We sat on the walkway across from the remains of the hotel and stared at it. The fire had gone out days before but smoke still rose up here and there in wriggling ghost-snakes. When the bottle was half gone, Charlie said, ‘Do you think Mayfield did it?’
‘Who else?’
‘He must not have left at all, but hidden himself away, waiting for us to go. I suppose he got the last laugh then.’ I admitted he had and Charlie said, ‘I wonder where your girl is.’
‘I had not thought of it.’ For an instant I was surprised by this, then not.
A person appeared down the road and I recognized him as the weeping man. He was leading his horse, tears streaming down his face, as usual. He did not see us or take notice of us; he was speaking lowly to himself, in a state of catatonic devastation, and I found myself intensely annoyed by him. I picked up a rock and threw it. This glanced off his shoulder, and he looked at me. ‘Get away from here!’ I said. I do not know why I disliked him so. It was as though I were chasing a crow from a corpse. Well, I was drunk. The weeping man continued on with his miserable voyage. ‘I don’t know what to do next,’ I admitted to Charlie.
‘Best not to think of it just now,’ he counseled. And then, bemusedly: ‘Would you look at this? It is my own true love.’ It was his whore approaching. ‘Hello, what’s-your-name,’ he said happily. She stood before us looking damp and raw and red-eyed, the edges of her dress dirtied, her hands trembling. She drew back her arm and threw something at my face. It was the hundred dollars I had left her to give to the bookkeeper. Looking down at the money on the ground, I began to laugh, though I knew it meant the bookkeeper had died. I thought, It must not have been that I loved the bookkeeper, but that I loved the idea of her loving me, and the idea of not being alone. At any rate there was nothing in my heart like sorrow, and I peered up at the whore and said to her pitiful face, ‘And so what about that?’ She spit and walked away and I picked the coins up from the ground. I gave Charlie fifty dollars and he dropped it into his boot, his pinkie arched elegantly skyward. I dropped mine into my boot as well, and we both laughed as though this were the pinnacle of modern comedy.
We were sitting fully in the dirt now, and the bottle was nearly empty. I think we would have passed out and slept in the road but Charlie’s whore had gone and gathered all the other whores, who presently stood over us in a pack, looking down with scandal and outrage. With Mayfield and then the hotel gone, they were all of them fallen on hard times, with perfume no longer trailing over their heads, their dresses no longer crisp and folded stiff with starch. They started in on Charlie and me, saying unkind things about our characters.
‘What a pair.’
‘Look at them on the ground like that.’
‘Look at the gut on the one.’
‘Other one’s hurt his hand, looks like.’
‘No more killing stable boys for him.’
Over the din, Charlie asked me confusedly, ‘What are they so upset about?’
‘We chased away the boss man, remember?’ To the whores I explained, ‘But we didn’t burn the hotel down, Mayfield did. At least I think it was him. But I am sure it wasn’t us.’ This only served to make them angrier, however.
‘Don’t you talk about Mayfield!’
‘Mayfield wasn’t so bad!’
‘He paid us, didn’t he?’
‘He gave us rooms, didn’t he?’
‘He was a bastard, but he wasn’t half the bastard as you two.’
‘You two are the real bastards.’
‘The genuine article, that’s the truth all right.’
‘What should we do with these bastards?’
‘These bastards.’
‘Let’s get them!’
Now they came upon us, overpowering and pinning us to the ground. Through the wall of bodies I could hear Charlie laughing, and I also found this humorous at the start, but my amusement gave way to upset when I found myself unable to move, and as I watched the darting hands of the whores empty my pockets of all my money. I began then, and so did Charlie start to struggle and berate the whores, but it seemed the more we fought the stronger they became. When I heard Charlie scream out in pain I felt truly panicked—his whore was grinding her heel into his injured hand—and I bit the whore closest to me through her dress, sinking my teeth into her rank and ample belly. She became enraged by this, removing my pistol from its holster and pointing it at my skull above the brow. Now I lay completely still and silent, and the look of hatred was so vigorous in her eyes I was expecting at any moment to witness that bright white light from the deep black pit of the gun barrel. But this never came, and the whores, having had enough, wordlessly climbed off and left us, taking with them our pistols and cash, save for the hundred dollars we had dropped in our boots, where they luckily had not thought to look.
INTERMISSION II
I passed out in the dirt and sun in the half-dead town of Mayfield. When I awoke it was dusk and the peculiar girl from my prior visit was standing before me. She had a new dress on, and her hair was just-cleaned and wrapped in a fat red bow. Her hands were clasped daintily to her chest and there was an expectant air of tension about her. She was not looking at me but to my side, at Charlie. ‘It’s you,’ I said. She made a quieting gesture, then pointed to my brother, who was holding a water-filled mason jar. At the bottom of this was a swirling dust devil of black granules and I saw that the girl’s knuckles were flecked in the poison, as before; when Charlie brought the jar to his lips I knocked it away from his hand. The jar did not break but landed in a pit of mud. The water drained away and the girl made a sullen expression at me. ‘Why did you do that?’
I said, ‘I have wanted to talk with you, about what you told me before.’
Staring distractedly at the jar, she said, ‘About what did I tell you before?’
‘You said I was a protected man, do you recall it?’
‘I recall it.’
‘Can you tell me, please, am I protected still?’
She watched me, and I knew she knew the answer but she did not speak.
‘To what degree am I protected?’ I persisted. ‘Will it always be so?
She opened her mouth and closed it. She shook her head. ‘I will not tell you.’ Her dress hem spun in a wheel as she turned and retreated. I searched around for a rock to throw at her but there were none within reaching distance. Charlie was still watching the jar, propped in the mud. ‘I am damned thirsty,’ he said.
‘She wished to kill you dead,’ I told him.
‘What, her?’
‘I saw her poison a dog before.’
‘The pretty little thing. Why in the world would she do that?’
‘Just for the evil joy of it, is all I can think.’
Charlie squinted at the purpling sky. He lay back his head and closed his eyes and said, ‘Well, world?’ Then he laughed. A minute or two passed, and he was sleeping.
END INTERMISSION II
Chapter 59
Charlie had his hand cut off by a doctor in Jacksonville. His pain by this time had lessened but the flesh had begun to rot and there was nothing else but to remove it. The doctor, named Crane, was an older man, though alert and steady; he wore a rose in his lapel and from the start I had faith in him as a person of principles. When I spoke of my and Charlie’s financial straits, for example, he waved away my comment as though the notion of receiving a wage was little more than an afterthought. There was an incident when Charlie produced a bottle of brandy, saying he wished to get drunk before the procedure, which the doctor was against, explaining that the alcohol would cause excessive bleeding. But Charlie said this made no difference, he would have his way and nothing in the world would stop him. At last I took Crane aside and told him to give Charlie the anesthetic without telling him what it was. He saw the wisdom in my plan, and after successfully sedating my brother everything went as well as such a thing can. The operation took place in the candlelit parlor of Crane’s own home.