Helldorado (15 page)

“Nah.” Prophet wanted to punch the ring-tailed varmint before him. But in deference to Hell-Bringin’ Hiram, he merely slipped his quirley between his lips and drew deep. “I think I’ll saunter over and take in the show.”

“It’s a good one.” Dryden smiled. “If that lead actress filly is drunk enough, she might even show her titties.”

“Good to hear.” Prophet turned and began tramping toward the opera house whose gas lamps had grown brighter against the thickening darkness.

“One more thing.”

Prophet glanced back at Dryden, whose nostrils flared. “I ain’t afraid of you, big man.”

Prophet grinned. “Ain’t this a coincidence? I ain’t afraid of you, neither.” He pinched his hat brim at the little man, turned, and walked away.

PROPHET COULDN’T AFFORD the seventy-five-cent ticket to see
Claudette: Portrait of a Chambermaid,
but he paid the money, anyway, leaving about two dimes in his pocket. He took the handbill a young usher gave him as he passed from the opera house’s marble-floored lobby through an arched doorway of varnished wood and between two bronzed knights holding flambeaus and drifted with the crowd into the main auditorium.

He wasn’t sure what had driven him into this castle-like construction filled with smoking, sweating, half-drunk townsmen and drovers. Maybe just a general unease and a feeling that if he tumbled into bed now he’d be in for some miserable tossing and turning before sleep got ahold of him. Or maybe he needed distraction, to let go of this crazy town that his old friend Hell-Bringin’ Hiram Severin had in his crazy iron grip and forget that he’d brought Louisa to settle down here.

He’d never been in an opera house before, though he’d seen a few from the outside. But he’d heard that you could get lucky and, between actual operas that were exercises in mind-tearing, eye-gouging tedium, run into dance shows where feather-haired girls ran around in circles, taking their clothes off and kicking their legs.

That’s what Prophet needed now—pretty girls showing their tits and high-stepping in red shoes.

He made his way down the center aisle in the main auditorium, tripping over his own boots as well as the spurs of the gent in front of him as he gaped at the massive vaulted ceiling and the plush, scroll-back chairs around him and at the stage with a burgundy, gold-trimmed velvet curtain at the back of the place. The stage was about five feet higher than the main floor, and there was a mural, too dim for Prophet to make out clearly, painted on the wall above the curtain.

Gas lamps at regular intervals along the walls and the cigarettes and cigars nearly every man in the place was puffing made the place as foggy as Chickamauga after four days of hard fighting. Through this haze and from his plush seat, boot hiked on a knee, Prophet enjoyed the program just the same, though he couldn’t make heads or tails out of the plot of what turned out to be, to his dismay, a theater play with a lot of serious chatter instead of dancing and titty-jiggling.

He might have been able to fathom a little of what was going on if nearly every man in the auditorium hadn’t been hooting and hollering at the main actress, a stygian-haired, willow-limbed, big-breasted gal—Miss Gleneanne O’Shay, Prophet assumed—who frequently turned to the audience to shriek and cry and drop to her knees before slamming her head against the floor, quivering.

At one point, having been admonished by an old, gray-haired gal in a gray cape who didn’t want the chambermaid making time with her rich young son any longer and kicked her out of the village, she tried to hang herself. She was about to put her head into the noose only to be saved by the tony-looking son with a waxed handlebar mustache, whom one of the cowboys threw a beer bottle at when he refused the chambermaid’s kiss on account of his mother.

The play finally ended with the chambermaid, scorned by a rich old gent with curly silver hair, finally ending her miserable, heartbroken existence by downing poison from a small, green bottle. When she’d dropped into her bed after another long rambling cry complete with arm throwing and head wagging, her bed was lifted into a wool cloud by ropes and pulleys that Prophet could hear squawking even above the crowd’s harangues.

“Jesus Christ, you mean we sat here for over an hour and she didn’t even take her clothes off
once
?” thundered a resonant voice somewhere behind Prophet.

Prophet felt similarly disappointed though he added no catcalls and heckles to that of the others, some of whom were also throwing spitballs made from torn handbills at the curtain quickly closing on the cast taking hurried bows. He’d just risen from his chair and was about to make his way back to the lobby when someone tapped his shoulder.

He turned to see a skinny gent in a bowler hat and with longish, stringy red hair leaning toward him, an unctuous smile revealing two chipped front teeth. “Pardon me, Mr. Prophet?”

The bounty hunter frowned at him.

“Your presence has been requested backstage.” In the man’s English accent, “stage” sounded like “styge.” His breath was rife with the smell of whiskey, and his eyes seemed to glow as though a bright candle burned behind them.

“I don’t wanna go backstage.”

This threw the gent off, and he frowned as the seats around him and Prophet cleared and both were jostled by the exiting horde. The Englishman looked around as though for help but, finding none, returned his befuddled gaze to Prophet. “But the lidy requests your presence, Mr. Prophet.”

“Lidy.”

“Yessir, the lidy,” the gent repeated, jerking his head toward the closed, buffeting curtain to which spitballs clung like oversized lice.

“Oh, you mean lady,” Prophet said.

“Yessir. The actress, sir. Miss O’Shay.”

Prophet looked at the curtain and his inborn caution was etched deep in his eyes as he turned once more to the nervously bowing Englishman, who was wiping his grubby hands on his grubby, brown-and-yellow-checked trousers. “I wouldn’t know her from Jehoshaphat’s cat.”

“Well, she must know you, sir, because she asked me to come fetch you.” The little Englishman turned and beckoned. “Right this way.”

“You better not be up to somethin’.”

“I’m not up to anything, sir. I’m just the assistant stage manager, and I do what I’m told. The name’s Pickwick. Llewellyn Pickwick. If the actors and actresses want me to fetch ’em a chimpanzee, I hop the train for the nearest zoo, if you know what I’m sayin’, sir.” The Englishman chuckled and glanced over his shoulder as he made his way toward the stage along the far right wall, making sure Prophet was behind him.

“If you got a bushwhack set up,” Prophet warned, striding along behind the man as the rest of the crowd was heading in the opposite direction, “just because I don’t have my gut shredder don’t mean you won’t go down screamin’.”

As Pickwick climbed the steps along the stage’s right side, he cast a troubled look over his left shoulder, then, muttering to himself, turned forward again and pushed through the curtains.

Prophet followed, bulling through the billowing curtains that smelled heavily of tobacco smoke, kerosene, and perfume. The heavy, smelly fabric wouldn’t let him go until he gave them a hard swipe with both arms and stumbled into the backstage area, closing his right hand around his Peacemaker’s grips and looking around carefully, half expecting to be facing grim-looking gents with pistols.

Instead, there were only a handful of men in overalls and cloth caps sliding set furniture around while smoking and, in the case of two men lounging on one of the couches, holding beer bottles. One saw Prophet standing there with his hand on his holstered six-shooter and looking owly and raised his bottle to the bounty hunter with a reassuring wink.

“Wasn’t all
that
bad—was it?” he said, chuckling.

Chagrined, Prophet let his hand fall away from the revolver’s handle and continued following the scruffy English gent across to the rear of the stage and down a set of stairs into a dingy, candlelit basement until Pickwick stopped at a curtained doorway and doffed his hat.

“Mr. Prophet to see you, Miss O’Shay!”

Someone made a slight choking sound behind the door, and a strangled female voice said impatiently, “Send him in, Llewellyn. Send him in, for cryin’ in the king’s crown!”

Pickwick stepped aside, throwing the curtain back with one hand, bowing, and gesturing Prophet through the door with a regal, exaggerated flourish of his free arm. The bounty hunter wouldn’t have been more befuddled if the queen of Timbuktu had summoned him across an ocean. There was something vaguely familiar about the woman’s voice, so it was with less trepidation and more curiosity that he tramped slowly through the door and felt the English gent drop the curtain into place behind him.

As Pickwick’s footsteps dwindled into the distance, Prophet looked around the small, tawdry-looking dressing room that was in sharp contrast to the immaculately appointed theater above ground. A creamy-skinned redhead sat bare-legged and all but nude at a crude table appointed with a mirror that leaned back against the rough, stone wall.

The woman smiled at him, rich, ruby lips spread wide. Her thick, red hair hung down over her shoulders and arms, and she sat with her bare knees facing Prophet, her heels lifted so that she leaned slightly forward on her tiptoes.

“Holy shit in a nun’s privy,” Prophet muttered, his eyes growing wide with recognition as he slowly doffed his ragged hat. “
Sivvy?
Sivvy
Hallenbach
?”

“Oh, Lou!” the girl fairly screamed, bolting up from her rickety chair and running across the cluttered room, her sheer black wrap billowing out like diaphanous wings, exposing her breasts.

The saloon girl whom Prophet had once spent a winter with in an isolated cabin near Devil’s Lake, Dakota Territory, after their stage had been run to ground by rampaging Sioux, threw her arms around the bounty hunter’s neck and pressed her delectable breasts against his chest, hugging him tightly.

“Oh, Lou!” she squealed, tucking her feet back against her thighs and hanging from his neck. “You don’t know how happy I was to see you out there!”

Prophet held the girl tightly, genuinely thrilled to see her again. It had been three years since they’d parted in Bismarck after a winter that had nearly killed them but during which they’d made the best of things, not the least of which was sharing body warmth. He’d known a lot of women in his thirty-some-odd years, but none except Sivvy Hallenbach could he have spent a Dakota winter with in a two-room abandoned stage station cabin, and not killed her or been killed by her.

“That was you out there?” he said, looking down at her as he smoothed her red hair back from her temples. He looked across the room at a long, jet wig hanging from a nail on a square-hewn ceiling post.

“Sure was,” Sivvy said, setting her feet back down on the floor and pulling her head back away from him, grinning up at him. “I come a ways in a few years, haven’t I, Lou? How’d you like the performance?”

Prophet said haltingly, “Sure, sure . . . well, I liked it just fine. What I could hear above the caterwauling . . .”

“Ohh!”
she cried, her face crumpling with irritation. “The men in these mountains wouldn’t know a world-class performance if it ran up between their legs and bit ’em in the balls. All they want is to see a girl naked!”

Prophet chuckled. Sivvy might be donning wigs and performing in shows that he couldn’t understand, but she hadn’t lost the salty tongue that had kept him in stitches through that entire Dakota winter. He noticed also that she hadn’t regained her inhibitions, if she’d ever had any, for he admired her naked, pale, pink-tipped orbs rubbing against his denim shirt as her sheer wrap hung back behind her nicely rounded hips.

“If you could have heard the words, Lou,” Sivvy said, caressing his neck with the thumbs of her entwined hands, “you’d have been right proud of your old Sivvy. I studied up with Mr. Simeon Nash Nye and Maude Granger over in Pueblo, and I traveled with them around the mountains putting on
The Brook
—that’s by Lord Byron—and several Shakespeare plays, and I really cut my teeth on that stuff.

“Mr. Nash and Miss Granger told me last fall they thought I was ready to go off on my own, and I ain’t seen neither since I took up with this show here, but I’m told by those who know about such things, that they can really see their influence in my work. I’m thinkin’, Lou, after a few more performances in these parts, I might head on over to Denver and then gradually make my way back East. Oh, wouldn’t you be so proud of your Sivvy if you heard she was performing in
New York City
?”

“If you performed that high in the golden clouds, I might just ride on over and take in the show myself. I bet I could even hear the words back there amongst the civilized folk. Bet they’d be hangin’ on every word, silent as pack rats in the parson’s closet!”

“We’d ride in hacks, and go out to all the finest restaurants, even the French ones.” Sivvy pressed her cheek against his chest once more. “Oh, it’s so good to see you again, you big saddle tramp, you! What’re you doing here, anyway? Haven’t heard from you or about you in so long, I figured you were nothin’ but a pile of big old bones bleachin’ out in the bottom of some deep canyon.”

Prophet opened his mouth to speak, but the girl clamped her hands over his lips. “Let’s catch up later. Let me throw some duds on, then let’s you and me head on over to my first-class digs at the Golden Slipper and diddle like minks!”

“YOU NEVER KILLED anyone?” Louisa asked Miguel Encina as they sat along the gurgling, drumming creek in the twilight outside Juniper.

“Nope.” The young banker shook his head. He was perched on a tree branch just a few feet above the ground, his back against the trunk, one leg stretched out along the branch before him. “Thank god it never came to that. I have my father and Sheriff Severin to thank for it, too.”