The Gamble (I) (28 page)

At that moment Agatha reached the back door after hearing the shot. She entered, puffing, and paused near the keno table to survey the scene before her. She saw someone lying on a gambling table with blood soaking his plaid shirt, and Scott was lying slumped on a chair with a knife protruding from his arm.

“Dear God!” she whispered, hurrying toward him.

Marcus tried to stop her, his hands strong on her arms, his eyes begging her to heed his silent plea and do as he indicated.

She met them squarely, understanding afresh that he cared enough to be concerned about her welfare as well as Scott’s. “Let me go,” she ordered gently. “He helped me; now it’s my turn.”

Marcus reluctantly released her and she hurried forward, already issuing orders to Jack and Ivory and all the girls, who hovered undecidedly around Gandy’s slumping form. “Lay him down before he falls off the chair.”

Dan and Jack reacted without a pause. Gandy groaned
and his forehead grew shiny as they laid him on the raw pine floor. Agatha struggled to her knees beside him. She released his tight tie and collar button and touched his throat lovingly. “Oh, Scott,” she whispered, her face drawn with concern, “oh, my dear.”

He managed a faint smile. “Gussie...” he whispered weakly, fluttering the fingers of his bloody hand.

She clasped them tightly and pressed the back of his hand between her breasts, heedless of the fact that her own hand grew bloody.

Just then Doc Johnson burst through the swinging doors with his nightshirt tucked into his trousers, his suspenders trailing beside his knees, and his red hair standing up on end.

“Step aside!” It took him less than thirty seconds before he pronounced, “Collinson’s dead.”

The name penetrated Agatha’s mind. Kneeling beside Scott, she fired a glance at Dan. “Collinson?” she repeated, shocked. “He shot Collinson?”

“No, I did,” Dan corrected.

She looked down at Scott’s blanched face, the knife protruding from his flesh. “Then how—”

“He tried to get Alvis to give over the knife... Alvis gave it over, all right.”

“Move aside!” ordered Doc Johnson impatiently. He knelt down, took one look at the knife, and advised, “Better get this man drunk. And the drunker the better.”

Jack fetched a full bottle of Newton’s whiskey. Scott lay on the floor blearily smiling up at the bartender. “Make sure you got the ninety proof, Jack.” He attempted a crooked smile, but it looked ghostly on his pale face.

Sheriff Cowdry arrived and made a silent inspection of Collinson’s body, while Jack fed Scott more whiskey than Agatha thought one man could consume and still remain conscious. Jubilee sat on the floor with Scott’s head in her lap while his blood dried on Agatha’s palm.

Cowdry questioned the customers, then cleared them out. The undertaker came to haul away Collinson’s body and two tables were pushed together to create an emergency operating room. Marcus, Dan, Ivory, and Jack lifted Scott
gently and laid him down. He was grinning loosely, his lips wet, his face flushed. He beckoned Marcus with one finger.

“Listen...” he whispered mushily. “This stuff’s damned good, but don’t tell Agatha I said so.” He chuckled drunkenly and craned his head to see Ivory, behind him. “And if I kick the bucket, none o’ your Baptist dirges at my funerull, boy. I want the cancan, ya unnerstan’?”

Jack put the bottle to his boss’s lips again. “One more, Scotty. That should do it.” The liquor trailed down Scott’s cheek and made a dark spot on the green baize. His eyes blinked slowly once, twice—but still didn’t close.

“Gussie?” he whispered, his eyes suddenly searching. “Where’s—”

“I’m here, Scott.” She moved quietly beside the table and found his good hand. He clutched hers desperately.

“Willy... you’ve got t’ tell Willy.” His eyes were rimmed with red. Against his black brows and hair his skin appeared waxy, except for the unnatural tinge of red brought to his cheeks by the liquor. “I’m sorry... tell ‘im I’m sorry.”

She touched the limp hair clinging to his perspiring brow, brushed it back. “I promise.”

Doc opened his black case and began threading a needle with a piece of horsehair. “Bring a fresh bottle of whiskey,” he ordered. “And anybody that’s queasy, get out.”

Agatha stayed long enough to watch Doc pull the knife blade out of the bone in Scott’s arm, and to see his body convulse and to hear him cry out in agony. Long enough to hear Doc order, “Give him another shot!” Long enough for her stomach to twist and her eyes to fill and her throat to thicken. But when Doc dipped the needle and horsehair into the whiskey, she slipped out the swinging doors to gulp the clean night air and sob alone.

Agatha had not been back to the Collinson house since that first time. But the smell was the same: a combination of must, coal oil, sour linens, and unwashed bodies. Even before she lit a lamp she knew she’d find no improvement in her surroundings.

Groping at the kitchen table, she found stick matches and a lantern. When it was lit she avoided glancing around; instead, she headed straight for Willy.

He looked so small curled up in a ball with his chin on his chest. He didn’t rouse, even when she brought the light near and set it on the floor. He was probably used to somebody stumbling around in the kitchen and lighting lanterns in the middle of the night. She stood a long time gazing down at him, swallowing the clot of emotion in her throat, wondering what would become of him. So young, so unloved, so alone. Tears burned her eyes. She clasped her hands beneath her chin and said a silent prayer for him. And for herself and the task she must perform.

Gingerly, she perched on the edge of his bed, forcing herself not to think of the other living things that shared it with him.

“Willy?” She touched his temple, the skull behind his ear. “Willy, dear.”

He snuggled deeper into the caseless pillow and she spoke his name again. His eyes opened halfway and immediately she saw they were puffed from crying. When he was fully awake he bolted up, his eyes wide open.

“Gussie! What’re you doin’ here? If Pa sees you we’ll both be in trouble!”

There were welts on the side of his neck and a red slash across his ear. Dried blood marked his dirty pillow.

“Willy, what happened to you?”

“Gussie, you gotta go!” His eyes grew frantic. “Pa’ll—”

“It’s all right. He’s still uptown. Did he do this to you?”

When she tried to touch his ear, he shrugged away and dropped his eyes to his lap. “Naw. I slipped when I was climbin’ on the cattle pens an’ banged it on a rail.”

She knew he was lying. He refused to meet her eyes, and he scratched at the bedclothes with one dirty index finger. She covered his hand and forced his chin up until she was looking squarely into his eyes. A child’s eyes, she thought, should not have pillows of puffed skin beneath them.

“He did, didn’t he?” she insisted quietly.

His eyes began filling. His lips tightened and his chin trembled in her palm. As his throat worked to repress the tears, she was torn between two fervid emotions: love for this forlorn orphan, and a heathen gratitude that his father was dead and could never hurt Willy again.

“He found some feathers stuck in my shirt and ast me where I got ‘em, and when I told him he thrashed me good with his razor strop an’ said I couldn’t go t’ your place or Scotty’s no more. So you better git outta here, Gussie, or he’ll take the belt t’ me again.” Though Willy managed the admission without breaking down, he came close. So did Agatha.

She drew a deep breath, squared her shoulders, and squeezed his hands hard.

“Willy, dear, I have some bad news for you.”

He studied her blankly for a moment, then declared, “I ain’t takin’ no more baths.”

“No... no, it’s not that. Darling, your father died tonight.”

Willy’s eyes widened with bewilderment. “Pa?”

“Yes. He was shot about an hour ago in Scotty’s saloon.”

“Shot?”

She nodded, allowing him a moment to accept that.

“You mean he ain’t comin’ home?”

“I’m afraid not.”

Willy’s brown eyes stared straight into Agatha’s.

“He’s really dead?”

Her thumbs rubbed the backs of his thin hands. “You know what that means, don’t you?”

His gaze dropped and settled on a spot in the shadows beyond her shoulder. “I had a cat once and it died. Pa kicked it an’ it flew against the wall and made a funny sound, and then my friend Joey an’ me, we buried it outside by the toilet.”

Agatha’s tears could be held at bay no longer. Willy looked up with dry brown eyes to find hers swimming.

“That what they’re gonna do with my pa?”

“He’ll be buried, yes, but in the graveyard where your mother is.”

“Oh.”

“Y... you’re coming home with me tonight. Would you like that?”

“Yes.” The word came out flat, expressionless.

“Willy, your father was probably a... a good man... deep inside. But he’d had a lot of sadness in his life, with your mother dying when she was so young.”

Willy’s mouth thinned and he stared at the tucks on Agatha’s bodice. Muscle by muscle tightened until a look of defiance was etched across his entire face. “I don’t care if he’s dead,” he said stubbornly. But his chin quivered. “I don’t care!” His voice grew louder and he punched the mattress. “I don’t even care if they bury him outside by the toilet! I don’t care... I don’t care... I d... don’t...”

By the time he plunged into Agatha’s arms he was sobbing. His small fists clutched her dress and his scraggly head burrowed against her bosom. She spread her hand on his small back as it heaved.

“Oh, Willy.” She cried with him, rocking him, cradling his head and pulling him against her aching heart. “Willy, darling...” She understood him absolutely. She empathized totally. She rested her cheek against his head as time spun backward and she, too, became a defiant waif,
making the same declaration Willy had just made, meaning exactly the opposite.

“Willy, it’ll be all right,” she said soothingly.

But how?
she thought.
How?

She put him to sleep in a shakedown on her floor but awakened in the morning to find him curled on his side in her bed with his warm little buttocks up against her lame hip. Her first waking thought was that he was the only male with whom she’d ever slept; her next was that having him there even for so short a time was worth all the work she’d have to go through to delouse her bed.

She took him down to Paulie’s for breakfast and watched him pack away enough pancakes to shingle a schoolhouse roof. Then she left him at the Cowboys’ Rest with instructions that Kendall was to scrub him everywhere, mercilessly, then quietly dispose of his wretched clothes. She’d be back for him in thirty minutes with clean ones.

She found the britches and shirt she’d made for him still folded neatly in her bureau drawer. Carrying them, she went next to Gandy’s apartment and tapped quietly on the door. Expecting it to be answered by Jubilee, she was surprised when Ruby appeared instead.

“How is he?” Agatha whispered.

“Middlin’. But he mule-strong, that one. He be fine.”

“I’ve come for Willy’s boots.”

“Lemme have a look-see.”

While Agatha waited outside she gazed at the picture of the white plantation house on the wall opposite the apartment door. Below it, a dresser held Scott’s humidor and a hat block with his black Stetson. It was odd how the sight of a man’s personal possessions, in his personal domain, made a woman feel as if she’d shared something intimate with him.

Ruby appeared with Willy’s boots. “How’s that li’l guy doin’?”

“At the moment, not so well. He’s at the Cowboys’ Rest getting a bath, and you know how he hates baths.”

“He know about his pa?”

“Yes. I told him.”

“How he take it?”

“He claimed he didn’t care.” Agatha met Ruby’s dark eyes while her voice softened. “But all the while he cried his litile heart out.”

“Reckon you had the hardest job of all, tellin’ him.”

“It wasn’t an easy night for any of us, was it?” The last time Agatha had talked to Ruby, the black woman had turned away with detached stoicism after Agatha had read the invitation to the governor’s tea. How it had hurt. Agatha reached out to her now. “Ruby, I’m sorry I—”

“Lawd, I know it, woman. Ain’t this a crazy mixed-up world, though?”

Ruby didn’t take her hand. But it wasn’t necessary. Agatha felt as if she had just shrugged out of a heavy yoke. She squared her shoulders and changed the subject.

“Willy wants to see Scott. Do you think it would be all right if I brought him up later today?”

“Don’t see why not. Should take the boss’s mind offa that throbbin’ arm.”

That afternoon at four o’clock, when Agatha knocked again on Gandy’s door, she held the hand of a boy whose hair was neatly parted on the side and combed into a crisp gold wave above his brow. Along with a fresh barbershop haircut, he wore brand-new underwear and socks from Halorhan’s Mercantile, shiny brown leather boots with unknotted strings, homemade blue britches, and a blue-striped shirt.

Ivory answered this time. He looked down at Willy and threw back his hands in feigned surprise.

“Well, what’s this?”

“I had t’ have another bath,” the boy complained, putting on a sour expression.

“Another
one?” Ivory looked properly shocked. “Tsk-tsk.”

“We come t’ see Scotty.”

Agatha jiggled his hand. “We
came
to see Scotty.”

“That’s what I said, din’t I?”

Ivory chuckled, then smiled at Agatha. “How’re you, Miz Agatha?”

“How is Mr. Gandy?”

“O’nry. Doesn’t much like bein’ laid low.”

She whispered conspiratorially, “We’ll tread lightly, then.”

His eyes were closed when they walked in. He lay in a curled-maple bed of masculine proportions, propped up against a bale of pillows with his arm bound in gauze. His chest was bare, the skin and black hair appearing dark in contrast to the white bedding. Agatha took one look at his face and recognized how much pain he’d suffered since last night.

Willy stood somberly at her side.

“Hi, Scotty,” he said.