Black fabric bunted the second-floor railing of the Wayside Inn. The cave-in at the Turnaway Lode took 11 men and 16 Chinese; out of respect, Miss Valentine bought the room a round, and lowered the price of pussy. A cheer went up, but it was a somber one. It took six days to dig the corpses all out. The funerals had been that afternoon. The preacher ran out of appropriate Biblical verses after the seventh or eighth man, which angered a mourner, who popped the preacher in the mouth, which caused the rest of the procession to turn on the first mourner; by the end of the brawl, the preacher had two more bodies to pray over. The Chinese were mass-graved in the easily-turned soil to the north of the Main Drag.

The piano player had the night off. Miss Valentine had overseen plenty of evenings after funerals that turned the whole town out. Fire that took out the Muddam family in St. Joseph. That was all the way back in Florida. Whole damn lot of ’em, all four little ones, too. She sold a hell of a lot of whiskey that night, and talked the crowd out of killing the Muddam’s slaves. It was they, the crowd figured, who had set the fire. Miss Valentine cautioned skepticism–might it not just be an overturned candle that caused the blaze?–and kept the rageful mourners at peace right until the very instant she ran out of whiskey and she stopped giving a shit. The mayor in El Paso. Miss Valentine was broken up about that one; it was a shame the mayor made her kill him. Mean Jay Funk in Minneapolis. He was a boxer, but this was the 1850’s, so that meant kicking and biting and choking, too; Mean Jay was good at all of those things, and he was the local champ. Men would come to town, challenge him. Sometimes, Mean Jay would kill the men in the improvised ring. The whole town came out. He put a pistol in his mouth one night. The whole town came out. And there was nothing the fucking piano player could do to ameliorate the situation, Miss Valentine had learned. Play sad music, and the action gets shot, room spins off all maudlin. Play something upbeat, and one of the dipshits at the bar would inevitably take umbrage and stab the pianist. So she gave the piano player the night off, and the room was full only of men’s angry voices.

Some of this story takes place in 198-, which is the past, but this part takes place in 186-, which is far past-ier. It was dark at night so long ago, even in great cities. Little Aleppo was not and would never be a great city. Men that walked about outside wielded torches. Actual ones, not euphemistically-named flashlights. Inside, candles were preferred. The Wayside Inn was as dimly-lit as a parallel institution would be today, but not on purpose: it was the best they could do. There was a lamp on each table, and attached to the walls at six-foot intervals, and clustered above the bar. Not enough, but they shat heat, and stunk, and so the number of lamps was strictly constrained. You could see the lamps’ spherical circumferences, just a couple feet. In some places, they touched one another, and sometimes there were flickering channels of shade that a man could sneak through.

Miss Valentine didn’t like funerals, though she had caused many, and so she hadn’t gone out east to Hank Foole’s land where the locals had taken to burying their dead. Canadian Bill told her about it, and how awful sad it was.

“Except for the fight, right?”

“No, no. The fight was real sad, too.”

She was about to take a shot of whiskey, but she stopped her hand, set the glass down, tilted her head.

“How the fuck is a fight sad?”

“The punchin’ and all. It was lachrymose.”

She picked up the shot and threw it back.

“Goddammit, Bill, you reading that fucking dictionary again?”

He tilted his brown gambler hat way back on his bald head.

“There’s nothin’ else to read around here.”

“Read the paper.”

“It’s one page, Miss Valentine.”

“I don’t wanna hear any of those fucking bullshit words. Speak English in my place.”

She turned around, back against the bar. All-black. Out of respect. Her boots, had they been polished in New York or Paris, could not have gleamed brighter. One of the small pleasures–and there were not many–of owning girls was having your clothes taken care of right. One of them was always teachable. Most people are capable of learning if you hit them hard enough. The stainy, crumbly polish that needed to be activated with spit, and the rag, and the hard bristled hand brush SHWOP SHWOP across the toe until the light reflected. Miss Valentine liked cuffs on her trousers. She ordered them from St. Louis and had Tappy pin them up and sew in the hem by hand. There would be a rigorous examination of the work afterwards. Her collar was open, and she didn’t wear any sort of necklace. Some days, she put on a tie, but thought a black tie on a black shirt in a black suit with black boots was a bit much.

“I was thinkin’ about goin’ back to school.”

“Shut the fuck up, Bill.”

Canadian Bill was behind the bar, and he scowled behind his mustache. Self-improvement was the right of every man, he figured. Black coat, but other than that his usual brown. He and Miss Valentine–and Zeke who was also behind the bar, and Possum who was watching the faro tables, and Tex who was keeping an eye on the girls–were noticeably cleaner than everyone else in the Wayside. Weekly baths were a iron-clad rule of Miss Valentine’s. Otherwise, you might as well just wear a dress and shit yourself all day like the savages to the south.

“It was fucking Braunce! Those cheap fucks killed those fucking men, and you know it! You know it!”

“Shut the fuck up, Lowry.”

“We need a fucking union.”

“Shut the fuck up, Lowry.”

The men, one of whom was named Lowry, were at a table with a lamp on it, along with two other miners, and there was no piano player so their conversation could be heard if one was listening. Miss Valentine was listening.

YOU ARE NOT EVEN LISTENING TO ME.

“No, I’m not.”

SHARE WITH ME YOUR HUMAN SORROWS.

“Shut the fuck up, Wally.”

DO NOT CALL ME THAT.

The Wall of Sound used to belong to the Grateful Dead, and now it was the sound system for The Tahitian. Somewhere in between the first and second fact, it became sentient but still did not appreciate being called “Wally.” Opening a movie theater is expensive, but reopening one built 80 years ago and left to rot for a decade is way more pricey. Several animals–some of which were cataloged for the very first time–had set up camp in the building; the bats and rats had begun interbreeding. The mold had grown cunning. There were at least three boojums, and one time a homeless guy swore he saw a pumpkinhead in there: the basement was like a dozen Stephen King stories having sex with each other. It would have been cheaper to knock the whole structure down and start again, but Augusta O. Incandescente-Ponui, whom everyone called Gussy, had had the theater declared a landmark, which meant she was eligible for non-profit status and all sorts of helpful financial shit, but also meant she had to leave as many walls standing as possible.

She didn’t mean to put her own money in. Business classes at Harper College. She got A’s, for fuck’s sake. She knew better than to put her own money in, especially if that money was not actually her money, but personal loans. And she definitely didn’t mean to use her credit cards. She had done both of these things, but she hadn’t meant to. Gussy wondered if that excuse would fly with the bank.

So when Precarious Lee offered her a sound system for free, she was too desperate to be smart. Clearly, she knew, this was some sort of Trojan Horse routine, but she countered that knowledge with the thought that one should not look a gift horse in the mouth. And then she reminded herself that she had no money; ever since, she’d been arguing with a needy artificial intelligence.

I AM HERE FOR YOU.

“Thank you for the offer.”

TEAM GUSSY.

“Why do you even know about this?”

YOU BELLOWED OUT THE FACTS OF THE SITUATION IN THE LOBBY. JULIO HAD A QUESTION FOR YOU AND YOU BEGAN BELLOWING.

Gussy was on the shitty brown couch in her tidy office. She had been laying there a while. Her feet were bare; her flats on the floor. Her purse was on the floor, too, next to the chair she had tried to throw it on. Her right arm dangled and her hand was by an overflowing ashtray. She sat up.

“I do not bellow.”

MY WORDS ARE THE CORRECT ONES.

She had bellowed. Julio was vacuuming the sprightly, gaudy carpet in the lobby with the ancient Electrolux. It was heavy and overbuilt–the headlight above its maw could blind a large cat or small dog–and the handle was angled uncomfortably to remind you that the past was ergonomically benighted. The vacuum was, like the theater, her birthright. Occasionally, Gussy wondered how granular the birthright thing was. She had the toilets replaced during the renovation; should she have kept the old bowls? Were they, too, her birthright?

Julio flipped the power switch so it was quiet in the high-ceilinged room with the popcorn counter and video games. He had a question about that night’s program, a highlight of Swedish action movies.

“There’s not any action in them,” he said when she swayed in several hours later than usual.

“Of course not. They’re Swedish.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Y’know what I don’t get, Julio? I don’t get how she leaves me a LETTER. A fucking LETTER, Julio. She SNUCK OUT and FUCKED OFF to L.A. with that MESSY BITCH Tiresias and she left me a LETTER.”

Then she walked, more or less in a straight line, to her office and locked the door behind her.

SHEILA, WHO HAS A NICKNAME BUT NOT A LAST NAME, AND WHOM YOU ARE IN A CONNUBIAL ARRANGEMENT WITH, HAS DECAMPED FOR LOS ANGELES. SHE DID NOT INFORM YOU PRIOR TO HER FLIGHT, BUT INSTEAD LEFT YOU A NOTE. I USED CONTEXT CLUES TO UNDERSTAND THE SITUATION.

“Well, gooooood for you.”

Gussy’s apartment is on the second floor, with a stairway down that opens onto Robin Street right across from Cagliostro’s. The door has a mail slot, but the post doesn’t come until two in the afternoon. It was odd to see an envelope on the floor of the landing at ten in the morning, and she wouldn’t have noticed it until later but she was out of sugar and grumpily threw her slippers on to shuffle down to the Mini-Mart. When she picked it, a whiff of Big-Dicked Sheila hit her nose and she thought it was a love letter. Which it was, kinda.

Tushee,

(Sheila called Gussy “Tushee.” She had been referring to her this way for a few days before Gussy asked, “Why are you calling me Tushee?” Sheila replied, “Because I like your tushee.”)

Tiresias and I went to Los Angeles. Call you once we get settled. LOVE YOU. 

And here was a waxy imprint in bright red of Sheila’s lips.

B.D. Sheila

It wasn’t exactly Abelard writing to Heloise, but it was a love letter, kinda. Gussy had been punched in the chest about a decade before; this felt like that. The floor was cold against her bare feet. The door had plated glass panels, three of them at eye level, and she saw several rabbis across the street. The letter. She read it five more times, flipped the paper over once or twice, looked in the envelope to see if there was anything she missed. Perhaps a second letter explaining the first one.

“She and her terrible friend have decamped to a terrible place. She’ll call you. I don’t see what you’re missing.”

“I just don’t understand it,” Gussy said.

Mr. Venable leaned over his messy table–he had been in his customary seat in the bookstore with no title–and smiled tightly. Both hands out in front of him, palms down, in the gesture that means “I cannot make this any simpler for you.”

“Sheila…and her terrible friend…have gone. Was it the word ‘decamped’ you had problems with, Gus? Gone. They have gone to Los Angeles. Which is a biiiiiig city south of here.”

Gussy deeply regretted not having girlfriends. She did in high school, and Harper College, but they had all grown apart and now–God help her–she had only Mr. Venable to take Sheila’s letter to. There was a muffled PLOOMPF from deep within the shop.

“What was that?”

“The Revisionist History section is staging a frontal assault on the Actual History section. I’m excited to know the outcome. Everything depends on whom Historicity and Historiography side with.”

She snatched the note from the table in front of him, refolded it, jammed it in the back pocket of her jeans. Gussy didn’t wear jeans often. They were boring, she thought, and they made her legs look short. She was still wearing the Cyndi Lauper tee-shirt she slept in; she had forgotten to brush her teeth. Mr. Venable was in his customary suit, and he had remembered to brush his teeth.

“Who would leave this for a person?”

“Sheila would.”

“Why?”

“Because she’s a flake of the highest order, Gussy. Lovely woman. Winning smile. Adroit with her scissors. And just the biggest, flakiest flake in the entire world.”

“But why would she do it to meeeeeee?”

Gussy threw herself across his table. Mr. Venable patted her on the shoulder exactly twice.

“There, there. Could you not be here, here?”

“What?”

“Up. Get up. Come on. Big girl time.”

“I don’t wanna.”

“The book you’re resting on has a typographically-transmitted disease.”

She recoiled, stood.

“Ew.”

“Mm. I should be wearing gloves. Gus, do you love her?”

Gussy felt like she was about to cry, because she was.

“Yeah.”

He leaned back, triumphant.

“Well, there you are. You only fall in love with flakes.”

She felt like a drink, and then it was several hours later and she was on the shitty brown couch in her office stinking like the Morning Tavern and poking around in her bag for her cigarettes, which she pulled out and they were Camels, like Sheila smoked; Gussy liked Marlboros when she was a smoker, but that was four years ago and she had not had a single one for four years, and then she met Sheila and now she went through a pack a day again, but this time Camels because that was what Sheila smoked, so when she looked at the pack she started crying. It was nighttime now, and she had picked up the letter off her landing floor in the morning, and it did not take that long to drive to Los Angeles.

THERE, THERE.

“Fuck off, Wally.”

LET IT ALL OUT.

“Jesus, I need better friends.”

“Are all the men’s friends in attendance here? Everybody here? I got something to say,” Miss Valentine yelled, and the room got quieter except for a man leaning against a wall upfront singing old songs about Jesus. Possum clocked him in the jaw, and then it was quiet and she continued, “Tragedy strikes at the heart of this community. You hear that word I just said? Community. That’s what we’re starting to build here, and when nightmare comes, we weather it together. We come together to honor–”

She lifted a shot of whiskey in front of her; she was standing on a wooden box behind the bar. The men in the room joined her.

“–our brave brothers.”

She drank, and so did they. The miners refilled their glasses with the bottles on their tables, and she hers from the bottle on the bar.

“And also the Chinks.”

The room drank again.

“And how do we honor them? Not by running around with our cocks soft and our minds confused. We’ll never know what happened in that mine, and that’s a fact. Structural flaw, human error. Shit, maybe there was a little earthquake. Shit, maybe the Chinks are responsible, I don’t know: what I do know is that we won’t ever know.”

Miss Valentine stepped off down and came around the bar and onto the main floor. There were a dozen round tables, and then square ones lining the walls, and up front there were two long, high tables that you stood at. The two faro tables were both oval, and felted in green. Everything else was brown: the tables and the seats and the whiskey and the teeth and the boots and the beer and the Main Drag and the walls and the spittoons and the dirt on top of the new graves. It is impossible to overstate the brownness of the Old West.

“Speculation. Ooh, that’s a killer,” she said. “And it distracts from our true calling. Which is how to honor their memories. I say we build ourselves a monument, and I tell you what: I’m kicking in the first hundred. Possum, c’mere. Take off your hat.”

Possum came there and took off his hat. Miss Valentine dropped a banknote in.

“Give what you care to, gentlemen. I’ll guarantee your contributions. Possum?”

He went from man to man, five here and ten there and big spenders with their hundreds who made sure Miss Valentine was watching when they threw the bills in. She smiled at them, nodded.

“And here’s how I’m gonna honor those brave men. Those heroes.”

She had a handful of straw in a closed fist.

“I’m giving away pussy.”

The men cheered, and not somberly. Discounted pussy was one thing, but free? Wow. They hooted and slapped their rough palms on the tables. There were men with beards, and ones who had stopped shaving some time ago. Needle-thin mustaches that extended far a-cheek. Elaborate muttonchops. One fellow in the corner’s head was made of hair.

“Draw your straw, boys. Lucky man gets lucky!”

She circulated through the room and each man chose his straw and held it up.

“I got it!”

“What’s your name, sir?”

“Lowry!”

“Nice work, Lowry. Hey, girls? Girls?”

The girls all lined up in front of Lowry, along the bar. They were wearing simple dresses; their tits were hanging out; they were high. Miss Valentine leaned into Lowry and asked,

“Who you want?”

Lowry pointed, and Miss Valentine nodded, and Lulu sashayed over. She had only learned to sashay recently. She took his hand, and led him into the back, into Room 5, which was her usual room, where Canadian Bill was standing behind the door with an axe-handle. He cracked Lowry in the head with it, not as hard as he could, but smartly: it sounded TOK like a solidly-hit single. It wasn’t like in the movies. Lowry staggered, his legs leaving him, and he slumped over and seized for ten seconds, and then again, and then he lay still but he had pissed himself. Lulu had turned to face the wall; she was shivering, but she was silent.

Bill slung Lowry up to his shoulders, dead weight, and said, “Hey, hey,” at Lulu, who turned around he motioned towards the window with his head. She walked over and opened it wide as it would go. There was a cheer from outside as Miss Valentine gave away another free lay. Canadian Bill slid the body out the window which overlooked the back alley. Tex was standing there. He made no attempt to catch Lowry.

“I’m sorry you had to see that, honey.”

“Okay.”

“Now, in about ten minutes, you’re gonna run out there and tell Miss Valentine real loud that the fellow you was fuckin’ in here stole your money and jumped out the window.”

“Okay.”

“And I’m sorry.”

“You already said that.”

“No, I’m sorry for this,” Canadian Bill said, and punched Lulu in the eye. She staggered back into the wall and shrank down into a ball with her arm over her head. She did not cry out, and when a second blow was not forthcoming, she peeked up.

“It’d look more convincing if you got a black eye.”

“Okay.”

“All right, honey. Ten minutes. And I’ll make up that eye to you. I owe you one,” he said and climbed out the window. Lulu sank back against the wall and wished she had a watch.

Possum and Zeke were bum’s-rushing the last stragglers by the time Canadian Bill and Tex got back. Miss Valentine was behind the bar, and she poured each of them a drink and then one for herself, and then they drank, and then she poured another round and they drank that. Once more she filled the shot glasses, but this time the three left them on the bar.

“I’m fucking beat”

“Hit the sack, champ.” Tex exited, and it was just Miss Valentine and Canadian Bill.

“You took him to Valhalla?”

“That big rock, yeah. Wasn’t anything left from the last fucker I left up there. Those squatch use every part of the fucker.”

“No such thing as squatch. Pumas, bears, and vultures.”

“Whatever.”

He threw back his shot.

“Why’d I kill that guy?”

“New in town. I never seen him before, so he’s new in town must be. New in town and talking loud about a union? If he ain’t a plant, then he’s just an idiot and either one is of no use. And I think I need something to blame someone for.”

Canadian Bill shoved a wad of chaw into his mouth.

“Who’s the someone?”

“Don’t know yet. I got some idea, though.”

She poured him another whiskey, and it was the middle of the night, which was O so very dark back then.