Wilde West Read online

  Time, then, would become irrelevant. There would be no limits, no boundaries at all. Except those which in the process he set, or discovered, for himself.

  The slow unhurried opening of flesh into blossoms of scarlet; the slow unhurried scrape of knife against pink bone,

  The prospect made him breathless, dizzy.

  But dare he do it?

  Do it. Do it. Take this one.

  Yes.

  Yes.

  He stepped to the entrance and knocked. The pinewood door, thin and shabby, rattled in its frame.

  THAT WEDNESDAY MORNING, as usual, Grigsby woke up and wished he was dead.

  It was dawn. Even with the curtains drawn, the light a blurred uncertain gray, he knew it was dawn. Since Clara left, no matter how much he drank the night before, no matter how early or how late he went to bed, he always awoke at dawn. It was as though some pain-loving, pain-seeking part of him insisted on his being present at sunrise, so he could suffer through every single long aching moment of daylight.

  His lips were parched and cracked; overnight his tongue and teeth had produced a fine thick crop of moss. His lungs were clotted with phlegm—it had been their rattle, as they lurched for breath, that snapped him awake, hurled him back from oblivion into a world, and a life, and a bed, in which he had virtually no interest.

  Stale fumes of cheap perfume made the air seem like some dense substance too thick to sustain life, certainly too thick to breathe. The smell was sickly sweet, spiky with the sharp, sour-oatmeal tang of dried sweat. The sweat might be his, it sometimes was, but who belonged to the perfume?

  He turned his head to the left—slowly, cautiously, so that it wouldn’t split down the middle.

  Above the brown woolen blanket poked a bundle of blond hair, showing an inch or so of gray roots on either side of a ragged part.

  For an empty moment he had no idea whose head it was.

  And then, his heart dipping in his chest, he realized.

  Brenda.

  Jesus.

  Had he really been drunk enough to fuck Brenda again?

  At the thought of drink, or maybe at the thought of fucking Brenda, his stomach reeled; hot bile foamed at the back of his throat. He swallowed it down, tossed aside the blanket, and slowly pulled his big weary frame upright. Carefully, he swung his legs off the mattress. Bones creaked loudly in his left knee—his body reminding him, once again, that it was turning into stone.

  He was wearing his union suit, so maybe he hadn’t actually fucked Brenda after all.

  He was exhausted. Sleep no longer comforted; it left him more weary than a day in the saddle.

  His stomach heaved again.

  He stood, swayed slightly, and then staggered from the bedroom that he and Clara had shared for four years, tottered down the hallway where Clara had sometimes sung softly to herself as she passed through on her errands, where the children had run and played and hooted. Bits of grit clung to the cold soles of his feet. He stumbled into the bathroom that Clara had kept spotlessly clean—this had been one of the first houses in the neighborhood with indoor plumbing—and he hobbled over to the toilet.

  The curtains were open; gray light seeped into the room. In the toilet, circling the bowl at the waterline, was a ragged ring of brown fur. The moment he saw it, his stomach erupted.

  He felt flimsy, fragile, made of sticks and string and rice paper. His skin itched, not on the surface, but below it, as though the hair on his body was growing backward. His shoulders were slumped, his head was bowed as he sat on the rim of the bathtub and stared down at the tile floor. Yellow splotches at the base of the toilet bowl. Small spidery coils of gray hair scattered about.

  Clara had been so damn proud of that floor—it was crazy, the way she’d carried on. Real tile, she’d grinned proudly, her big brown eyes wide and excited, her face slightly flushed.

  As though it was silver or gold.

  Maybe he should rip it out and send it off to her. They’d paid for it with money from her inheritance. It really belonged to her.

  He could box it up, freight it by train to San Francisco. With a note. Here, Clara, take the fucking floor, you’ve got everything else, you might as well have this too.

  He didn’t want the fucking thing.

  When you came right down to it, he didn’t want the fucking house.

  He should’ve moved out. At the beginning, as soon as she left. (She wasn’t coming back, not ever—it was time to face it.) Should’ve sold the place, got himself a room at one of the hotels. Fresh linen. Maid service. (And some of the maids, he knew, had a pretty broad-minded notion of service.) A good restaurant downstairs, tablecloths, smiling waiters who served up fried eggs and crisp bacon in the morning.

  His stomach twisted.

  He stood, opened the medicine cabinet with a trembling hand, groped past the cough elixir (unused, untouched since the children left), and plucked out the pint of bonded bourbon.

  He uncorked the bottle, raised it to his mouth, took a swallow, felt the whiskey scald its way down his throat. As the warmth went glowing out along the old familiar pathways, his stomach gurgled and cooed like a baby at the breast.

  He looked at himself in the mirror.

  His eyes were rimmed with red, as though someone had poked at them—someone with a sharp stick and a mean streak. His gray hair was matted. (Clara had always made fun of his hair in the morning, the way sleep had poked it into fuzzy tufts at the back.) His skin was gray and blotched and lined; along his cheeks and nose, narrow red veins traced whorls and curlicues. His stubble was pure white now, an old man’s, not a speck of black in it anywhere, not a one.

  One day you wake up and you look in the mirror and you discover that you’re an old man.

  And one day you wake up and you discover that you’re dead.

  He said aloud, “Grigsby, you are one pathetic son of a bitch.”

  He took another swallow of bourbon.

  Better. The whiskey was driving its core of warmth down through the hollow center of his being.

  He was beginning to feel half human again. Half human was about the best he ever managed.

  Now if he could get himself cleaned up and dressed and away from the house before Brenda figured out that he was gone.

  She came into the kitchen while he sat gulping his coffee at the table. Making the coffee had been a mistake.

  She was wearing an old pink bathrobe of Clara’s, one that Clara had left forgotten at the rear of the bedroom closet, and for an instant Grigsby wanted to leap up and rip it off her back.

  His fury surprised him. And then somehow, in the midst of his surprise, the anger dissipated.

  These days none of his emotions lasted for very long. Not fury, not surprise.

  Self-contempt—but that wasn’t an emotion.

  Fuck the robe. What difference did it make if Brenda wore the damn thing?

  He set the coffee cup down atop the red and white checkered oilcloth that covered the table. (Clara would’ve hated it, but it was easier to keep clean than wood.) He lifted his cigarette from the ashtray.

  Brenda smiled at him—she was a bit blurry, like a photograph not quite in focus—and padded around behind him, put her heavy arms around his neck. “How’s my big man this morning?”

  Sucking on the cigarette, he concealed a cringe of distaste. This was what she always said in the morning, whenever he had been lonely enough, desperate enough, drunk enough, to bring her here for the night.

  He grunted then, his standard morning greeting, deliberately cool, almost gruff. He always hoped that by refusing her any real conversation, she would one day stop trying to have one. So far, this had never worked.

  She put her cheek next to his. Her hair was stiff and prickly against his skin, like dried grass. “Let me fix you up some food,” she said. “You’re a growing boy, Bob. You need your vittles.” Her cheek pillowed out against his as she smiled.

  This was something else she always said.

  And that was t
he problem with Brenda. (One of them, anyway.) Give her the same damn situation and she would say exactly the same damn thing. Every time. Regular as a banker’s bowels. And whatever it was she said, you could tell from her smile, all sugary and pleased with herself, that she still thought it was cute as kittens. The first time, maybe it had been. (He couldn’t remember, but he doubted it.) Now, after ten or twenty or fifty times, whenever she did it he wanted to scream.

  He told her, “I’m not hungry.” And then—reluctantly, because her pitiful gratitude at his small kindnesses always shamed him—he added, “Thanks.”

  She squeezed his neck and again he felt her smile against his cheek. “Yeah,” she said. “I reckon maybe you had your fill last night.”

  Jesus.

  He had fucked her.

  He sighed. He lifted his cup and took a bitter, penitential swallow of coffee.

  “’M I gonna see you tonight?” she asked him.

  Not if he stayed sober. “Don’t know,” he said. “Lot of work to do.”

  “Well, you know where I live.”

  He grunted. He was able to make each grunt identically non-committal to the grunt before.

  She smiled again. He thought, I’ll keep the home fires burning.

  She said, “I’ll keep the home fires burning.”

  He grunted.

  She chose to take this particular grunt as an endearment, and nuzzled her nose into his neck.

  That was another problem with Brenda. She saw anything short of a punch in the gut as affection.

  And even if he were the kind of asshole who punched out women, how the hell do you punch out a woman who was hurting so badly for some kindness? Any kindness at all? Be like kicking a little puppy dog.

  The main problem with Brenda, when you got right down to it, was that she wasn’t Clara. And he couldn’t really blame her for that. Wasn’t her fault.

  The main problem with him was that he deserved Brenda, or someone like her, more than he had ever deserved Clara.

  He finished off the rest of his coffee. “Gotta go,” he said.

  She stepped back as he stood up, and just then someone knocked at the front door.

  Grigsby frowned. Doors that got knocked on at six in the morning never opened up onto anything good.

  He turned to Brenda. “Stay here,” he told her.

  She curtsied, smiling. She was too big a woman to pull off a curtsy—too big and too old a woman to do half the cutesy little-girl things she did. His feelings moved through their old familiar dance, shuffling from embarrassment to irritation to shame.

  She said, “Your wish is my command, sire.”

  He nodded, looked grimly away. Jesus.

  His clothes from yesterday, and hers, were flung about the parlor—pants on the floor, shirt draped over the armchair. Her corset wrapped around his other pair of boots. Her stiff petticoat standing upright, like a squat teepee, in the center of the carpet.

  He and Brenda had done themselves proud, looked like. No wonder he was so damn tired. He couldn’t remember any of it, but probably that was a blessing.

  He opened the front door.

  Officer McKinley stood there in his blue Denver Police uniform, looking fat and ill at ease. He glanced quickly up and down the empty street, as though he suspected that spies watched him from within the small frame houses or from behind the hedges and shrubs. He tapped the brim of his cap. “Mornin’, Marshal.”

  “Morning, Tom.” Grigsby yawned. The air was cold; he felt its chill through his woolen shirt, his leather vest. Behind McKinley the houses were taking on form and color in the early morning light. There had been a time once when Grigsby had actually enjoyed this part of the day.

  “Grady tole me to come talk to you,” McKinley said. “He said you wanted to know if sumpin happens to a hooker.” He looked off warily to his right.

  Grigsby was suddenly wide awake. “What happened?”

  “Molly Woods.” He looked off warily to his left. “You know her? She got cut up sumpin awful, Grady says. They already sent for Greaves.”

  “Molly Woods? Lives down by the river?”

  “Yes sir. You hurry, you can get there before he does.”

  Grigsby nodded. “I owe you, Tom.”

  McKinley shook his head. “Jesus, Marshal, how’d you know?”

  “Hunch.”

  “Grady says he never saw anything like it. He says there was pieces of her all over the place, like—”

  “All right, Tom. I’ll be going now.”

  McKinley remembered himself, looked furtively down the street again. “Greaves asks you, it wasn’t me what tole you. Right?”

  “Absolutely. I’m obliged, Tom. You get on back now.”

  As McKinley bustled off, obviously relieved to be leaving, Grigsby closed the door. He lifted his gunbelt off the coatrack, slung it around his hips, buckled it closed. Reflexively, out of years of habit, he adjusted the big Colt in its holster, slid it out a few inches, let it fall back, loose and ready.

  He slipped his sheepskin jacket from the rack, wrestled it on.

  Brenda wandered into the parlor. Grigsby had completely forgotten that she was in the house.

  “Who was it, Bob?” she asked him. She drew the front of the robe more tightly around her heavy breasts.

  “Business,” he told her.

  “You’re leavin’ now?”

  “Yep,” he said, hooking the last of the leather loops over the topmost staghorn button.

  She nodded. “’M I gonna see you later?”

  He frowned. “You already asked me, Brenda. I don’t know. I got a lot of work.”

  “Sure,” she said. “Sure, Bob. I understand.” She shrugged. “Well,” she said. “You know where I live.” She smiled a small smile, somehow sad and hopeful at the same time.

  Grigsby put on his hat. Sooner or later he had to end this thing with Brenda, once and for all. For her sake. “Right,” he said. “See you.”

  It took Grigsby five minutes to reach the livery stable, another five to saddle up the big roan.

  The shantytown along the North Platte was a part of Denver that the men of the Chamber of Commerce never mentioned in those advertisements they took out in the eastern newspapers. Most of the eastern travelers passing through town never saw it, never knew that it existed. The locals knew, but except for those who lived in it, and who had no choice, none of them ever came here.

  It was a neighborhood for people who had no choice—people who had run through all their choices, or tossed them all away, or people who had never had much of a choice to begin with. Italians recruited by the railroads, paid a starvation wage for a while, and then laid off. Negroes escaping the South and discovering, years after the War, a new kind of slavery. Swedes and Norwegians and their families who came looking for work and for clean mountain air, and who found typhoid, cholera, and pneumonia. And the women: widows, abandoned wives, unwanted daughters, farm girls who had once been pregnant and desperate and who now, after years of abuse, weren’t girls any more and didn’t have the energy to be desperate.

  Gathered here, huddled in ramshackle shanties of tarpaper and scrapwood, they were the refuse tossed aside by the city as it grew fat and sleek on the money from the mines and the ranches, the smelters and the stockyards.

  Grigsby hated the place. Here the light never grew brighter than the bleakness of dusk: day and night a blanket of smelter smoke obscured the sky. Soot lay everywhere, clung to everything; in winter the snow was the color of ashes. In summer the winds brought the grime and the dust billowing up off the rutted roadbeds in choking black clouds; in spring and fall the same roads became narrow swamps of black glutinous muck.

  The last rain had been a week ago, but the hooves of Grigsby’s horse made dull sucking sounds as the animal plodded down Curlew Street. Trash littered the mud: tin cans, whiskey bottles, scraps of paper, a dead cat. Thin, whey-faced children, bundled up against the cold in tattered rags, watched him from the sidewalks with big dark eyes
that were as shiny, and as blank, as marbles. The adults—some of them trudging slowly past, some stiffly leaning, arms folded, against the greasy wooden walls—had eyes that were blanker still.

  Three Denver policemen stood huddled together on the sidewalk outside Molly Woods’s small frame shack, the blue of their uniforms looking black in the murky light. They were silent, their hands buried in the pockets of their coats, their breath puffs of white in the chill, still air. None of them looked at the others.

  A small knot of shantytown locals, four or five battered-looking men, two battered-looking women, everyone dressed in shades of gray, stood off to the left, watching and waiting.

  Grigsby reined in the roan, swung himself down, felt the mud squirm beneath his boots. His right leg wobbled slightly—the hip was acting up again, pain knifing from the pelvis down the thigh bone. Pretty soon his riding days would be over. It would be buckboards for him then, and then the rocker on the front steps, and then the coffin.

  He tied the reins to a sagging wooden rail and, holding himself deliberately upright, walking through the pain, climbed up onto the sidewalk.

  The three policemen nodded; they all knew him.

  “Gerry,” he said, nodding first to the oldest, Sergeant Hanrahan. Then, to the others, “Zack. Carl.”

  The sergeant spoke for all three: “Bob. How’d you hear?”

  “Little bird told me. Greaves get here yet?”

  Hanrahan shook his head. His round face was red, but not from the cold. It was always red. “Hill’s a long way off,” he said. Capitol Hill, where Greaves lived, was Denver’s most expensive residential district. “’Specially this early of a mornin’.”

  Grigsby jerked his head toward Molly Woods’s shack. “Bad?”

  Hanrahan took in a deep breath, blew it out between pursed lips, shook his head. “Jesus, Bob. He was crazy, whoever did it. Ye can’t even tell who she was. What she was. Ye knew her, did ye?”