“I want it.”
“La quieres?”
He seized her mouth in his hard fingers. She was unsure if he meant to kiss her or hit her or do something she could not begin to imagine. With an instinct she hadn’t known she possessed she pressed the Colt against his stomach and cocked the hammer.
He chuckled—then kissed her deeply. She slid the gun down his belly to his phallus and found it standing rigid and they broke the kiss in laughter.
“Christ Jesus, I aint the only one loco,” she said. She eased down the hammer as she had seen him do.
He made an expansive gesture of relinquishment. “Te la doy, güerita. Como un…pressen.”
“A present?” She giggled happily and slipped the gun under the pillow as he got on the bed and positioned himself above her, his grin white, black eyes glowing.
“Wait,” she said. “Momento.”
She could not have said then or ever after why she did what she next did. It was as if something of the man’s blood was calling to hers—some atavistic urge as primitive as a wolf howl—and she could not deny its pull, her own blood’s yearn to join with his. In that moment of primal impulse, she probed into herself and extracted her pessary and slung it away.
He chuckled as at some comic mummery. “Y mas loca todavía.”
And entered her.
Dr. Marceau is a bespectacled man with a neatly trimmed gray beard and the polite but reserved manner of a distant uncle. The most lucrative portion of his practice comes from clients who share the need of his discretion and his willingness to help women beset by an age-old trouble consequent of reckless passion.
He regards the girl seated across the desk from him and shows her a small practiced smile bespeaking sympathetic understanding. His long experience has taught him to recognize the demimondaines even when they do not honestly identify themselves but assume some tired guise to preserve an illusion of dignity. Besides, the fallen ones of good family rarely come to him unaccompanied. It’s almost always some young pony, green and given to mistakes, who arrives at his door all alone. Like this one.
“Well, ah…Mrs. Sullivan,” he says, consulting his record sheet. “It’s definite. The stork is on the wing. And has been for about three months, as nearly as I can determine.”
She turns to stare out the window, her face revealing nothing of what she might be thinking. The doctor’s office building is set on a mountainside overlooking the two cities flanking the river. On this chilly winter morning the vantage affords a vista beyond a low blue haze of woodsmoke and past the near sierras and broad Mexican plain to a jagged line of long dark ranges deep in the distant south.
The doctor removes his eyeglasses and cleans them with a handkerchief, permitting her a moment to ponder the verdict. The situation is worse for these soiled doves, he has come to believe, than for the innocent ones whose sin was to love too dearly some charming rogue who then abandoned them to the fates. He knows how abruptly some of these young cyprians can collapse into tears, their circumstance all at once an irrefutable testament to their ruined lives, to their far remove from the world’s respect, from the future they had envisioned in a childhood only a few years past but seeming as distant as ancient history. The doctor prides himself on a certain finesse on these occasions. He has found that the whole matter was usually somewhat mitigated if he was the one to broach the solution to the problem rather than oblige them to tender the request. He sets the spectacles back on his face and rests his elbows on the desk and stares at the laced fingers of his hands like someone who has forgotten everything of prayer but its posture.
The girl continues to stare out the window.
“Ah, Mrs…. Sullivan. I know very well that in some instances—more prevalent than one might think, I assure you—such news as this is not especially gladsome. There are, after all, any number of reasons why a young woman might not be fully prepared for, ah, such a medical condition. Perfectly understandable reasons. Reasons she need not feel compelled to explain to anyone. And because the, ah, condition may be remedied by a rather simple procedure, a procedure in which I am very well—”
He is startled by the sudden look she fixes on him, blue eyes sparking, her aspect bright.
“I’m sorry,” she says—and it takes him a second to understand that she is apologizing for her distraction. “I only came to be sure.”
She rises from her chair. “Maybe I’ll be back. Maybe not.”
She goes to the door and stands there until he overcomes his befuddlement and hastens forward to open it for her. She smiles and bids him good day.
Bullshit,” Frank Hartung says. Cullen Youngblood’s smile is small.
“Be damn if I don’t about believe you’re serious.”
“That I am,” Youngblood says. He sips of his drink.
“I damn well can’t believe it.”
“If you believe it or not doesn’t change a hair on the fact of it,” Youngblood says. He catches the bartender’s attention and signals for another round.
“Christ sake, bud.”
“I know,” Youngblood says.
“Bad enough to want to get married, but…well, goddam, aint there no decent women?”
“She’s plenty decent.”
“Hell, man, she’s a whore is what she is.”
“Not anymore. Come next week she’ll be Mrs. Cullen Youngblood, so don’t go saying anything ungentlemanly about her or I’ll be obliged to kick your ass.”
“Shit. There’s no end to your pitiful illusions.”
“You might try congratulating me like a friend ought.”
“I ought have you locked up in the crazyhouse till you get your right sense back, what I ought.”
The bartender brings the fresh drinks to the end of the bar where they stand. Double bourbons with branch. Hartung picks up his and drinks half of it at a gulp.
“Christ sake, bud.”
“I aint the first to do it. I known others to do it.”
“Me too. Larry McGuane married one used to work in that house in Fort Stockton. They weren’t married a month when he caught her at it with a neighbor boy.”
“That one of McGuane’s—”
“He whipped her ass bloody and she swore to him she’d never again. Thought he’d straightened her right out. Coupla days after, she cooks him a big fine dinner to show what a good wife she’s gonna be. Half hour later he’s near to dying of the poison. He just did get himself to Doc Wesson in time. Meanwhile she’s burning down his house and emptying the jar of greenbacks he kept buried behind the stable and thought she didn’t know nothing about. Took her leave on the midnight train. That was what, five, six years ago. You seen him lately? Looks like a old man. Living with his aunt and uncle. His stomach aint never been right since. Yeah, I known some to do it.”
“That one was crazy to begin with and everybody knew it. McGuane knew what she was like, he just didn’t have no caution nor a lick of sense. He always was a damn fool with women.”
“I wouldn’t be calling nobody crazy nor a damn fool neither, I was you,” Hartung says. “Forty-five-year-old man.”
“They aint all like McGuane’s. Jessup Jerome married his Louisa out of Miss Hattie’s in San Angelo. Been twenty-some years and a dozen kids. A man couldn’t ask for a better wife.”
“One in a damn thousand,” Hartung says. He drains the rest of his drink.
“It aint that uncommon. I had a old uncle used to say they make the best wives because it means more to them after working in the trade. They got a better appreciation, he said.”
“That uncle sounds loony as you. Must run in the family.”
Hartung catches the bartender’s eye and makes a circular motion with his finger over the bartop.