OverTime 1 - Searching (Time Travel) (30 page)

I really
was
a slut, wasn't I?

"And what about," he started.

But—propping myself against the wall—I held up my hand as if I could bat away the next words before they got to me. "No more," I said, shaken.

He blinked at me, all innocence, which I
so
didn't trust. He wasn't innocent. He'd enjoyed this. "Geez, you're taking this a little hard, aren't you?"

I glared at him. "A little hard?
A little hard?
I thought maybe I was proper, maybe I was...." And I stupidly gave myself away by glancing at the door.

Everett laughed. "Goddamn! You lost your memory and got sweet on Clint Eastwood out there, didn
't you? Now
this
is proof that I'm a decent guy. I
should
have kept my mouth shut and let you think you were some sort of schoolmarm or something.
You
, hooked up with an old timey cowboy, trying to be prim and proper. You'd go crazy in a week."

"Not necessarily," I argued. Futilely, since I
wasn't
sweet on Clint Eastwood—Eastwood?—out there, and I wouldn't hook up with some cowboy anyway.

"You
're acting like you didn't enjoy your job! Wake up and smell the Starbucks, Rhinehart. You
loved
it! You loved the glamour, you loved proving what a smart, sophisticated bitch you can be, you loved running your own life. You earned more in a fucking week than your cowboy could earn in a year!"

I
'd earned enough to wear $85 shoes—shoes that cost over half a year's worth of lunches at Beatty and Kelley's. Damn Everett, he was still telling the truth, recognizable to me on a deep, instinctive level. His mudslide of truth was choking me. "No
more
," I insisted, and he sat back, shrugged.

"Fine," he said. "You
asked
me."

"I
've got to think," I insisted, pacing and resenting how the skirt tangled awkwardly around my ankles. "I've got to sort some of this out."

"Suit yourself. We
're not going anywhere."

It was too damned hot in here, hotter than the indoors should ever be. My head hurt, as if from trying to keep the cascade of ugly memories—memories I
'd worked so hard to revive—from flooding over me. Everything looked unreal.
Where the hell was I?

But I took a deep breath and I knew where I was. Dodge City, Kansas. It was where I
'd come from that couldn't be trusted, the dreams, the confusions...the truths.

Oh my God, something truly awful
had
happened to me. But had I maybe deserved it?

I had to escape this fetid room, had to escape the warring memories. Either I was a delusional, amnesiac courtesan—just as the Boss had seemingly suspected, just as the
Army Major had assumed—or I was something that couldn't exist, from somewhere that....

No! I had to get out, had to think—almost as desperately as I had to avoid Garrison to do it. He might yet leave in disgust, but he was so damned steady that, even if he
'd given up on me, he would probably let me know before he left. And after everything,
that
was one confrontation too many. Like a thief, I cracked the door to the drug store and peeked out. For a minute I thought the coast was clear, but then I saw, through the window, past the front of the store, where Garrison stood watch on the front sidewalk. His arms were folded as he stared down the street in angry thought. Even from this distance I could see that he had that coiled, dangerous look about him again, the one that scared me.

I couldn
't face him, not now, not yet. It made me a miserable coward—but after what I'd learned about myself, did a dollop of cowardice really matter?

"There
's a back door into the side street," offered Everett helpfully. "I think it's so the worst patients don't drip blood all over the drugstore. You know, I've only been here maybe three days, and there's been
two
gunshot wounds? This is not a happy fun-time place—"

But that
's all I heard, because I used the back door for my escape.

Chapter 14: Misbehaving

Had I really spent all week whining to remember?
Be careful what you wish for, Lilla—Elizabeth.
Remembering was worse, far worse, than blissful ignorance. My memories weren't simply gliding open like a blooming flower. Oh no; they came like falling rocks, incomplete, out of sequence, and incomprehensible.
Paying for my own drinks. Dancing with strange men to throbbing music, bare armed and....

I barely noticed where I was walking, except that it was
away
from anyplace Garrison had taken me. I was too busy trying not to let the damned, overlong skirts and petticoats trip me—and too busy mentally dodging falling, fragmented memories. At some point I crossed the huge, rutted dirt street and the railroad track, outran a team of at least eight mules, and almost choked on the dust it raised. This place seemed increasingly like a nightmare that didn't make sense and couldn't be escaped.

I found myself in a grassy "alley" behind the saloons I
'd seen from Front Street—the Lady Gay, the "Commie-Cue." Even in the mid-afternoon I could hear whooping men and jangly piano music, nothing classical like from the Long Branch.

More falling memories:
I can play piano. I can sing. Sometimes I sing in front of strangers.
A word that I couldn't place,
karaoke,
crashed past me and vanished.

Now I was almost running, holding my skirts up enough to not fall over the damned things, still fighting them and the grass too—three petticoats? Why hadn
't I kept my damned
pants?
I crossed another dirt road and vaguely noticed how it turned into a bridge over the Arkansas River, past which grazed far too many cows. Thousands—maybe tens of thousands. Cows were part of the nightmare, too, and even from here they smelled bad. Kansas in June was too hot, stifling even—and why was I wearing so much
clothing?

By the time I reached an uneven row of seven or eight little sod shacks, on the south end of town, I could barely breathe. I couldn
't seem to inhale enough to make a difference. My chest hurt. My steps were starting to falter. I had to stop and rest, whether the memories were chasing me or not.

Shaggy huts bricked out of dirt and grass, like the Peaveses
' place. The soddies clustered evenly between the back of the saloons and the river across which grazed all those cattle. They had their own little dusty road, something between a path and a real street, which looked capable of turning into a mud bath with the smallest amount of rain. Some of the shacks sported wooden signs over their doors:  "Star." "Rose." "Georgia."

The kind of names cowboys would like
.

I knew then what these were, and laughed a sobbing laugh at my unerring homing instinct. These were the prostitutes
' cribs.

This time I recognized what the three women, chatting and fanning themselves and glancing surreptitiously at me, really were. For one thing, they wore makeup—and maybe because they were closer to my age, and not all that attractive even with that help, this time I really
noticed
their makeup. For another thing, one woman wore a faded dress with half sleeves and a collar cut so low it almost showed her collarbone, the slut. It looked like a marvelously comfortable dress, compared to mine. Melting in the heat, I wanted one just like it, stains or no stains.

Yet another brief, disorienting memory attacked me—
putting on a special bra so that my boosted cleavage would peek out the low, low neckline of a party dress.
  No wonder I hadn't fit in here. I couldn't go back to the herd, back to the Army post, or even back to... Chicago? Or could I? An inexplicable horror swamped me, sickened me, begged me not to remember. But if this was a nightmare, why couldn't I wake up?

Because it wasn
't a nightmare. It wasn't, it wasn't, it wasn't.

One of the hookers, a pockmarked woman with hair a decidedly fake shade of red, ambled over to me. "You lost?" she challenged.

Desperate for anyone, anywhere that might accept me, I accessed what little information I had. "I'm looking for some...some women. Their names are Dixie and Belle."

The redhead laughed unpleasantly, and I saw that she was missing a lot of teeth, and that the others were brown. "Honey," she said to me, "this here is a cow-town. Half of everything female is named Dixie or Belle."

Please please please.
I realized I was praying for a break, just one break. I had to make everything stop. Somewhere, I had to find a place to stop running, to stop
thinking
, at least until I remembered how to do it right. My voice shook with the effort of staying calm. "Dixie is short, blonde. Cute, very young. Belle's tall, with black hair and an Irish accent. Also young. They both dress nicely."
As opposed to you.
But even with the edges of the world starting to wobble, I wouldn't say that.

"Don
't sound like they'd be working here, child," drawled a low voice, and I turned to see a tired-looking black woman in a dirty gray sack-dress. "Fresh ones like that work the dance halls, maybe one of the boardinghouses, until here's the only place left for 'em."

"Boardinghouses," I repeated unsteadily. Of course—I remembered that particular euphemism. They worked in a
'boardinghouse' for... for....

But the harder I tried to place their pimp
's name through the battering memories—
fancy restaurants, swimming in public next-to-naked, my very own private rooms
—the dizzier I felt. It was so hot out! All these petticoats weren't helping. The high neckline choked me. Thank God I hadn't bought the corset.

The original woman, the redhead, covered her mouth to cough, and that tiny glimpse of tired etiquette made my heart bleed for her. After she caught her breath, she said, "I
'm Alice, honey, and take some advice—you ain't ready for the cribs either. You ought not work this cheap, and we sure the hell don't need your competition. Go look in the dance halls."

Farther? Go
farther
? I was too dizzy to find a boardinghouse, too tired to go job hunting. Maybe I could use what change I had to convince someone to let me sleep in a back room...but I belatedly realized that, sometime between talking to Everett and now, I'd even lost my reticule and my "egg money." If I had an end of my rope, this was it.

"Is there a place I could sit down?" I asked weakly, suddenly feeling dangerously cold and clammy in the heat.
"Out of the sun?"

"Fanny died t
'other week. Nothin' catchin', and the landlord cleaned her place out with kerosene. You rest up in there," advised Alice. "Keep the door shut. Boys'll figure you've got business and leave you be."

I scanned the wooden signs, but couldn
't focus enough to read, much less find Fanny's name. Everything blurred at the edges, patches of sunlight turning dark, shadows bursting into light. As if from a great distance, Alice took me by the shoulders and led me, stumbling, through the flashing confusion until I suddenly stepped into a blinding darkness that, if it wasn't cool, was at least cool
er
than I'd been all afternoon. I was falling onto a cot and everything, finally everything went away....

The woman finds herself lying, weak and helpless, in the dirt. Bright blue sky hurts her eyes, but at least that means she can see again. Why can't she remember ever seeing before? She tries to turn her head, but her sluggish neck muscles barely manage to let it flop sideways. Rolling grassland and blue sky, everywhere.

She doesn
't know where she is, other than outside. She doesn't know who she is.

Her hand reaches haltingly out, searching with grasping fingers, clawing the dirt and grass for something she needs desperately but can
't remember. Her wrist, her arm, her shoulder are bare; she's been stripped physically and mentally. She's lost, alone....

I woke with a start, able to escape at least one nightmare. Telling myself it
was
just a nightmare, still a nightmare, made it easier for me to breathe. Compared to the nightmares, even the day I'd just had fell into a miserable kind of perspective.

The nap had helped. I sat up on the bed, no longer dizzy, and realized that someone—Alice?—had unbuttoned the collar and the cuffs of my
wrapper for me, so that it no longer constricted my throat or wrists and air could caress my chest. In the shadows of the soddy, the air wasn't even as desperately warm as it had been in the stores or the restaurant. Nature's insulation.

That isn
't to say that Fanny-the-dead-hooker's crib wasn't a tiny, desolate place. A small bed, a lopsided wooden chair, a weather-beaten table, and a very small, potbellied stove more than filled it. The one window was covered with what looked like greasy paper, so that I could barely tell it was still afternoon, probably late. I could still catch whiffs of the kerosene someone had used as an antiseptic, to wash away Fanny's germs as quickly as they had her memory. Other women had lived here, and died here—and in between, they'd worked here. Worked by fucking strange men for money. They'd had the stove in the winter, and the other, uh, ladies for company. And Fanny, at least, had survived for as long as she could, and then she'd stopped surviving, and that was that.