Savage Girl (3 page)

“Where?” I said.

Tu-Li bowed imperceptibly and motioned with her open palm, a maître d’ showing diners to their table.

An alley ran alongside the saloon. Lined on both sides with carts, booths, tents and hovels, the pathetic offerings of peddlers, hawkers and cheapjacks of the type that crowded the whole town, ancillary commerce to the mines.

At the mouth of the alley, a hand-painted sign.

SAVAGE GIRL
, it read.

Or rather the sign had originally spelled out
SAVIJ GIRL
, and then someone with more orthographic sophistication had come along and corrected it.

“Here?” my mother said.

Tu-Li nodded. “You will see,” she said.

The sign, the misspelling and the subsequent rectification somehow struck me as particularly dispiriting. I could read a whole history in it. The entire alleyway stank of poverty, failure and claims that hadn’t proved out. I was ready to pop over to Costello’s for a glass of beer and some target practice.

Upon the apparition of three tourists and a Zuni hermaphrodite approaching the mouth of their little hell, the vendors in the alleyway of broken dreams woke up and began to beckon Anna forward. She was, in her European finery, clearly the mark.

Come buy my patched-together mule harness, come buy my rusty Ames shovel, my mended socks, my rags, my nightmare.

No, no, no. I witnessed my mother at the moment of decision. She would definitely not venture into the little alley.

Tu-Li had led us on a goose chase.

Anna Maria would turn around, push her way down “A” Street, retreat to her hotel suite or, further, to our family’s private railcars, parked on a siding of the Virginia & Truckee line, waiting to whisk her across the endless plains to the East, out of the tiresome, ever-present alkali wind, back to civilization and happiness and our clean, dustfree, sparkling existence in Manhattan.

“No, no, thank you,” Anna said.

“I think you will like it,” said Tu-Li. “It is what you look for.”

“Absolument pas,”
Anna said.

But I had a different idea.

Beside the words, the weathered wood of the Savage Girl sign had a smudge upon it. I leaned forward. The sign maker had drawn a picture, very crude, a hairy animal countenance with oversize, oddly human eyes and a woman’s mouth painted in lurid, now-faded red.

The hand of the wind stirred the dust in the little lane. I shivered, feeling a frisson of . . . of exactly what? Fear? Attraction? I couldn’t say.

Anna Maria had planned a rendezvous with my father at the Brilliant Mine just before sunset. We had arranged to meet Freddy after completing our walkabout through town. By the slant of the sun, Anna Maria could see that it was getting close to the agreed-upon time, and she wanted to hustle us along.

“I think I will go down for a peek,” I said. The dirt of the alleyway had been laid with muddy duckboards.

“We must join your father, Hugo,” she said. “Tu-Li, Tahktoo.”

“Come along with me,” I said to Anna Maria. “You who have forced open so many closed doors in your life.”

“Flatterer,” she said.

“Just a brief look,” I said. “Unless you’re fearful.”

She hesitated. Then she took my arm and we headed into the alley. My mother could never resist a challenge.

Avoiding the peddlers tugging at our sleeves, we followed Tu-Li along the little lane. There the alley ended at a tongue-and-groove
façade with a plain pine door, two blacked-out and boarded-over windows on either side. A barn of some sort, constructed of exhausted, peeling wood.

The building stood at the bottom of the slope, but the ground behind it fell away into a gulch before rising, so that which we stood before actually represented the building’s second story. My mother looked over to me, on her face a bride-at-the-altar mix of anticipation and disquiet.

The portal’s homely plank boards had a peephole. As I stepped forward, the door cracked open.

Blocking the threshold appeared one of the oddest-looking beings I have ever encountered. A human toad of sorts. His slits were like eyes. A white-coated tongue emerged from a lipless mouth, and behold, he spoke.

“We don’t allow no women.”

Addressing my mother, who from my experience was easily up to the task of dealing with wart-giving creatures of all stripes.

“Young man,” she said, giving his humanity the benefit of the doubt, “you must let us in.”

“No women and no Celestials,” the Toad said. He looked at Tu-Li, who stared back at him evenly.

“No women?” Anna said. She pulled the berdache forward. “What about my friend?”

The doorkeeper could not wrap his mind around Tahktoo. I witnessed the tiny engine of the man’s brain seize up and begin to smoke.

We had gotten this far, and we weren’t about to turn back.

Anna Maria said, “I’m entering.”

“We don’t allow no women.”

“Not allowing,” my mother said, “is not allowed.”

More brain sizzle from the doorkeeper. He couldn’t handle that one either.

Then, as if he had been jerked up to heaven by an abrupt act of rapture, the Toad suddenly disappeared with a yelp.

In his place stood a huckster in dundrearies and a blue-checkered suit, smiling, bowing, gesturing us forward. His nostrils flared. He had the look of a man who smelled money.

The Toad might not recognize a three-hundred-dollar silk gown, imported by Anna Maria this year from Worth in Paris, but the huckster most certainly did.

“Madam, madam, please, you are most welcome,” he said, correctly assessing my mother as the true power in the group. “My name is Professor Dr. Calef Scott. I will assure your safety and comfort.”

“Thank you,” Anna Maria said.

“My assistant, Mr. R. T. Flenniken, has his marching orders but, like so many individuals of limited capacities, is burdened by a pronounced inability to modify his instructions with good judgment. In short, he is a fool.”

During this speech he ushered us into his establishment. If his assistant resembled a toad, Scott himself was a stuffed duck.

I waited for my eyes to adjust to the interior but then understood that the barn was not just dim, it was wholly dark. Canvas tent cloth had been stapled to the walls, obstructing the late-afternoon light coming through the gaps in the planking and also, I realized, keeping out the peering eyes of the nonpaying public.

“We ask a small token, madam.” Dr. Scott winked, and my mother pushed a gold eagle into his hand.

It was too much. The dollar entrance fee for each of the four of us, times five. Scott smiled like a happy child.

“This way, if you please,” he said. “I will place you in complete segregation from the hoi polloi.”

We had entered upon a gallery or balcony of some sort, a narrow platform that ran the length of the barn, with a sagging railing marking its far edge.

The gallery gave out onto the two-storied barn proper. We stared down from our second level to the rectangular floor below, thirty by fifty feet, an unswept dirt surface scattered with straw. In one corner stood a large cage, its door haphazardly shut, a soiled blanket tossed over it that obscured its interior, barely visible in the gloom anyway.

On the opposite side of the space from the cage, an odd edifice, a tall, circular galvanized tub, perhaps five feet high and almost the
same in diameter, its lip spilling over with water. A stock-dipping tank or some such.

A slim pipe angled down from high on the far side of the barn, eye level with we who stood in the gallery, positioned so that it dribbled an uneven stream of scalding water into the tub. The pipe, and the surface of the bath itself, threw off wisps of steam into the murky shadows of the interior.

Tapping into no doubt one of the myriad local hot springs. The overflow from the tub drained away down a gutter cut into the dirt floor.

“Where is she?” called out a greasy workman among the audience. The five-o’clock show, the second of six performances daily.

The ragged company of spectators packed close to the rail. I counted seventeen of them, with more coming every minute. The dude beside me casually tossed the lit stub of his cheroot to the floor of the gallery, not bothering to stamp it out. I stepped on the burning fag, thinking of the firetrap barn we were crowded into, and the fellow glared at me as though I had somehow trespassed.

Whiskey vapor, tobacco smoke, sweat, exhalations of eggy bad breath. The foul human stink engulfed us more as the audience grew in size.

Far from being made nervous by the hurly-burly around her, my mother assumed an expression of intelligent intellectual engagement, as though she were observing some indigenous foreign tribe, that she might one day lecture upon it.

Dr. Scott maneuvered us to a corner of the gallery, where a chastened R. T. Flenniken, whom it amused the doctor to dress in livery, quickly positioned four rickety wooden chairs, fawning and smiling all the while.

Scott made as if to withdraw but addressed Anna. “Madam, I discern you may be a woman of some parts. If you wish to discuss the natural phenomenon you are about to witness, I will make myself available after the spectacle.”

He backed away, bowing.

Then, at the last moment, his glance fell on me. With the practiced eye of a showman assessing his audience, he gave a secret smile and tugged at my arm. Pulling me away from my mother, he physically positioned me in the absolute far corner of the balcony, right up at the front, shoving aside a drover dressed in chaps to put me there.

“Keep a sharp lookout and you’ll see something,” Scott whispered.

Then he left.

A long, restless beat.

“Where the hell is she?” the workman repeated. “I paid my dollar!”

“Shut up,” someone else said.

By this I understood that the crowd was made up of an uneasy mix of first-timers and regulars.

Directly below us, on the floor of the barn, a torch blazed up in the darkness, wielded by Dr. Scott. He began to speak.

“Gentlemen!” he shouted. Then, with a bow toward my mother, “Ladies.”

He waved his torch in a circle as though it were a baton. The pine-pitch flame traced loops and flowery arcs in the darkness.

“Cast your minds into the blank and trackless emptiness of the Sierra wilderness. Savage, wild, forsaken by God and man. Thronged with ferocious packs of bloodthirsty beasts!”

A high, keening howl tore through the darkness of the barn, and I nearly jumped out of my skin.

2

Two hours later my groin tightened and my stomach fluttered as I felt myself dropping down, down, down, a thousand feet deep into the earth, riding in a sweltering wrought-iron hoist.

My mother, Tu-Li and the berdache remained above, seated comfortably inside the clapboard office of the Brilliant Mining and Milling Company. I had volunteered to go down and fetch my father for them.

I was assigned Colm Cullen, security chieftain at the Brilliant Mine, a guide to the underworld for the stripling son of the firm’s owner. I met him up top, at the mouth of the mine, where he seized my hand with a grip that could mangle steel.

“I’d like to see my father,” I said, sounding, to my dismay, like a child wanting his daddy. “Will you take me to him?”

Stepping into the lift, I craned my head up to the purple sky above me, with just a dusting of stars emerging. Below, the blacker pit.

We rode down in the “Elephant,” the mine’s number-one steam hoist, which hurtled fully as fast as a train. The heat rose up to greet us like a fist.

“Gives the impression of warmth, don’t it?” Colm said. False bonhomie with the owner’s son.

It did for sure give that exact impression. Other mines I had ventured into—just a cautious step into one here and there, never beyond where I could safely see the light of day, being afflicted with a bit of physical impatience in tight places, “claustrophobia,” my physiology professor labeled it—were cold and clammy. This one a steam bath. As wet as the tropics, but dirtier.

“Can I take a look at your iron?” I asked.

Colm Cullen had a big LeMat pistol strapped to his thigh, and when he unholstered it for me, I reached out, and it, too, was hot to the touch.

Sharp-jawed, red-haired Colm wore a navy flannel shirt and navy work pants tucked into his knee-high boots. All miners preferred dark blue clothing, he explained, since it showed the dirt less. He had a bit of a squint and an almost invisible scar that ran along his cheekbone. He appeared coolly unaffected by heat or vertigo.

I must have looked a little dazed, still in recovery from my recent encounter with Savage Girl in the barn.

A breast, as white as any moon
 . . .

I was not helped by the uniform that the Brilliant Mining and Milling Company had given me to wear: heavy rubberized shoes, thick cotton shirt and trousers, a felt hat and, for this swift trip down into the mine, a coarse woolen coat.

The car did not ease into the mine. It dropped. The grille to the side of me—the hoist remained open on two sides—scorched my fingertips when I brushed it by mistake. Another cage passed us, rising up with a full load of ore that looked like a heap of blue-black sand. Steam rose from the pile.

“Do you know what the body of a man sounds like when it falls a thousand feet?” asked Colm.

A thousand feet was how deep we were going.

Below, when the cage crashed to a stop, I stumbled forward into a finished-off gallery. I was aware of almost nothing but heat and closeness. The rock walls glistened with water, and drifts of vapor obscured the timbered reaches above me. I saw no one but could hear human voices. The acrid smell of nitroglycerin.

A tremendous bang sounded somewhere close, its echo feeding off itself until the reverberation engulfed the whole space.

“This is level one!” shouted Colm. “We got two more below, a thousand feet then another thousand feet more.”

Pumps and pipes pulled steaming water out of the walls and ran it up to the surface. Otherwise, Colm told me, scalding floods would spout from the cavern’s sides. In the early days of the Comstock, untold numbers of mine workers had been boiled alive.

“Do you have an egg?”

“What?” I said.

“Most of the tourists bring an egg,” Colm said. The water down here, he said, had boiled its share of souvenir eggs. Someone once brought a big one from an ostrich, and the waters had cooked it fine. Hadn’t I got one?

“I’m not a tourist,” I said, although in my ill-fitting rig I am sure I looked the part. “I’m just here to find my father.”

We crossed into the first chamber, a square space barely taller than a man and about the same distance wide. Then into a larger gallery. Rough-hewn timber stock and plank ladders stood propped up from one end to the other.

Deeper and deeper we penetrated into the mine. Workers stripped to the waist, their shoulders and biceps gleaming like marble, wielding sledgehammers and drill bits, jamming charges into seams in the quartzite rock. The pick handles burned so hot that the job required gloves.

I suffocated. From the heat or the fear of small spaces, I wasn’t sure, but I felt a fountain of panic bubbling within my chest.
Get me out of here!

Thousands of candles illuminated the gallery, flickering faintly, their tiny warmth swallowed within the larger furnace, like puffs of breath in a cyclone. The candle boxes affixed along the crumbly walls, Colm said, doubled as receptacles for human excrement.

Bowels of the earth indeed.

Staggering, I extended my arm and grabbed for Colm’s shoulder. It felt hard, like a seam of rock itself. I would faint.

“Hugo!”

“Father,” I said, half swallowing the word.

Freddy made his way into the chamber, pink-faced, his graying walrus mustache drooping, spangled with tiny droplets of water. He had shed his coat, and his cotton shirt stuck to his torso, having been wet through and through.

With Freddy were a half dozen men, his engineers, mine foremen, surveyors.

“What are you doing down here, son? It’s dangerous for you to come!” Meaning I had been sick and was too weak for such exertions. I had been down, over the past year, not only with emotional illness but physical ones: erysipelas, infections of the eye, then bronchitis resolving into pneumonia.

“I’m fine,” I lied. I was always the weakling in the family. My younger brother, Nicholas, who wasn’t along on this Western trip, was the strong and sturdy one, more like my father.

I had seen Freddy just that morning, but it was different encountering him in the mine he owned, catered to and cosseted by his minions.

“Isn’t it a marvel?” Tom Colfax, Freddy’s construction supervisor, said, gesticulating so broadly that his arm swept the cavern’s wall. “Every day we bless the name of Philip Deidesheimer. All these timbers.”

A honeycomb of wood framed up the soaked, sludgy walls of the mine. The famous German engineer Deidesheimer had invented the structural design, enabling the further disemboweling of the earth, keeping the death toll among miners down to an acceptable number.

“Square-set timbering,” said Colfax. “Six hundred million feet of timbers, buried now in Virginia’s mines.”

“That’s an amount of wood enough to build a town of thirty thousand two-story frame houses,” said one of the vaguer underlings.

Freddy reached over and gripped my arm, seeing what none of the others saw, that the heat was about to overcome me.

“We send down ninety-five pounds of ice each day for every man working,” he said, propping me up. “And if you’ll accompany me, you can have a lemonade up top.”

Cullen and Colfax stayed below while Father and I took the Elephant upward. Rising slower than it had dropped, but still fast enough to make my stomach heave.

Do not vomit on Father, I told myself.

“Why’d you come down, son? I told you not to.”

“Anna Maria and I have something to show you,” I said. “Tu-Li found it.”

He went silent, the hoist cranking upward. Do you know how the body of a man sounds, I asked him, when it drops a thousand feet? I provided the answer as well as the question.

“Like the whistle of a cannonball,” I said. “Just exactly like the whistle of a cannonball.”

Freddy did not respond. Unlike Colm Cullen, he had probably never heard a cannonball scream past him, having not attended the War of the Rebellion. Freddy had in fact paid substitutes to serve in his place, a common enough practice for the wealthy.

I couldn’t read my father. As I often did, I felt as though I were disappointing him. Going into a swoon on a mine visit.

Back on the surface, I immediately recovered my equilibrium, my nausea vanishing to leave behind only a faint sense of embarrassment.

My mother came to us across the equipment-cluttered yard.

“Friedrich,” she said to my father by way of greeting. “You are going to want to see this.”

•   •   •

An Indian drumbeat, hollow and repetitive.

The deep-voiced tones of Dr. Calef Scott sounding in the dim barn.

“In a draw in a rock-choked valley, John Trent and his pregnant wife, Dollie Bertles Trent, both from Georgia, had built themselves a sagebrush hut. The lowest habitation, just above a coyote hole. The valley being the site of a Paiute-Pawnee massacree, the newcomers all ignorant of its evil reputation, its hauntings by the ghosts of the dead, Trent and his wife toiled to establish a mining claim.”

Freddy stood with Anna at the balcony railing. Tu-Li and the berdache had not returned to the Savage Girl show with us, but though I had seen the whole spectacle that afternoon, I judged myself eager to witness it again.

Scott continued with his tale. “Espantosa, the Spanish call the little valley where John Trent unknowingly sited his humble domicile, a name that means ‘frightful or menacing.’ Americans have a different name for it. ‘Satan’s Vale.’

“There, on a black night in 1860 marred by a thunderous storm,
Dollie Trent, large with child, enters labor. The birth went to complications. The agonized prospective father leaps aboard his mule and rides to seek help—a doctor, a midwife, anyone who can aid his wife, wholly maddened by the pangs of birth.”

The same script as this afternoon exactly, identical cadences, Dr. Scott applying matching theatrical emphasis to the phrases.

I left my father’s side to claim my former place at the far corner of the gallery but found a lanky, clean-shaven cowboy occupying it. He stared intently at the cage on the floor of the barn. He knew what was about to happen. He had been here before. I attempted to move in on him. Without looking, he shouldered me backward.

“As Trent rides on his heroic quest”—I braced myself, and there was a tremendous crash—“a thunderous bolt of lightning strikes him from his mount, and he falls dead.”

The “thunder,” an immense sheet of tin, manipulated by Scott’s toady down below, died to silence. Into which rose an eerie sound, a newborn baby weeping (a kid goat, squeezed and poked by R. T. Flenniken). Then assorted yelps and growls (a trained dog) overcame the weeping and also died to silence.

“When neighbors arrive at the little brush hut the next morning, they find Dollie Trent lying dead. There is no sign of the infant. The baby, it is surmised, had been dragged off and eaten by the rabid beasts of the wild. Fang marks showed on the woman’s breast. A pack of wolves left tracks in blood upon the scene.”

Scott pronounced this last in perfect Shakespearean iambics. “A
pack
of
wolves
left
tracks
in
blood
up
on
the
scene
.” I could only imagine what my father must think of all this. But I was more intent on claiming my former vantage point at the rail. I nudged the cowboy. He turned to look at me, surly.

I held up five fingers.

Understanding immediately, he shook his head.

I used both my hands, spread out ten fingers. He nodded, I gave him a ten-dollar silver piece, and, grudgingly, he moved aside.

Freshly ensconced, looking down into the gulf of the barn, I silently mouthed the words:
Our story has only begun.

“Our story has only begun!” Scott shouted. “Ten years later a lowly shepherd is confronted in sheer panic by a pack of lobo wolves ravaging his herd. But that is not the true terror. Running alongside the wild beasts, dashing about manically on all fours, is the apparition of a human girl, naked as the wind!”

The door of the cage on the barn floor clanged open, the crowd in the gallery above surged forward, the balcony rail groaning with their weight, and two forms appeared down below at once.

A bleating sheep.

And the quicksilver outline of an adolescent female, indifferently clothed, crossing the darkened space with amazing speed, slamming into the poor animal and knocking it senseless.