Quake was nervous in a way that made Roslyn think of how some of her older boy-students would approach her, back when she was a young and pretty teacher. There was that same bashfulness, but also the fact that in the light of day, Quake’s youth was more apparent. He really could have been one of her schoolhouse charges back then. There were a dozen years between them, at least.
“I’d like you to accompany me,” he said, his eyes jumping between her face and his own shoes. Nervous. Was there any man, in any station, not constantly mortified by the prospect of female rejection?
She shook her head. “I’m not in that line of work anymore,” she said, though she knew that wasn’t what he wanted.
“I just meant to the park,” he said. “I’d like you to accompany me to the park. For a walk.”
“All right, but what for?”
“Because I enjoyed talking with you the other evening and would like to do more of that. I thought you might feel the same.”
She agreed and he extended his arm to her like such a proper gentleman, she almost laughed. She found his interest so unusual. It had been many years since she’d been on a real date.
Quake led her to a trolley stop and paid her fare. It was her first time on a Portland trolley, though she was too embarrassed to say so. She’d been walking everywhere, but why? Force of habit, fear of new things. This was better. Like a carriage, but more egalitarian. It pulled them in comfort through unfamiliar neighborhoods, until Quake gestured for her to stand and they left the car. They’d been let off at a stop across the street from the largest city park Roslyn had ever seen.
“Where are we?” she asked.
“This is City Park. Crown jewel of our fair city. It has gardens and a forest and a zoo. There’s a fine bear pit. Would you like to see the bears?”
“I wasn’t expecting bears today.”
“Well, that’s your mistake. You ought to always be expecting bears.”
They went to the zoo. Quake told her the first animals had been donated by a Portland businessman. He’d rescued them from sailors who’d acquired the creatures on their travels to exotic locales and then, once arriving in port, realized they were in over their heads. He had kept the cubs in his yard, as playmates for his children, until they grew too large and he urged the city to build a sanctuary, which became the zoo.
“The great city of Portland is currently, here in the year of our Lord eighteen eighty-nine, home to fifty thousand souls. We are the largest metropolis in the region, exceeding even Seattle by almost ten thousand . . . though perhaps even more now, considering their unfortunate disaster of late. Ninety percent of the city has electricity. Even the streetcars are on their way to electrification. There’s a five-year plan and then the horse-drawn ones will be obsolete.”
Quake delivered this information as parody, with grand gestures and flourishes. But Roslyn could tell he liked to be the sharer of facts, and he was good at it. Such a stark contrast to the tour Barton had given her on her first day in Portland.
“That’s a shame about the streetcars,” she said. “I like the horses.”
“Me too. Who doesn’t? Such beautiful animals. Speaking of which, have you ever felt you had a connection with animals? That they understood you, in a certain way? And you them?”
Roslyn shook her head. She did not.
“Pity,” Quake said. “You struck me as someone who might.”
He continued his tour-guiding: the approximate number of ships traveling the Columbia River this time of year; the impact of the Chinese Exclusion Act on the city’s growth (which he thought was a damn shame, to say who is and who is not welcome); the names for the trees they walked past.
“Have you ever killed anyone?” Roslyn asked, when Quake paused in his narration.
“Why? Have you?”
“Of course not,” she said, and then felt a shudder pass through her at her lie. The man who’d died in the fire—she’d gone nearly all day without thinking of him. “I just thought in your line of work there might be killing.”
“No, I’m not that sort of criminal. Never had the stomach for violence of any kind. Though bad things may have happened as a result of the information I’ve provided to others. I was going to let them hang Heydale. I thought they had until you told me otherwise.”
“How does one become your sort of criminal? The kind that doesn’t need to kill?”
“Luck.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I saw an opportunity and I took it. Then I figured out how to make the same opportunity happen over and over.”
“Every time there’s a disaster?”
“Not just disasters. Really anything people are afraid of. Or angry about. Or anything they hate. Hate is the best, actually. People are willing to part with a lot of money in the name of hate.”
“I’d imagine. What about love?”
“No. There’s no money in love as far as I’m aware. People tend not to pay out for things they like.”
“There’s something bleak in that.”
“It’s bleak that I can’t exploit love?”
Roslyn laughed. “I suppose that’s more my line of work. A whore can exploit love. Who else?”
“Is it love, though?”
“Well, lust. Intimacy.”
“But not love, really.”
She conceded he was right and thought it a nice sentiment.
“What did you do before you were a con man? Little Dan Kite wasn’t born a shyster, was he?”
She could see Quake bristle at the use of his old name.
“Oh, I did lots of things. I was a bricklayer, a train robber, a cavalryman. All the usual sorts of vocations.”
“You don’t seem like the cavalry type.”
“I wasn’t. Too much of a coward. My gun didn’t even work. I had a gun that worked, but I traded with a man whose didn’t so I wouldn’t ever have to fire it. He gave me fifty cents to trade and I thought I came out ahead.”
It was a warm day and Quake stopped at a cart to buy ice cream. They sat in the grass to eat, surrounded by young couples and families. She wondered what those around them thought. Probably nothing. Probably took them for just another pair of lovers, not a set of thieves who’d found each other through supernatural means.
After that, she didn’t see him for a few days. She went back to her usual routine—walking, meals, reading, sleeping—and wondered if he’d turn up again, or not, and how she might feel about either occurrence. She decided, ultimately, she would like to see Quake, but not so much so that she needed to seek him out. She felt no pull, psychic or otherwise, in his direction across town.
Then she found him leaning against the exterior wall of her hotel again one morning, same as the last time.
“I’m sorry I didn’t come by sooner,” he said when he saw her. “I didn’t want to seem too eager.”
This admission, of course, made him seem more eager than anything else he could have done. She went with him and had a fine time, just as before. From there on they saw each other most days. They were both, after all, people with plenty of free time and disposable income. They went for walks and ate in restaurants and talked in their flirty, bantery way. Fun, that’s what Quake was. What a marvelous respite from Roslyn’s solitary days of lurking through the city, weighed down by guilt and self-loathing. Even before she’d come to Portland, it had been a long while since she’d had very much fun. Quake, however, seemed the sort who had it all the time with whomever he liked. And so Roslyn felt grateful that, at least for the time being, he wanted to have fun with her.
“Why aren’t you working now?” Roslyn asked him one afternoon. “Do con men take holidays?”
“Sure. Everyone needs a holiday now and then,” he said.
“How long will yours last?”
They were sitting at a café, at a sidewalk table, drinking lemonade. The glasses were tall and cold, each with a single lemon slice floating at the top. Quake reached into his glass, plucked out the lemon, and set it on his tongue. He sucked on the lemon for a moment with the expression of someone enjoying a piece of candy.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Until I find my next job, I suppose.”
“Isn’t that as simple as finding the next fire? Or is fire season over for the year?”
“Oh, my sweet dear, it’s always fire season if you know what to look for.”
“All right. Then what’s the holdup?”
“Are you trying to get rid of me?”
“Absolutely not.”
“I’m waiting to see if your compatriots in Washington are going to gain statehood, for one thing. A sudden enthusiasm for government and rule of law is not exactly the kind of climate I want to be working in. And so I am considering other ventures in other locations.”
“I was looking forward to statehood when I was there,” Roslyn said. “It seems like a step in the right direction for us.”
“Yes, that’s exactly the trouble.”
His time in Spokane Falls had unmoored him temporarily, Quake admitted. He’d felt anxious and unsafe in a way he was not accustomed to. There had been too much at stake—too many different parties with something to lose and something to gain. It had made him doubt not just that particular job, but his whole line of business.
“I’ve recovered from that bit of irrational thinking,” he said. But the experience had left him with what he called a healthy appreciation for the growing risks of his occupation. So, he was taking some time to reassess.
“Are you also reassessing?” he asked. There was a note of caution to this question, like he was unsure if it was wise to ask it in the first place, but she said no. She was not reassessing. She was retired from her old profession.
“I don’t know what I’ll do with myself now,” she said. “But not that anymore.”
“And what about Washington? Will you be returning?”
She didn’t have an answer to give. She took another sip of her lemonade. A trio of young women passed by on the street, all twirling parasols, though it was neither raining nor particularly sunny. Roslyn found herself wondering what Mrs. Heydale might think of such impractical fashion.
On another day soon after, Roslyn and Quake had sex in her hotel room. This too, just like their walking and talking, felt easy to her—another way to have fun, as long as there was fun to be had. Sex, as a general rule, didn’t mean much to Roslyn. She didn’t believe this had anything to do with her former occupation. She’d felt the same about it before she became a prostitute. She’d had boyfriends on and off everywhere she lived and she’d had sex with them without compunction. Sometimes it was enjoyable and sometimes it wasn’t, but it was never much more than that. She thought perhaps this was because she’d never been in love with any of the boyfriends. She’d met them all after she’d started drinking, when she didn’t really love anything, aside from Mud Drink. Though she had made sacrifices for these men, shifted her life around to accommodate them.
It was thanks to a boyfriend that she’d ended up in Spokane Falls. After she lost her job teaching school in Steilacoom, her boyfriend at the time said he knew someone who owned a bar in Spokane Falls where they could work serving drinks. So they went. But the boyfriend had been a drunk too and eventually he got them both fired for some infraction Roslyn could no longer remember. So she’d taken up with another man at another bar who said he could get her work there, but the work at the new bar wasn’t waitressing like at the old place. Entertainment was the word he’d used. Roslyn had laughed at the idea and said no, but then somehow ended up doing it anyway, and it wasn’t as bad as she’d thought. Actually, it was fine. Just like the sex she had for free with the boyfriend. This boyfriend too had drifted off someplace eventually, and Roslyn, at the suggestion of another woman, left the bar and rented a room at Wolfe’s Hotel, where she’d stayed for almost a decade. It hadn’t felt like that long to her. In fact, there were whole years in that time to which she could attach no specific memories.
Now, with Quake, the sex felt special, but only because it was new. In a few days, it wouldn’t be new. Just another thing they could do together to while away their Portland days. His long body was a puzzle of sorts. What to do with a man who was all limbs? He was gawky—awkward without his crisp, tailored suit. She liked that, the vulnerability of him. She maneuvered him in the ways she wanted, and when they were done, she looked up to see his face stuck in the same pleased shock as when she’d first suggested he come upstairs with her a half hour earlier. He hadn’t done this very much before, she realized, and said it out loud: “You haven’t done this much before.”
“How could you tell? Was I awful at it?”
She pulled him to her again and reassured him, no, he was fine. “I can just tell. That’s all. Nothing bad.”
“Of course you can,” he said. “You can tell about everything.”
Then he closed his eyes and pushed his head into the crook of her arm, a position she knew to be a classic for comfort seekers. For men who wanted more.
She began to see she’d misread the situation entirely. She’d misread Quake entirely.