipped off the wrapper and a fellow whistled. Except for the ribbon in her hair and the red shoes on her feet, she didn’t have a stitch on, and she never looked more beautiful or more horrible. “Are you going to bet?”
She kicked, and a slipper hit me in the face. I held on for another second, and then I ran. I ran out back, the way I came in, and I just made the rail in time. It seemed a year before all the stuff I had drunk splashed down below, and before it did, a yell went up inside. I went down the scantlings ashamed and licked and scared. I ran till I came to a street, but when I came to a saloon I went in. If it killed me, I had to have a drink.
Around three o’clock I was at the International, sitting around the bar, afraid to go to bed for fear of what I’d think about when the light was out and it was dark. An officer came in and ordered rye. He raised his glass at me and I saw it was the young lieutenant that had got into the row with Biloxi over the song. “You left too soon.”
“I had to run. I was sick.”
“It’s all you can hear down there—the hundred she made out of it, the five she made for Biloxi, and the extra change she made for the girls. It’s all over the street. They say it’ll put Biloxi’s place right on top. They say it’ll even put her in front of the Twins.”
“Pretty slick.”
“Brewer, he loved it.”
“He can have her.”
“He did.”
Things began to go round, and he said a lot, but I didn’t hear what it was. Then he was asking me something: “You know what she did?”
“I don’t much care.”
“She—”
“I said I don’t care what she did.”
“She stood on one foot, and—”
“You want to take a dive in that spittoon?”
“Well, if that’s how you feel about it.”
“That’s how I feel about it.”
I never did find out what she did. What was coming out of their throats when they were yelling in there was all I wanted to know about it. They sounded like a pack of hyenas.
5
“Sale la linda
Sale la fea,
Sale el enano
Con zo zalea.”
IT WAS HIM ALL right, plunking the same guitar, singing the same song, eshriveled in the same foolish way. I ran over there fast, because I think I was gladder to see him than I had ever been to see anybody in my life. I had moved out of the International by now, because my money was running low, to a boarding house on B Street, and my shoes were wearing out and my hat was caving in, and still I couldn’t get up enough gump to get a job or leave the place or do anything but hang around the saloons and pretend what I was going to do when I got me a thousand dollars, and after that I was going to get the hell out. I had seen her once or twice, with this or that big sport, but mostly with Brewer, and she was carrying every inch of silk, satin, and lace that her sticks would hold.
But when I went running
over to him, where he was on the boardwalk with some other Mexicans, he just gave me a quick handshake and motioned me to wait, and went on singing till he had a crowd. Then he began making a speech, in Spanish. What it was about I couldn’t understand, but they all followed him close, and nodded at each other, and whispered. It wasn’t till he had written down some names and appointed some kind of a committee that he let his meeting break up. Then he took me to a little Spanish place on Silver Street, and only when we were sitting down to a table and he had ordered some red wine did he really shake hands and show his white teeth and look me over and ask me how I’d been. I said all right, and asked for his brother and the other boys in Sacramento, and he said the little muchacha was dancing with the mariachi now, and they were doing so well they had a job riding a steamboat. Then, like he didn’t remember at all what I’d come here for, he said: “And you, Rodrigo? You marry, yes?”
“Not yet, Paddy.”
“Some day, with nice muchacha.”
“... I found her.”
“Thees Morina?”
“Just like you said.”
I told him, then, something about it, not much, because talking about it upset the hell out of me, but a little bit. He shook his head, and after a while said: “In Mexico, not so bad. In Mexico, each do own work, and if liddle muchacha do thees work, take care of mamma maybe, give papa fine serape, what more can liddle muchacha do? Fallow love her, pay not attention. In thees country, is not so good.”
“It stinks in any country.”
“M’m—so.”
“Would you like it?”
“Rodrigo, I like you.”
I knew, of course, he was only trying to soften it up a little, so it wouldn’t hurt so bad, so I shut up and we sat there awhile, not saying anything. Then: “What you do here, Rodrigo?”
“Kill flies for the bartenders.”