The Rock Child (25 page)

“We understand,” said Sir Richard.

“That will be three dollars. I’d like to see her again in a week. Do you know how to keep a fever down?”

“Cool the patient with water or ice,” said Sir Richard, handing the doctor coins.

“If she has a crisis meanwhile, summon me immediately.” Pushing the cloth of the wall aside, he turned back and repeated, “Immediately.” Then he was gone.

There’s some people, the way they act, it just makes me want to shake my head and say, “White people.”

Soon as the doctor left, I says to Sir Richard, “It could be a long time. You don’t have to wait, you know. Sun Moon and me will be OK.”

I’m embarrassed, now, about saying that. I didn’t have two bits, and we’d have been on the street without a thing to eat. Beyond that, I was half-afraid of being left alone with Sun Moon, half-afraid of being left alone in Washo, and half-afraid of my own quest, which adds up to one and a half and means swamped. Luckily, Sir Richard had a heart half as good as his brain and saved me from my own foolishness.

“I wouldn’t think of it, my dear boy. I am devoted to the two of you.” He smiled. “Besides, Virginia City looks … appetizing.”

I didn’t like to think what appetizing might mean to Sir Richard.

Came a soft rap on the door jamb. Sir Richard let in one of the cleaning women. “I have hired Bridget to sit with Sun Moon,” says Sir Richard to me. “Will you permit me to take you to supper?”

We went to a fancy place called Nell’s. I was worried. Heckahoy, I’d never eaten in a restaurant before, and I half figured the place wouldn’t serve Indians, if they took me for an Indian. On the other hand, Harold had given me a bunch of new duds. The town seemed full of swarthy-skinned men who weren’t treated like Indians. It was worth the chance.

A young man with a bush on his upper lip seemed to follow us through the streets, came right in after us, and took a table nearby. I was less worried about him than myself and bluffing through.

The waitress trotted over without a raised eyebrow, give her credit, and asked did we want to order. Sir Richard even let me go first. “Ham steak, mashed potatoes, green beans, coffee, and pie,” I says. Welcome change from Muley and Carlson’s cooking clear across the Great American Desert, fried bacon and beans three times a day. Sir Richard ordered
eggs, sausages, and potatoes, which he claimed was the only edible American dish.

Next the waitress goes to Bush Lip at the nearby table, he looks around, and orders loud and clear, “Yes, Ma’am, one baked horned toad. Two broiled lizards on toast, with tarantula sauce. Stewed rattlesnake and poached scorpions. Very nice and well done, ever’ bit of it.” Then he surveyed the room with a toothsome grin, meeting everyone’s eyes but ours.

Sir Richard’s eyes was a-popping. “He’s pulling our leg,” I says. Sir Richard could be naive about some things. Bush Lip’s loudness gave him away clean.

He turned and looked at us at last, his eyes full of mischief and devilment. And that is how I have after since thought of him, a man who sees the deviltry in life and revels in it. “I take it you gentlemen are new to Washo?” he says.

“Isn’t everyone?” says Sir Richard.

“Captain Burton, if I’m not misinformed.”

Sir Richard hesitates, and then answers, “There is truth in desk clerks. Sometimes.”

Bush Lip stood up and handed Sir Richard a card. “I’m with the
Virginia City Territorial Enterprise,
” he says. “May I interview you? My newspaper is interested in Washo’s distinguished visitors.”

“Of which I am scarcely one. I’m simply a British traveler.”

I suppose lying comes naturally to spies after a while.

“Our readers would like your impression of Washo land,” said Bush Lip.

“Why don’t you join us?” says Sir Richard.

Bush Lip grabbed a chair like a hawk attacking a mouse. Before sitting, he stuck out a big paw to each of us. “Sam Clemens,” he says. “I write a little.”

Now you may object to me marching in Samuel Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, author of boys’ adventure books, here in a Virginia City restaurant. First Sir Richard Burton, then Brigham Young, and now Mark Twain? Preposterous, you’re muttering.

I understand. But all along here, on every page, I am telling you both fact and truth. You know how Sir Richard came to be in the West in 1862. It’s well-known that Brother Brigham was king bee in the Deseret
hive at the time we’re speaking of. And Sam Clemens was right there in Virginia, writing little bits for that very newspaper. You can look it up in his book
Roughing It
. Washo was like that. If this story followed the Comstock Lode along very far, you’d be surprised at the famous folks as would appear. Jenny Lind, the Swedish nightingale, for instance, Drew Barrymore, and Oscar Wilde, the Irish poet and playwright.

Right now our dinners came. Sir Richard was amused, silently, that Sam’s order turned out to be six eggs, fried potatoes, and toast with butter. “They’re fresh out of scorpions today,” says Sam.

“Dinner costs a dollar,” I says to him. “How can laboring men afford that?”

“A dollar?” says Sam. “
A dollar?
Why, in Washo we are never short of dollars. Other places they breathe air, here we breathe lucre. In Washo a fellow sets out of a morning possessed of a hangover and a bottled start on his next hangover. He wanders out unsteadily across the mountainside, tips sideways, tumbles three or four hundred feet, and wakes up with his nose in a vein that assays a thousand dollars a ton. That’s how our fair-city was founded. The drunk, name of Old Virginny, properly James Finney, said when he fell, ‘I baptize this ground Virginia.’”

I was struck by the way his telling worked. He didn’t just say words, he made them bob and weave. It made you want to hear what he was going to say next.

We chatted along through dinner. Since Sir Richard and I had just come across Nevada Territory via the Humboldt and the Carson Rivers, both of those streams petering out in desert sinks, Sam favored us with an explanation of how it happens that all the rivers of Nevada run not into the sea but into the sand. He told it in the manner of an old mountaineer or prospector, for Sam was a first-class mimic:

“The way it came about was in this wise: The Almighty, at the time he was creatin’ and fashionin’ this here yearth, got along to this section late on Saturday evening. He had finished all the great lakes, like Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, and them—had made the Ohio, Missouri, and Mississippi Rivers, and, as a sort of windup, was about to make a river that would be far ahead of anything he had done yet in that line. So he started in and traced out Humboldt River, and Truckee River, and Walker River, and Reese River, and all the other rivers, and he was leadin’ of them along, calkerlatin’ to bring ’em all together in one big boss river and then lead that off and let it empty into the Gulf of Mexico or the Gulf of California, as might be most convenient. But as he was bringin’ down
and leadin’ along the several branches—the Truckee, Humboldt, Carson, Walker, and them—it came on dark and instead of trying to carry out the original plan, he just tucked the lower ends of the several streams into the ground, whar they have remained from that day to this.”

Sir Richard grinned like only a connoisseur of tale-telling can grin. He’d found a kindred spirit, though he couldn’t admit to being a storyteller himself. “Perhaps you can also explain to us, then, the meaning and origin of the term
Washo Zephyr.
”

Clemens put on a pooh-poohing look. “Why, as you might guess from the name, Suh, it is a sort of breeze that comes hereabouts, particularly in the spring and fall. Its remarkable aspect is that it comes from the direction of the Pacific Ocean”—he held one arm toward the west—“deposits its moisture in California, and arrives here in the spirit of a dry drunk—lots of devilment but nary a balming drop of rain. In a devilish spirit it delights in going up vigorously, down with a vengeance, then round and round in whirlwinds, and at last from every point of the compass at once.

“At such times the tin on half a dozen roofs may be seen flapping in the breeze in chorus, each section of roofing giving out a roar more startling than would be the combined sheet-iron thunder of a dozen country theaters of average enterprise.

“Not to exaggerate, I may say that at times such clouds of dust are raised, that, viewed from a distance, all there is to be seen is a steeple stickin’ up here and there, a few scattering chimneys, an occasional poodle dog, and perhaps a stray infant drifting wrong end up, high above all the housetops. Down below in the darkness, gravel-stones are flying along the street like grapeshot, and all the people have taken refuge in the doorways.

“Out on the divide between here and Gold Hill, where the wind has a fair sweep, the air is filled with dust, rags, tin cans, empty packing cases, old cooking stoves, and similar rubbish. Hats! More hats are lost during the prevalence of a single zephyr than in any city in the Union on any election held in the last twenty years. These hats all go down the side of the mountain and land in Six-Mile Canyon, where drifts of hats fully fifteen feet in depth are to be seen in the bed of the canyon just named. All these hats are found and appropriated by the Paiute Indians, who always go down to the canyon the morning after a rousing and fruitful gale to gather in the hat crop. When the innocent and guileless children of the desert come back to town, each head is decorated with at least half a
dozen hats of all kinds and colors—braves, squaws, and papooses are walking pyramids of hats.”

Now Sir Richard was grinning with a slightly unfocused expression. I’d come to recognize it—it meant he was trying to remember the lines to write them down. Maybe it was Sam being interviewed and not the other way around, unbeknownst to him!

I had something else in mind, after the mention of Indians. “What do you know about the Paiutes? Where’s their camp? Can I meet some?”

Sam regarded me with curiosity and delight. That was what made him Samuel Clemens, I would say, a mind roving restlessly and a sense of humor about all it beheld. “I am acquainted with the Paiutes,” he allowed, “as few white men here are, and would be pleased to escort you on a tour of their camp and an elucidation of their ways.” Now he clicked his eyes from me to Sir Richard. “Especially if Captain Burton would grant me an interview.”

Sir Richard hesitated. He was willing enough, I knew, to talk to the press, which is to say to spin his own tall tales. But he had secrets to protect. He said, “Can we strike a bargain, Mr. Clemens? I will grant the interview if you will show us around your fair city.”

As the three of them strolled the streets, Burton felt exhilarated by the very air. A mining camp reeked of… desire. Everywhere the thump of hammers, the rasp of saws, shouts, the rattle of wagons, the clop of hoofs, lads yelling out the headlines of their newspapers, posters trumpeting chances to get rich, bulletin boards declaring the latest prices of mine stocks—everything in the world rushing to become what it was not, as of yet.

Cravings churned within Burton. He knew that, against the precepts he had learned so diligently in the Orient, he had not changed himself. He suffered from desire and dissatisfaction with the present as much as any.

They strode on briskly. Burton loved his little charade with Clemens and was intrigued by what the newsman pointed out. Yet the attacks on his sense swept away his whole being. Opium. Women. Booze. Opium. Women. Booze.
Oh, Isabel
.

As they passed gambling houses, he felt pleased that he was no addict of the roulette wheel or the faro box. His first enchantment was women, and here they were aplenty. Painted women, some of them showing their legs and sneering provocatively, even in the early evening.
Women looking damaged, actually selling their pathos and helplessness. Elegant women of the
demimonde,
young, beautiful, dressed even better than their respectable counterparts in the latest San Francisco fashions. There were fancy respectable women, too—wives of the prosperous, many of them, out for shopping or for luncheon. Wealthy women, owners of land, investors in stock, about the town on business. Burton couldn’t yet tell invariably which women were respectable and which not, but all the citizens would know.

He breathed in and out deeply. He might want one of these women, the high-class harlots. Or he might want one of their low sisters. Though it shamed him to admit it, he might especially want a Chinese woman and then opium.

For now he felt exhilarated. The desire was ripe for him to breathe. Desire for gold, desire for flesh, desire for power, desire for inebriation, desire for lotusland, desire for madness. He loved the feel of a mining camp.

He would indulge. Temporarily, that is. Burton well knew—hadn’t he and Isabel talked about it for long hours? hadn’t he made her promises?—yes, he well knew that for him wine, women, and opium were the road to madness. He could not indulge. Well, not more than briefly.

Clemens looked sharply at Burton. “Perhaps the great American enterprise is selling illusion,” he said with a touch of asperity. The captain beheld a street blocked by wagons, and on the boardwalk a huckster of the typically American sort haranguing a small crowd. His speech and dress gave him away—both attempted an impression of substance, but a glance revealed that the man had no breeding. What compelled Burton’s interest were a lad with spotted skin, a gargantuan snake, and a female dwarf.

“Gentlemen,” the huckster began, “you will agree the creatures before you deserve both your pity and your generosity. Behold this wonderful spotted boy, captured in the wilds of Africa, the huge boa constructor, which you see him handle with the greatest possible freedom. And here is the wonderful little Fairy Queen, eighteen years of age, and only thirty-one inches in height. She was born in Grand Rapids, Wisconsin, has a thorough education, and possesses the graces and manners becoming a lady of the highest standing in society.”

“Let us move on,” said Burton. He felt revulsion for the show, for the illusion. Somehow the huckster would turn sympathy into tossed coins,
and would hint that the diminutive Fairy Queen, possessed of such graces and manners, might be available after dark for unusual sexual experiences. Burton had seen it in a hundred cities.