Anything Goes

by Richard S. Wheeler

  “You like it?” Mrs. McGivers asked.

  “It’s as good as any, I guess.”

  “I bought it this afternoon.”

  That stopped a lot of conversation. She smiled, lifted her glass, and touched it to his.

  “I’ve got seven girls upstairs, a suite to live in, me and Joseph and Abel, a stage to play on if I feel like it, a bar, and this eatery. How’s that, do you think?”

  “Well, your monkeys knew how to rattle the tin cups, didn’t they?”

  “Hell yes,” she said. “Some shows, twenty, thirty dollars. Who could resist giving a dime to two monkeys, more on matinee days?”

  He sipped the bourbon. Or whatever it was. It tasted like varnish. He remembered sipping stuff like that on State Street in Chicago.

  “Okay, what?” he asked. This all had sudden implications.

  “Crappy act today.”

  He nodded.

  “Ethel Wildroot, God love her, she’s no damned monkey. And neither is whatever his name is, Cromwell. And Joseph, he wasn’t caring, and Abel, he’s in mourning. So you got the worst performance on the tour, from an act that flew apart and can’t be put together again.”

  He grinned. It was all shaping up.

  “You saying adios, are you?”

  “If you need me, August, I’ll play a few shows until you can get another act.”

  “I’ll miss you, Mrs. McGivers.”

  “I’ll miss you, too, August. It was a great tour. You’re a great manager. We had some good shows.”

  “Long way from home, I guess.”

  “Not so long. I was born in Scotland. Cold weather, it’s not something I’ve never seen.”

  “I know nothing about you.”

  She smiled. “I guess you never will. But now I’m a madam, with a dive in Butte, and some commercial ladies upstairs, and a monkey who’s ready to retire and entertain the customers. Joseph gets in free. So do you.”

  “I’d sure like to know more about you.”

  “If I started confessing, they’d lock me up.”

  “Do they know you here? These people?”

  “Not yet. They will tomorrow.…” She let it remain a question.

  “Tonight, if you wish,” he said.

  She laughed suddenly. A big, hearty, meaty yowl. “Maybe I’ll move in. Joseph’s got the itch. And Abel’s telling me he’s half froze. That hotel is not tropical.”

  “Mrs. McGivers, I’ll be leaving a piece of myself here. The show, it’ll be leaving a lot of itself in Butte. I suppose we should celebrate, but the truth of it is that I’m feeling blue.”

  “August, you need to get laid.”

  The kimono-clad bleached blonde showed up with gray stew, which August ate delicately, fearful of an upset stomach. But the stuff settled amiably in his belly, and he supposed he would survive Mrs. McGivers’ famous and maybe dubious hospitality. He wondered if the blonde was a working girl. They probably were all working girls.

  “I’ll have Joseph bring the stuff, and the monkey,” she said. “We’ve got a big square room at the back, upstairs where I can keep an eye on the ladies.”

  “You stay; I’ll tell Joseph,” he said. “He can bring the monkey and your stuff.”

  “I got a woolen scarf,” she said. “The little guy wraps it round and round, and pretty soon there’s nothing but wool and a tail.”

  She laughed, big and booming again, and reached across the table to kiss him.

  He sat there, amazed. He had just lost an act. A woman he loved, and her entourage. Life flowed on around them: men at the bar, ladies serving stew, stairs leading to quieter precincts. The loss of a monkey had killed her act, but maybe Butte had killed it, too. Butte was where everything happened. A troupe might arrive in Butte for a run at Maguire’s Opera House, and it wouldn’t remain the same company for long.

  She knew what he was thinking, and patted his hand.

  “Whenever you come here, everything’s free,” she said. “On the house.”

  They laughed.

  “You won’t get rich,” he said.

  “There’s always a way, a door, a future, if you’re willing,” she said. “Lots, they aren’t.

  “Well, if I’m free…,” she added, pausing, waiting for a nod, “I’d better move in. And tell the bunch here. They don’t know.”

  He nodded, stood, and welcomed her hug.

  “Thank you, August. Not everyone would do that.”

  That was true. But he had learned a few things about acts, and one of them was that unhappy acts made bad vaudeville. He smiled, clapped his hat on, and sailed into the night, not looking back.

  The air was still and crisp, and it was an easy hike up to the hotel. He liked Butte. But he kept a wary eye for footpads. One could never know, around Butte.

  He found Joseph, the accordion, some packed bags, and the monkey in the hotel room.

  “It’s fine,” August said.

  “Yah, good,” Joseph said. “Hey, it’s auf Wiedersehen, eh?”

  “I’ll fetch a cab if I can. The city never sleeps.”

  Abel perched on the rumpled bed, subdued. The star of the Beausoleil Brothers Follies seemed mournful since his pal had vanished. August realized he had never touched the little fellow, and was more inclined to cuss him. But suddenly everything had changed.

  “You mind?” he asked Joseph, reaching for the monkey.

  Joseph grinned. He was watching closely.

  August picked up the little fellow, feeling the surprising weight in his arms. The monkey snugged right in, his little paws clasping Beausoleil’s arm. It was an odd feeling, holding this creature so like a child. He held the monkey for a bit, found the long gray scarf, and wrapped it around the monkey, who helped him with it. There was a blue child’s receiving blanket, too, and August caught it up and wrapped that around the monkey, who rewarded August by pulling the blanket up over his monkish head and burrowing into it.

  Beausoleil had never had children. He had lived a while with a Latvian woman, Katrina, who had drifted away, or maybe he had drifted away, and he knew he was a stranger to hearth or home. He had grown up on the streets and scarcely knew what a quiet, serene home might be. There had been two or three other women, mostly very young and worldly, but never a home. Never a quiet refuge from the world. Never a Christmas tree, with strings of popcorn on it. Now, with Abel snugged deep into wool and bundled in his arms, he suddenly longed for the thing he had never had: a warm hearth, a home, a welcoming wife.

  Joseph wrestled bags and accordion down the narrow hall, down a flight, to the lobby, while August followed with the bundled-up monkey, who curled trusting in his arms.

  The deskman summoned a cross-eyed boy, who braved the night to find a hack, and after a few minutes one rolled up, the back of the dray horse frosted, the driver’s breath a haze in the deeps.

  The monkey shivered. The hack driver loaded bags and the accordion, and then Joseph climbed into the cold interior. August handed the bundled monkey to Joseph, feeling as if something had been torn away from him. Joseph gathered the bundle, and pulled the monkey tight against his massive chest, his big hands cupping the blanket.

  The cab door snapped shut. The driver clambered up, slapped the lines, and the cab, carrying the best act, carrying a creature August hadn’t realized he loved until that very moment, slipped into the hushed Butte night.

  24

  AUGUST BEAUSOLEIL woke up to a grim day. He had to move his troupe to Philipsburg, a miserable U-shaped route involving two transfers, and at the same time revamp his broken company. There would be a matinee and evening performance the next day at the new opera house there. He collected his company at the Butte station, told them that Mrs. McGivers had departed, and that he would be revamping the show en route.

  “Not her,” said Delilah Marbury. “She held it together.”

  “Her act died when Cain died,” August said. “She was brave enough to keep on trying.”

  “What is she doing now?”
r />   “Running a joint.”

  He spotted some smiles. Wayne Windsor announced he’d be fit to perform the next day, and that helped. But the company was still strained to the breaking point. They boarded a short train, a baggage car and two cigar-stink coaches, that would take them back to Helena, where they would transfer to a westbound Northern Pacific train. The stubby engine soon wrestled them out of the toxic smoke of Butte, and into a serene valley.

  The coach had banging wheels, which added to the travel headache, but August didn’t have time or energy to lament. He found Ethel Wildroot, sitting with the new man, Cromwell Perkins. The sisters were huddled together in the seats ahead.

  “You have an act yet?” he asked.

  Perkins started to reply, but Ethel cut him off. “We’ve tried to come up with something.”

  “In other words, no.” He stared at Perkins. “This one won’t get you any drinks. But sometimes things work. Could you insult everyone in Philipsburg—the town, the miners, their kin, and anyone else around there?”

  “Mr. Beausoleil, sir, I am in a class by myself when it comes to insult.” He turned to Ethel. “Just ask me what I think of the locals.”

  “You sure you want to do this?” she asked August.

  He smiled. “It’s practice. We’re out of there after one day. What I want is to get him cranked up for Missoula. It’s a college town. Be merciless.”

  “I loathe college students, miserable parasites bleeding their fathers of fortunes, learning how to ruin their own lives.”

  August thought he could like the man.

  “We’ll try an olio act, three or four minutes, for the matinee. Expand it to seven or eight in the evening. If they don’t threaten to put you in the hospital, I’ll call it failure.”

  “At last, a chance to enjoy life,” The Genius said.

  “It’s a small house. People halfway back can toss the tomatoes. It’s also new. We’re the first big show.” He smiled. “Maybe the last. If you don’t rile them up, I’ll hook you.”

  Perkins was mystified, so Ethel explained. “It’s a big hook on a stick, to drag off people who are boring the house half to death.”

  “As long as I can use it on you, I’m fine with it,” The Genius said.

  That was a novelty. August wondered whether there were moments when he should be hooked. He headed down the aisle to Ginger, who sat alone, staring out the window. She wore a gray teacherish suit, almost as if it were armor. The coach was chilly. She had been almost aloof since joining the troupe, and August could only guess at the reasons. Maybe show business wasn’t the lark she had imagined when she fled from somewhere or other.

  “May I?” he asked, sliding in beside her before she responded.

  “I’m revamping the show,” he said. “You know. What act follows what act. How do you think you did last night?”

  She looked uncomfortable. “I tried to do what you asked,” she said.

  “And?”

  “There was, I don’t know how to describe it. An invisible wall. A glass wall between me and the audience. It’s as if my voice stopped traveling.”

  “Your voice reaches the rear. I checked.”

  “Then I don’t know. They applauded.”

  “Yes, they did,” he said. They applauded politely, waiting for the next act. There were all types of applause, and they all sent messages, and the message they sent Ginger was indifference.

  “No one wanted an encore,” she said.

  “Maybe you could experiment some. Different songs. You must have lots.”

  “But I haven’t practiced them.”

  “It’s not a recital, Ginger.”

  She brightened suddenly. “It’s not at all like I thought. I mean, I’m trained. My voice is good. I was considered a prodigy. They all said so. I always thought that was it. I was at the top, the whole world would see it.” She smiled. “Some joke.”

  “I wish you could be a saloon singer. Up close, getting something back from the people watching you, people with drinks in hand, and you a few feet away, trying to entertain them.”

  “Entertain them?”

  “Of course. Entertain them.”

  She seemed puzzled. “But I perform.”

  He grinned. “Ginger, try something different. A nice, sentimental ballad or two. Don’t worry about getting high C or B flat right. Just wink at some gent, and see if he winks back.”

  “I don’t know how you put up with me,” she said.

  “I know some reporters,” he said. “They tell me about their training. How to write a lead that’s interesting. How to make sure the story has a who, when, why, where. The four Ws, they call it. How to catch a reader’s attention. How to be spare, not waste words. Good reporters, with years of training, years of mastering the art, the lore. And you know what? One or two of them switched to writing novels, and they crashed. They said it’s different; they had to unlearn everything they had mastered as newsmen. The lore didn’t help them write a novel. They lacked voice, the personal thing a novelist puts into his work. Maybe it’s that way for you.”

  She stared out the window at the passing slopes. “Maybe I was naïve,” she said.

  “I’m not giving up on you, Ginger. Let’s just see what you do. Let’s see what part of yourself you put out there.”

  “Oh, well,” she said, not believing.

  “Philipsburg is a good place to try something new. Brief engagement. Then on to Missoula, and big crowds.”

  “Maybe this is a train to nowhere,” she said.

  The engine lurched around a bend, the bad roadbed bucking the coach, and August patted her hand and left her there. Show business wasn’t whatever she had dreamed long before. But she was flexible.

  They were passing through anonymous forest that largely blotted out the scenery, so the train seemed to crawl through a place of no beginnings and no endings.

  Wayne Windsor was sitting on an aisle seat, but there was space across the aisle, so August settled there. Windsor was no longer masking his damaged face with high collars and scarves.

  “You’ll play tomorrow?”

  “One act, maybe two for the matinee. I’m talking, anyway.”

  “Small house,” August said. “But we don’t know much about it. No big show’s played there.”

  “I didn’t think I’d ever love a monkey,” Windsor said. “But I do. She had a great act, Monkey Band. It loosened people up. I always wanted to follow her, because everyone would be in a cheerful mood.”

  “Butte air’s hard on monkeys.”

  “She bought a joint?”

  “Whatever it is. With a little stage. She’s still got some box office. Along with a bar and some working girls.”

  “I never thought she’d end up in Butte. Cuba, maybe, but not Butte.”

  “Where will you end up, Wayne?”

  “In a big city, full of people. Not Montana. This is the hardest tour I’ve been on.”

  “Yeah, and a lot still left. Thanks for sticking with me, Wayne. You’re the draw now, always were.”

  Windsor sighed, rubbed his wounded profile, and stared at the anonymous forest. Montana was a lot of nothing.

  August managed to visit with each of the people in the company, as the train huffed north. The Marbury trio were doing fine; Harry the Juggler was as surly as usual. LaVerne Wildroot was cheerful. The other girls were a little blue. It would be their last tour, and they knew that, though nothing had been said about it.

  “Your music’s holding it together,” August said. “You’re out there when I need you.”

  They probably didn’t believe it.

  Butte sliding away, minute by minute. Mary Mabel Markey dead and buried there, lying beside a thousand miners who died young. Mrs. McGivers and the remains of her Monkey Band running a joint there. One monkey left. He felt an odd pang. Ever since he had carried Abel down to the waiting hack, swathed in wool, he had known that Cain and Abel were the true stars of the Follies. It took death to give him some insi
ght.

  They waited in a sturdy frame station off Last Chance Gulch for the Seattle Express, which would whistle its way to Garrison Junction, and another square-wheeled local that would shuttle them down to the sprawling silver camp that would soon see the first touring variety show ever to show up there. He hoped Pomerantz would meet them and settle them there. He knew the turf.

  By the time the troupe finally boarded the train to Philipsburg, which consisted of three box cars, a gondola, an ancient coach, and a caboose, everyone was ready to crawl under two blankets and into bed. August could not remember a more grueling and bone-cold trip in all the years he had been on the road with a touring company. He had an odd thought: it was no place for monkeys. Mrs. McGivers had saved the little guy’s life, staying back there in that bustling city. Abel and Butte were made for each other.

  They chuffed in at dusk, noting a snowy landscape. They had come to the end of the world. If Butte was isolated, Philipsburg was on another planet. The train halted shy of the gravel platform, leaving passengers to wrestle their way along the roadbed after a long step off the coach stair. Whatever was in those boxcars was more important than mere mortals.

  But there was Charles Pomerantz, collecting his crowd, opening his arms to his bride, who fell into his embrace as if were the only comfort left to her. The engine hissed steam, which enveloped them and smeared grit on them.

  “There’s no hacks here, but the hotel’s over there. And I’ve got some boys to help you,” Charles said. “The opera house is around the corner, a block beyond that.”

  Indeed, there were four boys in knickers and leather caps, ready to help. Pomerantz steered the boys to the larger trunks and satchels, and studied the troupe.

  “Am I missing something?” he asked.

  “We’ve got a lot to talk about. Including changes in the playbills,” August said.

  “Where’s the show? I mean, the acts?”

  “We’ve got a show. Just not the show we had when you left Butte.”