The Juliet (20 page)

By the eve of the Eve, Lily Joy hid behind a makeshift stage curtain to watch men, exhausted by the wholesome and spiritual pleasures of their families, pour into the Ophelia as the Ophelia poured into them. Each guest of the brothel received a hefty punch cocktail at the door and many more after that if they kept the cards and the girls in play. Her sister doves were out on the floor dressed like shabby winter queens in silken gowns and tin-can tiaras set with hunks of polished bottle glass. One of the women played a banjolin, loaned for the occasion by a Turkish miner. She sat on a stage of borax crates, her knees drifting apart as she concentrated on keeping her strums lively.

The men were unusually fresh and jovial, all shaved and bathed for the season. For once there were no dusty boots, no sullen faces, and best of all, no violence. Even Mr. Tanglewood had trimmed his hair and laundered his vest. When the banjolin woman was called away to ply her trade, a hand bell player took the stage dressed in a man’s smoking jacket and fez, but nothing else. She played a few holiday carols with a great deal of seriousness, and the audience responded with raucous applause.

Despite being fully electrified, the room was gold with candlelight, and the smoke added to the intoxicating fog already generated by pipes and cigarettes. Tanglewood could hardly keep up with the money changing hands at the bar and games tables. Lily and the girls were expected to keep their own accounts and settle up with him later.

Arthur Goud sat at the bar in a place of honor. He wore his Sunday shirt and carefully cleaned boots. He hadn’t paid for a drink yet, but he was well oiled, thanks to the generosity of friends he did not know he had.

Just as rumors of Centenary’s decline had threatened the joy of the season and hope for the future, Goud was profiled in the
Prospector
as a particularly intuitive and savvy miner whose faith in the Apollo operation remained unshaken. He was depicted as a rambler, tamed by Centenary, a gleaming modern city where the streets glowed with gaslights and shop windows dazzled with electricity.

The pull quote was this: “Centenary makes night into day. Life is longer in Centenary.”

If Goud believed in Centenary, then his optimism was the antidote to the caution of the Apollo mine’s assessors. He claimed could read the gold in a fistful of dirt from Penance Lane.

But Goud did not believe in Centenary. He only believed in Lily Joy.

At nine o’clock a gong was struck, and most of the candles were snuffed, leaving the attendees in shadows. The frails still on the floor pulled away from their men and assembled together at the back of the hall. There were eleven of them, including the banjolin and hand bell players. The women linked arms and pointed their toes so that their legs were exposed as they sang three songs:
The Boy I Love is Up in the Gallery, Oh! Mr. Porter,
and of course,
Jingle Bells.
When they finished, the women scrambled back to the laps of their preferred patrons, waiting in the darkened room for the evening’s special performance.

The room hushed, except for a few snickers of anticipation, but no one had to wait for long. Lily Joy stepped out of hiding, wearing a wreath lit with seven candles atop her glorious red hair, but underneath a shear, shimmering robe, her rouge-darkened nipples commanded as much attention as her crown of flames.

Greeted with sighs and groans, and other non-translatable expressions of carnal reverence, Lily Joy posed so all could see. Her hair spilled down from the candle crown, and the tendrils had been oiled to curl around the outsides of her breasts. Between them hung a heavy gauge golden chain, at the ends of which two green oval stones wrapped in gold wire cages dangled like clock weights.

The necklace was far from fashionable. The green stones lay like occult weapons on her flesh, deliberately crude and primitive. Deliberately disturbing.

She knew Goud, and every other squarehead in the room for that matter, would recognize her tribute to Saint Lucy, the virgin martyr who was sentenced to prostitution for distributing her family’s great wealth among the poor. And who tore her own eyes out rather than let them be admired by pagan men. Statues of Saint Lucy often depicted her presenting her own eyes on a platter. Lily Joy dangled two green stones between her breasts.
Oh night divine…

Then she sang, unaccompanied, in a strong, clear voice:

As Joseph was a-walking

He heard an Angel sing:

This night shall be the birth night

Of Christ our Heavenly King

The song was received with quiet awe for the first few verses, but then as her confidence grew, she began to move with the rhythm she’d chosen, bouncing her breasts with every downbeat. Objections were raised, but those men were either shouted down or escorted out of the party.

Lily’s profane performance was hypnotic, and by the time she finished the jolly mood gave way to a kind of hunger that spread wordlessly throughout the hall. Those who kept their senses moved to private rooms to exercise their urges, but some, in fact many, simply couldn’t wait.

Tanglewood played the pianola with his back to his guests. He played the three songs he knew, and then he played them again. When he tired, he loaded the paper rolls and pumped the pedals, trying to look professional under the circumstances.

Lily followed Goud to a padded bench near the Faro tables, where he snuffed out the candles of her crown one by one. The Ophelia, darkened by just that much, began to hum with low, devotional murmurs and other unmistakable sounds of release. While bankers and merchants cooed like children, miners reverted to their native speech: German, Italian, and whatever witchy noises the Irish fell into when they’d drunk the barrel dry. As Goud caressed Lily’s breasts through her fragile garment, he also stroked the great green pendants. She enjoyed his fascination with the stones, and as he made love to her, she took particular delight in the knowledge that Lily Joy would be forever remembered for this evening, her last on earth and her greatest triumph.

* * *

While the men of the town were indulging in an orgy conducted by their own Messalina, Marcus Skinner was the only man of means not in attendance. He’d been left home like a cleric, alone with his wine and his imagination and his reports. Retained by a minority committee of stockholders, Skinner was investigating irregularities in engineering assessments for the Apollo mines.

The news was bad. The mines were indeed played. His research also showed that the original assays were fraudulent. He would say “in error” in his own reports, but he knew that the mines had been overrepresented from the start. There was nothing to be done.

Centenary was doomed. Skinner would make his recommendations before the New Year. He’d already sold his own shares.

Things were changing. The painting of the Dutch children had lost its charm once the safe behind it was emptied. He could claim that Becky had finally forced him to reveal his secrets, but if he were honest, he’d grown tired of the loneliness. Now his secrets were hers, all hers. It was liberating.

All Skinner had to do was hope Becky would keep their bargain: she could do what she liked with the emeralds, anything at all, but she could not reveal
what
they were. He’d told her that they’d both go to jail, and that she would be identified as his accomplice. She pretended to believe him, like any good wife would. It didn’t matter. If The Juliet was discovered, Becky and Marcus would lose her, one way or another.

Once the idea of the Ophelia fête had been conceived, Becky set to work on her costume, which involved the delicate work of separating the emeralds from their all too recognizable setting. She had traded with the dentist/abortionist Liegertz for temporary possession of a set of probes and files, knowing that the currency of her favors also bought discretion.

Marcus took a glass of claret outside into the sharp night air. He and Rebekah were quietly beginning to move their things into Hogg’s house, even though the lottery in which the Skinners would “win” the property was a week away.

The view from the bluff was breathtaking. The lights of High Street burned a comet’s tail across the dark desert.

Rebekah was down there in the Ophelia being wicked. She’d promised it would be her final outing as Lily Joy. She cited many reasons, most having to do with discretion, but the most credible explanation she had offered was that she did not want Lily Joy to grow old. She also claimed that the secret of The Juliet would sustain her.

So many good reasons, she had. Sometimes Martin wondered if Becky was planning to have him killed.

He imagined that she was being taken by many men, though in a courtly, polite manner, each taking his turn. He wished he could be there for her, stroking her brow as she endured them all. She’d shown him her get up earlier that afternoon, and though his brain boiled with lust for her, the blood did not obey—not then anyway. It did now, as his imagination swam.

Now that his secrets were hers, they’d have something to talk about, wouldn’t they? There was much she didn’t know about his old life in Philadelphia. He never imagined that sharing The Juliet would bring him such hope. It was strange to feel so good and know that disaster was imminent.

His cheeks stung, and for a moment he thought about that final day at Morecambe’s store. The funeral, the cold weather, Jilka. It was the last time he’d seen snow.

A flake settled on the top of his veined hand. A snowflake? It wasn’t impossible. He tilted his face to the sky, and he could see them then, tumbling down. A snow shower in the desert. He’d heard of such things. The flakes were fat and slow, resisting their own gravity, as if they knew how lost they were.

* * *

Goud awoke on the bench, alone in the dark. He was still inside the Ophelia, but there wasn’t another soul with him.

He knew his way out. He’d slumbered on these benches before.

His head was heavy as he shuffled towards the great doors of the Ophelia. Would the night, having been anticipated as The Ophelia Fête or The Doves’ Gala, still have a name in the morning? Angels had become devils, and at such a holy time of year. Would there be rumors and jokes, or would there be a great silence?

There would be a cost. There always was when magic was involved.

And his lovely Lily Joy…he’d mouthed every part of her body, even her green stones, and made her cry out. The union felt so final. And then at the end, he was mesmerized by the emeralds, asking her where they came from. She cooled suddenly, as if he’d been rude to her.

Perhaps he had been. He felt she would never take him again.

Goud found the doors and heaved them open to a fantastic sight: snow had fallen in Centenary. The heavens had covered the basin in pure, white snow. Goud paused to catch his breath.

Snow in the desert, after such a night, was too beautiful to be a blessing.

* * *

February 1908: Centenary, NV

Becky made her list for the week ahead. She was a list-maker now. Traveling up and down the bluff was simple enough, but not with supplies in tow. Before she made the journey to Centenary Mercantile she had to write it all out, and be careful with her numbers. Gone were the days when she could step outside her door and pick up a saddle of rabbit and a few turnips to improvise the evening meal.

Becky paused over her work. It was too late to start a garden, wasn’t it? In the basin, gunshots echoed, something that didn’t happen as often as it used to.

The contest was over, the results announced, and Hogg’s bottle house was now called the Skinner place. Though it was only the middle of the day, long shadows kept the house a little too cold for Becky’s taste, but Marcus reminded her how grateful she would be come summer.

She was grateful already, quite glad to be out of common contact with the citizens of Centenary, especially after Marcus’ report was made public. The town’s collapse, which had begun as soon as the mines showed signs of petering out, suddenly sped up. She watched it change from her vantage point on the bluff. First the clusters of tent homes disappeared, then construction stopped on the school. Some of the burros that patrolled the weeds around their home seemed awfully thin and confused. She assumed their owners had let them go in the hopes that they would join a wild herd.

Then, one night, the electric lights of High Street were not switched on, and they remained unlit from that point onward. Centenary would no longer turn night into day.

Becky put more wood into the stove, but just enough to keep the embers going. Even after unpacking all of their belongings there was still so much to do. The Hogg children had managed to make a young house look old, and one of the first things Becky wanted to do was plaster over the bottles. It made her uneasy, feeling as if she lived in a glass house.

A sharp whistle from below the bluff meant a message had come for Marcus, but Marcus was in town. He still went into the office on a daily basis. Becky went out to the edge to tell the courier just that, but when she looked down there was no one waiting.

“Boy?” she called out. “Are you there?” There was no reply. If the kid was still down there he was probably passed out drunk. A year ago she would have climbed down to his aid, but a year ago he would have delivered his news and received a tip before going off to drown in the beer. Centenary was crumbling around the edges.

Becky returned to the bottle house, pausing on the threshold. She could smell him. The sweat, the filth, the alcohol. Someone was inside her new home, and it wasn’t the courier, either.

She recognized this particular pungency. The kitchen knives were a few steps closer than any of the guns Marcus kept, but her visitor was even closer. She smiled her brightest and widened her eyes. “Arthur?” she said. “Are you really here?”

Becky stepped inside and gasped when she saw him. He was so covered in grime that his eyes seemed to glow. This was not the natural soil of a working man, this was something else. Soot?

“Arthur, you tricked me.” Becky’s smile never faltered. “How charming.”