KANSAS CITY
1905
I Think of the Past and Future—Fancy Nan—A Song is Warbled
After Pip left the steps of the cigar shop, I took a rag of vinegar and water to the glass-fronted case of humidors, cutters, and silver flasks. My eye caught on the rosewood box I’d put front and center in a place of honor. I crouched down to stare at it, growing heavy of heart as I traced the fine walrus ivory relief. This gift, much like Charley the raccoon and the short-lived canary, had been accorded to me by an admirer. This time it was a Rufus Parsons, who had it delivered upon my second-year anniversary in prison. Rufus never showed himself physically, so I was left with my imagination as to his looks. Which meant he was a tall man with deep blue eyes that didn’t trick.
A stagecoach and tall saguaro cactus had been carved in the ivory, as had a line of passengers with hands held high and me and Joe Harper with our Colts. It was not a point of pride, but rather, like the sketch on the wall, a reminder to stay on the straight and narrow.
I swatted the top of the counter and stood.
“I hope Mexico is suiting you well, Joe Harper.”
I thought I would write to him, to apologize for bringing him into the sorry mess, but I did not know where he’d holed up after his escape. He said once he’d always wanted to see the ocean, so perhaps he’s bootless and rubbing his toes in the sand.
The letter, I concluded, would be torn up anyway. He had much animosity about my two-year sentence as opposed to his thirty-year. I told him at the time that a lady crying can cause miracles. He could have blubbered on the floor same as me had he been of a female persuasion. But he wasn’t. He was just dumb Joe Harper who blamed everything on me. And that had not appealed to the jury stuck in a courtroom with the windows shut and the weather approaching a hundred and one degrees. I think they took out much of their discomfort on him.
I slumped my way to the back room, wrung the rag in the bucket, and hung it on a hook. The wall clock ticked. All these minutes had become days and without any effort rolled themselves into years. A sharp image seared my eyelids. I saw my older self buttoned up and self-righteous and dull as dirt.
With a shiver of horror, I saw myself dead, a pinched up respectable body found on the floor of this very shop, with the hungry blowflies my only friends. The last lines written about me destined to be:
CIGAR STORE OWNER FOUND DEAD. ONCE HAD AN INTERESTING LIFE.
Just as quick, I thought of Pip, who had an interesting life, and that life was to be cut short through all the faults of our own.
And I thought: damn you, Pip Quinn.
Because she had to remind me of that life we once both led.
* * *
I found Pip Quinn alone at Lady Anne’s. She kept herself in the dim, along the back wall, observing the mostly empty room that stunk of beer breath and pickled cabbage. A piano player drooped over his keys, forehead resting on the front board of the old upright, the ashes of his cigarette drifting across the back of his hand. I had not an iota of a clue what song he played; something with flats like a good Delta blues but scuffed around like an old dirge.
Fancy Nan dragged her feather boa behind her and gave him a quick roll of her eyes before half-heartedly flipping the tassels on her tits. She did it one way then the other, which caused most of the men to sway before returning to nursing their lagers and rye.
I pushed past a hurdy-gurdy girl, giving her the same stink eye she gave me, though for different reasons. She was in my way of getting to Pip and I was in her way of plying an old man in coveralls with thinned-out whiskey and the promise of a feel.
Pip looked to be in a blue funk and her eyes held the sallow yellow of too much liquor. She knocked her heel against the flocked wallpaper, as if she could force the piano man to pick up the pace.
Fancy Nan bent forward then back in an arch and did something with her legs that might have been salacious except she could not hold the pose and her bottom smacked the floor. She didn’t seem all that interested in getting up and instead waved the boa around.
Pip crossed her arms and tipped her head to the side. “What in the hell. What is this?”
“It is a Tuesday,” I said.
“This counts as entertainment in Kansas City?”
“Most everyone’s down the street at the flickers.”
“Uh huh.” Her mouth hung open as she followed the path Fancy Nan took from center stage to drooping herself across the piano top.
“It’s a good moving picture. It’s called The Little Train Robbery. It’s not as good as The Great Train Robbery because there’s kids and all in it and I don’t think the story holds up all that terrifically, but then there’s a short that precedes it about Palm Beach and I would truly like to see an ocean and walk a beach someday.”
“I should just leave you to your own card.”
“What?”
“You’ll get one.”
The hurdy-gurdy girl sidled up to us, her violet skirts sheening in the electric light, her gray skin and fondness for opium wrestling below the powder and paste. “You’re not allowed in here anymore.” She smacked my shoulder so hard I stumbled into the old man in the coveralls.
He shoved me away with a spit at my feet. “You knocked my drink.”
“I don’t give a rat’s ass about your drink.” My shoulder throbbed and I rubbed my hand to it. “I just been abused.” I turned to Pip. “She didn’t need to go and do that.”
Miss Hurdy-Gurdy gave a small nod and snapped a finger to the bouncer to haul me out of Lady Anne’s for nonpayment of many bills. Which the man unkindly did.
* * *
It was a hot steamed-up night. I hopped from the sidewalk into the traffic, jogging left then right to avoid the drunk fellas who could barely walk and the drunk bicyclers and the buggy drivers who could cause a catastrophic fatality in the blink of an eye. Pip followed. She had retrieved her sombrero from the hat check, and when I squinted at her, I saw that wide brim turn this way and that as she one-eyed the space between streetcars. After two tries, including one that ended with a fella grabbing her arm and pulling her to the curb, she got the timing right.
She loped up, shaking a clod of manure from her boot and stumbling around to keep her balance. “This town smells like a sewer. And cow shit. And cows.”
“Stockyards do smell like shit. I’ll give you that.”
“It all stinks here. And it’s loud. So overbearingly loud.”
“You didn’t have one of the Special drinks, did you?”
“Did I? Was that the pretty green one?” She pulled in a great breath, arching back to peek at the sky, then landed in a dump on her ass.
“You’re going to be green tomorrow morning, too.” I grabbed her from behind, looping my arms under hers and sticking my shoulder in her back to get her moving and out of the way of an oncoming streetcar. I kneed the back of her leg to bend it so she could step up on the walkway.
“Maybe I won’t be alive tomorrow to puke it.” She set her feet wide and slapped down her hat. “Maybe I am meant to enjoy this one last drunk.” She pointed a finger at me. “Maybe that is my fate.” Then she pointed right next to me, closed one eye, and pointed back.
“You had two Specials, didn’t you?” I started down the sidewalk, waving a goodbye. “You probably won’t be alive tomorrow morning.”
“I’m not so drunk.”
“Good night, Pip.”
“Hey.” She wobbled after me, one hand sliding along the door of Beerbohm’s Butchers. “Hey! You just stop.”
I slowed and turned back to her.
“Why are you leaving me,” she asked, “when you were the one who came to find me?”
“No. You came to find me.”
“Then you came to find me.” She rubbed the back of her hand under her nose. “I didn’t ask you to do so.”
“But you said you’d be there. You said, and I quote: ‘I will be at Lady Anne’s.’”
“But I didn’t ask you to come. I just said I was going there.”
“Needless as that may be…”
“So, why’d you come?” She sat on the brick-edged window of Darletta’s Millinery and Gloves.
“Perhaps I was concerned. You’ve got a death card in your pocket, and it came to my mind you might be in danger.”
“I’m not in danger here.”
“How do you know that?”
She shrugged. “Does it really concern you if I’m in danger, Ruby?”
“Well, I—”
“What hotel do you recommend here?”
“The Baltimore, I guess. If you got the money.”
“What else?”
I knew by that response the nature of her purse. “You need a bed?”
“You have an extra?”
“No.”
But I did have a floor. And she knew I’d give her the hospitality. “Where’s your bag?”
“By your back door. Behind the trash bin.”
“Of course it is.”
* * *
My head buzzed as it should with a good cigar. I leaned back on my pillow, wrapped my arm behind my head, and followed the meandering of smoke. I took another puff, set my tongue against my lower teeth, and pushed smoke through my nose. The bed coils squealed as I shifted to my side and peered down at Pip who lay on the floor with her head on a rolled blanket.
“You okay in that nightdress?”
Her legs, moon pale and thin as reeds, knees knobby like a boy’s, poked out from the cotton chemise. She tapped a long ash from her cheroot into the ashtray near her hip. “I’m okay.”
“All right, then.” I watched her take a long drag of her smoke and blow concentric rings. It was a talent I could not match, no matter how many times I tried.
“What happened to everyone?” I asked. “From The Paradise? Verna and Tommy and—”
She blew another ring. “Maggie hanged herself.”
“When?”
“Right after it all…Darby walked into the desert and just kept walking. We found her. Well, never mind that.”
I studied her. It pained me to realize I could not remember Pip being pretty, though she surely had been. “Where’ve you been keeping?”
“This way and that.” She took a sharp drag and coughed. “I’d prefer to leave that alone.”
I rolled back in place and took a few last puffs before snuffing out the cigar. “You mind if I turn off the light?”
“Suit yourself.”
The oil lamp flickered as I twisted the knob.
“Lady Anne’s got electricity.”
“Lady Anne’s got money.” I pounded my pillow into a more comfortable lump and settled back, my fingers twined and resting on my stomach, and listened to the hiss of the cheroot Pip smoked.
Through the open window came the faintest echo of a piano, as if the Paradise was around the corner and not half a wild country away.
I cleared my throat of a frog and started to sing along with the tune.
Whether she loves me or loves me not,
Sometimes it’s hard to tell;
Yet I am long to share the lot –
Of beautiful Daisy Bell.
Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do –
I’m half crazy, all for the lust of you.
Pip gave a chortle. “That’s the real truth.”
It won’t be a stylish marriage.
Then she warbled out: I can’t afford a carriage.
Together, we sang a two-part harmony that used to stop the miners and guarantee extra tips:
But you’ll look sweet, upon the seat
Of my pole that is hard for you!
She put out her cheroot and there was the scrape of metal as she slid the ashtray to the wall. “You’ve got a sweet voice, Ruby.”
“Thank you.” I massaged my temples then dropped my arms to my sides to tighten the sheet just right. “You’re really going to kill him?”
“We crossed him. He doesn’t let things like that go.”
“We didn’t do anything wrong.”
“He thinks we all took the money.”
“But we didn’t.”
“You’re going to get a calling card, too.”
It grew quiet, the floor settling and the privy door squealing as Olaf finished his business for the night.
“Sing me another song, Ruby. Maybe a nice ballad.”
“How about Sweet Alice Fair?”
“That sounds fine.”
I hummed a bit of the tune.
I’d seen the few lines in the paper about Cullen. Enough to let me sleep at night, knowing he was locked up. I’d made a vow then to become a somewhat solid citizen. I needed none of those pressures and threats.
“Pip?”
“Yeah?”
“You’ll need to go tomorrow. I can only extend my generosity through tonight.”
She sighed and rolled on her back, crossing her arms behind her head.
“I have responsibilities here. I can’t just up and traverse the Plains with you to kill Cullen Wilder. You must understand.” I picked the front of my tooth with my thumbnail and watched her. “I’m not ungenerous. I hope you do not think that.”
“One night.”
“And breakfast. That’ll get you in the right frame of mind to move on.”