Hop Alley (16 page)
Authors: Scott Phillips
I was too weary to drive the buggy, and so I treated myself to a train ride to Golden. When I descended at the tiny depot the sun was sinking, and the air quite a bit chillier than it had been down in the city. When she opened her door, dressed like Denver’s finest society matron right down to the hat on her head, she made no comment about the hour, to my relief.
“Shame on you, Bill, I thought you mightn’t come. Step inside.”
As I did so she explained that we were expected back in Denver at the Charpiot Hotel for a reception Ralph Banbury was giving for his daughter’s engagement.
“I don’t think I’m dressed for the occasion, Cilla,” I said.
“I’ve some of Ralph’s clothes here, and they’ll fit you close enough.”
“Are you truly invited?” I asked.
“Of course,” she said, taking no offense. “Ralph and I had a long talk about things. He’s awfully relieved about your offer.”
That seemed a promising opening for the hard news I
wanted to deliver, but my tongue remained still in my head as she handed me an engraved card:
Mr. and Mrs. Ralph Banbury
Invite you to join them for a Reception
to Celebrate the Engagement of their
Daughter Gertrude to Mr. Harold Neville
Seven o’clock Friday Evening the 26th of April 1878
in the Ballroom of the Charpiot Hotel
I wondered why I hadn’t received one of these, and I saw the envelope it had arrived in; it was addressed to me at the studio, and not to Priscilla.
“You took this from my mail,” I said.
“I saw who it was from, dear heart.” She touched my cheek with her gloved hand with great affection and squeezed. “Surely it was meant for both of us.”
Wriggling out of this was going to be a more complicated affair than I’d imagined, and when I thought it over it seemed to be all the fault of Ralph Banbury. I didn’t see any reason we shouldn’t go to his reception; any embarrassment he might experience would be richly merited.
We exited. At the same moment as it occurred to me that it was the first time I’d been in her house without screwing her, I realized that we had no carriage and no convenient train into Denver, and no available train for the return either, and
I led her to the livery stable, where I hired a Concord buggy and a handsomer nag than I normally would have been willing to pay for. We said little as we bounced our way into town, and Cilla looked so content to be at my side I felt monstrous; I even doubted my resolve at one point and wondered how bad it would be to settle for a life with her, taking pictures of Denver’s illustrious and unknown and having her waiting for me
à poil
at the end of every day, as voluptuous and perverse as Messalina herself, with only bed, board, and the bottle necessary to keep her happy.
We rode first to the studio, where I hurriedly put on my formal evening attire, and then straight to the hotel, where I turned the buggy over to a bellman, and from there we proceeded to the ballroom.
With its walls festooned with crushed velvet and ten-foot-long tables laden with every sort of delicacy known this far west, and doubtless a few appearing here for the first time, the presence of a throne and England’s queen herself would not have seemed incongruous. We were met at the door by a liveried footman, and though I was famished, Priscilla insisted on immediately joining a reception line where the parents of the bride- and groom-to-be stood with their offspring accepting the congratulations of what looked to me like every single mining tycoon in Colorado, their wives and mistresses and an array of lesser figures, from Banbury’s fellows in the newspaper trade to the mayor of Denver and, if I wasn’t mistaken, the
governor himself. A small orchestra played a waltz to which many of the partygoers were dancing, and waiters circulated with bottles of champagne.
I watched Banbury shaking hands and making light and brief conversation with his guests, looking as miserable as I had ever seen him look, even though his eye was substantially improved, to the degree that it was completely opened and sported only a mild discoloration.
“Look at that bitch,” Priscilla said in too loud a voice. “So he’s quitting me for her?”
I looked around, wondering who she was talking about and astounded that Ralph would invite his new mistress to such an affair, and then I saw that she was referring to, and staring at, Mrs. Banbury. Once I’d caught sight of her I couldn’t take my eyes away either. The extravagance, verging on the garish, of her costume—a silk dress of sea green, with pea-green accents, and a hat decorated with bright emerald parrot feathers—only served to accentuate her homeliness, which would not have been so remarkable in a woman dressed in a more modest fashion. The daughter was no beauty either, with wide-set eyes and snaggled teeth, but her face betrayed a sweetness of character that her forbidding mother seemed at first glance to lack altogether; the doughy fellow next to her blushed to hold her hand and, despite Banbury’s claims of greed on his part, appeared genuinely consumed with affection for his fiancée.
Though we had not yet taken plates for the buffet, the slow-moving receiving line passed by several tables, one of which contained a plate of hors d’œuvres that no one was watching over. Surreptitiously I took a tiny pastry from the plate—a tiny mushroom turnover, by the look of it—and held it behind my back, then scanned the room to see whether I had drawn any disapproving looks; satisfied that I had not, I popped the thing into my mouth and bit down, enjoying a fraction of a second’s joy at its warm savor before letting out a horrible yell and doubling over, as the left side of my face erupted in pain as sharp as any I’d ever felt in my life. The generalized ache of the morning was gone in an instant, leaving only that violent throbbing in my jaw where the one-armed messenger had smashed the box. I did attract a few stares then, including that of Muriel Banbury, who did not seem pleased, but the room was noisy and the orchestra had started a new number.
One partygoer who had failed to notice my distress was Priscilla. We were nearing the honorees, and she clutched her purse and smiled fixedly. Still riveted by the blinding flashes of fire that coincided with each heartbeat I no longer worried that she would make some inappropriate remark to one of the Banburys, and when I heard her talking to Muriel I was only halfway interested in the exchange.
I did see, however, that midway through whatever Priscilla said to her Muriel’s face froze and she yanked her hand away and turned toward me. “And you would be?”
“Shadlaw,” I lisped, terrified of making any sound that would bring my upper and lower mandibles into contact with each other.
“Our tenant.” She seemed genuinely surprised I’d made the guest list but recovered quickly enough. “The photographer. I see. I’d like to have Mr. Banbury speak to you about arranging a bridal portrait for Gertrude.”
“I’gh ghe gherighted,” I said. Priscilla had passed the bride and groom, who looked offended and puzzled respectively, and was just reaching Banbury, who looked as uncomfortable as possible, and glared at me in frank anger.
“Please feel free to call on him at the offices of the
Bulletin
,” Muriel said as I saw Priscilla open her handbag, into which she stuck her right hand very slowly. I thought Banbury was about to complain aloud to me; his mouth was open and he was looking straight at me when we both heard a familiar clicking sound; his eyes followed mine to Priscilla’s hand, which, as the prescient reader will have guessed, held the Baby Dragoon, its hammer cocked and ready. Before either of us had a chance to grab it from her it fired.
The cellist stopped almost simultaneously with the shot, throwing the first and second violinists off tempo for a few beats until they too quit in confusion, leaving only the brave violist to stab gamely away at Herr Mozart’s quartet for another full measure. Ralph was on the floor with a bullet in his chest and Muriel bent over him, screaming, her hand slick with his blood.
“Bargain for me, will you, you son of a bitch?” Oddly I was very conscious of being very, very hungry as Priscilla swung the Colt at my face, and also of her considerable physical attractiveness, which her rage only accentuated. I heard her say “I will not be treated as a goddamned mule—” and then the barrel made contact with my jaw. I remember a flash of pain more horrible than the last one, and going down toward the carpet with the first stirrings of arousal, and then nothing.
O
pening one eye I determined that the prickly substance beneath my head was straw. The room in which I found myself was dark and suffused with myriad odors so delicately intermingled as to be unidentifiable, though I thought I detected a leitmotif of rancid urine over long-unwashed clothing and chronic mildew. My evening clothes were wet in spots.
“What the hell’s this place?” I said, looking around at a dark room about eight feet by ten, with nine other men crowded into it.
“Denver Shitty Jail,” lisped a man with as ruined a face as I’d seen since the war, his malformed nose competing for attention with a mostly missing upper lip.
What could I have done to get myself locked up, I wondered momentarily, and then the throb in my jaw brought first one thing to mind, then seven or eight more that, scrutinized in the light of day, might have earned me a trip to the jug. I sat up and sniffed, and identified another scent among the many, an unpleasantly familiar one.
“I smell rotten flesh,” I said, and as sick as I felt I feared it might be my own.
The deformed man’s neighbor, an ectomorph with the matted beard and demented eyes of a prophet, gave a short bitter laugh. “Goddamn City Jail’s nothing but the back room of the Butterick Meat Market.”
I was fortunate enough, then, to have been arrested in my unconscious state by a city policeman and not a county peace officer, who would have removed me to the county jail, a serious place of incarceration. The city facility, on the other hand, was a makeshift pen mostly intended to hold drunks and short-term felons with little motive for evasion. My cellmates were four Chinamen, including the nephew of the magus I’d cut down from the lamppost, and five white fellows. The prophet and his scarified companion and a third man, a hog butcher by trade, had been arrested during the riot. The other two wouldn’t say what had landed them in stir, but the first was a sorrowful
drunk, his bender wearing off quickly and leaving him desperate for a cupful. Though the second was seated, I would have guessed his height at six and a half feet tall at least, and he was as thick side to side as a chest of drawers.
The five white men sat on the floor on the left half of the cell, and the Chinese on the right, and there was a certain amount of grumbling from the left half when I first crossed the cell to the right to speak to the old magus’s nephew. The Chinese didn’t much like it either, and one of them rose to his feet in a threatening stance until the nephew said something to him with a gesture in my direction. His compatriot sat back down with no more friendliness showing on his face than before, but the nephew bade me sit. He introduced himself as Fong, without specifying whether that was his first or last name, and said that he believed his uncle had survived. Unsolicited, he also offered up his opinion that Mrs. Fenster had persuaded the old man to provide two advance men to distract and overpower Doctor Marcy while she murdered her brother-in-law. The two men who accompanied her (without, according to Fong, stealing the doctor’s opiates or anything else) were ignorant of her mission there, though Fong’s uncle surely knew why she needed the doctor out of her way.
I returned to the other side of the cell, where I spent the morning striking up no friendships and cultivating no allies. The three rioters, having failed to fold the remainder of the cell’s Caucasian population into their clique, spent their day
talking amongst themselves and until the turnkey arrived at noon with tin cups and a bucket of corn gruel their colloquy on the various and sundry character deficits of the Irish, the Jews, the Catholics, and the Chinese were the only words spoken aloud in the cell, apart from the souse’s mostly incoherent whimpering. The gangly jailer, so bent and arthritic he walked nearly sideways like a crab, dropped the bucket on the floor and threw the cups onto the shit-stained straw without a word, then scuttled back out, ignoring my demands to know for what I was incarcerated.
“Are you deaf as well as crooked?” I shouted at the door.
The three rioters laughed. “You won’t get much out of him. He don’t care for our class of character,” the prophet said, dipping his cup into the gruel.
After they ate the foul corn—I felt too ill to partake—the door opened again and a pair of policemen entered with a defeated-looking man in civilian clothes. It took me a few moments to recognize the silhouetted figure as that of Officer Heinecker.
“This the man what took your iron off you?” the first copper asked him.
“That’s him,” Heinecker said, looking me sadly up and down.
“What’s the charge?” I asked the coppers.
“Accessory to murder, as well as unheeling a duly charged officer of the peace,” the second one said, sounding amused.
“Banbury’s dead?”
“He will be soon enough.”
“I want to see my attorney.”
“If wishes was horses, then beggars would eat.” They led Heinecker off and locked the door again.