Past All Dishonor (11 page)

“That’s it, pardner.”

“You that good on a man?”

“When I’m scared, I’m fast.”

“I’ll take a chance, I think.”

“What’s the pay, by the way?”

“Fifteen a day, and you work at night.”

“I hear you pay twenty.”

“To the right man, yes.”

“I’m checking in tonight.”

“You wear a black suit. I require that.”

In the West a gambler wears the black suit, and some places even have the lookout do it. I said it was all right, I’d have one on, and he said: “And I’d get a haircut if I were you. I hear some of those generals at the Battle of Gettysburg wore curls right up to the mouth of the cannon, but anybody that tries it in my place is going out on his ear.”

“And anybody that tries to cut mine is going out in a box. Have we got that matter straight?”

“Well, don’t get excited.”

“So it’s understood.”

I wasn’t wearing curls. I had been sick, and neglected to get a haircut, that was all. But I wasn’t having him telling me, so that’s how I combed them out the way the girls wear them in school. Mine are yellow and curly, and all next afternoon, out on the back porch, I could feel Morina looking at me out the corner of her eye, when I showed up in the black velvet suit with silver buttons, the stitched boots, the black felt hat, the red shirt, and nice gold curls rippling around on my collar. I kept figuring what I’d say if she started to laugh at me, and I had a joke figured up. But once our eyes crossed, and I saw she wasn’t laughing. Then a throb went through my mouth, and I knew she liked how I looked. I picked her up, carried her inside, and pushed my face against hers. It was hot, and couldn’t lie to me about what it wanted. She didn’t lie. She just fought me, bit me, kicked me, and threw me out.

Two or three nights later, I found out what I’d do when it wasn’t just target practice. I don’t know if you know how it works in a gambling hall. On one side is the bar, pretty long, with a brass rail and three or four men mixing drinks. At both ends are the big fixtures, wheels of fortune and stuff like that, that run straight up and down and have mirrors and pictures and gaudy stuff all over them. Opposite the bar is faro, with four or five layouts, girls dealing at each table. On one side of the faro are dice games, like crap, and on the other side cards. In the middle of the room, between the bar and the faro, are three big roulette tables, each running a different limit. My place was up front, in the corner between the wheels of fortune and the dice, and for the purpose of seeing better I sat in a high chair. The lookout’s high chair is not any different from a baby’s high chair, and it works on the same principle, with a cross bar for your heels, arm rests, and everything else, but of course with no attachment to come down over your head and get in the way of free movement.

I was sitting there, getting used to my job, which was to keep an eye on things, and in case I saw something peculiar, like maybe a pair of dice coming out of a coattail, to drift over and walk past the gambler on that table. Those hombres, they don’t need any assay report to know there’s quicksilver in the ivory, so there was nothing exciting about it, and the only time I was to do something quick was in case of real trouble. So this night a fellow was at the bar, putting down liquor. I noticed him because it seemed to me he was working at it, and besides he was wearing two .44’s, butts facing. I mean, the gun on his left hip hung for his right hand, and the one on the right hip for his left. And then all of a sudden he grabbed for his guns and gave a one-man demonstration of all the things the fellow in the store had told me not to do. His right-hand gun came out first, and he shot with it, but a hip-shot that caused one of the comicalest things you ever saw. The gun went off, but it yanked him off balance, so he had to let go the other gun and grab for the bar to keep from falling. What he thought he was doing I don’t know, but as well as I could figure it out later he thought he’d pop off a few times so everybody would dive for the floor, and then he’d scoop up some money and run. Or maybe he thought he was shooting at me with that first one. From the hip, it could have been anything, and if it didn’t make sense there was no law it had to.

Anyway, as he reached for his guns I was drawing mine. It never seems to come out quick. It’s a year before it’s clear, and you think you’ll lose your mind before you bring the sights into line, and when you fire you’re like a wild man to line it up again. But in this case it was like I was taking my time and doing a nice, refined job. The .44 yanked his arm up and over, and as he lurched against the bar I had plenty of time to aim, and even to change my mind. Instead of shooting for his heart I popped one in his shoulder. Then as that gun dropped I broke his collar bone on the left side, so he wouldn’t get ambitious with the other gun. The place was screaming like a million hyenas were in it, but he stood there blinking like a man in a dream, and looked at the deputies when they collared him like he couldn’t imagine where he was. Then the whole place swarmed over him, and I think he’d have been lynched if the officers hadn’t hustled him out, yelling at me to stay where I was, they’d let me know when they needed me.

I never had so many free drinks, cigars, and chips out of noodle pots thrown at me in twenty minutes in my life. I had plugged a poor loon and I was the hero of the town. Even the two writers for the
Enterprise
were all over me, and they decided I was the greatest gun fighter in the West, because I didn’t even
have
to kill my man. I just winged him, and they said that was a novelty, and refreshing. To me, they looked like a pair of crazy newspaper men that would do anything to make people laugh. Anyway, that’s how it came out in the paper, and overnight I was an important man in Virginia City.

“So you were going to save the Confederacy and help the boys in gray and now you’re a goddam paid gunman in a Nevada gambling sink all dressed in black velvet like a Mexican cowboy with yellow curls over your collar and in love with a whore that’s not worth the powder it would take to blow her to hell.”

You lie awake enough, you talk to yourself.

A
LL THAT TIME I HAD
heard plenty about Brewer, and seen her with him, though after what she had said I would have put my eyes out before I’d have let her catch me looking, so when they came down the street I generally ducked around the corner. She drove a pair of black ponies to a small buggy, and the ponies had silver buckles on their harness, and the whole town knew he had given them to her. So one day, when I pulled the bell at 17, and a strange woman answered and said Biloxi had moved to the new house being built on A Street, I knew without being told what was up. When I went up there painters were still working on the shutters, and furniture was piled all over the big high portico with pillars on it that ran clear up to the second floor. Biloxi opened the door and took me in her arms and kissed me and called me her
pauvre petit
and took me inside.

There was a wide hall running from the front door to a winding staircase, and big rooms with high windows in them on each side. In one room there was nothing but the grand piano from D Street, and Renny in front of it, playing. Until then he never noticed me that I recall now, but when he saw me he jumped up and shook hands and began to rave about the room. He said the acoustics were so wonderful you couldn’t believe it, and he was never going to put any more furniture in it, except shelves for the music and a bench running around for people to sit on. Sofas, rugs, and pillows, he said, were out. He could hardly wait for Haines, and pretty soon Haines showed up, and sang some grand opera. Then Biloxi made him sing her some songs in French, and rang for Mattiny to put out drinks. Then she brought me to a room across the hall, where anyway a sofa had been put in and you could sit. “Ah Roger, it is ze happiest day of my life! George is soch wonderful man!”

“Brewer?”

“Morina’s fiance.”

“Oh, they’re going to be married?”

“Yes at last. And soch beautiful thing he has done for me. This house, all summer he build, as surprise for me. And now today, he move me in—pouf, like that, after breakfast.”

“Why?”

“He love Morina. He is like brozzer to me.”

“Hell of a friendly brother. And a hell of a place.”

“Twenty rooms, Roger, big rooms.”

“Where are the girls?”

“Girls? Roger! I have no girls here!”

“No business here?”

“Business,
fini!”

“His idea?”

“He want his little Biloxi to have easy.”

“Makes a little more sense that way.”

“But Roger, he is
rich!”

“He certainly must be proud.”

I asked when the wedding was to be, and she said in a couple of weeks, as soon as Morina got back from San Francisco, where she was going tonight to buy clothes. She began rattling the ice in her glass and looking at the little watch she had pinned to her dress. She had spilled her news and had her cry, and wanted me to go. Me, I wasn’t quite ready.

It was late afternoon when I heard horses, slipping and sliding, climbing Union Street. It was the ponies, and behind them a hack, and Morina waited for the hackman to hitch before she came inside. The buggy was too small for trunks, so the idea seemed to be he would take them to Overland, while Biloxi drove her down. The stage left at six, so there was quite a lot of running around, and for a few minutes she didn’t take any notice of me. Then all of a sudden she came into the room, closed the door, lit a
cigarrillo,
and sat down beside me. While she was upstairs she had changed into the same little traveling dress she had worn when I first saw her, with the same little bonnet. She took two or three inhales before she said anything, and during that time she didn’t look at me. Then: “Did Biloxi tell you about me, Roger?”

“She said you were getting married.”

“I want you to wish me well.”

“I will on one condition.”

“What’s that, Roger?”

“That you tell me, in some way that I respect, why you’re marrying this man instead of me, when I’ve asked you a hundred times, and I ask you one more time right here and now.”

“I can’t throw away a chance like this.”

“Like what?”

“Why, Roger, George is a millionaire.”

“Is money all you think about?”

“Doesn’t everybody?”

“They don’t do to get it what you do to get it. You’ve sold yourself for it, you’ve made a public spectacle of yourself for it, you’ve led a life of shame for it, not because you had to, because I’d have taken you off D Street any time, but because that money and that life was what you wanted. And now you’re marrying this man, not because you love him, but because he’s got a mine over there that’s making him so much money he can’t count it. I don’t call that being a wife. I call it being the highest-priced whore in the state of Nevada, and I’ll see you in hell before I wish you well at it.”

“Something might happen to you for that.”

“Nothing will.”

“Don’t be too sure.”

“There’s nothing I’d like better than to drill you through your dirty little heart, and I could do it right now, so if anything starts happening around here you know who it’s going to happen to.”

“How do you know whether I love him?”

“Because you love me.”

“Not that way.”

“There’s only one way.”

“Anyway, he loves me, I know that.”

“How?”

“Look what he’s given me.”

“When they buy you, that proves love?”

“What other way can a man show how much he thinks of you, if he don’t give you things? What have you ever given me?”

“Don’t you know why they pay to have you?”

“Because they want me.”

“So you can’t have them.”

“That don’t mean anything I can understand.”

“It means that after it’s over they can walk out and you’ve got no claim on them or right to say any part of them was ever yours or even the right to speak to them on the street. No, I never gave you anything, but myself, and that’s why I’m up here right now—”

Tears began running down her face, and she beat on the sofa with her fists. “It’s not true, what you’re saying! When a man gives you something, it proves how
popular
you are! It didn’t have to be me. It could have been any girl on the street. But instead of them, he finds me attractive, and the way he shows it, he gives me a present. And when it’s a nice present, a big present, it’s a
wonderful
compliment!”

I guess she said more, but all I remember is the way her eyes shone through the tears, and the way it hit me in the stomach, to find out at last
why
she was what she was. To her it was living. It was like being a queen, of a tiny, miserable, rotten little kingdom maybe, but with a crown on her head just the same.

That night came news of Chickamauga, and I don’t know which felt worse, me or the town. Because if it was the biggest thing for the South since Chancellorsville, there was nothing I had done to make me feel I had a part of it. And if the town was Union, there were plenty by now that were beginning to wonder if they’d ever get their war won, which of course they won’t. There wasn’t much whooping in the saloons that night, especially in the Esperanza, where the high-class trade took a thing like that a lot more to heart than a place with nothing but a bunch of bums at the bar. They stood around by twos and threes, talking it over, and not very loud. All you could hear was Bragg, Bragg, and Bragg. One day before, he’d been the funniest object on earth. They’d made jokes about his name, his looks, and his rows with his generals. Now they mumbled about him like he was a cross between Napoleon Bonaparte and a she grizzly, and nothing could stop him.

So out back, where I’d gone for some air, a little more mumbling didn’t mean anything, at first. It was on the other side of the fence, a few feet from where I was leaning against the building, looking at the stars, and I just figured it was a few more lads that had found out that hoping to win a war was not quite the same as winning it. But then all of a sudden I woke up. This had nothing to do with war. It was about a little party that was to start in a few minutes, and the guest of honor was to be me. There seemed to be four of them, but the only name I caught was Hoke. I didn’t know at that time that he was Big Hoke Irving, known from Texas to Canada as one of the worst bad men in the West. He laid it out for them three times. At nine o’clock they were to drift in one at a time and he’d take position near the door. One of the others was to go to the bar, order a drink, and at Hoke’s handkerchief signal begin to shoot. I was the first target, and after I dropped, he was to shoot at lights, bottles, and anything that would make a noise and scare the crowd. Hoke was to holler at them and shoot at anything that made trouble, but mainly huddle them and get them on the floor. When he gave the word, the other two were to go down the line with a gunny sack one of them had under his coat, and grab everything in sight, one holding the sack, the other scooping money. But the main thing, he said, was do it fast and do it rough. If they did it right, they’d be in, out, and away less than five minutes after they started.