The Best Bad Things

by Katrina Carrasco

  She slides aside Nell’s collar. Nuzzles under her clavicle as a knock sounds at the front of the house. The noise cracks them apart, Nell startling, her shoulders high.

  “Oh, no.” Alma holds the other woman close with her right hand at the small of her back, cursing her left arm as a no-good lump of shit. “Shop’s closed.”

  “Wait,” Nell says, pulling away as the knocking resumes. “It’s Delphine.”

  24

  JANUARY 20, 1887

  “Delphine?” Alma’s grip on her trousers falters, the front of her body cold where Nell had pressed against her.

  “She’s visiting today, like she promised,” Nell says. “At three o’clock. Hurry, keep those on for now. Where’s your jacket?”

  Nell squeezes past Alma and into the purple-papered hall, calling out, “Just a moment,” her slippers quick on the wood floors. Alma is lashed by Nell’s closeness, by how it was ripped away. By Delphine’s arrival: Alma’s not ready for it. She buttons up her trousers with some trouble, not able to recall where she put her jacket. The blanket served earlier and it will have to serve now. Nell unbolts the front door, and sunlight pours warm into the hallway.

  “Good afternoon, ma’am.”

  Alma wraps the blanket around her like a poncho, her shoulder stiff. She limps down the short hall. The light dims as Nell closes the door.

  “Good afternoon, dear.”

  In the shop Delphine is taking off her gloves. She pauses, black crinkle of silk in one fist, when her eyes meet Alma’s.

  “Well,” she says, her dark eyes unreadable. “I hope I’m not interrupting.”

  “A little bit.” Alma is walking a fine line, her voice almost insolent.

  “No, not at all,” Nell rushes to say, and fusses with the beige chair in the corner. “Please, Mrs. Powell. Have a seat.”

  Delphine eases into the chair, gloves in her lap. Alma is watching the two women, hunting for a snag that shows the underpinnings of their relationship—it could be anything between them, loyalty or lust or pure servitude. Alma’s seen Delphine inspire all of these things in men and women who did not at first seem susceptible. Felt some of each herself and not been sure why. She leans against the doorjamb. Spine of wood cold against her own, her eyes on the top button of Nell’s dress, undone. A sneer wants to start on her lips. I’m about to have her, the sneer might say to Delphine, so jump on in.

  “Make us some tea, would you?” Delphine says to Nell.

  “Of course.”

  Nell hurries into the hall, her skirts brushing Alma’s legs. As Nell clatters around in the kitchen, Delphine smiles at Alma. A warm smile, though her eyes are still guarded. Alma is wary—she has bad news to deliver—but they are alone in a private room again, at last, and Alma is stripped down to the skin. She is glad for Delphine to see her like this: those dark eyes on her, flickering over the blanket, the ridges of her exposed forearms, the line of muscle tracing down her stomach to the sagging band of her trousers. Alma has never felt so hard, so full of swagger and manhood, charged up by Nell’s hands on her, by Nell’s sighs.

  “I thought I told you not to get distracted,” Delphine says.

  “I might be having fun,” Alma says. “But that doesn’t mean I’m dropping any balls.”

  Delphine laughs. Her face softens, but Alma doesn’t know whether to trust it. She has to tell her about the Pinkerton’s agents—about how things have gotten hot. How they’re out of time. Damn it.

  “And so saucy,” Delphine says. “I’ve missed seeing you like this.”

  “I’ll pay you a call anytime you like.”

  Alma peels away from the wall, takes three steps that bring her almost to stepping on Delphine’s skirts. Her eyes on Alma’s hips. One hand coming up to nudge her full lower lip, her ruby ring winking. Belatedly, Alma realizes her trousers are stiff with blood and sweat. Now that she’s standing near Delphine, she hopes they don’t reek of piss, too.

  “I heard you were shot.”

  “News travels fast,” Alma says, drawn closer as Delphine holds out her hand. Alma takes it: her warm palm, soft, the trace of her thumbnail over the calloused skin at the base of Alma’s fingers.

  “You love the fight, Rosales,” Delphine says. “And I love that about you. But remember, you’re still flesh and blood. When Nathaniel came to me with the news, I—”

  Nell bustles in with a dish of chocolates.

  “The kettle’s on,” she says, her cheeks pinkening as her gaze catches on Alma’s and Delphine’s hands, still interlocked.

  “Wonderful.” Delphine releases Alma’s hand, something glinting in her eyes: mischief, or irritation. “I’m glad we had this chat arranged. After last night, I had to come check on … Jack.”

  Tell her about the Pinkerton’s agents. Tell her, while she’s flirtatious and almost smiling and might stay that way. But Nell is here, listening. Alma doesn’t like how in Delphine’s presence Nell dims a little, not so golden, not so enticing.

  “Can I come to the house?” Alma says.

  “I don’t think so.” Delphine nods at Alma’s feet, planted wide for balance.

  She looks down, and though she can’t feel it, her left hand has started to shake.

  “Jack, sit down.” Nell rises, her light touch on Alma’s elbow scratching the blanket against her skin.

  Alma shrugs her off. The motion leaves her dizzy.

  “Don’t coddle me,” she says.

  At all costs she must stay standing. Delphine is watching her; Nell is close behind, warm, hovering. If Alma falters, it will feel like more than a physical shortcoming. She wants the two women to see her stand there, jaw set, bleeding but ready knuckled even though she’s been kicked around.

  “Take the day off,” Delphine says. “You’re only human. Let Nell see to you.”

  “They’re coming,” Alma says. She is busted up and reeling, but only she can handle the Pinkerton’s agents—and she wants Delphine to know it. “Soon. We need to be ready.”

  Now she has Delphine’s full, sober attention. Her dark eyes sharp. Her ring flashing as she drops her hand from her chin, curls it around her black gloves.

  “Nell.” Delphine doesn’t say anything else, just nods at the inner rooms, and Nell bolts the front door and walks into the hall, pulling that door closed behind her. “I thought that was taken care of.”

  “It was,” Alma says. “But we were meant to have friends on the case. Yesterday I found out they’re not friends. Two new men, coming down from Colorado way. Due in Sunday.”

  “What are you going to do about it?”

  “Thought I’d head them off in Tacoma. Ought to start getting to know the place, anyway.”

  This trip requires another disguise, of a sort. She must meet the Pinkerton’s agents as Alma Rosales. Secretary to Daniel Lowry. Disgraced former agent scraping for any work she can get. Lowry’s letter writer and link to the agency while he is undercover with the opium men.

  “I thought we had more time,” Delphine says. “Now you tell me we have three days.”

  “Or more. If I can persuade them to cool their heels in the Sound for a minute.”

  “Do try.” Delphine stands, pulling on her gloves, tall in her heeled boots. “I have some social obligations to see to that will keep me away from Lower Town for a spell. I can’t get mud on my skirts.”

  “What about that private call?” Alma lets the blanket slip to reveal her uninjured shoulder, its supple cap of muscle, the raised triangle of the tendons connecting her arm to her throat. “Sarah Powell’s a busy woman. I wish she had more time for me.”

  Hot slide of Delphine’s eyes down her right arm, skipping on the band of her trousers.

  “She might if you’d get your job done,” Delphine says. “I’ve been wanting to visit Tacoma.”

  Alma laughs.

  “How long have you been using that name?”

  “Sarah Powell.” Delphine says the name with a dramatic flourish. “It’s terribly boring, isn’t it?�
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  “It doesn’t suit you. The name. The clothes.” All that somber cloth, the high choker of a collar. “I miss your old gowns. That red one. You wore it the night Finnegan died.”

  An evening of feasting, of excess: cigars, liquor, diamond-studded pistols, pretty company—the best bad things money can buy. The Nob Hill house a full-swing bandits’ party, villains of all stripes on the stairs, in the corners, women draped in stolen jewels, men flashing stolen watches. Delphine’s servants pouring bourbon like water, she watchful atop her smile, getting Finnegan and his friends stupid with drink so they would speak easy. Later, Alma smoking with Delphine on the balcony, feeling like a sparrow next to a phoenix in her drab wash dress, much patched, still living on bread and onions, still learning how to silence the part of her that yammered on like a policeman, listing her new comrades’ sins: licentiousness, thievery, forgery, sodomy. Learning to listen as a new voice narrated the current of desire flowing toward Delphine like a sunset tide, the other woman so golden, so sharp-nailed and sure. She’s a murderer and I don’t care. She’s a danger and I don’t care. I don’t care, I don’t care. Just crack me open, Delphine. Just eat my heart out.

  “I loved that dress,” Delphine says, sighing. “Red has always been my favorite.”

  Seven years since that night. Seven years of money, of power, of freedom to rattle the bars of her body and take different shapes. Delphine never telling her to do otherwise. Delphine trusting her to get the job done, whatever the job might be. Now the prize of Tacoma, new conquests, new contests. If Alma can deliver on her promises.

  “I’ll keep Pinkerton’s men busy,” she says.

  “Good.” Delphine pulls a slip of paper from her reticule, sets it on the table beside Nell’s sewing machine. Jasmine perfume rising from her skirts as she steps past Alma. “Take care, Rosales.”

  Delphine unbolts the door and slips through. In the seam of daylight, Joe stands beside an open carriage door, wearing a neat suit. Then Delphine pulls the door closed and the shop is dim, empty. Alma leans against the wall, unmoored, wanting Delphine back. Wanting, absurdly, to tell her she’d seen what happened to Finnegan that night: how, from a sliver of doorway, she’d watched him fall to his knees before Delphine, his single eye wet with tears, tearing his shirt open, and Delphine leaned down to kiss him, then shot him in the heart.

  “She called you Rosales.”

  “How long were you listening?” Alma stops halfway to the table, halfway to that little scrap of paper Delphine left behind. She covers the motion with a stumble that ends up more real than feigned.

  Nell comes into the room holding a wrapped parcel. She sets it on the sewing table, beside the lacquered machine, and puts the paper in her dress pocket. All the spit and fire that had held Alma up straight while Delphine was there is dredging away. It’s hard to stand without support. Hard to look at Nell without seeing three gold-haired women in pink dresses.

  “You’re shaking,” Nell says. “Come lie down.”

  The bread Alma wolfed down is climbing back up her throat, a sour pressure at the root of her tongue. Her left hand still not working.

  “All right.”

  Nell is warm under her arm, warm along her right side. Maybe this will clear her head—salt skin under her mouth, heated breathing—but it’s no good, she is too wrung out, too uneasy in her gullet, to pick up where they left off. She wants to be in charge, with clear eyes and sure fingers, not flop all over Nell like a rum-punched sailor. So she lets Nell lower her to the bed and undo her trouser buttons. Before, Nell’s fingers on her body were like magnets, pulling all the blood and feeling to the surface of her skin. Now they are just fingers, gentle. She lifts her hips so Nell can pull down the filthy twill, leaving her in the binding cloth and a pair of yellowed men’s drawers.

  “I’ll just close my eyes for a minute,” Alma says, fisting the blanket to her chest.

  Then it’s quiet.

  * * *

  The smell wakes her. Onions and sage, mutton fat, pepper. She breathes deep. Opens her eyes to a shadowy bedroom. Lace curtains gilded rose gold. The day has burned down, leaving only a little waxy light. But Alma’s shoulder has eased. And when she lifts her left hand, it obeys: its fingers open and close, flex into a fist, still tingling but regaining some of their dexterity.

  She tries to sit up—fails, seized by a spasm under her bandage. Tries again in the crabbed fashion that worked earlier, hand to knee, stomach clenched, rolling up and swinging her legs to the floor. The room is cold and she feels it everywhere, at the scabbed edges of her binding cloth, seeping right through the thin cotton of her drawers.

  “Nell?”

  Perched on the side of the bed, Alma tests the muscles in her arm. She can raise her elbow a notch higher than she could that afternoon. Find more range of motion in the connected muscles of her neck. This is progress. She curls her left hand into a fist, pounds it against her thigh. A shadow fills the doorway.

  “I made soup,” Nell says.

  “And I want to eat it.”

  Alma stands, finds her balance. She is steadier than before. Progress. She comes around the bed, keeping close to the post if she should need it. Nell watches from the door, eyes skittering down her body. Alma doesn’t bother hiding her grin.

  “I’ll be better sport, now that I’ve rested,” she says.

  “Let’s get some food in you first.” Nell takes the blanket off the foot of the bed, drapes it over Alma’s shoulders. “It’s warmer in the kitchen, but not by much.”

  At the table Nell sets a steaming bowl before Alma, a new loaf of brown bread. The soup is golden, lobed with liquid fat and carrot rounds. Alma lifts the bowl to her mouth. Drinks broth and bites bread in alternate motions. The soup salty and rich. Chunks of meat butter-soft between her teeth. When the bowl is empty, she wipes her chin with the back of her hand and holds the bowl out for more.

  “You like it?” Nell says, after she finishes her mouthful of bread.

  “It’s putting blood back in my veins.”

  Nell sets down her own spoon, stands to ladle more soup. Alma likes how the lamplight falls on Nell’s hair, on the long paleness of her neck.

  “Which is your real name?” Nell says, a spoonful of soup dripping between her mouth and bowl. “Camp? Or Rosales?”

  “Pick your favorite,” Alma says, twitching off the question out of habit.

  Nell dabs at the fat glossing her chin. Some still glinting on the curved bow of her lower lip. A few minutes to rest, to let the food settle, and then Alma wants to finish what they started. With the warm flush of the soup her body is starting to heat again. She wants it to burn slow. Enjoy the spark, the hot coil.

  “Forger, tailor, blue-ribbon cook.” Alma licks her teeth, her eyes on Nell’s. “How did you learn all your tricks?”

  Nell laughs. Tucks a curl of hair behind her ear.

  “My daddy was a schoolteacher. He taught me how to read, and how to write so fine.” She folds her hands on the table, the bowl of soup within the circle of her arms. “I don’t have much else to thank him for. I left home when I was fourteen. Worked my way toward the coast in lumber camps. Cooking some; there’s the soup come in. Some washing and tailoring; there’s the rest. But mostly keeping the men company. It was a hard time. I lost two babies. Left a third in Olympia, with a church.”

  She pauses. Nudges her spoon along the rim of her bowl. From the courtyard door, the sound of singing. The women back at their drying lines in the alley, two voices linked together, rising, dipping.

  “That was ten years ago,” Nell says. “My baby girl’s ten years old, somewhere.”

  “What did you call her?” Alma says, because they’re already talking about names. Because she has to say something—she can’t just sit there watching Nell start to cry.

  “Now, that’s my secret.” Nell blinks, flashes a tired smile.

  Alma runs her hand through her hair. Leaves it cupped at the back of her skull and tests the movement of her n
eck, the sore left side biting into her attention. The blanket slides off her right shoulder. Nell’s eyes catch on Alma’s bare skin, on the muscle that ropes the underside of her arm.

  “I’m getting sore, sitting here,” Alma says.

  “Back to bed with you.”

  Alma stands, rubs her left biceps. The touch pulls at her shoulder. Wrenching pain, but strength under the skin. Her body solid despite the abuse it has taken. She’s not as steady as she’d like, but the alternative is waiting even longer to have Nell, and that’s no alternative at all.

  “Joining me?” Alma says at the doorway.

  Nell’s chair scrapes over the floorboards. Alma walks into the hall, into the bedroom, where everything is dusted with soft blue light. In ten minutes it will be full night. She throws the blanket off her shoulders, over the foot of the bed. Cold air. Stale blood tang on her binding cloth. Nell comes in as Alma is striking a match, her left hand good enough to hold the box, her right hand bruised and strong in the wavering flame.

  “Take off your dress,” she says as the lamp catches.

  When she turns around, Nell is standing by the bed, her fingers on the third button of her collar, the lace frill of a chemise glinting in the seam. Her eyes autumn ivy-colored in the lamplight, latched on to Alma’s. She crosses the space between them, floorboards ridged under her feet.

  Five buttons. Alma stands near enough to feel Nell’s warmth. The dress gapes open, over the rise of her breasts, over the thin boning of a workday corset. Alma stops Nell’s fingers when they reach her waist. Leans up to her, breath passing between them, and then their mouths meet. Alma licks at the inside of Nell’s lips, tongue curling, and slips her good hand into the open front of the dress. Catches the quick heave of Nell’s breathing. She is thinking about Nell’s thighs, the meat of them puckering under her fingertips, pressing into her neck.

  Nell wraps one arm around Alma’s waist, curls the other over her good shoulder, careful of her bindings. Lace chemise soft in Alma’s palm. Pulling down so one pale breast spills over the corset. She bends to take the nipple in her mouth, and Nell’s fingers flex, tighten, clutch Alma into place and she likes that, she likes having to remind herself to be gentle, how it makes her feel strong. Nell’s skin smells of perfume—honeysuckle dabbed in the notch between her breasts—and sweat, sour and animal, the body she keeps wrapped under her clothes, the secret parts she is letting Alma stroke, take in mouthfuls.