Crooked Hearts

  “Well, there you have it,” said Reuben. “A gracious invitation if I ever heard one. What do you say, Gus?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  He shrugged apologetically. “The lady doesn’t think so. Would you excuse us now? We’re in just a bit of a—ahhha.”

  The hatchet man had pulled a meat cleaver out of his blue pajamas. He held it up, blade out, next to his round, grinning face.

  Grace felt Reuben’s suddenly sweaty grip on her hand slacken, saw all the blood drain from his face. “Ahhha,” he said again, smiling sickly. “Why didn’t you say so? Here—if you want her that bad, take her.” She gasped, and he gave her a little push in Mean No Harm’s direction.

  The surprised Chinaman grabbed her wrist with the hand that wasn’t holding the meat cleaver and started backing up. “Get your paw off me, you—” She jerked back, trying to fling away from him, but he held on tight while keeping an eye on Reuben—an unnecessary eye, since he was still standing in the same spot, baffled-looking, arms at his sides. “Reuben!” she shrieked at him. She couldn’t believe he was going to let the jolly hatchet man kidnap her. “Reuben!”

  He waved, sadly, and put his hands in his pockets.

  Mean No Harm’s chubby little hand was breaking her wrist. She tried a kick to his groin, but he dodged nimbly and gave her arm a painful, punishing yank. “Son of a bitch!” she called him, and clamped her teeth over his knuckles.

  “Aya! Aya!” He hit her on the shoulder—with the heel of his hand, not the cleaver—but she only shut her eyes and bit down harder. She heard a scuffling sound behind him. He heard it too, but not in time.

  Crash! Glass everywhere, and bubbles, and dripping water. No, not water—wine. Reuben had the broken green neck of a wine bottle in his hand, his mouth open in an expression of excited anguish, watching the hatchet man drop to his knees and fall over on his back like a sack of rice.

  “Gone,” Reuben whispered, heartsick, disbelieving. “Gone.”

  “No, he’s just unconscious,” she said gently. “You didn’t kill him.”

  He turned his tragic eyes on her. “Not him, you numbskull, the Dom Perignon. The Premiere Cuvee—a masterpiece—irreplaceable—” He choked up and couldn’t go on.

  The silver handle of a pistol was sticking out of the waist of Mean No Harm’s baggy trousers. Grace bent and snatched it out. A cheap .38; if he’d used it instead of the meat cleaver, he wouldn’t be lying on his back in the gutter. “Thank God for the hatchet tradition,” she muttered, sticking the pistol in her skirt pocket. “You weren’t really going to let him take me, were you?” she thought to ask. “You were just waiting for him to let down his guard, right?”

  “Right,” he said reflexively.

  She wasn’t sure he’d heard the question. He looked grief-stricken, as if his best friend had died. She had to drag him away, still mumbling disconsolately. “Come on, come on. Hurry, Reuben, we’ve got to get out of here, get home and out of sight. This street? Where is everybody? Is this north?” It was too cloudy to see the sun. She looked uncertainly down a lane that wound out of sight before the first block. She didn’t like the look of it, but if that was north—

  “We can’t go home.”

  “Yes, we can. If this is north and we just keep—”

  “We can’t go home because the Croakers trashed it.”

  “Oh, no!”

  “Everything’s gone, there’s nothing left. Except a note that says they’ll kill me if they find me.”

  “My God.” They stared at each other. “Reuben, what are we going to do?” Over his shoulder, she saw a man rounding the corner. It was Tom Fun.

  He saw them and started to run. Reuben grabbed her and they fled, back the way they’d come.

  At the first cross street, they careened to the left. For precious seconds their pursuer couldn’t see them. “Look,” Grace panted, hauling on Reuben’s hand to slow him down, pointing into the mouth of a damp, dark alley. “We could hide, get out of sight—” He grunted, and they ducked into the alley.

  Bad idea. The alley was blind, although they didn’t know it until they’d gone twenty yards and tried to follow what had looked from the street like a dogleg to the right. It was a dogleg into a brick wall, with no door, no crevice, not even a trash can to hide behind. Running footsteps made them spin around and freeze. Tom Fun, gaunt and scar-faced, appeared in the alley’s stinking angle, holding a big, ugly ax.

  Reuben groaned piteously and went white again. “Shoot him. Oh, please shoot him.”

  She’d forgotten she had the gun. She fumbled it out of her pocket and took aim.

  Tom Fun didn’t even break stride. “Shoot him,” Reuben begged.

  She couldn’t pull the trigger. Tom Fun raised the ax and kept coming.

  “Shoot him!”

  “I can’t!”

  The hatchet man lunged and swung, missing Reuben’s head by a hair. Stumbling into him, Reuben grabbed him around the waist. Now she could shoot— she knew she could—but they kept turning and grappling, she was afraid she’d hit Reuben by mistake. She circled them, gun pointed, barely aware that she was shrieking, “Reuben, get out—no, the other—no—move!”

  Tom Fun jerked his elbow up into Reuben’s throat, and he had to let go, choking. The hatchet man hauled back with his ax. Reuben pivoted toward Grace while she skipped sideways, looking for a shot. The ax caught him on the hip with a sickening thud, and he fell. “Reuben!” she screamed. Tom Fun’s body blocked her view; like a lumberjack about to split a log, he reared up again with the ax. At the height of his swing, she pulled the trigger and shot him in the buttocks.

  He fell on top of Reuben, squealing like a wounded pig, while the ax skidded sideways. Reuben squirmed out from under him, cursing, bleeding. Grace let the gun slip from her fingers and clatter to the ground as she dropped to her knees beside him. With his eyes closed, there was absolutely no color in his face except for the ash-gray of his lips. “Please don’t faint, Reuben. How bad is it? Can you walk?”

  “Walk?” he croaked, incredulous. “I’m dying, he killed me.”

  Tom Fun was writhing on his side two feet away, groaning, holding his rear end. Grace picked up the gun she’d dropped and put it back in her pocket—so he wouldn’t get ideas. “You’re not dying,” she told Reuben briskly. What she wanted to do was lie down beside him and pass out. She made herself lift her skirts, bite a hole in the side seam of her cotton petticoat, and rip a long strip of the hem off at the bottom.

  Reuben cringed, watching her fold it into a bandage. “Don’t touch me, it’ll hurt.”

  “I thought you were a shtarker.”

  “No, I’m a lemish. What are you doing?”

  “What does it look like?”

  He tried to grin while she unbuttoned his trousers. “Gee, Gus, all you had to do was ask.”

  It might’ve been funny, except that she knew everything she did was hurting him. No time to check the wound to see how bad it was—they still had to run—but the amount of blood staining the side of his pants gave her a clue: bad. “What’s a lemish?” she muttered, to make him talk while she slid the fat square of petticoat inside his knee-length flannel drawers as gently as she could.

  His head fell back. He bared his teeth and gritted, “Not a shtarker,” the cords in his neck bulging like cable wire.

  “Another word your German fraulein taught you?”

  “Hildegard, yah. She vas vunderbar.”

  “Gretchen,” she corrected, rebuckling his belt. “Reuben, you’re going to have to stand up and walk.”

  “Right. And then how about a nice polka.”

  “Sit up and put your arm across my shoulders. Get your left foot under—there. Ready?”

  “No.”

  “And—up.”

  He made it, leaning against her like a drunk, swaying from dizziness. “Give Tom a kick for me, would you, Grace? I can’t manage it and I want to say goodbye. Hit him a good one right in the—”

  “
Come on,” she fretted, already stumbling under his weight.

  He stopped talking to concentrate on walking, which got a little easier as he went on. But at the top of the alley, he had to lean against the wall to rest. “What’s your plan?” he asked with his eyes closed.

  “How much money have you got?”

  “Twenty dollars or so.”

  “Give it to me.” He handed her a gold coin. “Nothing smaller than this?” she asked in dismay. He rummaged in his other pocket and pulled out three wrinkled dollar bills and some change. “Good, this should be enough. Here, take your jacket off.”

  “Why?”

  “And tie the sleeves around your waist—I’ll do it. To hide the blood, of course. Now, stay here in the shadows and don’t move. You take the gun.”

  “No.”

  “Yes! It’s you they want to kill, not me.” She tried to put the pistol in his hand, but he wouldn’t take it. “Damn it, Reuben—”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’m going to find somebody who’ll—” She broke off at the sound of wheels clattering in the street behind her. “Help us,” she finished, jubilant.

  “A coal cart?” Reuben said querulously, but she was already striding off the curb and into the street. The high-sided wooden vehicle was almost empty, she could tell because the back flap was down. The sleepy-looking driver woke up when she stopped his mule by stepping in front of it and dragging on the harness.

  “Hey! Hey, get outa the road, whaddaya think you’re doing?”

  She walked toward him, trailing a hand along the mule’s rump as she went. The driver looked Irish and tough as nails, with a wild, gray-flecked red beard and hair to match. But his face changed from belligerent to beguiled in the time it took her to go from the mule’s nose to its behind, and she knew that whatever that thing was she could do with men when she wanted to, she was doing it now.

  “Hi.”

  “Hi.”

  “I could use a ride.”

  “That so?” They grinned at each other, first her, then him. They were sharing a joke they couldn’t have put into words; they just knew it was hilarious and very, very sexy. From the age of seventeen, when she’d first discovered it, Grace had known that this particular method of seduction, if she chose the man correctly, could not fail. Thank God her coal-delivering Irishman was the right man. “Where you want me to take you?” he inquired, loading the question with lusty implications.

  “The Clay Street wharf. I need to go right away.”

  He patted the splintery wooden seat beside him. “Yer chariot awaits.”

  She liked his style. She made him a coquettish curtsey and put her finger on her cheek. “Oh—I forgot—I have a friend. Can he go, too?” She gestured behind her, and Reuben limped out of the alley into the light, scowling.

  As expected, her Irish savior wasn’t pleased with this development. His rosy cheeks mottled and his bushy brows met over his nose. He was starting to say no when she played her ace. “I’ll give you three dollars if you’ll take us. He,” she added with a careless shrug, “can ride in the cart.”

  She didn’t know if it was the seating arrangement or the three dollars that swayed him, but the coalman agreed. She had to force herself not to hurry, not to show fear or urgency by her manner. Reuben needed assistance getting into the cart, though; no help for that. “He’s swacked,” she explained, hoisting him over the back, talking over his agonized groan as he settled on his good side, still glaring at her. “We had us a bit of a hullabaloo last night at O’Malley’s pub. D’ye know that joint on Montgomery Street?” A wee bit of a brogue crept into her tongue, easy as pie. She reached up trustingly, and the Irishman stuck out a great paw to help her into her seat. Hullabaloo—that was Irish, wasn’t it?

  “No,” he said, “I don’t think I know it. Montgomery Street, y’say?”

  “Oh, aye, a great black hole of a place, you ought t’ go there sometime. Tell O’Malley I sent ye.”

  “And who might you be?”

  “Faith, I’m Sheila O’Ryan. Pleased t’ make yer acquaaaintance.”

  And so it went, all the way to the Embarcadero.

  The trip home was a nightmare. As usual, the Oakland ferry was teeming with passengers, and Grace had to tell a man that Reuben was seasick just to get him a seat. The man had no trouble believing it; Reuben’s gray, clammy face was all the proof anyone could need. The choppy Bay waters made the crossing torture for him, but he kept up a stream of jokes and cracks anyway. She wasn’t sure who they were designed to distract, her or himself, but she was grateful to him for trying and joined in as well as she could. At Vallejo, she left him slumped on a bench in the railway station while she went to send Henry a telegram: “Urgent you meet 5:40 p.m. train Santa Rosa stop. Bring Ah You and wagon not buggy stop. Love, Grace.”

  The train was smoother than the ferry had been, but Reuben looked worse, and now he was too weak to bother making jokes. That scared her more than anything. His head fell on her shoulder, waking him up from a restless doze. He looked around blankly. “Where are we?”

  “On the train.”

  “Where are we going?”

  She shivered; she’d told him twice already. “We’re going to my house.”

  He closed his eyes. “Home, sweet home,” he sighed, and slept again.

  She wanted to look at his wound; they were in a middle seat of a crowded parlor car, though, and she couldn’t see opening his pants while half a dozen passengers looked on. No blood had seeped through his jacket yet. She took that as a good sign.

  “I’m dying,” he told her a little later.

  Her skin prickled and sweat broke out on her palms. But she made her voice crisp and said dismissively, “I don’t think so.”

  “I’m going to bleed to death sitting on a train.”

  She touched his forehead, which was hot and dry. “Don’t talk.”

  “I think I need a doctor.”

  “Ah You is better than a doctor.”

  He didn’t seem to hear that. “Last night, Gus. Last night?” He didn’t look at her. She had no idea what he would say next, and she waited in a curious state of dread. His lips moved, but no more words came out, and then she didn’t know if she was glad or sorry. After a long time, he startled her by saying, “Will you miss me when I’m gone, Grade?”

  He had his eyes closed; she couldn’t tell from his waxy, pain-stiff face if he was joking or not. “Hush, Reuben. You’re not dying, so I won’t get a chance to miss you. Be quiet now and rest.” He sighed again, raggedly. She waited until he was asleep. Then she reached for his hand, and held onto it tightly all the rest of the way home.

  The porter hollering “Santa Rosa Station!” woke him up.

  “We’re here,” Grace told him, peering out the window for a glimpse of Henry.

  “Santa Rosa?”

  “About five miles outside of town.”

  “I thought you lived in the Russian Valley.”

  She smiled, pleased to hear him so lucid. “I was lying. Look, there’s Henry.” She waved, trying to catch his eye, but the train slid by and he didn’t see her. The sight of him, dapper and distinguished as always, his handsome black-and-silver hair glinting in the afternoon sun, warmed her to her bones. She hadn’t known until this minute how much she’d missed him.

  The train ground to a stop. “Come on,” she told Reuben, standing up and hovering over him. He leaned forward and she got her arms around his back. But when he tried to rise, his whole body shook and beads of sweat popped out on his forehead.

  He fell back, panting, hands clenching on the wooden arms of his chair. “Can’t,” he said through his teeth. “Can’t get up.”

  She looked behind her in a panic. The porter was out on the platform, assisting an elderly lady down the steps. Leaving Reuben, Grace ran down the empty aisle to the door. “My husband’s ill,” she said quickly. “I have a friend who’ll help me. There—”

  The porter said, “Yes, ma’am,” and
tipped his cap, but she was already turning away and rushing into Henry’s open arms.

  “Here, now, what’s all this?” His tone was brusque, but he hugged her hard, and his lips pressing against her cheek were warm.

  She broke away first. “Help me get him off the train.”

  “Who?”

  “Reuben.” She pointed toward the window where his white face was framed, watching them, his eyes dark and burning. “He’s hurt, I can’t get him up by myself. Did you bring—”

  “Ho, Missy! Welcome home!”

  “Ah You!” She wanted to hug him, too, but there was no time. She clasped his tiny, birdlike hands in hers; his ageless face was wreathed in smiles, bright black eyes beaming. “Did you come in the wagon?”

  “Yes, Missy.”

  “Bring it up as close to the platform as you can, and then come and help us.”

  “Okay!”

  “Come on,” she told Henry, and dashed back into the train. Between them, with the porter’s help, they got Reuben out on the platform. Every second she thought he would faint. “Something he ate,” she muttered to the worried porter. Ah You replaced him at Reuben’s left side, and the porter watched the three men tack unsteadily toward the wagon, Grace twisting her hands and walking backward in front of them, until the train whistle blew and he had to reboard.

  Getting Reuben into the wagon was the hardest part, everybody pushing and pulling, trying not to hurt him. He was a big man, but she’d never realized before how heavy he was. Ah You jumped up into the wagon bed after him, agile as a monkey. Grace sat beside Henry on the seat. Usually she drove, but she was too shaky and upset for it now, her hands trembling too hard. Henry turned the wagon inexpertly and shook the reins, setting the horses to a trot. Reuben groaned. Grace put her face in her hands. Half an hour later, they arrived at Willow Pond.

  14

  A good patient is one who, having found a good physician, sticks to him until he dies.

  —Oliver Wendell Holmes

  “WAKE UP. WAKE UP, Reuben.”

  The voice nudged like soothing fingers at the sides of his nightmare, softening for just a second the razor edges of the blades. Dozens of blades, shiny silver-blue, hacking and hacking. The sound they made slicing across his flesh was a high, juicy sssst. No blood, just excruciating numbness, like an electric shock. He couldn’t scream anymore; he rolled himself up in a ball, became the center of the ball, surrounded by thick layers of stuffing. Then he was round, he could move any way he chose, crush the blades under the heavy weight of the ball. A merciful respite, but already the ball was disappearing—he could never stay in it for long in this dream—and now he was flat again and helpless, and the blades began to flay him again, sssst, sssst, sssst—