Karen Memory (3 page)

I had just enough warning to snatch back my reaching hand and slap my palms over my ears before Effie jerked the gun up and sent a load of buckshot through the stained glass over the door panels that didn’t never get too much sun no more anyhow. The window burst out like a spray of glory and Bantle and his men all ducked and cringed like quirted hounds.

I just stood there, dumbfounded, useless, as full of shame for what I’d been thinking about doing to Effie and Madame Damnable as some folk think I ought to be for whoring.

I wondered what the trick up with Pollywog thought was going on down here, and if he’d hightailed it out the window yet. We’re not supposed to know, but one of Pollywog’s regulars is Dyer Stone, and he’s the mayor of Rapid City. He sneaks in the back and never sits in the parlor, of course.

“I got four more fucking shells,” Effie said.
“Go on and get her.”

The bully who’d started moving couldn’t seem to make his feet work all of a sudden, like the floor’d gotten as sticky as my head had been. Without looking over at Beatrice, I said, “Bea sweetie, you go run get the constable. It seems these gentlemen have lost their way and need directions.”

It’d be better if we could call for help on that handsome mother-of-pearl example of Mr. Bell’s telephone sitting on the table beside the striped divan. But the city council hadn’t voted the constabulary money to install a set of their own, and honestly there was almost nobody in Rapid City we could even call, as yet. But we did have a line to the switchboard, and you could talk to the operator any time you liked.

When it was coming out of my mouth, I couldn’t believe it. The words sounded calm and smooth, the opposite of the sticky fuzz I’d been feeling a moment before. I even saw one of the bully boys take a half step back. It didn’t impress Peter Bantle, though, because while the library door was closing across Beatrice’s face he started forward. Effie worked the pump on the shotgun, but he looked right at her and sneered, “You don’t have the
balls,
” and then he was reaching for me with that awful glove.

Horaz Standish had his hand stretched out like he might try to stop Bantle, but also like he hadn’t made up his mind to do it yet. I didn’t know yet if I was going to scream or run or try to hit him, or if Effie was really going to have to learn to shoot a man dead that night.

But a big voice arrested him before I had to decide. “Peter goddamn Bantle, just what the pig-shitting hell do you think you’re doing in my house?”

Madame is quick to correct Effie’s mouth when it gets coarse. But I know where Effie done learned it.

Peter Bantle didn’t have the sense to turn around and run when he heard the ferrule of Madame Damnable’s cane clicking on the marble tile at the top of the stair, even though Horaz’s hand finally reached his sleeve and tugged him backward. He did let his hand fall, though, and stepped back smartly. Effie’s breath went out with a sound like surprise. I looked over at her pale, sweaty face and saw her move her finger off the trigger.

She really had been gonna shoot him.

I stepped back and half-turned so I could watch Madame Damnable coming down the stairs, her cane in one hand, the other clenching on the banister with each step.

She was a great battleship of a woman, her black hair gone all steel color at the temples. Her eyes hadn’t had to go steel color; they had started off that way. Miss Francina was behind her on the one side and Miss Bethel on the other, and they didn’t look like they was in any hurry, nor in any mood for conversation. “You got one of my girls in here, Alice,” Peter Bantle said.

She reached the bottom of the stairs and Miss Bethel fanned off left to come take the shotgun from Effie. “You speak with respect to Madame,” Miss Francina said.

Bantle turned his head and spat on the fireplace rug. “I’ll give a tart what respect she deserves. Now, you’re going to give me my whore back. Aren’t you.”

Madame Damnable kept coming, inexorable as a steam locomotive rolling through the yard. She was in her robe and slippers, like the rest of us, and it didn’t one whit make her less imposing. “I’ll give you your head back if you don’t step outside my parlor. You may think you can own folks, Peter Bantle, but this here Rapid City is a free city, where no letter of indenture signed overseas is going to hold water. The constable’s on his way, and if you’re not gone when he gets here I’m going to have him arrest you and your boys for trespass, breaking and entering, and malicious mischief. I pay more in taxes than you do, and most of the law would rather be with my happy girls than your broke-down sad and terrified ones. So you know how that’s going to end.”

That,
I thought,
and the mayor just slid out an upstairs window. Unless he’s still in bed with the covers over his head.

Well, I hadn’t seen Polly. Maybe the covers was over her head, instead.

Madame gestured to the broken door and the busted-out window. “The evidence is right there.”

“Your own girl shot out that window!” Outrage made his voice squeak.

I had to hide my laugh behind my hand. Effie squeezed the other one. She was shaking, but it was all right. Madame Damnable was here now and she was going to take care of everything.

Peter Bantle knowed it, too. He had already given way a step, and when you were faced with Madame Damnable there was no coming back from that. He drew himself up in the doorway as his bully boys collapsed around him. Madame Damnable kept walking forward, and all four of those thugs slid out the door like water running out a drain.

Their boots crunched in the glass outside. He couldn’t resist a parting shot, but he called it over his shoulder, and it didn’t so much as shift Madame Damnable’s nighttime braid against her shoulder. “You ain’t heard the last of this, Alice.”

“For tonight, I damn well think I have.”

He took two more steps away. “And it’s Hôtel
Ma
Cherie, you stupid slag!”

I wrote down in my journal that the big grandfather clock in the parlor chimed three as he slammed the doors behind him, but I don’t remember now what it did that particular night. The clock is a particular project of Miss Lizzie’s. She’s clockworked the thing up so it has about a hundred different mechanicals and figurines and cuckoos in it and near as many chimes and bells. The gears have some kind of offset that makes ’em perform different combinations of actions and sounds every time. Miss Lizzie says it ain’t really random, but it sure seems that way. I do remember that one time she had it playing “Time Was When Love and I Were Well Acquainted” off a piano roll, so if you like, that’s what you can imagine.

She probably ought to get her inventor’s license and pay the city its Mad Science Tax—which is less than the sewing machine tax, actually—but that’s a hard life for a woman, too. And I’d hate to see her leave Madame’s house.

The chimes died down, and over the last echo we finally heard the boots on the broken ladder. Madame Damnable breathed out and let herself look around at us. “Well,” she said cheerfully, “what a mess. Effie, fetch a bucket. Miss Bethel, put that gun away and find the broom, honey. Karen, you go tell Crispin when they’re done with the Chinese girl he’s to come down here and board up this window and sweep up the glass. He’ll just have to sit by the door until we can get in a locksmith. Miss Francina, you go after Beatrice and tell her we won’t need the constable.”

Miss Francina bit her lip. “Are you sure, ma’am?”

Madame Damnable’s hand glittered with diamonds and rubies when she flipped it. “I’m sure. Go on, sweeties, scoot.” She paused. “Oh, and ladies? That was quick thinking. Well done.”

*   *   *

When I came back up the grand stair with coffee in the china company service, the sickroom door was still closed, but I didn’t hear any screaming, or any steam engine chugging through it, which could only be a good sign. If Merry Lee was still under the knife, she would of been screaming and the machine would of been whining and wheezing away, and if she had died of it I thought the girl would be screaming instead. So I rapped kind of light on the frame, on account of if Crispin or Miss Lizzie was busy in there I didn’t want to startle them. It took me two tries to make my hand move, I was still that ashamed of myself from downstairs.

Crispin’s voice floated back. “It’s safe to come through.” So I set the tray on my hip and turned the knob left-handed, slow in case there was somebody behind the door. The sickroom’s different from our company bedrooms. There’s no wallpaper and the sheets ain’t fancy, and the bedstead and floor and all is just painted white. It makes it easy to bleach or paint over again if there’s a bad mess, and you’d rather paint stained wood than throw out carpets with puke or pus or crusted blood in them any day.

The knife machine kind of hangs in one corner on a frame, like a shiny spider with all black rubber belts between the gears to make the limbs dance. It’s one of only three or four in the city, and it needs somebody skilled as Miss Lizzie to run it, but it don’t hesitate—which when you’re cutting flesh is a blessing—and it don’t balk at some operations like other doctors might. And you always know its arms and tools is clean, because Crispin boils ’em after every use.

When I stepped inside, that whole white room looked like it had been splashed about with red paint, and none too carefully. Crispin looked up from washing his hands in a pink-tinged basin with clotted blood floating like strings of tide-pool slime around the edges. Merry Lee was laid sleeping or insensible in the bed—on her side, clean sheets tucked around her waist and a man’s white button shirt on her backward so you could get to the dressings on her back. There was a mask over her face, and Crispin’s other big enamel-knobbed brass machine that handles all those sickbed things that the steam-powered knife machine doesn’t was kind of wheezing and whirring around her, its clockworks all wound up fresh and humming. The bloody sheets were heaped up in the basket and the Indian girl was perched on the chair by the head of the bed, holding Merry’s sallow hand clutched between her olive ones and rocking back and forth just a tiny bit, like she was trying with all her might to hold herself still.

I picked my way between smears of blood. Crispin looked up, grinning instead of grim, so I knowed Merry Lee was going to be just fine unless the blood poisoning or the gas gangrene got her. “Karen honey, you are a delivering angel.” He nodded to the tray. “This here is Priya. She helped me change the sheets.”

I got a good look at her and at Merry Lee while I set the coffee on the cleanest bureau. Merry was a lot younger than I would of expected from the stories, fresh faced and sweet as a babe in her sleep and maybe seventeen, eighteen—not more than a year or two older than me.

Given she’s been a thorn in the side of Peter Bantle and the rest of those cribhouse pimps for longer than I’ve been working, she must of started pretty young. Which ain’t no surprise, given some of Peter Bantle’s girls—and boys, too—ain’t no older than your sister, and given that before she got away from him Merry Lee is supposed to have been one of them.

The Indian girl had dried her hair and Crispin or somebody must of given her a clean shift. She must of warmed up some, because she was sitting in the blankets like a nest instead of wrapped up in them.

Now I could see her arms and legs and neck, she was skinnier than anybody ought to be who wasn’t starved to death. I sat there watching the knobs of her wrists and elbows stick out and the tendon strings move in the backs of her hands. I guess sailors and merchantmen don’t care so much if the slatterns and stargazers they visit are pretty so long as they’re cheap, and it’s dark in a whore’s crib anyway; plus, I guess if Peter Bantle underfeeds his girls they’re easy keepers.

Still, as I sat there looking at her, her tangled hair with the blood drying in it and her long face and her cheekbones all sharp under skin the color of an old, old brass statue’s, it more and more griped me thinking on it. And it more and more griped me that I’d been going to let Bantle have her.

That weren’t like me at all.

Unless it was, I thought, sickened, and I was just making comforting noises at myself now.

There was plenty coffee in the pot, cream and sugar, too, and I’d brought up cups for everybody. But it didn’t look like the Indian girl—Priya—was going to let go of Merry Lee’s hand and pour herself a cup.

So I did it for her, loaded it up with cream and sugar, and balanced all but one of the biscuits I’d brought along on the saucer when I carried it to her.

She looked up surprised when I touched her hand to put the saucer in it, like she might of pulled away. She weren’t any older than me, either, and this close I could see all the bruises on her under the brown of her skin. Layers of them. There was red fresh scrapes that would blossom into something spectacular. That might of been from dragging Merry Lee bleeding across half of Rapid City. There was black-purple ones with red mottles like pansy blossoms. And there was every shade of green and yellow, and you could pick out the hand- and fingerprints among ’em. And the red skinned-off slick-looking burns from Peter Bantle’s electric glove, and some white scars, too, which made me angry and sick in all sorts of ways I couldn’t even find half the words to tell you.

She was a fighter, and it had cost her. My daddy was a horse tamer, and he taught me. Some men don’t know how to manage a woman or a horse or a dog. Where a good master earns trust and makes a partner of a smart wife or a beast, acts the protector, and gets all the benefit of those brains and that spirit, all the bad ones know is how to crush it out and make them cringing meek. There’s a reason they call it
breaking
.

The more spirit, the longer it takes to break them. And the strongest ones you can’t break at all. They die of it, and my daddy used to say it was a damned tragic bloody loss.

He probably wouldn’t think much of me working on my back, but what he taught me kept me safe anyway, and it wasn’t like either of us asked him to get thrown by a horse and go dying. Which just goes to prove it can happen to anyone, no matter how good and how careful they are.