James McBride - The Good Lord Bird

He rose from the bar and said, “Excuse me, gentlemen. I am tired after killing the most dastardly criminal of the last hundred years. I aim to take this little lady across the road to the Pikesville Hotel, where Miss Abby is no doubt holding my room for me on the Hot Floor, on account of having heard of my late rasslings with that demon who I wrestled the breath from and fed him to the wolves in the name of the free living state of Missoura! God bless America.” He pushed me and Bob out the door and staggered across the street to the Pikesville Hotel.

The Pikesville was a high-class hotel and saloon compared to the previous two shitholes that I aforementioned, but I ought to say here that looking back, it weren’t much better. Only after I seen dwellings in the East did I learn that the finest hotel in Pikesville was a pigsty compared to the lowliest flophouse in Boston. The first floor of the Pikesville Hotel was a dark, candlelit drinking room, with tables and a bar. Behind it was a small middle room with a long dining table for eating. On the side of that room was a door that led to a hall leading to a back alley. At the back of the room was a set of stairs leading to the second floor.

There was a great hubbub when Chase came in, for word had proceeded him. He was pounded on the back and hailed from one corner of the room to the other, drinks shoved into his hands. He hailed everyone with a great big howdy, then proceeded to the back room, where several men seated at the dining table howdied him and offered to give him their seats and more drinks. He waved them off. “Not now, fellers,” he said. “I got business on the Hot Floor.”

On the stairs at the back of the room, several women of the type that frequented Dutch’s place sat along the bottom rungs. A couple were smoking pipes, shoving the black tobacco down into the cups with wrinkled fingers and shoving the pipes into their mouths, clamping down with teeth so yellow they looked like clumps of butter. Chase staggered past them and stood at the bottom of the stairs, hollering up, “Pie! Pie darling! C’mon down. Guess who’s back.”

There was a commotion at the top of the stairs, and a woman made her way from the darkness and stepped halfway down the stairs into the dim candlelight of the room.

I once pulled a ball from the ham of a rebel stuck out near Council Bluffs after he got into a hank out there and someone throwed their pistol on him and left him bleeding and stuck. I cleared him, and he was so grateful, he drove me to town afterward and gived me a bowl of ice cream. That was something I never had before. Best thing I ever tasted in my life.

But the feeling of that ice cream running down my little red lane in summertime weren’t nothing compared to seeing that bundle of beauty coming down them stairs that first time. She would blow the hat off your head.

She was a mulatto woman. Skin as brown as a deer’s hide, with high cheekbones and big brown dewy eyes as big as silver dollars. She was a head taller than me but seemed taller. She wore a flowered blue dress of the type whores naturally favored, and that thing was so tight that when she moved, the daisies got all mixed up with the azaleas. She walked like a warm room full of smoke. I weren’t no stranger to nature’s ways then, coming on the age of twelve as I believe I was more or less that age, and having accidentally on purpose peeked into a room or three at Dutch’s place, but the knowing of a thing is different from the doing of it, and them whores at Dutch’s was generally so ugly, they’d make the train leave the track. This woman had the kind of rhythm that you 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.”