by Bill Albert
Charlie inclines his head for a yes.
“No need to look so surprised, son. Thing is we’ve already got someone else lined up. Better than you he’ll be for nailing shut the lid of Bill Haywood’s coffin. Just a matter of time before our agents in Oregon pick him up. Got a telegram only yesterday saying they were close enough to smell him. And once we’ve got him, well, then we won’t be needing to be bothering you any more. So, it’s down to you, Abraham. You want to cooperate and help yourself out, fine. You don’t want to cooperate, well that’s fine too.”
It’s grand to know I’ve got a choice.
5
“Steve Adams,” McParland says, watching for a reaction which I don’t give him.
Adams is a miner friend of Harry’s from Cripple Creek. As tough and mean a bastard as they come. I reckon Harry would sell his mother for a dollar, Adam’s mother you’d get for a bent dime. McParland could get Adams to admit to any story he wanted if the price was right.
When someone shows you his hand so deliberately, like McParland is, he’s doing it only to sucker you. I learned that and other finer points of poker from Jason “The Glove” Glover, who wasn’t much of a gambler, but knew what you had to do to be more of a gambler than he was. Listening to him rattle on you might think he was Doc Holliday or Luke Short. Watching him play poker, you’d have to figure he wasn’t even close.
Never draw to an inside straight. Never bet on two pair. Never stay with a short pair. Never stay on less than two aces or two kings. Never draw to a four-card flush or a four-card straight unless the bet is less than twenty percent of the pot. Never play the same way twice. Watch for ear pulling, nose scratching, finger drumming. If you don’t improve your hand after the third card in five-stud, drop out. Glove tried to teach me all those things, yet he couldn’t keep to the rules himself.
“For all the excitement that kind of play generates you might as well be employed serving in a dry goods establishment,” he told me, disdain dripping off his slow vowels.
I hooked up with Glove outside a saloon right after Steamdrill Irene abandoned me to my fate on the streets of Missoula.
Steamdrill Irene Copeland turned out to be no Molly B. Dam. She certainly was no saint. She wasn’t beautiful. She didn’t have a heart of gold. What she did have was a complaining nature and a razor tongue.
“I wouldn’t be doing this but for there ain’t hardly any trade worth a plug nickel back in Wallace. Just want ya to understand that, Jewish Mary.”
Irene was to take me as far as Missoula. There she would hand me over to a family Bill knew.
“Look like Hell in the hen house, I do!” Irene shrieked, catching sight of herself in the train window. “Oh Jesus and Mary! Just like my mother in her widow’s weeds. Couldn’t drag me in a one-legged Chinaman, ‘less he was blind. Damn! Who was the big one-eyed bastard anyway? Someone important? Going to find me somethin decent in Missoula. I sure as Hell am gonna do that. Proper boardin house. Had enough of them shanty cribs and them shanty two-bit dates. Woman like me deserves better.”
For the five long hours it took the train to reach Missoula I was trapped listening to Irene’s catalogue of woes—bad luck, worse luck, and no luck at all.
Her luck didn’t get much better when we reached Missoula. Neither did mine.
“Wadda ya mean he ain’t here?”
“Gone,” said the old man who opened the door at what was supposed to be Joad Penhaligan’s place.
“Gone? Where to?” Irene insisted.
“Don’t know, didn’t say.”
He squinted out at us, supporting himself on the half-open door. The hand resting on the door had only two end fingers on it. The stumps looked pretty raw. Tobacco juice stained his mustache and the top of a filthy union suit. He shook his head and spat a stream of tobacco juice into the yard.
“Butte maybe. Cripple Creek maybe. Hard to say.”
“That’s just fine and dandy. And what the Hell am I supposed to do with this here boy?” Irene asked the man.
“Donno, lady,” he said and then slammed the door.
She asked at a number of nearby houses but nobody knew anything about Penhaligan.
“Hadn’t figured on this. Figured on Missoula, couple a hours is all. Don’t be lookin at me like that now. Come on with me here.”
We walked back to the station. She sat me on a bench in the waiting room.
“Gonna look for a place for us. Stay right here ‘till I come for ya. Understand? Don’t ya move now.”
She hurried out the door. That was the last I ever saw of Steamdrill Irene Copeland.
After a couple of hours I wandered up into the town. I was standing in front of the Two Horse Saloon trying to work out what to do next when Glove shot out through the swing doors, the top half of him a good few windmilling seconds in front of the bottom half. The two halves finally caught up with each other in the dirt a couple of inches from my feet.
“An keep yerself goin, ya fuckin English tinhorn,” shouted a short, burly man in a derby hat who stood in the doorway of the saloon.
A crowd began to gather to watch the excitement, but as there wasn’t much to watch, after a minute or two they drifted off.
“Damnable cheek,” muttered Glove, as he untangled his long legs and started to get up.
“You find this a subject of amusement do you, my little man?” he said, looking down at me from his great height.
Except for Billy Baker the Boy Giant, Glove was tallest person I’d ever seen. Thin he was too. He had a long horse face with a pointy nose, faded blue eyes and pinched lips, narrow shoulders, skinny legs. Even his long yellow hair was thin, pink scalp showing through at the top. His all-black gambler’s rig made him look even thinner and his saloon pallor even paler.
“Don’t have the proper appreciation for the more subtle forms of levity, the Irish,” he observed as he dusted himself off. “Has that not been your experience? Something to do with their diet, I surmise. You’re not Irish yourself, are you? No? You don’t seem to have a great deal to say for yourself, do you, young man?”
I pointed to my neck and shook my head.
“Oh!” he exclaimed, “I say, dear boy, I am most frightfully sorry. From your demeanor I assume you are only mute and not deaf as well? Yes? Of course. If you don’t mind.”
He reached out and touched the side of my neck. His fingers were soft and educated to what he was doing.
“Yes,” he said after a minute’s probing. “A crushed larynx. Extremely fortunate that you didn’t choke to death with this type of injury. How long ago did it happen?”
I held up one straight and one half-cocked finger.
“Eighteen months? Hmm.”
It seemed so much longer since my encounter with Hyman Budnitsky, almost as if New York belonged to someone else about whom I had once heard a story.
“If we were in London I could send you to just the man to . . . But,” he said with a grin, gesturing to the surrounding buildings, “unfortunately, as you can see, we are not in London. Damn! I say, you wouldn’t care to do me a small but invaluable service? Good chap. It seems that I must have inadvertently left my hat inside that loathsome saloon and being as how the proprietor has expressed himself unwilling to let me return, I wonder if you would be so kind.”
Ten years or so before I met him Glove had to abandon his medical studies in London because of gambling debts. When the creditors continued to hound him with threats of physical violence, he had to abandon England.
“Could have gone to Australia, of course, but it sounds so terribly dreary out there. Quite similar to England, I’m informed, only hotter and full of wild black fellows. Decided to take the biggest gamble of them all,” he explained to me later that day as we escaped from Missoula on the tailboard of a freight wagon. “Everything about America is a gamble. Cast your eyes over this bloody, wonderful,
awful town. A gamble that wasn’t here yesterday and might not be here tomorrow. I think that’s bloody marvelous, don’t you?”
After Missoula I tagged along with Glove from one town to the next, him playing poker and me writing letters and generally being educated, according to Glove, by Life, always with a capital “L.”
“A formal education is a vastly overrated commodity, dear boy. Life itself is by far the most proficient teacher, especially for a young man like yourself in a young country like America. And with me, my tender Hebrew friend, you will be privileged to taste Life that moistens its loins at the very Fountain. I will show you Life that reaches out to the very essence of the Riddle.”
Loins and riddles and even fountains are fine, but it soon became clear that far from him looking after me, it was me that had to do the looking after. It was because Glove’s down-the-nose English wit, to say nothing of him just being an Englishman—the Redcoat villains of everyone’s history book—which did not go down at all well in the cheap saloons in which he was forced to try to make a living. And being the gentleman he was, he couldn’t see why he should keep his mouth shut. I found myself having to retrieve his hat in more than a number of towns.
“It’s mainly the Irish I hold to blame, dear boy,” he said, holding a piece of raw steak against his eye. “In my experience I have found them to be an impossibly surly people when faced with the inevitability of defeat at a game of chance.”
I tried to persuade him that it wasn’t the losing that got people, Irish or not, surly with him, but his insistence on explaining to them why they lost.
“Do you really think so? How very interesting.”
Fortunately for Glove, he didn’t have to explain why people lost to him all that often.
I wonder how he would have played out my hand with this particular Irishman.
6
Never bet a short pair. Steve Adams and Harry Orchard are a pair not to bet anything on, especially your life. They’re trying to save their necks by killing me. Without a gun, dynamite, or lifting a murdering finger—just with their lying stories. They only need the right words strung out and sung out like McParland wants to hear them. And unless the old man is bluffing, Harry’s already done that. What could be easier with him calling the damn tune, Bible in one hand, a noosed rope in the other, and a reputation grand enough to frighten the stuffing out of a couple of shiftless pug uglies like Adams and Orchard?
That leaves me having to find a story that makes sense for both McParland and for me and so, once more, I pick up my pen.
Before Cripple Creek I was with Glove for almost three years, finding out about Life and growing up, listening to an unstoppable torrent of stories and writing letters, more than a couple of thousand of them, while we worked our way through the towns and mining camps of Colorado.
“You would think, would you not,” Glove said, “that a man who gambled his very life under the ground every day would have sufficient of gambling not to want to spend his evenings over the green baize? Another invaluable lesson, my silent young friend, about the contrary perfidiousness of human nature.”
He had taken it upon himself to point out “invaluable lessons” like that to me when the occasion presented itself.
“As you might know, my dear boy, it is de rigueur to send one’s children off to the Continent on the Grand Tour accompanied, of course, by a suitable tutor. Well, you may, if you so wish, consider me as your tutor, although I hasten to point out to you that Colorado does not equate with the Continent nor Kokomo with Florence or Venice.”
Neither did Eldora or Fairplay or Ouray or Silver Cliff or Creede or Telluride or any of the dozens of towns we passed and repassed on my Grand Tour.
I learned a lot in those years. I learned that there was a load more disappointment in the world than I had imagined. I learned that it wasn’t just me that hadn’t found the West that he had set out expecting to find. Some wanted letters written to say just that, letters telling of hardship, bad times, and bad luck, and warning their family or friends not to follow them. Others wanted the truth kept hidden and had me write how extraordinarily well they were doing.
Of course, there were people who did find what they expected, people who prospered or at least came around to accepting the West as it was. I didn’t meet many of them in the daytime saloons where I hung my shingle.
Hanging that shingle wasn’t always easy. Glove had to lie to skeptical bartenders that I just looked exceptionally young for my age, although that wasn’t a lie. The lying came with him saying I was sixteen when I was only thirteen.
“By all that is logical you should not be retaining your cast of childhood innocence. These places,” Glove said, with a theatrical sweep of his long arms, “are good for naught but premature aging. Yet you, my small friend, seem able to see and hear another’s woes without sharing his sorrows in your childish countenance. Perhaps your enforced silence guards your own song of innocence from their monotonous dirges of experience.”
Though I may not have shown it, listening to all those stories and writing letters was pretty sad at times. Other times it frightened me. Glove never ceased explaining it was all Life as it was lived out, and it was better to face that and learn from it than to turn away and wish for something else.
“Do that, my dear boy, and you will find that Experience is a never-ending disappointment for you. Those so-called writers of those so-called novels that you profess yourself to be so fond of are peddling nothing but illusions for fools and small children. Life is most certainly not a dime novel.”
I knew that, but nonetheless I had to learn it again and again and again.
Cripple Creek was the one place which came the closest to winning Glove’s approval as being almost civilized. It was the center of one of the richest gold mining regions in the world, with about five hundred working mines spread out in a wide, shallow indentation five miles long, which I was told had been left when an old volcano gave up the ghost millions of years before. Unlike the steep gloomy canyons of the Coeur d’Alenes, the district’s many mining towns had a wide-open view and sat high up around and on top of dozens of blunt-topped hills, overlooked to the northeast by the snow-covered ridges of Pike’s Peak.
Cripple Creek itself was a proper city with three steam railroads, two electric tram companies, and a goodly number of fancy hotels, including the five-story National which dominated the city from the Hill. Further indicators of civilization were more than a dozen newspapers and at least three opera houses, although only the Grand was what you might call a proper opera house. Most importantly for Glove, Cripple Creek had almost one hundred saloons and gambling halls.
We spent at least three months in the district on our first visit. It was a couple of weeks into our second when Glove insulted his last Irishman.
It happened in a saloon on Myers Avenue. The Last Chance or maybe The Fountain. Anyway, it was somewhere between the Grand Opera House and the four or five parlor houses which filled up the Three hundred block. I was at a table by the front door composing a particularly excellent love letter for a young miner from Mason City, Iowa, when I heard the shots. Naturally, everyone scrambled for the floor, sending tables and chairs, glasses and plates crashing. After a safe interval there was a rush to the back of the saloon to see what had happened.
I had to fight my way through the circle of silent men. Glove was slumped face forward on the card table, a fan of blood soaking into the green felt, spreading out from under the strands of blond hair. A man leaned over and jerked the cards from Glove’s closed hand.
“Look at that, will ya!” he exclaimed, flourishing the cards to those crowding around the table. “Bastard was drawin to a damned inside straight!”
Consistent to the end was Jason Glover, with his cards, his tongue, and his difficulties with the Irish.
“Shouldn’t have said that,” complained a man standing back to the wall, a r
evolver held loosely at his side. “No call to say that. Ya all saw what happened.”
The man with the revolver was Sean O’Rourke. I never did find out what Glove said to him. They let him off with a plea of self-defense, although Glove didn’t carry a gun. I guess O’Rourke’s friends planted one on him. No one made a fuss. Why should they? O’Rourke was a local man and Glove was only another itinerant tinhorn gambler.
I was able to hold off the crying until they put Glove in the ground. I won’t call what happened a funeral because I couldn’t say any words over him and there was no one else to do it, only a bored undertaker’s assistant and a gravedigger waiting to get away for his dinner.
It was shortly afterwards that I ran into Harry Orchard coming out of Nebraska Nellie’s, one of the cheapest cribs at the Poverty Gulch end of Myers Avenue.
I was rubbing up against Death and Fornication in the same afternoon. I’m sure Glove would have appreciated that. No doubt he would also have found some “invaluable lesson” for me to learn from it.
7
Glove’s sudden death at the poker table left me alone once more. However, I was no longer the abandoned waif who had picked him up off the streets of Missoula. Although I was still too often taken for a little kid because of my smooth cheeks and diminutive stature, I was in fact nearly sixteen, five years out from New York with almost three years of the Grand Tour under my belt and well tutored in Life, in Death, and most of the bits that fall between. At least, that’s what I thought. But Harry Orchard had a few things to teach me which Glove had neglected to cover in his years of peripatetic tuition.
“Hyman old son, I won’t be takin a no for an answer,” Harry said, draping his thick arm around my shoulders. “Us old-time veterans of the Coeur d’Alenes got to stick together, don’t we? Remember that train ride? Ha! Ha! You and old Al and that stutterin fireman looked scared damn near to death! Quite a hot old time that was, huh? Come on, let’s not be standin here in the street like this. Take you home and introduce ya to the new Mrs. Orchard. Get ya fed and watered good and proper.”
