could hear a thousand miles down the Missouri. I wouldn’t throw her outta bed for eating crackers. She was all class.
She surveyed the room slowly like a priestess, and when she seen Chase, her expression changed. She quick-timed to the bottom of the stairs and kicked him. He toppled off the stair like a rag doll as the men laughed. She came down to the bottom landing and stood over him, her hands on her hips. “Where’s my money?”
Chase got up sheepishly, dusting himself off. “That’s a hell of a way to treat the man who just killed Old John Brown with his bare hands.”
“Right. And I quit buying gold claims last year. I don’t care who you killed. You owe me nine dollars.”
“That much?” he said.
“Where is it?”
“Pie, I got something better than nine dollars. Look.” He pointed at me and Bob.
Pie looked right past Bob. Ignored him. Then she glared at me.
White fellers on the prairie, even white women, didn’t pay two cents’ worth of attention to a simple colored girl. But Pie was the first colored woman I seen in the two years since I started wearing that getup, and she smelled a rat right off.
She blew through her lips. “Shit. Whatever that ugly thing is, it sure needs pressing.” She turned to Chase. “You got my money?”
“What about the girl?” Chase said. “Miss Abby could use her. Wouldn’t that square us?”
“You got to talk to Miss Abby about that.”
“But I carried her all the way from Kansas!”
“Must’a been some party, ya cow head. Kansas ain’t but half a day’s ride. You got my money or not?”
Chase got up, brushing himself off. “Course I do,” he muttered. “But Abby’ll be hot if she finds out you let this tight little thing shimmy across the road and work for the competition.”
Pie frowned. He had her there.
“And I ought to get special favor,” he throwed in, “on account of I had to kill John Brown and save the whole territory and all, just to get back to you. So can we go upstairs?”
Pie smirked. “I’ll give you five minutes,” she said.
“I take ten minutes to whiz,” he protested.
“Whizzes is extra,” she said. “Come on. Bring her, too.” She moved upstairs, then stopped, glaring at Bob, who had started up the stairs behind me. She turned to Chase.
“You can’t bring that nigger up here. Put him in the nigger pen out back, where everybody parks their niggers.” She pointed to the side door of the dining hall. “Miss Abby’ll give him some work tomorrow.”
Bob looked at me wild eyed.
“Excuse me,” I said, “but he belongs to me.”
It was the first thing I said to her, and when she throwed them gorgeous brown eyes on me, I like to have melted like ice in the sun. Pie was something.
“You can sleep out there with him, too, then, you high-yellow, cornlooking ugler-ation.”
“Wait a second,” Chase said. “I drug her all this way.”
“For what?”
“For the men.”
“She’s so ugly, she’d curdle a cow. Look, you want me to job you or not?”
“You can’t leave her in the pen,” Chase said. “She said she ain’t a nigger.”
Pie laughed. “She’s close enough!”
“Miss Abby wouldn’t like that. What if she gets hurt out there? Let her come upstairs and send the nigger to the pen. I got a stake in this, too,” he said.
Pie considered it. She looked at Bob and said, “G’wan to the back door out there. They’ll fetch you some eatings in the yard. You.” She pointed to me. “C’mon up.”
There weren’t nothing to do. It was late and I was exhausted. I turned to Bob, who looked downright objectable. “Sleepin’ here’s better’n the prairie, Bob,” I said. “I’ll come get you later.”
I was good to my word, too. I did come for him later, but he never forgave me for sending him out the door that day. That was the end of whatever closeness was between us. Just the way of things.
We followed Pie upstairs. She stopped at a room, throwed open the door, and pushed Chase inside. Then she turned to me and pointed to a room two doors down. “Go in there. Tell Miss Abby I sent you, and that you come to work. She’ll see you get a hot bath first. You smell like buffalo dung.”
“I don’t need no bath!”
She grabbed my hand, stomped down the hall, knocked on a door, flung it open, throwed me into the room, and closed the door behind me.
I found myself staring at the back of a husky, well-dressed white woman setting at a vanity. She turned away from the vanity and rose up to face me. She was wearing a long white fancy scarf ’round her neck. Atop that neck was a face with enough powder on it to pack the barrel of a cannon. Her lips was thick and painted red and clamped a cigar between them. Her forehead was high, and her face was flushed red and curdled in anger like old cheese. That woman was so ugly, she looked like a death threat. Behind her, the room was dimly lit by candles. The smell of the place was downright infernal. Come to think of it, I have never been in a hotel room in Kansas but that didn’t smell worse than the lowliest flophouse you could find in all of New England. The odor in that place was ripe enough to peel the wallpaper off the worst sitting room in Boston. The sole window in the room hadn’t been disturbed by water for years. It was dotted with specks of dead flies that clung to it like black dots. Along the far wall, which was lit up by two burning candles, two figures lounged on two beds that set side by side. Between the beds sat a tin bathtub that, to my reckoning, in the dim light, appeared to be filled with water and what looked to be a naked woman.
I started to lose consciousness then, for as my eyes took in the sight of these two figures, two young ones setting on the bed, one combing the other one’s hair, and the older one setting in the tub smoking a pipe, her love bags hanging low into the water, my fluids runned clear out of my head and my knees gived way. I slipped to the floor in a dead faint.
I was awakened a minute later by a hand slapping my chest. Miss Abby stood over me.
“You flat as a pancake,” she said dryly. She flipped me over onto my stomach, gripped my arse with a pair of hands that felt like ice tongs. “You small in that department, too,” she grunted, feeling my arse. “You young
I didn’t wait. I leaped to my feet, and in doing so, that pretty white scarf of hers caught my arm and I heard it tear as I took off. I ripped that thing like paper and hit the door running and scampered out. I hit the hallway at full speed and made for the stairs, but two cowboys were coming up, so I busted into the closest door, which happened to be Pie’s room—just in time to see Chase with trousers down and Pie sitting on her bed with her dress pulled down to her waist.
The sight of them two chocolate love knobs standing there like fresh biscuits slowed my step, I reckon, long enough for Miss Abby, who was hot on my tail, to grab at my bonnet and rip it in half just as I dove under Pie’s bed.
“Git out from under there!” she hollered. It was a tight squeeze—the bedsprings was low—but if it was tight for me, it was tighter for Miss Abby, who was too big to lean over all the way and get at me. The smell under that feather bed was pretty seasoned though, downright rank, the smell of a thousand dreams come true, I reckon, being that its purpose was for nature’s deeds, and if I wasn’t worried ’bout getting broke in half, I would’a moved out from under it.
Miss Abby tried pulling the bed from side to side to expose me, but I clung to the springs and moved with the bed as she slung it.
Pie come ’round to the other side of the bed, leaned on all fours and placed her head on the floor. It was a tight fit down there but I could just see her face. “You better come out here,” she said.
“I ain’t.”
I heard the click of a Colt’s hammer snapping back. “I’ll get her out,” Chase said.
Pie stood up and I heard the sound of a slap, then Chase hollered, “Ow!”
“Put that peashooter up before I beat the cow-walkin’ hell outta you,” Pie said.
