The Adventures of Johnny Vermillion (4 page)

Nearing dusk, they heard a noise outside. April drew a derringer from her reticule, a fine Remington with silver plating and ormolu grips. Vermillion opened the door and peered out, then spread it wide. “Merely our prodigal daughter. You may stand down, dear—although I must say that piece looks more comely in your hand than the Colt.”

“That horrid thing. I'm sure if I pulled the trigger it would flip me over onto my bustle.” She returned the weapon to its pocket in the lining.

Mme. Mort-Davies entered, pushing her bicycle. She'd strapped down her generous bosom with canvas and pulled on a heavy ribbed sweater and tan riding breeches of the kind worn by Western Union messengers, gathered tight to her calves with high lace-up boots. She made rather a homely man with her abundance of hair gathered up inside a tweed cap. Her cheeks were flushed from the cold.

“About time, my pet. Thirty minutes more and you'd have pedaled all this way for nothing.”

She fixed her husband with a stony gaze. “I've made it clear to Johnny these wagers of yours don't include me.”

“In any case I didn't agree to it.” Vermillion plucked the oilcloth bundle from the bicycle's wicker basket while Ragland went to work with a wrench. In three minutes the front wheel and basket were off and the entire vehicle was packed in the trunk. Vermillion waited until he finished, then dumped the bundle out onto
the table. Packets of banknotes lay among the silver dollars and glittering gold double eagles. April sighed.

The Major was the first to speak. “Next time, we must get inside the vault. I made more than this at the Old Vic.”

Who is Johnny Vermillion?

The history of the American theater makes no mention of him or the Prairie Rose, and his name occupies barely a footnote in the constantly mestasticizing library of Western outlawry, with inaccurate information appended. For answer, we must depart from the written record and borrow a technique from the medium of film.

The color bleeds to sepia and we observe a sprawl of maverick construction on the swampy shore of Lake Michigan, far more impressive for its size than its architecture; for it appears to be without limit. Grain elevators tower above its few wooden stories of houses, shops, barns, and municipal and county buildings, the first generation of brick warehouses on the lake, and long horizontal columns of depots built of native sandstone. There are stacks and chimneys, of course, and smoke lies in coppery layers like the sunset. Locomotives chug high and low and all about like toy trains. Superimposed on this, a virile legend: CHICAGO 1844.

Not, perhaps, the Chicago we expect. The eye searches in vain for the stockyards, slaughterhouses, and gingerbread mansions of iconic memory; they are yet to be built. This is an agrarian center, serving wheat and cotton and flax to the East on rails still shining and fresh. Its days of butchers and barons and grotesque wealth lie twenty-five years in the future. But it is a young force, brawny with plans.

We are drawn, as by the Ghost of Christmas Past, over roofs, past lines of washing, and through a window on the third floor of the Winston Hotel, which will perish, along with its mahogany and crystal and miles of green velvet hung in swags, in the Great Fire of 1871. We cross the glistening tessellated floor of the ballroom, littered with confetti in heaps like cornstalks, and stop at last before an Empire chair supporting the prosperous corpulence of Scipio Africanus McNear, assistant city comptroller and chairman of the local Democratic Party. His collar is sprung, his waistcoat unbuttoned to provide egress for his grand belly. A tower clock chimes four; all his colleagues have retired to their beds, leaving him to smoke a final cigar and sift through a pile of telegrams congratulating him upon the election of James Knox Polk to the presidency of the United States. He has been a tireless supporter of the gentleman from Tennessee ever since John Tyler gave up his own bid for reelection, and McNear has delivered Chicago to the Democrats at the expense of fifty tons of coal distributed in the South Side and a number of fractured skulls in the disputed precincts. He expects much from Washington in exchange.

However, the telegram we find him reading is not from a crony, but from the head of surgery at St. Patrick's Hospital downtown:

YOUR SON BORN TWO TWENTY THREE A M EIGHT POUNDS SEVEN OZ STOP MOTHER CHILD WELL RESTING STOP AWAITING NAME

Boss McNear, as he is pleased to be known to the press and public, has a pawkish sense of humor. Chuckling, he produces the pencil he used to tally the vote and scribbles a name on the back of the telegram: “John Tyler McNear, Esq.”

He reckoned he never knew a better day, and that fate demanded a steep price. In 1860, the year the Republican Party gave Abraham Lincoln to America, McNear's wife, Geneva, a daughter of one of the city's founding French families, was killed when the streetcar she was riding jumped the tracks; she was pregnant with a daughter, who perished also. McNear was serving as a state senator, and came home from Springfield to find himself a stranger to his fifteen-year-old son, a dreamy sort of lad who had spoken French exclusively until he was five. He was promptly shipped off to a boarding school in Rockford. There he failed consistently at mathematics, humiliating his father, the former comptroller, but scored well in history and drama, where his performance as Dr. Faustus on the school's amateur stage drew an enthusiastic review from the
Rockford Evening Gazette
. McNear, who did not attend, consoled himself that the young man might become a decent orator, but his hopes were shattered when John was expelled for theft.

Summoned before his father to explain himself, he confessed that after his exit in Act IV, he'd removed a number of valuable items from pockets in the cloakroom, and that a silver snuffbox
belonging to a patron had been found in his rooms. McNear beat him severely with his belt, and later beat him again when the school superintendent wrote to report that Master McNear had not committed the crime in person, but had seduced the young lady who played the Good Angel into performing the task while he was soliloquizing onstage; the young lady had come forward upon her own, hoping that the truth would lead to Master McNear's reinstatement.

“You filthy pup!” sputtered the old man, when his arm faltered. “Is that what they taught you up in Rockford?”

John Tyler, it's said, touched his torn lip with a handkerchief. “Actually, I believe it was in your suite at the Winston, the night the party nominated Douglas. I learned a great deal that evening.”

That evening, Scipio Africanus McNear suffered the first of several strokes that would force him to retire from public life at the age of fifty-eight. His investments during the cattle boom that followed the War Between the States allowed him to live the life of a wealthy invalid on Lakeshore Drive, with nursing care around the clock, and to pay his son an allowance to keep him away from home. Then came the fire. When the company through which he'd insured his pens and meatpacking plants defaulted on all its claims, the prospect of an impoverished old age brought on the stroke that killed McNear on the eve of his seventieth birthday. His former colleagues contributed to a collection to bury him in Mt. Carmel Cemetery, sparing him a pauper's grave on Blue Island.

John Tyler did not attend. He spent the day of the funeral in a banquet room at the newly rebuilt Palmer House Hotel, treating his friends to a champagne supper with the last of the money given him by his father. For years, he'd used his mother's maiden name, Vermillion. None of his guests knew of his loss, and his
women friends, who imagined they shared the secrets of his heart, were not aware he was related to one of those vulgar political creatures their fathers condemned at garden parties.

His descent from that point was vertical.

His male friends were not disposed to help him out. For some time, objects of value had had a habit of going missing when he was present—a watch here, an unattended banknote there. Such trinkets were considered dispensable in their set, and their principles differed sharply from those of the previous generation. Like John's, their family connections had released them from military service during the war: Honor, to them, was rather a remote concept, like the elaborate burial practices of the early Egyptians, and they looked upon it with the same combination of amusement and contempt reserved for last year's collar. When they confronted him, they were contented to accept his markers, just as they were when any of their peers lost at cards or arranged a loan to hold them over until their next allowance. Some of the items were returned, in fact, and some debts repaid. But after he was locked out of his rooms for nonpayment of rent, the reality of his financial condition barred him from both their company and their hospitality. Turned away from their doors with nothing but the clothes he stood up in, Johnny Vermillion perceived that his country was headed in a harsh new direction, to a place whose customs were dictated by money, and not by whether one's French ancestor had sailed with Drake or fought the British at Ticonderoga.

It was a lesson for which he'd been prepared all his life. From an early age, he had witnessed the comings and goings in his father's house of ward leaders and building contractors, bearing satchels of cash to and from Boss McNear for favors asked and services rendered. He'd spent the summer before his mother's death running
errands for the Democratic Party, and had seen the unsheathed greed on the faces of elder statesmen whose pen-and-ink likenesses graced the sober columns of the
Chicago Sun
when tariffs were discussed and hospitals under construction. Money was the ammunition of the Industrial Revolution; whether it was acquired with a pistol or scooped in buckets from the public treasury seemed less to the point than getting it and spending it. He had not so much a disrespect for the rights of property as a lack of awareness that any such rights existed.

The loss of Geneva Vermillion McNear, a creature above and apart from the soiled coinage that kept the political system tinkling like a player piano, had severed whatever connection this sensitive, good-looking, queerly observant boy had maintained with the catechism of
Peré
Argulet, the spiritual guide of his youth at St. Patrick's. The boy was a clever thief by birth and an uncommonly skilled one by education. He'd stolen far more from his acquaintances than they ever suspected—they'd blamed carelessness and attrition—and pawned it to support a standard of living somewhat greater than his father's subsidy had made possible. Now he was denied access.

His female friendships, although less altered (his father, a strikingly handsome figure before the overindulgence of his middle years, had given him a straight nose and a narrow waist, his mother her fair hair and all the charms of the Parisian court), offered even smaller hope for shelter. Many were married ladies, and those in single circumstances had strict landladies and rigid curfews. He had neither the training to enter a profession nor the endurance to withstand sixteen hours of physical labor daily. The spark of dramatic ambition that had glowed briefly at school had long since guttered out. That left either vagrancy or thievery from strangers. Prison fare,
he'd heard, was bad for teeth and ruinous to the complexion, and certain other rumors that had come his way concerning life inside he found not worth the candle. The wastrel's way beckoned.

By the winter of 1872, he was sleeping on streetcar benches and begging for coins. A successful day's panhandling bought him a “flop” for the night on Blue Island. This was a dirtfill in a canal leading from the lake and a hotbed of malaria, saloons, brothels, and that variety of lawyer that existed mainly to give abortionists and white slavers a reason to feel superior. The island itself was in a constant state of erosion, retarded only by the addition of fresh manure swept from the streets. To take a turn there was virtually impossible without kicking up a bone belonging to some indigent buried by the city. Even the Great Fire had gone around it as a waste of destructive force.

On a pewter-colored morning in late November—it might have been early December—Johnny awoke to a prod from an impatient toe and stirred himself to clear the doorway where he'd sought shelter from the wind an hour before. The visitor, however, made no motion to step past him. He was a stout, ruddy-faced party in a tall Mormon hat with an eagle feather in the band and a preposterous fringed coat trimmed with an otter collar, crumbs in his moustaches. Johnny thought he looked like a third-rate hotel waiter reciting
The Song of Hiawatha
in concert. The waiter fixed the man at his feet with an alcoholic glare.

“You look as if you'll clean up well enough.” He held up a silver dollar. “How would you like to be an Indian?”

The man's name was Buntline, plainly a
nom de caprice
under which he practiced professionally. To hear him speak, in a four-wheeler
growling over brick pavement into the heart of furious construction downtown, he'd been just about everything
but
a hotel waiter: naval officer, newspaper publisher, duellist, inciter to riot, temperence lecturer, popular novelist, and, currently, producer and playwright. Johnny shared the carriage with four other recent recruits in varying degrees of sartorial and hygienic neglect and learned their employment was temporary. A bill posted outside Nixon's Amphitheater had promised a spectacle involving authentic frontiersmen and genuine red Indians. However, there had been an oversight, and although the former were available, the latter were not. Until such time as the real article could be procured, he explained, “you gentlemen present will wear feathers and paint and carry on like wild dogs for the sum of two dollars per week.”

Scouts of the Plains
opened under Nixon's roof, a canvas rig as temporary as the nonspeaking cast, on December 18, led by an uncommonly beautiful former scout and buffalo hunter named Cody. He was two years younger than Johnny, with the identical straight figure and even features, and wore his chestnut hair to his shoulders, a closely cultivated Vandyke, and buckskins tailored to his measure. An execrable actor who stammered and forgot his lines, he was nonetheless a powerful presence; beside him, his fellow rude thespians, a man called Texas Jack and Buntline himself, faded into the painted prairie backdrop. The effect upon the audience, male and female, was electric. Johnny himself, behind the clay-colored pigment that smeared his face, developed a bit of a crush on Cody that evening; a manly one, to be sure, with no suggestion of unnatural attraction, but a crush just the same. But he was not so besotted as to fail to study the phenomenon and isolate its ingredients. In forty years in public life, Boss McNear had prided
himself on his ability to make stew from toads, and this, too, was his legacy. Cody himself seemed unaware of his charms, which was a contributing factor in its success. Years later, touring the great cities of the New World and the capitals of the Old, the star would learn to apply them to queens, kaisers, and Sioux chiefs, real ones; by which time Johnny Vermillion could provide lessons of his own.