by Rose Lerner
“There’s no need,” James said. “My thoughts are not nearly as interesting as your company.”
She gave him a waspish look and he blinked. His own smile slowly fading from his face. It hurt a bit to defeat that smile of his. It was a very nice smile. But she forced herself to remember the last person who cared for her.
The couple that ran the boardinghouse, whose lives were left in ruins because the wife had grown concerned over Helen’s health.
There had been other such events. The few times Charles lost the poker game, he sent Guy to fetch her from the winner with money in his hand.
And if the money didn’t work, Guy would convince the winner to let her go in other ways.
But should someone worry over her health again, she didn’t trust Charles to leave it at humiliation and a few bruises.
He would wield Guy like a weapon and truly injure Dr. Madison.
And it would all be her fault for encouraging that smile.
Oh, honey , her mother would say when the pressure of what they’d been doing during the war threatened to break her. We are pieces, not the whole. Do not put all this on your shoulders.
James was no longer smiling, but he was watching her with something wary in his eyes. Something…careful. And that was somehow worse than the smile.
“But,” he said, stepping away from the table. “I can appreciate your wanting to be alone after the effort you clearly put into your performance. I will leave you the courtyard.”
“Thank you,” she said icily. “You’re too kind.”
“I just wish there was a little more snow for you,” he said with a straight face.
She turned her face away, swallowing her own smile. When he came closer to the door, she stepped back, making sure there was nothing but space around them. She couldn’t feel the heat of his body. Smell the scent of whatever soap he might use.
He was nothing. Just as she was nothing. Not human. Not man. Or woman.
She blinked again, her head still light from the morphine Guy gave her before bed. She was thinking nonsense.
James stopped at the door and heaved a big breath.
Don’t. Don’t. Please don’t. Whatever you’re going to say or do, just swallow it back down.
But of course he didn’t. He turned around.
“Last night, I couldn’t help but notice-”
“What did you notice?” she asked, her voice low, her smile knowing. Trying to clumsily imply something sexual.
“The marks on your arms.”
The smile slipped from her face.
“You’re injected. Morphine?”
“I told you already, I have fits.”
“Guy told me the other night that you take laudanum daily. Is that in addition to the injections?”
“I find this very upsetting-”
“I find your dosage upsetting,” he snapped right back, and she stiffened.
“This isn’t any of your business.”
“Would you like to know why I live in a whorehouse?” he asked.
“You really like whores.”
He laughed, a weary hard humph straight from his chest. “I do, actually. But not in the way you’re implying. I live here because for years after the war I suffered from The Soldier’s Disease.”
“Opium?”
“Chloroform was my preferred poison.”
“The headaches…” she said, remembering those brutal days just after her mother’s death. Charles had not been nearly as sophisticated in his choice of drugs.
“You’re familiar?” he asked, and she could see him adding the information to some unknown medical record he was keeping of her.
“I’ve only heard stories.” She lied so well.
“I got used to the headaches. Or found them to be a relatively easy price to pay for the way the drug made me feel. Or rather, what it made me forget.”
The war. The nightmares.
She glanced over at the iced dead roses in the corner, unable to look in his handsome eyes. This honesty of his was unraveling her. He understood the price she was paying. He was empathetic. And concerned. Worried, even.
And nothing good came of that.
Listen, sweet girl, her mother’s voice whispered in her head. Listen to him.
“Weeks ago,” he continued. “My…inebriety nearly cost the life of a woman. A friend. And I left my offices and rooms, all of which I rented from her, and I came here.”
“Why here?”
“Delilah has some experience helping wean soldiers off the drug.”
“And you’re better?” she asked in a serious tone, perhaps slightly incredulous. Because when she tried to stop, when Guy listened to her pleading and threw out the dose he was required to give her sometimes twice a day, it was like hell had breached her body. As if the devil himself was coming for the world through her.
“I am,” he said. “Though the nights are hard.”
“Nights are always hard,” she said, and then immediately wished she could suck the words back. He stepped close with an urgency that made her want to shriek.
“You begged me for help the other night and I…see that you are under the spell of strong opiates. For a woman your size I am amazed you’re standing.”
“What are you saying?”
“If you need help…”
She laughed, because the shadows in the doorframe behind him were very deep and she didn’t know if someone was hiding. Listening. Ready to run to Charles with all this information.
“I want for nothing.” She laughed again, but it sounded brittle to her own ears and she couldn’t be sure the doctor was believing this story she told. “Charles takes grand care of me. Guy too. They are the dearest friends. Now, you offered to leave me the courtyard…”
He watched her for the longest time with those dark, serious eyes, set in that dark, handsome face. For a moment, the slightest flash, she allowed herself to think of how they would be different had they met years ago. Before the war.
Before everything.
He’d just be a handsome doctor, perhaps visiting the city… for doctor reasons. They’d host him, because that was what her family did before the war. Hosted handsome visiting doctors.
She would wear the yellow dress—her favorite. And she’d have gardenias in her hair and he would not be able to resist her. Such was the power of gardenias.
But the air was too cold to hold on to the thought of gardenias for too long, and the vision shattered.
“You’re right,” he said with a small courtly bow. “My apologies.”
She wanted to know where he would go. Where his life was lived. What it looked like.
There were seconds—days of them, weeks of them—when she felt as if her life was lived on the head of a pin. Small. So small. It was her and Guy. Her and Charles.
Morphine.
And fear.
But then he was gone, and it was just her and the courtyard.
She turned her back to the doorway, as if studying the rose bush, until the tears no longer burned behind her eyes.
Kyle locked the doors behind the last of the stumbling drunks, their arms slung over each other’s shoulders as they sang Dixie—off key and with mostly the wrong words.
“I hate that song,” Kyle said, his back to the door. The man looked tired, his face under the red hair and freckles nearly gray. A blood disease, maybe. The man needed a good steak and three weeks of sleep.
Or perhaps just to have Delilah put him out of his misery and fuck him or tell him to leave. But she did neither.
“So do I,” James said, gathering the metal cups and brown bottles that were all over the bar.
“What are you doing?” Kyle asked, as if James was ransacking the cash box beneath the bar.
“What does it look like?” He lifted the cups.
One of the kitchen boys came in with a bucket of hot water, and James dropped the cups in the bucket.
“That water was for the floor,” the boy said, staring at the
floating cups.
“Oh,” he said, the cups bobbing and shifting. “Sorry.”
The boy shot him an inscrutable look and went back into the kitchen for more water.
“You’re not one for helping out.” Kyle watched him out of the corner of his eye.
“Winter’s coming. I can’t walk forever.”
“So you’re going to scrub floors?”
“They’re here and they’re dirty.”
“You’re a fucking doctor. Why don’t you go be a doctor?”
“Kyle?” James said in a pleasant tone sharpened on the edge of a knife. “Do you really want to begin a conversation regarding the whys of our lives? Because I could ask you-”
“Suck a donkey’s cock, James.”
It was impossible not to laugh. And so he did, laughing it up while he gathered whiskey bottles from the tables.
It felt outrageously strange. Was this what Kyle and Steven did when they got together—insulted each other?
“So,” James asked, pretending to be relaxed, which around Kyle was impossible. Normally he would not ask Kyle what he thought about anything, because he hated talking to Kyle.
But the man was a judge of character the likes of which he’d never seen and somehow, despite his years in Delilah’s employ, he had a sense of justice a mile wide—the hard head and flying fists combination.
“What did you think of the show?”
“Well, I liked tonight’s songs better than last night’s. I thought we’d have the battle of Denver during ‘Tramp! Tramp! Tramp!’”
“Everyone was crying tonight.”
“Crying and drinking. Janey said half the men she took upstairs just wanted to be hugged like a bunch of children. You stuck around for the whole show.” It was a question disguised as a comment, and he wondered if for the moment the icy tundra between them might be thawing.
“It’s quite a show. What do you think of her?”
“The Northern Spy?” Kyle shrugged. “It’s a woman in a cage singing ‘Aura Lee.’ What was I supposed to think? She’s got a good voice, nice tits.”
“Kyle.” The admonishment slipped out of his mouth before he thought better of it.
“Oh, have I offended your sensibilities?”
“No. I’m just…I think you were right the other night. This whole thing seems wrong. Park has lost the poker game in the past, did you know that?”
“I assumed. No one is that good. Not without cheating. Let me guess, he sends Guy after the winner. Beats him to a pulp and gathers back Helen?”
“Sounds about right.”
Kyle hummed and used a rag to clean off the chalkboard that hung behind the bar. The chalkboard was used for betting when such events were happening. Which they always were. Horse races. People races. First snowfalls. Depth of first snowfall. How long the first snowfall would last. There was an endless list of what the good people of Denver would bet on.
“She’s scared in that cage, did you see that?” James asked.
“And Park likes it, did you see that?” Kyle asked over his shoulder. “Tonight I watched him go over and shake the rope just to make the cage swing.”
Yeah. James saw that, too.
“She told me he takes care of her.”
“Well, that’s a bunch of bullshit.”
James wondered if Helen really believed that. If she was foolish or scared or weak enough to believe that Charles Park cared for her in any capacity.
But it wasn’t an uncommon relationship. Delilah cultivated such sentiment with her girls, creating this persona of a great mother hen looking over her lost chicks. And they were grateful to her for her care.
Such as it was.
All at once James felt impossibly dirty.
Helen was lying, but he wasn’t sure what was the truth and what was the lie—the girl in his room, the girl in the courtyard yesterday, or the girl in the courtyard this morning?
And he had no interest in introducing his balls to Guy’s knife. But between the puncture marks on her arms, the grip she’d had on those bars and those eyes—he couldn’t let go of this worry he had. This cloud of concern.
Kyle wrote something on the chalkboard. James looked over the man’s broad shoulders to see it. A Night with the Northern Spy.
“What is that?”
“List of men who want to be in the poker game.”
Poker. James thought of Paris. Smoky, debauched Paris and all its money.
“What’s the buy-in?”
“Three hundred dollars.”
James whistled through his teeth.
“Keeps out the riffraff,” Kyle said, and then in a big flourish he wrote his own name at the top of the list.
“You’re going to play?” James asked, infuriated and stunned all at once.
“Someone’s got to try, don’t they?” Kyle asked, turning back around. “Someone’s got to give a shit if that girl is being hurt.”
“Yes,” James said. And then he very nearly said Put my name down. He very nearly said the words. They nearly happened, creating a public situation wherein he’d be somehow responsible for something. For someone. An outcome—an important one—would once again be on his shoulders.
And that had been deadly last time.
“You’re not trying to be some kind of hero, are you?” Kyle asked, watching James with a jaundiced eye. His laughter put a little color in his cheeks, and he looked not so near death. “Save the girl after you nearly got one killed.”
Ah yes, Kyle the brilliant judge of character.
“No,” James said, pushing the mugs one by one under water until they disappeared. “I’m not trying to be a hero.”
Chapter 7
* * *
James was sure he had just fallen asleep when the yells woke him up.
But when he opened his eyes, milky sunlight was coming in through his window.
He’d slept. Hard.
He could not remember the last time he’d slept so deeply and so long.
“Doc!” someone thundered, and he heard doors open all around the second floor. Finally he jumped to his feet, pulled on his pants, slipped his suspenders over his long underwear and stepped out the door.
“Go back to bed,” he told the girls, who were all yawning and shrugging into thin wrappers that did not keep out the cold. Their breath fogged in the cold air of the second floor, far away from the fire below.
Quickly the women all turned and went back to their warm blankets, and he headed for the stairs.
The smell of blood was in the air.
Whatever confusion remained from the hours of sleep vanished as he took the steps down to the main floor two at a time.
Guy stood three paces away from the bar, where Helen, in her red cloak, stood bent over something.
“What’s happened?” James asked, stepping up beside Helen. “Oh, Lord.”
On the bar was a young black boy, no older than ten. James recognized him as one of the kids Kyle paid to do odd jobs in the bar and run errands for the girls. Kyle had a small army of them.
Blood seeped from a gash on the boy’s arm. Helen had a scarf pressed to the boy’s head, and it was slowly saturating with blood.
“I was in the courtyard and I heard him yelling in the alley,” Helen said. “I went back there and found him, his arm caught in the woodpile. The whole thing had come down on his head. Guy helped me bring him in.”
James glanced over at Helen and Guy, who had blood and dirt streaked across their faces.
“Helen,” Guy said. “The doctor’s here. You should leave.”
Helen ignored him. Fascinating.
“Hey son,” James said to the boy on the bar. “Can you tell me your name?”
“Davey.”
James took the scarf from Helen. “Thank you,” he said to her. She stepped further away from him, but she did not leave.
He lifted the scarf and found a slice a few inches across, seeping blood. Head wounds were such a mess. He cleared the blood as best
he could. The slice went through the paoneurosis and connective tissue down to the outer table of the parietal bone. The emissary vein, however, was unscathed.
Small favors.
“Should I get Kyle?” Helen asked.
“Dear God, no,” James said. The last thing anyone needed was Kyle standing around wringing his hands and trying not to cry.
“What were you doing in the woodpile?” James asked Davey, checking the boy’s pupils and his arms and legs. Nothing was broken.
“One of the cats got stuck back there,” he said in a shaky voice.
“The calico?”
“Yeah.”
“I swear that cat’s got no more sense than a doornail.”
Davey smiled, the effect in his blood-washed face more than a little disturbing.
“Is he out? The cat?” James asked.
“Yeah,” Davey said. “Once the pile fell down he ran off.”
“That’s cats for you,” James said. One of Davey’s feet was bare. Filthy and wet. James touched his big toe and it was cold.
“Where’s your coat? And your shoe?”
“I wasn’t wearing my coat and my shoe’s back in the woodpile, I think. Fell off when I was trying to get my leg free.”
“Helen, go up to my room and get my bag, would you? It’s right by the door. And get someone to find his shoe?” he asked. “And grab the blanket from my bed in the meantime.”
Helen was off like a shot.
He was talking too much and he just kept talking. Telling Davey he needed to wear his coat. Lecturing him, really. On coats. He sounded like his own mother.
Because Davey’s cold foot reminded him quite suddenly of the Battle of New Market. Or rather, the soldiers who’d had to cross that muddy field in a downpour. Half of them got stuck in the mud, and those boys who had the bad fortune to end up back at his tent—none of them had boots or socks. They’d been sucked right off by the mud. Their feet were bare and ravaged and not at all bigger than Davey’s.
“Okay,” Davey said, in the manner of a boy tired of being lectured. “I’ll wear my coat.”
James shook his whole body as if the memories were a legion of blackflies intent on blood.
He turned to Guy. “Would you get me some warm water from the kitchen? And lots of towels? And if Kyle is there, tell him it’s for one of the girls.”
