At that moment, I knew my father was mad. I reached over to the side table, picking up the telephone. “You’re going to jail, old man. I’m not your patsy.”
I raised the receiver, waiting for the operator, but the line was dead. My father grinned.
“You know how hard it is to get someone up here to fix that?” I said. “Takes months.”
“You can afford it, Cowboy, considering the coin I passed for this photo.” He pointed to the photo on the wall. “It’s my gift to you. A lot of missed birthdays, I realize, but I thought you’d want to hold on to it.”
“You paid for it?”
“Eh, let’s say I left a donation as I went out the window. How’d you come across this shot anyhow?”
I didn’t want to talk about The Trench Angel, not with him. Instead, I just stared at him, quietly thinking about how to protect my sister and myself. You know, everyone thinks I must have been scared. The big bad Jesse Stephens had broken into my home and cut my phone line and was carrying a gun and I should have been scared, but I could see in his face that he meant me no harm. No, I wasn’t scared that he was going to hurt me. But if anyone found me harboring the anarchist, townsfolk with pitchforks and Pinkertons with cleavers would be knocking down my door.
“What do you want?”
“You’re surprised to see me. I know it’s been—”
“No, I wasn’t surprised at all. People have been seeing you all week.”
“But they didn’t know it was me.” Jesse rose. “No chance in hell did they know. They been seeing me for fifteen years. They see me every time something goes bad. They can’t tell their reality from their fictions, seeing as how they’re trapped in the yoke of their own oppression. No, they only thought it was me.”
“You killed the cow?”
“Not how they been saying.”
“The girl?”
“I didn’t touch no virgin,” he said. “Hell, Cowboy, I’m no barbarian. Just because a man holds certain convictions that are contrary to the prevailing convictions of some dominant order set up by tyrants don’t mean he wants to overthrow all of them. Just because I disagree with the economic raping, doesn’t mean I’ll stick my pecker in places it shouldn’t go. Those deeds are reserved for politicians and others who’ve been mentally handicapped by capitalism’s corrupting influences.”
“Christ, old man. What do you want?”
“Whiskey.”
I found a bottle beneath the sofa, and then fetched some glasses. It was only then that I saw my house had been ransacked: pillows torn, bed undone, closet evacuated, bureau turned turtle. A box of safes and a couple of unchristian calendars lay scattered along my bedroom floor.
“Jesus—”
“I prefer Jesse if you don’t mind, or Pa if you’re feeling some sort of sentiment.”
“Why couldn’t you have done it more delicately? I hate cleaning.”
“No kidding.” He glanced at the calendars. “Been lonely lately?”
“Not lonely enough.”
My father sipped his whiskey, letting it linger on his tongue, before swallowing. “Ahh. That is a fine, fine elixir for a foggy head. Not quite Laphroaig, but it does clear the ringing in my head. I ever tell you about the summer I hid out in the highlands?”
“You didn’t kill O’Leary, did you? Please say you didn’t.”
“It was 1911 and I’d just blown up the Central Bank of Edinburgh,” he said slow and wistful. “Three-legged Abe and Banjo Sarah were with me and then it all went terribly wrong.”
“I don’t remember 1911 and I don’t remember you being such a raving jackass.”
“Poor Abe. Repressed personalities like Dr. Freud said. I don’t care for alienists, but that Austrian’s all right by me. Met him that summer he toured the states.”
“O’Leary? Clyde O’Leary got shot in the head, you know?”
“Right, right, right.” Jesse refilled his glass, then his eyes turned toward Miss Constance’s bag. “That the same one I got you as a boy? The camera. You named it. What was that camera’s name?”
“Miss Esther.”
“Right, right,” Jesse said. “Why you always got to go and personify the inanimate? Just another distasteful materialist trend. I didn’t teach you that, did I?”
I’m sure my mouth was agape and I looked like I was talking to a madman, which I was. My father, I started to realize, had no idea what he was doing. I knew I had to get a hold of my uncle. If Seamus found I was hiding my father, he might not be so forgiving of me.
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
“About what?”
“About the fact everyone wants to hang you?”
“You think?”
“The town burns you in effigy every year.”
“I’m doing Guy Fawkes proud.”
“You’re mad, aren’t you? Everyone thinks you’re the damn devil and they’ll string you up first chance they get and you’re sitting here drinking like none of it’s happening. What are you planning?”
“Honestly, Cowboy. I don’t really know.” He waved his cigar, the smoke forming into some sort of anarchist apparition. “Got some ideas, some theories, but nothing to worry over because the best of it’s planned on the fly.”
“Did you kill Clyde O’Leary?”
“Swear I didn’t, Cowboy.”
“He was a Pinkerton.”
“Makes no difference.”
“You just killed a Pinkerton.”
“Just lucky, I guess.”
He kicked his boots up onto the table.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“You know why.”
“I haven’t an inkling.”
“Need to get into Seamus’ office. That old bastard’s got something of mine.”
Gertie’s voice rang in my head: my father hadn’t come home to see me at all because he didn’t care. I’m pretty sure disappointment washed across my eyes. “That’s it?”
“Well—”
“After all these years, you just want help breaking into Seamus’ office?”
“Don’t be so maudlin, Cowboy. I didn’t mean nothing by it.”
“You son of a bitch.” I hurled the bottle across the room, glass shattering against the back wall, whiskey raining to the ground, through the floorboards, into the basement.
“Get out.”
When he didn’t move, I went for his throat, yanking his collar, but he was leaden, rooted to the chair. After a while, when this struggle became embarrassing to both father and son, he did me the favor of twisting my arm behind my back and putting me on the ground, yet another old man whipping my ass.
“Why you got to go and throw a perfectly good bottle of bootleg like that? For Christ’s sake, what’s come over you?”
“She’s dead. Mom’s dead.”
“I know, Cowboy. I know.”
“She called for you until the day you died, you know that?”
“I’m awful sorry about that.”
“It was another woman, wasn’t it?”
“You already know the answer.”
If it’s not about money, then it has to be another woman. In my father’s case, her name was Mattie Longstreet. No one knew what she looked like, or at least the papers didn’t. It was she who made him leave, become an anarchist. The papers said so. They said she helped him with all his acts right up until the day he got her killed.
After Jesse got up, I pulled my knees to my chest, my boots scraping against the floor.
“Have you seen Tillie?”
“Yeah, I’ve seen her.”
I couldn’t believe she hadn’t told me. “Stay away from her.”
“Okay, Cowboy. Okay.”
A truck passed down the road, shaking the dining table. Jesse palmed his gun, and we
stayed silent until the truck passed out of earshot. Soon enough, another truck passed by, then another. I went to the window. An army caravan passed down my street, sneaking into town in the dead of the night.
“The militia,” Jesse said. “They’re invading.”
“They’re coming for you,” I said. “You’d better go.”
“Pay attention, cowboy. I ain’t got a lot of time and you don’t have a lot of sense. I’m not looking to start a war here. The violence will be mild. I’m going after the big boys. I’m going after your uncle where it hurts. He’s got this holy devotion to the material and I plan on taking some of that material away. The equalization of fortunes, you could call it. Seamus, that sheep fucker, has—”
“No.”
I went to door, pointing to the road. It was snowing hard.
Jesse touched my shoulder before stepping on to the porch. He lowered his hat and looked out to the road.
“Careful, Cowboy. No one cares you were Pearl’s son anymore. It ain’t the old days. They’ll hang you just like me. Don’t forget that.”
After he disappeared into the snow, I shut the light and went to the sofa, sitting in the dark for a long while, thinking of things you think about when you’ve had an awful day and you hope something profound comes to you, but it never does, not for a lot of years.
I walked outside into the cold air, carrying my marble doppelganger. Snow fell like ash as I walked past the row houses lit and heated by the last of their rationed coals, then strode up a hill, stopping at the summit. Most of the town lay asleep, the houses as dark as the empty prairie. Even the lamps along Seventh Street had gone black. To the west, scattered electric lights lit the outlying homes of the shopkeepers and coal executives, while to the east oil lamps and coal fires burned in the homes of Rahillville during their last night of peace.
The town had changed. It had grown out from the center like a fat man, gluttonous and greedy, consuming the surrounding prairie like a magnificent banquet. Aqueducts pocked the edge of the town, while canals shimmied out of the Platte and the Cache la Poudre rivers, crisscrossing like stretch marks. I imagined the new immigrants and the expanding families would keep growing south as far as Denver, devouring the coal, slurping the water. It was one of my few prescient moments during that long week of false prophecies. I dropped the marble head on the top of the hill and turned back down the hill.
When I got home, the light was on and I figured my father had returned for Gerard’s head. So when I opened the door, I was surprised to find a rotund detective sitting on my sofa.
“You’re not much for cleaning,” Jacob said, flipping through one of my calendars. “Hell, neither am I.”
He took a bottle from his coat and gave me a swig.
“You seen your father?” he asked. “Careful with your answer.”
“You just missed him by a few minutes.”
“How was the reunion?”
I pointed at the broken bottle, the turned over chair.
“You going to tell my uncle? I won’t blame you if you did.”
“Yeah, about that,” he started. “Just arrested Tillie for Clyde’s murder. She’s sleeping at the jailhouse tonight. Thought it best to come here and give you the news.”
You could say my heart sank or my stomach turned, but I really just felt numb. Somehow, I always knew it would come to this: my uncle would turn against us, our faces forever reminding him of our father, and mother.
“She do it?” I asked. “You think she—”
“Hell if I know.” He went to the window, but I couldn’t tell what he was looking for. “Seamus thinks it’ll draw your Pa out into the open. Thinks he’ll turn himself in for his daughter.”
“That isn’t the only reason.”
“No,” Jacob said. “Seamus been wanting to run her out of town for a long time. She’s been down in Rahillville doctoring miners and the Pinkertons got pictures of it now, but you knew all that, didn’t you?”
I nodded.
“Might be best if you both left,” he went on. “If you get the chance, I mean, and I’m not sure you will.”
“This my friend’s advice or the detective’s advice?”
He turned and I could see in the hollows of his eyes that he wanted to get out of town along with us.
“Look, the Pinkertons found Clyde’s files in her house. Almost all of them, we think. Whether she killed Clyde or not, I don’t know and don’t much care, but somehow she cleaned out the jailhouse.”
“Mine in there?”
He turned to his boots, not wanting to look up at me.
“Yep.”
“You read it?”
“Seamus read it first, but yeah, I read it.”
“Got any questions about—?” I couldn’t even say her name.
“Can’t fault you for the story you told. Not to normal folks because they’d have run you out of town so fast, but—” He paused, putting his hat on and tipping back on his heels. He’d been thinking of his answer on the drive up here. “But did you think I’d care she was Negro? I know what it’s like over there.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Look, Neal, I don’t know what’s going to happen, but it looks like people are going to hang and here’s hoping I’ve got no part in that and all I have to do is turn my head and you know that I love you like a brother, but I’m not going to step in front of a noose for you. If Seamus thinks you’re helping your father, God help you.”
After he left, I locked the door and kept the rock beside me while I sat in the dark for a long time wondering if I’d have any more visitors tonight. I reached into my boot and pulled out the check Clyde sent me. I didn’t know why he’d given it to me, a man he could barely stand, but I did know the check was the only leverage I had. It might have been better for everyone if I had burned it. The truth was that by that night I knew my uncle wasn’t the same man as the one I’d loved as a child, the man who’d taken me in after Jesse left. Even after the war, he’d still been good to me, finding me work during those dark days after Lorraine died. He’d been kind to me, in his own way, for my entire life and maybe he would have looked on me with Christian charity and let Tillie and I leave town on our volition, yet, call it intuition, call it fear, but I didn’t believe he’d let us go without a price, because he felt betrayed and that was something a man like him couldn’t abide because he’d always been loyal and righteous and he remained that way right up until the moment I shot him dead.
Part Two
The Handsome Man
—13—
O’Leary’s blood still stained the jailhouse floor, while a cadre of Pinkertons dressed in miner’s garb—sooted trousers and charcoaled hats and muddy boots—stood around the Sheriff’s desk doing some sort of arts and crafts project with rope. It took me a moment to understand they were tying nooses.
“Where is she?” I asked.
Jacob led me past the cells teeming with near-silent miners, all the way to the back, where my sister sat on the bunk of her cell, reading the Eagle. She wore a simple blue dress and her hair framed her face in a way that made her seem like one of those fallen girls you read about in True Crime novels.
“Give us a minute,” I said.
Jacob locked me inside and I sat beside her as she perused through the articles, seemingly oblivious to my presence, and her situation.
“How are you?”
“I’ve had three hours of sleep and two proposals of marriage. Do you think I’d make a fine miner’s wife? I could comb my hair into a bob and start dropping my vowels.”
I gave her a cigarette. “This seems like an appropriate time to take up drinking, don’t you think?” she asked. “Isn’t that what scorned women do in such situations? Of course, it’s my uncle and not a lover who’s betrayed me. No one writes poems about that.”
I tried laughing, but i
t didn’t seem too funny. She held the paper up for me.
“I’m surprised Roosevelt’s become so paranoid,” she said, in an easy, matter-of-fact tone. “A conspiracy between Forest and our father to destroy the statue. Can you imagine? For what possible reason? He might as well blame Masons.”
She waved me closer.
“Now me,” she said. “I’d change the headline. Not ‘Statue Destroyed,’ but instead ‘Revolution Begun,’ if we’re going to be at all politically accurate.”
“You’re sounding,” I said, grimacing. “Like the daughter of Jesse Stephens.”
She folded the newspaper, slid it beneath the bunk. “I have no qualms about our father’s methods, although he had nothing to do with this murder, though I’m sure he takes no issue with gaining credit for such an act. It makes him seem even more dangerous and I believe he enjoys the reputation. No, his means are fine. It’s his cause that disturbs me. It’s too Ludditian. Too antiquated. He wants this perfect world that never existed and never could. Not unless you rid the world of power, and that, dear brother, won’t happen as long as humans remain the planet’s principle masters.”
We were talking around the issue like we always had, but neither of us had time for this now. “Jacob said they’ve caught you down in Rahillville, helping the miners. I thought you were more careful.”
“I’m a doctor,” she said. “It’s my duty to—”
“But Seamus, Tillie. You know how he’d see it. They’ve got pictures.”
“Pictures? What good are those? They show me going into homes, but they don’t show me helping people. They don’t show the children who can breathe again and the casts and sutures—”
“And you’ve seen dad.”
“That’s not the point,” she said. “Listen to me, Neal, will you? I haven’t lost my mind and converted to Marx. You know I’m not that kind of girl.”
“What did you two talk about?”
“Something Clyde had. Something he used to blackmail Forest.”
I didn’t ask her what, because I already knew—the check. I stood and went to the bars and looked down the line of cells. I didn’t recognize most of the miners, not really. I’d seen them before, but I couldn’t name them, just bodies and boots plastered in soot.
The Trench Angel Page 10
