Port Hazard (5 page)

The Slop Chest—
this on the basis of the driver's declaration, since there was no sign to identify it—looked at first as if it had floated in on a devastating flood, and settled on its present foundation when the waters receded. It was built to resemble an oversize flatboat, with a cabin on the deck and part of the railing removed for visitors to enter by way of three warped steps and a door that might have been cut out of the side with a bucksaw for all the attention that had been paid to plumbs and levels, and hung with leather hinges. What appeared at first to have been a hit-or-miss whitewashing of the boards turned out on examination to be a couple of decades' worth of sea salt, washed up on deck during storms and allowed to dry into a crust as hard as limestone; seasons of rain had washed some of it onto the strip of bare earth that separated the structure from the boardwalk, forever preventing the growth of so much as a single blade of grass. A dilapidated rocking chair and glider occupied the deck—I suppose it could be called a front porch—and these, together with nearly every square inch of the floor, were covered with bodies flung about in loose-rag positions that suggested either a massacre or a bacchanal of ancient Greek proportions. These men were clad in peacoats, striped jerseys, and baggy canvas trousers, sailors' garb. Their snores were loud enough to rock the old boat on its moorings.

“Looks like the Little Big Horn,” said Beecher.

“Or Hampton Roads,” I said. “Who's minding the ships in the harbor?”

“Twenty-five cents,” said the driver.

I paid him. He stuck the coin between his teeth and gave the reins a flip. I stepped back just in time to save my toes.

Beecher slung his duffel over his left shoulder, unbuttoned his shirt to clear the path to the Le Mat under his belt, and we climbed the steps.

The interior was a saloon, better appointed than the outside would indicate. There were a couple of gaming tables covered in green baize, an iron chandelier suspended from the ceiling, beneath which a mound of pale wax from the dripping candles had begun to grow into a stalagmite on the floor, and a carved mahogany bar with a pink marble top. Behind it, above the bottles aligned on a back bar nearly as ornate, hung a canvas in a gilt frame as wide as a fainting-couch, upon which sprawled at full length a hideously fat woman amateurishly executed in thick paint. It was the lewdest thing I'd seen outside of the upstairs room of a brothel, and wouldn't have existed half an hour in any public establishment on the frontier before the decency squads poured in with their axes and wooden truncheons.

Beecher stared at the painting. “Man must of used up every drop of pink in town.”

The room wasn't as crowded as I'd expected on the evidence of the front porch. A blue-chinned tinhorn in a frayed cutaway and dirty top hat was dealing himself a hand of Patience at one of the tables and three men, two of them dressed as sailors, the third in a faded wool shirt and filthy overalls worn nearly through at the knees—a miner's kit—leaned on the bar, nursing glasses of beer and conversing not at all. The hour was too early for celebration and too close to midday for the gainfully employed. It was a depressing time to drink. Gloom hung overhead like the chandelier, dripping dejection into a sullen mound.

There was no sunshine to be had from the bartender, an old salt who at one time might have been cheerfully fat, but whom life had rendered down until the gray skin hung in sheets from his cheekbones and bare forearms, blue as old china with aging tattoos of indeterminate character. His bald head was as white as polished bone above the line where a hat protected it from the sun when he went outside; the first indication I'd seen that the city was not perpetually wrapped in smutty fog. I bought two beers, which he poured from a tap covered with green mold, and asked if Nan Feeny was on the premises.

“Who for, you or your man? She don't favor pumpernickel.”

Beecher clapped the Le Mat on the bartop, which at close range was far from pristine. The marble was mottled all about with odd saucer-shaped depressions with cracks radiating out from the centers. I couldn't decide what could have caused them. “Next one calls me his man won't be one much longer,” he told the bartender.

The old sailor looked at the pistol as if it were a fresh spill. “Hodge.”

He barely raised his voice. I was still puzzling out where this latest new word belonged in the regional lexicon when a section of the back bar swung away from the wall and a dwarf entered the room through the opening.

He impressed me as a dwarf. From his beltline to his bowler-topped head he was normal size, built thick as a prizefighter through the chest and shoulders, his biceps straining the sleeves of his yellow-and-black-striped sailor's jersey. From the waist down, he was no larger than a six-year-old boy, and one stricken with rickets into the bargain. He paused this side of the opening, then came forward, swaying from side to side on shriveled bowlegs draped in black broadcloth. His feet kept going when he reached the bar, pumping him up until he was facing Beecher at eye-level. I went up on the balls of my feet and spotted the three-foot ladder nailed inside the bar. His face was unlined, late twenties at the oldest, with a closely trimmed black beard covering the lower half, grown probably to prevent strangers from mistaking him for a child.

An explosion shook the bar, slopping beer over the rims of the glasses perched on it and draining a trickle of plaster from the ceiling. Beecher and I jumped; the other patrons at the bar didn't stir, except to lean on one elbow to watch a show they'd seen before. I looked down and saw a fresh depression in the marble. It was occupied by a black-enameled iron sphere half again the size of a billiard ball, attached by six inches of chain to a ring poking out of the little man's right sleeve. There was no hand there. With a practiced gesture he'd swung the ball in a short arc ending in a loud bang when it struck the bar, just short of crushing Beecher's hand where it rested next to the Le Mat.

“No firearms in the Slop Chest, mate.” He had a broad cockney accent, but his voice was low and silken, unlike the bray of a small man with something to prove. He didn't need it as long as he had that ball and chain. “Either check 'em here or leave 'em home.”

The bartender scowled at the new dent. “Damn it, Hodge, I told you before I'm responsible for this bar. Nan said she'd dock me next time.”

“I'll stake the whole bloody whack. A bar oughtn't be marble to start. It stains like cotton drawers. What's it to be, mate?” He kept his eyes on Beecher. “Lay up the snapper or take one in the brain-box?” He twirled his wrist. The ball made a shallow orbit and landed where it had started. Slivers of marble jumped up and skittered across the bar.

“Jesus, Hodge!” the bartender complained.

Very slowly, Beecher slid his hand forward and nudged the revolver's handle inside the little man's reach. Hodge scooped it up with his good right hand and thrust it toward the bartender, who took it and placed it on a high back shelf lined with back-straps of every make and model. There were more confiscated weapons there than patrons in the saloon; evidence that the place indeed took on boarders. Hodge's gaze slid my way. “What's your story, mate? Try me on?”

Using two fingers I drew the star from my shirt pocket and laid it on the bar. He barely glanced at it.

“Tin's cheap,” he said. “What else you got?”

I took out the telegram and spread it on the bar. The edges were tattering. I was considering having it framed and hanging it around my neck. Beecher probably wouldn't volunteer for that.

“What's it say, Billy?”

The bartender read aloud, stumbling over “officially” and “consideration.” It might have been signed by the man who emptied the spitoons for all the impression Arthur's name seemed to make on either of them.

“Paper's cheaper.” Hodge looked patient.

I slid the Deane-Adams out of its holster and held it toward him butt-first.

“On the bar. I heard about the border roll in Brisbane.”

I laid it down, retrieved the star and the telegram, and pocketed them. He picked up the revolver, thumbed aside the loading gate, and rotated the cylinder to inspect the chambers, all one-handed. “English piece. Limeys transported me old man's old man for picking an earl's pocket, but I ain't one to stroke a grudge. What's a Yank want with a barking-iron made in Blighty?”

“I don't care for Colts. The five-shot's lighter and packs the same fire power.”

“What happens when you face six men?”

“I run.”

He grinned in his beard. His teeth looked too white and even to have grown inside his mouth. I asked him if he lost his hand in Australia.

“Coming over. Worked my way across. Mainsail bust loose while I was striking it and took me rammer with it. Had me a regular hook till I rolled over on it in me doss and near crushed the old cobblers. Got a smithy on Battle Row to run me up this rig. I count me rise in the world from that day. You don't need to be as tall as Jack's hat when you got four pounds of Michigan iron slang off your fam.”

“How do you sleep?” Beecher asked.

“Like a rum angel, cock's-crow to day's arse.”

I said, “Sorry we got you out of bed. We need a couple of rooms. A policeman at the train station told us to ask for Nan Feeny.”

His porcelains gleamed. “Best be mum about that with Nan. She wouldn't appreciate a fly-cop giving her the oak.”

“Does anyone in this town speak American?” I asked.

“Nan's your mollisher. She was a governess in Boston till they caught her up to her petticoats in the master of the house. He's still rhino fat up there on Beacon Hill, but the booly-dogs stunned her right out of her regulars and she took it on the rods. She's fly to the patter when it suits.”

Now he was just showing off. “You're the bouncer here?”

“Keeper of the keys, and Nan Feeny's knees. Axel Hodge is the chant, and Black-Spy take the cove says it ain't. You're this bloke Murdock?”

“Page Murdock.”

“Horseshit,” said Billy the bartender. He was the most articulate man in the place.

Hodge's face was an opaque sheet. “Well, you may be flush gage out in country, but here you're just herring. Frisco's a bufe what eats anything.”

I'd had my colorful fill of Axel Hodge. I nudged Beecher's foot with my boot, alerting him, then took hold of the iron ball where it rested on the bar and jerked it across and over the lip of the marble on my side. Hodge's arm came with it. His chin hit the bar with a snap that was going to send him back to his dentist for adjustments. Billy reacted, reaching under his side of the bar for whatever weapon waited there, but before he could straighten up, Beecher wrenched the Deane-Adams out of Hodge's startled grip, rolled back the hammer with a gesture that told me he'd been practicing with the Le Mat while I wasn't looking, and took aim at the spot where the old sailor's eyebrows met above the bridge of his nose.

The other patrons took their elbows off the bar and slid out of ricochet range, but not so far away they wouldn't be able to witness what happened next. This was something new at the Slop Chest, worth repeating when they were back at sea and the tall tales had spun themselves out.

Hodge tried to pull away, but I leaned my hip against the iron ball, pinning it against the mahogany on my side. He couldn't get leverage with his short legs.

“I was told folks are friendly in California,” I said. “If this is how you treat all your customers, I'm not surprised they'd rather draw flies on the front porch than come in and wet their whiskers.”

The air stirred. Weatherbeaten boards moaned and shifted, leather scraped wood, a dozen voices howled in protest. In a small advertising mirror tilted on one of the shelves behind the bar, I saw sunburned, unshaven faces plastered against the windows and jammed together between the doorjambs leading to the front porch. I thought at first the sleeping sailors had been roused at last by the commotion inside. Then the bodies in the doorway separated as if someone had pried them apart with a pinch-bar and ten yards of taffeta and silk petticoat rustled in through the space, wrapped around six feet of female.

Movement rippled through the crowd, and caps and hats came off heads that had been breeding lice in darkness for weeks. That was impressive.

“What's the row, Hodge?” the woman said. “I could hear you punching holes in my bar all the way from Pacific.”

“Cly your daddles, Nan. It's all plummy.” With his chin nailed to the bartop, the rest of Hodge's hard-hatted head had to move up and down to get the words out.

Nan Feeny—what I could see of her while dividing my concentration among Hodge, Billy, and the woman's reflection in the mirror—had a handsome head on a long neck with a choker, topped by an elaborate pile of hair—startlingly white, against a face that was still too young to need as much paint as had been applied to it.

“Plummy as a bag of nails,” she observed, and unslung a pepperbox pistol from the reticule she carried.

“Red lady,” muttered the tinhorn seated at the table, laying the queen of diamonds on the king of clubs.