Finally, John said, “Say, Smith, you goddamned penny-pincher, will you stake me for a new hat?”
Calling Smith that gave John back some small uptick of pride.
Mr. Smith handed over a further twenty-dollar bill, just to show he could and could have given more if he cared to, and left the table lest Wild Bill ask him for a horse too.
It was fall, and cold, and he had not thought to buy an overcoat. His old camel-hair number would have to do, though it was not built for river winds. He fooled them all by doubling his undershirts and then wearing two shirts over them, and his jacket, and the tan coat buttoned tight. Better to look a little fat than to look cold. He could stand on the top deck watching the monstrous river roll, watching the banks in all their tiresome detail spool out behind, watching the smaller boats falling away as they chugged relentlessly into the north. If he looked fat, people would assume he had prospered. If he shivered, people would assume he had not. He couldn’t hide his battered boots, but perhaps they’d think he was a cattle baron made rich by his epic cattle drives from the border to the Midwest.
The stateroom in the upper reaches of the paddleboat was all white. Mr. Van Order took great pains to mingle with the rabble down below, feeling the obligation to represent the Saint in her absence. But he was also seeking games of cards, for the boat’s official gambling rooms were a tad rich for his taste, and the buy-ins to the games were for stout constitutions, and he would have lost much of his walking-around money against the weighted wheels and doctored dice in that red velvet plushness. Still, a few hands of five-card stud while sipping sweet rum, smoking black cigarillos, and smiling grandly at the stunning bar girls was irresistible. He actually won a round or two and upped his poke by two hundred dollars. He swaggered, he strolled—he was back! Benny Cove was rampant upon the earth.
The relentless rolling surge of the boat disagreed with him. The whapping of the paddle, as if some giant beaver were pushing them along with its flat tail, lunged the vessel forward, and the roiling waters rocked the craft back and forth. Mr. Van Order’s first breakfast, a conglomeration of waffles and sausages, had him vomiting over the rail halfway through. He managed to clamp his new Montana-style hat to his head and hoped he’d not been seen. He spent the rest of that morning in his room, seasick and praying for mercy.
Luckily for him, it was only a three-day trip, beating against the tide, and he was soon on solid ground again, standing at the Illinois border. He could feel the earth swell and recede beneath his feet. When he took a step, he rocked and lost his balance. One of the stripe-shirted river scum off a longboat laughed and told him he had some malady called sea legs.
“Ain’t been on no ocean,” John quipped.
Idiot.
He made his way toward the train station. It wasn’t easy. He could haul his own case of shirts, but there were also three cases of Teresita’s and a couple of hatboxes. Damn it—the tips were going to kill him, all these bastards pulling carts for him. But he was damned if he was going to drag wagons through the street for himself. There was a limit.
He didn’t notice when a box, a smaller one, fell from the stack on the wagon and lay in the street. The box that contained Teresita’s crucifix, her shells and her herb bundles and Huila’s apron. He rumbled along beside the wagon, cobbles shaking the whole awkward collection as a burly young Italian fellow pulled like a mule.
The box lay on its side. Later, at sunset, a child found it and cracked it open. He tossed the herbs on the ground, pocketed the cross, and held up the apron. It had some shotgun shells in the pocket. An old pipe. The kid put the pipe in his back pocket. A pocketknife! He stuck that in his pocket too.
He folded up the apron and placed it over his shoulder. He kicked the box up and down the alley until it was collapsing. He kicked it into the river, and it commenced its journey back to St. Louis. Maw was going to be happy to get a new apron.
John purchased two beef and onion sandwiches and three apples, put them in a sack, and bought himself a little bottle for those nippy nights. He tipped the Italian to muscle the bags onto the train and was delighted to find his berth. He didn’t have no state car like Teresita, but he did have a cozy bunk in the wall of a hallway. Wasn’t tall enough inside to roll over, but he didn’t mind—he liked to sleep on his back or his belly and there was a curtain to help with the light. When he inserted himself, he imagined he was some ancient pharaoh in a crypt.
This time, the rolling and the rocking eased him. Solid ground was where a man belonged. He was yawning before they reached Chicago. He was asleep by Indiana.
He slept late the next day, awakening several times to people bumping into his sprawled legs and arms, the conductor roughly tucking him back in until further slumber was impossible. John slid out of his bunk and stood on aching feet. Sleeping in his boots meant his feet—which tended to swell at night—hurt pretty bad. But there was nowhere to put his boots if he took them off, and he’d be dogged if he was going to let somebody steal these too. He cleaned up in the washroom at the end of the car, scrubbed his face, and dried it on his shirttail. Combed his hair. Cleaned his teeth with tooth powder on the end of his finger. He put on his hat and made his way down to the seats at the windows where he could smoke and stare. What the hell was that out there? Ohio? He scoffed. Ohio! Maybe Pennsylvania. Rubes in little black buggies? He wanted to shout out: Friends—you plow them onion fields! I’m going to New York City!
By the second morning, he had begun to smell a bit tart, but he was all right. He was sore, though. Sore and sour. The sandwiches had gone a little green, and he had to toss the second one. The apples and the bottle sustained him.
He felt like he was choking in the train cars, like one of them fishes all canned up in an airtight tin. He wanted to get out there and breathe in some of that fabled eastern air, that Atlantic breeze come all the way from France, or Greece, or wherever. He wanted the west to fall away from him like one of his tired old dreams.
For the first time in his life, John Van Order was entering his destiny.
And, after more hours of cramped discomfort, growing dread and excitement, restlessness and leg cramps, he could be forgiven—when he first caught sight of New York throbbing in the distance—for crying out “Good God!” and turning his back.
Silent exultations of horror and excitement.
This place, so massive, so clangorous and dark. He was made small, finally, invisible, helpless. He stood in the great station looking up at its vaulted heights, much taller than St. Louis’s. And the crowd was faster, hunched into the day, hurrying with serious intent. He was knocked aside three times as he stood with his tumbling cartload of cases. He lost his great hat once. The first of two hundred New Yorkers called him Tex.
John drank the last of his bottle, and a blue-backed copper in a police hat tapped him with his nightstick and said, “None of that here, Tex. This isn’t the Wild West.” Called Tex twice in ten minutes; he was appalled. Did they not see his fine camel coat?
He stared at the hustling chaos. All those feet in all those leather soles making that clacketing racket on the marble floors. They had bowlers and top hats and caps and ridiculous flat straw hats and some Germanic businessmen’s hats and a couple of louche slouch hats, but no sombreros in sight. A few brave souls went about with no hats at all. John stared at a chappie over there with a beret. French son of a bitch.
Nobody anywhere wearing a cowboy hat.
He couldn’t find a free porter, so he pulled his wagon along himself, indignant, burning with embarrassment. The doors out of the station and to the city seemed a mile away, and they appeared to retreat before him as he struggled. The cold made his eyes water. He squinted and turned his face away. He bumped into a paperboy yelling: “Booker T. Washington visits Roosevelt! Negro in the White House! Get it here! Get your paper here!” The boy turned on John and snapped, “Jay-sus! Watch it, Tex.” The boy veered away, hollering with a limp paper over his head: “Booker T. dines with president! Get it
here! Riots in the South!”
John banged out the double doors with his back to the street and pulled his wagon with him. He turned and beheld. The city: A wall of brick before him, cutting off light. Streams of human bodies rushed by on the street, confabs in every language whipping around his head with the wind. He couldn’t even hear any English in all that babble.
A little black boy was dancing for pennies in the street, his brothers slapping their thighs and knees in a crazy rhythm. A shoeshine boy toting a stained box stood and watched them, laughing. Somewhere beyond, John heard an alarming clanging, as if giants were tossing huge sheets of steel from rooftops. Fine gents in tall hats came along in a tight formation, five of them in a wedge, talking money and smoking and wielding shiny walking sticks like batons with which they conducted the mad ballet around them, cutting through and storming away before John could offer ’em a howdy. Horses drew flat drays like river barges. Skittering little black cars hopped around like june bugs. Everything barely missing every other thing. John saw right away that each corner was a test of survival skills.
Here’s what he didn’t expect to find: he didn’t expect to find that the city smelled like horse turds and mule squirt. Why, the street before him was jammed with carts—tall carts loaded, as far as he could tell, with refuse. Broken tables and old chiffoniers. Nags pulled these wagons and went every way in the street, parted by the rumbling, bell-abusing trolley cars. Those spindly little motorcars stalled and sputtered, blowing klaxons at the horses that balked and stomped and unleashed steaming avalanches of crap in the gutters. There were far more of these contraptions here than in St. Louie or Chicago. Where was the music? He had thought the city was alive night and day with festive concerts and dance ensembles hosting cotillions in the many parks. And he couldn’t get over these boater hats. The more he looked, the more he saw these hats. He’d be dragged to Hell before he put one of those clownish rigs on top of his head; let ’em call him Tex all they wanted.
Some mad dog in a long frock coat stepped up to John and demanded:
“Wer, wenn ich schriee, horte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen?”
“Back off, bindle stiff,” John said, pushing him away.
The shoeshine boy stared up at him.
“Need a shine, mister?” he said.
“Nope. Not now.”
“Them boots looks like shite,” the kid noted.
John looked at his poor old boots. They felt, at the moment, like his only friends on earth. He looked at the kid. The kid didn’t have a coat, only a tattered cardigan. He was shivering.
“Is it always this cold in New York?” John asked.
“Nah.” The kid shook his head. “It gets colder’n this.” He sniffled. “You want the shine or not?”
“Right here?”
“Mister. Where else we going to do it?”
The kid shook his head as John raised his foot to the shoe-shaped top of the box and rested it there. He spit and worked his brownest brown polish into his rag and got to it. John stood, feeling like a heroic statue, feeling the cold move along his bones. He found himself missing his little Saint.
John observed an old man in a heavy black frock coat and a black hat, a long white beard and a long curl of hair hanging by each of his ears, and some kind of rebozo ends bouncing out from under his coat.
The policeman from inside the train station came out and observed them.
John, remembering his beloved Matsell crime lexicon, said to the kid: “Twig that copper, lad. He’s peery at us.”
“Tex,” the boy said, focusing on the boots, “talk English, all right? This is America now, not no ’nother country.”
Glancing up, John found a distant streak of sky; it looked like a trout stream in a canyon had somehow been upended and hung above his head.
He made a silent vow to himself: As soon as he made his way through this frightening maze and settled somewhere, got the bags unpacked and the heater turned on for Mrs. Van Order—who wasn’t used to the cold of a city—he would head out and find some bene coves to pal around with, and he would get so drunk he couldn’t see a hole through a standing ladder.
Fifty-Two
THE VOICE SAID, “Mr. Van Order?”
John had stood there with his polished boots, unable to move, staring out at the hubbub and blocking the flow of pedestrians until irate New Yorkers kicked his feet and waved their hands and pushed him back against the wall. He didn’t mind. He felt safer there, and the wall was warm from the sun sneaking down the canyon to it. This right here, he was realizing, this whole New York episode, was the longest of long chances, and his odds were looking paltry. When the voice spoke, he was startled and expected anything—even one of Teresita’s angels.
He turned and regarded a gent in a blue suit and straw hat. Everyone was wearing them. Oh, well, John thought, the hat is gaining on me.
“Mr. Van Order,” the man said again. “They said I would recognize you.”
“How do,” said John. “Who said?”
“The Consortium.” The man fished out a yellow slip from his pocket. “I received a telegram.”
“I’ll be dogged,” said John.
They shook hands.
“I am Dr. Weisburd,” the gent in blue said.
“Doc, hey? Well, I am delighted to make your acquaintance, Doc. I was starting to think I’d made one of those calamitous decisions you hear about.”
The good doctor smiled.
“Would that be your first?” he asked.
John laughed.
“Now that you mention it,” he drawled, happy to have encountered the right audience again, “I almost made a bad decision back in 1899. But I decided against it.”
“Smart move.”
Dr. Weisburd tipped his head and extended a hand.
“I have a wagon down the block waiting for you. Perhaps we can find a helper.”
He put his hand over his head and snapped his fingers. A porter appeared as if by magic, calling: “Sir!” Dr. Weisburd nodded toward the wagon and headed out, followed by the cart—a two-man parade. Snap your fingers. Van Order took mental notes. It was going to be tough figuring out the play in this burg, but he’d do it. He told himself there had never been any doubt.
“We’ll get you settled in your new digs,” Dr. Weisburd told him.
John basked in autumnal light.
“I appreciate the Consortium arranging this for me,” he said grandly.
The doctor coughed softly.
“I’m afraid this is all about Mrs. Van Order,” he said. “I assume you are seen by my associates as a house servant.”
John maintained the blandest face possible. He told himself it didn’t matter. He’d show them all. Who cared how he got into his penthouse? The point was that he was getting into a penthouse! In New York!
“New York!” he cried.
Dr. Weisburd watched him.
“Indeed,” he said.
“Cold, ain’t it!”
“It is a bit brisk, yes.”
John almost busted his neck with all the craning around he was doing. Dr. Weisburd was kind enough to divert the driver from his itinerary to afford John a view of the harbor and Lady Liberty beyond, off the lower Manhattan shore. “Isn’t she a sight,” he said. The doctor grinned as if he had built her himself. He pointed to her left and intoned, “Ellis Island,” as if that meant anything to John. Smoke-belching ships crowded the waters. Self-important little tugs rushed about. “Don’t that beat all,” said John, just to have something Tex-like to say.
They wheeled around and got back to the main drags and wended their way up to Broadway and worked the varied boulevards to head east. It wasn’t lost on John that he had come all this way only to be lugged through the streets by a mule. In his mind, the city had been all airships and Fords and elevated trains moving through silver towers.
“Streets paved with gold!” Dr. Weisburd announced, as if reading John’s mind. But John wasn’t a fool. It was probably easy t
o read his mind. He reined himself in a little. It wouldn’t do to play the hick in a place like Manhattan.
“So,” he said. “You’re a real doctor.”
“I am.”
“The Consortium has gone legitimate, eh, Doc?”
Dr. Weisburd turned to him.
“Were they not before?” he asked. “I had been told they were a respected medical concern in the West.”
John smiled, patted his shoulder.
“Now that you’re aboard, things will look up,” he said. “Let’s just say they had their shady moments.”
The doctor looked concerned.
“Did they behave dishonorably?” he asked.
“Honor had nothing to do with it.”
This was not what Dr. Weisburd had been told.
“I joined in,” he said, “strictly to further the medical works of Saint Teresa.”
“How’d you join?” John asked him.
“Why, I made the thousand-dollar donation, of course.”
John sputtered. Those dirty sons of bitches. Partnerships!
“Are there many of you, Doc?” he choked out.
“Perhaps a thousand across the country.”
“I’ll be double damned,” John announced.
He was feeling growing dismay. They didn’t head into whatever glittering gulch of fine hotels he’d imagined. They didn’t clop along the edge of Central Park—wherever that was. He looked around, his heart sinking into his gut.
He noted that both the clangor and the magnificence were receding. The buildings grew lower, and turned to wood, and became scarcer. There came a tall church on the right side of the street, the tallest building in this part of the city. Beyond, by God, he saw a farm of some kind, and the cobbles ran out and the street turned to dirt and mud. The wagon shuddered as it lurched down into the clods and mud smears. Dogs. Trash.