Larry McMurtry - Lonesome Dove

"I believe I'll just stay," he told the foreman. "I like the view."

He also liked a long-legged whore named Sally Skull-at least that was what she called herself. She ran the whoring establishment for Bill Sloan, who owned the saloon. There were five girls but only three rooms, and with the herds coming through in such numbers the cowboys were in the place practically all the time. Sally had alarm clocks outside the rooms-she gave each man twenty minutes, after which the big alarm clocks went off with a sound like a firebell. When that happened, Sally would throw the door open and watch while the cowboys got dressed. Sally was skinny but tall, with short black hair. She was taller than all but a few of the cowboys, and the sight of her standing there unnerved most of the men so much they could hardly button their buttons. The majority of them were just boys, anyway, and not used to whorehouse customs and alarm clocks.

One or two of the bolder ones complained, but Sally was unimpressed and uncompromising.

"If you can't squirt your squirt in twenty minutes, you need a doctor, not a whore," she said.

Sally drank hard from the time she woke up until the time she passed out. She kept one of the three rooms for her own exclusive use-the one with a little porch off it. When Jake got tired of card playing he would come and sit with his feet propped up on the porch rail and watch the wagons move up and down the streets of Fort Worth. Once Sally had the alarm clocks set she would come in for a few minutes herself, with a whiskey glass, and help him watch. He had hit it off with her at once, and she let him sleep in her bed, but the bed and the privileges that went with it cost him ten dollars a day-a sum he readily agreed to, since he was on a winning streak. Once he had got his first ten dollars' worth, he felt free to discuss the arrangements.

"What if we don't do nothing but sleep?" he asked. "Is it still ten dollars?"

"Yep," Sally said.

"I can buy a dern bed for the night a sight cheaper than that," Jake pointed out.

"If it's got me in it, it ain't just a bed," Sally said. "Besides, you get to sit on the balcony all you want to, unless one of my good sweethearts is in town."

It turned out that Sally Skull had quite a number of good sweethearts, some of them so rank that Jake didn't see how she could stand them. She didn't mind mule skinners or buffalo hunters; in fact, she seemed to prefer them.

"Hell, I'm the only one of your customers that's taken a bath this year," Jake complained. "You could take up with bankers and lawyers, and the sheets wouldn't stink so."

"I like 'em muddy and bloody," Sally said. "I ain't nice, this ain't a nice place, and it ain't a nice life. I'd take a hog to bed if I could find one that walked on two legs."

Jake had seen hogs that kept cleaner than some of the men Sally Skull took upstairs, but something about her raw behavior stirred him, and he stayed with her and paid the daily ten dollars. The cowboys that came through were very poor cardplayers, so he could usually make his fee back in an hour. He tried other whores in other saloons, skinny ones and fat ones, but with them a time came when he would remember Lorena and immediately lose interest. Lorena was the most beautiful woman he had ever known, and her beauty grew in his memory. He thought of her often with a pang, but also with anger, for in his view it was entirely her own fault that she had been stolen. Whatever was happening to her, it was her punishment for stubbornness. She could easily have been living with him in a decent hotel in Austin or Fort Worth.

Sally Skull had bad teeth and a thin body with no particular beauties. Her long legs were skinny as a bird's, and she had nothing that could match Lorena's fine bosom. If anyone said a wrong word to her they got a tongue-lashing that would make the coarsest man blush. If one of her girls got too sweet on a cowboy, which could always happen in her profession, Sal promptly got rid of her, shoving her out the back door of the saloon into the dusty street. "Don't get in love around me," she would say. "Go do it in the alley if you want to give it away." Once she fired three girls in one day for lazing around with the boys. For the next week she serviced most of the customers herself.

Jake decided he was crazy for taking up with Sally-she lived too raw for him. Besides the drinking and the men, she also took powders of various kinds, which she bought from a druggist. She would take the powders and lay beside him wide-eyed, not saying a word for hours. Still, he would be awakened at dawn when she pulled the cork out of the whiskey bottle she kept by the bed. After a few swigs to wake herself up, she would always want him, no matter that she had serviced twenty cowboys the night before. Sally flared with the first light-he couldn't think what he liked about her, yet he couldn't deny her, either. She made a hundred dollars a day, or more, but spent most of it on her powders or on dresses, most of which she only wore once or twice.

When the Hat Creek outfit passed through, some of the men came in and said hello to Jake, but he froze them out. It was their fault that Lorena was lost, and he had no more use for them. But tales about him were told, and they soon got back to Sally Skull.

"Why'd you let that Indian get your whore?" she asked him bluntly.

"He was a tricky bandit," Jake said. "For all I know she may have liked him. She never liked me much."

Sally Skull had green eyes, which dilated when she took her powders. She looked at him like a mean cat that was about to pounce on a lizard. Though it was barely sunup they had already been at it, and the grimy sheets were a puddle of sweat.

"She never would mind," Jake said, wishing the Hat Creek outfit had kept their mouths shut.

"I wouldn't mind you either, Jake," Sally said. "I wish I could trade places with her."

"You what?" he asked, mightily startled.

"I've went with a nigger but never an Indian," she said. "I'd like to try one."

The news about the nigger was a shock to Jake. He knew Sal was wild, but hadn't supposed she was that wild. The look on her face frightened him a little.

"You know something else? I paid that nigger," she said. "I give him ten dollars to turn whore and then he never got to spend it."

"Why not?" Jake asked.

"He bragged and they hung him from a tree," Sally said. "Wrong thing to brag about in Georgia. Some of them wanted to hang me but they didn't have the guts to hang a woman. I just got run out of town."

That night there was trouble. A young foreman gave Sally some lip when she tried to rush him off, and she shot him in the shoulder with a derringer she kept under her pillow. He wasn't hurt much, but he complained, and the sheriff took Sally to jail and kept her. Jake tried to bail her out but the sheriff wouldn't take his money. "Leave her sit," he said. Only Sally did more than sit. She bribed one of the deputies into bringing her some powders. She looked a mess, but somehow it was the mess about her that men couldn't resist. Jake couldn't, himself-somehow she could bring him to it despite her teeth and her oniony smells and the rest. She brought the deputy to it, too, and then tried to grab his gun and break jail, although if she had waited, the sheriff would have let her out in a day or two. Somehow, in fighting over the one gun, she and the deputy managed to shoot each other fatally. They died together on the cell floor in a pool of blood, both half naked.

The deputy had nine children, and his death caused an uproar against whores and gamblers, so much so that Jake thought it prudent to leave town. He searched Sally's room before he left and found six hundred dollars in a hatbox; since Sally was dead and buried, he took it. The whores who were left were so scared that they hired a buggy and came with him over to Dallas, where they soon found work in another saloon.