Chapter 66

I was in a fix, no two ways about it, and was about to jump straight out of Mary’s window when the little whore emerged from her swamp of dirty bedclothes, propped herself up on a pile of ratty red velvet pillows fringed in gold and ordered Vikers and his boys, “Get out!” Mary the Murderer looked a lot more like a puny brown girl dying of consumption than she did a bloodthirsty harlot. She seemed harmless right up until you noticed all the straight-edge razors she had tucked here and there about the room.

With surprising energy, she leaped up, plucked an especially wicked-looking blade from beneath a pillow, flipped it open, and swished it to and fro at the men crowded at the door. “I told you donkey-balled, dirt-eating, fart-lickers before. One at a time. No shows ’less everyone pays.”

All the boys except Vikers backed up.

“Especially you, you card-sharpin’, bottom-dealin’ sneak,” Mary added, making to slice up Vikers’s nasty face. Preferring my odds with Mary, I hopped in and snarled at Vikers, “You heard the lady! Get the hell out fore she slits your throat!”

Soon as the door was shut, Mary slumped back down, hiked up her skirt, and exposed a pair of legs so bowed and coppery brown that I knew she’d grown up ahorseback, making her, most likely, an Indian. She wore no underclothes of any sort and when she threw her legs wide, she exposed her parts to me and all the world. They were of a purplish-brown color not too dissimilar from my own.

Hearing muffled scratchings and whispers, I flung open Mary’s door and Greene and Caldwell stumbled in, pushed forward by the crowd behind. I pulled out Lem’s sidearm, a .58 Remington, the finest percussion pistol ever made. The sight of that piece caused the hall to fall silent for they knew it could blow a dandy hole through a two-by-four.

“I am going to shut this door, count to three, and start blasting. You still the other side, you will meet your Jesus tonight.” The pack was gone and down the stairs before I could slam the door shut, lock it, and stuff my yellow kerchief in the keyhole.

“You shoot up my door,” Mary snapped. “You gon buy me another one. Don’t want no shot-up door.”

I slid the .58’s cylinder out and told her, “That won’t be a problem. Gun’s not loaded.”

Mary pulled her filthy skirt up even higher, and said, “Well? What you waiting for? I ain’t got all night. Get your damn pecker hard and do your business.”

I turned away for she’d started thrusting her hips in a fashion she fancied would put me on the prod but which gave me the creeping willies. “Yeah. Okay,” I said, thinking hard for Vikers would be sure to demand a full report of my performance from Mary. “Give me a minute. I need to get in the mood.”

“‘The mood’?” Mary repeated as though hearing the word for the first time. “You got thirty seconds, then I scream for your friends to come and drag you outta here!” This last Mary hollered at the top of her lungs to the audience I could hear scraping around again outside her door. The pack had returned. Mary added, “Perverts like them outside pay for such details. The more humiliating, the better.”

Oh, Mary was a vicious little guttersnipe. The prospect of humiliating me perked her up to an alarming extent and Vikers’s trap closed in around me even tighter. I had to shut Vikers up now, tonight, or I might just as well take one of Mary’s razors and open up a few veins. I looked around her room, desperate for a way out.

“You’re costin’ me money, nigger,” Mary grumbled. “And you or Vikers is sure God gon make it up to me. My medicine’s expensive.”

Mention of her medicine inspired Mary to refresh herself with a healthy swig of laudanum. A moment later, she drifted into a light doze and started snoring like a little kitten.

Hoping to find something of use, I quickly studied the few bits of girlishness atop Mary’s dresser: a locket with one half of the heart broken off; a tin of lilac talcum powder; a small glass vial with the gooey amber mess of what had once been perfume clogged inside; and the lacy remnants of a dainty hankie.

I picked up the hankie and found my salvation hidden underneath: a set of the strange beads exactly like the ones the General used to say his prayers on. Recalling their power to make even that hardened warrior blubber, I grabbed the pearly string by the tiny bleeding Jesus drooping on a cross at its end.

A cough and the shuffling of feet came from outside the door. The pack was closing in, hungry to rip me apart if I failed to prove myself a real man.

I went to Mary’s bedside and dropped to my knees. Her eyes flickered open. I whirled the tiny Jesus in front of my head and shoulders the way I’d seen Sheridan do, kissed the tips of my fingers, bowed my head, and started working those beads through my fingers. With the heat of a true believer, I repeated, word for word, what I remembered of the Mary prayer Sheridan had said so many times.

“Hell Mary! Full of grapes. Blessed Arthur. And blessed is the fruit that I won. Oh, Jesus! Oh, Jesus! Oh, Jesus!”

Staring at me dreamily, Mary asked, “Are you Catholic?”

I was glad for all the times I’d put on Sheridan’s Paddy accent to try and get a smile out of Solomon, for it came right back to me and I answered, “And what else would ye be thinkin’ I am, lass?” I used Mary’s moment of stupefaction to pull her skirt down and cover what ought be covered.

“I didn’t know there was no nigger Catholics,” she said.

“Oh, hell yes, they’s a mess of us,” I shot back, quick. Too quick, for I’d left off the accent. I hurried to replace it, asking, “Shall we be praying together to Hell Mary, me dear child?”

Something about the accent or the beads or the laudanum, or maybe it was just being spoken to kindly, but Mary puddled up. Big tears pooled in her dark eyes, making her look even more like a child, one haunted by things she never should of seen. Her lips trembled and, in a small voice, she said, “You sound like the Black Robes back on the reservation.”

“Will ye not kneel beside me, my child, and ask Hell Mary for forgiveness?”

She dropped her head and tears splashed down onto her bosom. “Forgiveness? For me? After all I done?”

The way Mary bowed her head down in shame for what she’d been forced to do reminded me of Clemmie. After Old Mister A spasm of anger gripped me, and I said, “You only did what you had to do to survive. Nothin’ wrong in that. Come on now. Jesus and Hell Mary love all their children.”

Mary was too lost in sorrow and memory and laudanum to notice that I’d let the accent slide. She lay there, propped up on those red pillows, crumpled into herself, sniffling away. Finally, in a little mouse voice she squeaked out, “Even me?”

“You more than anybody.” Mary looked so pitiful and lost that I added, “Let me tell you something I don’t tell just anyone.”

She lifted her eyes a bit and asked, “What?” in a voice sharpened by all the times she’d been lied to in her young life.

“I am a bona fide minister of Hell Mary.”

“You are?” She sniffled.

“I am. You want Hell Mary to forgive you, come on down here and pray with me.”

After a moment of debate, she slipped out of bed, kneeled beside me, and commenced to pray. Mary mumbled the way a poor reservation child, kneeling in one of those big, stone Catholic churches with a sad-eyed, bleeding Jesus looking down on her, would have been taught to do. But mumbling was not what I required at that moment and I demonstrated what was needed by calling out, “Oh, Hell Mary! Mary! My God! Mary!” I punctuated my cries by jiggling the bedsprings loud as I could.

Mary joined in, yelling out to Hell Mary. I suggested that maybe she should try appealing directly to Jesus and she switched, calling out, “Oh, Jesus! Oh, dear Lord! Lord, God Almighty!”

I led her in some selected prayers, my voice rising to a shout then dropping to a whisper as I said, “OH, GOD! Please hear our prayers. I AM COMING, OH, HELL MARY, to ask forgiveness for your sweet daughter who has been lost and now is found. I AM COMING! I AM COMING! I AM COMING to ask you to welcome her back into your love.” To Mary, I whispered, “You might want to second the request.”

“Yes, dear Lord,” she added.

“Got to show Him you mean it,” I suggested.

I led her on a rising crescendo of “yesses,” that climaxed with my telling her that her sins had been forgiven. Upon which Mary slumped, crying, onto the bed.

In the silence that followed, I heard Caldwell say in his deep, bass voice from out in the hall, “Well, shoot a bug. Whenever I topped Mary, she ain’t never said shit. Cathay be a sissy, make me a dog damn mule!”

Muttered agreement was followed by the clomping of boots as the men abandoned their posts. I kneeled beside Mary, patting her back, and telling her that her sins had been washed away. We continued on in this way for such a long time that several customers came and pounded on the door saying it was their turn. Mary yelled for them to go eat owl shit and carried on praying and calling on the Lord. After she was worn out on confessing her sins and me washing them away, she curled up on her bed, took a nip of her medicine, and dropped off to sleep.

It was near dawn when Bunny and I made it back to the fort. Only then did I realize that I had left my yellow kerchief stuffed into Mary’s keyhole. It was too late to go back for. I slipped into the barracks, crept over to Lem’s bunk, and placed both his sidearm and my scrimshaw razor on his pillow.

An hour later, at first call, I awoke to find two sugar plums on my pillow and Lem back in the bunk next to mine.