She gave a little laugh. “No, I guess not.” She thought a moment. “But it’s funny what you said about my heart doing a little flip-flop. When I saw you in the bedroom door that’s kind of what happened to me. You were the best and the kindest-looking thing I’d seen in a long time. You looked like a gent.”
“Must have been the hunger. You damn sure didn’t act like it when you got up off that bed.”
“It was because I had thought them things that I acted like that. Hell, I didn’t know you. The last thing I needed was to get my fingers burned again.”
“What do you mean by that?”
They were walking out in the early twilight, heading down toward the shack the Mexican mule handlers occupied. It was cool now that the sun was nearly down, and the sky had changed from a washed-out blue to an explosion of streaks of yellow and red and even deep purple. She said, tossing her head, “Oh, I don’t know. It just seems like I never had no luck with men.”
He stopped and looked at her. “Rita Ann, you ain’t old enough to be making statements like that.”
She sighed and heaved her shoulders. “Maybe it just seems like it on account of this last little experience I had.”
“Is that what put you in your present position, your last experience?”
She nodded. “Yeah, I suppose so.” She looked up at him defensively. “But I’m not blaming anyone but myself, you understand. I’m twenty-two years old and old enough to account for my own mistakes.”
“What kind of a mistake was it?”
She shrugged and looked away. “The stupid kind.” She folded her arms under her breasts and hugged herself. “I was living in Saint Louis, living at home with my mother. My daddy had passed on. It wasn’t a bad life. I had a good job waiting tables in the restaurant of one of the finest hotels in the city. And I had my share of beaus. They were kind of dull, but they were good young men. Then one day this man showed up at the hotel. All dashing and elegant and handsome as hell. He was a gambler. He’d just come off a riverboat on the Mississippi. Anyway, he took an interest in me, and after about two turns around the bed I was his toy. You couldn’t have pried me loose from him with a crowbar. He said gambling on the river was finished, said the big money was out West and would I go. He said Phoenix or someplace like that. Said everybody out there had a pocketful of gold and no brains.” She sighed. “So here we come. For a little while it was all right, but then he started losing. He never said nothing, but when he come in, late, he wasn’t in no mood for anything except more booze. We kept changing hotels until we finally ended up in a boardinghouse. His temper got worse and worse, and then one day he was gone. Left me flat. Naturally I didn’t have any money. Every nickel we had went for his stake, as he called it.” She shrugged and dug at the sand with the toe of her slipper. “I felt like a damn fool. Woman in love. Hah! Damn. I had gone blind was what it was. All of a sudden those dull young men back in Saint Louis looked pretty damn good.”
“So what did you do? Head for the nearest madam?”
She shook her head. “Not right away. I tried getting work waiting tables, but Phoenix is a rough town. hash houses in them places didn’t want any little nice Rita Anns with nice manners. Slinging hash ain’t just an expression, I found out. So I tried getting work cleaning houses. Whatever I could find. Nothing I could do paid anything. It was all I could do to earn enough to keep body and soul together, let alone earn enough for a train ride home.”
“Couldn’t you have wired your mother? Got her to send you some money?”
She gave him a look. “After the stunt I pulled? After walking out, running out, without so much as a goodbye? I don’t know about your family, Mr. Long, but we got a little pride in mine. I done my mother wrong and I sure as hell wasn’t going to turn to her for help after I’d made such a mess.”
Longarm said, “I think I know how this story ends, but you might as well say the words.”
She gave a laugh. “Yeah, I don’t reckon it is so original. I finally decided I could starve to death sitting on it or I could sell it. So I went around to a local house and talked to the madam. She didn’t have any cribs open, she said, but she knew about this crew of girls was going down south in Arizona near the border to relieve a crew that had been working down there for several months taking care of miners. I didn’t even know where the damn place was. I don’t know anything about this country except it could use a little water. Anyway, she sent me to this lady name of Rosy, and she put me in with five other girls was going down.” She threw out her arms. “That’s what I’m doing here.”
“What caused them to throw you out of the stage?”
“They didn’t throw me out. I got out. I got out when I found out all I was going to get was forty percent of the money I earned. If I charged ten dollars, I had to turn six into Rosy. That wasn’t the way it was explained to me in Phoenix. So I said to hell with it. I’d been done in by one bastard. I wasn’t going to let some bitch do it to me also.”
“What made them think they could get away with it?”
She shrugged again. “Hell, they know you’re broke. They knew I was green. Hell, they were going to have to teach me how to act. Seems that you don’t make love when you’re a whore the same way you do when you’re just a woman. Said I was going to have to pay for the privilege. If they’d of told me that in Phoenix, I could have made my mind up and taken it or left it. But here they thought they had me over a barrel. Well, ain’t nobody makes me do nothing I don’t want to. I would have got out in the middle of the damn desert if it had come to it. I slugged Rosy a pretty good one. Split her lip for her.”
Longarm smothered a laugh. “But you are still here. Still a long way from Saint Louis.”
“You don’t have to remind me.”
They had started walking again. They were walking by some corrals that were crowded with dun-colored Spanish mules. At the end of the corral was a rock shack. Smoke was curling out of the small chimney at one end of the cabin. Longarm said, “What about the doctor? How come he got pitched?”
She laughed dryly. “I don’t know if he was drunk or out of his head or what. But a few hours before we got to here he announced that he was the doctor supposed to inspect all the girls to see if they had the clap or whatever. And then he commenced to give it a try right then and there on the stage. My word, you never saw such a ruckus. He was trying to get in under the skirt of this young girl—Wilda, I think her name was—and she was kicking and screaming and squirming around. Hell, you couldn’t even see the doctor, if he is one, he had crawled so far up her skirt. Well, everybody piled in on him. Rosy has got a big old purse made out of cowhide, and she nearly beat him to death with it. The driver finally stopped and the guard came back and got matters straightened out. The doctor had lost his glasses and it took a time to find them. Rosy said that either the doctor got put off or they were getting off and just see how those miners at the other end of the line would like that. So the driver decided the doctor had to go. He tried to whine to me once we got here, but I didn’t want no part of him.”
It had been Mrs. Higgins who had told Longarm where he might find the doctor. She’d said, “Them Mexicans have got a big jug of either tequila or mescal, probably both. I reckon he’s down there drinkin’ with them. I don’t think he’s got much money. He inquired at the bar what whiskey cost, and when Herman told him four bits a shot, he kind of looked disappointed and wandered out the back. He’s been down there around the Mexicans most of the day. Maybe he’s swapping them some doctorin’ for a little of that poison they drink.”
Now Longarm said to Rita Ann, “You reckon he’s a real doctor?”