“Why not? We love each other, don’t we?”
“I’ve told you why not.”
I held her tighter, and her lips got hotter, and I knew I was going to have her. But when I did, she cried, and kept on crying.
9
When he found out he could trust me, Hale wanted me back, because things went sour under the new super, and he felt I brought him good luck. That was why he worked on Mrs. Finn that I could stay there, and told her Morina was just a girl I had known back home, and I wouldn’t be surprised he said she was my cousin. Anyhow, I didn’t have to look up any new place, and he began making the best propositions I ever had, beginning with a raise, and maybe some stock, and whatever I had in mind. But those three or four weeks, when I needed a new bandage every day, I had gone down to D Street, and when I didn’t mention what had happened, she didn’t, and we’d sit on the back porch in the afternoon, and look down at the trees in the flats four or five miles away, the only patch of green you could see anywhere around. And sometimes Biloxi would sit with us, and if Renny came out there they’d talk French, but mostly he stayed inside and practiced the piano. The square one was gone now, and a big grand was in its place. Sometimes Haines would come over, and if he was sober, and they were doing Italian selections with high notes in them, he could shoot a nice piece of silver, I’ll say that for him. And the other girls would come out there, but I didn’t care much for them. Two or three of them, Reiner’s Mexican girl Lola, Chinchin the half-Chinese girl, and Pat Kelly the New York chorus girl, were pretty enough, but dumber than hell and they fought a lot. I was with Morina, though, that was the main thing, and I’d try to forget what went on at night, and for an hour or two be happy. In her room was a photograph of an hombre in uniform, and when I asked who he was she said: “My husband.” It was the first I knew she’d been married to a Venezuelan general in Caracas, and only came to Virginia City when he got killed in a street fight.
But I wanted those afternoons, and if I went back with Hale I couldn’t have them. I kept thinking about my shooting, and one evening I went back to the same old gully to see how it felt to use a gun again. But at the first shot, what that stock did to the palm of my hand almost knocked me over with pain. The next night, though, I tried it with a little leather guard I had a shoemaker make me, and it was better, though the gun popped off it like a pickle off a fork. When I got a little soft leather pad, and a strap to hold it in place, I could hardly feel anything at all, and I began the same old schedule I’d followed before, popping at playing cards to start off with, and then when the rabbits came out, drawing and wheeling and firing at them, for speed. In a week or two I was as good as I ever was, and marched myself down to the Esperanza, one of the big gambling halls on C Street, the morning after the lookout quit, on account of a little trouble with a dissatisfied customer, horizontally. The proprietor was named Rocco, the son of an Italian charcoal-burner on the Sierra. He didn’t pay much attention when I applied for the job. “You look a little young to me, son.”
“It’s a young fool’s job, isn’t it?”
“It’s a shooting job.”
“Anything around here you particularly want shot?”
“Out back, as it happens, there is.”
“Then let’s go out back.”
“I’ll get you a gun.”
“I might have one, if I looked.”
He tried to see where I was carrying it, but by now it lay so snug you could hardly see it. He led the way out back, and tiptoed to a privy that had a board fence running back of it and a lattice built around it. Then he picked up a rock and heaved and it hit the privy like a grenade or something. Three rats jumped out the backside of it, and began running along the bottom of the board fence toward a pile of crates in one corner. I plugged them before they’d gone five feet. He stared at the bunches of blood and fur that were kicking around, and then he turned to me, but by now I had the gun back in the holster. “...You spit that stuff, or what?”
“That’s it, pardner.”
“You that good on a man?”
“When I’m scared, I’m fast.”
“I’ll take a chance, I think.”
“What’s the pay, by the way?”
“Fifteen a day, and you work at night.”
“I hear you pay twenty.”
“To the right man, yes.”
“I’m checking in tonight.”
“You wear a black suit. I require that.”
In the West a gambler wears the black suit, and some places even have the lookout do it. I said it was all right, I’d have one on, and he said: “And I’d get a haircut if I were you. I hear some of those generals at the Battle of Gettysburg wore curls right up to the mouth of the cannon, but anybody that tries it in my place is going out on his ear.”
“And anybody that tries to cut mine is going out in a box. Have we got that matter straight?”
“Well, don’t get excited.”
“So it’s understood.”
I wasn’t wearing curls. I had been sick, and neglected to get a haircut, that was all. But I wasn’t having him telling me, so that’s how I combed them out the way the girls wear them in school. Mine are yellow and curly, and all next afternoon, out on the back porch, I could feel Morina looking at me out the corner of her eye, when I showed up in the black velvet suit with silver buttons, the stitched boots, the black felt hat, the red shirt, and nice gold curls rippling around on my collar. I kept figuring what I’d say if she started to laugh at me, and I had a joke figured up. But once our eyes crossed, and I saw she wasn’t laughing. Then a throb went through my mouth, and I knew she liked how I looked. I picked her up, carried her inside, and pushed my face against hers. It was hot, and couldn’t lie to me about what it wanted. She didn’t lie. She just fought me, bit me, kicked me, and threw me out.
Two or three nights later, I found out what I’d do when it wasn’t just target practice. I don’t know if you know how it works in a gambling hall. On one side is the bar, pretty long, with a brass rail and three or four men mixing drinks. At both ends are the big fixtures, wheels of fortune and stuff like that, that run straight up and down and have mirrors and pictures and gaudy stuff all over them. Opposite the bar is faro, with four or five layouts, girls dealing at each table. On one side of the faro are dice games, like crap, and on the other side cards. In the middle of the room, between the bar and the faro, are three big roulette tables, each running a different limit. My place was up front, in the corner between the wheels of fortune and the dice, and for the purpose of seeing better I sat in a high chair. The lookout’s high chair is not any different from a baby’s high chair, and it works on the same principle, with a cross bar for your heels, arm rests, and everything else, but of course with no attachment to come down over your head and get in the way of free movement.
I was sitting there, getting used to my job, which was to keep an eye on things, and in case I saw something peculiar, like maybe a pair of dice coming out of a coattail, to drift over and walk past the gambler on that table. Those hombres, they don’t need any assay report to know there’s quicksilver in the ivory, so there was nothing exciting about it, and the only time I was to do something quick was in case of real trouble. So this night a fellow was at the bar, putting down liquor. I noticed him because it seemed to me he was working at it, and besides he was wearing two .44’s, butts facing. I mean, the gun on his left hip hung for his right hand, and the one on the right hip for his left. And then all of a sudden he grabbed for his guns and gave a one-man demonstration of all the things the fellow in the store had told me not to do. His right-hand gun came out first, and he shot with it, but a hip-shot that caused one of the comicalest things you ever saw. The gun went off, but it yanked him off balance, so he had to let go the other gun and grab for the bar to keep from falling. What he thought he was doing I don’t know, but as well as I could figure it out later he thought he’d pop off a few times so everybody would dive for the floor, and then he’d scoop up some money and run. Or maybe he thought he was shooting at me with that first one. From the hip, it could have been anything, and if it didn’t make sense there was no law it had to.