Chapter Nineteen

John Henry Cole asked Graves, the hotel clerk, to have a boy get a bottle and bring it to his room.

“Looks like you fell down in the mud,” he said.

“Make it mash whiskey.”

He climbed the stairs; they might as well have been the Rockies. He fumbled with the key to his door, found it already unlocked. The lamp didn’t need to be on for him to know there was someone in the room. He could smell her fragrance.

“What do you want?” he asked, without bothering to reach for the lamp. He struggled with his duster, wet and heavy with rain and mud, as were all his clothes.

“Mister Cole,” she said. From the sound of her voice, she was sitting on the bed.

“Who are you?” he asked, pulling out the tails of his shirt, working the buttons with his muddy, cold fingers.

He heard the glass chimney being raised. Then a match flared and the flame touched the wick; the room slowly filled with soft, warm light. It illuminated her face. It was a face he hadn’t expected to see again: Suzanne Smith’s. She looked different than on the stage, less prim and proper, less plain. Her hair was loose and down around her shoulders. She wore a waistcoat over her blouse and a long heavy skirt.

“What’re you doing here, Miz Smith?” Cole asked, still struggling to get out of the wet shirt. No matter how he moved, it hurt.

“I know this seems odd, my being here in your room like this, the light out,” she said.

“No, the way things are going, there’s not much I find odd. But it still doesn’t answer the question of why you’re here.”

“I don’t know . . . where else to be,” she said.

Then he saw, on the bed beside her, bundled under the blankets, the small, still form of her daughter, the toss of dark ringlets upon the pillow.

Suzanne Smith saw Cole’s gaze, and said: “She’s exhausted. I’m sorry . . .”

“Don’t be.”

“I had no intention to impose myself on you. . . . I barely know you. But you see, Mister Cole, I have no one else to impose myself upon.”

“If you don’t mind, I need to get out of these wet clothes.” He waited for her to avert her eyes, but she didn’t. The room was small, not built for privacy.

Cole pulled off the shirt, then the boots, and then his pants. He was still in his underdrawers, but they’d need to come off as well. He reached for a towel, turned his back to her, and with as much dignity as he could manage traded the drawers for the towel. When he turned back, she was still staring at him.

He scrounged a shirt out of his saddlebags, the one purchased to replace the one he had torn into bandages for Rose. He put it on, keeping the towel tied around his waist.

“You mind if I smoke?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“Normally I wouldn’t in the presence of a lady.”

“No, go right ahead, Mister Cole. It is your room, after all.”

Mud was clinging to his hair. He ran his fingers through it.

There was a knock at the door. She started, her right hand coming to her throat, just above a cameo brooch she’d pinned there.

“I think it’s the bottle I ordered,” Cole said. He reached into the pocket of his wet pants and pulled out the money.

The kid had corkscrew red hair and he tried hard to look past Cole into the room. Cole saw him grin when he spotted Suzanne Smith, the freckles spreading out across his nose. “Anything else you be needing, you just let me know, sir. Name’s Deke. Just ask Mister Graves downstairs to have Deke get whatever it is you be wantin’. I’ll do it.”

Cole closed the door with him still trying to get a better look at Suzanne Smith. He pulled the cork on the bottle, found the water glass, wiped it out with his fingers, and poured enough of the mash to get his blood circulating again. Then he remembered what manners he still had. “You?” he said, holding the glass forth.

She nodded just a little. He handed her the glass, watched her sip the mash, saw the flinch in her eyes as she swallowed it. She steeled herself, drank the rest, and handed back the glass. He poured another one for himself.

“So what’s this all about, Miz Smith?” he said, feeling the liquor rip through him.

She lowered her eyes at last. Her hands fidgeted, one against the other, the gray gloves she was wearing thin and tightly formed over her long, slender fingers. Cole imagined those gloves holding a parasol as she strolled along a tree-lined lane, a beau at her side, eager to please, a gentleman, and she as delicate in her manner as spring rain upon pretty flowers.

“You see . . .” she began, then drew a sharp breath. “I have no one to turn to, no place to go with my child, no one to take me in. And worst of all, Mister Cole, I have no money left.”

Her voice stumbled and she gripped the bedpost with one hand, the knuckles showing through the cotton glove. Then she lifted her gaze with as much pride as she had left.

“It’s not much of a reason,” she said, “but you’re the only one I could think of.”

“You mind?” Cole said, indicating the foot of the bed.

“No, please, sit down.” Then, as he moved closer, she said: “Your nose, it’s bleeding.”

He touched the back of his hand to it, pulled it away, saw a smear of blood. “I fell down. It was an accident.”

She looked at him a minute longer, knew he was lying about falling down, then swallowed, willing to let go the rest of the questions she had about what had happened to him.

“I thought you said on the trip up you were coming to meet someone, a man,” he said, sitting now on the bed. “What happened? Didn’t you find him?”

“I found him,” she said.

“And he disappointed you?”

She blinked several times, trying to hold back the tears that were building just behind her pale blue eyes. “You see,” she said, her spine suddenly becoming a rod of stiffness, her chin jutting forward in an effort to compose her dignity. “John has already married someone else. He said he sent a letter, explaining it to me. But I never received it. At least, he claims to have sent a letter.”

“The little girl?”

She turned her attention to the sleeping bundle of child beneath the blankets. “She’s his daughter,” she said. “John’s and mine.”

“That didn’t seem to bother him? That you came all this way, brought her with you?”

“She was three when he left us to . . . as he put it . . . find a better life for us. That was nearly two years ago. I couldn’t wait any longer in Denver. We were nearly out of money then.”

“So you thought you’d just come and find him, and everything would be all right after two years?”

She turned her face away. “I thought that it would . . . yes.”

“But you were mistaken about this John?”

She took a deep breath and let it out, her eyes wet, still wanting to be fiercely loyal, it seemed, to a man who’d abandoned her and their daughter. “He promised me . . .” It was like an unanswered prayer, the way she said it.

“Look, I’m sorry, Miz Smith. You and your daughter can stay here the night. In the morning, I’ll see what I can do to get you tickets back to Denver. You have people back in Denver, folks that could help you and the little girl?”

She shook her head. “No one.”

She was doing her best to maintain herself. He was doing his best to keep from closing his eyes and falling into the exhaustion that was pulling at him. “Well, try and get some sleep. We’ll discuss it over breakfast in the morning, what you and the little girl are going to do.”

“I’m a proud woman, Mister Cole. At least, I always was until now. If it weren’t for Tessie . . .”

“Don’t think about that right now, Miz Smith. I’ll go out in the hallway and finish my smoke while you get yourself ready for bed.”

Cole felt it was the worst kind of way to be, to be beholden to strangers, and he didn’t want to make it any harder on her than it already was. Besides, he thought, he had the bottle of mash and his makings, and for him, right then, that was just about all he needed. He stepped out in the hallway and smoked the cigarette slowly, taking turns with the mash, trying not to think about anything beyond the moment, trying not to think about Liddy and her visitor and Rose, or the men who’d nearly killed him out in a dark alley, or even why they’d tried to kill him. His exhaustion was so deep that events seemed to be turning faster than he knew how to keep up with them.

He waited for what he thought was long enough for Suzanne Smith to get undressed and into bed. He knocked lightly before stepping back inside. The flame of the lamp guttered low and he could barely see her face. He unrolled his sougan, stretched out on the floor, propped his back against the wall, still holding onto the bottle. He closed his eyes, listened to the buzz inside his head, medicated himself with the liquor, shifted his weight now and again whenever one spot got to bothering him. He let the whiskey begin its journey through his flesh and soul, let it carry him on a long, slow ride down a peaceful river. He didn’t mind resting that way. He’d done it a hundred times before in his life. Sleeping in places a man wasn’t meant to sleep: the hard ground, trenches filled with rain water, and saddles. Sleeping on the floor was hardly an inconvenience. He heard the little girl cough in her sleep, and it pulled him up a little, then the whiskey river carried him back down again.

He was nearly asleep, not quite, but just at the edge when he heard Suzanne Smith say something.

“. . . You want, it’s OK.”

He thought she was saying something to the girl. His mind was adrift, thick, heavy with exhaustion, the numbing effect of the whiskey. He thought maybe he’d been dreaming that she’d said something. Then she said it again.

“It’s OK if you want to lie here in the bed next to me, Mister Cole. I don’t mind. You don’t need to sleep there on the floor.”

It was soft, her voice, soft like a butterfly landing on the petal of a flower, soft and gentle and sweet. It drifted through his weariness. He thought about her in the bed. He thought about accepting the offer.

When he didn’t move or say anything, he heard her say: “I wouldn’t mind if you were to come and lay here next to me, Mister Cole. After all, it’s your bed.”

“Miz Smith . . . ?”

“You don’t have to say anything,” she whispered. “Words aren’t necessary. Not tonight they’re not.”

He remembered how she looked with the shadows of the light from the lamp edging over her face. She’d proved to be an attractive woman with her hair loose and free like she’d had it. At first, he told himself it was the whiskey, or maybe the exhaustion, or even the whipping he’d taken in the alley. He was hurting and halfway to being drunk and maybe that was all part of it, thinking that perhaps she was offering more than she was, lying next to little Tess in the bed. “It’s been a long day, Miz Smith. I need to sleep.”

“I must sound needy to you, desperate.”

“No, Miz Smith. You don’t sound that way to me at all.”

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

“Don’t be.”

For a long time more she didn’t say anything. He could hear the soft breathing of the child next to her, sleeping the sleep of the innocent, and he thought that must be the way an angel sleeps, soft and still and undisturbed like that.

“Mister Cole . . . ?”

“Call me, John Henry, Miz Smith. I guess we’ve gotten to know enough of each other in this short time you can call me that.”

“I just wanted you to know, I’m not needy. Not like that.”

“I know, Suzanne.”

He closed his eyes. Even though the flame had burned out and the room had become dark, he still closed his eyes. Something about her had touched him, her and the little girl. They were like angels that had fallen from the sky, their wings broken, unable to fly any farther, brought down by the false promises of a dishonest man and the unshakable weight of disappointment, their wings broken by hopelessness and despair.

“Suzanne?” he said. “What’s your man’s last name?”

“I thought I told you,” she said.

“No, you just said . . . John.”

“Oh,” she whispered, “it’s John . . . Johnny Logan.”