“As for why Nancy took to the life, that’s pretty Simple. It’s the same for most of us. She had to make a living somehow, and this seemed a good way. Easy. Good money.” Dawn made a face and laughed a little bit. Perhaps, Longarm thought, the money wasn’t all that good, no matter what a body might expect to the contrary.
“I mean,” Dawn said, “it wasn’t like she had a reputation to protect or anything like that. She was already a slut as far as her folks was concerned.”
“How’s that?” Longarm asked.
Dawn shrugged. “The usual shit. She was making it in the hayloft with some fella. In her case it was the preacher. One of those hellfire-and-damnation types that gets everybody all worked up and then needs some way to let down afterward. Well, with this one, according to what Nancy said, she was the one chosen to help him out with his good work. Help him out of his difficulty and into her drawers, plain and simple. Except, of course, she didn’t know a dick from a doorknob. She just knew that this preacher wouldn’t never ever lie to her and if he said something was all right, then of course it was all right. And he told her this was her duty, her path to salvation.” Dawn snorted. “The bastard put her on the path, all right, but not to salvation. Then when Nancy missed her period and her mother noticed that she wasn’t asking for rags to use at that time of month, her mother got to questioning her and it came out. The preacher denied the whole thing and prayed over her and accused her of fucking some neighbor boy, which she swore she never did, and her folks called her a harlot and a liar and all the usual shit. And so she sneaked out in the middle of the night and talked her way onto a westbound train. One of the brakemen let her ride in the caboose. Poor innocent Nancy. She didn’t know she’d have to pay the rent in exchange.”
“Pardon me?”
“Pay the rent,” Dawn explained. “She had to put out for the brakeman and his buddies in the caboose. All of them. It wasn’t the sort of thing she’d had in mind, see, but then she didn’t have any choice about it once they got started. And of course it didn’t kill her. It wasn’t much different with those guys than it’d been with the preacher. So when they put her off the train in Cheyenne, well, she knew by then she was damaged goods, as the saying goes, and no point pretending to be Miss Goody-Goody. She had nothing and she had nobody, but she knew how to spread her legs. And she was pretty. She really was, you know. So pretty. And so sweet.” Dawn sighed. “So that’s how she got into the life. A real ordinary story, you know?”
“What about the baby?” Longarm asked. “Where is the baby?”
Dawn chuckled, but there was no hint of mirth in the sound. “That’s a real pisser, mister. Turns out she wasn’t knocked up after all. It was just a false alarm. Isn’t that just about the funniest damn thing you ever did hear?”
“Yeah,” he said in a dry, sad voice. “Damn well hilarious.”
Chapter 20
Longarm walked to the window and peered unfocused into an unseen distance. He could not actually have looked out through the glass had he wanted to. It was frosted over a quarter-inch thick or more, and he could feel the chill seeping through his clothes to find vulnerable flesh when he stood near the frozen glass. He stood there for several minutes, smoking, thinking about the dead girl-child Nancy. Then he tossed the butt of his cheroot into a rusting can that served as a makeshift spittoon and went back to sit again on the side of the bed next to Dawn.
Who, he could not help but notice, had not made any attempt to cover herself. She was still naked. And getting prettier as the minutes passed.
“Tell me about last Sunday morning,” he said.
Dawn turned her face away and seemed to collect her thoughts. Finally she spoke. “I guess that’s why I feel so extra bad about what happened to Nancy,” she said.
“How’s that?”
“Saturday nights are always real busy, but Nancy, she never was one to sleep in late. She had the habit of rising early no matter what. Me, I’ll sleep till way past noon if I can get away with it.” She tried for a small smile and almost managed one. “That’s one of the advantages of my line of work, if you see what I mean.”
“Sure.”
“Last Sunday, though, I was awake early for some reason. I wasn’t sick or nothing like that. Just awake. Nancy came by, oh, about ten o’clock I think it was. She didn’t knock. Prob’ly she didn’t want to wake me if I was still asleep. She just opened the door and peeped in. I saw her and said good morning, and she slipped inside and sat on the edge of the bed. Right there where you are now, ‘cept in the other place instead of here. She sat right down and reached over and took my hand. Her hand was cold, I remember. I suppose she’d been out to the backhouse already, then come back inside to get ready to go out. Anyway, her hand was cold. I remember that so plain. I can as good as still feel it. You know?”
He nodded, encouraging Dawn to continue but not wanting to interrupt the flow of her thoughts.
“She held my hand in both of hers and said, ‘Dawn, why don’t you come out with me. It’s such a beautiful morning. Come walk with me.’ Nancy loved to get up, sometimes real early, and go walking. Not to any place in particular. She just liked to walk in the mornings. She said the air was clean and sweet then and the walking made her feel good. She asked me to come along any number of times, and I always thought that one of these days I would do it. But the way it turns out, I never did and I never will.
“But I wanted to. Really I did. But I’d worked awful hard the night before and the bed felt so soft and warm and it was cold outside. Had been for a couple weeks already. There wasn’t no snow yet. Not but a few little flurries every now and then, but there wasn’t no snow sticking on the ground yet. That was still to come.
“And anyway, Nancy wanted me to come out with her and in a way I wanted to, but in the end I decided to stay under the covers and let Nancy go on alone.” Dawn gave Longarm a haunted, stricken look. “If I’d got my ass out of bed that morning and gone with her …”
“If you’d done that,” Longarm said, “then more than likely you both would be dead today. It wouldn’t have done Nancy the least bit of good.” Not that he believed that. The truth was that if there had been two girls strolling together, then today they almost certainly would both be alive. But that was not what Dawn needed to hear right now.
“Do you remember what she was wearing?” he asked.
“Every stitch,” Dawn said. And she proceeded to describe to perfection the women’s clothes Longarm had found at the Travis cabin.
