Bones of the Barbary Coast (Cree Black Thrillers)

by Daniel Hecht

  This is where I spend my afternoons and evenings, tending to the damaged and the faithless, the sullied and the worn, the sick and the lost. And there are so many! At times it strikes me that the world is a great, cruel grinder, into which are fed unblemished innocent children, and out of which coils and tumbles a terrible mash of broken, ruined lives.

  Yet on Tuesday night late, though I had labored all day in this Hell's Kitchen, this Devil's Acre, I was not satisfied; as I do regularly, I went to conduct a secret business still deeper in this dark world. Hans and the church fathers admire my virtuous, selfless service to the poor, and it is true I care deeply for their plight; yet my devotion to the mission, like everything about me, is full of pretext and contrivance.

  But now I cannot continue, for there is old Cook at the back door, banging and puffing as she trundles in with the milk and bacon, and I must go assist her.

  22

  FRIDAY, MAY 10, 1889

  IT is JUST before dawn, and I am in the pantry with a lamp and my ledger. I am stunned with weariness, yet I have not been able to sleep for thinking about these last few days. I have fallen far behind in my narrative, for events outpace my sluggish efforts to note them.

  Tuesday, by the time I set out into the night streets, I was exhausted from an especially difficult day at the mission. Sister Gertrude and I, along with Deacon Skinner and Rev. Smith, had struggled hard to feed the bellies and souls of those who came to us. Our work varies: At times, the mission seems a small, country church; at others, a dining hall; at others, a hospital. On Tuesday we had great trouble with a young whore from a nearby crib, whom I had sought out and brought to the mission. She had clumsily attempted to remove her unwanted baby, and her damaged womb unexpectedly began the contractions of labor though she was only six months along. We sent for Dr. Mahoney to attend to her in our back room, and we assisted him as well as we could while tending to our other business. Her screams were most heartbreaking, each shriek and plea eliciting a reciprocal ache in my own belly. After some hours the sound wore so on us that we began arguing over small concerns, dropping things, expressing impatience with the other unfortunates come for respite. When at last she went silent and Dr. Mahoney emerged from the back room, arms bloodied to the elbows, we all looked at him expectantly.

  "The girl was lucky," he told us. "She will live. If infection does not kill her."

  "And the baby?" I asked.

  "Luckier still. He is dead." The doctor took himself to our front porch for the comfort of his pipe, too weary even to wash his red hands.

  Immediately Rev. Smith picked up his Bible and hurried toward the back room, eager to seize the girl's remorse as an opportunity for her salvation. But I stopped him with a hand upon his arm. "Sometimes just to let be," I told him, "is the greatest kindness."

  And though he looked at me strangely, he did refrain from tormenting her, and let her rest.

  When it was ten o'clock, I wrapped myself in my cloak and ventured out into the dark. Rev. Smith saw me to Darby's carriage, as he always does, for after sunset no one is safe here, most particularly a woman. There was a thin fog, sliding through the streets like a vaporous serpent, and I did not mind, in that its concealing haze would suit my clandestine purposes.

  Darby Jones is a simple man who is commissioned to deliver me safe to home from the mission. I pay him from my own purse, and generously, to make sure he knows where his best interests lie. Yet he is not complicit in my activities; he believes I have some legitimate errand, associated with my mission duties. We ride, speaking little, several blocks to the place where I dismount and he waits unquestioningly for my return.

  And then I become submerged in the underworld. Hans would be outraged that I expose myself to such dangers, but so far I have been fortunate, and quick enough with my feet or wits to avoid injury.

  Darby sees me enter the doorway of a linens warehouse where the mission does some business, where one light burns in an upper window and a solitary clerk works late. He does not know I exit immediately by a side door. I then walk alone for many more blocks, angling through secret alleys and gangways, hastening across the gas-lit streets, toward my real destination, which is on the edge of the even denser and more mysterious warren of Chinatown. Voices mutter from dim windows, or the noises of eating or fighting or sexual intercourse; I skirt dark figures sprawled in doorways, not knowing if they are drunken, drugged, or dead. The air smells of urine and bad cooking and other human smells, and sometimes of dead things or rotting vegetables.

  Here my mouse-gray hooded cloak saves me, for it conceals my identity and to some degree my gender, and allows me to vanish into shadows and fog if the need arises. In those dark streets, every person is a menace to me, whether vagabond, drunk, hoodlum, madman—or, equally, policeman, businessman, minister, or city official. One kind might rob, kill, molest, or abduct me; the other might accomplish what I fear even more: discover me. Often when I see indistinct forms approaching, I am moved by an instinct of danger and do not sweep anonymously past but compress myself into a doorway or the shadow of a stoop, to avoid detection. Then I crouch, holding my breath, my heartbeat shaking me, and rue my situation in every way. Each time I pray to God and earnestly swear that if He spare me now I will go back home and never do this again; I will repent and become truly virtuous and proper and cautious.

  And each time when the man or men are past, I recant every oath and vow, and so lie even to my Maker.

  At last I come to a more brightly lit section, where sailors congregate and other rowdies take their entertainment. Here I cannot hide but must maintain the camouflage of a deliberate haste and aloofness, and given the drug-sodden state of the inhabitants of this place, I am quicker and can usually slide past before they react. I dodge fistfights and foul propositions, shouting matches between whores and the imprecations of half-crazed derelicts. Then I slip down one more dark gangway and at last through a battered door I know far too well. I enter a dim, smoke-hazed room where listless women lounge in their underclothes and where some rough man might linger as he makes his selection. Accustomed to my intrusion, the women look at me incuriously. If she is not among them, I step quickly up the stairs and walk down the hall with increasing trepidation to another peeling door.

  Sometimes the door is open and I enter directly. Sometimes it is closed, and I wait uneasily outside. On Tuesday, I arrived just as a man emerged in a befuddled way, refastening his belt, followed by a gust smelling of poppy, whiskey, tobacco, and sweat. I went in quickly and shut the door behind me, startling the woman who was rinsing herself at the basin. The room has no windows and is lit by a smoky lantern on the bedside table, a soiled and yellow light. Its walls are thin, barely muffling the sounds of exertion on either side.

  I appraised her closely to assure myself of her condition, and what I saw was this: a woman with large sagging breasts, colorless hair in disarray, some rag of a chemise pulled up at her shoulders, a wary and unwelcoming look in eyes that are far too world-weary for someone only four years older than myself.

  On Tuesday, she looked me over in return, then thrust out her lower lip like a pugilist, grunted, and returned to her washing.

  "Back already?" she cackled over her shoulder. "Someone might think you're starting to like the life."

  I have learned to expect her surliness and distrust, and to ignore it.

  "Look," I said, "I have brought you some things."

  And I set out on the table the gifts I carried in the pocket of my cloak: a small waxed cheese, in the hope she will be nourished; a fine mother-of-pearl hair comb I thought she would find pretty; and a five-dollar gold piece that could relieve her of five men, if she chooses. I have concealed these expenditures in my household ledger, attributing their cost to other items and risking Hans's disapproval of my spendthrift ways.

  She looked with her customary contempt at my offerings, which she sees as tokens of condescension. But her fingers could not resist a light, quick caress of the comb; I was greatly
pleased, and found that single gesture easily worth all the difficulty incurred to witness it.

  For this is Margaret, my sister, the companion of my childhood, my only living relative in the world, and there is nothing I would not risk for her.

  I do not visit her every night. She would not tolerate it if I did, nor could I stand to, for the harrowing walk and the time we spend together are wearing on me. But I have tried to see her at least once a week for all the years since I discovered her whereabouts.

  At first when I found her and visited her, I would offer suggestions as to how she might extricate herself from her predicament: I would somehow purchase her freedom from the whoremaster, I would find respectable employment for her, get her schooled for some other trade. For each she had an argument. Perhaps I resumed contact with her too late, and the coils of her circumstance had already wrapped her too tightly. Most recently, she is enjoying the attentions of a lover named Percy; she has shown me his photograph, a dandy of a pimp who maintains various dubious enterprises, including a good business purchasing opium from the Celestials and supplying it to Whites in the Barbary Coast. He has made some arrangement with her whoremaster, so that he takes her dancing now and again; he also sells her poppy at a reduced rate, and refers custom to her—what more, after all, could a woman ask?

  At times she says sadly that she would change, but it is too late, she has been branded by the life she has led, is soiled beyond redeeming; at others she argues that she has in fact made a choice to live this way, it is a gay and exciting life and a choice I would understand were I not so naive and prudish. I cannot argue that point, but must grant her that illusion if it provides her with some strength. And she loathes my pity and compassion. We no longer discuss the remedies I dream up for her.

  Yet I know she is in that terrible grinder, that she is being torn apart by its cruel mechanism, and there can be no end but a tragic one. So I visit her and bring her small things, so that there is one strand connecting her with a more wholesome and sunlit world; and, selfishly, to reassure myself that she is still alive, perhaps even has some slight advantage, even as humble as a small cheese, to help her endure. On Tuesday, when I looked at her, my ears were still full of the screams of the girl trying to give birth at the mission.

  When she was done with her washing, she lounged on her bed wantonly, legs spread, as if to deliberately offend me, smoking. In the years since we've reunited, I have watched her mannerisms grow increasingly coarse, her voice becoming as rough as her complexion. It is from being so hard-used, and from so long among such rough associations; yet I also see her hardness as the vestiges of a stubborn pride, to which each person is surely entitled, and I will not complain of it.

  "You'll get killed one of these times," she said. "If the hoodlums don't kill you, the dogs will. Or some Chinaman will catch you and you'll wish it had been the dogs instead."

  "Dogs?" I was still standing, for I am reluctant to sit on the one wooden chair or otherwise touch anything here.

  "Don't you read the newspaper? Just the other night, they got another poor bastard. Ripped him to pieces, I heard." She chuckled: "And too bad—he was a regular here."

  I have often seen dogs in the district, stringy miserable curs feeding on garbage, but they are timid and scatter fearfully if approached.

  "You won't scare me off that easily," I returned.

  This amused her. I watched her smoke, and she watched me. Sometimes we get on well, but more often it is hard to find a starting place. If I inquire about her activities, she may see it as my deliberate attempt to expose her humiliations; if I tell her of my own life—the purchase of a pretty quilt, my work at the mission, some idea that has set my thoughts afire—she may see it as my asserting my superior virtue, or advertising the genteel pleasures of respectability. A noisier pairing commenced in the next room over, reminding me that the time was ticking away. I knew I must soon return to Darby, or he would get worried; Margaret must go downstairs, for if she did not return to duty her master would take his percentage from the money I gave her.

  "Are you well?" I asked.

  She shrugged. What I see is what she is, well or otherwise.

  "Do you need anything?" I asked foolishly. "I was thinking—"

  "Me?" She gestured with her cigarette at the four walls of her shabby room. "What more could I possibly want?" She found this hilarious, and laughed until a fit of coughing took her. She convulsed for a long moment, and afterward her expression had turned cruel.

  "How about you?" she retorted. "Need anything?"

  She meant to provoke me, and, being not unlike her in temperament, I provoked her in return: "Nothing but a sister who loves me as much as I love her."

  My virtuousness angered her. "You've come to the wrong place, then. But go round the corner, third door on the right, there's a girl who specializes in that kind of service." She flicked her hand dismissively at the gold piece on the table. "Cheaper, too."

  I was stunned by her callousness, but she was not done yet. She pretended to give me a horse-trader's appraising look, up and down.

  "But no—you have the look of a woman who's getting what she needs for free. Getting it nicely from your giant Dutchie husband, are you? It's not often good, but when it's any good at all, it's better than Jesus, isn't it? I could teach you a few tricks, you know. Keep him quite happy."

  I would not hear my husband insulted nor the Lord blasphemed. I opened the door to leave, speechless with outrage and sadness; even for her this was extreme and unkind. But when I turned for one last word, I was surprised to see her hard face fallen. She looked like a woman of fifty, not thirty. Suddenly she was groping in the drawer of the little stand next to her bed, and in a moment she brought out the clever wooden box, of Oriental make, that I have seen before. She fumbled off the top, spilled the contents onto the bed, and snatched at the sectioned pipe and the paper-wrapped ball.

  "You are being stupid!" she blurted. She pinched off a piece of the tarry lump and began desperately rolling it between her fingers. "Your husband will find out where you go, and you'll have thrown away your one lucky chance. Or you'll get killed!" She blazed a glance at me. "You'll die in these streets and your last thought will be that it wasn't worth it. I wasn't worth it!"

  At this a veil was pulled aside, and my heart truly broke. I understood suddenly that she shows me her cruelty and coarseness with the intent to ward me away, so that I do not come here and put myself at risk. My elder sister is protecting me in the feeblest of ways, the only way she can.

  "Margaret, please," I began.

  "Go away," she shouted. "You don't belong here! You're not my sister. Those are my sisters, downstairs!"

  I was incautious on my return to Darby. Normally I possess excellent night vision, and by remaining watchful am usually able to see threatening persons before they see me. But on that night I stormed along heedlessly, blinded by tears, and did not see a pair of men until I was nearly upon them. They were crouched in the alley, bent over a prone figure and taking things from it, even pulling off its boots. Immediately, I stepped sideways into a gangway, where not even a window lit the ground. I should have been safe, but as I stepped back my shoe hit a bottle and sent it clattering.

  "Hell's that?" a voice said. "I'll look," another said, and then I heard footsteps approach.

  I fled deeper into the gangway. The buildings were three storied and I was in a long slot between them, with no visible place to hide. At the very end was an airiness indicating a small courtyard, but as I approached it I was horrified to see it cut off by a stone wall, perhaps ten feet high. The only refuge was a wooden stairway from the upper parts of the building, beneath which a last flight of steps descended from ground level to the cellar. I scuttled down into the blackness there.

  I pressed myself against the wall directly beneath the slant of the stairs, wrapped my cloak around me, and brought one arm up to cover my face, all but my eyes. I was now in a cul-de-sac, a cement box perhaps eight feet on a si
de, with no place to run.

  I stayed rigid with terror, praying most fervently and hypocritically for God's mercy. This is what I had feared on every one of my secret nighttime walks, what I had avoided only by great luck all along; at last I was about to receive my due. The footsteps approached until the man's feet must have been inches from my face, for though I could not see them I heard the grit of particles beneath his soles. When he came around to the descending stairs, I could make out his dim, bulky form as he bent to peer into the deeper darkness.

  For an endless moment his shape didn't move. And then he straightened and turned away. I heard him stroll along the wall and at long last make his way out of the gangway again. In my relief, I felt so faint I had to grip the rough cement to avoid falling.

  I hated the darkness where I stood, the meaty, moldy stink there, yet I knew I had to give the men time to finish their business and move on. It truly seemed an eternity before I tiptoed up the steps and into the open, watchful, relieved to be out of the inky dark yet reluctant to leave its sanctuary. By then my eyes had grown accustomed to the complete absence of light, and now the tiny courtyard seemed brighter; light bled into the sky from the gas lamps several blocks away. I became afraid that the men would see me if they were to glance down the gangway again.

  As I hesitated, listening anxiously, a sudden movement and noise exploded not ten feet from me. From the cellar stairwell came a scrabbling and scrambling, and then something burst out of the darkness. It came out of the shadows on all fours and I took it for a large dog: I saw the profile of its muzzle, and for an instant it swung its head toward me and I saw the dim flash of long teeth. It must have seen me, for it momentarily seemed to flinch or brace itself; then it scurried with astonishing quickness to the wall at the end of the alley. When it was reared against the stone wall, leaping and reaching to pull itself to the top edge, I saw the fully extended shape of its body and was amazed to see that it was more man than dog; and briefly, at the top of the wall, against the brighter darkness of the sky, I briefly saw its whole silhouette and knew it was neither man nor dog but something else unknown to me or to anyone.