Savage Girl (4 page)

A collective gasp from the audience in the gallery. The sight of a human being running about on all fours asserts an almost mystical sway upon the modern sensibility. It is difficult to describe. It possesses the ghostly power of a long-suppressed memory.

Another burst of inexplicable speed and she was gone. Fled beneath the rickety gallery. The crowd craned over the railing but could not see.

Down below, the Toad dragged away the dazed sheep.

The shepherd’s tale is doubted,
I said to myself.

“The shepherd’s tale is doubted,” Dr. Scott said, taking up his tale.
But other reports begin to come in, fantastic tales
 . . . “But other reports begin to come in, fantastic tales, a cowboy alone in the high chaparral, confronted by a witch, half human, half wolf, a sheepfold ripped through and human footprints found, a stakeholder’s wife, frightened mute, witness to a piglet-stealing creature she cannot even describe.”

The gallery was wholly silenced. Dr. Scott had his audience mesmerized. Even I felt swept up.

This is where I myself enter the story.
 . . .

“This is where I myself enter the story,” Dr. Scott said. “Hearing these reports, my curiosity was excited, my interest piqued as an esteemed natural scientist with several degrees from highly prestigious universities in the East.”

He bowed modestly.

“I organized a search party. By means of a simple subterfuge”—below, R. T. Flenniken tossed a raw beefsteak into the center of the barn floor—“I managed to take hold of the savage girl of Satan’s Vale.”

The figure crept from below the balcony, snatching up the piece of meat, and Scott pounced on her. She screamed like a monkey, biting, clawing and kicking.

It appeared a real battle, entirely unchoreographed. The two grappled and rolled about the floor, banging into the walls of the barn, shaking the whole structure.

We saw that Savage Girl had been equipped with a ridiculous extension of her hands, a set of six-inch talons that acted as claws. Ridiculous yes, to the rational mind, but in the dim murk of the barn, terrible and horrifying.

Another full-throated shriek, half sob, half howl.

Savage Girl straddled the supine form of her erstwhile captor. She raised the hand talons above her head. With a look of fury, she drove them downward.

“Watch out!” shouted one of the spectators.

Scott rolled to one side, and the claws barely missed him but embedded themselves instead in the dirt of the floor. Thus immobilized, Savage Girl was easy prey for the triumphant Dr. Calef Scott. He roped her with a lariat and hog-tied her limbs, capturing the creature who only moments before had been on the verge of murdering him.

The crowd erupted with hoots, catcalls and applause.

Dr. Scott bounced to his feet. “Gentlemen!” he called out, forgetting, for the moment, my mother in the gallery. “I give you the Savage Girl of Satan’s Vale!”

Clapping, shouting, stomping, the audience members sought to collapse the very balcony upon which they stood.

Below, Savage Girl revealed.

Bound, she remained ungagged and snarled pathetically. The thin muslin garb she wore might as well have been transparent. The stimulating display continued as Dr. Scott trod victoriously in a circle around her, the dominant, strutting male who had tamed the rebellious female.

He peeled off her hand scissors and tossed them dismissively aside.

From my post I could gaze directly down at her. Flashing amber eyes. Jet-black, thickly matted hair, tangled to the degree it resembled a swatch of carpet, not locks, more like a mane. I had expected her to be filthy, yet instead she gave off an air of catlike cleanliness.

She was nothing but a child. Seeing her thus a second time, I felt the hand of pity brush against my heart. It passed in a moment. In that moment, though, I swore she looked directly up at me. Not supplicating. Not pleading.

Challenging.

With Savage Girl’s capture, some of the vitality went out of the presentation. But Dr. Scott was not finished.

“By painstaking degree I have pieced together the story of this low creature, the Savage Girl. For years she had lived alone in the wilderness, accompanied only occasionally by her pack of lobos. How did she survive our terrible winters? She found a cave, and within that cave she found a hot springs.”

Dr. Scott knelt down and began to untie his captive.

Shouts of “No! No!” came from the audience. The spectators feared for his safety.

“And with that knowledge I found the key to pacify my wild quarry. Because you see, gentlemen—and if there are those among you affronted by female nudity, avert your eyes—yes, gentlemen, there is nothing Savage Girl enjoys more”—pausing for effect—“than to take a bath.”

Wild cheers, whistles, throaty, guttural catcalls.

“She became accustomed to daily, sometimes hourly, lavations in her cavern redoubt. Would you wish to witness her tamed and domesticated, no longer savage but rendered meek and unresisting by her enthusiasm for hydrotherapy?”

“Yes! Yes!” cried the spectators.

“Show me!” Scott roared. “How strong is your desire? Is it a weak thing? Demonstrate your approval!”

They showered coins down upon him.

The figure of R. T. Flenniken appeared below to erect a chaste curtain in front of the tub.

Audience members booed and hissed this process. They chucked projectiles at the offending factotum, balled-up handkerchiefs, wads of tobacco, spent bullet cartridges. The Toad endured the rain of scorn.

But I, positioned at the far corner of the balcony, possessed a secret view. The erected curtain failed to extend wholly across the tub. For the second time in a day, I caught a fleeting glimpse of an unclothed Savage Girl as she stepped daintily into the bath.

A breast as white as any moon
 . . .

The Toad took away the curtain. The spectacle of her nakedness was somewhat obscured by the water and steam, just enough to further tantalize the male gaze. Only her shoulders showed.

Then, and this was perhaps the most bizarre element to the show, Flenniken inserted a pole into a pair of U-shaped metal clamps affixed to the side of the tub. Setting his feeble-looking shoulders to the pole, he managed to turn the tub, with Savage Girl in it. The bath apparently rested on some hidden roller apparatus, exhibiting all aspects to the spectators above.

In his action turning the tub, the Toad resembled a trudging mule, in harness on a circular track, powering a pump, perhaps, or grinding meal. He gazed worshipfully up at the girl as he plodded round and round, round and round.

But none of us upstairs marked the Toad at all. We were, to a man, transfixed. Peering down, praying for the steam to lift, the water to part as Moses did the Red Sea.

“See her bathing there,” Dr. Scott intoned, “her naked shoulders, a breast as white as any moon. . . .”

In a splendid touch, Savage Girl fished a hand mirror from beneath the surface of the water in the tub, gazing at her own face as she turned round and round, round and round.

•   •   •

You possess a rather remarkable memory, says my lawyer, Mr. Howe. And we can see where this is going. An incredible tale, wouldn’t you say, Hummel?

Hummel coughs.

But it is daylight already, Howe says, we have a long way to go, and I am ravenous.

He summons a police officer and orders up the most enormous breakfast I have ever seen a human being tuck into, delivered there to him in the prison director’s office—table, plate, silverware and all brought in from Howe’s second home, Delmonico’s restaurant.

Caviar and oysters, shirred eggs, pancakes, a pair of immense pork chops, applesauce, a whole trout, cornbread, scalloped potatoes, hominy, muffins and a sirloin. Pots of coffee and a gallon of orange juice to wash it down.

A condemned man might lose his appetite, forgoing, out of terror, a last meal before hanging, but if he retains counsel, he can count on his hungry attorney to take up the slack.

Continue, Howe says, his mouth full. Go ahead, young Hugo.

3

“His show,” Freddy said. “The little drama Dr. Scott plays out. He has forgotten the third act. The resolution.”

Breakfast the next morning. My mother wasn’t down yet. The dining hall of the International Hotel had nearly filled when I stepped in at eight o’clock to meet my father. I took the “rising room” elevator down from the sixth floor, an impressive experience despite its resemblance to the Elephant of the previous evening.

I had slept only fitfully. Wolves prowled my dreams.

We used the club dining room on the mezzanine, white tablecloths, less public than the busy restaurant off the lobby down below. As an alternative, we took meals privately in our rooms.

In the presence of wealth, every man transforms into a tout. A public appearance by my father, widely recognizable in town, often brought out hordes of faceless supplicants, each proposing some transfer of funds from his pockets to theirs. Pity the miseries of the rich.

The very air of the Comstock provoked money hunger. Even at eight in the morning, we could hear the steam whistles and the brisance of nitro from out in the hills, the stamp of the presses from the mills.

“A third act. Scott has the protasis, the epitasis, but he lacks the catastrophe. Don’t you think?” Freddy asked, helping himself to fried potatoes.

Aristotle. Greek drama.

“A third act. How would you say it goes?” I asked.

“Well, it’s very clear, isn’t it?” He peeled off a slice from his rasher of bacon.

“Is it?”

“She completes her bath.”

Me, chewing. “Yes.”

“Dresses. End of epitasis.”

“All right.” Swallowing toast.

“Am I embarrassing you?”

“No.” A gulp of coffee.

“You look a little flushed,” my father said. “Pink about the ears.”

“That’s just the java,” I said. He enjoyed teasing me. “And then?”

And then Tom Colfax entered to interrupt us, accompanied by Michael Hart-Bentley, another of my father’s business intimates, a few steps up the ladder from Tom. We were joined in quick order by the silver magnates Oliver Stringfist, Stanley Beales and Dixon Kelly. Suddenly I found myself at the richest table in the room.

The servers arrived instantly, toting well-singed beefsteak, pickled salmon, mutton pie and heaps more fried potatoes. Two immense steaming pots of coffee.

I was boxed in. The magnates seated themselves in a semicircle beside my father, leaving me alone on the side of the table against the window.

I said, “I’m sorry, gentlemen, I rather feel in this arrangement as though I am facing a panel of jurists.”

Hart-Bentley said, “Why, have you done something that requires judgment?”

The fabled Ollie Stringfist had a wealth of sensational whiskers, which he wore parted and tied snugly under his chin. “What do you think of our Virginia, my boy?” he asked.

“A Babel of noise and a Cologne of stinks.”

Stringfist laughed. “It is at that.”

“You are at school,” accused Dix Kelly, the only one of them who did not wear a waistcoat, a fob and a tie.

“Yes, Mr. Kelly.” It is indicative of our set that I did not need to mention which college. Harvard was assumed.

“Never saw the use of it myself,” said Stringfist. He used his belly as a table for his coffee cup.

Stan Beales waved his arm vaguely at the mountain that dominated the town. “Out here,” he said, tearing a biscuit in two and swallowing half of it. “Greatest university in the known world. There’s profit to be made, son, profit like lightning.”

“Medicine, is it, that what you’re studying?” Stringfist said. “Doctors, a dose of humbug and a great big bill.”

I was beginning to get the drift. These millionaires had been summoned not for business but for a Stern Talk with the Young Delegate Boy. Freddy’s friends glared at me but gazed at him with fond affection. And why shouldn’t they? He had helped to enrich them all. Men love you if you make yourself a benefit to them.

“Marvelous time in the Comstock,” said Hart-Bentley. He spoke in a clipped, hurried manner. “New opportunities every day. Deep, deep, how we dig now. The deeper, the higher our returns. Big Bonanza discovered in ’73. We all learned, dig deep, manipulate the soil, then comes a sulfuret. Not magic, no, science. Your father knows about that. Best science mind of his generation. Only a chemical, silver chloride, though it drives men to lunacy.”

“We tore this town out of the wild,” said Stringfist, the whisker knot bobbing below his chin. “Wasn’t so long ago that men bunked in shelters made of blankets or potato sacks or old shirts. That’s the way it was.”

What guff. I happened to know that Oliver Stringfist hired other men to do his tearing of towns out of the wild. He had never slept under a potato sack in his life, or even ridden down in the Elephant, being afflicted with the same kind of coffin panic as I was.

A second course materialized. Not only were there griddle cakes and syrup, we had, somehow, chervil and lettuce salad. And boiled eggs—I had a doleful thought they might have been cooked down in the Brilliant Mine.

I found myself distracted by the entry into the clubroom of a tall, rangy fellow, his face weathered to a sheen of high-polished leather.

A real western character,
the easterner in me thought instantly. A lawman, or a desperado. No one wore a hat in the dining room except for him, and his white-gray Stetson Boss was a monument to all
headgear. The red of his shirt blended with the red of his bandanna and the red of his sunburn.

As he progressed across the room, his boot spurs dragged over the wooden floor, clanking rhythmically. He was one of those men who managed to appear even bigger than he was. He took in everyone, and it seemed he had a special, hard look reserved just for me. I felt a slight chill.

“Now, young Delegate here,” I heard Stringfist say, “we could take him in hand, teach him the business from the ground down. Eh, fellows? From the ground down?”

General laughter. Jokes are much funnier, I’ve noticed, if the teller has a few million in the bank.

The lawman-desperado stopped at the tableside of a heavyset, dark-blond man with a full beard and mustache, seated at the opposite end of the room from us.

“The crucial thing now is milling,” Hart-Bentley said. “Roasting the ores brings in five thousand dollars a ton. Hear the stamps outside? That’s the tattoo of money.”

Something was happening across the room. The blond man attempted to rise, and the lawman shoved him back into his seat. Their raised voices were audible from our table, but I couldn’t quite make out what was being said.

A group of gentlemen tourists entered the clubroom, admiring the sizable aquarium beside the doorway.

A server came across to us with a plate of oranges.

The Comstock booster committee still talked at me, oblivious. Someone said, “Twenty-five thousand souls in the Washoe, and more coming every day.”

The tall, weathered gent in the spurs drew his six-gun from its holster and shot the blond man in the chest. The victim slumped backward in his chair, a scarlet stain broadening on the white silk brocade of his vest, a gasping, clenched look on his face.

The stain, I remember as my first thought at the time, was surprisingly small.

“We have more gas lamps in this town,” Stringfist said, “than in Main Line Philadelphia.”

•   •   •

The event, Freddy told me later, should best be characterized as a homicide, not a murder.

“A finding of murder can only be determined in a court of law, by a jury,” he said. We had left the International Hotel and proceeded over to “A” Street. “‘Homicide’ is the more neutral term.”

All right. A homicide. Victim, a freight-service owner named Hank Monk. Shooter, a former lawman (my guess had been right) from Reno named Butler Fince. Affirmed by all at the scene to be “a rough customer.” So perhaps lawman-desperado had indeed been an accurate assessment.

I was surprised by the casual reception the killing had received. The diners, including the men with my father and me, appeared unperturbed. Butler Fince was allowed egress from the premises without hindrance. The tourists at the aquarium scattered, but table service proceeded uninterrupted. Crowds of men poured up from the first-floor dining hall to gawk, though they dispersed when the body of Hank Monk was taken away.

The consensus seemed to be that this sort of thing was so very ordinary. Folks evinced a wondering pride as they quoted the “murder-a-day” statistic. Bad men made their reputations on the number of good men they had killed.

The particulars of the murder—who shot whom, what it was all about—ran like lightning around the clubroom within minutes of the shooting itself.

“Fince maintained that Monk had killed his brother,” Tom Colfax said, having garnered the intelligence from the waiters, reporting back a little too breathlessly for the phlegmatic magnates around our table, who did not enjoy having their morning cigars disturbed.

I could not take the shooting with the same level of equanimity as the others. I had seen animals die, but never a human being.

As an anatomy student, I had, in the previous year, dealt with human cadavers on the dissecting table. “The breathless dead,” as Homer calls them. At times I wondered at my ability to tolerate my future career. Even with a hunted whitetail, shot in the wilds of the
Adirondacks, say, the moment of passing from life into death seemed to me a gut-wrenching, incredible, numinous event.

Animated flesh, then, abruptly, clay.

Walking south, Father and I passed Costello’s Saloon and Shooting Gallery, quiet at this time in the morning, and turned in to the little alleyway that led to Dr. Scott’s barn.

Freddy posed a familiar question. Why did I think he and my mother were so interested in instances of the feral-child phenomenon? They previously journeyed, just a few years before, to France, in order to investigate the home ground of Marie-Angélique Memmie Le Blanc, 1731’s Wild Girl of Songi, as well as that of Victor of Aveyron, the celebrated wild boy of 1800.

Freddy felt himself fascinated to the degree that he bought at high expense a few tooth relics dating from the Songi girl, which had fallen out of her mouth when she left the forest and began to eat a European diet. Eighteenth-century thinkers worried over the question of whether wild children could be said to have a soul. They seemed to exist in a no-man’s-land, neither rational being nor instinctual animal.

I knew, or thought I knew, why such bizarre creatures fascinated my parents. Freddy occupied himself as an independent natural scientist—independent, that is, not associated with any university or institute. The question roiling the world was, of course, Darwin’s idea of natural selection. His book threw a monkey wrench into everyone’s works.

Freddy became an instant proponent.

The wild child is a blank slate. He (or she) is perfect for investigations of whether our physical inheritance influences us more than do the circumstances of our raising, or whether it might be the other way around. Nature or nurture? Can a proper, caring environment make a silk purse of a sow’s ear, in other words, or must that ear remain what its nature made it, the auricular flap of a swine?

Freddy and Anna Maria always hoped to acquire a feral child of their own, which they planned to include in their household, somewhat like King George I’s keeping a court pet, Peter the Wild Boy.

Or perhaps it was more than that. My father saw himself turning
science on its head with his research. He collected people. The naturalist John Burroughs studied beetles. Darwin himself did barnacles. Friedrich-August-Heinrich Delegate, on the other hand, would be satisfied with nothing less than the hominid in whole.

He collected within his net Tu-Li and the Zuni berdache, both of them specimens prized for their exotic bearing, from whom he hoped to learn the secrets of the self. And those two were not the first, only the most recent.

My mother had a more personal interest in the affair, seeking a surrogate replacement for my late sister, a treasured daughter lost in toddlerhood.

“They’re always fakes,” Freddy said as we approached the barn at the end of the little alley. “Any wild child we have ever been presented with has always proved out totally bogus. This one here, for example. We will walk in and catch the girl reading her Bible.”