Two nights later, I lay in bed in my room at the Boston House with Katie Goode, after we’d done our business, and talked about Allie.
“Don’t you see what she’s doing?” Katie said.
“Being nice to her husband’s friend,” I said.
“Husband? They got married?”
“I don’t think so. But that’s what they call each other.”
Katie shrugged.
“What is it they call it in a war,” she said, “when a general doesn’t use all his troops but holds some out.”
“The troops are in reserve?”
“Yes. That’s what I was trying to say. Allie has you in reserve.”
“Reserve? Reserve for what?”
“In case Virgil gets killed.”
“She has me standing by to replace Virgil?”
“Virgil dies, you replace him. Then you’re the stud horse. That’s why she’s so nice to you. That’s why there’s no more talk of how you molested her that day, at the house before it was finished.”
“Praise be,” I said.
“And she reminded you how you saw her naked.”
“Yeah,” I said, “she did.”
“That was a kind of flirting, you dumb man.”
“Right in front of Virgil?”
Katie smiled. “He’s a dumb man, too.”
“So why is she so set that everything we did was for her?”
“Oh, Everett,” Katie said. “You ain’t that stupid.”
“I ain’t?”
“ ’Course you ain’t. Just think a minute.”
I was quiet while I thought about it.
“Makes her feel important,” I said, after a time.
“Um-hm,” Katie said.
“You learn all this stuff being a whore?” I said.
Katie smiled.
“I spend my working time with men,” she said. “But my social time is with women.”
“All women know things like this?” I said.
“Most of us understand Allie French,” Katie said.
“What do you all understand?”
“She ain’t no different,” Katie said, “from any of us working girls. She’s willing to fuck who she got to fuck, so she can get what she needs to get.”
“How ’bout love?” I said. “Love got anything to do with it?”
“Out here, love’s pretty hard for a woman,” Katie said. “Mostly it’s the men worry about love. You know how many miners and cowboys told me they loved me just before they, ah, emptied their chamber?”
“Tell you the truth, Katie,” I said, “I guess I don’t want to know that.”
“Men maybe can worry ’bout love,” Katie said. “Most women out here got to think ’bout other things.”
“Ever been in love?” I said.
Katie laughed.
“I don’t love you, Everett,” she said. “But you’re as close as I come.”
“So what do you feel?”
“I like you,” she said. “You’re not mean. And you got some education. I’m always glad when it’s you that hires me, and I’m always glad when you pay for the night.”
“You think that’s how Allie feels about Virgil?”
“I don’t know what she feels,” Katie said. “She probably don’t know how she feels, either. She just knows he’s the top hand, and she’ll stay with him till he ain’t.”
“Well, what I know is I paid for the night, and I don’t want us wasting time.”
“Just passing time while you recovered,” Katie said.
She put her hand under the covers.
“And I do believe you have,” she said.