He would ask Jau Dong-Sing to deliver Kate’s detritus to Bessie’s house as soon as possible. What Kate did next was none of his affair. She could leave town and get a fresh start someplace new, or she could drink the money up and go back to work for Bessie Earp.
Either way, we’re even, John Henry thought as he undressed. She is still a whore, but she is better off than when we met.
“A necessary evil.” Bessie Earp had heard that hackneyed phrase all her life, and it made her want to spit. Well, which is it? she always wanted to ask. Can something necessary be evil? Can something evil be necessary?
Without prostitutes, Necessity claimed, the filthy impulses and ungovernable desires of men would have no other target than respectable women, for prostitution drains away the sins of Christian society, as a sewer carries filth from a city.
Well, then, Bessie wondered, why not treat the girls who do Necessity’s ugly work with some respect? Why not give them the small dignity of a ditch digger or a street sweeper?
Because, Evil replied, their own lust is to blame for their degradation. They are unredeemed sinners, these soiled doves, these fallen women. They are drunkards and drug fiends. As long as they ply their dirty trade, their wages will be ill treatment, appalling disease, and short, unhappy lives.
If the doves are soiled, who dirtied them? That’s what Bessie wished someone would ask. If the women have fallen, who pushed them? But reformers would go just this far and no farther: lament the sin, but ask no questions.
And so in every city in America, a corrupt farce played out before a respectable audience eager for cautionary tales of female depravity. The police arrested the girls and marched them down public avenues to be stared at by jeering crowds of nice people. Judges levied fines and sent the girls out penniless, with no way to pay for their next meal except go back to whoring. Politicians railed against unrepentant wickedness to win votes. And later that night, all of the bastards—cops, judges, and pols—were in the house, winking and jovial, collecting their cut of the brothel income and taking some out in trade.
“No harm done, right, Bessie? There’s an election coming up. Gotta put on a show for the rubes.”
Who could you complain to? To what court did you bring your suit when the judge beat the girl? Who’d jail the extortionist if the chief of police said it was legal for the house to sell liquor one week, drank with your girls the next, and arrested you for it the third? How do you change the laws when the johns can vote but the girls can’t?
“Honey,” Bessie’s mamma used to say, “politicians and judges and coppers are money-grubbing thieves. They’ll screw you, and rob you, and win elections for doing it, but there’s no way around them. Smile and pay the sonsabitches off.”
The sheer shameless duplicity drove Bessie to fury, but there’s no one more pragmatic than a whore. Bessie had learned the facts of life at her mamma’s knee, and the facts were these. Men like to fuck. If they have to, they’ll pay to do it. Women like to eat. If they have to, they’ll fuck to earn their bread.
In the 1840s, when Bessie’s mother went into business for herself, Nashville was pleased to call itself the Athens of the South, for all its early industries were lofty ones: publishing, education, religion. Soon, however, railroads converged on the city. A new suspension bridge linked the region’s agricultural lands with markets in the North. Paddle wheelers by the hundreds steamed up and down the Cumberland River, each carrying moneyed men. And in the center of the action sat Smokey Row. Handy to the waterfront and the tracks. An easy walk, downhill, for senators and congressmen.
When Nashville fell in ’62, a hundred thousand Yankee soldiers came to occupy the city. Within months, miserable Southern prostitutes had accomplished what gallant Southern soldiers never did: the complete destruction of an invading Northern army. Smokey Row put a third of the occupiers into hospitals with syphilis and gonorrhea, but when the Yankees tried to expel the girls, each hooker’s place was immediately filled by two new women willing to trade the certainty of starvation for a high probability of disease and early death. Finally a Union provost marshal got fed up with high-minded hand-wringing over the Necessary Evil and instituted a system of licensed prostitution.
And that, by God, made it safer for everyone.
Each week, Nashville’s working girls kept an appointment at a quiet office in a secluded part of town. One by one, they went into an examination room that had good light, a nice bed, a table, and all the necessary appliances for a private examination. If a girl showed the slightest sign of disease, she was sent to a well-run hospital, where she was treated by an army doctor, provided with decent clothing, and given instructions in hygiene and comportment. When she was clean, inside and out, a medical officer declared her fit for duty and she was given a certificate to present to customers. Disease rates plunged and stayed low for the rest of the war. The system even made a profit, its whole expense covered by the girls’ weekly license fee of fifty cents apiece.
The Yankees went home after Appomattox. Smokey Row went back to business as usual. By then, Bessie’s mother had died and Bessie herself had married James Earp, a Yankee boy who’d first laid eyes on Bess when she was hanging out laundry in the courtyard of Hospital Eleven. James might have been looking down on her from a second-story window in Hospital Fifteen, but that was the only way he looked down on her. They were both being treated for the same thing, and James Earp was no hypocrite.
And no matter what anybody thought or said, he was no pimp, either.
Even after he and Bessie married, she ran the house, for James was an easygoing, broad-minded man who nearly always deferred to Bessie’s commercial judgment. That said, it was his idea to head west in ’65, out where there was no law to make criminals of Bessie and the Nashville girls they took with them.
James had no real use of his left arm, for his shoulder had been shot to kindling during the war, but he could still run the bar and he had a nice way of keeping things peaceful in the house. No matter where they went, Bessie kept back money to pay doctors for exams, and set a room or two aside for girls who shouldn’t be working. Local johns appreciated knowing that they wouldn’t carry the pox or clap home to their wives, and they paid extra for the peace of mind. James made sure that Bessie’s place got a town’s best transient traffic, too, politely directing filthy miners and stinking cowhands elsewhere, but welcoming visiting industrialists and cattlemen.
When things got civilized enough for politicians to rail against vice, Bess filled envelopes with cash and smiled when she handed them over, while James made plans to move on to the next boomtown. Wherever James and Bessie opened shop, two or three of his brothers were on the police force. If things got rowdier than James could manage, there was always some signal that would bring Morg or Virgil in fast to settle things down. Even Wyatt came running, although after he got religion, he hardly ever looked Bessie in the eye anymore and left the house again as soon as he was able.
Into this smoothly running business, one woman came and went like the goddess Discord: unpredictable, disruptive, exhausting. Kate Harony, Kate Fisher, Katie Elder … Who knew what her real name was? In Wichita and Ellsworth, she had worked for Bessie; here in Dodge, she just used a room in the house and gave Bess a percentage of her income from private clients. Kate was good company when she was sober and lent tone to the proceedings, for she was able to speak to eastern businessmen with charm and poise, and to wealthy foreigners in their own languages. Katie could be sharp-tongued, but some men found that exciting, and they asked for her, special. Trouble was, she drank when she was bored or scared, and picked fights when she was drunk. Bessie wouldn’t have put up with Kate’s behavior in anyone else, but James had always liked the girl. There was something underneath her snappish belligerence that made him feel protective and tolerant.
“She’s gonna get us in real trouble this time,” Bessie had whispered when Kate showed up at the house that morning. “Talk to her, James. I can’t do it.”
James kissed his wife’s forehead and patted her behind. “You ain’t so tough as you make out,” he said, but even he waited to speak to Kate until the liquor wore off. Sometimes it’s better to strike when the iron is cold.
When he found her at three that afternoon, she was sitting, slumped, at the kitchen table, aching head in her hands. James poured coffee for them both and sat down across from her. “Katie,” he said quietly, “Bess says your carpetbag is full of money. Where’d you get all that cash, honey?”
She wouldn’t look at him, which was as good as a confession.
“It’s Doc Holliday’s, isn’t it,” he said.
“Most of it,” she admitted. “Not all.”
“There’s an election coming up,” James told her, sitting back. “Reform’s looking to slap a bunch of vice laws on us here. Dodge has been good to us, Kate. We’re trying to keep a lid on things. If Holliday asks Morg to press
