“I’ll take one of these,” he said.
They went back to the dining room of the Excelsior for their evening meal. The room was crowded tonight. A dozen or more press men, in town for Grant’s visit, filled the air with cigar smoke and forced levity, but Jesse managed to secure a reasonably private table in a darkened corner. He ordered mutton stew with a side of boiled onions; Elizabeth ordered roast beef. A waiter drew the curtains and lit lamps as sunset colored the sky.
“We don’t know for sure if it was Onslow who supplied the pistol,” Elizabeth said, “but we can be fairly sure he has connections inside the City. So we need to look at the supply side, any City employees Onslow might have had contact with. I’ll call Barton tonight and let him know what we found out.”
“It’s a different town after dark,” Jesse said, “when the shops close and the saloons open up. It would be easy enough to follow Onslow, see who crosses his path.”
“I guess we could do that.”
“Not we,” Jesse corrected her. “A respectable woman would be out of place in the kind of establishment Onslow is likely to frequent.”
“I’m respectable now?”
He smiled and said, “In a dim light you’d pass.”
“So what are you suggesting?”
“I can scout the south end of town while you talk to the City.”
“Uh-huh. Or you could just go out and get drunk.”
“I could get drunk and hire a loose woman and come back with my pants on sideways, but is that really what you imagine I mean to do?”
She laughed. “I guess not.”
At least she gives me the benefit of the doubt, Jesse thought. “I’m sorry I raised the subject of your husband, back at the helicopter show. It’s none of my business and I shouldn’t have presumed.”
“Are you curious about my husband?”
He didn’t know how to answer that.
She said, “His name’s Javiar. I met him in high school. He dreamed about doing something big, like becoming a doctor, but he was a west Charlotte kid with all the baggage. We enlisted about the same time. Nineteen years old, both of us, we got married at city hall and signed up a month later, how crazy is that? I ended up in signals intelligence, but Javiar was infantry. Multiple tours. After we mustered out it seemed like we had a chance. I got a job with Riptide, that’s a security company that hires a lot of vets. Javiar hired on, too, and that was okay for a while, but he didn’t last. They eventually fired him for not showing up, or for showing up drunk, some combination of the two. So I was the breadwinner, and we had Gabby by then.”
“Gabby?”
“Our daughter. Gabriella. When Javiar got bored with looking for work he took up with some of his old friends. Who were mostly petty criminals. Breaking and entering, low-end drug dealing. He was happy to spend my paychecks but he resented having to ask me for them. He got angry. Often. He finally saw somebody at the VA hospital, got diagnosed with PTSD. Okay, you don’t know what that means—it’s something that happens to people who’ve had some kind of shocking or terrifying experience. Humiliating for these guys who come back from the front and suddenly they can’t sleep through the night, can’t think straight, get in fights, drink, do drugs, maybe end up on the street or in jail. So I tried to nurse Javiar through it. Talk him down when he woke up screaming. Tolerate his fits of anger. I drove him to the hospital and I made sure he kept his appointments. All that. But.”
Jesse waited as she took a sip of water.
“But he was out of control. It wasn’t just the PTSD. I think PTSD just opened the door to something that was inside him long before he enlisted. It got to where he was obviously dangerous, not just to me but to Gabby. He fired a gun in the house.”
“Is that why he went to prison?”
“They took him on multiple charges, including a botched drug deal where he pushed a guy into a wall and broke his hip. But I testified against him in court. Because by then it was clear to me that Javiar wanted to hurt us, and that he would hurt us, or try to, sooner or later. I wanted him behind bars long enough to get Gabby and me to a safe place. Which is why I’m at the City, actually. The City’s security service offered me a pretty generous contract. It means I’m away from Gabby for months at a time, which is bad, and it means my mother is caring for Gabby while I’m in 1876, which I’m not real happy about. But at the end of my tour I get a paycheck big enough to take us out of North Carolina altogether. Divorce, name change, new job. That’s my plan.”
Jesse was too startled to say more than, “I see.”
“The moral of the story is, I’m not shocked by the fact that you wake up in a cold sweat in the small hours of the morning. I don’t think it’s some kind of weakness you have.”
“Do you think I’m dangerous? Like Javiar?”
“I don’t know you well enough to say. But on slim evidence, no, I don’t think you’re dangerous.” She added, “In that way.”
Clearly, she knew she was treading on troubled ground. But Jesse guessed she wanted to clear the air. She valued honesty. After a moment’s thought he said, “You twenty-first-century women remind me of whores.”
Elizabeth stiffened in her chair. Her eyes went narrow and hard.
He said, “That’s not an insult. I don’t mean you have loose morals or that you’re venal or contemptible. I was raised around whores, and for the most part they treated me well. What I mean is, whores tend to speak frankly. They see much, and they take a cynical view of things. Listening to their talk spared me a host of polite delusions. It made me harder to fool, and it forced me to think honestly about myself. Do you understand?”
She was a long time answering, but she said, “I guess so.”
“I think you’re an honorable woman, Elizabeth. And I hope things go well for you and Gabby.”
“Okay. So what would you say to a whore who asked you about your bad dreams?”
“I would thank her for her concern,” he said, “and I would tell her it’s a subject I don’t care to discuss.”
Futurity Station was a different town after dark. It was still a circus, Jesse thought, but it was a night circus now: fewer lion tamers, more cooch shows. Storefronts closed and saloon doors opened. Lookout Street was crowded with men, many of them spitting tobacco with carefree abandon, and on the side streets gaslights gave way to torches.
Onslow’s store was shuttered now, but there was a saloon around the corner. Jesse went inside and was assaulted by the smell of adulterated liquor and cigar smoke and the bodies of unbathed men—four years of sanitized City life had made him as sensitive as a woman.
The saloon served beer at tables, like a German establishment, but featured frontier attractions: faro, poker, California pedro. Jesse spotted Onslow standing at the bar. He turned away and took a table at the far end of the room and paid for pickled eggs and a pitcher of beer.
He thought about what Elizabeth had said about PTSD. The letters, she had explained, stood for post-traumatic stress disorder. Post, a Latin word meaning after. Traumatic stress, self-explanatory. Disorder, because the people of the future liked opaque words; since the condition was treated in hospitals, Jesse guessed the word was a euphemism for disease.
Did that mean he was suffering from a disease? Maybe so, by Elizabeth’s standards. But it didn’t feel exceptional enough to qualify as diseased: His condition wasn’t exactly uncommon. The whole nation has PTSD, Jesse thought. It was a plague that had started at Fort Sumter and grown virulent at Manassas. Its nightmares were lynchings, Indian wars, and the pick-handle brigades that hunted Chinamen on the docks of San Francisco. And if we ever wake up from such dreams, he thought, then yes, we’ll likely wake up screaming.