The City of Lovely Brothers (44 page)

The blacksmith came to see him before he left. "I come because I heard what that scumbag done to you," he said. "Cheated you worse'n he done me. I thought you'd wanna know how he paid me back. It's all in this here paper, written and signed by the skunk himself. I'll sell it to you for what he owes me."

"What's in it?"

"You'll hafta buy it offa me to find out."

"I ain't got that kinda money."

By then the blacksmith knew that Darcie did not

have it, either, and that Calvin Jr. was not coming back. He took what he could get for it: twenty-five dollars.

* * * *

Logan rented a room in a cheap Denver boarding

house and was lucky to find a job in a meat processing plant despite the high rate of unemployment. At the end of 55the month, he went to the police to inquire if they had begun searching for Calvin Jr. The directive had arrived from Montana, but they had no description and did not know where to start. Logan described him to a police artist, who made several sketches until he came up with one Logan thought was a passable likeness. The artist advised him to obtain a photograph. Logan wrote to his mother asking her to get one from Darcie, but Amanda was too embarrassed to ask her for a photo of her son that would be given to the police.

Every two or three months, Logan went to the

police and asked how the search was progressing. Each time they said they had not yet come across any leads. They doubted they would find him in Denver and suggested Logan contact the Montana authorities and have them widen their search.

Around the time of Logan's first visit to the police station to inquire how the hunt for Calvin Jr. was going, a man about the same age as Logan came to Denver looking for work and took a room in the same boarding house. He had come out of his room after dumping his things there when he saw Logan and a couple of friends headed down the stairs. "You guys know any cheap place I can get a meal around here?"

"A couple," Logan said. "We're on our way to get 55supper right now. Wanna join us?"

"That's mighty friendly o' you. Thanks. I appreciate it."

The man introduced himself as Jim Calhoun. Logan told him he had an uncle named Calhoun.

"No kidding!"

"He's more'n just my uncle. He's also my… Gee, I don't know what you'd call him. My father-in-law, maybe."

"You married?"

"No."

"Then he ain't your father-in-law."

"He's my sister's father-in-law. She married our cousin."

"He's still just your uncle."

They continued talking about the coincidence in the restaurant. "This Calhoun, he your favorite uncle?" Jim asked.

"Nah, my favorite's Uncle Caliban, but I ain't seen

'im in going on ten years. He's in Saint Louis, or was last time I heard. Uncle Calhoun's okay, though. I like him, too."

"Okay then, that cousin your sister married, he your favorite cousin?"

"I don't got a favorite cousin. All my cousins're alot older'n me. Except my cousin Calvin, and I hate him." "'S everyone in your family named Cal something?"

another guy asked.

"Nope, my name's Logan."

They all laughed. "Well, don't you go calling me Cal," Jim said. "Calhoun's my last name."

"Sure, Uncle Jim. We only got five Cals in the family: all four o' my uncles and that one shit-faced cousin."

"You really have it in for 'im, don't you?"

"Would you have a soft spot in your heart for some guy who robbed you?" Then he went on to tell them what Calvin Jr. had done. "I come to Denver looking for the no-good bastard," he concluded.

Jim was impressed. "So if it wasn't for what he done, you'd be a rich landowner."

"I don't know about rich. It ain't but an eighth of a ranch, not quite fourteen thousand acres. But at least I'd have something."

"Sounds like a lot to me."

The others at the table agreed with Jim. Fourteen thousand acres was not what one would call huge, but it made a decent size ranch, and that much land was worth a lot of money.

* * * *

Logan and Jim became fast friends. Logan found

him a position at the meat processing plant where he worked, and they used to walk to and from work together and stop at a bar for a drink on the way home. They told each other their life stories. Jim could not get over that his friend would have been a rich landowner if his cousin had not cheated him out of his inheritance. They went to casinos and pool halls together, and once in a while to a movie. When they had the money, they would go together to spend it at one of the city's brothels.

Every man in Denver had heard of the Grand

Balcony, the most expensive whorehouse in town, but few had the money to go there. They spoke of it in hushed tones. Men did not go there to have a couple of drinks and follow a woman upstairs for a quick fuck; it was place where they could act out their fantasies, however bizarre.

They served imported champagne and caviar. They had costumes for rent that the whores and their customers could put on to play any role one could imagine, even gorilla suits. For triple the going price, two men could share the same woman. According to rumor, there were also male whores if you wanted to try something different. Or not so different if you had a taste for that sort of thing. The idea of sharing a whore intrigued Jim and Logan, but a night at the 56Grand Balcony was way beyond their price range. It was inevitable, however, that someday one of them would win big at cards or dominoes, and they would have their splurge.

They got their chance in the autumn of 1931. They had gone to a casino on a Saturday night, played at separate tables, and won close to two hundred dollars between the two of them. Jim held his fistful of greenbacks in the air and hollered, "Grand Balcony, here we come!" Logan said it made more sense to wait a week. The night was half gone.

Every night after work they would sit on the bed in one of their rooms and talk about what they were going to do, trying to decide whose fantasies would be the most fun.

They shared more sexual confidences that week than either had in his lifetime. They found they had more in common than they had thought, for example, they had both done it for the first time at fourteen. But now and then their eyes would become wide as saucers when they heard some of the kinky things the other had tried. Then they would fall back on the bed in a heap, laughing and punching one another in the shoulder, and would say things like "No kidding! You didn't!" and "Show me!" At the end of the week, they still did not know how they would spend their winnings at the marvelous and mysterious whorehouse. The ground floor of the Grand Balcony was a huge, ornate parlor, almost two thousand square feet. The place was humming. They were having a busy night. There were plush sofas, a bar, a buffet table, and a small jazz orchestra.

On a loveseat in the far corner, sitting on the lap of a corpulent older man who was pawing at him, Logan saw Calvin Jr.

Logan turned his face away before Calvin Jr. caught sight of him and went and asked the madam, "That guy, he work here or is he a client?"

"Who? Vinnie? He's been with us about two years now. You interested? He's busy right now, but he'll be free in about an hour."

"An hour, you say? Then we'll be back. C'mon, Jim."

Before Jim could open his mouth to protest, he had walked out. Jim ran after him and found him waiting for him by the front door.

"Hey, Logan, what the hell? We just got here."

"Did you see that boy whore in the corner? He's the sonofabitch cousin who robbed me. We're going to the police. I'm afraid we ain't never gonna try out that Grand Balcony. They ain't gonna welcome us back after I show up with the cops and point 'im out to 'em."

"Catching that sonofabitch is more important than a 56night in a whorehouse. You know, I was thinking that when we got all this money it's kinda dumb blowing it all on some nutty orgy."

"You're right. We could use it to get outta this hole we're in. Get us a decent place to live, for one."

"Still, I been looking forward to this all week, so you owe me one. You're gonna hafta make it up to me somehow."

"Got it. I'll write you an IOU for one wild orgy."

They laughed hysterically all the way to the police station, bumping into each other and tears rolling down their cheeks. The people they passed in the street thought they were drunk.

How fragile is the memory of a generation!

Individuals remember, but as their relatives, friends and neighbors pass on, only fragments of memories are left, in no way like the shared knowledge of a cohesive society of people in their prime and still active. When my parents moved there a year before I was born, there were Caldwells living in Caladelphia, but none were descendants of the Caldwells who had owned the ranch. When I was growing up, there must have been people there who had lived there when it was still a ranch, at least in name, and occupied houses Calvin had built for them. They must have known all the people I tell about in this history and could have told me many things that Nick, whose interest focused only on Caliban, did not put in his diary. Today it would be hard to find more than a handful who know where the first syllable of their city's name comes from. It was a Classics scholar at Bozeman who speculated and later convinced himself it had to mean "The City of Lovely Brothers" and explained it to me as such, along with a lesson in Greek etymologies, when I told him I was writing a history of the city's founding.

How Calvin died is a supposition. I read the coroner's report and found it vague. It attributes his death to suffocation, but does not specify either natural or unnatural causes. I have not been able to learn anything about Darcie and Hester after they left Caladelphia. They simply drop out of sight. Nick does not give Betsy's married name in his diary, and I have not been able to find a record of their marriage anywhere in Caladelphia, at the Rosebud County courthouse, nor in Livingston, Helena, or the archives at Bozeman.

The only person I would have wanted to interview is Jake. It is unlikely he has lived to the ripe age of one hundred four. Only he could have answered the questions I want most to ask. It probably would not have been difficult to track down his grandchildren. I might have found tucked away in their attic an old box containing some of the letters Caliban wrote his nephew, but I would not find in them a portrait as intimate and revealing as Nick's diary. Nick was a mediocre writer, but read from beginning to end instead of singling out the sexual parts and skimming of the rest, the pages glow with a passion that few novelists have been able to capture.

Caliban died early in the spring of 1933. At the time, Nick had filled up about four-fifths of the last notebook. Caliban had been bedridden for several months 56and in great pain. His hip had been deteriorating rapidly for several years, and his right leg had atrophied and become unusable. Nick quit his job and stayed home to nurse him.

Their love for each other, which had sustained them through the happy years and the many trials that followed, again sustained them until Caliban drew his last breath.

For the last month of his life, Caliban was on

morphine and doped up a lot of the time. The doctor who prescribed it wanted to take him to the hospital.

"What'll happen if he goes to a hospital?" Nick asked.

The doctor swallowed, realizing the pointlessness of it all. "He'll die," he admitted.

"Then I'm keeping 'im here. I can give 'em them shots myself, and I'll be with 'im so's he can die in my arms."

The first time Nick gave Caliban the shot, Caliban hovered between reality and euphoria. He asked Nick to fuck him again. "I can't feel my hip," he said. "That is, I feel it's there, but it doesn't hurt anymore, and it feels as if it's both part and not a part of me. My whole body feels like that."

It had been a long time since they had been able to make love, but at night they cuddled and slept with their naked bodies close to each other. While Nick was fucking him, Caliban said, "I wish we had discovered this stuff years ago. I've never felt anything like this, intense, yet far away."

There are tear stains on the page where Nick wrote about it, one of the last times they made love. It was not long before Caliban needed more morphine, and eventually he was unconscious more or less round the clock. Nick would sit on the bed beside him and stroke his hair or wipe the sweat off his body with a cool rag.

* * * *

After closing his friend's eyes, Nick cut off a lock of his hair and tied it with a piece of yarn. He mourned Caliban for a month; then he found another job and returned to work.

Caleb's son Logan came to see his uncle and Nick in Saint Louis a week after Caliban died. He told Nick how he had found Calvin Jr. in Denver, and Nick wrote it down in his diary.

"I got something more on him, Nick. A piece of paper he wrote out for the blacksmith at Caladelphia before he left. I bought it off the blacksmith for twenty-five bucks."

"What is it?" "Read it and see. I'm gonna give it to you for free on account o' I know how much you and Uncle Caliban hated

'im. You can stick it in that diary I hear you keep. You still writing in it?"

"I ain't stopped yet."

"I think it'll interest you, what he done. Sure as hell knocked me for a loop, like when I found 'im. D'ya think that sorta thing could run in families, like it looks like in ours? I mean, there was Uncle Caliban and Calvin Jr. and— "

"Then you know about your pa," Nick interrupted.

"I heard rumors in town, but I didn't believe them till we found Calvin Jr. in that whorehouse."

"They were true, Logan."

"I know that now. But I was gonna say: 'and me'."

"I never thought about it running in families, but it might. I wonder why."

"Does there gotta be a reason?"

"Are you okay with it, Logan? I mean, okay with yourself?"

"As okay as any of us are, I s'pose. I got a boyfriend. We don't live together or nothing, and we ain't as close as you and Uncle Caliban were, but Jim's alot o'

laughs and life ain't bad. Were you okay with it?"