by Laird Barron
“No, not today, my dear,” Blake said apologetically.
Delilah pouted and knitted her paper-white brow.
“You don’t go to a cattle auction just to smell the cow shit too, do you?”
Blake grinned, took her hand and dropped two dollars into it.
“Christmas is the day after tomorrow, you know,” he said to her. “I pray you have a happy one, Delilah.”
“With some smelly cowboy sweating and grunting over me, and while you’ll be singing carols and eating rumcake? Don’t be stupid, Blake.”
He shrugged, unsure of what to say so he said nothing at all. She stood up from his lap and dropped the two coins in her apron pocket.
“Whoever she is, I reckon she can’t be worth it.”
“Why would you say that?”
“Because no one’s worth it. Not in the end.”
She offered a bittersweet smile and turned on the balls of her feet before melting back into the hollering mob. A moment later she shrieked as her head and shoulders flew up above the seat of pomaded and hat-covered heads. Some rough fellow had swept her up like so much chattel and was barreling through the crowd toward the back rooms with her slumped over his shoulder. Her face was grave but she wasn’t resisting her fate. This was, after all, Delilah’s lot in life. This was Guy Town.
He drank a quarter of the beer and left. Just outside the batwing doors a tall woman leaned against the saloon’s façade, her red curls cascading down and over her shoulders like liquid flames.
“Evening, Blake,” she purred.
“Mona.”
“Do me a favor?”
“I’m not looking for company tonight.”
“Neither am I—that’s the favor. Could you just walk me back to May’s? Nobody’ll bother me if you’re along.”
Blake sighed and failed to suppress a small smile. He offered his arm and Mona accepted it, and if she had not been one of the better known whores in Austin they would have looked just like a pair of amorous lovers out for a late stroll. They spoke little during the long jaunt to the southerly end of Congress Avenue where an unassuming three-story hotel stood. No outsider would ever have given the plain structure a second glance, but May Tobin’s knocking shop was infamous to locals. Like a half dozen other girls Mona lived there, more or less, so long as she kept a steady stream of paying guests visiting her in her room. Why she was eschewing her professional obligation tonight Blake did not know, but as a longtime friend and client of the capital city’s working girl contingent he knew better than to ask prying questions.
They stopped before the front door where Mona delivered a kiss to his cheek. He replied by way of a soft squeeze on her shoulder.
“You’re a prince, Blake Prentiss,” she said with a wink before opening the door and vanishing into the hotel.
“Ain’t I just,” he whispered to himself as he turned back the way he came. The rhythmic clop of mules’ hooves sounded behind him, the arrival of a carriage at the Tobin House. Blake shook his head and laughed quietly, remembering the rustic little town Austin had been a mere fifteen years back. The thought of a May Tobin—never mind her thriving success or the city fathers’ unvoiced acquiescence to it—would have sent any number of the town’s mere five thousand citizens into apoplectic fits then. Now lewd women were a given, an assumed aspect of life in a rapidly growing city. How quickly things change, Blake thought.
He paused under the light of a streetlamp—another recent introduction—and watched as the mule driver stayed his beasts and the carriage slowed to a halt. Presently the driver stepped down to the unpaved street and opened the carriage door, from which came a woman in a billowy dress the color of a robin’s egg. Blake fairly stared, his mouth agape. It was her. It was Eula Phillips. And she was not alone.
Next emerged a tall and reedy figure dressed in black, a wide-brimmed hat perched on his head. The tall man paused to confer with the driver, leaning in close to speak in private. Then the driver climbed back up to his seat and the tall man opened the hotel door, which he held for Eula. She glided in like a ghost and the man stalked after her, shutting the door behind him. In the next instant the driver jerked the reins and the mules went clopping north on Congress, trotting right past Blake and off into the night.
Blake froze, his mind reeling. What on earth was Eula, a married woman, doing at a house of assignation with a strange man? That he loved her and chose drink over adultery only exacerbated his bewilderment. Out of respect for her Blake did everything in his power to avoid her company lest his baser instincts get the better of him, yet here was undeniable proof that she cared nothing for her matrimonial bond with Jimmy, for the man who escorted her into that house of ill-repute was most assuredly not her husband.
Thunderstruck, Blake stepped away from the halo of light that bathed him from above and slinked through the inky night to the nearest window on the hotel’s first floor. The lace curtains were only slightly parted, though enough that he had a direct line of sight into the parlor. A pair of half-dressed girls sang and served drinks to a trio of inebriated men in black suits while May herself played an out of tune melody on the piano. Abruptly one of the fellows, a fat man with a handlebar moustache, grabbed a yellow-haired girl and tore the whalebone brassiere from her torso with a single deft stroke. The girl screamed and covered her bared breasts with her arms as she sped from the room. The man laughed uproariously, and every other person present soon joined his mirth. May switched tunes—“Sweet Betsey from Pike”—and the party continued as though nothing had transpired. Blake frowned and snuck to the next window down.
Here Blake found a hallway lined with closed doors and a staircase in the middle. One of the doors on the left cracked open and a young girl’s head poked out. The party in the parlor fell into song and the girl grinned.
“Oh, do you remember Sweet Betsey from Pike
Who crossed the wide prairie with her lover Ike?
With two yoke of oxen, a big yellow dog,
A tall Shanghai rooster, and one spotted hog.”
She smiled more broadly still and stepped out into the hall, fully naked from crown to toe, and added her warbling voice to the proceedings:
“Hoodle dang, fol-dee-dye-do,” she hollered at the parlor. “Hoodle dang fol-dee-day!”
“That’s the spirit, Amelia!” May Tobin hollered back.
A spattering of low, throaty laughs followed. Blake moved on.
At the fourth window down from the street, he peered into a chamber weakly lit by a sconce on the wall. He sucked in a sharp breath upon seeing Eula seated stiffly on the edge of the bed in the center of the room and her escort facing the opposite wall, his hands together behind his back. The man still wore the wide-brimmed hat and stood so still he seemed unreal, a statue or manikin. Eula’s shoulders bounced as she softly wept.
“Luly,” Blake whispered. “What have you gotten yourself into?”
He lowered himself to a squat and sat on the ground beneath the window where he listened to the love of his life sob beside an uncaring stranger.
III.
She was only seventeen, a fair-skinned beauty with dark brown curls she usually wore swept back from her soft and pensive face. Already married and the mother of a young boy when Blake first laid eyes on her, he knew immediately that he would always be relegated to admiring her from a distance, loving another man’s wife in the cold isolation of his aching heart. For a time he tried to choke it off at the roots, to suffocate the unwanted emotions without pity, but he learned in due time it could not be done. Blake Prentiss loved a woman he could never have and there was nothing he could ever do about it. From the moment this realization dawned on him, Blake sought refuge at the bottom of a bottle—a thousand bottles. Branded a layabout as things stood, he should become a roustabout, a “rowdy” like so many of the rough types who populated Guy Town in the First Ward. A cur, a scoundrel, a useless wretch. Though lately a bucolic cowtown, Austin was fast approaching cityhood and that made room for wort
hless rascals and dipsomaniacs who whiled their days away with drink and whores. The only trouble Blake ever foresaw was his inability to lie with any woman who did not happen to be Eula Phillips.
If he was fortunate, Blake oft-times reasoned, the drink would kill him before he had to take a more direct approach. Otherwise, there was no shortage of trains that shuttled through the center of town in front of which he might just lay down and close his eyes and…
The scent of rosewater and sweat filled his nose, cloyed in his throat. His head swam and he was back at his father’s apothecary—not eight blocks north on Congress—that same heady aroma sweeping into the room and nearly knocking him over. The other woman came in first, blocking his view of the downcast girl trailing behind but not the scent, not the scent. Chamomile flowers, cottonwood extract and ergot was what she wanted, her eyes ever drifting back to the pitiful looking girl at her side, and Blake was no blockhead, he knew what manner of potion this alchemist aimed to throw together. The young girl was to induce an abortion, perhaps by this stern woman’s urging, though perhaps not. What was certain was the girl’s desperate despondency, an aspect of her mysterious aura that only heightened Blake’s utter fascination with her. He fulfilled the order and put the charge in the ledger, debited to one James Phillips. As they left, the escort barked, “Come, Luly…”
Luly.
Five days after Christmas it was, an easily memorized date not only for the importance it held in the chambers of his wounded heart, but in the terror and mystification of anyone who heard tell of the Negro servant girl’s murder. The poor girl, name of Mollie Smith according to the newsmen, was discovered back of her wealthy employer’s estate, stripped to her underthings and left behind the outhouse with a yawning red hole in her skull. December the thirtieth, the day Blake’s soul shriveled up inside of him and an unfortunate young woman fell afoul of the business end of a fiend’s ax blade. And though he witnessed the grisly aftermath, the neighbors who came scuttling at the screams and the policemen who looked on stupidly with lanterns held aloft, his thoughts remained focused on the frail girl in the apothecary, desperate to prevent the birth of the child in her womb. His eyes stung and tears spilled down his cold face while he watched the police turn Mollie’s violated corpse this way and that, offering baseless suppositions to one another and poking probing fingers at the grinning red mouth the ax made.
“Did you know the Negress?” a corpulent officer of the law demanded of him. “Did you observe the killing? Who did it? What do you know?”
But of course Blake knew nothing apart from his envy of the late Ms. Smith, her suffering in this atrocious game put to an end. Perhaps, he considered, they would apprehend her killer, whereupon Blake was certain he would be tried, convicted and hanged with all the efficiency and aplomb the Great State of Texas could muster. What would never be so much as whispered by anyone was the great favor the assassin had bestowed upon poor Mollie Smith. All life was pain and disappointment, white and colored alike, and this black angel came to relieve her of that anguish.
“No,” he muttered to the officer. “I saw nothing.”
He saw plenty while he fitfully slept that night, however: visions of murdered girls, their skulls split in twain, nude but for the concealing dresses of red-black blood that swung majestically about them like the finest fabrics. Luly Phillips was chief among them, the queen of the dead, unrecognizable due to the total removal of her face though Blake could never mistake the tiny steps she took, the way she directed her gory head to her bloodstained feet with shame and self-loathing. Her bare-boned jaw flapped on its hinges and incoherent sounds roiled out of her throat, crying out for release, for an end to the myriad miseries life inflicted upon her. He reached out for her, stretched aching limbs to just touch her fragile, pallid skin, but at his touch her flesh turned liquid and sloughed off like mud in a rainstorm.
He awoke at noon, his eyes swollen from sobbing in his sleep.
IV.
Spring arrived before he was tortured with a second visitation from Luly Phillips.
The five-month interval had done nothing to calm Blake’s frayed nerves, but for the most part Austin no longer gossiped about the gruesome demise of the servant girl Mollie Smith. Her common law husband, it was revealed, was also attacked and survived. Mollie herself was determined to have been outraged by her attacker, a nasty detail that led detectives to the doorstep of her former lover, a man named Lem Brooks. The bewildered man was promptly arrested, beaten within an inch of his life, and tried. To the astonishment of a breathless city, he was freed when the court failed to nail down sufficient evidence to convict him of Mollie’s murder. In weeks, the outrageous crime dissipated like smoke, all but forgotten.
Then, in May, Blake Prentiss espied the annihilator of his peace and well-being ambling down Cypress Street, a parasol in her hand and a dour-faced gentleman at her side. He swooned like a woman in a melodrama, fell to his knees in the street. A threesome of cowboys rushed to assist him. Luly did not notice.
As a train shuttled noisily over the nearby railway track, a white-haired man in an equally white suit waddled from the expansive porch of a house set back from the street. A colored woman stood in the doorway, wringing her hands as she watched the man hurry to Blake’s side. The cowboys had him sitting up, though his face was besmirched with dirt and his eyelids fluttered, struggling to stay open.
“All right, boys,” the older man said with deep-voiced authority. “Best we get him up to the house, then.”
The man led the way as the cowboys dragged Blake from the street and up the walk to the porch. The woman leapt out of the path of the charging man, who barked at her, “Eliza—hot soup for our guest.”
“Yessuh,” the girl answered softly, and she scurried off to the kitchen.
The cowboys trampled through the parlor leaving a trail of mud in dust in their wake. They clumsily dropped Blake on a divan and as quickly as they came in, they went back out. The man stood over Blake like a conquering warrior, his hands on his broad hips and a slight smile on his lips. Blake tried to sit up, but the room spun and he fell back into the soft cushioning of the divan.
“No, don’t try to move, son. You’ve had a spell. My girl’s bringing you something to get your strength back up.”
The man shoved a meaty pink hand at Blake and announced, “L. B. Johnson—I’m a doctor, so don’t you worry. You’re in good hands.”
“Mr.—Dr. Johnson, I’m embarrassed terribly,” Blake muttered, turning his head away from the older man’s staring face. Johnson merely laughed as Eliza returned from the kitchen with a serving tray balanced atop her hands.
“Our Eliza’s a fine cook, son, a fine cook. Pea soup, is it?”
The woman nodded as she set the tray down on the adjacent table where Blake could see a ceramic bowl filled to the top with a steaming green goop. His stomach flipped. He sat up at once, his face hot and vision blurred. Somewhere in the blur Eliza lingered nervously, eyeing him with something like suspicion but not quite fear. Blake stood up, shakily.
“I mustn’t impose, Doctor,” he said. “I’m wanted elsewhere, you understand.”
“But, young fellow…”
“Thank you, Dr. Johnson. And thank you, Ms. Eliza. I’m sure your soup is lovely.”
Johnson sputtered and Eliza took several long strides toward the kitchen as Blake staggered for the door. The woman’s perfume intercepted him halfway, striking his senses like hammer on nails. Did servants permit themselves such niceties? Perhaps, he reasoned, it was a gift from her employer. Perhaps the venerable physician insisted upon Eliza smelling pretty in his presence. Blake reached for the door handle and fell gasping out of the house as he lurched down the steps from the porch and hurried back to Cypress Street. Behind him Dr. Johnson appeared in the open doorway.
“Be careful, son! Be careful!”
As his head cleared and his stomach settled, Blake rushed around the corner to Jacinto Street. He glanced back at the doctor’s big ho
use and saw Eliza exiting from the back through the servant’s door, holding up her skirts as she traversed the tall grass to a shack on the far end of the property. She was a pretty woman, if in a deeply glum sort of way, and Blake could not help but notice how gracefully she moved. He shook it off, disinterested, and kept on until the house and the shack and the sad servant girl were far behind him.
There was only one woman who could fill his thoughts beyond his desire for her to do so, and she had ruined him. He had no room for another.
Still, when Blake found himself wandering the streets in a drunken stupor in the wee hours of the night that followed, he was surprised to discover that he had returned to the corner of Jacinto and Cypress streets, the address of Dr. L. B. Johnson. He paused on the very spot upon which Luly stood when he saw her early in the day, stayed there for several minutes as if he could absorb the air she breathed and exhaled into his skin. He wondered if she ever laughed, and if so what it might sound like. It occurred to him that he had never heard her voice at all. She was a spirit, a creature of smoke and mist. Was it her utter unavailability that twisted his guts so? She was a dagger in his ribs, poison on his lips. He felt his knees buckle and his heart started to pound a savage tattoo against the inside of his chest. Blake dropped to the ground, buried his face in his hands and cried.
He invoked her name and the name of Christ in the same desperate moan when a high-pitched shriek split the air and his skin grew cold. A policeman’s whistle pierced the night and a woman’s voice screamed, “Murder! Murder here!”
The policeman tramped by Blake and over Johnson’s property, blowing his terrible whistle all the while as lights flared up in nearly every window in the house. People poured out of the back, each in possession of a lantern or lamp, and a confused chorus of shouting voices rose up.
“Dead!” the woman screeched. “My god, she’s dead!”
“Look out!” a deep voice boomed. “Get the women inside.”
