The Bully of Order (2 page)

Then the bullwhacker's boy, ten or twelve years old, caught up to the rampagers and dove beneath their yoke and chains as they came at him, and caught the ring that held them and gave it a yank, and another and another, but they didn't stop. He was trapped there in the middle, as in a raft of logs. And on they went toward the wharf, with the boy hanging from the oxbow by one arm while tugging on the chain with the other. Then one of the dogs caught a hoof in the ribs and another was gored in the neck and flung lifelessly against the wall of Porterfield's Junk Shop. All of a sudden the ferals ceased their attack and the survivors limped back to the trash pile or cat kill or whatever they'd been nosing in the alley before the accident. Seeing that the dogs had fled, the boy yelled something to the bullwhacker and beckoned him in. The man shoved his whip into his back pocket and hurried forward, making loops with the lead as he went. He tossed the rope to the boy, who quickly hitched it to the ring and threw it back to the bullwhacker. Two times around the nearest post and under tension the animals staggered to a halt and heaved in air. The bullwhacker held the rope and craned his neck upward to see how the post was attached to the beam, furrowed his brow, wrapped the rope around his fist, not letting go. With the boy calming them, the animals dropped their heads and sniffed the ground for water. Someone in the crowd cheered and then they all did. The bullwhacker nodded to the boy and the boy ducked and stepped free of the animals and stood proudly in the street, held up his hat and took a bow.

Just then, from around the corner, a doubtful flower appeared and graced the muddy collusion. She wore a bright yellow hat and a white dress.
Narcisse des près
, she pointed and said something to the bullwhacker and blew a kiss at the boy, and then walked into the street and around the accident, careful to avoid the broken boards, the leering toughs cowering on the walk. She lifted her feet quickly from every footfall as if she was fit to dance or come August enter a show at the fair. White here is brave and temporary, steam in the windows, ice in the pan.

All at once I recognized this woman as someone who not long ago had come to my office to have a boil on her tailbone lanced. She knew what she needed because she'd had it done before. The infection had returned and was bothering her awfully. She said she couldn't sit down and had to sleep on her side. When she'd undressed and presented herself for the procedure I saw that she had whip scars on her legs and buttocks. The incision I made was three inches long. I paralleled the scar from the previous surgeon. It had to be incredibly painful, but she didn't make a sound and squirmed only for the briefest moment. The drain from the boil wafted upward in that sulfuric way they do, and after I'd wicked most of the pus and blood out of the wound I removed a cyst the size of a guinea egg. The relief she felt was immediate. Seeing her now as she was, completely changed, I imagined her to be a new woman, de facto citizen, a person formerly but never again employed in what was most likely whorish business. I couldn't help but think that I'd drained the poison from her very life. Such is the vanity of physicians.

The bullwhacker's boy was wiping the oxen down with a burlap sack while the bullwhacker patiently dabbed at their wounds and talked to them. Down the street, men were standing around the trampled horse; the other one was already gone. The beams and the cart remained, blocking the street from all but foot traffic.

The new sheriff, Chacartegui, would need to be summoned, and if an agreement couldn't be made, Judge Lombard too. Who pays for the street? For the walk and Sheasby's wall? The injured horse? Like mother and child, property damage holds the hand of compensation. I wanted to know the reason they weren't on Satsop Avenue like they were supposed to be. It'd be all anyone talked about tomorrow. Somebody might even earn a fine, according to our new and rickety version of the Twelve Tables. Laws are the ax blade, and the enforcement of those laws is the handle.

A work gang arrived with peavey and chain and moved a few beams to the side, and then dragged the ruined cart, the whole crushed mess, to the edge of the wharf, and with a backward glance at the bullwhacker, an acquiescent nod, they shoved it in. It wasn't his, after all; it came from the new mill, name burned on the rail: Boyerton.

While in my corner perch, my bank of windows, I'd learned that the business of things was at the edge, the shadow, the worn corner. The water's edge, the road's edge, youth's. This place we lived was the pool of honing oil on the blade. Say this happens: Due to the wrecked cart a ship is left waiting at the docks for its cargo. The crew gets drunk in the lull and a deckhand lips off to a first mate and somebody is sent walking or worse, thrown overboard in a tussle, and when he hits he breaks his neck against a stray timber. All because the oxcart failed to arrive. And where did the neck-breaking timber come from? Who can say? Perhaps from the busted oxcart. Who built the ship, forged the blade? What drives the boom? Accidents? Providence? Destiny? It was a bull force that moved it, but delicate too. A wife's gentle nagging and a steam engine's crushing yard. What could be better than a frenzy? Find a place at the edge and make a fortune, that was the key. Stay well above the waterline, keep some perspective, always. Feeling brave? Raise a family. Berated? Raise some hell. Step on some necks. Sophisticators arrived by the dozen, sometimes hundreds, every day, and they were, more than anything, of all sorts: ecliptic, slicked by rain, gaunt at the rail, silent faces on silent ships passing through the fog and mist as if they were underwater. Lily hats in the stream. Jawbones in the mud, femurs in tar pits. Half the bones in your body are in your hands and feet. If nothing else, that should tell a person to stand and hang on. And sometimes, just so, I'd catch the profundity as it passed over their faces, like the mud sparrows flying from under the wharf and blocking the sky, when they'd just hit the breaking point, the point of realizing exactly what they'd gotten themselves into: I have no protection. I could die here, today. Now.

When the women of the Line were little girls they'd never thought they could be waking up in sticky beds, scratched by sawdust, listening to the rain pelt the shingles along the shores of this dark harbor, or looking over their shoulder at a grunting logger with a belt in his fist, or perhaps more fearful, a charlatan physician, lancet raised: worried meet worried. The truth of it is that most of us are more like the oxen than the bullwhackers, and it's a rare day when we don't get turned, dogs be damned.

The woman in the hat, the top button of her dress was undone. She must've felt the cold breath of the wind because she grasped her throat as if she meant to choke herself. I knew that I'd remember the white dress and the yellow hat for much longer than I'd remember the oxcart. Who remembers oxcarts? Bullwhackers, that's who. Unfortunate that I could still conjure the scent of the boil and the dead rigidity of her hip as I held her.

The first time I saw my wife, Nell, we were at a church in Cincinnati. She wore a blue dress with a white ribbon. I'll never forget that. Ox and cart. Mud and puddle. Husband and wife.

I looked up when I heard the shot and saw a man standing over the injured horse with a smoking pistol. The wreck had been cleared and loose planks spread over the holes in the street and the walkway. Sheasby was on his knees in front of his broken wall, picking at the damage with his doughy fingers, swinging his fat jowls around to whine, but no one was listening. I'd like to buy him out someday, chase him and his hardware store out of here, just to watch him go. He beats his children and I don't like him.

The oxen were brought over and the boy set chains to the dead horse and they dragged it away, most likely to Fortneau's to be butchered, or, depending on the owner's sentiment, it could be going up the hill to be buried, tombstone and flowers, not likely.

Soon men again filled the streets. Look at them, all of them, beasty little slints. They landed here: torn, dirty, and scared; starving mostly, flashing their frantic grins and yellowpine teeth. Do your best, gents, and welcome to the Big Show. Watch the puddles. That one swallowed an oxcart. That other swallowed a town. Welcome to the white man's burden, the slaughter of war ponies, the poisoning of the well. We're doing it here, and we'll take more if you got them.

Maybe I should still be afraid but I'm not. I learned long ago that it's easier to fail of your own volition than to be defeated, and truly weakness is only a triviality here, like bad teeth when the meat is tough. If you're hungry, you'll find a way to get it down.

On cue, the rain whipped against the windows. The punky wood of the southern sill was swollen. My thumbnail scratch from last night, made to test the rottenness of the wood, was there and beady wet. I beheld a watery reflection in the imperfect glass and lo it was me. Thy ugly self a-blinking.

A face doesn't change anything, but hundreds do, because then they're faceless.

You say San Francisco is a rough town? New York? Shanghai? Our washerwomen are tougher than their meanest ax-murdering thugs. Our smallest, puniest orphan can beat Jim Corbett at arm wrestling. Our shortest Chinaman is six-four if he's an inch.

A body is a mob, a convulsion, an orgasm of destitute rabble. Listen to it breathe. Feed it. Keep it appeased, always. It's written on the wall: T
HE
H
ARBOR
W
ELCOMES
Y
OU
.

Down the street, at the docks, a new crowd was forming, inveterate roil. Among the black sea of hats was the pale flesh of a shaved head and the amber wood of a club. The hats parted and scattered and the bald head lurched after them. It was that mad German, Bellhouse, the barking dog that kept the Harbor up nights. He'd taken the strong and lawless ground and become a structurist (the Coast Sailor's Union labor fight) and harrier (mill owners) and ultimately the king of the rampallions; a company of thieves, pimps, and murderers that served as the tendons and muscle to Bellhouse's brain.

I followed the pale head, a thumbnail among so many blackened hands, through the crowd and up the gangplank of a schooner christened
Feather
. Three men followed close behind him. No mistaking the biggest of the three, Tartan, a head above the tallest in the crowd, a shimmering green greatcoat and a black bowler. His big hands swung around and swatted two men onto their asses to study their feet, behold ye upended boots. On deck Bellhouse was passed a hatchet and he held it up and howled at the rain. Then a shotgun blast rang out from somewhere on deck and the crowd pulsed and shifted back and then forward like tidewater plants. Tartan had fallen. The two other men with him brought out their pistols and fired two shots apiece at the wheelhouse. There was no more shooting after that. A man was dragged from the cabin with a rope around his neck and tied to the rail like a finger in a square knot. Tartan was lifted to his feet and helped toward the wheelhouse. He'd been shot in the leg. My heart thudded against my ribs because I knew they'd be coming to find me. But not yet. The German yelled something at his men and then chopped the stern line. He forced his way forward and did the same thing to the bow. At first the ship didn't move, and then ever so slowly it parted from the dock like ice from the floe and the gangplank slid and dropped into the water. With Tartan injured, Bellhouse and the two others had a tough time chasing the remaining stevedores from the deck into the water. If they wouldn't jump, they were thrown. Hats were lost, tobacco surely ruined. A lone deckhand stood at the rail, nervously looking over his shoulder to make sure Bellhouse approved, and waved the tug into position. The tugman's boy pitched him a line and he tied it off. The swimmers were fished out of the black water and hauled onto dry land. This was a Thursday in May, a day of no occasion.

Bellhouse stood over the man tied by the neck, the ship's captain most likely, pressed the man's face against the stern rail, and waved good-bye to the crowd with the ax. People mostly cheered, save a few brave souls who booed. I never saw the shotgun. I had everything ready downstairs if they came back and needed buckshot removed. I'd sleep lightly tonight, expecting them.

There were reasons for everything, even low piracy. Bellhouse and his men would ride back with the tug, and the next ship that didn't pay the German's tithe would get the same treatment or worse. Pay somebody or make them pay you, those were the choices. He'd abandoned ship's crews on sandbars at low tide and was known to shoot them and stab them too, beat them unconscious and throw them in the water. The floating fleet. Last month he'd made a homemade bomb and blown up a cigar shop on F Street. One story went that he'd eaten human flesh in Whitehorse. All sorts, and Bellhouse was only one. He led his pack, but there were others that could pay to have him ripped apart on a whim.

My father used to brag that he was a friend of Rockefeller, implied a business relationship, although as far as I knew the families had never met. He'd been a surgeon during the War, my father, but he put it away when he came home, tried his shaking hands at coal, and then oil. He couldn't bear to see shoes or boots of any kind stacked willy-nilly on the floor or pant legs hiked up either, no matter if it were children or God save us a woman. I don't think we ever even lived in the same state as the Rockefellers, let alone the same town. He bought stock and lost it, along with the rest of the country, but he took it to heart. There wasn't much he didn't. We seemed to be the opposite of the Rockefellers, but he'd tell you we were of a feather, my father would. At first he'd speak the powerful names like a trained bird, not knowing, but later in his life that changed. The blank cheerfulness subsided and he became more of a conjurer, a moribund circus magician, his incantations turned to questions and finally to pleas for mercy. He wasn't a bad man, though, my father. He was a man in a hole looking up. There were many others like him that the War had left mostly useless, mostly ruined. When I left home I took his books and his bag and all of his tools. I might be worse than Bellhouse or Rockefeller or any of them, simply because I'm not who I say I am.