Winding Stair (9781101559239) (19 page)

“By the way,” Mitchell said. “Johnny Boins's parents are in town. Staying at your hotel, they say. Hired a lawyer from Little Rock to defend their boy. The man says he'll ask the court to appoint him counsel for any of the other defendants in the case who haven't got a lawyer. Says it's all a put-up deal, by Oscar Schiller and the other officers of the court. He's been in town once, while you were in The Nations, telling that story. Name's Merriweather McRoy. He's one damned fine lawyer.”

It didn't make me feel any easier about the case. Except for the black boy's testimony, everything we had was circumstantial. But I was too busy to worry with it then. I arranged to have Emmitt taken to the stables and look at the blue roan, and regardless of what Evans had said, I set up a window-room confrontation so the boy could get a look at Skitty Cornkiller and Nason Grube before the hearing. I held off on Jennie Thrasher. Let her see them first in the magistrate's court, when she was under oath, I thought, brutal as that might be.

At midafternoon, I went to the hotel to get out of my crusty field gear and take a bath. The high-heeled boots had put knots in my calves that hurt with each step. In the hotel saloon, the coolest place in Fort Smith with its open tubs of cracked ice behind the bar, I drank beer and had liver and bacon. The waiter seemed more attentive to my needs than usual. When I went to the cashier, he called me marshal and said there was no charge. I paid him anyway, embarrassed but trying to carry it off as casually as possible. I tossed two silver dollars on the counter and touched the brim of my hat with two fingers as I sauntered to the elevator. All pretense of calm disappeared when I walked into my room again. Jennie Thrasher was sitting on the bed.

“Hello, Eben,” she said.

In the faint light from the window she was like a porcelain doll, cool and detached in this sweltering room, a smile sculpted on her full mouth, her hands lying in her lap. Her blouse was unbuttoned partway down the front and I could see the lacy top of a cotton chemise covering the hollow between her breasts. She looked altogether breathtaking.

She was up quickly, moving across the room and pressing against me as she threw her arms around my waist. Her eyes and mouth turned up to my face in open invitation, and I started to take her in my arms and carry her to the bed, to hell with Evans and Schiller and this whole case. But with a willowy movement she was away from me, laughing, teasing me with the rhythm of her body.

“Are you glad to see me?”

“Damn it, Jennie,” I said, suddenly furious with the illusion she purposely gave, had always given, of some delicious feast just out of reach, and with no more substance than a fistful of July breeze. “What are you doing here?”

“My God. What happened to your nose, Eben?” She reached up and touched it lightly and I drew away from her impatiently.

“Never mind my nose. I ran into a Frisco locomotive. Now, what in God's name are you doing here?”

“I wanted to see you,” she said, her head tilted to one side in the way she had, and I realized she was a coquette beyond all the talent of any young woman I had ever found in Saint Louis society. The kind of woman I had always despised. But I did not despise Jennie Thrasher, and the contradiction made me more furious than ever, because it bewildered me.

“I got tired of that hot jail,” she said, doing a little half-turn dance step, holding her skirt out to either side. “That old baggage Zelda Mores drinks a bucket of beer each afternoon when it's hot, and I just waited until she went to the privy and I slipped out. She's likely still sitting over there sweating and fanning her fat neck and not even knowing I'm gone.”

“You can't do this,” I said, slapping my hat down on the desk, where all my maps for father were still undone. “How'd you get up here? How'd you get in this room?”

“You were eating when I came in, and I told one of those nice men downstairs that you'd asked me to come over on official business, because now you're a marshal, and he sent a boy up here with a key because I told him we shouldn't disturb your dinnertime.”

“Just like that, you told them I'd sent for you and they let you in, just like that?”

“Sure. I smiled at him.” And she laughed.

There was the urge to charge across the room like a rutting bull and grab her before she could move that laughing, moist mouth out of my reach, to take her face between my hands and hurt her. But Evans's words, not to get involved, were stark and irrefutable in my mind. Jennie herself broke the spell, turning away from me and sitting on the bed once more, with an expression of complete detachment. Her face and mood were as mobile and intractable as a summer storm blowing in from The Nations, and it left me defenseless and miserable.

“Come, let's talk, and give me a cigarette,” she said. “I've missed our little talks.”

I gave her a tailor-made cigarette and lit it for her and she puffed it a number of times, inhaling deeply and with a satisfied sigh. She patted my shoulder as though I were some pet dog or horse, but it felt good to have her touch me, even in that way. It came home to me again that the vision of a beautiful little girl, innocent and without defense—what I had seen lying on the bed at the farm in Winding Stair—was more illusion than reality. That I could sit near her and think such a thing was some sort of triumph, but I wasn't sure I liked it much.

“We've got to get you back to the courthouse. All hell's going to break loose if they find you gone.”

“All right. But after I smoke.”

“You haven't got any business wandering around the streets where anybody can get at you.”

“I was lonesome,” she said with a flash of temper, her mood shifting again. “Nobody over there at that damned jail likes me. You like me, don't you, Eben?” She didn't wait for my response, but rushed on as though afraid I might not tell her what she wanted to hear. “It's worse than the farm. Nobody to talk to and nobody who cares about me.”

“That's not true, Jennie. We've got you in there because we don't want anyone to hurt you.”

“Just because of the case, and you want me to talk all about it and I've already told you all about it. It's all just official, and you are, too. Sometimes you make me sick, Eben, really—you're so official.”

“Listen, Jennie, we've brought in two men and a horse that may have belonged to your father and you'll have to come to the commissioner's hearing and tell us whether you can identify any of them.”

“You see? You're so damned official.” She puffed on the cigarette, turning it hot and red. She had switched on the ceiling fan before I arrived, but it did not stir the air enough to dissipate the smoke. “I read in the newspapers you arrested a nigger and a Creek.”

“For God's sake, don't say ‘nigger'!” It was a thing my mother had always impressed on me, but until now I had not realized how distasteful the term was.

“All right. Colored man. Colored man, is that better?” She jumped up and marched over to the window and stood there looking through the curtain at Garrison Avenue below. “Why should I know them? I told that old bastard with the beard that I didn't see anything that day. Why do you all keep bringing it up?”

I moved over behind her, close enough to smell her hair. Now was the time to tell her the best of it, something that I was sure would make her happy.

“Jennie, we think your stepmother is alive,” I said quietly. “We're almost sure of it. Oscar Schiller is in the Choctaw Nation now, trying to find her.”

Her back stiffened and for a long time she faced away from me, trembling. Then she whirled on me and her eyes were full.

“What? What did you say?”

“I said we think your stepmother is still alive.”

With a shriek she flung herself against me, pounding at my chest with her fists. One blow struck me in the mouth and I tasted blood before I could react and pin her arms to her sides. The lighted cigarette had dropped onto the rug, filling the still room with a pungent odor of burning hair. As suddenly as her rage developed, it disappeared and she collapsed against me, sobbing.

“Oh God, my papa's dead and that bitch is still alive,” she cried. “Oh God, God, God, my poor papa. What am I gonna do now?”

She was sobbing, moaning, gasping out words hardly intelligible, her tears wetting my shirt as she hung against me. Then she shuddered violently and pushed me back and sat on the bed, her head down, still crying. I had no idea what to say to her. I handed her my handkerchief.

“Here, wipe your face. Blow your nose.”

“God, what am I gonna do now?” she asked softly. She snuffled into the handkerchief and looked up at me, her eyes red and her skin blotched. “I'm sorry, Eben. But me and her never got along at all. She's just an old bitch.”

“But, Jennie, she raised you.”

“No! No, she didn't. Papa raised me. He always kept me close to him whenever he went anyplace, to races or up to Tuskahoma to build things for the Indians. He knew I never liked any of those people, and he knew I never liked that old bitch, and she didn't like me either, and he knew that, too.”

I sat with her and she let me put my arm around her shoulders and hold her near. For a long time she said nothing, wiping at her face with the handkerchief.

“Papa never sent me to the Choctaw school, the only one around,” she said. “He took it on himself to teach me to read and to write. Sometimes in the evening we'd sit in the front room and he'd read to me out of his books. Then he'd go off to bed with that old bitch who was always fussing about me not doing enough around the house. Mostly, I stayed with Papa or the hands, in the barn or in the fields or the blacksmith shed. Papa let me because he knew I didn't like her.”

“But she never mistreated you, did she?”

“Papa wouldn't let her do that. But she'd look at me with those black Indian eyes and I knew she hated me.” She drew back then and looked at me a long time and touched my cheek with her fingertips. They felt cool and dry. “Let's go,” she said.

“Yes. Button your blouse.”

I was glad Joe Mountain had shown me the rear stairwell. Holding Jennie's arm, I moved her out into the alley and onto Rogers Avenue and along it toward the federal compound. We walked in the afternoon heat without saying anything until we reached the north gate; then she stood back from me.

“I'll go on from here alone. I don't want you having trouble with Zelda Mores,” she said. “And Monday, I'll say whatever you want me to say at that hearing or whatever it is.”

“Jennie, I just want you to say the truth.”

“Oh hell, Eben, this is all such a mess.”

“In the morning, I'll ask Zelda to take you over to the stable and look at that horse. He's a bay gelding with a
T
brand.”

“It's probably Red,” she said. She was looking toward the river now, and she seemed defeated. “If she's still alive, she's probably hiding on her brother's place down close to McAlester. He's got a big farm down there and she used to visit him all the time, always nagging Papa to take her down there. That's probably where she is.”

She turned to me once more and lifted her fingers to my face.

“You're a nice man, Eben Pay. And I wish you were still in Saint Louis. I wish you'd never come. You don't belong in this place.” And she turned and quickly walked into the compound.

Feeling a little sick, I was inclined to agree with her.

At the Frisco depot a northbound passenger was loading out and the station was crowded. But there was no one at the telegraph window and I sent a wire to Oscar Schiller, in care of George Moon at Hatchet Hill. I suggested that he look closely at the farm of Mrs. Thrasher's brother in McAlester. If the woman was alive, that was where she would be.

For the first time in my life, I felt the need, the real need, for a stiff drink of hard liquor. Back in my room, alone, I had it and sat in the growing darkness thinking about Jennie Thrasher and what she'd said to me. And about her stepmother and her father and how life had been for them all on that farm in the mountains. The more I thought about it, the more depressing it became.