Savage Girl (6 page)

“Colm Cullen?” Freddy asked.

“What do you think would be a fair price to hire him?”

We were at the barn by then, where inside the same trio of blackguards greeted us, Woodworth, the Sage Hen, the oleaginous Scott himself.

“Delegate!” Scott called out. “I have good news.”

He thrust himself forward and grabbed my father’s hand.

I looked below, locating Savage Girl in the gloom. She slept, or appeared to sleep, curled up like a tabby in a corner next to her cage, watched over by an equally sleepy Toad.

“Very good news,” Dr. Scott repeated. “The three principals here—myself, my friend Jacob Woodworth, and the Sage Hen—you
may congratulate us on our hard work, we have agreed upon a proper level of remuneration.”

“Ah,” Freddy said. “I thought we had determined that formerly.”

“Changed. Negated! Those negotiations we cancel, withdraw, obviate and declare void. Instead of an outright sale, and after laborious give-and-take between the three of us that became quite heated at times—”

“You must grasp the degree of our sacrifice, losing the dear creature,” interjected the Sage Hen.

“We have come to a magnificent compromise,” Scott announced, sounding as though he had reconciled God and Lucifer. “It involves, and I know you will be as excited by this concept as we are, a lease arrangement rather than a complete transfer of ownership.”

“See, we would be losing her forever if we didn’t keep a hold of her somehow,” Jake Woodworth put in.

“That is correct,” Dr. Scott said. “I must say it was the Sage Hen who broke the jam. It is she for whom we must all be grateful.”

“Por nada,”
said the Sage Hen.

Scott raised himself on his tiptoes in a show of ecstasy. “A woman of most surprising capabilities, I have to say, as is evident by her multilingual phraseology.”

“So . . .” my father said. “One thousand, or was it two when we broke off yesterday?”

“Oh, no, no, these new terms require a complete reorganization of payment. We have mutually agreed upon a sum of five thousand dollars for a yearlong indenture.”

“Six months,” said the Sage Hen and Woodworth simultaneously.

“Yes, yes, I apologize, we went back and forth on this also, and such a flurry of numbers and terms always work to dizzy me. The contract is for five thousand dollars for six months, such contract renewed at end of term by mutual agreement of the parties, with a concomitant adjustment in payment.”

“Upwards,” said the Sage Hen. “Of course.”

“Of course,” my father echoed.

On the barn floor, R. T. Flenniken had dropped his somnolent posture and stood directly below us, staring up at the group on the balcony.

“I have taken the liberty of employing my attorney”—Scott snapped his fingers imperiously, summoning an officious little man in a gray frock coat from the shadows at the end of the gallery—“Rodney Estes, to draw up a contract, embedding said terms within legalistic constructs.”

“Rodney Estes, Esquire,” the gray frock coat said, pushing forward a sheaf of papers.

Scott said, “I would rather this be done on a handshake, but the Sage Hen insisted we formalize—”

“May I make a counteroffer?” my father said, interrupting.

“It will not be heard, sir!” Scott said shrilly. “It will not be heard!”

Flenniken had begun making small sounds of distress down below, pulling at his sparse, dirt-colored hair and walking in circles, muttering to himself.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry for my tone,” Dr. Scott said to Freddy, regaining his composure. “If you knew what an arduous process it was to arrive at this agreement, you would not ask, sir, you would instead express your eternal thanks for the generosity of the Sage Hen here, and of Woodworth.”

He abruptly left us, strode to the balcony railing, and screamed, “R.T., will you please strangle yourself!”

I looked at my father, feeling sorry for him. It appeared as though they had him boxed in.

Scott returned, smoothing his hair and face.

Freddy said, addressing the whole group, “Begging your pardon for any discomfiture it might cause, but I would like to express an answering offer to you all.”

His bearing silenced them. My father could be almost regal sometimes.

The trio of handlers, a quartet now with the addition of Estes, waited on him, expectant.

“My offer is . . . nothing.”

They had leaned forward a few inches to hear him, and now they fell back as a group, nonplussed.

“Nothing,” Scott said softly.

“Not a penny,” Freddy said.

Scott managed to conquer his surprise by going into high dudgeon. “An outrage, sir, you waste our time, we come to you in good faith,” he said, sputtering out the phrases.

“I tol’ you we was pushing him too far!” Jake Woodworth shouted.

Scott was not quite through working himself into a paroxysm of wounded indignation. “That is all, Mr. Delegate, we do not have to endure your abuse. Leave this place at once.”

“I will, but I will take Savage Girl with me.”

New squeals of rage from the quartet. “You shall not, Delegate, you shall not! Mr. Woodworth, I must tell you, is an expert in all forms of fisticuffs, a man mountain who flattened the Truckee Giant with a single blow!”

“You will meet me in court!” shrieked Estes, stepping on Scott’s last words.

“Thief! Thief!” called out the Sage Hen, as though raising an alarm.

Freddy merely turned away from them, opened the door, and summoned in from the alleyway outside Colm Cullen and the stranger in the derby hat.

“Gentlemen, the Sage Hen,” he said, “this is Marshal Jack Pite, duly empowered authority of the Second Judicial District, State of Nevada. He is here to remind you, although it really does not need to be said, that to hold human beings in any form of peonage, slavery or illegal indenture, or in any way against their will, can under the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution draw federal felony charges down upon the perpetrator.”

Pite did not look big, but he had an air of calm authority to him. And Cullen appeared able to handle anything that might be put forth by the eighty-year-old, white-haired man-mountain vanquisher of the Truckee Giant.

Hurrah! I thought. Lincoln freed the slaves!

Many things happened at once.

“I tol’ you, I tol’ you and tol’ you!” Woodworth shouted.

The Sage Hen withdrew an evil-looking twin-barreled derringer from her person and pointed it at Marshal Pite.

My father leaned over the railing and summoned Savage Girl. As if under the spell of a djinn, she rose immediately and padded across the barn.

The Toad tried to block her, but with an effortless fake move Savage Girl made him trip over himself and fall. She walked around the man and went below the balcony to appear, only a second later, at the top of a ladder at the far end of the gallery.

Marshal Pite stepped over to the Sage Hen and took the derringer from her. Somehow frozen by his gaze, she did not resist. He tossed the little pistol back over his shoulder, and it clattered to the barn floor behind him.

“I’ve got a bigger one,” he said, extracting an enormous Colt from beneath his suit jacket.

And that was that.

I had never been so proud of my father. Foxing the con artist and endorsing the rights of man in the bargain. Life, liberty and the pursuit of et cetera.

Freddy threw open the door to the alley and motioned Savage Girl to accompany him outside, as if into the heady atmosphere of freedom.

She hesitated.

Did she not want to go? Was she terrified of Scott? Or was the responsibility of independence too much for her?

Colm Cullen and Jack Pite had the quartet of her former masters backed off down the gallery from the rest of us. The marshal holstered his sidearm in a casual way that I could never have imitated had I worked for years at practicing it.

Savage Girl suddenly slid over the balcony rail, shinnied down one of the support pillars as if it were a sidewalk she were walking along, crossed to the enormous bathtub and reached inside.

The hand mirror. Her arm streaming with water, she retrieved it, reversed her course up the ladder and headed through the door beside my father.

Mewling out the mournful toad cry of his species, R. T. Flenniken emerged from the dark end of the balcony and charged toward Freddy.

“You shan’t have her!” he cried. “She’s mine!”

Marshal Pite put him low with a single fist blow to the temple, and the five of us—Colm, the lawman, myself, my father and Savage Girl—stepped out of the sideshow barn into the alleyway, trusting never to return.

5

We lost her.

My parents had made ready for a fast getaway. At the end of the alley, Anna Maria waited in a closed coach driven by a swarthy
pistolero
with a reckless gleam in his eye.

Savage Girl came willingly. We piled in, Freddy handing off his new protégée to Anna Maria, then climbing inside himself with me behind. Colm Cullen mounted up to sit beside the driver in the cab.

Leaving Marshal Pite to guard the alley’s entrance onto “A” Street and cut off all pursuit, we jolted away in haste.

It was the closest I had ever been to Savage Girl, and it allowed me the opportunity to examine her closely. She sat hunched at our feet, seats and benches and erect posture seemingly foreign to her.

Again I was impressed by her slightness. She looked waiflike, or rather urchinish. I had the uncanny sense that we, as a family, had acquired a new pet. She smelled rather nice, though, not like a dog. Her remarkable hazel eyes, the left one marked by a tiny rectangular fleck of black.

I wanted her to display excitement, pleasure, a wild gratitude, but she embodied none of those emotions. She looked not at us but mainly at the floor of the coach. She reminded me of the shyness displayed by the local Paiute Indians I had met in the Washoe. I always got the sense they were embarrassed for me. As if I were behaving in a mawkish or inappropriate manner.

The female at my feet seemed vital enough. Savage Girl’s diminutive size appeared to come from having all excess somehow burned away, so what remained was a skeletal rigor. I remember thinking that
I would not like to face off with her in a wrestling match. Too much caged energy.

“Dear one,” Anna Maria said, reaching out. Savage Girl did not react to her touch. But at least, I thought, she did not snarl and bite off one of my mother’s fingers.

“How old do you think she is?” Anna Maria said.

Neither my father nor I answered, lost in contemplation of the being we had suddenly invited into our lives. Creature or beast or human or ghost, we didn’t know. Her presence filled the coach with a palpable sense of oddity.

“Say some Comanche to her,” I urged.

“Is she a Comanche child, then?” Anna Maria asked.

My father remained silent, fidgeting with his hands, inscrutable. Anna began to pet Savage Girl’s black, tangled mane.

“Virginia,” she said. “That will be her name.”

Freddy and I both knew what that meant. I had lost my little sister to scarlet fever, when I was seven and she four, our darling, named Virginia, after, in fact, Virginia City, where my father’s mines produced millions a year. We had all doted on her and felt the deep wound of her death. She had been replaced, two years later, by my brother, Nicholas, but it was not the same.

A hole in the human heart,
my mother had said, referring to the gulf that gold was meant to fill. But Anna Maria possessed an inner void of her own, created by the death of my sister and bored deep by longing.

Thus I suddenly understood my father’s need to bring Savage Girl with us, not out of any special idea to study her as a feral child—because he believed, at that point in time, that she was a fraud—but quietly to put her forward as some sort of replacement for my lost sister.

Virginia, my mother wanted to call her. The transubstantiation of this child for the one vanished into death had already commenced. Savage Girl would be around the same age as my late sibling, had little Virginia lived.

My father poked the trap window open to the driver. “Stop at the International,” he said, “and then we go on to the train.”

Why did we make that fateful detour to our hotel? My father never
explained. Halting in front of the busy hostelry, he leaped out and vanished within. My mother made a move to leave the coach also, and there was a moment of confusion.

I definitely did not want to be alone with Savage Girl, and neither did I think she should be left without a watchful eye trained upon her. Climbing out to accompany my mother, I thought to ask Colm Cullen to transfer himself from the driver’s bench to a post inside the coach.

Doing so, I left her alone but for an instant. When Colm moved past me, he suddenly stopped. “Where is she?”

Startled, I looked back. The coach’s interior was empty.

“Mother,” I said sharply.

We had her, and then we lost her.

On the seat, left behind when she vanished, her precious hand mirror.

“Oh, no,” groaned Anna Maria.

I was forlorn after our panicked search turned up nothing, not from a sense of losing Savage Girl herself but because I knew that her disappearance would disappoint my mother.

I had failed my parents once more. In a cruel replay of her earlier grief, Anna Maria would see an already beloved daughter taken from her.

We reunited with Freddy. Colm and I scanned the crowded street to no avail. I kept assuring Anna Maria that Savage Girl would be found but finally agreed with Freddy. We had lost her.

As of that moment, my parents and I were seized with the same feeling, a sense of unhappiness with the International Hotel, the scene of bad luck and misfortune, up to and including murder in the club dining room. It was agreed: We would move back into our private train, which was parked on a siding at the northern end of “C” Street in the lower part of town.

I was sure Freddy would be totally crestfallen, but I was mistaken. My father took the news of Savage Girl’s disappearance with disturbing composure.

“No doubt she returned to Scott,” he said. “The devil she knew being preferable to the gods she did not.”

I don’t often feel this way, but at that moment I wanted to sock my father. Such an incredible masterstroke, extricating her from Scott’s clutches, and then to be so blasé about losing her!

“If she does not want to stay with us, Hugo, we can’t attempt to imprison her,” he said wearily, covering his eyes with his hand. “If we did, we would be exactly like Dr. Scott.”

“We can snatch her back again,” I said. Thinking of my poor mother, who had the look of someone bearing up under hardship.

Freddy remained silent.

We continued, without speaking, to our cars on the Virginia & Truckee siding.

•   •   •

Two days on, I sat in the second-to-last car on our train, the parlor car, brooding, staring out at a bleak landscape of mill piles, smokestacks and tailing dumps that represented the effluvia from the Virginia silver mines.

Sandobar, Freddy had named the twelve-car consist, with sleepers, a galley, parlors, a shooting car and a six-man crew to keep it running. But a train car at rest, I discovered, resembled a coffin. We remained stranded on the siding, provisioning for the epic trip across the continent, Freddy commissioning some work on the interiors. He was always remodeling.

Virginia City was right there, clearly within view, the town boundary fifty yards away, but after losing Savage Girl we shut ourselves off from it.

Tahktoo joined me that afternoon, entering the parlor car silently, easing cross-legged to the floor to work on his knitting.

Melancholy, I gazed out the window some more. “You know, Henry Comstock wound up committing suicide,” I said, to myself rather than to the berdache (he didn’t converse much). Comstock, the early miner who had swindled a couple of others out of what turned into the biggest claim ever in the history of the country. Then lost it all.

“They named the whole sixty-million-dollar lode after him, and he put a bullet in his head in a nickel-a-night flop.”

The alkali wind swept through the chock-a-block town jumbled at the foot of the mountain. The berdache did not seem contaminated with the same mood of mournfulness.

•   •   •

Wait, wait, Bill Howe says.

Tahktoo had upon first meeting struck me—

Wait, wait. The rotund attorney waves his hands. Your father had a twelve-car private train?

Sandobar, I say. Named after Grandfather’s estate on Long Island.

By that time, late morning Saturday, the warden’s quarters where we speak are a little more lively, busy with a half dozen clerks, factotums and secretaries, all summoned from the law offices of Howe & Hummel. Actual personnel from the Tombs—turnkeys, bailiffs and such—visit only occasionally.

Out the window, across Centre Street, the firm’s immodest billboard-size sign dominates the area, in enormous block letters that are illuminated by night (
HOWE & HUMMEL’S LAW OFFICE
), looming over the Tombs as if to declare that the prison is a mere annex to the illustrious partnership.

Imagine an arraigned criminal, bonded out of the Tombs, wavering in his conviction of what to do next. Whiskey always foremost in his mind. But then the huge blazing billboard. Perhaps, before a drink, an attorney. It sometimes happens that way.

The firm’s clients include the most celebrated citizens of New York City, the highest of the high. Bankers. Brokers. The actor Edwin Booth. P. T. Barnum. And the lowest of the low. When seventy-four brothel madams were rounded up during a purity drive, every one of them named Howe & Hummel as counsel.

With all my talking, I am perhaps overtired, since I don’t feel like sleeping but rather exist in a sort of in-between twilight of mind and memory. I still have blood on my clothes, random spatters from the corpse in the Gramercy Park mansion.

One of the cars wasn’t our own, I say. We were transporting Lincoln’s car back to the East as a favor to Huntington.

Huntington, Howe says. That would be the Central Pacific man.

Yes.

Lincoln’s car. Of the martyred president.

One made for his use, I say. Unfortunately, he only ever occupied it in death. It carried his casket from Washington, D.C., to Springfield.

Howe asks, This car was in your train on the siding at Virginia City?

I didn’t wonder at his special interest. The Lincoln car holds great significance for many people. Stories, myths and tall tales are linked with it in the popular mind.

Do you mark it, Mr. Hummel?

Hummel nods and produces a soft sound such as “Uh-hmmn.” His first verbal communication of the morning, I believe, although he is a furious note taker.

I see the thought wheels turning in their massive brains. A possible defense strategy. On his trip across the country, the Delegate boy becomes inhabited by the ghost that haunts the Lincoln car. He (that is, me) is driven mad. The late murders are to be assigned not to me, not to her, but to some disembodied ectoplasm. The spook of John Wilkes Booth himself, perhaps.

I am found innocent by reason of demonic possession.

A ludicrous strategy, but William Howe is known for putting over all sorts of ludicrousness to juries.

An anecdote they tell of him: When Howe was once rehearsing his dramatic closing speech to the jury in a capital case, his partner, Hummel, suggested that at a precise climactic moment in the oration some sign of emotion might be appropriate.

A tear, perhaps, said Hummel.

Howe considered, then asked, From which eye?

Had he been on the boards, Bill Howe could have been the greatest actor of the day.

I will order lunch, he says now. But pray continue on.

•   •   •

Tahktoo had upon first meeting struck me as an incredible grotesque, either laughable or sneerable, his craggy form appearing ridiculous,
draped in a dress. But the longer I associated with him, the more I came to recognize his beauty.

Lhamana,
the Zuni called them. The twin-spirited ones. Members of the tribe, both women and men, who crossed boundaries to take up the costume, behavior and activities of the opposite sex. “Berdache” was a name the Spanish saddled them with, meaning “slave.”

Eventually I came to realize that Tahktoo had a greater aura of personal dignity than anyone I had ever known. His appearance tended to trigger instant fury on the part of outsiders. But somehow he kept himself (she kept herself? pronouns went funny around him) immune to ridicule, raillery, intimidation, insinuation, humiliation and the other sundry slings and arrows with which we humans sometimes assault each other.

Freddy had collected him in San Francisco. He had been abandoned there by an Office of Indian Affairs Quaker who with the best intentions had lured the berdache away from his homeland in the mountain desert of the Southwest. In order to show him the superiority of the white man’s habits.