Cottonwood (21 page)

“Maggots? Maggots! Jesus, Jesus, Jesus! They’re all over me!” he hollered, letting out tiny, high-pitched yelps at each imagined bite, his bulbous eyes fairly leaping out of the sockets.

“Sit down and shut your fucking hole, Dearborn, all the maggots is on the floor and none’s on your sorry carcass.”

“Jesus, Jesus, sweet baby Jesus,” he yelled, his voice rising in pitch. He stuck his hand down his pants and the screaming got louder. “Oh, God, they’re eating my balls, get ’em off me, get ’em off me.”

The poor wretched bastard was shaking like a dervish and his voice was growing rawer with each outburst, and as Morley chuckled at his torment Dearborn began to spin frantically about, careening as he did so toward the cauldron.

To prevent the burning liquid overturning I moved in between the two of them and shouldered the bag of bones away before he collided with the pot; deflected but still hysterical, he ran smack into me before falling into a cowering heap on the floor. I was knocked back into Morley, whose knife arm slipped.

He looked mildly surprised as he felt the blade give, finally cutting through the tendon and then into something infinitely more tender than the softest part of that mutton. He was looking at me, though, and didn’t see the knife slice clean through the pinkie of his left hand at the first knuckle, didn’t appear to be aware of its falling from his hand along with the meat, to land with a searing sound on the stew’s bubbly surface before sinking with a hiss. It was no doubt the freshest, though not the cleanest, piece of meat the pot had ever contained.

But my wounded tenant’s eyes were still focused on me, and brandishing the knife he leapt. “You son of a bitch, you just about made me cut myself.”

“You did cut yourself,” I said. “Look.”

Morley looked down at his left hand with a look of dawning comprehension and horror; from the pinkie’s stump blood pumped in appalling quantity. “Where’d it go?” But even as he said it he was turning in horror toward the stew.

He stumbled over to the cauldron and, howling like a coyote, stuck both hands into the roiling, fetid liquid. In a half second or so the source of his keening changed from indignation and sorrow to plain and simple pain, and he withdrew from the pot his forearms and hands but only nine of his fingers. He looked back at me with his arms held before him, dripping with scalding, viscous stew.

“Looky there,” he said brightly. “Stopped bleedin’.” Then his knees gave way beneath him and he collapsed onto the planks, smearing their decades’ worth of ground-in dust and grime into grainy rivulets of mud.

Half the rummies in the dump had roused themselves to see what the noise was about. The boy appeared catatonic, his eyes on me like I was Satan himself, bat wings spread and ready to descend back into Hades.

“Lad,” I shouted at him. When he didn’t respond I snapped my fingers and shouted louder. “You. Boy. Run fetch a sawbones and make it quick, or your boss is dead.”

He kept standing there, silent, and I slammed my open palm upon the head of the cutting barrel. The sound made him jump, but he didn’t respond in any more useful way. “Goddamnit, boy, if you don’t go fetch a doctor right now I’ll make you sorry for it.”

Wordlessly he pointed to an old man seated by the front door.

“Him?” I said.

“You’re a doc, ain’tcha?” he said to the man, who didn’t appear to have heard.

“He’s a goddamn rummy. Go find a real doctor.”

At that the old man stood, legs shaking. “It’s true,” he said, “I’m a man of medicine. Where’s the patient?”

“To hell with you. You’re skunk-drunk.”

“That’s got nothing to do with it,” he said. “You find another doctor within five blocks of here who’s not in an advanced state of inebriation and I’ll show you a doctor who wouldn’t set foot in this shit-hole for a twenty-dollar honorarium.”

“There’s your patient,” I said, indicating Morley, who lay face-down, his breath ragged. His arms, where the flesh could be seen, were blistered, and the vomitous stew clung to his sleeves, coagulating as it dried.

“Morley?” the doctor said. “Ought to let the son of a bitch croak.”

“That’s a fine attitude for a physician to have,” I said.

He gave me a sour look and, mispronouncing the Greek, misquoted Hippocrates. He was displeased when I corrected him, but he knelt to examine Morley’s injuries. He grunted and sniffed, and started peeling back the sleeves of Morley’s raggedy shirt. “He’s in shock,” he said. “Best get a wagon to take him home.”

I shook the arm of a relatively alert looking specimen and handed him a silver dollar. “Go hire us a cart. Do as I say and you’ll drink free until you drop. If you’re not back in five minutes I’ll come find you and you’ll be goddamned sorry for it.”

He took the dollar and hightailed out the door. I turned to the boy. “You got any idea where Morley lives, anyway?”

“Sure,” the boy said. “He’s my pa, ain’t he?” He returned to his portering duties. I studied the doctor, who had his ear to Morley’s chest. He was as dirty as anyone in the place, yet still bore the remnants of some former dignity.

“So what’s a doctor doing in a wine dump in the middle of the afternoon?”

“Getting pickled,” he answered without deigning to look in my direction. He pulled his head upright and rose to his knees. “I don’t suppose I’d be wise to expect any kind of fee, but I’m expecting some wine out of this transaction.”

I grabbed a metal cup off a hook on the wall and filled it from the barrel. At a distance of fully two feet from my nose its aroma proclaimed its vile character, and when I turned to hand the doctor his bug juice I found every conscious eye in the place on me with heartrending supplication.

“Boy! The house is buying a round.” His baffled expression told me it was a phrase that had never been spoken there before. “Everyone gets a free drink,” I explained, but as one they had all already arisen and had begun advancing toward the barrel.

“Sit down, all of you, or there’ll be none. I’ll dump the goddamned barrel dry if you don’t.”

Aghast at the thought of all that wasted snake venom they took their seats, and I had the boy fill every cup. “Make sure they understand it’s the only one,” I said. “The sawbones and the fellow I sent for the wagon can keep drinking for free.”

He nodded and began running back and forth with the wine, serving it as fast as I could fill the containers. When all present had been served the doctor looked up from his jar, somewhat the better for the dose, and watched the boy going about the cleaning of the place.

“Funny how he listened to you like you were his boss, instead of some character just wandered in off the street. Some people are just born to be bossed around.”

“I guess so,” I said.

He cocked his head at me. “So what do you give a good goddamn for if that son of a bitch loses a half a barrel of wine?”

“I used to run a saloon myself, once. And I’m his landlord. How am I to be paid if you souses are robbing him blind?” I was sorry as soon as I’d said it, and I apologized.

His eyes grew wide with mock innocence. “And why would I be offended at such a characterization? I’m years past the capacity for shame.” He knelt and checked Morley’s neck for a pulse. Satisfied that he hadn’t yet died, he took his seat again. “How’d his finger come off ?”

“Carelessness in his meatcutting,” I said.

“A good object lesson for him, then. Where was this saloon of yours? Perhaps I knew it.”

“Kansas,” I said, ready to lie if he asked the town. “I moved on years ago.”

“I lived for a time in Wichita. Do you know a part of it called Delano?”

“Passed through it once, on my way out of the state.”

“I used to have a job certifying the girls in the cathouses there were clean.” He sighed heavily, and his eyes crinkled wistfully with the pleasure of memory. “Municipal pussy inspector. If that wasn’t the best part of doctoring in Wichita I don’t know what was.”

Soon enough the fellow came back with the wagon. Its driver was a big Irishman who helped me carry Morley outside. His spiteful clientele watched his inert form passing by with a mixture of contempt, hatred, and fear, and there was more than one meager gob of spittle on that floor before we got him to the front. When the driver and I heaved him into the wagon’s bed Morley’s skin was yellow-white as tallow and beaded with droplets of sweat, and the doctor checked once again to make sure his heart still throbbed.

“It’s beating,” he said. The boy gave the driver the address, and I left in ignominious defeat. The day was still bright and clear, though, and I decided again to make the trip afoot. Though I’d spent no more than an hour in the wine dump I had the sensation of having spent the night in a hopeless dungeon, and a corresponding one of having been released from it into an entirely new day.

I was anxious to see my landlady, even though at that hour of the day our business was strictly limited to the legitimate interactions of a monied landlady and her respectfully subservient tenant. At the moment she was my only source of erotic distraction, and she’d just returned from a two week stay at the Calistoga baths; I hoped that our brief separation might lead to a relaxation of the house rules. I was therefore disappointed upon knocking at the back door to learn from her maidservant that she was out with one of her legitimate suitors, Mr. Arthur Cruikshank, and wouldn’t be returning home until after the dinner hour. I left my calling card and made a note to pass by later in the evening rather than the next morning; after an evening spent earnestly teasing her society beaux her fires often as not required quenching.

I spent the day printing up pictures on the rooftop, since the sun was out for most of the afternoon; no customers demanded any of my time or energies. After dinner I retired to the studio with the day’s edition of the
Morning Call
and the orations of Cicero. On the front page of the
Call
I had a considerable surprise, under the rubric IN BRIEF: LATEST ITEMS BY TELEGRAPH IN CONDENSED FORM:

ARE THEY THE BENDERS ?

Niles, Mich., Jan. 15—from Our Correspondent—Two Michigan women believed to be the feminine half of the deadly Bender gang, responsible for a notorious wave of savage killings near here sixteen years previous, have been extradited to Kansas, pending a hearing to establish their identities. Once it has been determined that they are the Benders, trial is expected to be held, and there is little question in these parts as to their culpability. The fate of the male members of the family is uncertain, although rumors circulate that they are dead, likely fallen victim to their own depraved womenfolk.

I almost laughed; whatever the fate of the Bender clan, it had never become public knowledge, and fanciful reports of their wanderings and doings continued to appear in the press for several years afterward, sometimes including accounts of arrests made. One such report had the quartet in custody in Paris, France, to which they had escaped by hot air balloon, and over the next year or two any number of solitary old vagabonds were arrested in Dallas or Omaha or St. Louis as the infamous Old Man Bender. Certainly these women would be released, just like all those old vagrants had been, as soon as they were paraded before the citizenry. The only chance to get the Benders had been that night on the Verdigris, and we’d scotched it. Still, it would have been good to see them in the docket, or better still on the scaffold waiting for the trap to drop them into hell.

The hour was only five, and the sun still high enough for me to read by the skylight; it wasn’t until after six that the waning light, warmed to a rosy orange, dimmed sufficiently to warrant burning a lamp, and by that time I was restless. Between the mention of the Benders in the
Call
and my reading of Cicero my thoughts kept returning to my errant Maggie. For some odd reason there came to my mind a particular evening in the winter of 1873, shortly after our establishment in Greeley, Colorado, when the snow had drifted up to our parlor window. We’d taken turns that night reading Homer aloud by the light of our single oil lamp, wrapped in a buffalo robe next to the fire. What struck me in retrospect was how fleeting and unimportant our penury seemed then; by the following summer it would be a different story altogether, with me off to Denver in search of steady work while Maggie tried to make a go of our business unassisted. She lacked the technical skills necessary to operate a photographic studio on her own, though, and my periodic returns to Greeley—I was making enough money by then to afford the train fare—became more contentious and less frequent. The last time I saw her we disputed so furiously the neighbors offered to put her up for the night; instead it was I who stormed off into the night and slept in a barn, and took the train back to Denver in the morning without a good-bye. I thereafter refused to answer or even open her letters until they stopped coming, at which time I attempted, too late, a reconciliation.

As usual during these sorts of reflections my mingled longing and worry over her fate turned quickly to resentment and reading soon became impossible; I changed my clothes and shaved again and headed out the door with the idea of a visit to Adelle’s.

It wasn’t until I reached Polk Street that I felt my spirits begin to lift in anticipation of my landlady’s ministrations. This time when I knocked, her maidservant told me that I was expected upstairs. I tapped at the door and, upon her command to enter, found the room awash in candlelight, though there were no fewer than three oil lamps therein. She was seated on the
canapé
, smiling in her prim way.