“Let’s go to the Comique,” she suggested in French, pronouncing the theater’s name properly, not the way the locals did. Commie-Q, they called it. Ignorant louts. “We can catch Eddie Foy’s last show.”
He shook his head and went on smoking. For a time, they stood together silently, listening to the night sounds. Clanging pianos. Accordions and fiddles. Inebriated shouts of laughter. The hollow clatter of horns in a cattle pen south of the tracks.
Kate took the cigarette back, pulled the last long drag on it, and flicked the butt into the dirt.
Doc was a tall man. She liked that about him. She liked the feel of stretching up to put her hand on the back of his neck, bringing his face toward hers—pulling him down to her level. She kissed him on the mouth, then stood on tiptoe to bring her lips closer to his ear.
“Come to my bed,” she said in English, the language of the brothels. “I can make you forget all those bastards.”
And that little bitch back home, she thought.
“Come to my bed,” she said, voice low and harsh and foreign, “and I will fuck you blind.”
Later, after, he lay beside her, hands linked behind his head. He’d hardly said a word since they left the Green Front, but Kate was used to that. When Doc wasn’t talking a streak, he dummied up entirely.
She got out of bed and poured them each another drink. “Which reminds me!” she said. “He won’t give the girls his empties.”
Doc looked at her, blank.
“George Hoover?” she reminded him. “Cheap sonofabitch makes the bar girls buy the empty whiskey bottles for their tea. And they hate his wife—reformed hooker.”
“Grier?” Doc asked.
“Nobody knows.” Kate smiled. “But trust me: I’ll find out.”
Second Hand
Bad Beat
The former prince and present priest Alexander Anton Josef Maria Graf von Angensperg had been warned about Johnnie Sanders. “Don’t get your hopes up,” Father John Schoenmakers told him. “These children will break your heart.”
Twenty years on the Osage reservation had taught Father Schoenmakers to temper his expectations. So many obstacles had hindered the spiritual and educational progress of the Indians. The scarcity of Jesuit missionaries and the miserable conditions under which they worked. The violence and dislocation of “Bleeding Kansas,” and of the civil war that followed. The American government’s policy of deliberate neglect. The rapacity and corruption of Indian agents. The fear and intransigence of the Indians themselves.
“The work of bringing the Osage from barbarism to civilization and thence to Christianity is a labor not of years but of centuries,” the stolid Dutch priest told Alexander von Angensperg when the Austrian arrived at St. Francis School in 1872. “Mere decades are too brief a time to yield significant effects.”
The younger priest did not argue with Father Schoenmakers, but neither did he accept what his superior said. Alexander von Angensperg was a man in his prime. Energetic and fit, his hair still cropped cavalry short, his bearing still military, he was an aristocrat accustomed to achievement, eager to serve Christ among the red Indians and prepared to charge through enemy lines when necessary. Father Schoenmakers was not the enemy, of course, but Alexander believed it was important to resist the older man’s weary pessimism. To do this work, it was imperative to keep a high heart and even to believe in miracles.
In that spirit, Alexander had allowed himself to imagine a glowing future for Johnnie Sanders. Finishing his secondary education with the Jesuits in St. Louis. Going on to university. Conversion to the True Faith. Perhaps, one day, even a call to the priesthood, for it was plain to Alexander that the young man would have made a good Jesuit. John Sanders is a natural teacher, Alexander wrote to the Missouri Provincial, outlining the boy’s potential and inquiring about the possibility of a scholarship. He is at home on the borderlands between races, languages, and religions.
The letter was posted just a day before Johnnie disappeared, last autumn.
They did that, Indian children. They disappeared. You had to be on guard all the time. Father Schoenmakers was usually able to detect the signs. “Keep a close eye on Paul Little Dog,” he’d say at breakfast. Or “Joseph Two Birds is going to turn rabbit soon.”
Sometimes, they’d find the runaway before he made it off the mission grounds. Sometimes, they would never see him again. They might hear that a boy had gone back to his tribe; a few days or months or years later, they’d learn that he had been shot dead by a frightened settler west of Wichita, or that he was killed in a skirmish with the cavalry, or that he’d died of alcoholism on the edges of Kansas City. Once boys left St. Francis, their chances of survival fell like stones dropped from a high tower.
Some Indian parents understood that grim fact. They insisted that the runaway return to the mission school, often with a younger brother in tow. Small, skinny children would arrive all but destitute of clothing, and what little they wore was fit only to be burned. The boys themselves had to be dosed for ringworm, bathed with yellow soap, their heads shaved and their bodies rinsed in kerosene to kill their fleas and lice. When that ordeal was over, they were shown how to put on the school uniform and escorted—stumbling in their unfamiliar shoes—to the classroom. Scrubbed, shorn, and shod, they sat on wooden benches, wary as deer. If they spoke English at all, it was a poor and ungrammatical pidgin. Most seemed almost mute.
When Alexander von Angensperg walked into the classroom his own first day, he was nearly as overwhelmed as the newest boy at St. Francis. All the children were dark-haired, dark-eyed, dark-skinned, and they seemed to him as indistinguishable as the dark little chokecherries that grew on bushes near the school. On any given day there might be fifty students in his class, though their numbers were often thinned by illness, for scarlet fever, colds, whooping cough, mumps, and chicken pox spread easily in the close quarters of the dormitories. Each had been given a short, plain Christian name—easy to spell and write, but not memorable, not individual. Daniel, Thomas, Paul, Joseph. Matthew, Mark, Luke, John.
“Me, I’m not named for the Evangelist,” Johnnie Sanders told Alexander. “I’m named for John Horse. He was a Seminole general. My daddy fought at his side in Mexico and Texas.” The boy looked thoughtful for a moment and added, “Course, could be John Horse was named for the Evangelist.”
Everything set Johnnie Sanders apart. His fluency in English. His looks: the curling hair, the flaring nose, his pride in bearing. His responsiveness and immediacy in class. His curiosity and openness to learning. He was only twelve when he came to St. Francis, but he was calm, not wary. Self-possessed, not speechless. He had been orphaned in June of 1873, but told Alexander that he’d already gotten through the worst of his sadness while staying with Wyatt Earp, a Wichita policeman who’d brought the boy to the mission school that September.
During his four years at St. Francis, John Horse Sanders absorbed lessons as good soil takes in rain. “I’m here because my parents were killed,” Johnnie said when Alexander praised his hard work. “I don’t want to waste the tears.”
In addition to English, Johnnie spoke his mother’s tongue, not the Osage of his classmates, but he was good with new boys, patiently showing them how to work door latches and pump handles, how to button shirts and tie shoes. Before long, he could communicate with the others in their own language, and full-bloods would tell him things they’d not been willing or able to tell the Jesuits. It was Johnnie who explained why they resisted looking adults in the eye. (“They don’t want to be disrespectful, Father.”) And it was he who helped Alexander understand why cutting the boys’ long hair was so distressing to them. (“Indians cut their hair for mourning, Father. When you cut their hair, they think someone in their family died, but they don’t know who.”) Alexander came to rely on Johnnie as an interpreter and as an informal assistant teacher. Working together, they had many of the new boys reading reasonably well and writing a good hand by the end of each school year. And Johnnie invented ways to teach arithmetic with card games, an unorthodox but effective method that was enormously popular with the other students.