The Book of Duels (14 page)

Ms. Mintoria Moran, 28,

Only Daughter of the Moran Clan

 

W
hen our skiff struck the shore, I snatched the derringer set beside Doc Reynolds and hopped out the boat, water licking my ankles, and ran to Mr. McCarthy—my Alex, my Lex—the wind whispering against my thighs—oh, may he ravage the world but not my Cadet!—I cannot bring myself to consider him on a bier beside his brothers, not my Cadet, brother and nephew and son, born so small and squeaking in that Natchez nunnery where Father sent me to swell and whom I carried in, and fed with, my own body—certainly not now when it is spring and the first crocus fingers have pushed through the wild moist earth calling for human fingers to push back—to plant seeds, not bodies—these thoughts go hissing like kettle steam whistling through my mind mingling with the odor of Lex’s skin—that deep scent of sandalwood makes me a weak-boned six-year-old in Father’s lap, wagon-bound home from market, sacks of vegetables stacked behind us—I was only going to fire a warning so he might lay down his arms and take me up in his as he did this morn when I poured his tea in Mother’s fine wedding china—that smell came over me and my bosom swelled and I swooned and spilled his drink on the red parlor rug and took his face in my hands and kissed him hard on his lips and pressed him to me and he pressed me back, kissing me—John walked in and slapped me and slapped Lex too—John, the same brother who came to my bed and put his hand across my mouth and done those things he did and said it was all my own silly fault—if Lex had killed only John, or only all three of them boys, I’d still have run away with
him as far as San Francisco—instead he accepted Cadet’s challenge with all the passion of a man asked to pare an apple—so I come to this island for the first time to hear the judge call
Vale—

I run yet faster and Lex stares at me and stands still as his walking stick, his long curled locks black against his bone-pale skin, his silk-lined cape whipping in the wind, holding that position like a half crucifix, and of a sudden, he folds his arm up under his chin and the smoke rises ’round his jaw hasps even before I hear the shot—his scalp lifts as if he were merely tipping his top hat to me and he steps back and bows and lists and falls—I am breathless but there to catch him in my arms, to rest him in my lap, to put my lips to his moist hair, sticky with the same garnet that splays across my white skirts, and the sandalwood smell now couples with an iron taint and he jabbers through shaky lips about matricide and marriage and one night in a castle with a son who should have been killed.

Alexander “Lex” McCarthy Jr. 28,

Winner of Nineteen Previous Contests

 

I
stand here again on this towhead spit of land, Father’s etch-handled Manton warm in my hand, my thumb web tattooed black from all the powder I’ve spent today—I try to read my future in the markings but all I see are streaks of dark chaos, and now this last one, the baby, has come like his brothers to be brought low by the best shot artist ever known and it is a shame: during my three weeks here I’ve admired this lad, rambunctious and guileless as a baby raccoon, the kind of kid I might have been if Father hadn’t proven himself coward and damned me to this life of constant killing—though that’s not the truth—I was born a killer, carried my mother off on my very first day of life, and I came to this estate to take it for my own, to build a castle overlooking the river—then I met Mintoria—I had to take her too—Cadet could have called me Father, instead he called for my blood, even though I put my last ball in his brother’s heart and the one before right through a vest buttonhole, and for the first one, John, I won’t even ask God’s mercy—he invited me here, one more speculator to rob, and, as often happens with money and women, our business ended with a bullet in his eye. I saw him look at Mintoria, covetous as Amnon, just as I see her now, dainty feet churning the loam, her skirts held in one fist—and what’s this, a small sidearm in the other—running straight at me. I draw a line in the sand with the heel of my boot, take careful aim at her final brother, his eyes slammed shut, and I can go to my grave certain he too would have fallen on this island—Father put his pistol skyward and sent me surely to hell—how many
have I killed since then, their faces coming, twisted, to me each night—I can never
delope
nor allow Mintoria to enter this horror of honor and death, so I decide on a thing I’ve always feared, and the judge hollers,
Vale—

Knowing there is no shot as worthy as my own, I press the barrel under my chin and squeeze out a prayer—the wind rips through my skull and my bullet carries me into a million falling stars and I’m stretched so far I can’t even see my own boots—Mintoria is beside me, pray—I try to explain but I can’t ’cause the time has come for me to join my father, Heaven still at a damned remove.

Catfight in a Cathouse: Carol v. LaRouche

Two Whores Brawling in a Storyville Brothel during the Last Month of Legalized Prostitution, New Orleans, Louisiana,

April 13, 1917

Cora Carol, 19,

Prostitute in French Emma’s Circus

 

P
ap sets his lens just so and measures the light and lights the flambeau and measures again before he duck-waddles his dicty self back to the camera and whines in his high nasal voice,
Stay still now, Sistuh
—for the five dollars he offers I’d stretch his bellows let alone sit here naked on a clean couch—I shake, laughing, and he says,
Corpse-still now, les ya ruin da print
, and I wish for a flash I’d been a stillborn and not a trick baby delivered in this Tenderloin District of men, though they mean very little to me save the money they bring, like when I walked in on Ma as she dissolved the purple salts in a washrag to clean her john who stood there naked and limp, potbellied and hairy, gazing at me in my white party dress that made me look even younger than my ten years allowed, and he said,
Why don’t you give your mama a hand?
and I shrugged and took up the cloth with no more thought than when each Monday I’d take the gals’ bedsheets out—all yellowed with sweat and spilled seed and Rolly Rye—to scrub and tug them clean, which I did to his prick and it swoll in my palm, straining against its own fleshy self, and so I squeezed it more till its top pushed out like some purple-headed turtle and the man moaned and tangled his fingers in my locks and tugged my head back till I saw his eyes closed and Ma guffawed,
Well hell, honey, go on ahead
, and I froze till she put her warm fingers over mine and we tugged together only twice more before he spit his load on my forearm, which I yanked back as if it was snakebit, and Ma laughed hard—hair and boobies bouncing, head thrown so far back I could count her cavities—and his grip loosened in my hair and my scalp
tingled good and he slumped down in the chair, fuddled his drawers midway up, and took from his pocket a five-dollar tip and Ma come up with a clean rag and said,
Oh my
, and took me next day to Krauss Department Store where I bought white gloves and opera-length stockings like any other whore.

Now Vivian crosses the floor—the odor of rain and roses, all legs and eyes and a sneer spread across her fine face—under her breath she says,
Bulldagger
, and I’ve never felt shame for being a whore any more than for being human, but just now I feel as if she’s caught me diddling myself to a sticky picture of her split lips, my nipples stiffen and as she passes between me and the lens, touching her chippie ribbon, I leap from the couch and snatch that bitch by her long hair and I bang her against the wall.

Vivian LaRouche, 15,

The Flying Virgin, Featured Attraction in French Emma’s Circus

 

I
walked in the parlor and saw Bellocq acting prissy as a queen in heat, fluffing a pillow and worrying the knot in his soft pink scarf, set to make a likeness of ugly ass Cora, the heavy degenerate—God only knows why, when not one man I’ve known has screwed her in the light of day nor lamp—when he should be making my picture again, because I’m the one here the men come to see, when in the theater I hang from my silk ropes, swinging bare-breasted and bewinged above braying Emma, while she is mounted by her rutting Great Dane, my braids rising and falling against my pale back, my feet pointed far out as I can stretch them, admiring my own knees and thighs and thrush, and I know the men have paid dearly to watch me and touch themselves—I can’t read a lick except that look in a man’s eyes, but Daddy wouldn’t even glance my way when he dropped me here three years ago today—Emma putting that stack of money in his left hand, the tan line precise from the wedding ring he’d buried with Mother—I’m going to be a star on the big screen like Lillian Gish or Marguerite Clark, whose films I’ve snuck out of the District and into the Quarter to see, and though I know if I’m caught over there I’ll be arrested or beaten or raped, I will continue to cross busy Basin and Rampart Streets on down to the Louis Gala House where they show films for a nickel apiece, and as I sit in the dark watching their large eyes on screen, I say to myself,
Vivian, that is going to be you someday soon, and Daddy, I swear, you will have to pay to see me again
.

As I cross the wide-plank floors, I happen to pull the string of my dress and it comes undone and my chest rises against the lace and pushes it apart and I stare first at Bellocq and then at his camera’s one big eye and my lips swell and sweat and begin to itch a bit—does he touch himself when he holds the portrait of my nakedness?—my head snaps back and I’m pinned on the wall with that dyke’s breath in my ear and I bite her forearm and twist her chin back and bury my thumb in her eye and we crash to the floor and she’s pounding my head into the wood and I wish I had my razor to undo her with, because though I am very small, I am not an easy row to hoe.