The Outcasts (19 page)

Nate nodded, but Dr. Tom said, “I need a promise on that.”

Nate in that moment had a presentiment, what his wife would have called a glimmering, that he was in the presence of a man making a last request. He said, “I promise.”

Dr. Tom put his hat back on and worked his mouth around a dry tongue. “I need something sweet to wash out this sour taste. Would you walk up the street to Henderson’s Dry Goods and get me some rock candy? Go on, now, Nate. I just need a minute to settle my nerves. When you get back, we’ll get this thing started.”

Nate walked out of the livery and turned right on the Strand. He hadn’t asked the way but decided Henderson’s must be farther into town. He walked slowly, giving Dr. Tom the time he asked for, and watched the traffic, the horses, pedestrians, and carts, still crowding the streets.

The sea wind had turned colder and he settled his hat more firmly on his head and turned up his collar. He nodded to a couple on the sidewalk, a boy on a horse, a man in a buggy, and looked on both sides of the street for a sign that said
Henderson’s.

He glanced up at the storied buildings. Even with the few gaslights, the stars were legion, dimensional and sharp, and Nate thought there should be a new word to describe the luster over the Gulf sky.

He walked a few more blocks and then turned back, retracing his steps. He caught sight of his own profile in some glass fronting a shop with a sign that read
Oceanside Lots for Sale. See Surveyor Inside.

The man in the buggy.
The one he’d passed on the street. He’d seen the man only briefly in profile—bearded, spectacled—but the memory of sharing the ferry ride with McGill resurfaced and, immediately following, the recollection of his wife’s warning about staying away from rough water.

McGill had been riding in the direction of the livery. Nate turned and began to run, and two blocks away from the livery, he heard three distinct revolver shots, two fast and one following shortly after.

Drawing his own revolver, he cautiously entered the livery through the open stable door, but he already knew what he was going to find.

T
here was little doubt in Lucinda’s mind that Bill had meant to kill her on the seaside road in Galveston. Instead, he ran the fingers of one hand over her face and told her, “You go to work now, Lucy. And you’ll work until you’ve made up for all that’s been lost.”

He kissed her, his lips tasting of tobacco and brine, and pinched up her hair in his fingers, yanking it behind every word. “Every. Last. Dollar.”

And then he released her; her knees buckled with relief.

“The steamer
Josephine
departs the docks at midnight for New Orleans,” he said. “If you keep up a brisk pace, you’ll make it in time.” He climbed into the buggy. “Walk fast, Lucy. I need to know that you are still with me.” He chucked at the reins and headed out, alone, towards town.

She watched the buggy until it had disappeared into the darkness, but even then she could hear the faint sounds of the wheels crackling over the shells, like a plague of locusts departing.

She began walking rapidly, passing no one along the road, watching the tiny lights of boats slipping through the deep currents of the Gulf waters. It was cold, making her teeth clatter together, and she rubbed her hands up and down her arms for warmth. In the third hour of walking, the shells on the road started to cut through the leather of her shoes, and she trailed spatters of dark blood in the shale behind her like tiny starfish caught on dry land. But the wounding of her feet was a distraction from the frigid wind, and she welcomed the pain. She would later reveal her wounds to Bill as visible signs of her penance.

She arrived at the docks before midnight, pulled herself hand over hand along the gangway rope, and limped onto the deck. She knocked timidly on the door to Bill’s cabin and felt her head grow dim with fear over his reception. He opened it and she almost fainted, her eyes rolling back in her head. He carried her to the bunk, where he cut the laces of her boots with his knife and took them off her swollen ankles. He put a damp handkerchief over her face and washed her naked feet gently in a bowl of cool water. He cooed to her, stroking her hair, and told her, “I’m the only one left to take care of you. I’ll always take care of you, Lucy, but you must never again go against me.”

Her wounds, her helplessness, her contriteness, all seemed to excite him, and he pulled up her skirt and took her on the narrow bed, her head rhythmically tapping the wall with every thrust like a metronome.

When he was finished, he got up from the bed and moved to look out the one porthole window. She watched his profile, the tension in the curves of his hip and thigh, and she hid a smile in the hollow of her shoulder.
He’s forgiven me,
she thought.
He would never truly hurt me.

“Tonight I had to kill a man who would have killed me.” He said it quietly, without emphasis on any one word. She sat up, tense with fear again.

“There will be others looking for us,” he said. “I’ve given my last fifty dollars to the captain to keep quiet about us being here, but we need money as soon as we dock.” He looked at her and she nodded once that she understood. He would go to the streets and alleyways, anywhere there was gambling, or an easy mark to fall under a confidence game or a robbery. She, in turn, would do the work she did best.

He lay on the bunk again. “I had to do it, Lucy.” He circled one arm around her, soothing her, and whispered into her ear, “We need to look to the future. What we need is a wealthy fish, and I know just the fishing hole.”

The morning they arrived in New Orleans, Bill took Lucinda to the Fourth Ward, to a grand house that sat on South Basin Street. In front of the building’s entrance were two large pagan statues holding gas torches, still lit.

Bill knocked and they were at once admitted to a downstairs receiving room in which every piece of furniture, every ornament, was sharp-edged, glittering, and false.
Cold as death, with more than a whiff of decay,
Lucinda could hear her father saying.

A large black man dressed in evening wear led them upstairs to the madam’s office. Hattie C. Hamilton owned the second-finest bordello in New Orleans, after Kate Townsend’s palatial crib down the street, and had a long acquaintance with Bill. That Hattie had shot and killed her lover a few months earlier, a senator named Beares who had entirely financed the building, served only to heighten the allure of the place.

Bill made the introductions, and Hattie squinted her eyes at Lucinda and proclaimed her hair and skin exceptionally fine, but she shook her head at Lucinda’s torn shoes and wrinkled dress. She asked, “How old are you now? Twenty-seven?”

Lucinda knew it was a negotiating tactic, but it pricked at her vanity. She smiled and answered, “I’m twenty-three today. Tomorrow I might be nineteen.”

Hattie had laughed at that, her wide shovel jaw working like the hinge to a tool chest, but her eyes, as well as her handshake, were bloodless. They agreed that Lucinda was to work exclusively for House Hamilton. She’d get twenty dollars per customer for an hourly, and fifty dollars for a night’s stay-over, and she’d pay an exorbitant 40 percent of that to Hattie the first month. “For debut expenses,” Hattie said.

“But you can keep whatever tips the customers care to give you,” the madam added. “You’ll need clothes to start and a sitting with my hairdresser. You can’t appear downstairs looking like you do now. I’ll want you ready to start right away.”

By nine o’clock that evening Lucinda was sitting in the parlor, having already received in her room two customers eager to try the new girl. She let her eyes drift about the room to the other men and women in various stages of negotiation and undress, and to the front door, which seemed to be open more often than it was closed. It was attended by the black doorman, Lucius, who carried a double-bladed knife sheathed in his long formal coat.

Bill would not come again before morning—he had his own business to take care of—but she searched the clients walking through the door for his angular form anyway. It was a way to take her mind from the bone-crushing restlessness of waiting, and it gave some warmth to the chill of sitting in the gilt perfection of Hattie’s parlor.

Lucinda turned her eyes to a couple nearby: a wealthy customer and his regular, a French whore wearing white-and-red stockings that showed beneath her linen chemise like lurid ribbons under a wedding cake. They were sprawled on a narrow settee, the whore sitting on the man’s lap, and she rocked her hips and swung her shoeless feet, making him laugh. One of her hands disappeared into the waistband of the man’s trousers, but she frowned when she followed his gaze and saw the object of his attention.

The man shifted in the settee, allowing her hand to slip farther into the pleated folds of his pants. “Who’s that?” he asked, pointing to Lucinda.

The whore kissed his neck and answered, “She’s no one. She’s new.” With her free hand she unpinned her hair, which fell in a complicated frizz around her shoulders, and then set about the business of distracting him.

An older man approached Lucinda, disturbing her thoughts, and she turned her head away from him. He’d attempted earlier to engage her, but he smelled of day-old grease and beer, even through his expensive worsted suit, and she rebuffed him. She’d have to be careful about refusing customers. Hattie would not be pleased. But she had in mind another fish, the one she had been watching carefully and who she knew had special, expensive tastes. The fish was now enmeshed firmly in the grip of the whore with legs like a barber’s pole, but he snuck a look at Lucinda and she parted her lips, creating a small, rounded O with her mouth. She needed to work fast, and subtle gestures would not achieve the needed results.

She smoothed out her skirt, running her hands lingeringly over her thighs. It was a simple woolen travel suit of evening blue, cut straight and high across her bosom. She looked like a schoolteacher, which was the point.

Hattie had given her a gown in advance of her wages, a dress of champagne silk, the décolletage cut almost to her nipples, and the hem shortened in front to her knees. The same sort of tart casing that every girl in the place would be wearing. But against Hattie’s wishes, Lucinda put on the more modest dress, telling the madam it would be more alluring to place herself apart from the other girls.

With studied decorum, she leaned forward and brushed an imaginary bit of dirt from her new kid boots, then let her fingers slowly trace the outline of the seams. They were the only shoes that she could tolerate wearing, as the blisters and swelling on her feet were still painful.

Lucinda’s fish had been watching her movements and he smiled broadly at her. She smiled in return, encouraging him, knowing that he had had the French girl for weeks and was in all likelihood growing bored with her. Lucinda caught the huff of tension and anger rising from the whore on his lap.

“Hallo,” he said. “Tartine says you’re a schoolteacher. Is that so?”

Lucinda dipped her chin, but kept her eyes on the mark.

“How did you get your students to mind you, looking so sweet?”

She leaned forward slightly and said, “Discipline.”

Later, when the man followed her up the stairs, Lucinda was aware that Hattie was watching her from the bar, smiling; she had a fist on her hip and one foot on the railing, like a man. The French whore stood at the bottom of the banister observing her with quite a different look.

F
or the second time, Nate helped load Dr. Tom’s horse onto the Galveston train, but it was oriented on the rails pointing back towards Houston. In the baggage car was a long box labeled
Houston Cemetery,
to be signed for by the same physician who had seen Dr. Tom through his pneumonia; the felt-lined medical kit with all its gleaming, carefully tended scalpels and lancets was going to the Houston doctor in gratitude for services rendered. In the instructions for burial, Nate had included the epitaph for the headstone. He had wanted a passage from Dickens, but the wordiness of the author’s sentiments made the job too costly, so he wrote what was on Deerling’s headstone:
Comrade in Arms, Father, Friend.
Nate didn’t know the year Dr. Tom was born, so below the first line he put only the year of his death:
1870.

For a good while he lingered on the platform, even after the train had departed, as the state policeman standing next to him shifted impatiently. The officer was a tall, wasp-waisted black man, the first state policeman of color Nate had seen. That officer’s partner was also black, blue-black like a grackle’s wing, and he carried two cross-draw pistols in his belt. The officers had been summoned to the livery after Dr. Tom had been shot. In checking the ranger’s revolver, they found that he had fired off one shot, but there was no evidence that it had found its mark.

The officers carried out, to Nate’s mind, a swift and coolheaded search of streets surrounding the stables. But he had no idea how thoroughly they had searched the piers or the ships docked between them.

The lead officer’s name was Thoreau, which he pronounced “Thurah.” He watched Nate for a while and then cleared his throat. “There’s no way to know for sure if your man was on one of those steamers. Captains are bribed all the time to keep quiet about who and what’s on board. Besides, even if McGill was on a steamer, as long as he’s out of Texas, it’s not our problem anymore. Am I right?”

Nate shifted his weight, one foot to the other, but said nothing.

Thoreau gently tapped a finger on Nate’s arm. “There’s nothing left for you to do here. If you leave Texas, you’ll have no authority.”

Nate nodded noncommittally and asked, “Are you going to report me?”

Thoreau breathed out through his nose. “Who would I report you to?”

Nate took up the reins of the big bay and set off in the direction of the docks. He heard Thoreau and his partner walking away, back towards town.

“Hey,” Nate called, turning and catching up to them. “Letter for my wife.” He handed Thoreau an envelope taken from the Republic Hotel.

Thoreau put the letter in his pocket. “She know she’s married to a fool?”

“She does now.” Nate turned back towards the water, uncertain if he had done the right thing in telling his wife where he was headed. He would have already been gone but for Thoreau’s insistence on the formalities of giving a lengthy statement, which Nate suspected was a ploy to keep him in Galveston until his temper had cooled.

Nate left his horse tied to the side of a warehouse and walked out onto the pier to book his passage. He wasn’t sure how the horse would take to being on the water after the firestorm in the stock car, but he wouldn’t leave the stallion behind. He paid for his passage and then galloped the horse hard down the beach road for miles. When the stallion’s breathing became labored, Nate brought him around and trotted him into the wind. The horse’s eyes rolled white with the surf and Nate reined him onto the beach, where his nostrils flared wildly at the salty, churning foam, and he set his dark legs into the tidal sand as though confronting an adversary.

Nate, for the briefest of moments, imagined Beth and Mattie there on the beach and himself sitting between them, watching the ships far out in the Gulf. But he pushed those thoughts away, and, when the horse had calmed, he rode back into town. He sat on the docks through the afternoon, waiting for the departure of the evening steamer taking a dozen Texas-bred horses to New Orleans.

He had paid for the fare with the money his partner had pressed on him in the hours before he died. Dr. Tom had lingered for two days, in and out of consciousness, but with the certain knowledge that he would not recover. The ranger had been carried to the Republic Hotel on the Strand, but when he saw they meant to put him in their best room, he protested over the expense and so was taken to a smaller room in the back.

He told Nate through pain-clenched teeth, “I’d stick them with the bill, but they’d just get it from you.”

The physician was sent for and he stanched the bleeding from the wounds in the stomach and shoulder and laid on thick the laudanum. He pulled Nate aside, whispering, “It would be no sin, and maybe a blessing, if you were to add twenty more drops to the man’s water.”

Nate drew up a chair and sat with Dr. Tom through the daylight hours, sleeping on the floor at the foot of the bed through the night.

Once Dr. Tom asked him, “How many hours do you suppose you’ve sat next to me while I’ve been sick, and me not even an old man yet, and listened to me talk about myself?”

Nate patted him on the arm but didn’t trust himself to speak. He stared at the laudanum bottle for the longest time, but Dr. Tom didn’t seem to be in unbearable pain. The ranger lay mostly with his eyes closed, occasionally his lips moving, fingers tapping out some unknown rhythm on the sheets. Once his eyes opened and he asked, “What’s the way that song goes?” But Nate didn’t know what song the ranger was trying to remember.

Nate stared at the floor for hours, hoping that Dr. Tom would speak again, but mostly he slept. When the ranger finally shifted restlessly, Nate looked towards the bed and saw that Dr. Tom’s eyes were on him. He breathed in gasps, saying, “Remember. McGill. You promised.”

Nate leaned forward. “I’ll find him.”

“Lucinda. And the child.”

Nate nodded, remembering the pledge he had given to McNally years before: to bring a herd of horses back to Texas, saving an entire bloodline.
As a son to a father,
he had promised McNally, and he repeated the same words to Dr. Tom. “As a son to a father.”

If the ranger heard him, he made no reply. He turned his face towards the window, just lightening with the dawn.

“It’s the coming of day…” Dr. Tom began, but then he was silent.

The last thing Dr. Tom did before he stopped breathing was brush the back of his palm under his mustache with a slow and steady hand. Nate had seen him do it a hundred times in anticipation of something pleasurable or to order his thoughts in preparation for a necessary but onerous task. Dr. Tom had then laid his arms at his sides, and the blanket slowly sank into the concavity of his chest.

Nate reached out and clasped his hand, and though there was still warmth, there was no returning pressure. He sat at the bedside listening to the rise and fall of the street noises coming from the Strand, hearing the whistle from the approaching train traveling over Galveston Bay, and thought of Dr. Tom in the engine cab, his eyes closed, smiling with the pleasure of the rough vibrations traveling upwards from the bottom of his boot heels. He remembered his partner standing in the streets of St. Gall gazing at the stars overhead, heard Tom’s voice telling him that they were all in the black soup together, linking them forever in a kind of kinship through adversity.

Nate’s own father had never so much as given a nod to his son’s accomplishments and talents, such as they were. And yet this one man, unknown to Nate until several weeks ago, had counseled him, encouraged him, and entrusted to him his last earthly possessions.

Nate pressed the already cooling hand to his own forehead and then laid it back on the bed. Soon after, he walked from the hotel down to the pier to book his passage to New Orleans.

The sun was now low in the west, muted and red through a thin mist of clouds, and he led his horse calmly up the boarding ramp and onto the steamer going to New Orleans. He removed the saddle and stowed it and Dr. Tom’s Winchester with the general tack, but he carried the valuable Whitworth with him onto the deck, where he cradled the rifle in his arms like a child and watched Galveston Island slipping away.