This Scorched Earth

by William Gear

  She actually laughed. “Are you out of your mind, George? I just buried my husband.”

  “One thousand a night.”

  She stared at him, almost uncomprehending. “Men in this camp work for two to three dollars a day. Even the best engineers only get ten. Even as a joke that’s—”

  “One thousand dollars. Two nights.”

  Her heart skipped. “Dear God, you’re serious.”

  “I am.”

  “For Pete’s sake, George, why?”

  His smile thinned under those deadly eyes. “Did you know that in all the time I knew him, Bret never looked twice at another woman? One night I asked him if he were made of wood. He told me, ‘Nothing compares with what’s waiting for me at home.’ I’ve always wondered what it would be like to share your bed. We call you the goddess, you know.”

  Sarah blinked, shaking her head. “You’d bed me, knowing all the time that I despised you? That while you were on me, I’d be dreaming of Bret?”

  “I’ve never offered a woman a thousand dollars a night. I’m not sure anyone has.”

  She struggled to understand. A thousand dollars a night?

  What would Bret say?

  “Don’t be a fool, Sarah. Two thousand dollars is one hell of a salve for any woman’s conscience.”

  And it wasn’t like she was guarding anything men hadn’t used before.

  As if Nichols could see her struggling, he said, “Call it a fair business transaction. Straight service for fee. Do that, and I’ll hand you Parmelee.”

  Parmelee? Hers? That easily?

  “I’m like cracked glass, George. Even if I decided to do this, there’s no telling but I might break down into a sobbing wreck right in the middle.”

  Twitches of amusement formed at the corners of his mouth.

  “You won’t. You will give me full measure because, first and foremost, you’re a businesswoman.”

  85

  June 16, 1867

  “Not a word, Doc. It’s like he dropped off the face of the earth. Not even so much as a rumor. And you know your brother. If he’s around, people do talk.” Those were Big Ed’s last words as Doc walked out of the Cricket Club after stitching up two of the burlesque girls who’d gotten into a fight. Their weapons of choice had been broken bottles.

  He stepped out onto Blake Street, finding the day warm as the morning sun rose high in the Colorado sky. The trash-strewn street with its bottles, flattened cans, and bits of paper had that acrid tang of ground-in horse manure, urine, and dust. Mixed in were the smells of burning coal and the rich aroma of baking bread. His stomach growled, adding to his hunger.

  “Butler, where the hell are you?”

  Deep down, the worry just kept building. He’d expected Butler to come back. But in the following days there had been no word. As his anxiety built, Doc played to his strengths; what was the point of knowing people who knew everything if they couldn’t locate a lost lunatic? But no one in Big Ed’s, Francis Heatley’s, Ed Jumps’s, or Patrick O’Connell’s circles had heard anything. These were the people who made it their business to know everyone else’s business, and they had their networks alerted to report any sighting or rumor about Butler.

  Doc had even gone to the extreme of offering a hundred-dollar reward. The culmination of that so far apparently futile venture was that every lunatic in the city had been rounded up by various posses of drunks and delivered to Doc’s doorstep in hopes that it might be the wayward Butler. It had been a hell of an incentive for creativity. For a hundred dollars a man could stay “roostered” on hooch for a couple of weeks.

  “Me and my damn mouth,” he whispered to himself as he stepped around a battered freight wagon and its team of drooping oxen. From an alley came the clatter of tin cans. Moments later, a pack of half-starved dogs shot out, startling a passing rider’s horse into a bucking fit. Hot on their heels a man appeared in pursuit, waving a stick and cursing as the canines vanished into the thoroughfare.

  Ah, Denver!

  What the hell had possessed him that day? Was he just as crazy as Butler? Throat tickling, he stifled a cough, and shook his head as he batted at the flies that buzzed up from a slimy green puddle of something in the street.

  He’d gotten his fill of flies in Camp Douglas and hated the damn things. Denver City’s manure-filled streets, lines of rickety outhouses, piles of half-rotted garbage, and tossed tins bred millions of the buzzing beasts—not to mention the alleys where drunks and vagabonds shit, pissed, and vomited their guts out. Nor was there any shortage of animal carcasses decomposing in the sun and crawling with maggots. Denver swarmed with flies like hell swelled with sin.

  At his surgery, Doc fought a constant war with the beasts. Even in benighted Camp Douglas, they’d finally figured out that flies carried contagion.

  At the corner, a man perched on a freight wagon and called out, “I got the last canned peaches in Denver! Two dollars a can! Ain’t no more to be had! Get ’em now! Twenty cans left! Won’t be no more.”

  A small crowd stood around, most with hands in pockets, some fingering their last coins and wondering if it was worth the cost. Back in the United States a can of peaches might have sold for ten cents.

  Being summer, the grass was up, which meant the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho had shut down the Platte River Trail in the north, the Smoky Hill Trail across Kansas, and the Kiowa and southern Cheyenne had closed the Arkansas River route in the south. Word, however, was that some fool general named Custer was chasing back and forth across the Plains in an effort to defeat the heathen once and for all.

  Good luck on that.

  Doc, as he always did, experienced that little surge of hope as he opened the door to his surgery and stepped in. A quick scan of the room showed no Butler. Instead a thick-shouldered Irishman sat across the desk from Aggie. He wore a fine broadcloth sack suit over a shaw-collared vest. An expensive dark-brown felt homburg rested at his elbow on the desk.

  As the man rose to his feet, Doc figured him as being in his early forties, maybe five foot six, and white was infiltrating the fiery red hair at his temples. Whiskey or frostbite had left its trace in the veins in his pug nose, but the green eyes that fixed on Doc were as shrewd and cutting as a ten-dollar Bowie.

  “Ah, let me guess,” the Irishman said, offering his hand. “Ye must be Dr. Hancock. I’m Patrick O’Reilly and most pleased to meet ye. Jist come t’ check on Aggie, here. An’ ’tis a wonder. Yer a miracle worker, Dr. Hancock. Me Aggie, she’s near to the perfect rose I’ve always known.”

  “Philip Hancock, sir. At your service.” He glanced at Aggie and winked to set her at ease. He’d often wondered at the relationship between these two. In the weeks since Aggie had been boarding with him, his interest had grown as had his discomfort.

  She’d been the madam in one of the most prominent parlor houses in Central City. He’d also heard that it had been burned the day of her assault. That she was essentially wiped out and destitute, yet here sat O’Reilly, looking after her welfare? He cringed at the history they must have, at the intimacies they’d shared.

  Over the weeks, he’d rather taken to Aggie’s company. And, though it seemed sacrilege to admit, her cooking was a thousand times better than Butler’s. Even given the scanty rations that dwindled with each day that the trails remained closed.

  She delighted him with her little jokes, the wry sense of humor, and quick wit. More than once, she’d assisted him with emergencies in the surgery when Dr. Elsner wasn’t available. Aggie didn’t have a squeamish bone in her body when it came to blood, effluvia, pain, or excrement.

  And now her rich and powerful patron was back, smiling at her across the desk.

  Doc wanted to laugh with futility.

  “Doc?” She pointed to a covered tin resting on the side of the desk. “I brought hot biscuits, butter, and side pork. I figured you’d have a hunger on.” She paused, brow lifting. “How was the stitching?”

  “Mostly cosmetic and restricted to the forearms
and hands. If the girls hadn’t been staggering drunk, the damage might have been considerable.” He gestured to O’Reilly. “Have a biscuit?”

  “Thank’ee laddie, but I’ve eaten at the hotel. Do help yourself, sir. I jist stopped in t’ see to Aggie.”

  She glanced at Doc, a curious mixture of excitement and sorrow behind her green eyes. “Pat tells me that Sarah has paid my debts.” A faint smile came to her lips. The pink weblike tracery of scars on her forehead and cheeks bent and flexed with the power of it. “She’s coming to Denver. Has title to a new house.” Her eyes hardened. “Parmelee’s.”

  “Now, isn’t that a turn of fate?” Doc asked as he bit his biscuit. Damn fool that he was, of course she’d go back to a house. “I helped to bankrupt the son of a bitch, and I didn’t even know him.”

  “And how moight that be, sir?”

  “I helped Parmelee’s battered girls escape beyond reach. His professor cleared out the next morning, figuring he’d be held to blame. Last I heard, Francis Heatley had a lien on it. It’s a nice house. One of the best in Denver. Brick construction. Two stories. Phillipa spared no expense when she built it. And the location couldn’t be better.”

  “Sarah wants me to come and help her,” Aggie said, hesitation in her voice for the first time. “It’s such a relief, Doc. First the attack, then my house is burned, my people scattered. Because of you, I may be scarred, but I’m not a monster. Then I learn my debts are cleared, and I have a place to go.”

  You could stay with me, a voice in his head said, startling him. Did he want that? A madam? A purveyor of prostitution?

  “Which brings me t’ me purpose.” O’Reilly placed his hand on the desk. “What do I owe ye, Doctor, for all ye done for Aggie, here?”

  “Nothing, sir.” Doc took another bite of biscuit, the panic settling like a rat down in the pit of his stomach.

  “Nothing?” O’Reilly and Aggie asked in unison.

  Doc smiled at her, a melancholy sorrow building. She’d told him that she’d been born Bridget O’Fallon in New York. Her parents were famine Irish. Crowded ten to a room on the east side of the city, the family had scraped by. Her father had scrounged menial day labor. Brought home moldy bread for the family and watered alcohol for himself.

  As a young girl, Aggie had had a choice to make. She could scrub floors for twenty-five cents a day, which she’d have to surrender to her father. She could marry one of the local boys, move into his tenement, and bear his children in squalor. The third option had presented itself on the street one day; a man in a flashy suit promised her a passage to Chicago, employment at two dollars a day, room and board included in what he called, “a house of entertainment.”

  On arrival, she’d discovered that her virginity was worth an extra five dollars to her first client. Being no one’s fool, she had bargained it up to ten, and never looked back.

  He remembered the night she’d told him. They’d been seated across from each other at his table, sharing a cup of tea by lamplight. “Philip, in my world, a poor woman with no education sells her body one way or another. The only man who will marry her stinks of old sweat, stale tobacco, and cheap whiskey each night when he crawls into her bed. She prays he won’t beat her too hard or often, and that he keeps a little food on the table while she pops out his kids one after another.

  “She can get work for a tenth the wages a man can make in a factory, or maybe cleaning in a business or household, but she’ll live ten-to-a-room in hungry filth. Either way she’s sold her body whether it be to bear a man’s children or for the labor it produces. But if she sells her cunny the work isn’t as hard, the hours shorter.

  “Sure, she’ll face a brief and fast life. Odds are, one way or another, she’ll be dead by the time she’s forty. However she ends, it won’t be pretty. If it isn’t disease, beat to death by a johnny, or suicide, she’ll finally starve to death in the streets when the drunks won’t even pay a penny for her. The brave ones conjure up the cost of a bottle of laudanum and drink it down to end it all.”

  “But you did well?”

  “I paid attention. Learned to read and write. Taught myself to talk to a man about more than his johnson. Listened when smart folks talked. And I gambled everything when I walked out the door in Chicago and spent every penny I had on a ticket to Colorado.”

  Where she had put her body up as collateral, and this man, O’Reilly, had bankrolled her.

  And why the hell is that bothering you?

  “You’re smiling, Doc.” Aggie’s voice brought him back to the present.

  “Aggie, truth be told, I amuse myself sometimes. Any idea when your partner will arrive?”

  “End o’ the week,” O’Reilly told him. “About your bill, sir? We owe you.”

  Doc waved it away. “Mr. O’Reilly, Aggie has cooked, straightened, assisted me in the surgery, and scrubbed up the gore afterward. She’s kept the ledger. For the first time, I know my accounts! She has reassured me that my wayward brother is all right. Dear Lord, she’s cleaned my house spotless.” He gestured down. “My clothes are immaculate. And my trousers pressed. My shoes are blacked and polished. I … I can’t take a penny.”

  “You housed me, Doc. Bought food,” she said. “Gave me your brother’s room.”

  “Well … it felt better. Like he wasn’t gone. If I’d been in that house alone, it would have all come crashing down like … like…”

  What the hell, he couldn’t find the words. He shot an imploring glance at Aggie. Bridget. Whoever.

  “If you’ll excuse me,” O’Reilly said, rising and collecting his hat. “I think the two of ye need t’ work some things oot.”

  At the door O’Reilly looked back, a smug smile on his face. “’Twas a pleasure t’ meet ye, Dr. Hancock. Take care of the lassie, will ye?”

  And then he was gone.

  Doc took a deep breath, the biscuit forgotten in his hand.

  Aggie was looking up at him, a question in her knowing green eyes. “Ah, I see. Doc, you’re not developing a case for me, are you?”

  “What? No. I…” He gestured helplessly with the biscuit.

  “Over supper the other night you told me about Ann Marie. She wasn’t the first girl to break your heart, was she?”

  “No.”

  Aggie’s smile rearranged her scars. “Companionship? Someone to talk to? Especially when you’re feeling guilt over Butler? A wounded woman, one for whom you feel both sympathy and responsibility? Those can lure a man into making a fool’s decision.”

  “What fool’s decision?”

  “You’re a smart man, Doc. Especially when it comes down to anything but yourself.” She reached out, taking his hand. “You think a woman like me don’t know the signs? Haven’t had men get that moon-eyed look you’ve started to give me?”

  “What moon-eyed look?”

  “The one you’re giving me right now, you fool. I could bat my eyes, tell you that with Sarah coming to town I was hanging on the edge of perdition. I could change my posture, just so.” She shifted slightly so that her muslin dress accented her breasts and narrow waist. “It would take me no more than five minutes, admitting how much I was going to miss you, and what a wonderful man you are. I could work you like putty around a windowsill. All I’d have to do is take this hand, lead you back to that examining room, bolt the door, and I’d have you wrapped up like a fly in a spiderweb.”

  Doc blinked. “Aggie, I really don’t think you could…”

  She stood, stepped around the desk to slip her arms around him. When she leaned her head on his chest he could smell her hair, feel her body pressed against his, conforming. Her breasts, hips, and thighs felt so firm. His heart began to pound, his penis rising.

  Feeling it, she chuckled and stepped away. Retreating to the desk, she seated herself and arched a knowing but scarred eyebrow. “Eat your biscuits, Doc. I don’t want them getting cold. Ain’t that much baking powder left in Denver City with the trails closed.”

  With a smug smile, she propp
ed her elbows, laced her fingers together, and cradled her chin as she studied him with those thoughtful green eyes.

  “How did you do that to me? I’m a physician, for Pete’s sake.”

  “You’re a lonely and desperate man grasping at straws, Philip Hancock. A bloody fucking martyr ready to be led to the stake and set afire. Now, I been in that room back there hearing you talk about bodies, medicine, and relief. How long has it been since you bedded a woman? Be honest with me?”

  “Maybe ten years.”

  “A lamb to the slaughter.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  This time, there was radiance to her smile. “Because, Doc, these last weeks with you, they’ve been some of the finest in my entire life. I’ve never just lived with a man. I damn sure never expected to admire and trust one, let alone want to protect him. And as easy as it would be to trap you, all it would take would be the right words, the right look, and you could reel me in like a hooked fish.”

  Doc felt his heart lurch, his muscles beginning to tremble. He whispered, “I’m sorry. I just wanted to make sure…”

  “You can’t even finish a sentence, can you?”

  “It would be easy to fall in love with you.”

  “And what then? You want to keep me as a mistress? Maybe marry me?”

  “I haven’t thought that far.”

  “No. You haven’t. Right now you’re in the hot rush, Doc. Like you just took a swig of laudanum. So we fall into each other’s arms, ride the high. We laugh. We wear out the bed springs. What happens after the rush fades? When you finally come to your senses and realize you’re married to a cut-up whore? You going to buy me nice dull brown frock dresses and take me to the theater? Escort me to supper invitations at the Moffat house? Maybe even Governor Evans’s? Or up at Walter Cheesman’s fine mansion?”

  “Don’t say it so bitterly.”

  “I’m being frank. You always see the hope, the goodness in people. That’s one of the things I love about you. But high society? They’re a mean, backstabbing lot by nature. And they’ll torture you if you take a whore as a wife.”