He begins asking in the saloons. He has taken up whiskey, to scour the deep dust out from his craw, and it seems only polite to order at least a small one in each place before asking questions.
“Couple days ago, sure,” says McCormack in the first of the gin mills. “It isn’t like ye could miss her in a crowd. Had a bad cough, though.” The bartender pours Hod two fingers’ worth. “Word has it ye’ve been chased.”
Company spies are rampant in Leadville, and more than one miner has been dumped, bleeding and unconscious, on the railroad platform late at night, a paper with Out of State scrawled on it pinned to his back.
“They got me confused with a Federation man.”
“False witness is a terrible thing,” says McCormack. “Not that I’ve anything against the union.”
There are Federation men in town as well, and the mine dicks, the smart ones, never walk abroad at night unless they’re heeled or in a group.
“I suppose we all look alike to them.” Hod pours the whiskey straight to the back of his throat, still not reconciled to the taste of it.
“I’ve heard they’re hiring again in Blackhawk,” says the bartender. Behind him hangs a painting of naked women being chased by bearded men with goat’s legs. There was an identical one in Skaguay, Hod can’t remember which saloon.
“The thing to keep in mind,” Jeff Smith used to say, “is they’ll never catch up with those females.”
There are a dozen flockie miners taking up the rest of the counter and talking whatever it is they talk, a couple assayers losing at hi-lo and Riggins, who used to be a foreman at the Morning Star before his leg was shattered under an ore car, passed out face-down at his table. No women yet. Hod feels the welcome numbness start at the roof of his mouth. Addie Lee tries to dress in green, to compliment her hair, and wears a scent like nothing else smelled in Leadville.
“Of course, if yer on their list, ye might consider a change of careers,” says McCormack, who the men say worked the hard coal back in Pennsylvania, lowering his voice as he leans in. “Speakin from me own experience.”
Hod drains his glass and wanders back out onto the street, packed with miners now, men speaking in a half-dozen tongues and searching, searching for a fight, a card game, a woman, searching for some proof they are alive and of some consequence on the earth’s shaft-pitted surface. Music spills out from the saloons, from house ensembles and melodeons and groups of soon-to-be-drunken men harmonizing—
Oh show me a camp
Where the gold miners tramp
And the buncos and prostitutes thrive
Where dance halls come first
And the faro banks burst
And every saloon is a dive!
Hod steps into the street to avoid a strutting mucker with blood in his eye. If she is here and he can find her he doesn’t know what he’ll do, no money, no job. There are men, he knows, who live off their women, who set them up in cribs or turn them onto the streets, but he has never considered it. And she never offered.
He looks for Addie Lee in the Saddle Rock and the Cloud City Saloon and in Hyman’s and in Curley Small’s pool hall and behind West Second in Stillborn Alley and even passes by the Crysopolis again to get the same answer, payday girls sitting in the lobby offering to take her place it’s all the same in the dark honey but he continues, throat not so raw now, a swallow or two in each of the saloons and nobody has seen her, not the faro dealers or the sporting women or the men dishing poison behind the bar, and by the time he finds Spanish Mary in the Trail’s End he can’t feel his nose and even the American miners are speaking words he doesn’t understand.
Spanish Mary has one crooked eye and seems always to be looking over your shoulder.
“Sure, I know her. Skinny as a broomstick.”
“She been around tonight?”
If the woman recognizes him she doesn’t let on, neither of her eyes making contact with his as she watches the action in the saloon. “She gone off to Cripple Creek with the others.”
“Others?”
“Fellas get tired of the same old slop buckets, they shift em around. There’s a bunch just come in from the Creek if you’re looking for something new.”
“She just left?”
“The Poontang Special rolled out yesterday.”
“But you said she just got here—”
Spanish Mary shrugs. Down Went Mc Ginty is on the pianola and she absently taps her fingers on the tabletop, a little behind the beat. “Maybe she’ll end up at the Old Homestead, spreadin it for the carriage trade. The cough she got, she sure can’t stay up this high.”
Hod grabs the back of a chair to steady himself. He’s only passed out once, climbing the hill back to his bunk, and woke with his pockets empty and his shoes gone. He feels like if he doesn’t find his girl, his skinny, tubercular whore of a girl, there will be nothing left to tie him to the earth, that the whiskey will float him somewhere else, somewhere darker and less solid than the deepest mine he’s ever crawled into.
Spanish Mary snorts. “Think they getting something new,” she smiles, “when it’s only been relocated.”
He doesn’t quite remember how he gets to the next place, but there he is, standing in the middle of the narrow, unsteady room. There are paintings, mostly of gaudily dressed women, balanced on a strip of wood trim high on one wall and a herd of animal heads — deer, antelope, elk, mountain goat — hung on the opposite. There is a sallow little professor sleep-walking his fingers over the piano keys in one corner and a heat-blasting woodstove, a bar with a dozen Polish muckers swilling beer and, at one of the three faro tables, little Billy Irwin and Niles Manigault losing to the house.
“Behold,” says Niles, “a fellow pugilist has graced our presence.”
Hod knows Irwin as a tough little mick who works at the Maid of Erin mine when he’s not fighting.
“This scruffy mine rat, is it?”
“Hands of stone,” winks Niles. “In the land of Gold and Hardships he was legend.”
Hod stares at him and tries to keep his balance.
“He’s the one was bounced at the Ibex today,” says the Irishman. “The story’s all over Leadville.”
“I note that you have finally succumbed to the nectar of the grain,” says Niles, raising his own glass. “May I offer you a libation?”
Hod sits heavily in the empty chair next to the gambler. “I’ve had enough.”
“Yes — extemely discouraging to lose one’s employment. Or are we still pining after that underfed daughter of joy?”
“Ye won’t find any work in this town,” says Billy Irwin. “Unless it’s a potwalloper in some hash house.”
“You left Skaguay.” It is hard for Hod to form the words.
“Shortly after your own retreat. A rather large sporting debt to a person of lethal temperament—”
“Soapy couldn’t fix it?”
“We run that skulkin little rat out of town years ago,” says the fighter.
Manigault’s expression does not change. “Soapy has met his Maker.”
“Bastard still owes me money,” says the little mick.
“Billy here is on a card in Denver this Friday—”
“I’m not fighting,” says Hod.