The Gamble (I) (13 page)

What about at the top of the stairs last night?

You don’t really think... he wasn’t going to...

You thought so, didn’t you?

But tonight he was so charming to all of us, and I could see he was upset when Alvis Collinson shoved Evelyn.

A clever man.

What are you saying?

What are you saying?

No. I refuse to believe it of Gandy.

See, Agatha? See what ten gold pieces will do?

The Gilded Cage closed at midnight. Dan Loretto went home. Marcus Delahunt polished the neck of his banjo, then tucked it away in its velvet-lined case. Ivory Culhane closed the key cover on the piano and Jack Hogg washed glasses. Pearl stretched, Ruby yawned, and Jubilee watched Gandy close and lock the full outer doors. When he turned, she smiled.

Smiling, too, he weaved his way through the tables to her. “So what’s the smile for?”

She shrugged and walked toward the bar with him. “It’s good to be back, that’s all. Hey, fellas, isn’t it good to be back together again?” Reaching Ivory, she gave him an impulsive hug. “Gosh, I never thought I’d miss everybody so much.”

“Hey, how ‘bout me?” Jack Hogg put in.

Jubilee leaned across the bar and hugged him, then gave
him a peck on his cheek. “You, too, Jack.” She leaned both elbows on the varnished mahogany surface and propped up her chin. “So, how’s business been around here?”

Gandy watched her and the others as they gathered around. Jack, Marcus, Ivory, Pearl, Ruby, and Jubilee—the only family he had. A bunch of loners who’d all been scarred in one way or another. Not all their scars showed, as Jack’s did, but they were there just the same. When he’d gathered them together after the explosion on the riverboat two years ago, something magical had happened; he had felt a oneness of spirit, a bond of friendship that filled the voids in all their lives. Superficialities mattered not a whit—skin color, relative facial beauty, or lack of it. What mattered was what each brought to the group as a whole. They’d been split up for a month while he got the Gilded Cage set up and operable. It had seemed twice that long.

“I went down to New Orleans to visit the girls in a crib I used to work,” Pearl was saying.

“As long as you weren’t tempted to stay,” Ivory remarked.

“Uh-uh! Never again.” Everyone laughed. “You see the doc in Louisville, Jack?”

“Sure did.” Jack removed his white apron and laid it across the bar. “Doc says it won’t be long I’ll be lookin’ as pretty as Scotty here.”

Again they laughed. Ruby turned and looped an arm through Scotty’s. “What you want a face like that for? Look a little coluhless t’ me.”

Jack’s scar grew brighter as he laughed again with the others.

“So, where’d you go, Ruby?”

“Went down t’ Waverley. Visit my mama’s grave.”

Every glance shifted to Scotty. He revealed none of the emotions he felt. “How is it?”

“Looks seedy. A few o’ the old ones still there, shiftin’ for theirselves, growin’ greens an’ livin’ in the cabins. Leatrice”—the strange name rhymed with mattress—“she still there, waitin’ for Lord knows what.”

At the news, Gandy felt a stab of nostalgia, but he only inquired, “You give her a kiss for me?”

“Mos’ suttenly did not. Y’all wanna kiss Leatrice, ya’ll go down an’ do it yourself.”

He pondered momentarily, then replied, “Someday, maybe.”

Jubilee stood near Marcus, half leaning against him. “Marcus and I saw about getting the cage made and picked up a couple jobs here and there playing and singing before we met the girls in Natchez. We did one place called the Silver Slipper.” She draped an elbow over Marcus’s shoulder and looked smug. “They wanted us to stay awful bad, didn’t they, Marcus? We drew crowds that filled the hat every night.”

Marcus smiled, nodded, and made motions, as if counting out dollar bills. Everybody laughed.

“Is this a bribe, you two?” Scotty inquired. “I already pay you more than you’re worth.”

“What do you think, Marcus?” Jubilee lounged on Marcus’s shoulder while looking teasingly at Scott. “Should we go across the street and offer our talents to one of the saloons over there?”

“Just try it,” Scotty replied, taking aim with a forefinger as if it were a gun, pointing it straight at Jubilee’s pretty pink nose.

“What about you, Ivory?” Pearl asked.

“I stuck with the boss. Had to get the piano hauled in here and tuned up, and plenty to do gettin’ the whole place set up. Had to help him pick out the picture for the wall.” Ivory raised one eyebrow and half turned toward the nude. “So what do you think of her?”

The men smiled appreciatively. The women looked away and arched their eyebrows with a superior air.

Pearl said, “With those thighs she doesn’t look like she could kick a hat off a kitchen chair, much less a man’s head, does she, Ruby?”

“Pro’bly couldn’t sing a note, eithuh,” Ruby added.

“Tsk-tsk,” Jubilee added. “And the poor thing certainly is running to fat.”

When they trooped upstairs they were all in good spirits. Ivory and Jack retired to the first room on the left. Marcus took the next. Pearl and Ruby shared the one just beyond
the gilded cage, which now occupied the dead center of the hall, where the new trapdoor had been cut. That left Jubilee and Scotty.

She stepped into her room and lit a lamp, while he lounged against the doorframe.

“It’s a nice room, Scotty. Thanks.”

He only shrugged.

She flung her white boa over a pink oval-backed settee. “A window. A view of the street.” She moved to the front of the room, leaned both palms on the sill, and looked down at the row of coal-oil lights. Then she glanced over her shoulder at the man in the doorway. “I like it.”

He nodded. It was good just looking at her. She was a strikingly beautiful woman and he’d missed her.

“Whew!” She swung around, hands to the ceiling, flexing her shoulders. “What a long day.” She plucked the feather from her hair, discarded it, and picked up a buttonhook. Dropping to the pink settee, she held it out to him. “Help me with my shoes, Scotty?” Her voice was quiet.

For several seconds he didn’t move. Their eyes exchanged messages. Unhurriedly, he pulled his shoulder away from the doorframe and crossed the room to go down on one knee before her. He cradled her white boot against his groin and unhurriedly freed the buttons. Without looking up, he asked, “So how’d things go in Natchez? You meet anybody who struck your fancy?”

She studied his thick black hair. “No. Did you?”

“Uh-uh.”

“No sweet young Kansas thing, fresh from her mama’s arms?”

He pulled off one boot, dropped it, and looked up, grinning. “Nope.”

He took her other boot against him and began applying the hook. She watched his familiar dark hands perform the personal task. In the lamplight the ring flashed brightly against his dusky skin.

“No pining Kansas widow who’s been alone since the war?”

His dimples formed as he looked up into her familiar almond eyes and spoke lazily.

“Kansas widows don’t cotton to Johnny-reb gamblin’ men who open up saloons in their towns.”

She threaded her fingers through the hair over his right ear. “Well, gosh-a-mighty, if we aren’t two of a kind. Natchez mamas don’t turn their sons loose to no soiled dove-turned-dancer, either.”

He dropped the second boot, kissed her toes, and rubbed them with his thumb. “I missed you, Jube.”

“I missed you, too, you no-count gamblin’ man.”

“Wanna come t’ my room?”

“Just try to keep me away.”

Rising, he held out a hand. He led her past a tapestried screen, snagging her turquoise dressing gown from over the top of it and flinging it over his shoulder. “Bring the lantern. You won’t be needin’ it in here tonight.”

In the blackness at the other end of the hall a door remained slightly ajar. From his own dark room Marcus watched the lantern light splash the hall. Through the bars of the gilded cage he saw Scotty lead Jube by the hand to his doorway. Her hair shone so brightly it seemed as if it alone could have lit their way. Her white dress and bare arms appeared ethereal as she padded silently behind Scotty. What would it be like to take her hand? Walk her barefoot to bed? Remove the pins from that snow-bright hair and feel it spill into his hands?

Since the first time he’d seen her, Marcus had wondered. During the past month, while they’d traveled alone together, there were times when Jubilee had touched him. But she touched anyone and everyone without compunction. A touch didn’t mean to Jube what it meant to Marcus. Tonight by the bar she’d draped her arm over his shoulder. But she never suspected what happened inside him when her hand took his elbow or she adjusted his lapel, or—most of all—when she kissed his cheek.

She kissed all their cheeks whenever the spirit moved her. She’d kissed Jack’s only thirty minutes ago. They all knew it was Jube’s way.

But nobody knew the hidden torment of Marcus Delahunt.

Often he had to touch her to get her attention, so he knew
what her skin felt like. Sometimes when she’d turn to watch him communicate some silent message, he’d have to remind himself to make the motions. To look into Jube’s eyes, those stunning pale brown windows of her soul, was to lose his own. How often he’d longed to tell her how beautiful he thought she was. Locked in perpetual voicelessness, he could only think it. Often he played it to her on his banjo. But all she heard were musical notes.

Down the hall Scotty’s door closed. Marcus pictured him taking the white dress from Jube’s body, laying her across his bed, murmuring love words to her, telling her the thousand things Marcus himself wanted to say. He wondered if sound made a feeling when it rose from one’s throat. He wondered what laughter felt like when it was more than the shaking of one’s chest, and what it was like to whisper.

To love a woman, a man had to be able to do all those things. He pictured Scotty doing them now. Nobody else Marcus knew was good enough for her. Her pale beauty deserved Scotty’s dark good looks. Her bright laughter deserved his teasing grin. Her perfect body deserved another equally as perfect.

What would a man say first?

You’re beautiful.

Do first?

Touch—her cheek, her lips, her angel hair.

Feel like?

As if the world and all its glory were in his hand.

Jube... Jube...

“Jube, let me do that,” Scotty was saying in the room across the hall. He did all the things Marcus Delahunt could only dream of doing. One by one he pulled the pins from Jube’s fluffy, white hair. He felt it tumble into his hands and smoothed it over her milk-white shoulders. He unbuttoned her dress, then freed her corset stays and watched her long-legged body emerge as she kicked free of garters and stockings. When she turned and looped her arms around his neck, he placed his hands on the sides of her breasts and kissed the black mole between them, the one the rest of the world thought she glued to her skin
each morning. He kissed her willing mouth, touched her in ways that temporarily held loneliness at bay. He laid her on the bed and murmured endearments and told her how he’d missed her and how glad he was to have her back. He linked their bodies with the most intimate of caresses and found within her a surcease for emptiness. He even cleansed her and himself when it was over. And wrapped her close in the big, soft bed and slept naked with her breast within his palm.

But between them the word
love
was never spoken.

The first herd of Texas longhorns arrived the following day. Bawling and bullheaded they came, driven by men who’d been three months in the saddle on a dusty, dry trail. Both the cattle and the men were dirty, thirsty, hungry, and tired. Proffitt was ready to accommodate them all.

Its inordinately wide streets were designed first to handle the unlovable beasts with horns twice the width of their bodies; next, to assuage the frustrations of the weary Texas cowboys who drove them.

Agatha looked out the window of her millinery shop and watched two boys race across the street—their last chance to do so for some time. From the far end of town the rumble of hooves could already be felt. Resignedly, she said, “Here they come.”

The herd passed through Proffitt from west to east, a shifting, drifting, sometimes unmanageable mass of beef flesh that created a stream of red, brown, white, and gray cowhide for as far as the eye could see. Beside them rode the hardscrabble cowpunchers as tough as the hundreds of miles of mesas they’d crossed. Saddle-weary and lonely, they wanted three things: a drink, a bath, and a woman, usually in that order.

The prostitutes had already returned to the cat houses on the far west edge of town after wintering in the bagnios of Memphis, St. Louis, and New Orleans. Garbed in dressing gowns and scanty corsets, they stood on the railed roofs and hung from the windows, waving and beckoning.

“Hiya, cowboy! Don’t forget to ask for Crystal!”

“Tired of that saddle, cowboy? Li’l ole Delilah’s got somethin’ softer ya can ride.”

“Up here, big boy! Hoo-ee! Would you look at that beard, Betsy?” Then cupping her hands to her mouth, she called, “Don’t shave off that beard, honey. I
lo-o-ove
beards!”

The trail-worn cowboys stood in their saddles and waved their battered John B’s, white teeth flashing in their grimy faces. “What’s your name, honey?”

“Lucy! Just ask for Lucy!”

“Keep it hot, Lucy! Big Luke’ll be back!”

The cattle flooded the street from hitching rail to hitching rail, sometimes even clattering onto the boardwalks themselves. Unruly and stupid, they often reverted to their wild, untamed nature, charging into the open doorways of saloons, breaking windows with their horns, rolling their eyes and charging anything that got in their way.

“Here goes the last of our peace for the summer,” lamented Agatha as the lead bull led the herd past her door.

“I think it’s exciting.” Violet’s eyes glittered.

“Exciting? All that dust and noise and smell?”

“It isn’t dusty.”

“It will be. As soon as this mud dries.”