Stabenow, Dana - Shugak 11 - The Singing Of The Dead

by The Singing Of The Dead(lit)

  her destiny. She had promptly fallen in love with a man who gave no

  thought to their future, and had, folly of follies, actually married

  163

  him and borne his child, and for what? To be widowed and sold into

  slavery, and this time into slavery not of her own making.

  "Pride goeth before a fall." She remembered that verse from the Bible

  teachings her minister father had bellowed at them daily over the table

  at breakfast and dinner, if she remembered none other. She had been

  proud, and overconfident, and she had fallen, hard, right to the bottom.

  There, at the bottom, she had allowed Alex Papadopolous literally to

  beat her into submission, to force her to sell herself over and over

  again. She hadn't fought him for her share of the money she earned, and

  she had allowed him to take her son away. She had let herself believe

  Alex when he said the boy was all right. It was easier, she thought now

  with a shudder of self-loathing, easier and less painful to believe

  Alex, not to challenge him to a conversation that would only end in his

  fists striking her body, carefully placed hits that would not show to

  the casual customer who usually cared little how much of her was covered

  so long as her skirts were up to her waist. He knew how to hit, Alex

  did. Even now there was lingering soreness on her back and shoulders.

  "How did I put up with it for so long?" she asked herself now. "How

  could I? Matt was shot because I couldn't act for myself." Matt, who she

  saw with the wisdom of hindsight had cared for her all along, ever since

  Dawson. Matt, who had saved her and Percy both, had risked his life, and

  handed over his poke in a sacrifice all the more painful because it had

  been so willing.

  The day before they reached Seattle, she had looked at the boy child in

  her arms, had seen the pinkness creeping back into his cheeks and the

  roundness creeping back into his limbs, and had felt a surge of terror

  at the prospect of ever losing him again.

  She looked that terror full in the face for a long moment.

  164

  acknowledging its presence, and then she spit squarely in its eye and

  made three vows.

  Never again would she put her child in peril.

  Never again would she put herself in peril.

  Never again would she have to be rescued.

  She sent a telegram to her parents in Missouri, telling them about their

  grandson for the first time and asking for money. They sent it to her

  with a terse request that she not return home. She sent a telegram to

  Sam's parents in Minneapolis. They, too, wired money, and when she went

  to collect it saw two policemen waiting outside the telegraph office,

  and remembered all that Sam had told her about the wealth and power of

  his father. She waited, watching, and two days later when the policemen

  had become bored and began to wander off, bribed a street urchin to

  fetch the bank draft for her. She cashed the check immediately,

  collected Percy, and took the first train to Denver.

  She rented a small apartment, hired a nursemaid, and lived quietly and

  frugally while she looked for employment in the only profession she

  knew. She found it eventually in an establishment owned by a big, bluff

  woman with a nearly impenetrable Irish accent, shrewd eyes, haired dyed

  a defiant brassy blonde, and a raucous laugh that could be heard in

  Boulder. Mary Kelley looked the Dawson Darling over with a critical eye

  and said, "With that hair I could have won the West all by myself.

  You've got a trim figure, and you look clean. I like the name, too. So

  will the customers. " She waved an all-inclusive hand and an enormous

  breast popped out of the low-cut bodice of the red velvet dress she

  wore. She reached up to stuff it back in, pausing to scratch

  unselfconsciously at the equally large brown nipple. "In my experience,

  nothing'll get a man up and off quicker than a hint of the exotic. When

  can you start?"

  "How will I be paid?"

  One outrageously blonde eyebrow went up. "Oh, so she's not all looks and

  no brain, now, is she?"

  165

  Both had a healthy respect for each other's financial acumen when

  negotiations were concluded. Mary showed her her room, large and

  well-appointed with fashionably heavy furniture and a rectangular mirror

  on the ceiling over the bed. "I've never seen such a thing," she said.

  Mary cast a disparaging glance upward. "Yeah, well, it's all the rage

  now, lovey. The boyos seem to like it well enough."

  Mary ran a quiet house and employed two large men to escort anyone who

  wasn't quiet enough outside to see how high he could bounce. Mary

  couldn't abide violence, and abusive customers were shown the door just

  as soon as they showed their stripes. She sold liquor on the premises,

  but she wouldn't put up with drunkenness in employees or in customers.

  She wouldn't tolerate thievery in any form, and one girl who was caught

  going through a customer's wallet was promptly thrown out and her

  belongings after her. She was a fanatic on the subject of cleanliness,

  and had had a large porcelain tub installed in the downstairs bathroom

  which she insisted employees use regularly. It was available to

  customers as well, and whether they used it alone or in company was a

  matter that affected only the price. A doctor was a regular customer,

  who bartered services for the privilege of Mary's company.

  One room downstairs was reserved for the playing of games of chance, and

  winners were expected to tip the house ten percent of the night's

  winnings on their way out. There was a piano and a selection of ragtime

  sheet music. A burly member of the local constabulary named Kevin

  O'Leary dropped by every Wednesday evening for a drink and a tussle with

  Mary, who always emerged from these encounters with her eyes sparkling,

  her cheeks glowing, and her exuberant breasts threatening once more to

  leap the bounds of her dress. The house never had a problem with the

  Denver police.

  The girls ranged in age from fifteen to thirty-five, in race

  166

  from Swedish to Japanese. The roster remained remarkably steady but for

  the depredations of a series of piano players, who always seemed to fall

  fatally in love with one or the other of them. Mary Kelley finally threw

  up her hands and hired a piano teacher to instruct the girls, who took a

  night off upstairs in exchange for a night downstairs on the piano

  stool. The Darling came to love that piano, the feel of the ivory keys

  beneath her fingers, the way she could make music sound from beneath the

  polished wood of the upright.

  Soon after she went to work for Mary, she bought a tiny house in a

  quiet, working-class neighborhood on the opposite side of Denver, and

  moved Percy and his nursemaid there. She had Thursday afternoon and all

  day Monday off, and she spent every free minute she had with her son,

  reading to him, playing with him, singing him to sleep. He was tall for

  a child, blue of eye and fair of hair like his father and with the

  promise of his father's long, lanky frame. He was intelligent a
nd

  inquisitive and friendly to a fault to any passing stranger. He played

  with the neighbor children, but they didn't invite him home. Their

  parents watched when she left, and they watched when she came home, and

  they weren't fools.

  So the Dawson Darling smiled, and one night a week played the piano, and

  the rest of those nights opened her legs for a succession of

  increasingly faceless men, some of whom would have been willing to love

  her if she'd given them half a chance. She saved her money, and dreamed

  of the day when she would have enough to support herself and her son for

  the rest of their lives.

  The years slipped by and that day didn't seem to be any closer than it

  had been when she arrived. In 1906, Mary called the girls together and

  announced she was selling out. They stared at her, and she snorted her

  laughter. "You look as if you'd seen the Pope himself walk in the front

  door,? the lot of you," she informed them. She patted her hair, this

  year a bright brown, and said, "The fact of the matter is

  167

  this, that Kevin O'Leary, fine man that he is, has taken up a sherifing

  job in Oregon, and he's had the great good sense of asking me to

  accompany him there as his wife, and I have accepted him." She sat,

  placid and satisfied, waiting for the cheering and the applause to die down.

  But it did die down, when they came to realize that their safe haven was

  no more. The house would be closing at the end of the month, with one

  big party that last night for all the steady customers, at which Mary

  expected everyone's presence and the morning after which bonuses would

  be paid. They wouldn't be big bonuses, they knew that already, as Mary

  Kelley was tight with a dollar, but it was enough to keep them working

  for her until the end of the month and she knew it, and she knew the

  girls knew it. They dispersed in ones and twos, whispering, making

  plans, going upstairs to their rooms to look at their belongings and

  decide what to take and what to leave behind. Mary had given them names,

  people to contact, other houses to go, but Mary Kelley's had been a

  special place and veterans all, they knew it and were sorry to see it go.

  The Dawson Darling sat at the piano after everyone else had gone,

  fingering the keys, drifting from one tune to another, and looked up

  suddenly to see Mary watching her from the doorway. "I'm sorry," she

  said, closing the lid of the piano and rising to her feet. "I'm late, I

  know. I'll go get into my working clothes and-"

  Mary held up a hand. "Wait." She looked her over with the same critical

  eye she'd used the day the Darling had walked in her door for the first

  time. "That town you've taken your name from, Dawson. It's in Alaska,

  isn't it?"

  "Almost," the Darling said, smiling. "Next door, anyway. " Everybody

  Outside had very vague ideas about the north.

  "Mmm," Mary said. She swished across the floor and sat down in an

  armchair, waving the Darling to one

  168

  opposite her. "I've been hearing things, I have, about a different place

  in Alaska, good things for the working girl." She paused. "Have you

  heard how things used to go on in St. Louis for girls like us?"

  The Darling's interest sharpened. Of course she had, they all had. St.

  Louis in the early seventies was a dream come true for the working girl,

  where pimps were outlawed, where there was a special district within the

  city where they could own their own homes, where medical checkups were

  held on a regular basis, where there was hospitalization for the

  diseased. The saloonkeepers and the cops on the take hadn't been happy

  with the result and it hadn't lasted long, a mere four years, but St.

  Louis continued to be a place where the working girl had a fighting

  chance of keeping what she earned, without being beaten, robbed, or

  murdered along the way.

  "A fella passed through the house last night," Mary said reflectively.

  "Said he was down from the gold fields in the Klondike. Says there's a

  new mining town up along some river or other in the middle of the Alaska

  territory. Name of-what the hell was it now, Fairbanks, that's it. Says

  there was only seven working girls in the whole town the last time he

  passed through. Says they were plumb tuckered out. Says a new girl

  arrived on the same boat he left on, and the city fathers met her with a

  parade."

  The Darling was silent.

  Mary shrugged. "Thought you might be interested, seeing as you hail from

  those parts. And you might want to start thinking about providing for

  that boy of yours." Her breasts shook with silent laughter when she saw

  the expression on the Darling's face. "What, you thought none of us

  knew? Denver ain't that big a town, honey. You've about scandalized your

  neighborhood with your comings and goings and carryings on." She clicked

  her tongue reprovingly.

  "I never-carried on at home!"

  169

  Mary shook her head pityingly. "Do you think that matters?" Serious now,

  she leaned forward and gripped the other woman's knee. "Go north. I know

  you left under a cloud, whatever it was, but it's been six, almost seven

  years. Whoever it is you're on the run from is long gone. They're

  pulling gold out of the ground by the fistful, and some of it has your

  name on it. And your boy's name." She sat up. "You've got a few good

  years left in you, Darling. Make them work for you."

  She'd thought it over and concluded that Mary Kelley, hardheaded

  businesswoman turned sheriff's wife and Oregon rancher, was right. Alex

  Papadopolous was very probably long gone. If the ratio of men to women

  was even half of what she remembered, if the stories Mary had heard were

  even partially true, then she would be welcomed with open arms.

  And paid better than she would ever be south of the fifty- three.

  So she packed up and moved north again, and now here she was, in

  Fairbanks, Alaska, a city of eight thousand on the edge of a narrow

  river an unattractive grayish-brown in color from the glacial silt in

  it, with thickly wooded hills rolling away in every direction. On a

  clear day, if you squinted north from the top of a high hill, you could

  see the icy peaks of the Brooks Range. Many days in summer, the air was

  blue with the wood smoke of forest fires blazing unchecked through the

  territory's interior.

  The Line, as it was referred to, was all she had been led to believe.

  She had her own crib, a narrow building containing a sitting room with a

  large window, beneath which ran a boardwalk. Customers could stroll down

  the boardwalk as they window-shopped for a companion for an hour's

  entertainment. Customers were mostly miners, although businessmen and

  city fathers, some of whom were Line landlords, picked a partner for the

  long, juicy waltz often enough, too. She was afraid that at thirty-two she

  170

  would be too old to attract attention, but there were women working the

  Line in their forties. The money was ten times what she had earned at

  Mary's in Denver, and soon she had a steady roster of regulars, whi
ch

  enabled her to work a six-hour shift in the evening.

  Best of all, she had found wonderful care for Percy with Lily MacGregor,

  an Athabascan woman married to a Scotsman named James, who had invested

  heavily in Fairbanks real estate some years prior to the booming of the

  town and the creation of the Line, and subsequently had a great deal to

  lose when he developed the habit of beating Lily when he came home of an

  evening. Lily waited until he passed out after one beating and then went

  to the judge who was running against James for mayor. The judge was

  delighted to grant Lily a divorce and the ownership of all her husband's

  real estate.

  When it came time for the Dawson Darling to invest in her own crib on

  the Line, she went to Lily, a tiny woman with rosy brown skin, tilted

  brown eyes, and sleek black hair who held title to two lots on Cushman

  Street. Lily's home was full of strays, old, young, men, women, children

  of every age and race tumbling over one another in the house, in the

  yard, in the trees of the yard, in the stream running through the yard.