Astray (11 page)

“Come on,” says Jensen suddenly, “has my wife promised you something she’s got stashed away, from her papa?”

“She’s got nothing,” says Mollie, “except another little Jensen about to carve its way out of her.”

He stares. “You some class of do-gooder?”

“It was a slack week.”

The fact is, she does make a habit of this kind of thing. Hears of a man sick in camp, rides out with medicine and rabbit soup. Adventure’s scarce since the Indian Wars ended.

As darkness moves over the hills, she decides they must be another hour from Jensen’s camp, and it isn’t worth breaking her pony’s leg.

She likes to sing while she’s cooking. Jensen pulls a face: “Somebody forgot to grease the wagon.”

When she serves up the doings, he holds out his bound hands. “Let me hold my fork.”

“Not till you’re home.”

“For blazes’ sake, I’m not some lost steer.”

“A steer would have more sense.”

It may be foolish, but she undoes the knot anyway. Jensen flexes his hands, shakes them, rubs them where they’re chafed.

Mollie doles out a small measure of whiskey. “Here’s how,” she says, for a toast.

They swap tales of veins and lodes they have known, as sailors talk of their ships.

“I wear the clothes that fit the work,” says Mollie, “but they get me arrested every now and then.”

“Arrested?”

“Impersonating a man, so-called.”

“Huh.” He shakes his head. “I wouldn’t mistake you.”

They have a cigarillo each. Jensen’s followed gold all over the map: Nevada, Boise, Salt Lake City. Got bit by a rattlesnake one time. “Never gone looking for a bullet,” he mentions, “but I’ve always thought that if one happened my way, it wouldn’t make no odds.”

She leans to top up his mug.

“I still reckon you’re getting something out of this business,” he says suddenly.

For a minute she thinks “this business” means life. Then she gets it, almost laughs, lets out a long sigh instead. “Well, I can’t fool you, Jensen. Your wife did promise me something I’ve always had a hankering for.”

“I knew it!”

“Something you’ll hardly miss.”

“What is it?”

Very quiet. “A child.”

The fire crackles. Jensen stares at her over his smeared plate. His mouth moves before he speaks. The word comes out hoarse. “Which one?”

She would have liked to keep it up a bit longer but she can’t stop the sound, it bubbles up, it whoops out into the starry night.

Jensen’s plate is overturned, he’s jumped the fire, he’s on top of her. “You dyed-in-the-wool bastard.”

Mollie’s helpless with glee.
“Which one?”
is all she can squeak:
“Which one?”

His hands are on her throat. She can’t reach her Peacemaker,
this could very well be the end of Mollie Monroe, the all too likely squalid end for a woman of her peculiarities, left throttled by a dying campfire, but still she can’t stop laughing.

Jensen’s teeth are very close to hers. They’ve stopped moving. “You’re as ugly as a burnt boot,” he informs her.

“Mm-hm.”

“Face like a dime’s worth of dog meat.”

Mollie lets out a small groan. “Oh, fish or cut bait, won’t you?”

She pulls down her own pants before he can. He goes at her hammer and tongs. Like a wolf, like she likes it. His flesh a stone pounding her to dust. Sand in her face and her own gun bruising her thigh.

They sleep back-to-back for heat.

Up before the sun. The mountains stand gray and saw-toothed. Mollie doesn’t make coffee. They pack in silence, without looking at each other, like two old prospectors. Jensen takes back his rifle.

When the little camp comes into sight around a bend, she says, “Hey! Finally shed of you. You going to do the clean thing now, make the bettermost of it?”

He speaks between his teeth. “Next time you set yourself up for judge and jury—”

“Christ almighty,” she says, “who am I to judge? I’ve woken up in my own puke on a poker table.”

He’s looking right past her at the tent with the fire smoking outside it.

Mollie reins in her horse. Turns to undo the packs of supplies.

“Will you have some breakfast?” His eyes are scanning the rocks for his children.

“I won’t.”

He shakes her hand.

“Give my respects to Monroe.”

“And mine to Mrs. Jensen.” Mollie clicks her tongue to her horse, turns back toward Wickenburg.

The Long Way Home

Mollie (born Mary) Sanger, born somewhere in New England in 1836 or perhaps 1846, arrived in Arizona as the wife of a lieutenant in the mid-1860s but soon paired up with George Monroe and worked as a prospector, cowboy, cook, and saloonkeeper. This story, about a (possibly apocryphal) incident from the early 1870s in which she dragged a prospector back to his family, draws on two articles, “Mollie Monroe: Memorable, ‘Crazy’ Character of Early Prescott,” in
Sharlot Hall Museum: Days Past
(November 2, 1997), and Nell Simcox’s “The Story of Mollie Monroe: Girl Cowboy,” in
Real West Magazine
(April 1983).

A few years later, Mollie moved from Wickenburg back to Prescott (apparently without George Monroe). In 1877 she was the first woman in Arizona committed for insanity, which probably translates as cross-dressing, promiscuity, and alcoholism. In 1895 Mollie Monroe escaped from Phoenix Asylum and roamed the desert for four days, surviving on one bottle of water and a few crackers, before being recaptured by Indian trackers. After a quarter century of confinement, she died in 1902.

CHICAGO

1876

THE BODY SWAP

A
rainy October night at the Hub on Chicago’s West Madison Street. Mullen, the jewel-eyed little barman, smoothes his thick mustache and tops up Morrissey’s glass. He leans one elbow on the sodden plank bar, considers the young man, then jerks his head toward the back. Morrissey has been fraternizing at the Hub for some weeks, telling stories of his time in Wisconsin State, but this is the first time Mullen’s invited him into his office.

It’s as plain as the front but smells better. There’s a sad-eyed character there already, sandy beard half-covering impassive features. “Hughes,” says Mullen, with only a trace of a brogue, “this is Morrissey that I was telling you of.”

The older man sticks out his hand.

Morrissey shakes it, and accepts a broken-backed chair. “So what’s on?”

Hughes looks sideways at the Hub’s proprietor. “He knows nothing?”

“I could hardly go into it at the bar.” Mullen sits down and pours three shots.

“I’m hoping you gentleman have a mind to bring me in on some business,” Morrissey volunteers.

“What kind of business?” asks the older man.

“Oh, come on, Mr. Hughes. The coney trade, the bogus; shoving the queer.”

“Knowing the lingo doesn’t mean knowing the business,” observes Hughes.

“I never claimed to. The proverbial blank slate, that’s me. You need a shover, is that it? I could pass bad bills with a straight face.”

Hughes releases a sigh like air from a tire. “The business is all done in.”

Morrissey looks taken aback. “You say?”

“Time was, there was more queer than good floating round Illinois,” Hughes laments. “With all those newfangled notes and greenbacks the Government printed during the War between the States, who could tell bogus at a glance? But since they formed this Secret Service to crack down on us, trade’s turned tight as blazes.”

“It used to be you could bribe them to turn a blind eye,” Mullen contributes, “but these days …”

“And now they’ve banged up our Michelangelo.”

The young man blinks at Hughes. “Your—”

“Ever hear of Ben Boyd?”

“Can’t say as how I have,” admits Morrissey.

Another sigh. “In any other field of art or industry, the man’s name would be on every child’s tongue. But Boyd works on the quiet, like some angel.”

“A friend of yours?”

“Ben Boyd is only the greatest living engraver of queer. Living
or
dead,” Hughes insists.

“We’ve never met him in the flesh,” Mullen adds.

“But by his works we know him.”

“You’d swear you’re looking at a genuine silk-thread Federal banknote,” Mullen tells Morrissey. “Big Jim wholesales them all over the Mid West. You know Big Jim?”

“Well, sure; I know of him.” Big Jim Kinealy is the Hub’s silent partner, the mover behind all business conducted in this room.

Hughes takes up the story. “But nothing’s moving these days. Since January, Ben Boyd’s been in Joliet State, doing his first year of ten.”

The young man winces. “So your best supply’s been cut off.”

“The only coney worth a bean,” Hughes corrects him. “What’s out there wouldn’t fool a nun.”

Silence; they all drink their rum.

“I’m truly sorry for your troubles, gentlemen,” says Morrissey, “but where do I come in?”

“Not just for our own sakes but for the sake of the whole profession,” says Hughes, “Boyd must be sprung.”

Morrissey lets out a small laugh. “Horse stealing or a touch of safe-cracking, and I’m your man, but—”

Mullen waves one finger to shut him up. “Big Jim has a plan. We’re going to spring Boyd, make our fortunes, and go down in history, all at the self-same time.”

“Is that a fact,” murmurs Morrissey.

“Are you in?” Hughes wants to know.

“Oh, come on, now, it’s only white to tell a fellow what he’ll be getting into first.”

The barman curls his lip. “You think I’m going to lay out our design and have you walk away and blab it all over Chicago?”

Morrissey spits to show what he thinks of blabbers. “I’d be considerable of an idiot to say I’m in till I hear the details, but my lips are sewn.”

“Go on,” Mullen tells Hughes, “he’s all right.”

Hughes shifts his chair a little closer to the table and tops up his glass. “What would you say is the perfect swag?”

Morrissey stares at him.

“Take a guess. The ideal booty.”

“Something worth a lot … that’s easy to take, and fits in your pocket,” hazards Morrissey.

Hughes shakes his sandy head. “If it’s worth a lot, and if you’re tumbled, you’ll do a lot of time.”

“But if it’s not worth much … why trouble?”

Mullen sniggers.

Hughes delivers the answer like Scripture: “The perfect swag is something worth nothing, that people will pay high for.”

Morrissey looks between the two men. “Is this some class of a confidence trick? Like, the mark thinks there’s a diamond in the empty box?”

“No,” says Hughes, stroking his beard, “no deception’s involved.”

“Think it through,” Mullen teases.

“I am doing.” Sulky now. “Something worth nothing … what, nothing at all, like water or dirt?”

Hughes raps the table. “You’re getting warm.”

“Which?”

“Dirt.”

“You’ve a mind to steal dirt?” Morrissey asks.

“A special kind of dirt.”

“A body of dirt, you might say.” Mullen grins as he slicks back his hair. “Dust to dust!”

“Oh, I get it.” Morrissey lets out a whistle, then lowers his voice. “You’re talking to a veteran body snatcher, as it just so happens. Back in Wisconsin I dug up a dozen or so, sold them to the medical school.”

“We heard that story,” Mullen tells him. “That’s why we figured you might want to make a stake with us.”

“But selling to doctors is not our game,” says Hughes with disdain. “You ever hear of the Trojan War?”

“I reckon.” Morrissey’s voice is uncertain. “This one fellow did for another fellow, and then he went one better on it, because he ransomed the corpse back to the fellow’s pa for its weight in gold.”

“Naw!”

“And the best thing is, the State of Illinois’s got no law against the stealing of a cadaver,” Mullen puts in. “It’s nobody’s property once it’s stopped breathing. The most we could be pulled for is the price of the coffin, and that can’t mean more than a year in jail.”

“But whose coffin?” asks Morrissey. “Just what body are we talking about?”

“No need for names,” says Hughes before Mullen’s got the first syllable out. “Come on out to the bar for a minute.”

“You jokers are just pulling my leg,” says Morrissey,
pushing back his chair. “What, is he one of the regulars?”

Mullen shakes his head. “He took a bullet eleven years back.”

The Hub is filling up when they emerge: six men at the billiards table, another dozen hanging on the bar, getting impatient. Hughes lets his eyes flicker to the wall above the bottles. Morrissey follows his glance to the plaster bust of Abraham Lincoln.

November 6, the night before the election, the three men press through a Democratic torchlight parade to the station. They get on the nine o’clock train to Springfield, taking over an empty carriage. Mullen drops a clanking tool bag.

“Mind my foot,” objects Morrissey, pulling it out from under.

“Put it up in the compartment, Mullen,” says Hughes. “Are you drunk?”

“Just a little jollified, in honor of our venture,” Mullen tells him. “Accepted three Democrat shots and four Republican ones.”

“You’ve got to play fair,” agrees Morrissey, grinning.

“It’s a sad fact about our line of business that it requires a nomadic sort of existence, since laying low prevents registering to vote,” remarks Hughes, making himself comfortable by the window. “If it were otherwise I believe I’d give my ticket to Governor Hayes, seeing as he’s a war hero.”

Mullen snorts. “Uncle Sammy Tilden’s going to sweep in and clean house. High time we pulled our troops home and left the South to solve its own hell-fired problems.”

Hughes’s eyebrows soared. “The barman is a citizen of views,” he told Morrissey. “Most of them claptrap.”

“I reckon this election will be the closest thing that ever was, anyhow,” contributes Morrissey.

“Five bucks, says Tilden,” mutters Mullen.

Hughes bursts out laughing.

“What now?”

“Five bucks? What a small-timer you are, Mullen. By the time this job’s done, as well as getting Boyd out, we’ll each have bagged a sixth of two hundred thousand dollars!”