He felt absurd sitting on the floor, in the dark. He was hiding in his own room. But he knew what would happen if he let her in.
A few more taps and evidently she got the message. He heard her footsteps pad away.
You really are Man of the Year, huh? his id voice complained. What kind of MAN says no to a horny woman?
Collier didn’t answer the voice.
thunk!
Collier’s head jerked upright. The sound he’d just heard…had come from the other side of the wall. The bath closet.
Had Lottie returned, to tempt him further with more
exhibitions of her body?
And the next sound? A rapid gurgling…
Collier looked back to the peephole.
A dark blur crossed his pinpoint field of vision. The gurgling sound continued, heightened, then stopped. When the blur moved off again, Collier blinked, and in the space of the blink thought he saw a man…with his head in the hip bath…
Impossible! he yelled at himself.
Another blink, and then he heard a vicious gnawing sound.
Collier jerked his eye back from the hole. He took repeated deep breaths, staring into the dark. Then he jumped up, pulled on his robe, and bound out of the room and over to the bath-closet door.
He paused, hand on the knob.
I know that when I open this door, no one will be inside.
He opened the door and found the small room unoccupied.
Madhouse, he thought again.
He returned to his room and went back to bed, disgusted, exhausted, and no longer capable of considering the latest absurdities.
Go to sleep. I have to go to church tomorrow…
Exhaustion and unease sucked him deep down into sleep… III
Just as the sun sinks, you notice the man hanging by his neck. That’s the first thing you saw when you turned the corner at the bottom of the hill…
Then you blink, and you’re a little girl again.
Your spirit has transfused. Your name is Harriet, and you know this because you read it in your mother’s diary that you kept for five years after she died. You remember: When you were seven, you came back from picking boysenberries in the woods and saw the Indians ripping off her clothes. She was screaming, and the Indians took turns lying on top of her and moving funny. They chopped off the top of her head with a great war hammer, then peeled off her scalp. You were terrified but you knew you must be very quiet. You looked around for your father but quickly saw that the Indians had done the same to him. After that one Indian cut off your father’s thing, too, and put it on a cord around his neck; the cord had the things of many men on it. Another Indian had a curvy French knife—you knew it was French because your father had one just like it. He’d told you once that he got it from his own father, who’d killed lots of Indians in a war a long time ago. In this war, French soldiers gave lots of these knives to the Indians and paid them for parts they cut off of colonists. But anyway, right now this Indian used the knife to cut off the fur between your mother’s legs, along with the skin, and he put it in a bag.
Then the Indians burned the camp, but they never caught you.
You were in a place called the Ohio Territory, and this happened in 1847. You thought you were going to freeze to death that winter but some federal soldiers found you and took you with them. They took you south. You lived in a supply wagon, and it was your job to wash the soldiers’ clothes, and at night they’d all come into the wagon and take turns lying on top of you and moving funny the way the Indians did to your mother.
That’s how it went. You got used to that part. The soldiers always smelled horrible but they gave you food and left you alone most of the time. By spring, they arrived at an army post in Tennessee called Camp Roan.
There you lived with a lot of children whose parents were killed during various Indian wars or died from diseases. It was mostly widowed women who taught you how to sew, cook, tan hide, and any other duty that was needed around the camp. These women also taught you how to read. That’s when you were able to read in your mother’s diary about your name. “Walter wanted to name our wonderful baby Harriet after President William Henry Harrison, the hero of Tippecanoe. ‘He’ll be the finest president we ever have,’ Walter always said, ‘and it’ll be good luck to name our beautiful daughter after him.’” At least your luck had lasted longer than President Harrison’s. He died during his first month of office.
Because the camp had calendars, you always knew what day it was. On your sixteenth birthday, you snuck out of the camp and never came back. You got real skinny living on roots and berries but eventually you were taken in by a charcoaler. He was a strange little man who lived in a sod hut and spoke almost no English—he was from some weird place called Germany. You cooked for him and sewed his clothes while he spent the whole day chopping up wood and turning it into charcoal to sell to blacksmiths. He was always smeared black with soot. Every night he put his thing in you just like the soldiers but he also taught you how to do other things to his thing, too, with your mouth. You guess you did it very well because sometimes he’d bring you little presents from the nearby town called Branch Landing where he sold his charcoal. Several times you got pregnant but the baby usually died in your stomach and came out early, but one time it lived, and you were overjoyed. By then you understood that this happened most of the time to pregnant women, so to actually have a baby that lived was a great gift. You named your baby Henry, after President William Henry Harrison, and maybe that was bad luck, because a week later the German man took the baby to town and sold it to a couple who just lost theirs. They gave the German man thirty dollars, a big sack of flour, a brand-new cast iron skillet, and a pig.
That night you killed the German man for selling your baby. He fell asleep after you used your mouth on him, and then you collapsed his head with the skillet. You buried him in the giant ash pile and let the pig go, and then you left. You’re not sure how old you were then but you were probably around nineteen, because a trapper’s wife you met on the road to town told you it was 1859.
You didn’t know how pretty you were. You hadn’t seen a mirror since the camp. When you got to the town, a jolly fat woman named Bella took you in. You were dirty and covered with charcoal soot. She washed you vigorously in a tub, chattering, “Oh, my good Lord, aren’t you just the most precious thing to ever walk in here!” It was a wooden building with two floors, which you never knew existed, and it had a swing sign out front that said BELLA’S. There were a lot of other girls there who didn’t look very happy to see you.
When you’d crushed the funny German man’s head, you took the thirty dollars he got for Henry, plus more money he got for his charcoal, but Bella took it. “It’s for housing and training, dear,” she told you. “All the girls have to pay, but lookin’ at you I can tell you’ll be earnin’ your keep a right fast.” This was when you learned what a whorehouse was.
You learned a lot more here than the camp. You learned that there were men who pay money to pretty girls who let them put their things in them. You learned that if a girl squirted vinegar in herself after a man put his thing in you, then you sometimes wouldn’t have a baby. You learned there was a thing called an abortion that would kill a baby growing inside of you, and lots of girls did this because they could make more money at the whorehouse. There was a doctor in town who could this for a girl but it had to be a secret because it was against the law.
You also learned that the town wasn’t called Branch Landing anymore; it was called Gast, after a tall man in nice clothes who brought lots of money to the town. Most of the men who came to Bella’s worked for Mr. Gast, and they got paid lots of money because they were building a railroad for him. Mr. Gast never came to Bella’s whorehouse, though, but he did build it, so his men would have a place to put their things in girls.
