The Whip (13 page)

Five

Charley was making a name for herself. She was working more hours than any of the other whips in Birch’s Sacramento operations. She had developed a reputation for always being on time, with zero accidents to boot. Helped no doubt by her decision to quit drinking on the job.

She had found her freedom.

Her eyes still searched for Lee in the faces she passed. But that was okay. Somehow, this journey of hers…she could never have imagined would bring her to where she was.

Saving up enough money, she bought herself a few acres of land on the outskirts of Sacramento. The cabin on it was crude but homey and serviceable, a big improvement from soiled rooming houses or the cold ground where she’d laid her tired head when she first arrived in California.

It was more than a life.

Sacramento seemed to be changing so fast—right before Charley’s eyes. In January, 1850, a major flood had hit the city when the American and Sacramento rivers crested at the same time. Since the rebuild, there were fewer canvas-and-frame structures and more brick buildings, more Yankee-style wooden stores painted white with green trim, and covered top to bottom with enormous signs. There was more of an air of permanence about the city now.

Charley, who did not most days have the time nor the inclination to read a newspaper, did read, along with everybody else in California, an article that stated that on the auspicious day, September 9, 1850, President Millard Filmore had just signed his signature, decreeing that California was now the 31st state in the Union—and it had joined as a free state, safe from slavery. Since that day, there had been an unprecedented orgy of drinking, bonfires, processions, serenades, speeches, suppers, and cannon salutes—but mostly drinking. In fact, the word seemed to have been passed around that it was the duty of every patriot in California to get howling drunk. And Charley, of course, was happy to oblige.

Everywhere wild crowds were wobbling about shouting and cheering. A veteran reporter remarked, “One thing is certain; every face I meet is very happy.”

Newspaper reporters from the east, now wanting any excuse to come out west, swarmed over the crags and peaks with their notepads and pencils, writing their confabulatory tales—
Wild Stagecoach Drivers of the Wild, Wild West
.

All of the whips put on a show for them.

There was a thundering sound—someone driving a coach and six, careening down a treacherous mountain road. There atop the driver’s box, whip cracking, obscenities and tobacco juice flying, sat Charley Parkhurst, putting on one terrific spectacle for John Ross Browne—who was white-knuckling it in the seat of honor by Charley’s side, trying to hold onto pad and pencil, flapping hat, and guard rail all at the same time. At Jim Birch’s request, Charley was giving the famous writer a private demonstration of stagecoaching expertise. Charley was forgetting that it was a performance though, so convincing she was in her taciturnity, her stoicism, her spitting of tobacco juice.

There was a scrabbling sound of scree under the horses’ pounding hooves; a thick cloud of dust rose up for a moment obscuring the road. The dust cleared. They were coming up on a curve ahead.

“We going to make that?” shouted Browne.

“Yeah,” shouted back Charley. “I been over this road so many times I can do it with my eyes closed.”

Browne looked over to see Charley driving with her eyes closed. “Mr. Parkhurst!”

Charley grinned wide and opened her eyes. She spat to the side and slowed the coach down to a brisk walk in order to make the curve.

“Truth is, I listen to the wheels. When they rattle, I’m on hard ground. When they don’t rattle, I figure it’s too late anyways.”

Browne looked over the edge of the coach down the cliff. The wheels seemed awfully close. He cleared his throat. “Uh…do many people get killed on this route?”

“Nary a kill that I know of. Some of the drivers mashes ’em once in a while, but that’s whiskey or bad driving. Last summer a few stages went over the grade, but nobody was hurt bad—just a few legs and arms broken. Them was opposition stages. You know a stage is worth more than two thousand dollars, and legs costs heavy besides. Our company’s very strict though. They won’t keep drivers, as a general thing, that get drunk and mash up stages.”

Browne was not comforted.

Charley pulled a couple cigars out of her pocket and offered him one.

“A smoke to calm your nerves?”

“Don’t mind if I do.”

Browne lit both cigars and handed one to Charley. The coach continued on.

“Exhilarating ride,” Browne said. He took a few draws and let out a deep sigh. “Most excitement I’ve had since watching Hyer beat Sullivan in ’49.”

Charley had no idea what the hell he was referring to so she just kept puffing away on her cigar.

Ahead on a ledge overhanging the road, a mountain lion was crouching at the same level as the driver’s box—its colors were the colors of the rock, tawny and buff.

The horses were sensing danger. Charley noticed their agitation but was unsure of the cause. Something was out there—a spot of intense stillness somewhere very nearby. She could feel it. Then she spotted the cat, the powerful focused trance of predation, the golden eyes flaring at her. The creature, all flank and claws, drew back in a tight ball to spring. Charley snapped the whip out to the side. She was so quick at it that her gloved hands were a blur. Browne didn’t know what was happening. The mountain lion flinched, snarled, and backed off from the overhang as the stagecoach passed.

At that exact moment, Browne met eyes with the fanged, snarling creature on the ledge. He let out a blood curdling scream. The horses, still very much on edge, panicked. And then like the speeding shock waves following an eruption of dynamite, they bolted out of control.

“Damn you,” swore Charley, not at Browne—she expected that sort of behavior from writers—but at the horses, who were Westerners who should’ve known better.

She tried to regain control of the team, swearing steadily at them. The abusive words were a soothing flow, an even flow, and in a moment would have worked to quiet them. Already they were contemplating allowing themselves to be calmed—but then, the stagecoach grazed a rock, lurched to one side, and Charley was thrown off the box.

Still clutching tightly onto the reins, she was dragged a good ten yards over hard-packed dirt, her body bouncing and twisting. It was a few agonizing seconds until the confused horses started to slow down at the unusual pull on the reins.

Browne’s mouth dropped open in horror—he couldn’t even scream this time. The befuddled team came to a full stop, snorting.

Browne stared back at Charley who was stretched out on the road. Was the blasted man dead? Charley wasn’t moving, not at all.

“Okay, boys, okay,” Browne said to the horses. He made an unconvincing gesture that suggested he was about to descend from the driver’s box, but somehow his limbs weren’t moving. He heard a cough. He turned to look.

Charley was folding her knees below her and pushing herself up with her arms, in obvious pain.

“Oh, my God. I thought you were dead,” Browne yelled out.

A long minute more as Charley untangled the reins, reassured the horses, and then with her crooked smile, she climbed back up onto the driver’s box.

Browne stared at her, scratched and bloody and covered with road dust. “You okay? Can I do anything?”

“Nope. I’m fine. Thank God I didn’t get dragged under the damn wheels. If we’d been going any faster, you would’ve been scraping me up and pouring me in a hole.”

She took her seat and adjusted the reins. It was costing her a lot to move without groaning in pain—but Browne’s look of shock and awe was gratifying.

“Shit,” she said. “Guess the whip’s life depends on the temper of a horse or the strength of a screw. I hear we got a position opening up if you’re interested.”

Grimacing, Browne shook his head and said nothing. As they drove towards town, he kept stealing quick looks at Charley.

In the pressure of the writers attention, Charley forced herself not to cry out in pain as she was sure she’d busted some ribs in her little tumble to the ground.

They continued on, albeit slower than usual, and at last trotted up Front Street in Sacramento. Charley stopped the coach in front of the headquarters of the Birch Stage Company.

Browne, still shaky, held out his hand. “It’s been a pleasure, Mr. Parkhurst, of the variety I hope never to experience again in my life.”

As Browne walked away, pain creased Charley’s face and she doubled over, holding onto the side of the coach for support. With difficulty she made her way through the business of checking in the coach and team. Every breath and step she took was like the stab of a knife in her lungs. She needed to find a doctor.

Six

Dr. Tom Jarvis, MD and DVM, seemed to be a bit of a loner for a doctor, judging by his office—an unprepossessing shack on the outskirts of town. All the better for Charley, of course. She stopped in the dirt road out front and slumped over to one side on her horse, pausing there for a long time trying to catch her breath and calculate the odds of the thing. She couldn’t see any way around it. She reluctantly got down from her horse, gasping with pain, and went inside.

Dr. Jarvis was a round man in his fifties with the pink, spidery veins of a confirmed drinker. Charley stood next to the wooden examining table as the doctor made some notes.

“Now, take off your shirt, sit down and let’s have a look,” he said.

She was expecting this. “I told you what it is,” she said. “I got drug by a six-team and busted my sides in. Give me some tape and something for the pain, and I’ll be on my way.”

“I’m the doctor here. You need help. Would you be letting me drive that stagecoach of yours, Mister”—he looked down at his notes—“Parkhurst? You stick to your job and allow me to do mine.”

He held Charley’s gaze unflinching, until with a deep sigh she unbuttoned her shirt, exposing the dirty bindings that covered her breasts.

Dr. Jarvis stared. “What the hell is that?”

She removed her shirt and almost defiantly began to loosen the strips of cloth from around her breasts. She winced in pain.

The doctor offered a brown bottle, “Here. Take a couple of slugs of this.”

She took a grateful drink. Then she took another and handed back the bottle. The pain was making her nauseous.

Dr. Jarvis lifted the bottle up for a slug of his own.

She resumed unwrapping herself, prepared for the doctor’s shocked expression, the crude exclamation that would ensue, the joke maybe, and then, worst of all, questions. The idea of someone wanting to know the whys and wherefores about her history frightened her, and she almost lost courage.

But when she arrived at the inmost layer and revealed the contours of her breasts, the doctor made no visible reaction.

“Okay,” he said. He placed his hands on her rib cage and palpated, causing her to groan.

“One…two…and three. You busted three. You’re damn lucky though Mr. Parkhurst…your own bandages helped you from breaking more. Now, you want me to tape you up, or you still want to do it yourself?”

“Go ahead,” she said.

Afterward, her ribs taped, strips of cloth back in place over her breasts, her shirt back on, she began, “Uh…Doc, I’d appreciate it if —”

“I respect your privacy. Not a word to anyone. But you’re not the only one, you know.”

She looked up. “Who? Here? In these parts?”

“Yep…in these parts, and other parts as well. Nothing to worry about…nothing unusual. Hell, most people wouldn’t see a grasshopper if it landed on their nose. Sure, I guess a few folks might surmise the truth about you fellas but I guess they figure it’s live and let live…You must know what I mean yourself.”

Dr. Jarvis took another swig of his brown bottle and then seeing Charley’s incredulous eyes, offered her some as well. “Finish it up. You’ve had a hard day.”

She took the bottle in a kind of haze and downed the liquid without even tasting it. It was stunning, this revelation.

Dr. Jarvis handed her a bottle of laudanum. “Not more than four times a day.”

She paid her bill. Starting towards the door, she turned and said, “Thanks Doc. For…everything.”

As she rode home, her thoughts were drifting…hard to focus. Damn…there were others like her. All that hiding. Fear of being discovered. And is it possible that some folks might know? How the hell could they know? Smell us out like an animal or maybe they actually looked at another human being. Unbelievable. She was not alone…there were others. For some strange reason this was comforting, soothing and also very funny. If she was not hurting so much she would be laughing out loud. Was that why Edmund kept staring at her? Maybe he knew. She was going to drive herself crazy thinking about all this…one hinge short of a nuthouse door if she wasn’t careful. And what could she do about it anyway. What she needed to do was just get into her bed and mend.

Seven

Shingle Springs, California on yet another Saturday night—the wingding night the miners were in from their diggings, milling about the streets half-drunk and more often than not, drunken in full. They were alone, each and every soul. And like every soul had, or once had, immortal longings—rare and high and strange and intense. Each man’s longings distinct from the immortal longings of all others. But it was hard to see this about them if you were to look from the outside at the milling men in all their jagged humanness, as they migrated through the streets in great accidental throngs—their personal edges now furry and hapless and animal. Disorganized so hopelessly with the desperate single-mindedness of their week’s hard work and now filled with prodigious sloshings of drink.

Charley, migrating with the rest, passed a huckster trying to persuade the passer-by inside a saloon for the blood sport of ratting.

“Live rats in a ring with a weasel. Place your bets. How long will your rat live? Win big!”

Charley shook her head in disbelief and pushed her way out of the swarming throng of drunken men and crossed the road.

She saw a big canvas-and-frame tent festooned with a vivid banner:

Vivaldi & Co. Presents
A selection from William Shakespeare’s
Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra.
2 Live Females Inside!

It must have sprung up overnight like some kind of giant mushroom, a huge flapping one, appendaged here and there with canvas vestibules.

Inside the tent, behind a curtain, sat Anna. She stared at herself in a broken bit of mirror. She was liquid-eyed, raven-haired, a genuine Italian beauty. She knew it. She had once had immortal longings in her. In her dreams since early childhood, she’d soar bodiless from one glorious theatrical role to another—a dove of unusual spirit lighting upon and entering and waking up the great dead characters of the stage so that they’d move and speak and inspire and in all the important matters, transform mankind once and for all.

Anna frowned into the mirror. She could hear Luigi, the barker, through the canvas of the tent. He’d be standing on the barrel, a slight Italian man with a voice three times his size, hawking the night’s entertainment.

“Vivaldi and Company—under the artistic direction of famoso impresario Luigi Vivaldi—who is none other than myself…”

He’d be bowing now, waving his hat.

“We present for your pleasure this evening—a selection from Shakespeare’s
Antony and Cleopatra
. The famous death scene. The bard at his most sensual. A story of passion and intrigue. A delicious repast for the hungry soul and a feast, a feast for the eyes.”

Building the volume of his voice, he added, “Gentlemen, I bring you not one, but two—two members of the fair and gentle sex in the classic roles of Egypt’s queen and her lovely young handmaiden.”

Anna muttered into the mirror: “Pigs and goats.” She was wasted in this rude land of sex-craved men.

Her daughter Tonia plopped on a tatty Egyptian wig and made a face into the mirror over her mother’s shoulder. She was a sturdy looking girl of eleven—the kind of child whose cheeks, much to her distaste, were always being pinched.

“Don’t call them pigs and goats Mama,” she said. “I like pigs and goats; they’re nice.”

Outside, a pair of drunken miners supported each other as they wove their way out of the general crowd over towards the barker. “You sayin’ you got real live women in there?” one of them shouted.

“I got not one but, two—two members of the female classification.”

“Well then goddamnit, I want them to sing
Sweet Betsy From Pike
and shake their titties.”

A group of half-crazed men surged past Charley en masse and crowded around Luigi in their haste to buy tickets for the show. Coins and pouches of gold dust flew.

Charley, curious to see these two members of the female classification, bought a ticket for herself as well.

“Take it off, Cleo,” shouted one of the men as he entered the tent.

Anna heard it and grimaced. Tonia gave a short laugh. Others in the growing crowd had picked up the cry, “Come on out Cleo. Take it off. Take it all off.”

“Pigs,” muttered Anna. She began swearing dark words in Italian.

This, Tonia knew to be a very bad sign. Tonight she would have to be extra careful. Times like this her mother was known to skip most of the words and scream things at the men, curses that made Tonia blush. Those were the terrible nights Luigi refused to pay them and they had to beg for food. Not to mention, that when her mother misbehaved, she incited the audience and sometimes they had to run for their lives.

The crude stage was fashioned from crates, boards, and barrels. Anna entered as Cleopatra, head held high. She was dressed in a long golden dress, trim bodice cut low showing her full cleavage. The men roared, some of them throwing coins up onto the stage. Anna’s hair, curly and long, flowed around her shoulders. She moved her arm. The men roared. She began to smile. The men roared. Then she touched her fingers to her bodice in the general vicinity of her breasts. Roar upon roar. The men were beside themselves. Candles serving as footlights cast her body into relief. Her gestures got larger and larger.

Luigi, at the side of the stage made a signal that in Luigi talk meant: remember the bosoms. She tightened her lips for a moment but then recovered…pouted, pointed her toes and arched her back. Luigi responded with a big smile, nodding his head up and down, then rubbing his fingers together in the universal sign: money.

Anna tossed her hair back with disdain. This was not what she dreamed her life to be…but she continued.

Tonia, as Charmian the handmaiden, brought a basket of figs onstage and handed them to Anna. Anna flounced and preened.

She turned to her handmaiden, “Charmian, give me my robe, put on my crown…” She was hammering out the words, “…I have immortal longings in me.”

Tonia clumsily draped a worn velvet robe around Anna’s shoulders. She placed a painted crown, with several of the jewels missing, on Anna’s head.

Charley, who had been standing near the back of the crowd watching, thought, mother and daughter no doubt. Mother and daughter. A stab in her heart at the sight of the lovely pair, alive to one another. Charley was grateful for the darkness and the crowd. No one could see her face.

Anna reached into the basket and pulled out a pathetic-looking homemade snake. A miner gave a sharp whisper. “Here comes the titty part.” He threw a few coins onto the stage.

Anna then bent down to kiss her handmaiden, her eyes flickering warning to Tonia: don’t laugh. Sometimes Tonia would start to shake at this point, trying to hold in her laughter.

“Farewell, kind Charmian,” Anna proclaimed.

She raised up the sad looking snake, turned round in a kind of odd pirouette, and then writhed the snake around her. Despite herself, she became involved in her performance. She loved to die on stage. She held the snake in front of her face and narrowed her eyes.

“Come, thou mortal wretch…” she hissed. “With thy sharp teeth this knot intrinsicate of life at once untie. Poor venomous fool, be angry, and dispatch!” The words of the Bard were drowning beneath her thick accent but no one cared.

With a grand gesture Anna plunged the snake inside her bodice. The miners in the front row strained to see.

“Titty,” shouted a man. A few more coins were thrown.

Tonia pulled a snake from the basket and applied it to her pale upper arm, made a face and fell to the floor.

“No. Titty,” shouted another. “Titty.”

“O eastern star…” cried Anna.

She swayed and also dropped to the floor. It still wasn’t over. She spoke.

“Peace, peace…” she intoned. “Dost thou not see my baby at my breast, that sucks the nurse asleep?”

A miner shouted, “Breast? I don’t see no breast.”

Anna moaned, “O Antony.”

She reached out to the last snake, spilled from the basket to the floor at her side, and applied it to the inside of her wrist. She shuddered on the floor in agony, rolled her eyes, sighed. She then died.

Pretty good tonight, Anna thought.

A hush descended over the crowd.

Then a single voice threaded itself through the silence. “We’ve been had.”

Another voice. “Take it off. Goddamn it, take it all the hell off.”

A chorus of drunken voices. “Take it off. Take it off.” Stomping in rhythm. Fists punching the air. “Take it off.”

Anna, still lying dead on the stage floor, the candles rattling before her, was seething. Her eyes were closed, but under the heavy Egyptian-style greasepaint, her skin was flushing red.

She sprang to her feet, rising from the dead, swearing a blue streak in Italian.

Charley, who’d been inching her way to leave, stopped and looked back in interest at the cursing woman.

Anna reached down with both hands grabbing the clay figs from the basket, and started to hurl them into the crowd, screaming now in Italian and English. Tonia, still lying on the stage, watched wide-eyed.

“That fucking whore hit me,” shouted a miner near Charley.

He picked up what remained of the offending fig and hurled it back towards the stage. The flight of the fig happened towards Tonia, who rolled away, dodging it. It smacked onto the floor and shattered into powdery pieces.

Tonia was laughing, noted Anna with disapproval.

“Leave. Go,” Anna shouted at her. Tonia was still laughing, but obediently rose and left the stage.

The drunken miners were yelling obscenities. A few had started fighting amongst themselves. A full-on brawl was about to begin. Left weaponless, Anna had an instinct. With great flaming eyes, she grabbed the top of her bodice and with both hands pulled it down and then slowly back up again, revealing her lavish breasts to the men for a brilliant moment.

There was a breathless silence.

Anna, with calculated imperiousness, strode off the stage. She knew that her insolence had shut them up. Knocked them into a cocked hat.

Now that the stage was empty, the herd of men began to dissipate, in grumbling, cursing clumps. In one of those clumps was Charley.

Outside, extricated from the sour smell of male sweat, she could breathe the cool night air again. She looked round at the moonlit tent with the last of the subdued men stumbling out and disappearing into the shadows. She had seen something memorable tonight. In her defiant act, that lone woman against a crowd of drunken men, had gambled and had somehow won. That woman had won her applause.