Savage Girl

by Jean Zimmerman

  She suddenly turned her head away from her drawing and looked up at me. The eyes that I saw the evening before as amber now appeared an ordinary hazel. Her expression contained, amid its wildness, an uncanny glint of intelligence.

  Did she recognize me? A member of her public who had now come to see her spectacle twice in a row?

  She obviously had many such adherents. I felt myself, under her stare, diminish. I wanted to turn away, but she had me fixed. She dropped her gaze before I could drop mine.

  R. T. Flenniken climbed the ladder from below and approached me. “You are Hugo, right? The son?”

  “Yes?”

  “You might want to take a try at these.” He held out the pair of claw devices that Savage Girl wielded to such great effect during the show. “Sure, put ’em on,” he said. He spoke in a wheezing stridor, passing his words through his nose.

  I expected the claw hands to be somehow fabricated out of gray-painted wood, false as the act itself, but taking them, hefting them, I realized just how lethal they were.

  A pair, identical, one for each hand, three blades on each, like triple stilettos. All six razors measured a half foot long in honed steel and were attached to a metal rig that was similar to the guard on a fencing foil. This guard had an iron peg running crosswise through the middle of it. The whole device came off as well smithed and ingenious.

  “I had ’em made up myself,” Flenniken said.

  It so happened I liked knives. I slipped my hand inside one of the vicious claws, folding my grip around the crosswise peg. Then the other.

  “We first tried giving her fangs,” the mouth breather said, “but a girl with fangs just looks silly, and besides, they wouldn’t fit right and made her gums bleed. These here were just the ticket. A man feels reborn with a set of knives on his fists.”

  Reborn, yes. Unassailable. I waved my bayonetas in the air and instantly gashed the back of my left hand with a blade of the right.

  “First blood,” the Toad said, smiling, and retrieved the nasty things from me.

  “You neglect the third act,” I heard Freddy saying to Dr. Scott. “Your show needs a turn.”

  “It is poor theater, you are right,” Dr. Scott said. “The huge crowds it attracts are unsophisticated in the extreme.”

  “My darling has followers,” spoke up the Sage Hen, “who come here night after night.” Her voice resembled a deep-seated squeaking.

  “Let her bathe, then let her be dressed again,” Freddy said, gesticulating with his hands, framing the imaginary scene below. “The spectators believe that the show is over. They shuffle and mill, unsure if they should leave.”

  “I always told ’im we should be selling waffles to the audience,” interjected Jake Woodworth.

  My father would not be deterred. “But it is a false ending. From outside the barn, a wolf howl is heard, then another, and soon a whole chorus. They crowd all about, surrounding us in the darkness, yowling.”

  Freddy threw his head back and let loose a full-throated howl. I had to laugh. Like many confident men of wealth, he had mastered a trick, one I had not yet gotten hold of myself, that of not caring what other men think.

  I glanced over my shoulder at Savage Girl, considering whether she might answer my father’s wolf call. But after looking mildly up at us, she returned to her drawing.

  “It is her wolf pack, returned to collect their own!” said my father, effectively imitating Dr. Scott’s theatrical delivery. “Chaos! Trembling! Abrupt banging sounds against the building walls!”

  “I shout out, ‘They have come for her!’” said Dr. Scott, getting swept up in the moment.

  “Your torch somehow snuffs itself out,” Freddy said. “Darkness. Forms move down below.”

  “I could get the dogs to do it,” Scott said.

  “And when the torch is finally relit . . .” Freddy said.

  “She is vanished,” Scott said.

  “She is vanished,” my father said, nodding.

  “Oh, my,” said the Sage Hen.

  “That’ll do,” pronounced Jake Woodworth. He let go a black stream of liquefied tobacco down onto the barn floor below.

  Dr. Scott was silent for a beat, his face straining with contained excitement. “Yes, that’s very good. I might use that.”

  He bowed to my father. “I yield to a dramaturge of superior abilities.”

  “But don’t you realize, Dr. Scott—or Calef, may I call you Calef?”

  Dr. Scott bowed again, preening.

  “You know, Cal, this is no life for a young girl.”

  Freddy said it gently, bringing us all back down to earth after the extravagance of his previous presentation. It was another marked characteristic I noticed in my father’s dealings among people, the ability to switch moods completely and abruptly. It made his interlocutors strain to follow him and thus put them in his power.

  He walked over to the railing. “No life for a young girl at all,” he repeated softly, looking down at Savage Girl.

  My father is an autodidact. A self-taught dabbler with a lot of time on his hands, and there can be nothing more annoying than that. At various times in his life, he studied Sanskrit, Swahili and the Occitan dialect of the Languedoc. Still, it surprised me a little to hear my father call out in a language I had never heard.

  “Kimaru, nai-bi,” he said.

  The effect upon Savage Girl was immediate. It was as though she had touched the leads of a galvanic battery. She jerked her head around and stared at my father, a look of pure excitement seizing her features.

  “Kimaru, nai-bi,” Freddy said again.

  Savage Girl let out a screech, a sound I had never before or since heard a human voice make.

  She rose to her feet, bounded across the barn, leaped up one of the pillars that held the balcony in place and, before any of us could react, had scrambled to the other side of the railing opposite my father, to where her face was inches away from his. She stood balancing there for a long moment, grinning, a wild-haired banshee.

  Then—my heart stopped—she back-flipped down to the floor of the barn with a resounding thump. Racing around the space like a madwoman, running on two feet and occasionally on four, she finished up by zipping suddenly into her cage and slamming the door shut.

  She did not come out for the remainder of our visit.

  4

  I remember thinking green, green, g in “green,” g in “gin,” and marveling at how the whiskey went in the green bottles and the gin went in the brown.

  Well, no, that didn’t much make sense. It was the other way around. The first sign I wasn’t myself. I had drunk gin and whiskey both, since returning to Costello’s after dinner that night, chasing a chimera, drawn to a creature I could barely believe existed.

  Gin the rising favorite, newly fashionable, a gin drunk seen to be more sophisticated, less likely to result in one’s stomach emptying upon one’s shoes.

  “We tried to buy her,” I informed the muttonchopped stranger next to me, an excellent gent I had only just met, matching me drink for drink and keeping up.

  “Tried to buy her?” Muttonchops asked, unfocusedly. Unfocusedly?

  “We tried to buy her, and they would not sell.”

  “Offer ’em more,” he suggested.

  “We did,” I said.

  “‘D’ Street?” he asked. “The Barbary?”

  “‘A’ Street,” I said. “Right next door.”

  This caused Muttonchops to erupt in drooling chuckles. “Sheee?” he said. “Shee-hee-heeee!”

  We had indeed tried to buy Savage Girl. Or rather Freddy had. Before I quite knew what was happening, earlier that morning at the barn, my father had become engaged in a spirited bidding war. Although “war” might not be the word for it, since he was bidding against himself.

  “I think five hundred would be fair to take her off your hands,” he had said to Dr. Scott.

  I felt myself confused. Why was my father offering to buy a creature he had labeled a fraud? And
hadn’t we fought a nationwide war just a decade earlier, whereby human flesh could not be bought or sold by other humans?

  “Five hundred!” Dr. Scott crowed. “Five hundred gold? Why, that’s most generous!”

  “Do we have a deal?”

  “Yes!” Scott said, seizing my father’s hand. Then, abruptly, pulling back.

  “What am I doing?” Scott said. “I have partners in this concern.”

  “I own half of her,” Jake Woodworth said. “I found her near dead up in the hills, and she’s half mine.”

  “Then the Sage Hen here, she is owed a great deal,” Dr. Scott said. “She nursed her back to health.”

  The Sage Hen nodded, well, sagely. “Yarrow smoke, mesquite oil, orange water.”

  “And laudanum,” Dr. Scott added.

  “A scant dram,” Sage Hen said.

  “Six hundred, then,” my father had said.

  “Deal!” Dr. Scott had pronounced again.

  Only not. A pattern emerged, recognizable from my time the previous summer working under the speculator Jay Gould on Wall Street.

  A price, agreed upon, then jacked up, agreed upon, then jacked again.

  As Mr. Gould would say, By God, I have him well cooked!

  In our case at the barn that morning, Dr. Scott had been the one who had managed to fricassee us.

  “She needs my constant minding,” the Sage Hen said. “Without me I believe she is like to perish from sadness.”

  Whatever is not nailed down is mine, Mr. Gould used to say. Whatever I can pry up is not nailed down.

  Only we couldn’t pry her up.

  After I spent untold hours that night drinking in Costello’s Saloon and Shooting Gallery, the room went cockeyed. The ceiling seemed to be somehow dropping, drumming its stamped-surface designs upon my cranium. My sadness abided. I needed the Sage Hen to come take care of me.

  “I have lost her forever,” I said.

  “Let’s have another drink,” Muttonchops said. “Are we on gin or whiskey this time around?”

  I had already fallen once, when I slipped on a brass cartridge casing. I saw dozens of rimfire .22 shells scattered across the linoleum, all of which, the shells and the linoleum, looked to me as if they wanted to come up and hit me in the face.

  Good to stay put. Whiskey. I had never consumed so much even on the loosest night at college.

  I felt light, high, and then down and heavy. My head was one with the bar. All true drunks, Bev Willets used to tell me, consider the floor their best friend.

  At some point in the evening, I felt myself assaulted by Muttonchops and a confederate, who put me in a corner and began an aggressive search of my pockets. There seemed to be some disagreement about paying for drinks, but that was no reason for them to steal my shoes. No other patron noticed or cared that I was being robbed right there in the establishment.

  Colm Cullen came through Costello’s dice-set doorway just about that time. My hero. He muscled the assailants away, regained my footwear and returned a jackknife that had been stripped from me. I decided it might be wise to move back to gin from whiskey.

  “You’ll need to keep a good lookout while you’re in Virginia,” Colm said, shaking some of the drunkenness out of me. He wore his hair slicked back with brilliantine and his mustache well waxed. “It wouldn’t do for us to lose Mr. Hugo Delegate.”

  Two men stood behind him, dressed in the local uniform of blue flannel shirt, blue pants and tall leather boots. I believed them to be two anyway but was unsure.

  “My associates,” Colm said. “Grainger and Markham.”

  Good. They were two.

  “Would you take a drink, gentlemen?”

  My soft, pink hand went out to grasp their rough ones, and then the same hand returned to me.

  “Chew?” offered Colm.

  I shook my head. Chew had always been sick-making for me.

  “Smoke, then,” said Colm. He removed some shreds of tobacco from a pouch and wrapped one tightly in paper.

  I didn’t smoke either. Yet now I did.

  The lamps down the bar threw a flickering light over Colm’s Irish countenance as Grainger and Markham concentrated on their drinks.

  “Your finest tarantula juice!” commanded Markham.

  “Another whiskey!” I echoed, even though I had switched to gin.

  “Hugo’s in deep with the Brilliant,” said Colm. “Took him down the throat of it yesterday.”

  We tossed ours back. My vision went temporarily missing. When it returned to me, the boys were swaying, while I was perfectly still.

  I decided I would rather be perfectly still outside Costello’s. I rose from the barstool and found myself transported at a staggering trot out the back door of the saloon, on a little trip to the porch, taking deep, shuddering breaths, winding up leaning heavily against a shaky wooden column.

  Gunfire, crisp in the night air of the Washoe. Next to me a half dozen shooters with puny .22 rifles, blasting away at the mountain.

  The obsidian western dark. Nose smarting from the alkali dust. The moon had come out white and then went lopsided. I glanced up at the flank of Sun Mountain, where the big billboards glowed vaguely like a deck of cards that had been scattered there. Everything looked hollowed out.

  I could see Scott’s barn beyond the shooting gallery, the front of the place drenched in shadow. I bowed my head, hoping my dinner would stay where it was supposed to be. It didn’t. I staggered to the railing of the porch and retched down into the gulch.

  Always puke from an upper story if you can. Much more entertaining.

  When I lifted my eyes, I saw a vendor put away his wares in the little alley that ran up to Scott’s barn, setting goods in sacks and laying the sacks on a low barrow.

  It was time to go.

  At the shallow ditch in the back of the barn, where the structure met the rise of the slope, a small figure moved hurriedly in the darkness. Wrapped in an oversize coat, clutching at a blanket.

  With bare feet.

  I stood still. I couldn’t hear my breathing. I had stopped breathing.

  She moved toward me, right beneath the blaze of the shooting gallery guns, slipping past us all, past the puffs of dust sent up as the slugs tore into the slope.

  “What did you say to her?” I had asked my father, earlier in the day, wondering about what possible incantation he’d used to bring Savage Girl running, racing, leaping up to him like a puppet on a string.

  “I said, ‘Come here, young woman.’”

  I was beside myself. “In what language, for heaven’s sakes?”

  “Comanche,” Freddy said.

  “Comanche? Comanche?” A tongue I was entirely unaware my father knew.

  “I’ve picked up a few phrases here and there, and some grammar,” he said. “It’s the common language of the Plains, you know.” Freddy had done a couple tours of the West already and for all I knew had spent time camping out in a tepee.

  “Whyever on God’s green earth did you think Comanche would work on her?”

  “There’s no need to bring God into it,” Freddy said. “The pictograms she was drawing on the wall were Comanche.”

  There on the porch of Costello’s Saloon and Shooting Gallery, I paddled through the inland seas of alcohol sloshing in my brain, trying in vain to remember the magic words my father had used to summon Savage Girl.

  “Ka-ka-ka-roo,” I stuttered, before giving up. Instead I was reduced to saying softly, almost to myself, “Come here, young woman,” in the useless language of my mother tongue. She couldn’t hear me over the bang of the sharpshooters on the firing range and passed out of sight down the little gully behind Costello’s.

  But first, I swear, her eyes caught mine. If you told me this creature had come fresh from heaven or had been flung out from hell, it wouldn’t have mattered.

  I would still have wanted to run from her, or save her.

  • • •

  The next morning, feeling like the opposite of a million dol
lars, I cleaned the throw-up off myself and ventured forth once again from my befouled nest at the International.

  Whole body throbbing, my head ringing like a dinner bell (though the thought of food revolted me), I went to find my father, only to be told he had left the hotel early. I made a wild guess where Freddy had gone and followed him there.

  On the streets of Virginia, the normal chaos reigned, the noise and stench a fulsome challenge to my delicate, gin-bruised sensibilities. At the intersection of “A” Street and Summit Avenue, an altercation. Some fool had brought a salt-laden camel into town, and the sight of the strange beast frightened a team of horses, which had run up the sidewalk and mangled a passing Celestial.

  Both teamsters bellowed at each other, the horses screamed, and the stubborn dromedary looked stupidly around for some victim out of which to take a piece. A camel’s bite, I had heard, was vicious, so I kept my distance.

  “You see the wild in collision with the domesticated,” said my father’s voice, Freddy suddenly appearing at my side. “The domesticated is alarmed by the recrudescence of the wild into its peaceable kingdom.”

  A false metaphor, I thought, since both camel and horse had long been tamed by man. But I let it go.

  Freddy went accompanied that morning by a man in a fresh black derby hat and dark pin-striped suit, whom he did not introduce, and had Colm Cullen along with him as well. Both men appeared sober, Colm magically so after the excesses of the previous evening, and both wore expressions of grim determination.

  Something was up.

  Wordlessly, Freddy led the way past the raucous crash scene to the end of “A” Street. The sound of screaming horses faded. Costello’s, the scene of my floor-crawling drunk the night before, lay fallow and silent.

  We turned, like a platoon in march step, into the little duckboarded alleyway.

  My father and I left Colm and the derby-wearing stranger waiting in the lane and proceeded on to Dr. Scott’s barn.

  “Friedrich,” I said formally, “I want to employ Colm Cullen.”

  “Sure,” he said. “We’ll take him on at Mill Valley.”

  “No,” I said.

  “In the city? At the office?” Blandly agreeable.

  “No, I mean I want to employ him. Me, personally.”