Anyway, as he reached for his guns I was drawing mine. It never seems to come out quick. It’s a year before it’s clear, and you think you’ll lose your mind before you bring the sights into line, and when you fire you’re like a wild man to line it up again. But in this case it was like I was taking my time and doing a nice, refined job. The .44 yanked his arm up and over, and as he lurched against the bar I had plenty of time to aim, and even to change my mind. Instead of shooting for his heart I popped one in his shoulder. Then as that gun dropped I broke his collar bone on the left side, so he wouldn’t get ambitious with the other gun. The place was screaming like a million hyenas were in it, but he stood there blinking like a man in a dream, and looked at the deputies when they collared him like he couldn’t imagine where he was. Then the whole place swarmed over him, and I think he’d have been lynched if the officers hadn’t hustled him out, yelling at me to stay where I was, they’d let me know when they needed me.
I never had so many free drinks, cigars, and chips out of noodle pots thrown at me in twenty minutes in my life. I had plugged a poor loon and I was the hero of the town. Even the two writers for the Enterprise were all over me, and they decided I was the greatest gun fighter in the West, because I didn’t even have to kill my man. I just winged him, and they said that was a novelty, and refreshing. To me, they looked like a pair of crazy newspaper men that would do anything to make people laugh. Anyway, that’s how it came out in the paper, and overnight I was an important man in Virginia City.
“So you were going to save the Confederacy and help the boys in gray and now you’re a goddam paid gunman in a Nevada gambling sink all dressed in black velvet like a Mexican cowboy with yellow curls over your collar and in love with a whore that’s not worth the powder it would take to blow her to hell.”
You lie awake enough, you talk to yourself.
10
All that time I had heard plenty about Brewer, and seen her with him, though after what she had said I would have put my eyes out before I’d have let her catch me looking, so when they came down the street I generally ducked around the corner. She drove a pair of black ponies to a small buggy, and the ponies had silver buckles on their harness, and the whole town knew he had given them to her. So one day, when I pulled the bell at 17, and a strange woman answered and said Biloxi had moved to the new house being built on A Street, I knew without being told what was up. When I went up there painters were still working on the shutters, and furniture was piled all over the big high portico with pillars on it that ran clear up to the second floor. Biloxi opened the door and took me in her arms and kissed me and called me her pauvre petit and took me inside.
There was a wide hall running from the front door to a winding staircase, and big rooms with high windows in them on each side. In one room there was nothing but the grand piano from D Street, and Renny in front of it, playing. Until then he never noticed me that I recall now, but when he saw me he jumped up and shook hands and began to rave about the room. He said the acoustics were so wonderful you couldn’t believe it, and he was never going to put any more furniture in it, except shelves for the music and a bench running around for people to sit on. Sofas, rugs, and pillows, he said, were out. He could hardly wait for Haines, and pretty soon Haines showed up, and sang some grand opera. Then Biloxi made him sing her some songs in French, and rang for Mattiny to put out drinks. Then she brought me to a room across the hall, where anyway a sofa had been put in and you could sit. “Ah Roger, it is ze happiest day of my life! George is soch wonderful man!”
“Brewer?”
“Morina’s fiancé.”
“Oh, they’re going to be married?”
“Yes at last. And soch beautiful thing he has done for me. This house, all summer he build, as surprise for me. And now today, he move me in — pouf, like that, after breakfast.”
“Why?”
“He love Morina. He is like brozzer to me.”
“Hell of a friendly brother. And a hell of a place.”
“Twenty rooms, Roger, big rooms.”
“Where are the girls?”
“Girls? Roger! I have no girls here!”
“No business here?”
“Business, fini!”
“His idea?”
“He want his little Biloxi to have easy.”
“Makes a little more sense that way.”
“But Roger, he is rich!”
“He certainly must be proud.”
I asked when the wedding was to be, and she said in a couple of weeks, as soon as Morina got back from San Francisco, where she was going tonight to buy clothes. She began rattling the ice in her glass and looking at the little watch she had pinned to her dress. She had spilled her news and had her cry, and wanted me to go. Me, I wasn’t quite ready.
It was late afternoon when I heard horses, slipping and sliding, climbing Union Street. It was the ponies, and behind them a hack, and Morina waited for the hackman to hitch before she came inside. The buggy was too small for trunks, so the idea seemed to be he would take them to Overland, while Biloxi drove her down. The stage left at six, so there was quite a lot of running around, and for a few minutes she didn’t take any notice of me. Then all of a sudden she came into the room, closed the door, lit a cigarrillo, and sat down beside me. While she was upstairs she had changed into the same little traveling dress she had worn when I first saw her, with the same little bonnet. She took two or three inhales before she said anything, and during that time she didn’t look at me. Then: “Did Biloxi tell you about me, Roger?”
“She said you were getting married.”
“I want you to wish me well.”
“I will on one condition.”
“What’s that, Roger?”
“That you tell me, in some way that I respect, why you’re marrying this man instead of me, when I’ve asked you a hundred times, and I ask you one more time right here and now.”
“I can’t throw away a chance like this.”
“Like what?”
“Why, Roger, George is a millionaire.”
“Is money all you think about?”
“Doesn’t everybody?”
“They don’t do to get it what you do to get it. You’ve sold yourself for it, you’ve made a public spectacle of yourself for it, you’ve led a life of shame for it, not because you had to, because I’d have taken you off D Street any time, but because that money and that life was what you wanted. And now you’re marrying this man, not because you love him, but because he’s got a mine over there that’s making him so much money he can’t count it. I don’t call that being a wife. I call it being the highest-priced whore in the state of Nevada, and I’ll see you in hell before I wish you well at it.”
“Something might happen to you for that.”
“Nothing will.”
“Don’t be too sure.”
“There’s nothing I’d like better than to drill you through your dirty little heart, and I could do it right now, so if anything starts happening around here you know who it’s going to happen to.”