Alexander C. Irvine (13 page)

It
w
as Saturday
night and Belinda’s Bright was filled to the rafters with workingmen drinking themselves into a collective stupor. The steamy heat of the saloon’s main room fogged the single window set to the right of the door, and Archie was sweating rivers as he took a short break from hauling kegs out of the storeroom. The Bright featured three-cent drinks, for which price a man could take a tube tapped into a keg and drink until his breath gave out. During busy times, the rubber tubes were passed from hand to hand like a drunk’s communion, and the kegs emptied nearly as fast as Archie could roll them out.

Midnight had come and gone, but the banjo-and-fiddle combination still worked steadily through their six-song repertoire. Since nine o’clock, when they’d cleared a corner for themselves and begun playing, they had been through it six times, taking ample breaks to make the best of the free beer that was their only compensation. Fortified by their liquid salary, they showed no signs of tiring. Neither did Belinda’s patrons or the two whores who doubled as serving girls.

Archie, on the other hand, was bone tired. He’d never been one for hard physical work—the typesetter’s job at the
Herald
had been just a means to an unaccomplished end—and Belinda kept him running, moving casks of beer and whiskey out from the back room and carting crates of iced oysters up from the Bright’s cellar. In return, he was allowed to sleep in that same cellar and help himself to the oysters and whatever else Belinda cooked in her “kitchen”—a small hearth behind the bar, hung with a kettle in which she kept a beef stew constantly simmering. Between the food and the work, Archie’s body was beginning to recover from its ordeal of the past month or so. He’d gained back some weight and even begun to add a fiber of muscle here and there in his shoulders and back. And his leg had made a nearly complete recovery, although it was inevitably stiff and sore when he got up from his straw bed in the basement chill.

Belinda whistled piercingly from the front end of the bar, near the Bright’s entrance. Archie looked up and saw her waving a meaty arm at him as she took an empty glass from a square-jawed black Irishman, who looked carefully in both directions before scurrying out onto the street. She whistled again, and Archie returned her wave, thinking that while her voice wouldn’t cut through the din, her whistle could raise the dead. He smiled to himself at the joke.

“Need you to watch the back door the next hour,” Belinda shouted in his ear when he’d made his way to her. “My pet copper was in here saying some great fuss is being made at the ward station and patrols being put out all night. It’s a raid, is what I’m thinking, and I don’t intend to be open for the coppers to bust up my place and pour my liquor down their damned greedy grafting throats. We close early tonight.”

“What am I watching for?” Archie asked.

“The only folks I want using that back door are them two niggers,” Belinda said, cocking her head toward the musicians. “Bank on it: if a white man tries to leave through the back door, he’s either bringing the police or running from them. And if the coppers raid me, and some robber they’re lookin’ for makes good an escape into that alley, I might as well close up for good. I can’t have them thinking I harbor thieves and murderers here.”

Belinda turned our toward the chaotic barroom and let loose a whistle that left Archie’s ears ringing. She waved at the musical duo, motioning them to wind up; the fiddler noticed and damped his partner’s strings with the flat of his hand.

“Closing early tonight!” Belinda bellowed.

A slurred chorus of dismay rose up, and a glass broke near the door. Belinda ignored it. “You’ve got half an hour to finish what’s on your tables and move along. You two,” she finished, pointing at the musicians, “one more tune to see everyone off.”

She pushed Archie toward the door that gave out on the alley behind the Bright. “Go on, and remember what I told you.”

In the half hour that followed, only the two Negroes passed Archie’s post at the alley door, nodding and sharing a bottle as they walked out into the chill night. The day had been warmer than usual, but the thaw was fading, and Archie sunk his chin into the knitted scarf Belinda had given him when he started. It had been lost by one of the girls’ patrons, as had all of the other clothing Archie was currently wearing; a regular wardrobe was piled on a pallet in one corner of the cellar.

The stairs creaked over his head as either Kate or Lydia ushered a client up to the second-floor rooms. Archie wished he had a drink. He was adult enough to know the difference berween sex and love, but every time he heard that creak of foot on stair he nearly drowned in memories of Helen. How many times had he led her across the creaking floor of their bedroom on Orange Street, then laid her on the creaking bed and made delirious creaking love to her?

Not nearly enough.

Archie looked out into the main barroom, saw Belinda with her back to him, scattering handfuls of sawdust on the stinking floor. He went quickly into the back storeroom and brought out a quart of gin, taking a long juniper swallow as he reseated himself and kept watch for thieves and murderers. Bottle in hand, he forgot about Helen, drinking the memory away as Belinda shouted and stomped her booted feet, rousting senseless revelers.

Archie leaned his head against the doorframe and let the gin take his mind where it would. A cool draft dried the sweat from his face, the last memory of the oddly springlike day. It would have been a good night for a long walk, if he’d had the energy, but he’d scarcely left the Bright in the three weeks he’d been there.

A trickle of sweat itched his nose and Archie wiped it away, brushing the lump left by Royce’s sap. He hadn’t healed badly, considering the punishment he’d taken. Thanks to Wilson, he had food and a bed instead of slow decay in a muddy grave.

“Presto,” Archie slurred against the doorframe. “Answer the madman’s question and this, too, can be yours.” He drank again and repeated, “Presto!” It sounded better when spoken a bit louder.

Although Wilson had saved his life, the situation he offered Archie was like a mean-spirited joke at the expense of Archie’s former self. Archie had lost home and employment with a reputable firm, and now he sat drunk on gin, held up by the doorframe of a waterfront saloon he wouldn’t have set foot in two months ago.

To his surprise, Archie found his normal resigned bitterness scoured away by a murderous bursting fury directed at Riley Steen and his Dead Rabbit henchmen. Emotion had been rare in the past weeks, when he’d simply been trying to come to terms with being alive, and now it was, well, intoxicating. He enjoyed the anger, reveled in its pure energy. Revenge gave him something to think about other than oysters and barrels of whiskey and the creak of warped floorboards under the feet of whores.

Wilson had asked Archie, as they sat in the Brewery’s muddy noisome cellar, if he felt he’d gone insane as a result of his burial. “I certainly would have.” Wilson had shuddered before he continued. “Premature inhumation is without doubt the blackest, most horrible fate that can befall a man.”

Archie had nodded without understanding; at that point his mind had been boiling with echoes of the deranged vision that was all he could remember of the previous three weeks. Wilson had listened raptly to Archie’s narrative of the dream, nodding now and again as if Archie’s recollection confirmed some long-held conviction.

But
dream
wasn’t the right word, nor really. Archie had felt a constant sense in the vision that he was remembering the incredible events rather than creating or experiencing them. When he told Wilson that, the sad-eyed man had drawn in his breath sharply and looked for a moment as if he couldn’t decide whether to dance a jig or run screaming from the room.

“Your soul left you, Archie,” Wilson had finally said, terrified wonder quavering in each word. “You must realize that. God! for a mesmerist to draw from you the rest of the tale.”

Wilson had made good on his promise, taking Archie to Belinda’s Bright (“It used to say ‘Belinda’s Brighton Tavern’ but part of the sign was stolen one night,” Wilson explained) and presenting him to Belinda herself. The gray-headed matron had squinted warily at Archie’s emaciated frame, looking him up and down as if to assure herself that work wouldn’t kill him, but she had taken him in as if the entire arrangement had been made ahead of time.

Archie harbored suspicions that Wilson had taken more than simply altruistic interest in his predicament, but he couldn’t fathom why. Once, about a week ago, Wilson had stopped at the Bright and asked Archie if he’d ever had a recurrence of the vision. Archie told him no, he hadn’t, and hoped he never would. Wilson had smiled, nodded, and dropped the subject.

“That Wilson’s an odd character, isn’t he?” Archie had said to Belinda after Wilson had gone.

“Who?”

“Wilson, there. The man who brought me here.”

“Archie, that beating must have addled your brains.” Belinda held a shot glass up to the light, set it on the counter, and filled it. “His name’s Edgar. Edgar Pope or something. An opium-smoking beggar, but folks tell me he’s something of a writer.”

“Is that so,” Archie said. “I’ll have to ask him about that the next time he comes in.”

But Wilson—or Pope, or whatever his name was—hadn’t been back since, and Archie, curious though he was about the man’s deception, was perfectly happy not to see him. If Wilson returned, Archie guessed, it would be to ask Archie again for a written account of his Brewery ordeal for the magazines, and Archie had no intention of providing such an account regardless of the incentive. He had poured too much of himself into the writing of other people’s misfortunes, and at last, it seemed, he had lost the taste for wallowing in his own.

Thinking of dreams, Archie realized that he hadn’t been able to remember a single moment of dream since his arrival at Belinda’s. The details of that first vision, though, were still vividly alive in his memory: the city of stone pyramids, shadowed by cloud-wreathed green mountains; the fire, stinking of cooking flesh and roaring like the last breath of a dying soul; the huge fanged face carved from stone in a vast dark room, and the terrifying desperate hope that had come over him upon seeing it.

The feathered token seemed to warm now, radiating a soothing heat against his chest as he let the vision surround him. The small brass medallion had a symbol carved on it, what looked like a crescent moon inside a sun, and three long feathers were attached to a hole punched in the medallion by some sort of beaded string. He’d hung it around his neck on a leather thong, and he kept the knife on him at all times. They kept all of the experience real, somehow, and Archie had found that he couldn’t bear to be without either.

He started, realizing that he’d dozed off. Anger and bitterness had both faded away; now he was just tired.

Up front, Belinda was blowing out the last of the barroom lamps. “Go on to bed, Archie,” she called. “You can sleep late tomorrow.”

That’s another thing I’ve lost, Archie thought as he stumbled down the narrow stair to his pile of straw in the cellar, the gin bottle sloshing in his hand. She decides when I go to bed, when I wake up, when I eat. I might as well be an infant again.

H
e
awoke
the
next morning with his mouth tasting like a cow’s hoof and the odor of gin seeping from his sweaty skin. “God,” Archie croaked, sitting up. The motion drove jagged slivers of glass behind his eyes, and he couldn’t focus on anything in the room. Objects swam drunkenly within their shapes, and the light was far too bright.

He rubbed at his grainy eyes and someone shifted on the bed beside him. “Helen,” Archie murmured. “Can you get me a glass of water, love?”

“Who?”

Archie blinked and squinted; it wasn’t Helen in the bed, but Kate, the younger and darker of Belinda’s two serving girls. She was naked as a baby under the patched quilt. Helen was dead, and he was …

Archie looked around, the sun streaming through the high narrow window immediately telling him that he wasn’t in his basement alcove.
Jesus,
he thought.
I
don’t remember any of this. Was I drunk? When? How did I get here?

His mind stumbled, as if something kept falling between his questions and their answers like the sick pungency of the gin soaking out of his skin, masking his own smell. Something connected to the fierce pain that stabbed his eyes in the morning sunlight.

He was naked, too, he realized, becoming slowly aware of it as his bare thigh brushed against Kate’s ample rear. Too naked, in fact; the talisman was gone from around his neck.

Archie sat up and stripped the quilt from the tick mattress, searching through the rumpled bedsheet. “Archie, sakes, it’s cold,” Kate grumbled, reaching across him to pull the quilt back over her.

Ignoring her and the vertigo swirling through his head, Archie got to his feet and dug through the pile of his clothes. All of his money was still in his pockets, but no feather token.

“Relax, love, it’s early. ‘Linda won’t need you for hours yet,” Kate murmured, turning her face into her pillow.

“Kate, wake up.”

“No. What?”

He resisted a powerful urge to shake her. “Where’s the pendant I was wearing last night?”

“Dunno, somewhere—” She waved an arm under the quilt.

“Where?” Archie shouted. The effort dimmed his vision, and he felt his knees beginning to buckle.

She sat up abruptly and reached down to the floor on her side of the bed. “Here,” she snapped, throwing the talisman at him. “Now stop your yelling and let me sleep.”

Archie caught the talisman in both hands, feeling a clarity return as it touched his skin. The blinding pain behind his eyes eased, and the vertigo calmed into a simple hungover daze.

I
can think again,
he thought, and memories of the night’s events flooded back into his mind along with the bludgeoning echo of the realization that Helen was dead and he was a drunk working for board in a sawdust-floored dive.

He crawled onto the bed, struggling to separate the barrage of memories from his present, which seemed suddenly in danger of being swallowed up by his mind’s regurgitated past. Last night he had dreamed again, or suffered a nightmare was more like it. The mummy had … no, he had
been
the mummy, performing some gruesome ritual among torchlit stone walls with rivulets of mercury coursing down all around him, and watched over by that terrible statue with ringed eyes and some kind of bar splitting its upper lip … and Mike Dunn standing at his side, fresh mania burning bright in his eyes even as his lips formed the words
No Archie… .

And the victim of the sacrifice had been Jane.

Kate elbowed him in the back. “Get out of here, Archie, I have to sleep.” She burrowed into the bedcovers, pushing him away with her knees.

He stood, his mind full of the image of Jane grown into a beautiful girl, lying silently on the stained altar as he raised a chipped obsidian knife over the pale skin of her belly.
No, Archie,
Mike Dunn had said, his words sparking tiny flames along the scallops in the blade’s edge. And Jane had been happy and perfect, a dreamy smile on her face as she echoed the words spilling from Archie’s mouth. But Archie hadn’t been able to hear those words; they were lost amid the roar of the fire and the rumble of the statue as it said over and over again
macehuales imacpal iyoloco.

Archie blinked and tried to knot the leather thong where it had broken, but his hands were shaking too badly. The chacmool had said exactly those words when it stood over Archie with the watchman’s heart spurting in its clawed hands.

“Kate,” he said softly.

“Go away.”

“Kate, please, I’m sorry I woke you. Please—what did I do last night?”

“Ha,” she said from under the pillow. “You weren’t that drunk.”

“Tell me,” he pleaded. “Then I’ll go away.”

She rolled toward him onto her side and pulled the pillow away from her face. “You came in here in the middle of the night blubbering and babbling about some horrible dream, waking me out of a sound sleep. You ripped that trinket from your chest and threw it away, cursing about I don’t know what, and then you crawled in next to me.

“That reminds me,” she said, fumbling around on the floor again. She came up with the gin bottle and drank off the inch or so left in the bottom, making a face at the taste.

“Next best thing to savin for stopping a brat,” Kate said. “It’s near my time, and I shouldn’t even have let you in. Now go away.”

She turned away from him again. “Go somewhere else the next time you’re drunk. My sheet stinks like gin.”

He wondered what exactly he’d said to her, if perhaps he’d made some strange promise. But instead of asking, Archie dressed silently and went back downstairs.