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The Old Ways

Ed Gorman

THERE HAD BEEN a gunfight earlier in the evening, but then, in a place like this one, there usually were gunfights earlier. And later, for that matter.

The name of the place was Madame Duprée’s and it was one of the big casino-drinking establishments that were filling the most disreputable part of San Francisco in this year of 1903. The Barbary Coast was the name for the entire district and, yes, it was every bit as dangerous as you’ve heard. Cops, even the young strong ones, would only come down here in fours and sixes, and even then an awful lot of them got killed.

The way I got this job was to get myself good and beaten up and tossed in an alley behind the Madame’s. One of her men found me and brought me to her and she asked me if I wanted a job and since I hadn’t eaten in three days I said yes and so she put me to work as a floater in her casino. What I did was walk around with a few hundred dollars of Madame Duprée’s money in my pockets and pretend to be drunk. Inevitably, rubes would spot me as an easy mark and invite me into one of their poker games. Thanks to a few accoutrements such as a holdout vest and a sleeve holdout, I could pretty much deal myself any cards I wanted to. Eighty-five percent of my winnings went back to Madame Duprée. The rest I kept. Not bad pay for somebody who’d been raised on an Oklahoma reservation and see three of his brothers and sisters die of tuberculosis before they reached eight years of age. I’d gotten my memory back and wished I hadn’t.

What Madame Duprée didn’t say—didn’t need to say, really—was that an Indian was a perfect mark because he was held to be the lowest form of life in these United States, even below that of Negro and Chinaman. What rube could possibly resist taking money from a drunken Indian? Or, for that matter, what Indian could resist? You saw a lot of red men along the Barbary Coast, men who’d worked or stolen their way into some money and now wanted to spend it the way white men did. The Barbary was about the only place in the land where no distinction was made among the races—if you had the money, you could have anything any other man could have. This included all the white girls, some of whom were as young as thirteen, though this particular summer a wave of various venereal diseases was sweeping the Barbary. More than six hundred people had died so far. A Methodist minister had suggested in one of the local newspapers that the Barbary be set afire with all it’s “human filth” still in it. I wasn’t sure that Jesus would have approved of such a proposal, but then you never could tell.

Tonight’s gunfight pretty much started the way they all do in a place like this.

On the ground floor, Madame Duprée’s consisted of three large rooms, the walls of which were covered by giant murals of easy women in even easier poses. As you wandered among the sailors, the city councilmen, the crooked cops, the whores, the pickpockets, the professional gamblers, the farmers, the clerks, the disguised ministers and priests and even the occasional rabbi, the slumming socialites, and the sad-eyed fathers looking for their runaway daughters, you found gambling devices of every kind: faro, baffling board, roulette, keno, goose-and-balls, and—well, you get the idea.

Tonight a drunken rube suspected he’d been cheated out of his money. And no doubt he suspected correctly. He got loud and then he got violent and then as he was being escorted out one of the side doors by a giant Negro bouncer with a ruffled white shirt already bloody this early in the evening, he made the worst mistake of all. He pulled his gun and tried to shoot the bouncer in the side. And the bouncer responded by drawing his own gun and shooting the man’s gun away. And then the bouncer threw the man through the side door and went out into the dark alley.

Everybody who worked here knew what was going to happen next. Every bouncer at every major casino in the Barbary had a specialty. Some were especially good with knives and guns, for instance. This man’s specialty was his strength. He liked to grab the top of somebody’s head with his giant hand and give the head a violent wrench to the left, thereby breaking the neck. I’d seen him do it once and I couldn’t get the sight out of my mind for a couple of weeks afterward. The funny thing was he was called Mr. Stevenson because late at night, at a steak house down the street, he read Robert Louis Stevenson stories out loud to anybody who’d listen. Mr. Stevenson told me once, “I was a plantation nigger and my master thought it’d be funny to have a big buck like me know how to read. So he had me educated from the time I was six and a couple of times a week he’d have me come up to the house and read to all his friends and they just couldn’t believe I could read the way I did.” That gave us something in common. An Oklahoma white man who ran the town next to my reservation put me through two years of college. I probably would have finished except the man dropped straight down dead of a heart attack and his son wasn’t anywhere near as generous.

That was how Mr. Stevenson and I were the same, the education. How we were different was his physical strength.

After Mr. Stevenson finished with the rube, I got myself a good cigar and wandered around in my good clothes, weaving a little the way I did to let people know that I was a drunken Indian, and I got pulled into three different games in as many hours. I won a little over four hundred dollars. Madame Duprée would be happy—at least she would be if she’d gotten over her terrible cold, which some of us had come to suspect was maybe something more than a cold. Be funny if one of the owners died of venereal disease the way their girls and their customers did.

Around ten, I saw Mr. Stevenson working his way over to me. He wore his usual attire, a bowler perched at a rakish angle on his big head, his fancy shirt with the celluloid collar, and a sparkling diamond stickpin through his red cravat.

“You catch a drink with me?” he said as he leaned over the table where I was playing.

“Something wrong?”

He nodded. He had solemn brown eyes that hinted at both his intelligence and his anger.

“Five minutes.”

“You know that coon?” one of the rubes said after Mr. Stevenson had left.

“Met him a little earlier. Why?”

The rube shook his head. “Scares the piss out of me, he does. I heard about how he snaps them necks.” He shuddered. “Back in Nebraska, you just don’t see things like that.”

I finished the hand and then joined Mr. Stevenson at the bar. As always, he drank tea. He took his job very seriously and he didn’t want whiskey to make him careless.

I didn’t much worry about things like that. I had a shot of rye with a beer back.

“What’s up, Mr. Stevenson?”

“Moira.”

“Oh.”

There was a group of reservation Indians who had collected in the Barbary over the past two years or so. Maybe a dozen of us, all employed in various capacities by the casinos. One was a very beautiful Indian girl who’d been called “Moira” by the Indian agent where she’d grown up. Mr. Stevenson was sweet on her, and in a terrible way. He’d go through periods where he couldn’t sleep; you’d see him standing in front of her cheap hotel, staring up at her window, doing some kind of sad sentry duty. Or you’d see him following her. Or you’d see him sitting alone in a coffeehouse all teary-eyed and glum and you knew who he was thinking about. Or I did, anyways. I’d gone through the same thing with Moira myself. I’d been in bitter love with her for nearly a year but then I’d passed through it. Like a fever.

Not that you could blame Moira. She was as captivated by another reservation Indian named Two Eagle as we were captivated by her. Did all the same things we did with her. Followed him around.  Bought him gifts he didn’t want. Wrote him pleading little notes.

Then they got a place and moved in together. Moira and Two Eagle, but word was things weren’t going well. He was one of those Indians too fond of the bottle and too bitter toward the white man to function well. Kept a drum up in his room and sometimes in the middle of the night you’d hear it, a tom-tom here in the center of the Barbary, and him yowling ancient Indian war cries and chants. He was fierce, Two Eagle, and he seemed to hate me especially, seemed to think that I had no pride in my red skin or my ancestors. I returned the favor, thinking he was pretty much of a melodramatic asshole. I was just as much an Indian as he was. I just kept it to myself was all.

Only time I ever liked him was one night when I ran into him and Moira in a Barbary restaurant, real late it was, and Two Eagle gentle drunk on wine, and him telling her in great excited rushes about the old religions of ours, and how only the red man—of all the earth’s peoples—understood that sky and sun and the winds were all part of the Great God spirit—and how a man or woman who knew how to truly speak to God could then address all living creatures on the earth, be they elk or horse or great mountain eagle, for all things and all creatures are God’s, and thus all things in the world, seen and unseen alike, are indivisible, and of God. And he spoke with such passion and sweep and majesty that I could see tears in his eyes—and I felt tears in my own eyes…and I saw that there was a good side to his belligerent clinging to the old ways. But his bad side…

Moira liked white-man things. Back when she’d let me take her to supper a few times, we’d gone for a long carriage ride by the bay and she’d enjoyed it. Then we went up where the fancy shops were. She made a lot of little-girl sounds, pleased and cute and dreamy.

This was the part of her Two Eagle hated. By now he’d got her to dress in deerskin instead of cloth dresses, her shining black hair in pigtails instead of tumbling tresses, her face innocent of the “whore paint,” as he pontifically called it. He worked as a bouncer in a place so tough it might have given Mr. Stevenson pause, and she worked behind the bar in the same place. Pity the man who got drunk and started sweet-talking Moira. Two Eagle would drag him outside and make the man plead for a quick death.

Now that I was over Moira, I didn’t especially like hearing about either of them. But you couldn’t say the same for Mr. Stevenson. He was as aggrieved as ever, all pain and dashed hope.

“She went out on him.”

“Oh, bullshit.”

“True,” he said. “Few nights ago.  They got into a bad fight and he kicked her in the stomach. He didn’t know she was just startin’ to carry a baby. Killed the baby and nearly killed Moira, too.”

“The sonofabitch. Somebody should kill that bastard.”

“You haven’t heard the rest of it.”

“I’m not sure I want to.”

“He wants to cut her.”

“Cut her?”

“The old ways, he says. What the Indians used to do back when I was on the plantation. When a woman went out on a man like that.  You know—her nose.”

“That’s crazy. Nobody does that shit anymore.”

“He does. Or at least he says he does. You know how he is. All that warrior bullshit he gets into.”

“Where’s Moira?”

“That’s the worst part. She thinks she’s got it coming. She’s just waitin’ in her room for him to come up and cut her. Says she believes in the old ways, too.”

I shook my head. “That sounds like Moira.” I took my pocket watch from my breeches. “I’ve got some time off coming. I can tell Madame Duprée I’m going for the rest of the night.”

“You’re tough, man, but you aren’t that tough. Two Eagle’ll kill you.” He showed me his hands. How big they were. And strong. And black. “Fucker tries to cut her, I’ll take care of him.” He nodded to the front door, his bowler perched at a precarious angle. Sometimes I wondered if he had it glued to his bald head. “Let’s go.”

We went.

Making our way along the board sidewalks this time of night meant stepping over corpses, drunks, and reeking puddles of vomit and blood from various fights. Every important casino had a band of its own, which meant that the noise was as bad as the odors.

It was raining, which meant the boards were slick. But we walked fast, anyways. Two Eagle had a couple of rooms on the second floor of a livery stable. Moira lived there, too. She’d waited a long time for him to marry her. I figured she’d wait a lot longer.

A drunken rube made a crack about Mr. Stevenson, but if the black man heard, he didn’t let on. Just kept walking. Real quiet and real intense. Like he had only one thought in the entire world and everything else just got in the way. Moira can make you like that.

The Barbary looked pretty much as usual, a jumble of cheap clothing stores for drunken sailors, dance halls where the girls were practically naked, and signs that advertised every kind of whore anybody could ever want. There was a new one this month, a mulatto who went over four hundred pounds, and a lot of Barbary regulars were giving her a try just to see what it’d be like, a lady so fat.

Half a block away you could smell the sweet hay and the sour horseshit in the rain and the night. Closer, you could hear the horses roll against their stalls, making small nervous sounds as they dreamed.

We went up a long stretch of outside stairs. The two-by-fours were new and smelled of sawn wood, tangy as autumn apples on a back porch.

Stevenson didn’t knock. He just kicked the door in and stepped over the threshold. The walls inside were stained and the floors so scuffed the wood was slivery. She’d put up new red curtains that were supposed to make the shabby room a home but all the curtains did was make everything else look even older and uglier.

Moira, sad beautiful Indian child that she was, sat in a corner with her head on her knees. When she looked up, her black eyes glistened in the lantern light. She wore a deerskin dress and moccasins. The walls were covered with the lances and shields and knives and arrows of Two Eagle’s tribe. He liked to smoke opium up here and tell dream-stories about ancient days when the medicine men said that the bravest warriors had horses that could fly. But the toys on the wall looked dulled and dusty and drab. Every couple of weeks he had his little group of Barbary-area Indians up here, Moira had told me once. The last stand, I’d remarked sarcastically. But she hadn’t found it funny at all.

“This is crazy shit, Moira,” I said. “We’re gonna get you out of here before he comes back.”

She had wrists and ankles so delicate they could make you cry. She stood up in her red skin, no more than ninety pounds and five feet she was, and walked over to Mr. Stevenson and said, “You don’t have no goddamn right to come here, Mr. Stevenson. Or you either,” she said to me. “What happens between Two Eagle and me is our business.”

“You ever seen a woman who’s been cut?” I said. I had. The man always took the nose, the same thing the ancient Egyptians had taken, just sawed it right off the face, so that only a dark and bloody hole was left. No brave ever wanted a woman who’d been cut, so many of the women went into the forest to live. A few even drank poison wine to end it quickly.

She looked at Mr. Stevenson. “We don’t have no whiskey left.”

“So the nigger goes and fetches you some, huh?” he said in his deep and bitter voice.

“I need to talk to Jimmy here, Mr. Stevenson, that’s all. Just ten minutes or so.”

He brought up his big murderous hands and looked at them as if he wasn’t quite sure what they were.

“Rye?” he said.

She smiled and was even more beautiful. “Thanks for remembering. I’ll get some money from Two Eagle and pay you back.”

“I don’t want any of his money,” Mr. Stevenson said, and fixed her with his melancholy gaze. “I just want you.”

“Oh, Mr. Stevenson,” she said, and gently touched her small hand to his wide, hard chin. Sisterly, I guess you’d say. She was like that with every man but Two Eagle.

“You don’t let him lay a hand on her,” Mr. Stevenson said to me as he crossed the room to the door.

I brought up my Colt. “Don’t worry, Mr. Stevenson.”

He glanced at her one more time, sad and loving and scared and obviously baffled by his own tumultuous feelings, and then he left.

“Poor Mr. Stevenson.”

“He’s a decent man,” I said.

“Kinda scary, though.”

“Not any more so than Two Eagle.”

“I just wished he understood how I felt about Two Eagle.”

“Maybe he finds it kind of hard to understand a man who kicks a woman so hard she loses the baby she’s carrying—and then wants to cut her nose off.”

“He didn’t mean to kick me that hard. He was real sorry. He cried when he saw—the baby.”

I went over to the window and looked out on the Barbary Coast. One of the local editorial writers had estimated that a man was robbed every five minutes in the Barbary. At least when it rained, it didn’t smell so bad.

I turned back to her. “I want to put you on a train tonight. For Denver. There’s one that leaves in an hour and a half.”

“I don’t want to go.”

“You know what he’s gonna do to you.”

Her eyes suddenly filled. She padded back to her corner and sat down and put her head on her knees and wept quietly.

I went over and sat down next to her and stroked her head as she cried.

After a time she looked up, her cheeks streaky with warm tears that I wiped away with my knuckles.

“He caught me.”

“It’s not something I want to hear about.”

“I was so mad at him—with the baby and everything—that I just went out and got drunk. Didn’t even know who I was with or where I was.”

“Moira, I really don’t want to hear.”

“So he came looking for me. Took him all night.  And you know where he found me?”

I sighed. She was going to tell me anyways.

“Up in some white sailors’ room. There were two of them. One of them was inside me when he came through the door and found me.”

I didn’t say anything. Neither did she. Not for a long time.

“You know what was funny, Jimmy?”

“What?”

“He didn’t hurt either one of them. Didn’t lay a hand on them. Just stood there staring at me. And the guy, well, he pulled out and picked up his clothes and got out of there real fast with his friend. It was their own room, too. That’s what was real funny. By then, I was sober. I tried to cover myself up by I couldn’t find my clothes, so I went over and held Two Eagle just like he was my little boy, and then he started crying. I’d never heard him cry before. It was like he didn’t know how. And then I got him over to the bed and I tried to make love to him but he couldn’t. And he hasn’t been able to since it happened, almost a week now. He’s not a man anymore. That’s what he said to me. He said that he can’t be a man ever again after what he saw. And it’s my fault, Jimmy. It’s all my fault.”

I wanted to hate him, or her, or myself, I wanted to hate some goddamned body, but I couldn’t. It was just sad human shit and at the moment it overwhelmed me, left me ice cold and confused. People are so goddamned confusing sometimes.

She laughed. “You and Mr. Stevenson must have some conversations about us, Jimmy.”

I stood up, reached back down, and took her wrist. “C’mon now, I’m taking you to the train.”

“You ain’t takin’ her nowhere.”

A harsh, quick voice from behind me in the doorway. When I turned I was looking into Two Eagle’s insane dark eyes. I’d never seen him when he didn’t look angry, when he didn’t look ready for blood. He wore a piece of leather tied around his head, his rough black hair touching his shoulders, his gaunt cheeks crosshatched with myriad knife slashes. His buckskin outfit gave him the kind of Indian ferocity he wanted.

He came into the room.

“Why can’t you be true to our ancestors for once, Jimmy?” he said, pointing his Colt right at my head. “Cutting her is the only thing I can do.  Even Moira agrees. So why should you try to stop it? It’s our blood, Jimmy, our tribal way.”

“I don’t want you to cut her.”

His hard face smiled. “You gonna stop me, Jimmy?”

He expected me to be afraid of him and I was. But that didn’t mean I wouldn’t shoot him if I had to.

And then Mr. Stevenson was in the doorway.

Moira made a female sound in her throat. Two Eagle followed my gaze over his shoulder to the huge black man in the doorframe.

“You’re smart to have him around, Jimmy. You’ll need him.”

Mr. Stevenson came into the room carrying a bottle of rotgut rye in one hand and a single rose in the other. He carried the flower to Moira and gave it to her. Then, without any warning, he turned around and backhanded Two Eagle so hard the Indian’s feet left the floor and he flew backwards into the wall. The entire room shook.

Mr. Stevenson wasn’t going to bother with any preliminaries.

He went right for Two Eagle, who was trying to right his vision and his breathing and his ability to stand up straight. He’d struck his head hard when he’d collided with the wall and he looked disoriented. Bright red blood ran from his nostrils.

Mr. Stevenson grabbed him and it was easy to see what he was going to do. Maybe he thought that this would ultimately give him his first real chance with Moira, killing Two Eagle by snapping his neck.

“No!” I shouted.

And dove on Mr. Stevenson’s back, trying to pull him off Two Eagle.

But it was no use. I clung to Mr. Stevenson like a child. I could not even budge him.

By now he had his hands in place, one on top of Two Eagle’s head, the other on the bottom of his neck—ready for the single wrench that would kill Two Eagle.

Two Eagle used fists, feet, even his teeth to get free, but Mr. Stevenson paid no attention. He was setting himself to perform his most magnificent act…

Moira shot him once in the side and then raised the gun and shot him once on top of the head. His scalp flew off and affixed to the wall by pieces of sticky flesh and bone.

The funny thing was, he kept right on going, as if he refused to acknowledge what Moira had done to him.

Getting ready to snap Two Eagle’s neck—

And then she ran closer, shrieking, and shot him again, and this time not even Mr. Stevenson could refuse to acknowledge what had happened. Blood poured from his ears.

An enraged Two Eagle was now able to bring his hands up and seize Mr. Stevenson’s throat, holding tight, choking him, as the big black fell over backwards, Two Eagle riding him down to the floor and then grabbing the gun from Moira’s hand.

Two Eagle put the barrel of the .45 to Mr. Stevenson’s forehead and fired three times. Didn’t seem to matter to him that Mr. Stevenson had died a little while ago.

With each shot, Mr. Stevenson’s head jerked upward from the coarse board floor and then slapped back down.

Two Eagle was calling him nigger and a lot of other things in our native tongue.

Then he was done, Two Eagle, pitching forward and lying facedown on the floor, very still for a long time.

I got up and straightened my clothes and picked up my gun from the floor where it had fallen when I’d jumped on Mr. Stevenson.

Moira said, “You two shouldn’t have come up here.”

“I guess not.” I nodded to Mr. Stevenson. “He was trying to help you was all.”

“It wasn’t none of his business and it ain’t none of yours, either.”

“I guess he didn’t see it that way. Seeing’s he loved you and all.”

“A nigger,” Two Eagle said, getting up from the floor suddenly. “A nigger, lovin’ Moira. Maybe you think that’s all right, Jimmy, but then you give up bein’ a true man a long time back.”

And then he went for me. Couldn’t help himself. He still had all this fury and it had to light somewhere.

Some came at me, but he was stupid because he didn’t look at my hand.

I felt his powerful arm wrap around my neck. I smelled his sweat and whiskey and tobacco.

He pushed me back against the wall.

And that was when I raised my Colt and put it directly to his ribs and fired three times.

He was dead before he hit the floor.

She was screaming, Moira was. That was about all I can tell you about my last few minutes in the room. She was screaming and Two Eagle had fallen close by Mr. Stevenson and then I was running. That’s about all I can remember.

Then there was the night and the rain and I was running and running and running and tripping and falling and hurting myself bad but no matter how far or how fast I ran, I could still hear Moira screaming.

***

WEEK LATER IT was.

I was back doing my nightly turn at Madame Duprée’s, winning upwards of five hundred dollars this particular night, when I saw Lone Deer come in the side door by the faro layout.

She looked frantic. I figured it was me she wanted.

Being’s as we were waiting for some liquid refreshments at our table, I got up and went over to her.

When I reached her, she said, “She’s goin’, Jimmy. Leavin’ us. Twenty-five minutes, her train leaves. I didn’t find out till half an hour ago myself. Thought I’d better tell you.”

“I appreciate it.”

I suppose, like Mr. Stevenson, I’d had the idle dream that Moira and I would be lovers now that Two Eagle was gone. I didn’t have to worry about any recriminations from the law getting in my way. A dead nigger and a dead Injun on the Barbary Coast don’t exactly turn out a lot of curious cops. They’re just two more slabs down at the morgue.

I’d figured I’d give it a few weeks and then go see her, tell her how what I did was the only thing I known to do—kill him to save my own life. And then I’d gentlelike invite her out for some dinner and…

But that wasn’t to be. Not now.

Moira was leaving.

“You’d better hurry,” Lone Deer said. And then took my arm and drew me closer. “There’s something else I need to tell you.”

***

LESS THAN TWO minutes later I was running toward the depot. It was crowded and the conductor walked up and down all pompous as he consulted his railroad watch and shouted out that there were only a few minutes left before this particular train pulled out.

I found her in the very back of the last coach. The car was barely half full and she looked small and isolated there with the seats so much taller than she was. Moira. She’d always be a child.

I dropped into the seat next to her and said, “Lone Deer told me what you did.”

“I wish she wouldn’t have. I didn’t want nobody to see me off.”

“I love you, Moira.”

“I don’t want to hear that. Not with Two Eagle barely a week dead. Didn’t I betray him enough?”

I’d seen the soldiers drag my grandfather from the reservation one day when I was very young. They were taking him to a federal penitentiary where he would die less than two months later at the hands of some angry white prisoners. I could still feel my panic that day—panic and terror and a sense that my own life was ending, too.

That’s how I felt now, with Moira.

“But I won’t betray him no more,” Moira said. “You can bet on that.”

“Is that why you did it?”

“Why I did it is none of your business.”

I looked at her there in her black mourning dress and black mourning hat and black mourning veil, a veil so heavy you couldn’t make out anything on the other side.

“No man’ll ever want to bother me again. I made sure of that.”

I was tempted to lift the veil quickly and see what she looked like. Lone Deer had said that Moira had used a butcher knife on her nose and that nothing remained but a bloody hole.

But then I decided that I didn’t want to remember her that way. That I always wanted her to be young and beautiful Moira in my mind.  Every man needs something to believe in, even if he knows it’s not true.

“You got a ticket, buck?” the conductor asked me. Ordinarily, I’d take exception to his calling me “buck,” but at the moment it just didn’t seem very important.

I leaned over and kissed Moira, pressing her veil to her cheek. I still couldn’t see anything.

“Hurry up, buck. You get your ass off of here or you show me a ticket.”

I squeezed her hand. I love you, Moira. And I always will.”

And then I was gone, and the train was pulling out, all steam and power and majesty in the western night.

Then I walked slowly back to Madame Dupree’s where I got just as drunk as Indians are supposed to get.

Copyright(c) 2006 by Ed Gorman

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