The Trench Angel

by Michael Keenan Gutierrez

  I’d heard this one too, but like the others, I didn’t buy it. It had to be the way the newspapers reported it. Everyone was always looking for a reason why my father went crazy, and they all thought it had to do with Big Hank’s killing, that it had bent him funny, but it wasn’t like that. He wanted another life, another woman.

  “Seamus was also shot,” I said. “Don’t forget that.”

  “In the shoulder, conveniently,” Jacob said. “No, Jesse shoots Seamus where he’s likely to survive, then plants a gun on Big Hank. A cover-up. Seamus was never in any real danger.”

  To my thinking at the time, it was just another conspiracy created by a paranoid town.

  “Hooey,” Sam said. “Should lynch all you Stephens. Rid the world of them.”

  Lazy Eye turned to me. “He’s just drunk.”

  “No, no, no. He’s back. And you know how I know? Because I got witnesses.” Sam hit his chest in a display of Lutheran bravado. “You know Old Virgin McSweeney? She saw your father last week. No kidding. Took her cow. Stole it, raped it, cut out its innards, then slept in its carcass. Foul, but true. And tragic. It’s hard to get a good milking cow these days.”

  “Is the Old Virgin still speaking to Lincoln every night?” I said. “Still telling him they have to wait until her daddy gives consent?”

  “Yep.”

  “And she saw my father have relations with her bovine?”

  “Yep.”

  “Sam,” said Lazy Eye. “Don’t be making trouble.”

  Sam touched his heart. “Apologies, Nigger Norris. Apologies, Neal Stephens. It’s not just the Virgin who saw. The greaser family over near the golfing club said it was your daddy who broke into the jail yesterday and killed the dastardly O’Leary. And that’s two.”

  “You been goin’ around for months blaming Jesse Stephens for everything,” Lazy Eye said. “Bet you blaming him for getting that Jessup girl in a family way.”

  “I have heard rumors to that effect, yes,” Sam said.

  “Shit, Pop,” Jacob said. “Lay off, will you, or I’ll haul you down to the drunk tank.”

  “Apologies Nigger Norris. Apologies Neal Stephens,” Sam said. “It’s just Betty. I miss my Betty.”

  Sam turned to his son, his old preacher’s eyes drooping like a canteen. “I don’t know why your mama left me. I don’t know why she couldn’t stay.”

  Jacob had nothing to say about his disappearing mother. It was like staring into the sun.

  “Perhaps,” Lazy Eye said, pouring Sam another beer. “Because you’re my best customer.”

  But Sam wasn’t listening. His head lay on the bar, his snores a hymn. I handed Sam’s wallet to Lazy Eye.

  “For the bed,” Lazy Eye said. “Got to charge him for the bed.”

  The door opened from the alley and a clatter of boot steps descended into McGuffey’s. Three fat men with coal miner hands and no necks stopped at the coat rack. The first man, the largest, wore a black city suit and carried a silver pocket watch chain off his coat that glistened in the candlelight. He stank of wealth, but it was all a ruse—the man wore each day he’d worked underground across his face like a tattoo.

  He raised three dented fingers at Lazy Eye. “Whiskey,” he said. “And follow it with three more, quick as you can, boy.”

  Jacob leaned toward me. “Union men here to keep an eye on Forest.”

  On a nearby table rested the head of Swift Mickey, his back moving in tandem with his snores, his missing leg buried in some Flemish field. At one time he’d been the best baseball player in all of New Sligo, spending every afternoon manning third base on the Normal School’s diamond. Now, he couldn’t walk ninety feet without leaning against a wall because the crutches cut into his arms so bad they blistered. He’d only been home a year, but it seemed like he was fixed to that table like the stars to the night sky.

  We sat near him and Jacob raised his glass. “To O’Leary,” he said. “Cocksucker, had it coming.”

  He had, but even though he was blackmailing me, all I could think of were the ways O’Leary could have turned out all right, maybe gotten a job in Denver or taken the train to California, anything but staying in New Sligo haunted by his father’s ghost.

  Then I did something funny. I guess it had just been on my mind and I hadn’t thought of it consciously, but things just slip out once in a while when you least consider them.

  “A Pinkerton.”

  “What?” Jacob reached for his gun. “Where?”

  “No, I fucked a Pinkerton last night.”

  “He get you drunk at least?”

  “No, it was Gertie. Seamus’ Gertie. You remember her?”

  He groaned, disappointed like a cuckolded husband. “Yeah, remember her alright.”

  He pulled a small revolver from his ankle holster and laid it on the table.

  “Here. Try not to shoot your cock off.”

  The revolver reminded me of the last gun I’d owned, a French pistol I’d taken off a dead Belgian.

  “I don’t want it,” I said. “Can’t fit it in Miss Constance’s case.”

  It was a lie, but neither of us felt like having a talk over it. Instead, we listened to the snores of Sam Bailey, the snorts of Lazy Eye Norris, the machinations of the union men, the cleaver of O’Clair. Swift Mickey stirred, knocking over an ashtray.

  I wondered if he dreamed about his missing leg.

  —9—

  It was late in the afternoon by the time I exhumed myself from McGuffey’s. I still had an hour until the debate and I needed to walk off my drunk so I slipped through the center of town and into Pioneer Park, which, lately, had begun to look more like an English estate than a piece of the American frontier. My uncle had brought in tulips, daffodils, and other European flora to give it a more royal feeling, but I missed the old sage grass and cottonwoods and Colorado clay. Still, he couldn’t get rid of all the town’s Americaness: the gravel pathway was glazed in yellow maple leaves, the air smelling sweet and musty like boiled pumpkins as the sun hovered over the Rocky peaks, shading the mountain snow like a bruise. The evening wind cut down the path, kicking up leaves into small funnels. I buttoned my coat, then pulled down my hat and found a bench to sleep on, but before I could doze off, I heard a miner’s wet cough from down the trail, and looked up to find a giant Jew slouching toward me.

  When he was a boy, Forest Kaslovsky had come to New Sligo from some ghetto outside of Warsaw. His real name wasn’t Forest, but something Polish and unpronounceable and long forgotten—he’d taken on “Forest” because it was the first word he’d learned in English. He took work in our mines and rose up quickly to become a union leader because of his steadiness, his strength, and his eagerness to cripple a scab. I’d known him since I was a boy and while I can’t say we were ever friends, we did have an understanding that kept us from being enemies. He stopped before me, towering like a Semitic Visigoth, and stuck his hands in his pockets before surveying the park. A dark shadow cut across his chest, sawing him in half. He looked worried.

  “You being spied on?”

  “Stephens, is that you?”

  “Who else?”

  “Shit, I figured you for some train tramp until I saw that shit camera of yours.”

  “Do I look that bad?”

  He didn’t say anything and I didn’t expect him to. He was nearly fifty years old, a man of my father and uncle’s generation, and thus they had been raised on street fights and knife wounds. He wasn’t the type to whisper even a gentle insult unless he was there to bloody you.

  “Sit,” I said. “Please.”

  Just being near him, I could feel the weight on his shoulders, like he was holding up an entire mine shaft on his back. While this wasn’t his first strike, it was the first since his wife passed from the flu. I couldn’t tell how it changed him, not then, but everyone sensed that he wasn
’t the same man. There was something quieter about him, which, maybe not accidentally, made him seem more dangerous.

  “What are you doing here?” I said. “If you don’t mind me asking?”

  He pointed toward a dark wooded area, and behind an oak stood a man in a black suit with a starched white shirt and black tie and long, curled moustache. He looked like an old photo of John Wilkes Booth, but of course it was just another Pinkerton.

  “They’re like flies on shit,” he said. “And I’m smelling awful rank.”

  “He’s a lousy spy,” I said. “Seems like they’d put someone better on your trail.”

  “He knows I see him. That’s the point. Supposed to make me nervous. You’d think that your uncle would have learned by now that I don’t scare easy.”

  “You’d think.” I raised Miss Constance at Pinkerton Booth, and then fired, but the man didn’t flinch.

  “I’m sorry about O’Leary,” I said.

  “No you’re not. No one is.”

  “He was Big Hank’s kid.”

  “Don’t make him good,” Forest said. “Truth is that boy was always mean.”

  I didn’t remember him that way.

  “Clyde used to shoot prairie dogs for sport.”

  “A lot of people do that,” I said.

  “He aimed for their legs. Wanted to cripple them, watch them drag themselves back to their holes so their families could watch them bleed to death. He was only eight when I caught him doing it, long before your father orphaned him.”

  He went on. “Saw you’re pinning his killing on me. Front page this morning, not that I read that shit paper of yours. Telling everyone me and your father done that shit.”

  “You know Roosevelt,” I said. “If it wasn’t you—”

  “Your name under the headline.”

  “No one reads the paper anyway.”

  “You gonna ask?”

  “What?”

  “What O’Leary had on me?” He looked hard at me, the folds beneath his eyes, the caverns on his forehead, illustrating each mine collapse, each moment mourned for his wife.

  “I don’t care,” I said.

  “You’re the worst scribbler there ever was,” he said. “Don’t you care about nothing? Anything you might give a shit enough about to try hard on, to sacrifice for?”

  “Lucky I’m pretty,” I said. “Otherwise I’d be in some real trouble.”

  He stood and asked for a cigarette and I gave him one and he inhaled and coughed, a hard sopping cough. “Haven’t had one since before I got married. Used to love them but Rachel said it was bad enough breathing coal all day that she didn’t need this shit stinking up her linens.”

  His eyes drifted toward the woods, toward Pinkerton Booth.

  “Why now?” I asked.

  “Now, you got a question.”

  “Blackmail’s regular. Happens all the time. You picking up a new vice this late in the day is odd. There’s the difference.”

  “Guess you start wondering what things you would have changed had you not done something. Don’t know if that makes sense? Figure, if I’d kept smoking, things might have gone another way. You understand?”

  “No use revising what’s already happened.”

  “So you never—”

  “Shit,” I said. “I do it all day long, but do you want to start looking like me?”

  He laughed and I felt my back relax. I’d been more nervous then I thought.

  “That’s the kindest thing you’ve ever said to me. I’ll remember it the next time I pick up the paper and think of blackjacking you.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  He turned toward town while I leaned against the bench and looked at the clouds hovering over their mountains, threatening us with a week of snow, until, out of the corner of my eye, I saw in the woods, behind that oak, Pinkerton Booth staring right at me.

  Paris

  A couple of months after our first meeting, Lorraine and I sat on a fading bench beside the Seine River eating stale bread with warm cheese, drinking wine with coffee, as men marched to work and women chased their children, as barges ferried coal downriver and painters revealed their empty canvases. It was right after sunrise and Lorraine had just finished cleaning a clerk’s office.

  “I won’t go to bed with you,” she said. “I told you why.”

  After a night pushing a mop, her face glistened and her eyes waltzed to a silent song.

  “All I asked is if you wanted to go to the ocean some time before it gets cold,” I said. “Who mentioned bed?”

  She chewed. She didn’t talk when she chewed and she ate all the time so our friendship, and that’s all it was at that moment, was punctuated by long silences. She took another bite into her bread.

  Down by the river, an old man fished. He must have been near ninety. Slumped and pained, the man had been born before Andrew Jackson was President. He’d been a boy when Robert E. Lee was at West Point. He’d been too old to fight in the Civil War. Back then, I ordered the world like that. Lorraine said it was a sickness needing curing, because if I wasn’t in America, I was no longer American.

  “Frenchmen are always French,” she’d said, in a tone I took as insulting. “Chinamen are always Chinese. Americans are renters.”

  “But I’m not a Frenchman,” I said. “So what am I?”

  “A little boy.”

  That was our first blowout, a fight that had lasted days. After my hangover eased, I found myself, through no fault of my own, pining for Lorraine, seeking her forgiveness.

  That morning along the Seine, I’d concocted a plan to get her out of Paris, to a place where we’d be forced to share a room, a bed. Like any woman with half a brain, she’d seen right through it.

  “What do you think would happen if we went to the ocean together?”

  “Swimming.”

  “Now you’re being fresh with me.” She broke the bread, putting it to her mouth. She chewed.

  “We take a train to the ocean,” she said. “We have to stay overnight. We drink some wine. We share a room. What happens then?”

  “We sleep.”

  She picked up my arm and then bit my wrist. It hurt. She’d done it before and I was fine with it because it meant I was getting somewhere. At first, she hadn’t even allowed me hold her hand, but, after a few weeks, she’d let me kiss her and feel under her blouse, yet that was as far as she’d take it. I knew why.

  “What happens to me when you go back to America and I’m stuck with your child?”

  The old fisherman wasn’t having much luck, his line bobbing in the brown, flat river.

  She punched my arm. “Answer me. I let you make love to me and I get stuck with a white man’s child while you’re off telling your friends about some colored girl you bedded. What use do I have for a white man’s baby?”

  “It’s not like that,” I said. “There are ways so you won’t be with child.”

  “See,” she said. “I knew it.”

  She went to the riverbank to think over the water. I let her stew instead of assuaging her, which had made her angrier because she thought I was just passing out token platitudes. I’d feared she’d stop talking to me if she got angry enough, but it was never like that. She was always happy to see me. It would have been easy to dismiss me as a cad and I probably was at first but this unconsummated affair had turned into something else for both of us.

  After the old fisherman had taken his bait home, Lorraine returned from the banks and sat beside me and rested her head on my shoulder and she felt warm and fitting and I wanted to tell her I loved her but I was still too afraid she’d think I was lying so I said nothing.

  “You said you brought scotch,” she said. “Pour me one.”

  It went on like this for months. I’d bring her breakfast and we’d go to her apartment to pl
ay around until she fell asleep.

  Afterward, I walked the city alone, looking at faces I’d have photographed if I’d had a camera. Months after the Rite of Spring debacle, and I still hadn’t replaced Miss Trixie. She’d been a good camera, but bulky with heavy glass plates and I’d had to lug her and the flash pan along and it all felt artificial. I’d tried a few cameras on, but none had fit my eye. I guess I was waiting for inspiration or desperation and neither had arrived at my door.

  I walked the entirety of the city that winter, the dark, icy alleys full of tramps and the bright, snowy boulevards of the bourgeoisie and I talked with other exiles about the possible war and I got excited about following soldiers into battle and I knew that when the war came I’d be a part of it because everyone agreed that it was going to be one short, glorious battle.

  During that winter in Paris I met all sorts of people and I felt like a part of history rather than a victim of it. I’d meet French and English girls, who, somehow sensing the coming disaster, offered themselves to me, but I always turned them away because I was in love with Lorraine. I couldn’t push her into bed. I just had to wait.

  One morning in February, I arrived at her door covered in sleet, desperate to declare my love for her because it was a burden and I needed her to understand. I was nervous that she wouldn’t believe me.

  “You’re crying again, Snowball.”

  She led me into the house and pulled off my wet boots and laid my feet near the coal furnace.

  She looked over me, confused. “What’s wrong with you?”