by John Okas
It says on the ticket overnight lodging is to be provided by the line. The first night they arrive in a ghostly town called Utopia. When Sam shows her the bed in the stable, and breathes a peculiar smell all over her that makes her shudder, she chooses to stay sitting up in the coach, hardly able to sleep at all. It is the same the second night in another godforsaken rats’ nest named Runnymead.
After two days of rough riding thus they are out of the Beehive State. When Sam crosses the border into the Silver State, he seems relieved, doesn’t hit the horses quite so hard, say “hay” quite so loud. About noon on the third day they come to a place called Dejection Junction, and he is obviously in his element. It is a tough back road town, more populated than the two she’s seen, with the type of dusty unkept main street that can give a man an unquenchable thirst.
Sarah wonders what is going on when the stage pulls up in front of a ratty looking building that has the word “Eldorado” hand written on a pine board sign, which has come loose and swings on a rusty nail in the doorway.
“I thought the next stop was to be in Charsville,” she says to Sam.
“Just making a rest stop, Miss.” Sam, no gentleman, goes in before her to do his business. He brings two cartons of “sweaters” in with him as he goes.
Sarah, used to the clean, well-paved streets in the neighborhood surrounding the Tabernacle is too uneasy to even notice how Sam struggles with the boxes. From the looks of the Eldorado she would rather hold it in. But she is in considerable discomfort and the back of the stage, shaky and cramped, is no good place to pin a clean diaper on the baby. After what seems like an eternity Sam comes out, looking red-eyed and woozy, with that peculiar smell now very strong on him. Sarah decides to take her turn. Already encumbered by the baby and the bag which has the elements of the change, she has no hand left to hold her own bag which contains her money, and change of clothes.
“You can leave that right there on the seat, Miss, right in your baby basket,” says Sam, “I’ll keep a close eye on it all for you.”
Sarah is so green she has no guard to drop.
“The restroom is just to the left of those swinging doors.” Sam gives her directions from the stage.
“Thank you.”
A few steps and Sarah sees the inside of a saloon for the first time. It is filled with whisky and creeps who leer at her and who, like Sam, see the tan baby as a license for the young mother.
The restroom is where Sam said it would be, but she finds that it is occupied. A skunk is so drunk that he is passed out in a puddle of urine, his mouth bubbling with vomit. There is a lump of excrement in the sink.
Always herself clean as a whistle, neat as a pin, Sarah withdraws in an instant. But when she tries to exit the Eldorado entirely and get back to the stage a fat bear with a red beard that stinks of whisky snatches her up in his arms, dribbles and drools all over Gloria, and pokes his dirty fingers all around her person.
No one else in the room is gentleman enough to tell him to stop. There is a man in a booth wearing a silver star. She looks to the law to protect her but like the others the sheriff is laughing, encouraging the bear to continue his slobbery hug.
Sarah must elbow her way out of it for herself. But just as she is free to run back to the stage she hears the infernal Sam say “hay” to the horses and snap the reins. She gets to the door just in time to see the big wheels roll off with all their things and money.
“How Mummy wishes we had not tried to hide ourselves on this damn back road.” She whispers with a tear to the sleep-heavy bundle in her arms. “We should have taken the railroad. I do fear we have fallen in with men whose characters are even worse than your grandfather’s.”
Because of the struggle Gloria rustles and is roused from sleep. She blinks her eyes, shakes her head a few times and goes back to a dead calm slumber. Sarah’s senses are heightened by the danger. She must turn to whatever authority presents itself. Pretending she’s not afraid she goes back into the saloon, fights off a few more groping hands in making her way to the man with the star. He is drinking with a pair of seedy looking men whose idiotic grins show more teeth missing than in their heads.
“Are you the sheriff?’
“Sure am,” says the man, “Sheriff, town dentist, and owner of this social club. The name’s Doc, Doc Havecock.” The men giggle like girls. “What can I do for you?”
“I would like to report a robbery.” says Sarah and begins to go into the details.
“Nothing I can do to a driver who wants to keep the stage running on time,” Doc cuts her off. “You women fuss around too much, that’s the problem. You’re always late. My advice to you, Miss, is to take a room upstairs for a couple of nights, the day after tomorrow there’ll be another stage through here. Room is two dollars for the night, breakfast included, payable in advance. You have two dollars, don’t you?” Doc eyes the bag.
In Dejection Junction the law is not on the side of logic. And it is surely no place to rely on the kindness of strangers.
“Sheriff, haven’t you heard what I’ve been telling you? All I have is powder and pins. I came to you because I’ve been robbed!”
“Maybe you were robbed, maybe you were careless,” says the sheriff. “I’m the law, all right, but I’m a businessman too. This is a nice quiet town, Miss, a respectable place. A young girl who looks like she’s running away from something carrying a baby touched by the tar brush isn’t likely to be someone I’d want to trust. Room will be two dollars, or suit yourself, you can make yourself comfortable out in the street.”
God bless the child who can stand up and say, “I’ll raise my own bread.”
“I notice that you have a stage here.” She says, pointing to the platform next to the bar. “I’ve done some entertaining in my time. Would you let me audition?”
“We always like a new act in town, right boys?” says Doc loudly to all the men at the other tables.
The boys all whistle.
As the spotlight tightens on her Sarah feels Gloria drop one level deeper down into sleep. The deadness of her weight, her clamish calmness, eases Sarah’s stage fright. She removes her thin cloth coat, folds it up and puts the baby down on it in a corner where she will be safe. Then, white and sweet, in her homespun frock, she turns to meet the situation with courage. She takes several deep breaths and stands up and faces a couple of dozen afternoon drunks. She figures that there’d be no call for The Homecoming March of the Prophet so she tries to entertain them by whistling the rags that jazz wore when it was in diapers.
She bombs anyway. For one thing it’s a country and western crowd, for another the boys have something more showy in mind. She sings a tune currently popular in the Bay Area called Umph, Uh-huh, Uh-oh and there is scattered applause at the slightly suggestive lyric. When she launches into her whistling rendition of The Polecat Stomp, she barely makes it through four bars when they shout out some very badly phrased ideas to her. “Boo!” “This ain’t the entertainment we had in mind.” “Boo!” “Let’s see what you got under them clothes!” “Boo!”
It’s no easy buck selling yourself to such uncultured men. She looks down on them. What a smelly, worthless, contemptible bunch of failures they are! No woman with a hair of self-respect should bother with them. She gathers up Gloria and, tuned to the pedestrian channel of the Home of the Brave, goes to walk out of the Eldorado, walk to the Golden State if she has to. Her brow raised, her chin up, her nose high in the air, she never looked more perfect in her life. She does not expect them to feel the power of her scorn, yet they do. In their eyes she rises six inches to the occasion.
The animals collect themselves into a murmur. The sheriff speaks for them. “Please don’t be leaving, Miss. The boys liked your song. They just like to shoot off their mouths. They’re not very used to the company of ladies. There aren’t many women who come around these parts and the ones who do and call themselves entertainers usually get themselves done up in skimpy costumes. Know what I mean?”
Sarah stops a
nd thinks it over, and whether she has a good idea or is overcome by one of her sudden compulsions to reveal herself, she can’t say, but she thinks about the way the girls and boys posed in those art books she got through the mail. “Sheriff, do you mean to say that you and these men are free thinkers?”
“I reckon I do.”
Sarah knows it is a stretch of the truth, and so she feels free to tell a stretcher as well. “It just so happens that besides my musical talent I’m a famous artist’s model in the City by the Bay. As a figure study I earn twenty dollars an hour.”
Doc says, “Figure study? Do you mean to say that if we give you twenty dollars you’ll show us your teats?”
“Not only my breasts,” Sarah corrects him, “but I will leave nothing about a woman to your imaginations. You may draw me on paper, photograph me, or admire me in any other way you wish, but I expect you all to maintain a respectful silence and distance during the session.”
Every single man in the room will agree to that. Each digs a dollar out of his pants, and when Doc gives her all twenty-three, She puts the lumpish Gloria back down in the corner and assumes a lofty position on the raised platform. “Now keep in mind that this exhibition is for the sake of art, a light for you to remember when you are fumbling in the dark somewhere.”
She takes off her homely bonnet and lets her platinum mane down to her shoulders. She takes a deep breath, full of apologies to Corn Dog and thanks him too for being a model of brazenness for her. She unbuttons her dress, matter-of-factly, without a tease or a jitter and slips it off, one leg, then the other. “Aah!” There is a mass expiration in the Eldorado when she removes her plain white cotton underclothes and puts her one leg bent beautifully at the knee up on a chair, a position that gives the men a good view of everything mysterious.
Her soft whiteness is on a par with the moon. To the beasts of Dejection Junction, her beauty does indeed read like a classic book, open to everyone, but over their heads and out of their reach. They feast their eyes and eat their hearts out and in the privacy of their own pants they experience the rapture of aesthetic contemplation in its most basic form.
Frills
Two days later, it’s Sarah’s nineteenth birthday. When the next stage comes through Dejection Junction, she gets on it. With the money she has earned from two night’s modelling in the Eldorado she pays her way through to Charsville and has twenty-six dollars to spare hidden away among Gloria’s diapers.
When the driver makes an unscheduled stop in a town called Dry Wells Creek in order to deliver several boxes marked “lamps” to a social club called The Watering Hole, a magnet for the parched throats around those parts, Sarah is armed with experience. She takes advantage of the unscheduled, but expected, delay to browse through town. Dry Wells Creek is actually rather civilized as compared to Dejection Junction. She follows a rickety wood sidewalk past an assay office and a small grocery and there finds Drei’s Goods Store, a clothing emporium for the frontier family.
Sarah thinks, poor Glory Bee! First stripped of the symbol of her father, now her basket and everything else stolen out from under her, she has nothing in the world but this thin blanket and these rags we use as diapers. I have to get some things to keep my baby safe and warm, dry, snug and cushioned against the bumps of the road. An extra blanket and a new baby-sized basket would be a good start. As for me, it wouldn’t hurt to replace some of my clothing. After four days in this same old dress, I do believe I’m a bit overseasoned. The least a young girl with no bath in fore- or hindsight can do is find a change of underpants.
Heinz Zwi Drei is the proprietor. When Sarah tells him what she’s looking for he steers her clear of the serviceable items she has her eyes on and directs her attention to some specials he has going on in the luxury import department.
“What cloth blankets?” Heinz says, “for this baby satin smooth down from the Skaagland Islands. Feel.”
Sarah runs her hand across a blue comforter and admits it will make the basket she has picked out a better place for Gloria.
“I give you my word,” Heinz swears, “I paid twice for it what I’m asking. The galoots around here don’t know quality and I have to close it out. Only six dollars.”
With the two-dollar basket, that makes eight. That’s a lot more than she intended to spend. “But isn’t blue for boys?”
“Baby blue. What’s the difference?” says the salesman.
Sarah is not one to dicker. She takes the comforter and wraps Gloria up like a satin doll.
Now Heinz sets out to follow suit with the lady. He warns her off the domestic underpants, three for a dollar. “Sure, they’re cheap but will they last? I have things in store that may interest a person of beauty and quality such as yourself.”
He shows her pink bloomers that are ruffled like rose petals. She raises her eyes at the five dollar price tag. Is that each? She will need at least two pair.
“These I promise are more than cheap frills, they’re handmade by Madame Oohlala in La Ville de Luxe. And look at this.” He shows her a silk print parasol gaily decorated with fringe. The pattern is nothing less than bouquets of primroses. “The latest rage with all the de Luxe mademoiselles overseas,” Heinz guarantees. “Yes, the ones with the cream white skin like yours know it pays to protect it from the sun. Six and a half dollars.”
Although he has a small part in the saga of our family tree Heinz Zvi Drei with his skillful sales pitch is there to direct our grandmother at her turning point from rags to riches. He knows his customer better than she knows herself, it was obvious to him, even if not to her, from the moment she walked into the store it was luxury items she was after. Indeed everything Heinz says makes sense to Sarah; she wants to be sold on an unconventional approach to acquiring necessities.
It’s like buying desert when I haven’t had dinner, she thinks. To have the panties and the parasol will leave me with one dollar fifty cents. That will not even put us up for the night. And if I buy more homely drawers and keep the remaining seventeen dollars, where can I go on that? Maybe Borondale? And what will I do in Borondale? This back road is so much slower and more expensive than I thought. At this rate I figure it will cost me about eighty dollars to get to the City by the Bay. I see where modelling got me, no doubt it will get me further especially if I’m not such a purist and agree to do a little teasing. After all, these are the very same sort of props that I saw on the model girls in the Freethinker Press catalog. With these underpants and this umbrella I will not have to strip down right to the nitty-gritty as I did in Dejection Junction. And as far as I know, concealing something does not necessarily make bad art.
The fact that she would rather not face is that she enjoys modelling, even if the clientele is a bit less genteel than she would like. She can enjoy thumbing her nose at her father and the Lord. But what about Corn Dog? Would he be angry that these “artists” she exposed herself to were nothing more than daubers and dabblers? She can’t imagine that he, her fearless soulmate, her eye and ear on the wide world, her model, her inspiration, along with Clement Collier, to freethinking, the man of her finest hours, would want her to feel ashamed of following her own path to freedom and happiness. He did not object when she showed him what she did for the Lord. If anything it got him worked up for her. If men fondle their penises over her what harm is done. She would never charge him to see what these men will pay her for. There is no one like him! She would never turn her back on him. To the contrary she is working her way, looking forward to seeing him.
And there is the fact that, obviously, modelling brings in money. Some essays she got from the Freethinker Press were written by women who wanted to be liberated from men. Ursa Morrow wrote that the most liberated thing a woman can do is work, not only does it free the woman from the dictates of the man, but it releases the man she loves from the obligation of supporting her. A few weeks of modelling and she might be able to work up enough money to get a motor car and driver to take her down to the train station at Los Pecados, w
here she can pick up the Bay City Special and get to the coast to meet the Buck just about as expected, as promised.
Tough times are easy ones for taking risks. Sarah tests, and hopes to prove the theory that in depressions luxuries are essentials. She comes out of Drei’s Goods store with twelve bits in her bag and some items that seem frivolous indeed, but which she intends to parlay into a whole better way of life for Gloria and herself.
Again she misses the stage. This time on purpose. She plunges into The Watering Hole and shows the manager the primrose print parasol and tells him about her underwear. “I have a show that will help you sell whisky, I guarantee to make every night this week a Saturday.”
The posters go up on a Thursday,
The Watering Hole is proud to present, Miss Bette Noire, a well-known model for the Voyeuriste School of painters of Elysee. She will strike au natural poses on our stage for a limited engagement starting Friday night. We emphasize that this exhibition is for art’s sake and artists only; the management is not responsible for the shock of those uncontinental few who might be squeamish about the sight of the undraped human female form. Admission is one dollar. Materials not included.
Who would have thought that in the gullies surrounding Dry Wells Creek there would be over fifty artists?
Their pencils are all poised on their pads when showtime comes. Sarah puts the sleeping Gloria, now wrapped in baby blue satin, to bed in the closet in her room upstairs, above the bar. “Be good, Baby. And, oh, please do get some personality … but not just yet, Mummy needs you not to need her now.”
And thus the peach of Zion Beehive makes for the stage to exhibit for hungry eyes and incontinent loins what a genuine mademoiselle model, posing the way they do over where gapery is an art, looks like.
Private Session
Sarah goes a little further, an inch that takes her a mile.
For the third time she rides the Purple Stage. Out of Dry Wells Creek, the coach trundles down the back road that goes to Snake Eye Flats, a town of dust devils and tumbleweed, the low point on her journey. Right next to the stage depot office there is a road house called The Pit Stop. In the alley between them a circle of toothless men place bets and yell loudly, driving a pair of bulldogs into ripping one another’s throats apart. All the potential artists she sees are a sorry lot, dragging around the street, flat out wasted. They look so starving she bets they can barely scrape up two bits apiece for the model.
