Port Hazard (16 page)

On the last
night but one for Barbary, Beecher and I set out with determination to get as drunk as we could and still find our way home to the Slop Chest.

Although the second part was problematic, the first was a dream easily obtainable anywhere within thirty blocks of our bug-infested berths. There were upwards of three thousand aboveboard drinking establishments in the City of San Francisco, most of them on the shady side of Nob Hill, and Nan Feeny estimated that an additional two thousand operated without licenses. These “blind tigers” sold home-brewed beer, whiskey cut with creek water—Beecher found part of a crawdad floating in his glass the first place we stopped—and turpentine laced with brown sugar to give it the color and approximate flavor of rye; the sightless beggars who tapped their way along the boardwalks and sat in doorways rattling the coins in their cups hadn't all lost their eyes at Shiloh, despite the signs around their necks identifying them as crippled veterans. An article in Fremont Older's
Call
placed the annual income from the local sale of intoxicants above ten million dollars, roughly three times what Congress shelled out to outfit the U.S. Army. Witnessed at first hand, it looked like more.

“I forget.” Beecher looked up blearily from a glass recently evacuated of freshwater life. “Is this a dive, a bagnio, or a dead-fall?”

I looked around. We were in the cellar of a warehouse stacked with barrels of sorghum, with greenwood tables and benches crowded to one side to make room for dancing. A glum-faced fiddler and a pianist with an eyepatch made a respectable job out of “Cotton-Eyed Joe” for the benefit of sailors, miners, and probable Hoodlums who were stepping on the toes of female employees of the establishment in short skirts and provocative blouses. I'd heard the blouses were a suggestion contributed by the police, who had raided the cellar a month or two earlier for parading the women around with nothing above the waist. I tried to remember where I'd been a month or two earlier and decided that wherever it was, it didn't compare.

“I think it's a dance hall,” I said.

There was a brief interlude when one of a pair of customers who had each seized an arm of the same hostess smashed a bottle on the edge of the bar and threatenened his rival with the jagged end. A bartender resolved the situation by slamming two feet of loaded billiard cue across the skull of the unarmed man, who then dropped out of the competition. The man with the broken bottle blinked, then discarded his weapon and dragged the young lady out onto the dance floor as the musicians struck up something lively.

“Reckon I'm drunker than I knew,” Beecher said. “Looked to me like the barkeep hit the wrong man.”

“He was closer. It came out the same either way.”

“Everything's backwards here. I don't get out soon I'm going to start thinking this is the way the world works.”

“It
is
the way the world works. You and I get paid to spin it the other way.”

“Speak for yourself. I ain't seen so much as a nickel since we left Gold Creek.”

I got out my poke, opened it under the table, and passed a few banknotes across his knees. “That's as much as I can spare. I wired Judge Blackthorne for expenses, but the hinges on his safe need oiling. You'd think it came out of his own pocket.”

“It did, if he owns property.”

“He owns twenty linen shirts, a dozen frock coats, and a bunch of books by a fellow named Blackstone. Whatever else he had burned with his chambers. It wasn't much. The grateful citizens of Helena gave him the house he lives in with his wife in return for defending civilization. I don't know how much the federals pay him, but he doesn't spend any of it. He's the property of the U.S. government, just like that monument they're building to George Washington.”

“You feel that way, why don't you quit?”

“He's the best man I ever worked for.”

“That's the way I feel about Mr. Hill; not that we ever met or that he wouldn't throw me downstairs if I showed up in his office.” He gave me one of his rare grins with the cigarette he was lighting stuck between his teeth. Then he looked troubled. “Ain't one of us ought to stay sober? How we going to stand behind each other's back if we can't tell it from the front?”

“Take a look around. Shantytown's got a death sentence hanging over it. All the Hoodlums and cutthroats are too busy trying to have a good time while they still can to bother with two law dogs from out of town. I don't know about you, but I think we've earned a holiday.”

“This got anything to do with Sid the Spunk being dead?”

“Don't be a jackass. Sid isn't dead.”

Just then one of the dancing girls let out a stream of language that would have curled the edges of a slate roof and swung into a pirouette with nine inches of curved steel sticking out of her dainty fist. The brute she was dancing with saved his throat by stumbling and falling. As it was, the blade took off the top of his right ear. Bright blood arced out, ruining the costumes of two other dancers who were trying to get out of the way. The bouncer, a short, stocky albino with too much muscle bunched around his neck to accommodate a collar, sprang away from the wall, got hold of the woman's knife arm, twisted it behind her back, and hauled her off the floor with both satin-shod feet kicking. The bartender who had broken up the other fight threw a towel at the man on the floor, who jammed it against his lacerated ear. The other bartender, small and wiry in an apron that brushed his shoe tops, came out from behind the bar with a mop to clean up the carnage. Another brute built along the same lines as his friend helped the injured man to his feet and escorted him outside, the towel still held in place and staining bright maroon.

All this took place in about twenty seconds. The staff had rehearsed all the actions many times before, and even the two civilians had been through enough similar scrapes to take themselves out of the action without stopping to file a protest.

“Let's move on.” I got up and slapped a dollar on the table to take care of the drinks. Beecher followed.

On the boardwalk in front of the dance hall, I put a hand on his arm. “Wait a minute.”

The bleeding brute and his companion were standing in the middle of the street, sunk in mud to their insteps. The man holding the towel to the side of his head made a violent gesture with his free hand. They were shouting over each other's words. Other pedestrians, accustomed to such scenes, crossed the street on either side of the pair without pausing or even turning their heads. In Barbary, non-involvement wasn't just a policy; it was a law of survival.

The two men closed suddenly, as if embracing. They parted, and the man holding the bloody towel turned and came back toward the dance hall, leaving his friend standing in the street with his hands hanging empty at his sides. He looked after his departing companion, then shook his head, turned, and waded off through the mud toward the other side of the street.

I saw the squat-barreled pistol in the other man's hand as he mounted the boardwalk. I nudged Beecher and we parted to clear his path to the door. I let him pass, then drew the Deane-Adams, spun it butt-forward, and tapped him firmly on the back of the head with the backstrap. His knees bent, the short pistol clunked to the boardwalk, and I kicked it into the street, where the mud sucked it under in less than a second. It was out of sight before the man hit the ground.

“Slicker'n snot,” said Beecher as we walked away. “I thought you was fixing to put a hole in him.”

“It seemed drastic just for stepping on a girl's foot.” I inspected the revolver for damage to the frame and stuck it back in its holster.

“How'd you know he'd come back heeled?”

“Wouldn't you, for an ear?”

Gunshots rattled a street or two over, traveling swiftly on the fog drifting in from the harbor.

Beecher said, “You're dead on about this place. Like a kid getting in his licks before someone boxes his ears.”

“I saw it in Abilene, just before the city fathers voted to ban the cattle outfits from town. It's like a fever.”

“You deputied Wild Bill?”

“It was after his time. Part of the hell being raised was mine. I was punching cows then. I hadn't got the call yet.”

He shook his head. “We ain't the same, you and me. I'll have had my life's portion of hell after we leave here. From here on in, I'm polishing spitoons and liking it.”

“Who for, J. J. Hill?”

“No, sir. For the first hotel or saloon I come to in Spokane that's hiring. Or some other town, if Belinda won't have me. I've had itchy feet since I left Louisiana. I want to see what it's like to stay put for forty or fifty years.”

“You're a smart man. I wasn't too sure when you took me up on this offer.”

“I didn't exactly have a choice.”

“You could have left that chair standing where it was in that caboose.”

He said nothing for several yards. I had the impression he was wishing he'd chosen differently.

When he spoke, however, it was to introduce a different subject. “You really think Sid the Spunk's alive?”

“Whenever someone goes out of his way to tell me something, my policy is it's a lie. F'an Chu'an owes Sid more than he owes me, and a debt to a dead man isn't worth paying. Also, a corpse doesn't need protecting.”

“What about Pinholster? He lie, too?”

“No reason. His man saw what he said. Our Chinese friend is modest. He's a better doctor than he made out. He pulled Sid through, and he's either hiding him in Chinatown or covering up his tracks.”

“Sid might of quit Frisco.”

“Then there'd be no reason to convince us he's dead.”

“We fixing to go on looking for him?”

“That's Pinholster's cradle. Let him rock it. Judge Blackthorne already thinks we're off chasing rabbits.”

“Not tonight, though.”

“Not tonight. Tonight we're getting drunk.”

We entered a place called the Slaughterhouse, on the southern end of Battle Row. There, the patrons were gathered around a little platform built for musicians, where a red-bearded Irishman with leather lungs was auctioning off a drunken naked girl. Her ribs showed and she had tiny breasts, but there were no visible scars and the bidding was up to fifty dollars. Each new bid was louder than the one before.

Beecher leaned in close and shouted in my ear. “I thought this ended in sixty-three.”

“I don't think it's a full sale,” I shouted back. “Just an overnight rental.”

The whiskey was a little better than turpentine, although it might have been useful in loosening rusty bolts. It burned furrows down our throats and boiled in our stomachs. A balloon opened in my head, making sounds echo and multiplying everything I looked at. The skinny girl went to a sailor for sixty-two-fifty and was replaced on the platform by three fat girls, or maybe it was just one, who was quickly stripped with some assistance on her part, and upon whom the bidding soared rapidly; the air outside was nippy and there's nothing like cuddling up to a heap of naked flesh on a cold night. A couple of sailors got into a fistfight over a fifty-cent raise, and part of the audience peeled away to form a circle around the brawlers. No attempt was made on the part of the establishment to separate them.

“Should we take a hand?” Beecher asked.

“I'll put a dollar on the little fellow.”

I didn't see how the fight came out. Things and people were losing shape and time passed on a sliding scale. Two other customers argued over a spilled drink; one smashed the other in the mouth, and I thought I was only a witness until I woke up the next morning with my right hand swollen and throbbing and extracted a shard of broken tooth from the third knuckle. In order to examine the hand, I had to pull it out from under the naked woman who was lying on top of it, and half on top of me in my narrow berth at the Slop Chest. I extricated myself from the snoring creature, dressed, and wobbled out into the saloon, where Beecher grinned at me from the end of the bar.

“Sixty-five even,” he said. “You beat out the nearest man by a dollar. You fixing to charge it to expenses?”

“Long live the
emperor,” Nan Feeny said. “Sluice your gob with this. It'll draw the sting from that rotten swig what they pour at the Slaughterhouse.”

I watched her fill a glass with something orange and yellow from a canning jar. It glopped twice and she stirred it with a spoon until it assumed a uniform consistency as thick as sausage gravy.

“Should I ask what's in it?” I picked it up and sniffed at it. It had a familiar smell I remembered from childhood, mixed with something never before encountered. It wasn't entirely unpleasant.

“Buttermilk and grenadine, to start. I'm sworn to family secrecy as to the rest. My grandfather in Limerick died with a glass in his hand. Don't let it funk you,” she said, when I set it down untasted. “He was shot by a vicar.”

I picked it up again. “What's it do?”

“Well, it won't get rid of that baggage in your room. I ought to charge you extra rent.”

“I packed her off with two dollars for her time. When was the last time something happened in the Sailor's Rest you didn't know about?”

She touched the ribbon at her throat, thinking. “Christmas Day, eighteen seventy-nine. I was down with the Grippe. Tip it down, and don't leave off till you can see me through the bottom. It won't work took in pieces.”

I drank it in one long draught. It tasted the way marigolds smelled rotting. She saw on my face what was going on in my stomach and pointed at the spitoon in front of the footrail. I bent and scooped it up in both hands. It was a near enough thing even then. When I came up, wiping my mouth with the back of a hand, she was unstopping a bottle of ginger beer. “That should cut the copper.”

I took two swigs. The metallic taste began to recede, and with it the pounding in my skull. My legs were still weak. I leaned on the bar for support.

“I'd of warned you away of the Slaughterhouse if you asked,” she said. “The bilge they use to cut the squail's worse than the squail itself.”

I'd wearied of the conversation, which I'd only half understood anyway.

“Where are Billy and Hodge? This is the first time I've seen you behind the bar.” I was the only customer apart from a sailor losing steadily to Pinholster. Beecher, who recovered from the effects of strong spirits as quickly as he succumbed to them, had gone out in search of breakfast.

“It's Billy's morning out. He spends every rag he makes on a mollisher up on Telegraph Hill. Axel's down with a worse case than you, right along with the rest of Barbary. Come this time next week, they'll all be smacking the calfskin in Goodhue's congregation; them what ain't dancing at their death from the gas lamps.”

“And where will you be?”

“Well, Goodhue's calfskin ain't mine, for all the words are the same. I ain't touched a drop of the peach since night before last, nor will I through tomorrow night, when I'll sit on the bed the Commodore bought, with my pepperbox close to hand and loads enough to see me through Gabriel's blast. I don't intend to sail to Hell unescorted.”

“If that's Barbary's philosophy, Goodhue's Hundred are in for subtraction.”

“A properly raptured Christian ain't so easy to kill as all that; ask Caesar. And a hundred has a way of becoming a thousand once they're kindled.”

I couldn't argue with her arithmetic. I'd seen it put to the test in too many towns.

“What's Goodhue's draw? Bible slappers don't kick up much dust most places.”

“Most places ain't Frisco. Every few years the swells get their crops full of Barbary and they don't look too hard at whoever steps up to the mark. After it's done they call in the army, hang the loudest, and dress for dinner. In the old country, we lit a candle. Here they light Barbary.”

“Where does Goodhue hang his hat?”

She pursed her lips. She had something of the school matron in her. I remembered she'd been a governess in Boston before circumstances drove her West.

“He's got him a crib on Mission Street, courtesy of the God-fearing folk of San Francisco. It's a sin to own things if you can trade Paradise Everlasting for bed and board.” She mopped the bartop, sweeping away marble splinters along with the spills. “I wouldn't aim for his heart, if that's where you're bound. The ball would pass through empty air and hit a soul worth saving on the other side as like as not.”

“Don't believe what you read in the dime novels. I haven't shot anyone in weeks.”

She stopped mopping. Her face went blank. “Steer clear of the Major Doctor. He's Black Spy in a collar.”

“If he's human and speaks English, I've got nothing to lose by seeking him out.”

“That's your second mistake. Your first is wanting to seek him out to begin with. He was a barrel-maker before he took to the cloth, and age ain't weakened him nor piety gentled his nature. He's throwed more than one poor sinner down the steps of the East Street Mission just for questioning his interpretation of the Word.”

“I'll stay away from stairs.”

“You'd profit higher staying away from Goodhue.”

“Now I'm curious. I've never locked horns with the clergy.”

“What's the percentage? I thought it was the Sons of the Confederacy you was after.”

“I'm not forgetting that. I'm not forgetting I'm sworn to keep the peace, either.”

“You got to have peace to keep it.”

I smiled. I was feeling better by the minute, thanks to either the conversation or Nan Feeny's orange elixir. It put me in mind of the wisdom of a deputy marshal, dead these five years, who'd told me he couldn't understand people who never drank hard liquor, rising each morning knowing that's as good as they would feel all day long. He'd been stone-cold sober the day he was killed.

“Peace is just a time to reload.”

She swept up the ginger beer bottle and clunked it into the ash can behind the bar. “I'll see they cut that into your stone,” she said. “If I live through tomorrow night.”

 

The sailor threw down his cards, scraped back his chair, and wove an unsteady pattern toward the bar. I slid into his place.

Pinholster, stacking his chips, shook his head. “If you ever decide to change professions, I don't recommend mine. When people win, they crow at you, and when they lose, they bring your parentage into question. You never see them at their best.”

“I'm short of sympathy. You could have posed as a priest.”

“Even worse. I'd have to listen to them complain about their losses in confession. I assume, since you've cleaned me out of both cash and intelligence, that you come with news.”

“Sid the Spunk is dead.”

He shuffled the deck. “May I inquire as to your source?”

“Let's just say I got it from the mysterious East.”

“You surprise me. Celestials are renowned for their wisdom and their unwillingness to share it with the uncivilized West. Obfuscation is the one dialect common to all the provinces of China.”

“Corroboration is a dangerous business in Chinatown. I'm expected to take a hatchet for the United States of America, not for Allan Pinkerton.”

“It's Fat John, then?”

I said nothing. I'd forgotten how good he was at spotting tells.

He shrugged and set down the deck. “That's that, I suppose. My last assignment.”

“Don't look so funereal. Now you can go back to Chicago before all hell busts loose.”

“I'm haunted by the suspicion that Sid the Spunk will show up to see me off. I wouldn't care to go to my reward knowing I'd failed at the finish.”

“Your reward may come as early as tomorrow night.”

He scratched his ragged beard.

“I've never seen a lynching, though I've heard it described. I'd still take the rope over what's in store. Is it your conviction our yellow friend has told you the truth?”

I shook my head. “You didn't pay to see my hand.”

“Nevertheless, I believe you've shown it to me.” He picked up the cards. “One last friendly game? Just to determine which of us is the better gambler.”

“It wouldn't prove anything. You've got nothing to lose.”

“I believe the condemned is entitled to a boon.”

“How many last requests do you have coming?”

We played, however. The game ended in a draw.

Minutes later, standing on the boardwalk, I looked up at the slanted roof of the Slop Chest, my home away from the home I didn't have. A seagull, red-eyed and fat with carrion, was roosting on the peak of the stovepipe. That was an omen I scarcely needed on my way to see Owen Goodhue, founder of the First Eden Infantry, Army of the River Jordan.