Cottonwood (22 page)

“My dinner was awful, Bill,” she said. “I was so pleased to get back and see you’d called.” She patted the silken upholstery next to her thigh. “Come sit and I’ll tell you about Calistoga.” I set the cash box down on the seat of a wooden chair at the door and complied.

Before she had got past the list of attendees, I had already stopped listening and begun concentrating on the smell of her, and the whispery rustling of silk as she moved.

Fifteen minutes later we were in her bed, the oddly pleasing, citric flavor of her twat lingering on my tongue as it plied the inside of her ear. Afterward, having lain there for a while in silence, she raised herself up on one elbow and spoke as if she could read my mind like a newspaper.

“If you’ve come to ask for another brief extension on the rent, that’s fine.”

“Oh,” I said, at once pleased at the essence of the offer and nonplussed that she’d guessed my motive so effortlessly. “I thank you.”

“But I’m afraid those days are coming to an end soon. Arthur Cruikshank’s asked me to marry him, and I’m going to tell him yes.”

“Oh,” I said again in an attempt to impress her with my quick wit. Such an arrangement implied myriad changes in my life, none of them to the better. “I suppose you’ll do what you have to,” I said.

“I don’t have to do anything, Bill. I’ve got more money than Arthur Cruikshank.” She extended her right leg and raised it in the air perpendicular to her body, then grabbed her calf and pulled the marvelously supple leg down toward her head until it was parallel to her torso, something not many women a quarter-century her junior could do as gracefully. “But he has a certain social position I’d like to attain. I’m tired of being known in society as a vulgar miner’s widow.”

“You’re hardly vulgar,” I offered.

“But poor Sandstrom was. I taught him to read myself, at the age of twenty-eight. He ate peas off of his knife at Delmonico’s more than once. Anyway, I’m decided.”

“Your children hate Cruikshank. You told me so.”

“They do as I tell them, and if I tell them to call him ‘Papa dear’ then that’s what they’ll do.”

I doubted that. One evening her second-eldest son had stopped by for a surprise visit with his wife and twin babes, and she’d tried to explain away my presence in her upstairs with a story about an alteration I wanted to make to the studio, a different sort of landlady/tenant transaction than that which had actually just taken place. The son, a jug-eared and excitable young man named Stanley, didn’t believe a word of it, and he clearly wanted to take a poke at me. His lovely and timid wife couldn’t tear her eyes from Adelle’s hastily arranged coiffure or her rumpled dress, and after mumbling my excuses I left them to their tense interlude.

“The wedding will take place in the spring, but Arthur will be handling all my business dealings as soon as it’s announced.”

“What about Mr. Malthus?” He was her business manager, and the man to whom I actually paid the rent.

“He won’t be responsible for the tenants any more, I shouldn’t think.”

She said it casually, as though innocent of the disastrous nature of what she was announcing to me. I could find another suitable female companion without much difficulty, and one with whom I might dally on a more frequent schedule at that; my problem was the imminent loss of my sympathetic and forgiving landlady.

“Arthur knows who you are, because Mr. Malthus mentioned you as an example of a tenant who sometimes lets things slide a bit.”

“And did Mr. Malthus tell him I’d obtained on occasion an intercession on your part?” To judge by the overt disdain Mr. Malthus generally demonstrated toward me, he must have guessed at the nature of her indulgences.

“He did, and Arthur told me that was the sort of thing that was going to stop.”

I was finished, then. If Cruikshank suspected the truth—which he must have—he’d evict me at the first opportunity, which meant I might as well go straight home and prepare to pack up or liquidate.

“Don’t look so gloomy, darling, you can still come and see me. We’ll have to be even more discreet, of course. And I won’t let Arthur upstairs, not until after the wedding. If then.” She snickered and rolled over on top of me, pressing her substantial breasts against my chest, and she grabbed my wrists, pretending to pin me by force. “And now, my friend, you’ll have to go. I have engagements in the morning.”

Despite the sorry news I’d just been handed I felt my prick begin to stiffen again, and I rolled her over onto her back. “Not so fast, madame,” I said, and we had another quick one before I clothed myself again and left, as always, via the tradesmen’s entrance.

I walked the rest of the way home, though it wasn’t yet eleven and the cars were still running. When I returned home I lit a lamp in the studio and took another look at the
Morning Call
. An article therein on the Cody Wild West Show got me thinking about an old photograph I’d taken shortly after my departure from Cottonwood, and I searched through the various boxes of views until I found the case containing it. Inside were a dozen copies of the view, the only one I’d ever had much commercial success with.

Scenes of the West Series. Copyright 1874 by Wm. O. Sadlaw, Golden, Colo.

No. 11. A Buffalo Hunter Killed, Scalped, and Left on the Prairie.

It was a stereoscopic view of a dead buffalo hunter, flat on his back and attended by two kneeling soldiers, one of them unable to suppress a shit-eating grin at the prospect of being photographed, even as an element in so grisly a spectacle. Maggie and I had spotted the soldiers to our northeast late one June morning, just a few hours outside of Dodge City; one stroke of ill luck after another had reduced us to crossing the plains aboard a creaking, decrepit photographer’s wagon, but when I saw the dead hunter’s skinless, bloody skull glistening in the midday sun I knew that our fortunes had changed. Having spent the last of my meager bankroll and the contents of Maggie’s jewel box during a brief, unhappy stay in Wichita for that rotting wagon, its meager contents, and a stereographic camera considerably inferior to the one I’d left at the Cottonwood Hotel, I set about committing the pathetic vista to glass, with Maggie’s enthusiastic but inexperienced assistance. The work did not go quickly, but the soldiers were models of coöperation, taking more interest in the making of the picture than in the disposition of the hunter’s remains, and before the plate was developed I knew I had something I could sell.

Idly I now examined a copy in the light of the studio lamp; despite the primitive conditions under which it was made, it was as fine a view as I’d ever done, with the soldiers, the cadaver, and the background each occupying a distinct plane, as crisp and rounded as the moment the lens projected their image onto the wet glass.

The others in the series were competently made, including a similar composition made low to the ground of a field of dead buffalo, the thick brown fur of the nearest two or three animals like dark cotton, so luxuriant that you wanted to stick your hand through the viewer into it. But none had the attraction of the dead hunter, whose post-mortem image had been seen by more people than he likely ever met in his life; with Dodge City already behind us that day I’d had no way of learning his name.

I replaced the view and started going through the boxes with the idea of throwing out all but my own views. Soon I’d be moving, out of the studio if not out of town entirely, and I might as well travel light. Even among the views I’d made there were precious few I cared to keep, and in the end I saved only the buffalo hunter and the dead buffalo; the rest I took outside to the alley for the ashman’s children, thoughtfully leaving an old Holmes viewer atop the views for their use as well. Then I mounted the stairs and crawled into my lonely bed.

Weary as I was from the day’s exertions I thought I’d fall quickly to sleep, as was usually the case, but the memory of that day outside Dodge, of Maggie’s endearing desire to be helpful and of her exaggerated grief at the realization that she wasn’t, got me thinking about her again, and I was a long time staring at the ceiling.

I spent most of the next day making plans for the liquidation of the studio, and going from photographer to photographer trying to interest a buyer. My spirits were reasonably high; the last few years had been lean ones anyway, and San Francisco’s considerable charms had exhausted themselves on me. The prospect of leaving almost pleased me, in fact, except for the galling fact that the leaving had been imposed by others.

Early in the afternoon I stepped out of one none-too-savory studio on Mission Street and strolled past women standing in doorways, revealing as much of themselves as the law and the winter temperatures would allow. I was importuned a dozen times as I walked up the street, with no intention whatsoever of partaking in the wares offered.

“Come on upstairs,” one fallen angel said at the corner of Twenty-First Street, “see what a real California Gal can do when she sets her mind to it.” She grinned, revealing a mouthful of yellow and gray stumps. Half a block farther another informed me that I hadn’t ever seen tits like hers, and her neighbor one door down wondered when I’d last enjoyed the company of two women at once. At Twenty-Second a short, round woman tugged at my sleeve, hissing urgently.

“How’d you like to slide your prick into the very same pussy as Booth and Lincoln both did?”

That one stopped me in my tracks. “You pleasured Lincoln
and
Booth?”

She slipped her arm into the crook of mine with a serenely proprietary smile. At close range she appeared old enough to have serviced the Continental Congress, with dyed black hair showing snowy at the roots and a wizened face that hinted at a beauty whose loss had apparently robbed her of her reason. “All the Booths. Especially Junius Brutus, he would have made me his bride. General Lee, President Davis, U.S. Grant, too. President Cleveland himself could give you a testimonial on my behalf. He likes to work his way up the backstairs with a little spittle.” To illustrate, she spat into her left hand and rubbed it into the palm of her right. “That young bride of his can’t hardly walk a straight line since they wed. Now he’s out of office it’s buggery morning, noon, and nighttime, poor thing.”

I closed my eyes and tried to picture a rainbow, or a moonrise over the Adirondacks. “Sounds like you get around a little bit.”

She nodded, her paint-slathered face assuming a contemplative pout. “I’m very much in demand.” She smiled, sweetly, and curtsied, her hand still on my arm. “I used to be Laura Keene, the tragedienne.”

I had seen Miss Keene onstage once, in a production of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, and my natural inclination was to laugh at this shriveled harpy’s appropriation of her identity, but to her it was no joke, so I merely doffed my hat and apologized. “Afraid I’m in a hurry, Miss Keene, though it’s been a pleasure jawing with you.”

Her shoulders were so round her shrug was nearly imperceptible. “You’ll regret it tonight when you awake all alone dreaming of this sweet sweet pussy,” she said, and so confident was she of her allure that I lingered for a moment to hear more.

“So you knew old Honest Abe?”

“Abe Lincoln could do it five times nightly. Had to, in fact, that was what made Mrs. Lincoln into a madwoman. And when he died and she had suddenly to do without it, why that made her even madder. It’s that which finally killed her, in fact.”

She still clung to my arm as if we were about to take a stroll somewhere, though we stood rooted to the spot. I tipped my hat to her and told her I’d be on my way.

“Goddamnit,” she said, and she finally took her hand away, lifting her skirt to reveal a dark, hairy patch amidst much adipose whiteness, “how can you resist this? How can any man? This is the thing that brought Sherman through Atlanta. Thousands died in the most abject manner so he could shove himself into it quicker.”

Several of the street’s other denizens were watching us with unconcealed amusement, and I was beginning to get embarrassed. I handed her half a dollar in memory of my fallen Commander-in-Chief and took my leave, promising to visit her again soon.

Over the next few days I canceled what few sittings I had on my schedule and spent the days cataloguing my equipment and fixtures for sale; though I planned to continue as a photographer in some new locale, I had no desire to transport the 11-by-12-inch camera, or the various pieces of furniture and darkroom gear that I had accumulated over the last six or seven years. I hoped to be out of the building and of San Francisco entirely before Adelle’s sweet Arthur had a chance to bring the axe down on my head.

Several days hence I was awakened before dawn by an extraordinarily vivid auditory hallucination; I was conscious of the fact that I was in my bed in San Francisco before I knew that the voice wasn’t real.

“Sun’s up, Bill,” it said. “Time to be heading home.” The voice was Cordelia Fenn’s, and I thought it strange how precise and accurate my memory of its tone and timbre seemed, at more than a quarter century’s distance, and without my having given her more than passing thought in all that time.

By the time I’d made it home to my small Ohio town in ’65 the Great War had ended, though the massive wave of returning soldiers had not yet crested there. In my absence my mother had passed on to whatever her reward amounted to, and my uncles and aunts were all either elsewhere or dead themselves; I had no interest in my school-day chums and owned no property there, real or otherwise. I had no particular sentimental attachment to the place, and no plans to spend my life there, or any part thereof beyond the succeeding week or two. I visited the town partly for the sake of seeing my parents’ gravesites for the last time—and the first, in my mother’s case—but most especially in hopes of leaving it with Miss Cordelia Fenn hanging on my arm as my wife.