In the Rogue Blood (11 page)

I
n the foyer behind the curtained door a man in gartered sleeves sat at a small table in the niche under the stairway, talking to a man in a bowler hat who sat astraddle a reversed straightback chair, smoking a cigar and massaging his knuckles. He wore a pistol on his belt. At the foot of the staircase behind him was a doorway into the alley.

The garter-sleeved man was the teller. He patted the tabletop and said, “It’ll cost you two solid dollars, boys.” The bowlered man scrutinized them as they paid. The gartered man asked their preferences and Allenbeck said he was in the mood for a redhead. From a wicker basket holding a variety of poker chips the teller extracted a white one with the number four painted on it and handed it to him. “Give this to the nig-gerwoman
upstairs,” he said. Allenbeck winked at John and took the steps two at a time.

John wanted a quadroon but was told all three were busy and likely to stay that way a while, so he asked for a blonde but both of them were occupied too. The teller suggested a Chinese girl, a Celestial darling fresh off the boat and only just turned thirteen years old, a virgin, practically. For such freshness he would only have to pay one more dollar. John handed it over and was given a blue chip bearing the number thirteen.

“I’ll hold that there bootknife till ye come back down,” the bowlered man said. John met the man’s eyes. The bowlered man grinned and shrugged. “You aint got to give it to me, boy, but it aint goin upstairs.” John slipped the knife out of his boot and laid it on the table. Without taking his eyes off him the man said, “Thank ye kindly.”

On the upper landing a hugely fat and yellow-eyed Negress sat in a wide rocking chair flanked by a low wooden box holding a collection of poker chips. She took John’s and glanced at it. “Room number eight,” she said. “Lass on the leff.” She tossed the chip into the box and gestured through the open door into the narrow and dimly lighted hallway flanked by numbered doors on either side.

The hall lay empty but the thin doors hardly muffled the moans and curses of men in the wallows of passion. A pair of shutters that opened onto a balcony at the end of the hall was closed against the clamor in the street below. Passing the second set of doors he heard Allenbeck’s voice from the room on the right, number fifteen: “
Easy
, dammit! Suck it
gentle
, you red bitch!”

Halfway down the hall the door to number twelve abruptly swung open and a glowering fat man wearing only his trousers and boots stepped out muttering, “Goddamn little cunt!” He called, “Hey, auntie!” and John glanced back to see the black woman lean forward in her rocker and peer in at them. The fat man beckoned her and said, “Get on over here and see about this, goddamnit!”

As he passed the open door of number twelve John glanced in the room and saw a girl lying on her back on the narrow bed with her eyes closed and her short green satin chemise up high on her hips and exposing the patch of blonde hair between her legs. He took two more paces and stopped and came back and looked in again and saw that it was his sister Maggie.

He looked down the hall at the Negress who was still in her rocker and was tucking a fresh chaw in her jaw and appeared in no hurry to
come see what the fat man wanted. The door to number four opened and a man in a goatee came out and adjusted his coat and planter’s hat looked at them and then strode down the hall. The Negress was on her feet now and stepped into the hallway and then she backed out again to give the man room to go by her.

John’s breath was lodged in his throat. He looked back into the room and told himself he was wrong, it wasn’t her, could not be her. But he knew it was.

The fat man looked at him and said, “Little bitch. I get in there and ask her does she want a drink. She was fairly wall-eyed already, so I shoulda known better, but she says sure, so I hand her my pint of rum that’s near half-full and turn around to hang up my coat and shirt and I hear her bubbling that bottle like a sawmill nigger. I mean she
drained
it, friend. Not five seconds and it was
gone
. I said, ‘What the
hell
you doing, little girl?’ and she gives this shit-face grin and her eyes roll up in her head and she falls on the bed. I like to thought she was dead but the little bitch’s only drunkern hell is all. If these bastards think I’m paying to hump some passed-out little dipso cunt who drank all my hooch they best think again.”

She lied, John thought. She lied, she lied, our lying goddamned crazy mother
.

“Listen, friend,” he said to the fat man, “I’ll trade you. You can have mine in number eight. She’s a three-dollar special, a Celestial, thirteen years old, practically a virgin, they say. Me, I
like
it when they’re out cold.” It was the only explanation that leapt to mind. His heart was racing, his mouth dry. He wondered what he thought he was going to do.

“What you want?” the black woman said as she came up to them.

The fat man looked askance at John. “You
like
them passed out? Shit, son, that’s like humping the dead. It aint no fun in
that
.”

“It’s what I like. Look here, mister, I’ll throw in a dollar for the deal.” He dug out a silver dollar and handed it to the fat man, thinking that if he did not accept it he would offer him all of the rest of the money he had, about four dollars. And if the fat man still refused he would stomp the son of a bitch to pudding.

“Why you all standin here for?” the Negro woman said.

The fat man held the dollar like a poker chip he was not sure he wanted to bet. “You must got a hell of a hankering, son.” He took a look down the hall toward number six. “A Chinee girl, you say?” He looked at the
dollar in his palm again and smiled and put it in his pocket and said, “Deal.”

“What you mens
doin?
” the Negro woman said. “Caint be goin from one room to another. Aint allowed.”

The fat man went back in the room for a moment and then came out and said to her, “You just get back to your chair, auntie, and mind your own damn business.” He walked over to number eight and went in and shut the door behind him.

“
Is
my business,” the Negress said, looking hard at the door and then at John.

John stepped into number twelve and started to close the door but the big woman easily held it open with one hand and peered around him at the girl on the bed. “That girl be drunk
again?
Mista Boland gone whip her ass good.”

“Listen, dammit, I don’t care she’s drunk,” John said. “Just let us be.” He was ready to punch her if she did not release the door.

“We see bout this,” she said and lumbered off toward the landing.

John shut the door and stepped over to the bed and looked down at Maggie. She was breathing through her mouth and smelled like she’d been pickled in rum. He touched her face gently, marveling at the reality of her. He stroked her powdered cheek and saw that under the powder a cheekbone was lightly blued with a bruise. There was a small fresh scab in the corner of her mouth and a front tooth had been chipped. Her legs showed a few yellowed bruises. Her pubic hair was neatly trimmed. He stood there for a long moment staring at the compact lips of her vulva before becoming aware of his arousal and flushing hotly and quickly tugging down the hem of her shimmy to cover her sex.

His mind spun. He had no idea what to do. The front balcony was a good fifteen feet above the sidewalk. He could make the drop himself but never with Maggie in his arms. He could go downstairs and get Edward but then how would—

Bootheels came thumping down the hall. He went to the door just as the man in the bowler hat strode up, his face as tight as the fists at his side. He still wore the pistol on his belt. Behind him came the big Negress.

“What the
hell
are you—” the man started to say, and John interjected, “Listen, mister, she’s bad hurt! Somebody done stuck a blade in her gut! She needs help real bad!”

The bowlered man shifted his eyes to the girl in the room and in that instant John drove an elbow into his face with all his weight behind it
and nearly lost his own balance as the man’s head snapped back against the doorjamb with a loud crack and his legs went out from under him and he sat down hard and his bowler rolled away. John snatched the pistol from the man’s belt and jumped back and pointed the gun at the black woman who had turned and started for the stairs and said, “Stand fast, mammy.” The pistol was a fancy silver-mounted Kentucky dueling model and its .54 caliber ball was capable of removing a sizable portion of her head.

The Negress turned and folded her arms over her great bosom and stared at some point just to the side of him. “I aint studying nothin or nobody,” she said.

The man on the floor moaned and gingerly fingered his face. Blood streamed from his mouth and ran down his arm and crimsoned his white sleeve. He worked his tongue slowly in his mouth and let two teeth drop to the floor in a bloody web of spit, then looked up at John and said, “Bruck ma yaw sumbish.”

He braced himself against the jamb and started to get to his feet and John clubbed him with the pistol barrel behind the ear and the man crumpled without a sound and lay still. John took the man’s purse and looped it onto his own belt and then swiftly searched him for his bootknife but it was not on him. The door to number three opened and a man poked out his head. John showed him the pistol and the man’s head vanished and the door slammed shut.

“Pull him in here,” John said, gesturing for the woman to drag the man into the room. The Negress did it, laboring as much to squeeze her own bulk through the door. She seemed to fill the room. John sat on the bed and told her to put Maggie over his left shoulder and the big woman draped the girl over him facedown like a sack of flour. John stood up with Maggie’s arms and hair hanging down his back and her legs dangling against his chest. He held her against him with his free hand tight on her exposed ass and jostled her, shifting her weight to set it more securely. He told the woman to pull Maggie’s shimmy down but the garment wasn’t long enough to cover the girl’s bare buttocks completely and so he ordered her to remove the shirt from the man on the floor and wrap it about the girl’s waist. She did it and then John told her to sit down and stay put if she knew what was good for her.

He was hoping for Allenbeck’s help but when he got to number fifteen the door was open and a redhaired girl sat naked and alone on the bed. She gaped at him dumbly and put her hands over her breasts. A door
opened down the hall behind him and a fully dressed man stepped out and glanced from the girl on his shoulder to the pistol in his hand and quickly retreated into the room.

He felt Maggie’s belly spasm against his shoulder as she retched and warm vomit ran down the back of his pants leg and he heard it splatter on the floor and smelled its acrid stink. He shifted her weight once again and went out onto the landing. The music and babble from the front room seemed louder now, but even through the din he could hear laughter and voices from the niche below the stairs. The alley door at the bottom of the stairway seemed vastly distant. He was midway down the stairs when a laughing man came into view and looked up and saw John pointing the pistol at him and his laughter caught in his throat.

“What, Stevie?” a voice asked. “Big Bertha looking down mean at you?”

The garter-sleeved teller and a lean and mustached man with a pistol at his waist appeared beside the man named Stevie, both of them smiling, and then they saw John on the stairs and lost their smiles.

He aimed squarely at the armed man’s face and said, “Hands behind your neck, friend. I mean quick.” The man glowered, hesitated, and then complied. John kept the pistol on him as he descended the rest of the stairs and told the man named Stevie to turn around and put his face to the wall and lace his fingers behind his neck. To the teller he said, “Take your friend’s pistol there and tuck it in my belt and be quick and careful about it.”

The mustached man stepped back from the teller as if to deny him the weapon. John stepped forward and backhanded him across the face with the pistol barrel. The man dropped to his knees with both hands over his broken nose and blood running through his fingers. John readjusted Maggie’s weight on his shoulder and said, “Do it.” The teller took the pistol from the man and gingerly slipped it into John’s belt. It was a fine Kentucky model fitted with a percussion lock.

A man came in through the curtained door from the front room and looked at each of them in turn and put his hands up without a word.

John told the teller to open the alleyway door, then ordered them all to get down on the floor and sit on their hands. When the mustached man took his hands from his nose the blood gushed over his mouth and chin and onto his shirt. His eyes were pouring tears and flaming with pain and hatred.

“I’ll shoot the first sonofabitch who sticks his head out this door,” John said. He backed out into the alley and kicked the door shut.

The near end of the alleyway abutted the brightly lighted street in front of The Hole World Hotel and throngs of people were passing by. He hastened toward the darkness in the other direction, his heart pounding, his ears straining for cries of alarm and shouts of pursuers, but all he heard were the sounds of revelry in the street behind him and a low rolling rumble of advancing thunder.

The shadows stirred like living things in the rapidly shifting light of a quarter-moon rushing through gathering storm clouds. He followed the alley across a narrow lane without even glancing toward the voice that called, “Four bits for your package, cap’n,” or at the men who laughed in response. Now the alley wound behind clusters of lightless buildings and rows of double-storied derelict warehouses and the moon abruptly disappeared in a scud of heavy clouds and in the enveloping blackness he almost walked into a stone wall. For an anguished moment he thought he was in a cul-de-sac and would have to retrace his steps and then he realized the alley branched to the right and left. He could not get his bearings and felt thoroughly lost and was certain a posse was closing on his heels like silent tracking hounds. Then a steamboat horn groaned hoarsely from somewhere off to his right. He cursed himself for a panicky fool and set out toward the sounds of the river traffic. He bore toward the horns and bells and whistles, wending a crooked course through the dark back-alley world of vague shapes and impenetrable shadows. There came a longer and closer roll of thunder. He made his way through washes of litter, stumbling on chunks of brick and discarded lumber, bumping into broken crates. He waded through layers of slippery reeking garbage. Chittering rats scurried over his boots. A dog growled in the darkness. He felt eyes watching from the deepest recesses, heard muffled coughs in the shadows, muttered curses, startled gasps. Passing by an adjoining alley he heard the urgent pantings of sexual coupling.

The alley was suddenly lit brightly white by a shimmering flash of lightning and the ghostly instant revealed a black woman naked but for her shirt sprawled on a heap of refuse, her teeth bared in a rictus under the rats feeding on her eyes. And then the world was black again and an
explosive blast of thunder staggered him so that Maggie almost slipped from his grasp.

Scattered raindrops began to fall as he emerged from the alley on a street fronting the river. He slipped the pistol under his coat and into his belt, next to the gun he’d gotten from the mustached man. He was surprised by the ache in his hand, so tightly had he been gripping the weapon. He stood there pondering, raindrops smacking on his hat brim. The thing to do was get off the streets until Maggie regained her senses, then make their way to the livery at the Tchoupitoulas docks where they’d stored their outfits and wait for Edward to show up or find him already there.

Lightning flared and thunder cracked and now the wind picked up. Men hurried to ships moored at the wharves or to taverns along the street. He thought he spied a hotel sign down the street to his left and so he headed that way. A pair of men in the loose shirts of rivermen were about to enter a saloon but paused at the door to watch him pass by. He became aware that the shirt around Maggie’s hips had slipped down to expose most of her ass and he pushed it back in place. He heard the sailors fall in behind him. “Looks well bored with his company, don’t she now?” one said, and the other lewdly laughed. John drew a pistol and turned and pointed it at them and they stopped short. “That’s all right then, bucko,” one said, raising his hands in a gesture of wanting no trouble. They turned back to the saloon and gave him a grinning rearward glance and went inside.

Midway down the block an overhanging sign swaying and creaking in the wind announced The Mermaid Hotel, a small and shabby two-floor establishment whose grimy front window bore the faded pronouncement,
SPIRITS—FOOD—ROOMS
. He entered a nearly deserted taproom as the rain suddenly swept up the street in a torrent. Except for a man sleeping with his head on a tabletop, there was no one in sight but two men rolling dice at the bar. One of them was bearded and clothed in the manner of a riverman and the other was the boniface and said yes, he had a room for the night. One dollar. The men’s eyes roved boldly over Maggie’s bare legs.

“That your parrot?” the bearded man asked with a grin.

“My sister. She’s sick.”

The bearded man laughed and gave a broad wink. “Right you are, boy. I’ve had me some pretty sisters with the rumhead sickness a time or two meself.”

“She
is
my sister,” John said. The bearded man smiled broadly and nodded and said, “Well now, course she is.”

The room was upstairs, one of six in a narrow hallway lighted dimly by a wall-mounted lamp. The hall resounded with erratic snores and was ripe with the malodors of unclean men. The innkeeper led him to the room and went in first and lit the oil lamp on a small bedside table that also held a washbasin and a pitcher of water. A small brass bed with a stained pungent mattress was the only other furnishing in the room. The lamp flame fluttered in the glass, jumping to the breeze blowing through a door open onto a narrow balcony overlooking an alley. The boniface closed the door shutters against the spray of rain. John stooped and angled his shoulders to let Maggie slide off onto the bed. He nearly cried out at the relief to his cramped muscles. The shirt had fallen free of the girl’s hips again and the boniface’s bright eyes were fastened on her exposed pudendum. John pulled down the hem of her shimmy and the man smiled at him and shrugged and left.

Her breathing was deep and regular but she made no response when he sat on the edge of the bed and shook her by the shoulders and gently slapped her cheeks. He’d never seen anyone so insensibly drunk, not even Daddyjack. He soaked the shirt in the water basin and washed the streaks of vomit off her face and arms. Her damp hair looked dull and felt greasy and he recalled that she had always prided herself on her cleanliness and the sheen of her gold hair most of all.

He shook her again and her breasts jiggled freely under the thin shimmy. He stared at them. Then looked over his shoulder at the door. Then gingerly touched one. Pressed it lightly. Felt of its firm softness. His blood thumped in his throat and his chest tightened. For years he had harbored such shameful secret yearnings….

Sweet Jesus!
He jumped up from the bed covered her legs with the damp shirt.
You rotten son of a bitch! What in hell’s wrong with you!
He was suddenly desperate for a drink. He went to the door and looked out into the dim hallway. Snores and farts and sleep babblings from the other rooms. The door had a swivel latch on the inside but there was no lock on its outer side. He closed the door behind him and went to the end of the hall and peered over the landing rail and saw the bearded man and the boniface still at the bar and no one else about.

He went downstairs and asked for a bottle of Nongela. A look passed between the boniface and the bearded man but he made nothing of it.

The boniface said he had to get the Nongela from the storeroom in the
rear and suggested that John take some food back upstairs with him. “She’s like to be hungry when she wake up,” he said. “They love you forever if you feed them. I can have my scullery boy to lay out a plate of bread and cheese.”

It occurred to John that Maggie might not have eaten for some time and some food at hand when she came around would be a good idea if she wasn’t too hungover to eat. From this end of the bar he could easily keep watch on the stairs while the plate was made ready. “All right,” he said.

The boniface said fine, he’d be right back, and he poured John a large glass of whiskey on the house to sip at while he waited. The bearded man said it didn’t look like the rain was going to let up anytime soon so he might as well quit waiting and just get on back to his boat and to hell with getting soaked. He tossed off his drink and said so long and set out the front door into the downpour.

The rain struck like flung gravel against the front window and thunder quavered through the wooden counter under his elbows and the air was sharp with the smell of lightning. He drank the whiskey and watched the stairs and the minutes passed and then he remembered the balcony outside the room’s shuttered door and wondered if it ran the length of the building and maybe even all the way around it.

He spun off the stool so fast it twirled on one leg before toppling and he took the stairs three at a time and had a pistol in his hand and then recovered sufficient presence of mind to come up on the door quietly, the crash and drum of the storm covering the creak of the floor under his boots. He paused at the door and pushed it gently but it held fast. He cocked the pistol and stepped back and then kicked the door hard with his bootsole and the latch snapped loudly and he rushed into the room and there the sons of bitches were.

In the quavering light of the oil lamp the rain-drenched boniface stood slack-mouthed just inside the open shutters with his fingers at the buttons of his pants. The bearded man was between Maggie’s wishboned legs with his soaked shirt plastered to his back and his pants bunched around his booted feet and his pale ass driving hard and he gaped big-eyed over his shoulder at John and stopped humping and raised up on all fours as the boniface whirled and darted out the open shutters and ran away along the balcony.

John thrust the pistol within inches of the bearded man’s face and pulled the trigger and the flint sparked but the gun did not fire. He threw
it aside and grabbed for the other pistol under his coat but the man lunged and caught him by the shirtfront and the second pistol slipped from John’s grasp as they tumbled to the floor in a snarling embrace. Though hindered by his pants tangled about his ankles the man rolled on top of John and got both hands on his throat and began strangling him with red-eyed fury. John worked his hand between them and found the bearded man’s bare balls and clenched his fingers around them with all his might and yanked hard and felt the scrotum rip free and blood rush hotly over his fist.

The man screamed. His hands left John’s throat and he fell on his side and clutched his torn nutsack. John scrambled to his knees and caught him by the hair and shoved his head back and punched him in the Adam’s apple and the man’s face instantly purpled and he gagged horrifically. John stood and grabbed him by the collar with both hands and dragged him out onto the balcony and into the pouring rain and pulled him to his feet and shoved him over the railing.

The man fell into the darkness without sound and struck the muddy ground with a dull splash. Heaving for breath, John leaned over the rail but could not see him in the blackness below until a shimmering blue flash of lightning showed him lying on his belly with his face half-buried in the mud and his bare ass gleaming and his legs crossed at the ankles where his trousers were twisted round them. Then the alley went black again and John wanted to spit down into it but his bruised throat could not hawk up saliva. To swallow was torture. He stood at the rail and let the rain wash the blood off his hands. In the next flare of lightning he caught a glimpse of the drain pipe running down along the corner of the building, the pipe the bastards had shinnied up.