The Trench Angel

by Michael Keenan Gutierrez

  “You killed O’Leary, didn’t you? You killed him for Forest.”

  “Not that simple.”

  He put out his cigar and took another pull from the bottle and then gave me a smile that made me want hit him with a bat.

  “Not until I can trust you,” he said. “Not until you start coming clean about what you did to that poor girl.”

  I looked to the mineshaft full of rubble, to the bones never found.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “For what?” he asked. “You just throw words around like that and expect it all to be better and I’m sure a lot of folks will nod and forgive you but they’re not forgiving you for the right things, because sorry is just a sorry explanation for a lot of wrongs you did and they’re forgiving you for things you ain’t sorry for, or at least shouldn’t be. So what are you sorry for, Cowboy? Careful with your answer, because it’s going to tell me a lot about what kind of man you’ve turned out to be.”

  “I’m going to kill you.” I kicked, aiming for his head, but I was still cuffed to the steering wheel, flailing like a war cripple.

  “Let me go so I can fucking strangle you.”

  “All right, Cowboy.” He came around to the other side of the car. “You think hard on this question. We’ll talk this over soon.”

  “I hope they hang you.”

  He laughed as he pulled the bottle of ether from his coat pocket, and he cackled as he poured the liquid on the rag, and he guffawed as he put it to my mouth, my father, the merry trickster of New Sligo County.

  —18—

  When I awoke from the ether fog, I found myself in an alley filled with garbage pails and stray dogs, the latter waiting for me to turn cold so they could gnaw me down the bone. Miss Constance lay beside me. On my chest, my father left another limerick:

  “There once was a bastard named Neal

  Who despite his good heart was a heel

  He abandoned the war

  Left his wife like a whore

  So Cowboy that’s shame you should feel.

  ¿En qué pararán estes misas, Garatuza? El Guapo.”

  He’d dropped me in the middle of New Sligo, taking my car with him. Yet he’d made a mistake. I was only two blocks from the Eagle.

  When I marched into Roosevelt’s office, he looked up from his copy, and then scowled. “Did you just resurrect yourself?”

  I pulled off my boot.

  “Fucking hell, Stephens. Letting me bugger you isn’t going to get you anywhere.”

  I gave him the check. “This is what Clyde had on Forest. It’s what my father wanted.”

  Roosevelt looked it over.

  “Back in the day, my father was paying Big Hank off and it kept the union in line and I figure it all went south when Clyde lost his eye because Big Hank found a conscience or something or at least he wanted to get back at Jesse, but later on Clyde found the check and put it to Forest, hard. You know how Forest has made Big Hank into this Christ-figure? If it got out that the union’s been taking payoffs since at least ’04, it would ruin Forest.”

  Roosevelt sat there massaging his cane in a way that would make a lady blush.

  “My father was searching for it. Got to figure he killed Clyde trying to find it. It was all to save the union’s face. It’s maybe not enough to convict Forest, but it’ll lock him up for a couple of weeks.”

  “I’d heard rumors back in the day,” Roosevelt said. “Even asked your uncle once, but he laughed at me. Calling it fantasy. Never gave it a second thought.”

  “I doubt he knew.”

  My uncle wasn’t a man for subtlety or backroom machinations. He preferred the sledgehammer to the spyglass.

  “I’ll bring it to him,” Roosevelt said. “We’ll see if it’s enough.”

  “It’s enough to get Tillie out.”

  —19—

  Like most afternoons in those days, I found myself walking the street for hours thinking of nothing but leaving this goddamn town, before giving up and heading to McGuffey’s. Yet this time was different. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten, and, after finking on Forest, I felt a craven sort of hunger that made me put away a whole liverwurst sandwich, potato chips, boiled beets, and a pickled egg in a sitting. The bar was quiet, nearly empty, just Jacob sitting between Alma and Sam, the latter explaining his theory on why my father had returned.

  “Now, I know it seems mighty odd, but I think he’s come back to aid the dirt worshipers in their hopes of conquistadoring this here land.”

  “Dirt worshipers?” Alma asked.

  “Indians,” Jacob said. “Ignore him.”

  “Don’t be sly with me,” Sam said. “If that anarchist wants no land to be held by decent folks, wants no governing body, wants no real God with a book of evidence on his side, then it sounds to me like a dirt worshiper. Am I wrong?”

  “Stop it,” Jacob said. “He’s come back for revenge.”

  “You really think he’s that crazy?” Alma asked. “Won’t they hang him?”

  “I disagree, Mr. Detective,” Sam said. “Why is it that a man who left the prettiest lady this side of Sarah Bernhardt seeking vengeance? Don’t make no sense.”

  “Did she look like Tillie?” Alma said. “Or Neal?”

  Sam wheezed. “Missy, those children got the worst of both parents. Cursed they are.”

  I could hear the whole conversation, but I just kept eating.

  Sam went on. “No, Pearl was the prettiest woman this town has ever been fortunate enough to possess. A regular Juliet she was. Her children just poor-looking progeny if you ask me. “

  Alma put her hand to her face, her scar highlighted by the flickering candlelight. “She sounds remarkable,” she said. “A real dame.”

  “She was an angel,” Sam said. “If things had just gone a bit better for old Sam Bailey, I’d have married her.”

  Jacob snorted. He was feeling particularly mean, I imagine, because he’d already heard what I’d done to Forest. “Married her. Woman wouldn’t let you wash her feet.”

  “You’re wrong there. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.” Sam stood and shook his son.

  “Sit down, you old drunk.”

  “Jesse Stephens killed that woman,” Sam said. “Killed her like he put a gun in her very mouth.”

  “You don’t honestly believe that, do you?” Alma said.

  “Well, she was doin’ just fine after that evil anarchist hightailed it out of here, but then a sickness came over her like none any of us seen, a curse, you see. That anarchist couldn’t leave well enough alone and he cursed that poor woman, made her fragile and such and every sort of sickness that could be caught, she did go and caught.”

  “It was pneumonia,” Jacob said.

  That was the story we told everyone: a lingering case of pneumonia.

  “Curse, I say,” Sam cried.

  “Happens all the time,” Jacob said. “Sometimes you got no choice in some things.”

  He looked over at me, giving me a hard, accusatory grin. “Other times you’ve got plenty of choices, but you just choose whatever’s easiest for you because you wouldn’t want to ruin your reputation as a lazy, worthless, no-good piece of shit because people might start thinking you give a damn about someone else than yourself. Ain’t that right, Neal?”

  I put out my cigarette on my boot heel, and then lit another.

  “It is a shame,” Jacob went on. “Tillie said that one’s folks are like the clay that shapes the man, but as far as I can tell that’s a bunch of horseshit. You’re an old drunk and I turned out fine. And Neal there, well, he’s got a Pa who was brave and never let no man make him a coward and look at how he turned out—all coward, all the way through. Here’s thinking that parentage doesn’t mean shit in this world.”

  Alma came over to me. She put her hand on my shoulder and leaned in
, softly, whispering, “You’re crying. Why?”

  Why was I crying? Christ, where could I begin?

  Jacob took his hat and stopped at the coat rack, then turned to Alma and sneered.

  “’Cause he’s a fink,” he said. “Knows he’s a fink and finks cry. Christ, Neal, you stupid son of a bitch.”

  He disappeared up the staircase.

  “Nigger Norris,” Sam called out. “Let me buy Neal here a beer.”

  “You don’t have enough for the one you’re drinking,” Lazy Eye said. “Bastard can afford it anyhow.”

  Lazy Eye, I could tell, already knew what I’d done to Forest and I knew that everyone was going to hate me. “I did it for Tillie.”

  Lazy Eye threw down his rag. He went to the other side of the bar, muttering something to himself, then came back, looked at me and spit.

  “Don’t pawn that shit off on me,” he said. “I don’t give a fuck about your confessions.”

  “She’s my sister. What do you want me to do?”

  “Fuck boy, I know what she is, but the best you can do is the shit you pulled? That’s all you got, college boy? Give it up to the first cocksucker who winks at you?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You a sorry sack of shit is what you are,” Lazy Eye said. “Thought you had more sense than that kid. And you know what else? I never liked having Rahills drinking here but I made you the exception ‘cause I thought you had some goddamn sense. Guess I’m shit for brains just like you. And you know what else you pasty Irish sheep-fucking piece of—”

  “My wife was a Negro.”

  Maybe it was the alcohol or the food or Lazy Eye’s scolding or Sam’s kindness or Alma’s sympathy, but I think I lost my mind for a moment. Still can’t say why. Guess I just stopped being scared.

  “She grew up in St. Louis,” I said. “Her mother was Negro and her father was Negro and I knew she was Negro and I don’t give a damn what you think.”

  None of them said anything for a long time, just listening to the house band: the hack of the cleaver, the patter of blood from the ceiling. I rubbed my boots against the floor as if I was pacing at a standstill.

  Finally, Sam whispered, “What was it like, you know, on the honeymoon?”

  “Shit, Sam,” Lazy Eye said. “Ain’t like nothing you ever felt before. Like tasting steak after living on salt pork your fucking whole life.”

  “I just always wondered,” Sam said. “Is it the same with a Negress? Is it better? It ain’t better is it Neal?”

  “He’s just makin’ this shit up,” Lazy Eye said. “No Negro with her right mind ever marry a sorry bastard like him. It was the goddamn French who fucked that girl’s head.”

  Only Alma stayed quiet. I figured Swedish opera singers didn’t care about miscegenation.

  “You goin’ to say anything, Neal?” Sam asked. “Got any words?”

  I stared down Lazy Eye. “Fuck you.”

  “About the only sense you made all day,” he said. “Come back when you’ve got your brains right.”

  —20—

  The Rahillville refugees stretched for a half-mile along the highway, pulling mule carts and wagons spilling out with their remaining worldly possessions: pans, coats, and mattresses. Families staggered from their homes, coiling on to the gravel highway, heading west toward a fallow field, a makeshift camp, bought and readied by the union. It was like they’d done at Ludlow.

  Alma drove.

  “Have you ever seen anything like this?” she asked.

  I had. This sort of thing happened a lot back in those days: it was more like a civil rebellion than a modern day strike with organized picketing and lawyered negotiations. The higher-ups—politicians and corporate barons—saw a strike as insurrection rather than a normal labor practice. It was all a lot more rough and tumble. But I’d also watched scenes like this in Europe as well, during the early part of the war, when they’d pushed families out of Belgium toward the south, into France, but they’d only carried enough to last a few weeks because reporters told them that they’d be home by Christmas.

  “Were you in Sweden during the war?”

  “No,” she said. “Belgrade. I was in Belgrade.”

  She drove carefully, slaloming through the refugees, skirting the militiamen standing guard on the highway’s edge. She kept the wheel steady, concentrating on the road, avoiding the perplexed glares of those wondering why in God’s name she drove toward Rahillville.

  I took out Miss Constance.

  “Do you mind?”

  “Not me,” she said. “My manager doesn’t like me out of costume. Aim at them.”

  The wind blew through the prairie grass, scattering flowers and dead soil and the refugees shielded their eyes against the dust devils while maneuvering down the rutted road. There were too many people, too many images to really nail one down. It was confusing and there wasn’t a story I could picture, nothing that would be true, I figured. During the war, my camera illuminated death: men went over the top and never returned. That was the story. But here, it wasn’t so simple. I tried pointing Miss Constance at some soldiers, but that didn’t seem right. They were just working.

  I pulled myself up on the windowsill, bracing Miss Constance against the roof of the car, calling out to various men and women, asking them to turn and look. Each posed before Miss Constance’s eye: some fixed their hair, others took off their hats, and one tightened his tie. Behind those portraits, the other refugees pushed on, saddled with blankets, food, and coats, but also packed with picture frames, jewelry boxes, china plates, postcards, Bibles, and paintbrushes. One woman walked barefooted in her wedding dress, mud staining the skirt, while her husband wore a tuxedo and carried a glass vase. A calf brushed alongside of them, a bell wrapped around its neck ringing like the call to prayer. A boy pushed a piano down the road, his tendons tensed, his teeth gritted, while a little girl leading a pet pig and holding a bouquet of daisies skipped alongside crying out “Ring around the Rosy.”

  The occasional scream, the scattered pops of gunfire didn’t bother me. I just kept reloading the film. When those folks looked straight at me, when they posed in a manner of their own choosing, I could see a new sort of truth. It was how they wanted to be seen. And they didn’t want to be victims. Wish I could say the day ended just as triumphantly.

  —21—

  Forest lived in a brick house with a corrugated tin roof and a single coal stove that heated both rooms. It was like every other shanty in the company town, forlorn and barely habitable. While everyone else seemed to have cleared out, Forest’s drapes were still up. Maybe it was a signal to his men, to Seamus, that he’d fight until the end. But I didn’t think so. My guess was that his wife had sewn those drapes, hung them herself, and Forest couldn’t bear to take them down.

  I told Alma to stay in the car and then I went toward the house, stopping at the door when one of the Pennsylvania union men came out, put a gluttonous hand on my chest, and told me to wait.

  “We’ll be done here soon.”

  Across the narrow road, Tobias Smith, one of Rahill’s few Negro miners, emerged from a house with a potato sack slung over his sunken shoulders. He was followed by a white woman dressed like a gypsy with mismatched, brightly colored clothes, so radiant in the Rahillville grayness, that she seemed like paint splattered on a daguerreotype. She carried a toddler and smiled at me and I felt handsome for a moment until I saw it was just Ruth O’Donnell, a girl I’d been sweet on when she was Ruth Grant and we’d been in school together. I could tell by the easy grins they passed to me that they didn’t know what I’d done to Forest. If they had, Tobias would have broken my knees and Ruth would have gouged my eyes.

  I steadied the mule cart, while Tobias dropped the potato sack into it. I asked about Tommy O’Donnell, Ruth’s husband.

  “He got picked up couple hours back,” Tobias sai
d. “Pinkertons took him and a couple others over to the jailhouse.”

  “I’m getting by. Wish we were leaving for somewhere pretty, like California.” Ruth covered her child’s ears. “And not some goddamn field out by Germantown.”

  “You’re not lying,” Tobias said.

  Heavy trucks rumbled through a distant part of town, while the intermittent screams of children flew along with the wind. A hog ran by, slopping mud right and left, and Ruth slipped her child over her shoulder, patting his back.

  “Wish I was getting on that train today,” I said. “Go all the way west to the water and never look back.”

  Gunfire erupted from the south and all of us jumped a little, but settled back as it trailed off.

  “Neal, you look god-awful. All blue and purple, like you’ve been getting knocked cold from every which way.”

  “She’s right,” Tobias said. “I heard Seamus whipped you the other day.”

  I touched my face and it felt sore. “Not yet,” I said. “But it’s his turn.”

  A fire bell rang, and we looked north toward the smoke pluming into the colorless sky. Another bell sounded. It had a sharper ping like a school bell.

  “The work bell. Keeps ringing though no one’s working,” Tobias said. “We better get you going.”

  “Just a few more things,” Ruth said.

  The gruff no-neck union men came out of Forest’s house. I couldn’t tell much by their faces, but they looked around with suspicious glares and I didn’t get a charmed feeling about them.

  I went over to Forest’s house, knocked, and, when no one answered, I went in.

  The place was wrecked. I thought at first someone had tossed it, but it was just the habits of a man in mourning. The sofa, the floor, and dining table were swathed by old dishes, leftover food, mostly beans and corn, and strewn, filthy clothes. On a table beside the furnace, there was a picture of Forest’s wife, framed and dusted.