It was on another’s tab anyway.
As the coach trotted along, McBride took in Galveston. It was a Southerner’s version of New York, with a touch of the tropics. Houses were upraised on stilts — thick support posts actually — against the washing of storm waters, and in the city proper the houses looked to be fresh off Deep South plantations.
City Hall had apparently been designed by an architect with a Moorish background. It was ripe with domes and spirals. The style collided with a magnificent clock housed in the building’s highest point, a peaked tower. The clock was like a miniature Big Ben. England meets the Middle East.
Electric streetcars hissed along the streets, and there were a large number of bicycles, carriages, buggies, and pedestrians. McBride even saw one automobile.
The streets themselves were made of buried wooden blocks that McBride identified as ships’ ballast. Some of the side streets were made of white shell, and some were hardened sand. He liked what he saw, thought: Maybe, after I do in the nigger, I’ll stick around awhile. Take in the sun at the beach. Find a way to get my fingers in a little solid graft of some sort.
When McBride finally got to the whorehouse, it was full dark. He gave the black driver a big tip, cocked his bowler, grabbed his suitcase, went through the ornate iron gate, up the steps, and inside to get his tumblers clicked right.
After giving his name to the plump madam, who looked as if she could still grind out a customer or two herself, he was given the royalty treatment. The madam herself took him upstairs, undressed him, bathed him, fondled him a bit.
When he was clean, she dried him off, nestled him in bed, kissed him on the forehead as if he were her little boy, then toddled off. The moment she left, he climbed out of bed, got in front of the mirror on the dresser and combed his hair, trying to push as much as possible over the bald spot. He had just gotten it arranged and gone back to bed when the redhead entered.
She was green-eyed and a little thick-waisted, but not bad to look at. She had fire-red hair on her head and a darker fire between her legs, which were white as sheets and smooth as a newborn pig.
He started off by hurting her a little, tweaking her nipples, just to show her who was boss. She pretended to like it. Kind of money his employers were paying, he figured she’d dip a turd in gravel and push it around the floor with her nose and pretend to like it.
McBride roughed her bottom some, then got in the saddle and bucked a few. Later on, when she got a little slow about doing what he wanted, he blacked one of her eyes.
When the representatives of the Galveston Sporting Club showed up, he was lying in bed with the redhead, uncovered, letting a hot wind blow through the open windows and dry his and the redhead’s juices.
The madam let the club members in and went away. There were four of them, all dressed in evening wear with top hats in their hands. Two were gray-haired and gray-whiskered. The other two were younger men. One was large, had a face that looked as if it regularly stopped cannonballs. Both eyes were black from a recent encounter. His nose was flat and strayed to the left of his face. He did his breathing through his mouth. He didn’t have any top front teeth.
The other young man was slight and a dandy. This, McBride assumed, would be Ronald Beems, the man who had written him on behalf of the Sporting Club.
Everything about Beems annoyed McBride. His suit, unlike the wrinkled and drooping suits of the others, looked fresh-pressed, unresponsive to the afternoon’s humidity. He smelled faintly of mothballs and naphtha, and some sort of hair tonic that had ginger as a base. He wore a thin, little moustache and the sort of hair McBride wished he had. Black, full, and longish, with muttonchop sideburns. He had perfect features. No fist had ever touched him. He stood stiff, as if he had a hoe handle up his ass.
Beems, like the others, looked at McBride and the redhead with more than a little astonishment. McBride lay with his legs spread and his back propped against a pillow. He looked very big there. His legs and shoulders and arms were thick and twisted with muscle and glazed in sweat. His stomach protruded a bit, but it was hard- looking.
The whore, sweaty, eye blacked, legs spread, breasts slouching from the heat, looked more embarrassed than McBride. She wanted to cover, but she didn’t move. Fresh in her memory was that punch to the eye.
“For heaven’s sake, man,” Beems said. “Cover yourself.”
“What the hell you think we’ve been doin’ here?” McBride said. “Playin’ checkers?”
“There’s no need to be open about it. A man’s pleasure is taken in private.”
“Certainly you’ve seen balls before,” McBride said, reaching for a cigar that lay on the table next to his revolver and a box of matches. Then he smiled and studied Beems. “Then maybe you ain’t&. And then again, maybe, well, you’ve seen plenty and close up. You look to me the sort that would rather hear a fat boy fart than a pretty girl sing.”
“You disgusting brute,” Beems said.
“That’s telling me,” McBride said. “Now I’m hurt. Cut to the goddamn core.” McBride patted the redhead’s inner thigh. “You recognize this business, don’t you? You don’t, I got to tell you about it. We men call it a woman, and that thing between her legs is the ole red snapper.”
“We’ll not conduct our affairs in this fashion,” Beems said.
McBride smiled, took a match from the box, and lit the cigar. He puffed, said, “You dressed-up pieces of dirt brought me all the way down here from Chicago. I didn’t ask to come. You offered me a job, and I took it, and I can untake it, it suits me. I got round-trip money from you already. You sent for me, and I came, and you set me up with a paid hair hole, and you’re here for a meeting at a whorehouse, and now you’re gonna tell me you’re too special to look at my balls. Too prudish to look at pussy. Go on out, let me finish what I really want to finish. I’ll be out of here come tomorrow, and you can whip your own nigger.”
There was a moment of foot shuffling, and one of the elderly men leaned over and whispered to Beems. Beems breathed once, like a fish out of water, said, “Very well. There’s not that much needs to be said. We want this nigger whipped, and we want him whipped bad. We understand in your last bout, the man died.”
“Yeah,” McBride said. “I killed him and dipped my wick in his old lady. Same night.”
This was a lie, but McBride liked the sound of it. He liked the way their faces looked when he told it. The woman had actually been the man’s half sister, and the man had died three days later from the beating.
“And this was a white man?” Beems said.
“White as snow. Dead as a stone. Talk money.”
“We’ve explained our financial offer.”
“Talk it again. I like the sound of money.”
“Hundred dollars before you get in the ring with the nigger. Two hundred more if you beat him. A bonus of five hundred if you kill him. This is a short fight. Not forty-five rounds. No prizefighter makes money like that for so little work. Not even John L. Sullivan.”
“This must be one hated nigger. Why? He mountin’ your dog?”
“That’s our business.”
“All right. But I’ll take half of that money now.”
“That wasn’t our deal.”
“Now it is. And I’ll be runnin’ me a tab while I’m here, too. Pick it up.”
More foot shuffling. Finally, the two elderly men got their heads together, pulled out their wallets. They pooled their money, gave it to Beems. “These gentlemen are our backers,” Beems said. “This is Mr. —”
“I don’t care who they are,” McBride said. “Give me the money.”
Beems tossed it on the foot of the bed.
“Pick it up and bring it here,” McBride said to Beems.
“I will not.”
“Yes, you will, ‘cause you want me to beat this nigger. You want me to do it bad. And another reason is this: You don’t, I’ll get up and whip your dainty little ass all over this room.”
Beems shook a little. “But why?”
“Because I can.”
Beems, his face red as infection, gathered the bills from the bed, carried them around to McBride. He thrust them at McBride. McBride, fast as a duck on a June bug, grabbed Beems’s wrist and pulled him forward, causing him to let go of the money and drop it onto McBride’s chest. McBride pulled the cigar from his mouth with his free
