Hop Alley (17 page)
Authors: Scott Phillips
“Say,” the prophet piped up. “You took that copper’s gun off him?”
“I needed it.”
“When’d you do that? On the street?”
“During the riot.”
“The Chinee riot? Then what the hell you so friendly with that chink for? Don’t you know they killed a poor old man in his sickbed?”
I sat down without answering, and as the others gulped their swill Fong leaned over to me and spoke very quietly.
“Five prisoners escaped this same jail six months ago. Broke bars out of the window.” He nodded at the window; the bars had been reinforced with what looked like cement.
“Might be worth a try,” I said.
The prophet dropped his empty tin cup and rose. “I want you to stop talking to that son of a bitch.”
I glanced at him without answering, and when I turned back to Fong I noted that his companions were watching the group with concern, though Fong was careful to ignore them.
“Did you hear me? Come on over to the white man’s side or I’ll crush your skull like a fuckin’ melon.”
I turned to find that the three of them had risen. The one with the ghastly scars was laughing through mostly toothless
gums as though Christmas was coming. I stood and faced them, and I supposed I’d have to drop the prophet first and hope the other two would be intimidated into backing down. Lacking confidence and feeling weak as a babe from fever besides, I was trying to calculate the likelihood of Fong and his comrades coming to my aid when the gigantic, speechless man on the floor rose to his full height and width—even more massive than he’d appeared when supine—and spun the prophet around with one big paw, then cuffed him solidly across the face with the other. I thought I heard the smaller man’s nose crack, and he collapsed like an abandoned marionette onto the pissy straw.
“Gott-dam tired of listening to you,” the giant said, and then he returned to his seated position on the floor. That was the last we heard from the rioters until the evening meal, when the prophet tried to elicit assistance from the turnkey.
“That big Dutch son of a bitch knocked me down,” he said.
The turnkey shrugged painfully and spat at the ground. “Be glad he don’t fancy fucking you in the bargain.” He left another bucket of corn gruel, and after he went off for his own meal we decided to try our luck first with the bars, while the others disinterestedly concentrated on their unappetizing meal.
I rotated one clockwise, then counterclockwise, and it gave easily in the concrete the jailers had haphazardly poured after the last escape. The bar was long, however, and though we could move it vertically two or three inches it wouldn’t come out far
enough to allow our egress. After watching us for a minute the giant grunted, dropped his cup, and drew up to his full height, then moved to the door and started pounding.
“Jailer! Dem crazy chinks has done and caught the straw on fire!”
I looked over at Fong, who looked puzzled for a second and then let out a scream of such convincing pain I thought he was truly injured. “I’m on fire! Help!” he shouted, and I joined my own voice to the chorus. Fong yelled something at his friends in Chinese, and they commenced screeching as well in their own tongue. Only the drunk and the three rioters kept eating, looking puzzled by the cacophony.
“Pipe down,” the prophet said. “Ain’t nothing burning.”
The giant reached down and backhanded him ever so gently across the face. “Shut it or I’ll break it.” The prophet shut it, his eyes glistening.
I heard the turnkey coming then, keys jangling, yelling for us to hold on, and when the door opened the big man gave him an uppercut that lifted him into the air before depositing his skinny, bent frame on the ground.
He looked around and then scowled. “Ain’t no goddamn fire in here.” He started to stand and then he was looking straight at a fist the size of a ham hock. “Now hold on a goddamned minute.” The rioters had stopped eating, though the drunk was taking advantage of the confusion to drink his muck straight from the bucket, and spilling the stuff down the front
of his gray shirt, from which he scraped bits of wet corn with his grimy finger, which he then licked more or less clean.
Fong slipped out the door and returned with a set of wrist irons. He took the keys from the jailer, who was quietly making predictions about our speedy capture, and he chained the poor fellow to the bar we had failed to remove.
He looked sadder than he did angry. “You sons of bitches are going to get me fired,” he said as we filed out of the room calmly.
Outside on Thirteenth Street we could hear him yelling immediately. The giant wanted to go back inside, but Fong stopped him. “Always outside the jailhouse people hear yelling.”
The giant nodded. “Best ve split up now,” he said, and all concurred but the three rioters and the drunk, who were headed straight for the nearest saloon, the Rusted Nail. The last I saw of them they were whooping in harmony as they entered.
B
y the time I had made my way through the dark streets to my studio the fever had worsened considerably. Opening the front door, which no one had seen fit to lock, I had to fight back nausea at that old familiar smell of graveyard detail and the Benders’ charnel pit, and for a moment I wondered whether I wasn’t delirious, for I could think of no rational reason for such a smell to permeate my entryway, unless Mrs. Fenster had died during my absence and gone undiscovered until now. An eerily faint orange light was barely discernible in the upstairs foyer, and I imagined I heard the muffled weeping of women.
Atop the stairs I was greeted by the macabre spectacle of a veiled quartet of ladies, dressed in mourning and quietly
lamenting. Black crêpe bunting had been draped all about the walls of the foyer, and though candles were burning throughout the room no lamp was lit, and it was impossible to make out any of the faces beneath the black lace veils. At the center of the room on a makeshift catafalque lay a figure so small I took it for a child at first, until its features, distorted by two or three days’ lifelessness, resolved in my mind into those of my poor stunted assistant Lemuel. I presumed, then, that these were his aunties and his mother.
I bowed in the ladies’ general direction, as the stoutest of them rose huffing to her thick feet. “Didn’t have any way to ask for your permission,” she said.
“Mrs. Fenster?” I pointed at the still form. “What happened?”
She gave me an odd look. I attributed the pinching of her nostrils to the general stench in the room until she opened her mouth. “I shot him, as you well know, with your own gun.”
“Lemuel?” I asked, stupefied at such a claim.
“Lemuel’s over there.” She indicated a corner of the room near the gallery where the boy sat on a wicker chair with a look of bovine contentment on his imbecilic features. Looking over at the body on the slab I reconsidered its concave eyes and its lips drawn tight to reveal its uneven dentition; even in that state, these were clearly the mortal remains of a man of forty or fifty, and I understood that its slight resemblance to my own idiot assistant was a family one.
Mrs. Fenster had raised her veil, and I noted to my surprise
that she herself had been weeping. “I’m surprised to see you carrying on so about Cowan,” I said.
She sniffed with some force, snorted, really. “He was my brother-in-law for an awful long time, Mr. Sadlaw, and wasn’t always mean.”
I nodded, and sniffed myself. The smell was powerful, and I wondered aloud why he hadn’t been put underground.
“What with the riots and your lady friend, plus a fire in a boardinghouse, the undertakers is all busy with the better sorts of stiffs, and Hiram’s been moved to the back of the line with the paupers.”
“I understood the
Bulletin
was going to pay all the funeral expenses.”
“With Mr. Banbury dead the paper ain’t paying for planting nobody but Banbury.” She studied my face and scowled. “You’re not well.”
“I’m not,” I allowed, and I sat down in a narrow armchair that sat against the wall. The pervasive tinge of corruption in the room exacerbated the effects of the fever, and a sweat had broken on my brow.
“You could do with a bite to eat, I’ll wager.”
Oddly, despite the ferocious stench in the room and my queasiness, I did feel hungry. I hadn’t eaten since the fateful hors d’oeuvre at Banbury’s reception.
“Come on into the kitchen, I’ve kept the door shut and the smell’s not bad in there.” I followed her waddling form through
the door and found that the odor was, indeed, much diminished. She offered me first a biscuit from a tin. I bit into it with relish, and though it was a tasteless thing it was a pleasure to swallow. On my second bite I forgot myself and bit down with the left side of my jaw, and presently howled with such force that when I fell off my chair Mrs. Fenster’s three sisters burst into the kitchen to see what was the matter.
The pain was momentary and was replaced quickly with a foggy dreaminess as my housekeeper and her three veiled sisters clucked over my prostrate form, arguing about what was the matter with me. The fever seemed to rise back up in me with great speed, and I began wondering who was under which veil. I supposed that one sister was the pressman’s widow, that another was Mrs. Fenster’s murderous accomplice, and I wondered whether the third wasn’t the sister Mrs. Fenster had gone to visit ten years prior, from which trip she returned to kill the faithless Mr. Fenster. They seemed to be swimming above me in some sort of thick but transparent fluid, and their voices weren’t entirely clear to me either. I managed to point at my mouth.
“Tooth,” I yelled.
They picked me up and, as one, carried me through the house to the sound of rustling cotton. They babbled incoherently as they laid me out on my bed, and Mrs. Fenster lit the bedside lamp. She made some sort of pronouncement, and they all gasped at it.
Mrs. Fenster disappeared for a moment, and one of the sisters removed her veil. To my astonishment she was a lovely woman of perhaps forty years, and bore only the most tangential resemblance to my housekeeper. She mopped my brow with a handkerchief, muttering soothing words to me, and I began to feel the shameful stirrings of an erection. At that moment Mrs. Fenster returned, and at her signal the two still-veiled sisters each took hold of one of my arms. The lovely widow straddled me indecently at the waist, then grabbed my lower jaw and, simultaneously, my forehead. I was at once aroused and terrified, and as Mrs. Fenster approached me from the side I screamed, certain these were the angels of death, come to take me to hell. This arranged very well for Mrs. Fenster, who deftly inserted the pliers she had gone to fetch into my mouth and yanked powerfully once, twice, and thrice. At three I lost consciousness, aware that the fractured molar had slipped from its moorings.
I awakened on several occasions without truly regaining full consciousness; just enough to remember hearing Mrs. Fenster talking to a police officer about the reason the dead man was still in the foyer, and about her theory of where I had gone.
“He was here just long enough to pack his grip,” she said, “and then he lit back out, never to return. He said he was headed for Ohio, where he has folks.”
There was also a hubbub at one point because the idiot boy had punctured the hand of the dead man with a fork, stabbing
it to the makeshift catafalque and laughing maniacally. That may have been a fever dream, however.
And then toward the end of my delirium I was brought into something akin to consciousness by the extremely pleasant sensation of some sort of warm wetness at my groin. Upon opening my eyes I found one of the sisters bobbing her head up and down at my waist. I must have let out a gasp because she looked up, disengaged her mouth from my prick and, using her right hand to keep the black veil from her face, smiled most pleasantly at me.
It was the widow Cowan herself, and the muted daylight that showed through my drawn curtain revealed her to be, if not the beauty I’d deliriously imagined the other night, a reasonably handsome woman nonetheless, despite a right eye with a tendency to wander, and a nose that had been broken and badly set. She seemed not at all embarrassed to be surprised in such an act. “This is by way of thanking you for being so kind to my boy all these months.” She slipped her mouth back around my cock and, lowering the veil, resumed bobbing. As she did so the border of the veil rhythmically grazed the skin above my groin, and though I was somewhat bothered by the smell of her husband’s putrefaction in the other room the overall sensation was pleasurable. I drifted back into a dream-state and she became a dozen women one after another, starting chronologically with Mary Harding and proceeding forward. When a Kentucky lass whose name I couldn’t remember metamorphosed into my abandoned
wife Ninna I was taken by surprise but, oddly, not displeased, and it was into Ninna’s hungry gullet that I discharged a day or two’s worth of ejaculate. I opened my eyes again to find the widow wiping her lips with a handkerchief in a demure manner.
“My name’s Henrietta, but they call me Hennie,” she said, and I slipped back into contented sleep before I found the words to reply, aware that I was recovering and anxious to be going.
A
DAY LATER
I sat upright as though just waking from a satisfying night’s sleep, and called for Mrs. Fenster.