Authors: Scott Phillips
Hop Alley (6 page)
“What else do you want to do? Turn him away? Have me stay here and listen from the wardrobe while you make the two-backed beast?” I moved toward the door and when I took the
knob in hand the pitcher containing the bluebonnets shattered on the wall next to the jamb, dousing me with water.
“Son of a bitch!” That was said loud enough for Ralph to hear, at least the last, explosive word of it, and I made my way quickly down the stairs.
She was close behind me but she stopped cold when I opened the door. “Evening, Banbury,” I said.
If he was surprised at the sight of me in his lover’s doorway at the hour of their regular weekly assignation, he maintained his aplomb. “Sadlaw,” he said, as nonchalant as if we had come across one another on the street.
“Come on in, I was just on my way. Cilla took today for Wednesday.”
“I see. Perhaps I ought to come back another time.”
“As I said, I was already on my way.” Peering around me he saw her on the stairs, her dressing gown hurriedly wrapped about her shoulders and her feet accusingly bare, her auburn hair winding damningly down past her shoulders. His grin grew tighter and I shouldered my way past him with a faint apology. I heard her door closing and the sound of shouting, followed by those of a heavy object hitting a wall or the floor and glass breaking. Her curio cabinet, most likely, and certainly at her own hand; whichever of them had upended it, though, it would be Banbury who bought its replacement after the fighting had given way to tearful apologies, declarations of love, and finally to urgent copulation, likely as not right there
on the downstairs canapé. I climbed aboard my buggy, sorry for their trouble but happy to be temporarily drained of the source of my own.
I
STOPPED AT
the dining room of the Wentworth House Hotel for a dinner of steak and fried potatoes, then made a visit to the Occidental Hall to have a glass of beer and see the miners and prospectors get themselves fleeced at the gaming tables. I watched one prospector in particular lose spin after spin on the roulette wheel, dropping a dollar or more on each try. His face was dotted with fresh scabs that suggested he’d tried to save money by shaving himself after a long abstinence, and he grew slightly more crestfallen with each successive failure of his luck to change. I watched the operator, too, and the cruel glimmer in his eye each time the wheel slowed and refused again to hand the wretch a small win, defying the laws of probability; fortunately for him the prospector’s familiarity with mathematics was probably limited to the simplest arithmetic. After a while it stopped being funny, and I left the poor fellow to it and hoped he wouldn’t lose his entire fortune trying to prove a point about luck.
T
he next morning was cold and overcast and useless for printing, and I went about my morning activities in an agitated state. This was made worse around midmorning when Augie Baxter turned up at the door with his sample case and an air of obsequious bonhomie that suggested bad news. I led him into my office and sat him down, and the boy brought us coffee in china cups.
“Sales are down,” he acknowledged as I eyeballed my earnings. “Even atrocity pictures aren’t moving like they used to do. I bet we didn’t sell ten of your scalped buffalo hunter in the last six months.”
According to my statement only seventy-three dollars and thirty-five cents were owing to me for the six months covered, less than what I still owed him for views of Paris and Rome and the land of the Hottentots I’d ordered on his last visit.
“I don’t suppose I’ll be making an order then, this time.” I handed him the statement back.
“Wait.” I turned back to find him rifling the sample case. “Let me show you something before you say that.”
He handed me a single view, which I placed into the stereopticon. Pressing my eyes to the lenses I was treated to the sight of a naked woman leering at the camera, one hand demurely resting at her shoulder and the other stimulating her unusually hirsute genitalia. The look of wanton depravity on the woman’s face and the artless explicitness of the pose set this view apart from the typical nude views sold in the back rooms of saloons and cigar stores and whorehouses, or, for that matter, from the ones I’d taken years before of Maggie. I was sad at the thought of those images I’d left behind in Cottonwood and apoplectic at the notion that someone might have found them, might at this moment be pulling them from a similar sample case somewhere for under-the-counter sale to slack-jawed, masturbating yokels unworthy of her glance.
“Not interested,” I said.
“I was just showing you, is all.” He took the view back and replaced it in the case’s hidden compartment. “I sell a hell of a lot of these extra-dirty French views out of the cathouses, and if
I could get a few of some local gals who don’t look like they’re about to keel over from the last stages of the clap, in some real inviting poses, I could sell even more. I’d really like to start vending them under the counter in some of the finer galleries, like yours right here.”
“Good luck,” I said. “You won’t be the first one who’s tried.”
Augie noticed the boy standing in the doorway before I did. “What do you want?” he asked with some belligerence.
Poor Lemuel cowered and shrank into the corridor, extending his hand to me. In it was an envelope. “Fellow just brought this by,” he said. “Urgent message for you, Mr. Sadlaw.”
He scurried out as I opened the envelope, which bore neither postage nor return address. Inside was a single sheet of stationery bearing the engraved flag of the
Denver Bulletin
, reduced to fit the page.
Sadlaw
,
Meet me at the Charpiot Hotel at noon for luncheon
.
R. Banbury
I shoved the envelope and the letter into my desk drawer. It was a quarter past eleven. “Sorry, Augie, I’m being summoned. You’ll have to come back later.”
“Fine, I’ll head on down to Market Street and have a look at some of those whores.” His eyebrows rose and fell dementedly, and he seemed to expect me to be impressed.
“You go and have yourself a good time,” I said.
“I’ll leave you these and come back for your order tomorrow.”
I nodded as he pulled the samples and a catalogue from his case and set them on my desk, though I had no intention of making an order with so many sets of views unsold in the display cases.
A
FTER INFORMING
M
RS
. Fenster that I would not require any lunch, I descended to the street and strolled to my engagement at a leisurely pace, not particularly concerned about punctuality. The sky had remained low and dark gray, the day as cold as it had been at dawn, and I regretted not having put on a heavier coat. I arrived at the Charpiot shortly before noon and didn’t see Banbury in the dining room. I told the maître d’hôtel whom I was meeting and was informed with a disdainful sniff that Mr. Banbury took his luncheon in his private suite of rooms on the third floor.
The corridors and the staircases of the Charpiot were finely wrought, with imported carpets and flocked velvet walls, and though I was dressed with more care than usual I still felt like the ashman misdirected through the parlor. I was certain that the staff and guests I passed on the way to the suite saw me the same way, and somehow certain also that Banbury had planned this humiliation as punishment for defiling his
inamorata
,
though I knew this was absurd, since he’d been well aware of my connection to her for some time.
The door of the suite was ornately carved like that of a church, and before I had the chance to knock it opened and a liveried servant led me to a dining room as sumptuous as the one downstairs. It was so gloomy outside that even with the curtains wide open the candles were burning, and I despaired of getting anything useful out of my afternoon sittings; Banbury waited at a small table, one eye covered with a bandage stained orange-red with blood. He had already begun to eat his soup and was mopping it up with a crust of bread as I took my seat. “Glad you could come, Bill,” he said.
“Thanks for the invitation,” I said, and started in on my soup.
“There’s no hard feelings about Priscilla, just so you know.” As if to mock the room’s baroque elegance he was in his shirtsleeves and what was left of his hair fanned out in all directions as though toweled dry and then neglected by the comb. “Not toward you, anyway.”
“I heard you two going at it when I left.” A glass of red wine stood next to one of water, which I drained. An elderly man with a waxed moustache appeared at my side and filled it again from a crystal pitcher.
He snorted and tossed the last of his morsel of bread in the remnants of the soup. “Christ, all I said to her was I hoped she wasn’t having trouble with bedsores, and the next thing I knew she was shrieking at me, said I was spying on her. I said, ‘Priscilla,
dear heart, I’m not spying, this is Thursday, same day as I always come by.’ Then she’s knocked that goddamned curio cabinet of hers on the floor and everything in it’s smashed to bits, and then she’s got the goddamned fireplace poker in her hand.”
“Funny how that bedsores remark didn’t restore her equanimity.”
“Well, hell, you can’t expect me to stand there and say, ‘That’s all right, sweetheart, you go ahead and lay down for any of my chums your heart desires.’ After all I’m paying the goddamned rent on the place.” He picked the sodden bread back up and lolled it around in his mouth. “I’d be satisfied if she’d just make a pretense of hiding it from me.” He pointed to the bandaged eye. “Now how do you think I explained this to Muriel when I got home?”
“I don’t know.”
“With considerable goddamned difficulty, is how. Shit, she knows I’ve got a sweetheart somewhere, but it’s a lot easier to pretend when I don’t walk in the door with my eye gouged halfway out. I’m lucky not to have lost the goddamned thing.”
“I guess you are.” Muriel was, in fact, the owner of record of my building, having inherited the entire block from her father, a failed forty-niner who had stumbled upon a vein of silver on his way back east to rejoin his wife and daughter and take a job in his cousin’s slaughterhouse in Virginia. I had never met her, as she preferred to keep the more vulgarian of Ralph’s companions at arm’s length. “How is old Muriel?” I asked, just to be polite.
“She’s out of my hair, mostly, getting ready for a big shindig downstairs that’s going to cost me a bundle. It’s for Gertrude’s engagement, did I tell you about that?”
“You didn’t. Congratulations.”
“Well, he’s a young man from Germany, and he’s after her mother’s money, but at least she’ll be out of the house. I love her dearly but Jesus, Mary, and Joseph if she ain’t every bit as homely as my own poor Muriel.”
The soup was tasty and I was hungry, but I was preoccupied with the thought that Banbury was leading up to a proposal to alter the status quo, which for the moment mostly suited me. The waiter took our soup dishes and put down plates of what looked like bœuf bourguignon, its blackish gravy still bubbling.
“Hell, I’ve just had a bellyful. That sweet thing she sits on just ain’t worth the trouble. What I’ve been wondering is,” he said with his mouth full of the first bite of beef, huffing little breaths in and out to counteract the heat, “how’d you like to take her on full-time?”
I nearly choked on my wine at the thought. “Not much,” I said.
“Half the problem’s that goddamned laudanum, if you want to know what I think. Fact is,” he said, lowering his voice and leaning forward as if afraid Priscilla would hear, “I already got another gal set up here in town and she’s not half the trouble Cilla is.” Banbury took another bite, blowing on it first.
I placed a forkful of beef into my own mouth, taking the
same precaution and scalding my palate regardless. I wondered if he expected me to keep his plans from Priscilla; I wasn’t willing to take up the responsibility of paying her rent, but I thought she should have some warning before she found her means of support removed.
“What’s funny is, I used to worry about that husband she left back in Iowa. I wondered if maybe he’d track her down and burst into that bedroom sometime and perforate me.” He brought his hand up to his bandaged eye. “And then I figured it out. Hell, he’s probably been running the other direction the whole time, worried she’s coming after him.”
“What do you suppose she’ll do without your support?” I said.
“Used to be a seamstress. She could do that again. Wouldn’t be able to keep up the way she’s living now, but she wouldn’t starve. Hell, she could make a living singing.”
“Is that a joke?”
He looked puzzled. “You haven’t heard her sing and play?”
“Never. Piano’s always been shut when I’ve been there.”
He shrugged. “Well, her voice is mighty pretty.”
The food was remarkable, and once our conversation turned away from Priscilla I much enjoyed it. Dessert was a sort of bread pudding laced with rum, followed by a very special old pale. Upon finishing Banbury rose, patting his distended abdomen with fond pride. “They serve a hell of a table here,” he said.
He walked me downstairs and out to a sidewalk teeming with ill-tempered pedestrians huddled against the cold.