Winding Stair (9781101559239)

by Jones, Douglas C.

  I opened his door without knocking and caught him before his desk, his hands full of documents. As he turned to me, I shouted at him.

  “What did you do with that girl?” The color came suddenly to his cheeks above the beard. He yanked off his pince-nez and threw them on his cluttered desk.

  “I assume, young man, you’re speaking of Jennie Thrasher?”

  “Of course I’m speaking of Jennie Thrasher. She’s been crying.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised.” He sighed, shaking his head and gaining control of his own temper. He moved behind the desk and sat down. “I did what had to be done.”

  “You took her to look at that man without taking me. And all along I’ve been her closest friend since what happened to her, and with your approval and encouragement.”

  “I didn’t want you there.”

  “Goddamn it . . .”

  “Look here, son,” he said quietly. “Don’t come in here raving about that girl, or how I’m running this case. Are you afraid we might find out more about her than you want us to know?”

  “I hope you’re not implying that I know anything I haven’t told you.”

  “Of course not.”

  “She’s told you what she knows,” I said, still panting. “She’s told you that. And she knows nothing. She was up in that attic, terrified. Why in God’s name are you badgering her?”

  “Oh hell,” he said, leaning back in his chair and closing his eyes. “She knows Johnny Boins, Eben. She knows him but won’t admit it.”

  “But she said—”

  “I know what she said. But after a while in this business you can tell. When she saw him she almost jumped out of her hide. It was like I’d hit her in the belly with a stick of stove wood. He never saw her, of course, behind that screen, but it didn’t matter. I can promise you, she knows him.”

  I was so furious, the implications of what he said failed to penetrate. All I could think of was her drawn face and the painful twist of her mouth.

  “I thought we were supposed to be her friends.”

  “You don’t have any friends in this business. You try to find the truth.”

  “Truth, hell! What you’re trying to find is a conviction, no matter what, and you—”

  Abruptly he was up, slamming his fist down so hard on the desk that the typewriter bell rang.

  “You listen,” he roared. “The truth so far is you’ve got too close to that girl. You’re blind to what might have gone on in this case. Think, for God’s sake! That letter. What girl do you think they were talking about in that letter?”

  With a little encouragement, I could have strangled him. Yet at that moment, I knew he was right. It had been a thing in the back of my mind from the time we’d heard Lila’s story. Johnny Boins bragging about women and getting even with someone in The Nations, and now the letter. If we had arrested the right man, surely Jennie Thrasher was the girl Milk Eye said he’d found. But until Evans threw it at me, I had been unable to face it.

  “Did she say anything else? About the case?” I asked, choking and hardly recognizing my own voice.

  Evans sat down again, replacing his pince-nez. Deliberately he unwrapped one of his fat cigars and struck a match to it. I knew he was taking his time to allow my temper to cool, but it only made me indignant, to be treated like a child.

  “Nothing. She said nothing more. But I warn you, Eben, she likely knows a great deal. I told her that someday she’d be on the witness stand and would have no choice but to tell. You know what she said when I mentioned perjury?”

  He looked at me through the dense blue smoke, peering over his pince-nez, and beneath his beard I thought there was the beginning of a smile.

  “How would I know?” I said sarcastically. “Not having been invited to listen.”

  “She said I could go to hell!”

  The whole thing was falling down around me. The enthusiasm I had felt just a short time ago at the prospect of seeing her again had gone sour. And I could still feel the caress of her hair against my face. I took the china dog from my pocket and put it on his desk.

  “Would you have someone take this up to her?”

  “Yes. If you don’t want to do it yourself.”

  “From what you’ve just said, I assume you want me clear of this whole case and everything to do with it.”

  The remark infuriated him. He was up again, banging his desk with a clenched fist, red-faced and the cigar almost aflame from his puffing.

  “Goddamn it, Eben, I don’t want you clear of this case. But you still haven’t grasped the kinds of things we deal with here. Hell’s fire, haven’t you learned anything about this business yet?”

  He slammed the cigar into a tortoiseshell ashtray and spun around toward his dusty window, looking out onto the compound as he tried to regain control. The back of his neck was still red when he spoke softly, but with great emphasis.

  “Whiskey! Greed! Lechery! God knows what else. It’s tearing that country apart. Do you know how many men we’ve got out as deputy marshals at any one time? About two hundred! And do you know how many men we’ve lost in the line of duty? Shot or stabbed or clubbed and left to die in some ditch? Over fifty! Why, the things that go on make some of those old hell-raising towns like Ellsworth and Dodge look like a girls’ school promenade. Do you know how many square miles we try to police from this court?”

  “What’s that got to do with—” I started, but he turned on me.

  “I’m trying to make you understand something!” he shouted. “I’m trying to get it through that thick skull of yours what we have to deal with here. We can’t get involved with these damned cases personally. Do you know how much territory we’ve got? Hell, even I don’t know anymore. We started with over seventy-four thousand square miles. That’s bigger than New England. It’s too big. We can’t get involved. . . .”

  He stopped, sweating, the beads of moisture running down his face and into his beard.

  “All the goddamned predators over there in that country. Congress has whittled away parts of it and given it to other courts, but it’s still too big. Hell,” he said, throwing out his arms and then slapping his sides with his hands. “You’ve got to assume the worst and take it all as a part of the working day, Eben. Anything can pop up. Anything.”

  He sat down and grabbed the cigar again, stabbing at it with his hand.

  “We shouldn’t even be in this case. The Choctaw Nation is supposed to be under the jurisdiction now of a court in Texas, but they haven’t picked it up yet, so we’re still in it. And now, you’ve gone and got the sweetass over some pretty little thing . . .”

  He let it trail off and somehow what he’d said irritated me only a little. Perhaps because it was all true.

  “Then you still want me to work with Schiller on it?”

  “Yes, but goddamn it, don’t come in here again raising hell about how I’m preparing the case.”

  “All right. But I’d still appreciate it if you saw she gets this stuff.” I placed two packages of peppermint chewing gum on his desk beside the china dog.

  “I’ll do that. And I don’t think I’ll be needing you the rest of the afternoon. Get out and walk, or shoot some pool and forget it. You got a load of guts, Eben, but you got a generous nature, too. Don’t let it blind you. Now, let’s not say anything more about it.”

  He had already begun to arrange papers and open files lying in folders on his desk, puffing his cigar furiously. As I went out, I gave him one last bellow—“I think I’ll get drunk!”—and slammed his door.

  It was Frisco payroll day at Henryetta’s, and the downstairs bar-parlor was crowded with railroaders. Henryetta was at her usual place against the bar, but not dozing now. Her golden smile flashed as she talked with her customers, telling bawdy stories and winking slyly. I found a small corner table, wanting to be left alone, but she came over and started a conversation that interested me not at all, even when she said that Lila had left for Memphis the day after Oscar Schiller and I
had talked with her. Big Rachael brought me a lemonade and gin, but I irritably pushed it away and told him to bring me a bottle of the best house rye and a water glass.

  For a moment, it appeared Henryetta might ask me to leave, what with my rudeness. Then she shrugged her fat shoulders and returned to more amiable guests. Some of the girls were working the parlor, dressed in their evening clothes. They disgusted me with their bare shoulders and garishly painted lips—all meant to titillate, I supposed. Each time I saw one of them laughing, the red mouth open in mock cheerfulness, I thought of Jennie Thrasher’s pink lips and how they had felt against my own.

  To hell with it all, I thought. Getting myself involved with a little Nations chippy who didn’t want to get involved with me. A girl who cussed and smoked cigarettes. As the rye burned down my throat and boiled in my stomach, I goaded myself with the thought of Jennie. Evans was right, of course. All along, I’d thought the whole messy business might blow away in the wind, leaving Jennie and me as though courting in Saint Louis, me in my boater and needlepoint shoes, she in demure taffeta and lace. To hell with it all, I thought. I am going to throw myself one magnificent drunk, and then go back home where I can drown myself in civilization and good breeding.

  I began to relax, looking at the crowd and at Henryetta’s gold teeth, finding it all suddenly amusing and frivolous and high-spirited. Not so slowly, the liquor began to dissipate despair and self-pity.

  The room was full of talk about the great event planned in just two days in celebration of the Fourth of July. There was to be a prizefight on the sandbar along the bend of the river across from Fort Smith, it being against the law to hold such a contest in the state of Arkansas. It held little interest for me at first, but as the rye took its effect, everything changed. I could hardly keep from hearing all about it; because the railroaders seemed so accustomed to shouting while they worked around the noisy trains, it had become the only way they knew how to talk.

  A visiting professional prizefighter from somewhere in the East would be matched against a local challenger. The challenger was Big Rachael, the overwhelming favorite. I heard it said that Dirty Jake, the professional, weighed twelve stones. Mentally, I calculated that this meant he was about 168 pounds. It occurred to me that Evans had failed to explain, in his professional role, that there were so many Anglo-Saxons working in Fort Smith. But then, it could be expected because the English had always been railroaders.

  If Dirty Jake weighs twelve stones, I thought, Big Rachael would run close to twenty-one, for he was every ounce of three hundred pounds. I giggled at my own cleverness, converting old English weight to pounds. As the rye continued to dull the sting of what had happened earlier in the day and created, too, a loss of inhibition, I found myself making bets with the railroaders against the local favorite. They were laying three-to-one odds that Big Rachael would knock Dirty Jake senseless. Soon, I was at the bar, inviting bets at five-to-one that Big Rachael would not last twenty rounds.

  During the course of this sporting talk, two of Henryetta’s girls took my arm and explained that my money might be more enjoyably spent upstairs, but I brushed them away. Henryetta and some of the railroaders apparently thought me too abrupt with the girls, considering the nature of their business and the enterprise they displayed. I began to hear comments that I was another of these Yankee sons of bitches, like Dirty Jake, come down to Fort Smith to show off and spread my big-city money around.

  My belligerence increased as the level in the bottle of rye dipped downward. By dark the place was crowded with men, some of whom eyed me with hatred. It was exhilarating. With the bravado of youth and the whiskey dulling my sense of self-preservation, I stood at the bar declaiming on the fine art of fisticuffs and prizefighting, an endeavor I had never actually witnessed. What was worse, I began to cast aspersions on those stupid enough to sweat over oily locomotives, then waste their money betting on something they were not intellectually competent to understand. I used all the fine words I could recall from the University of Illinois and various law offices, browbeating them with terms beyond their comprehension. But they got the hang of most of it.

  There was a scuffle near me along the bar and I realized one of the railroaders was trying to get at me—to emphasize, I thought drunkenly, how little I knew about fighting. Henryetta was beside me then, shouting that there would be no disturbance in her place. Big Rachael, against whom I had just wagered almost fifty dollars, gently escorted me toward the door, his hand on my back like a slab of bacon. They pushed me to the door and across the veranda and down the steps into the street, a large number of whorehouse customers immediately behind. It finally came to me that I might be in for a severe beating, and at that thought I began to laugh. I kept thinking that already darkness had come on, and a good bottle of rye not yet finished. The headlights of the switchyards engines looked like dingy mothballs.

  But more serious considerations overtook me as the dark forms of railroaders closed around me. There would be no chance standing among them, for they could get at me from all sides, so I somehow moved over against the wall of Henryetta’s, dancing along like the drunken man I was. My hat blew off in the still-gusting wind and for an instant I thought of the little Smith & Wesson pistol back in my room. Then they were on me. I struck the first blow, happily feeling knuckles against breaking teeth. Their fists hammered me. Blood was salty in my mouth and my nose was smashed but I managed to land a few more hard punches before their weight overcame me and I was on my knees.

  I tried to cover my face with both arms, expecting them to finish me in a final rush. But nothing happened. The dark forms heaved around me, grunting and cursing, and I heard then the dull thud of something solid against flesh. They were falling back, two of them thrashing about on the ground like beheaded chickens. Over me was a formless shape, crowned by a wide-brimmed hat. At first, I thought it was Big Rachael, come out to prevent homicide, but then I saw the cake-knife blade of the hatchet in his hand.

  “I don’t want to kill nobody here,” Joe Mountain shouted, the hatchet swinging at his side like a metal snake’s head. “But you men come in here again, I’ll start using the edge on you.”

  “You goddamned red nigger bastard,” someone yelled.

  Joe Mountain pulled me to my feet, still watching the group around us. They shouted insults, but no one wanted to come within striking range of the French hatchet. The two men who had gone down from blows by the flat of the blade were up on wobbly legs, moving back among their fellows, screeching at us.

  “You goddamned dirty red nigger son of a bitch.”

  Joe Mountain pulled me toward the corner of the house, along the wall. My legs were weak as water, and he had to haul me like a limp sack of wheat grain. In the lights from the switch engines I could see his teeth shining.

  We were around the house then, and there was no purpose in hurrying because the railroaders had already started back inside, still shouting their insults about Yankees and red niggers. We stumbled along through backyards, over one picket fence and through the gap in another. We came to the next block, on Commerce Street, and only then did Joe Mountain stop and look at me.

  “You’re bleedin’ like a cut pig, Eben Pay,” he said. “You can’t whip the whole Frisco railroad.”

  “Like hell,” I said, laughing. I spat a mouthful of blood onto the sidewalk and the big Osage laughed with me.

  “Come on. Cap’n got a place just up the street where he stays when he’s in town. We better go and get you cleaned up.”

  “Where the hell’d you come from, Joe?” I asked, stumbling along beside him. He held one hand under my arm to keep me from falling.

  “The Osage reservation,” he said.

  “I mean at the damned whorehouse. Where’d you come from?”

  “The Osage reservation,” he repeated, grinning.

  “Joe. Joe, I’m sure glad you did.” I grabbed a light pole and hung on for a moment and Joe Mountain waited, watching me bend over and throw up.
<
br />   “Eben Pay, you puke more’n any man I know,” he said.

  EIGHT

  A long Commerce Street there were a number of boardinghouses, some of them new, others from before the war and now dilapidated and unpainted. In one of these, Oscar Schiller shared the basement room with a furnace, stacks of empty cardboard boxes, and worn-out bedsprings. It was a large room and the light from a single kerosene lamp on the night table beside Schiller’s bed left deep shadows in all the corners and behind the furnace that squatted like a concrete-coated toad at one end. There were old ladder-back straight chairs discarded at various times by the people who lived above, and in addition to Schiller’s bed, covered by a homemade quilt cover, there were two bare mattresses on the floor with rumpled blankets.

  In the shadows of one corner, leaning back in a chair tilted against the wall, was a well-dressed black man, his dark hat set at a jaunty angle over one eye. From beneath his coat I could see the butt of a large pistol and on his vest a metal star large as a Mason jar lid. He watched me with an even stare, seeming not at all surprised to see my bloody face and red-stained clothes.

  Oscar Schiller was sitting on his bed, his shirt off and the long flannel underwear showing dampness under the arms as he bent over the night table. There, arranged in neat rows, were five snuff cans, a box of snuff, and a sheet of paper. On the paper was a mound of white powder that looked like sugar. He was mixing snuff and the white powder in the snuff cans. I knew it was cocaine, the powerful stimulant so popular among much of Saint Louis high society. I had never tried it, but I knew it was expensive. Also on the night table was a cup of hot tea, and into this Schiller sprinkled a spoonful of the narcotic, stirred it, and took a long sip before looking up at me.