Melting the Snow on Hester Street Page 32

  She looked, I used to think, rather like a beautiful doll: with small, pointed nose, and thick golden hair and round grey eyes, and a tiny, slim body that seemed to fizz with energy and life. I had seen her driving up Main Street towards the public library, her scarf flowing behind her, just like Isadora Duncan. And I had seen her at the issue desk in the library. In fact, on several occasions, being an enthusiastic reader, I had presented her with novels to stamp (respectable novels, I should add, nothing like the filthy French novels dear old William used to send me. They didn’t stock those at the Carnegie Library of Trinidad). There were occasions when I sensed she might have liked to talk, if only to share her literary opinions of the novels I was borrowing. But she always stamped and returned them without quite looking my way.

  So there we were in Carravalho’s Drugstore. I was waiting in line to stock up on the usual medications, essential for my trade. Mr Carravalho knew me well and would have a package already prepared for me, and I was in no hurry. Which was fortunate, since Inez Dubois was taking her time. She was fussing and flirting with Mr Carravalho, informing him of her dire need to buy ‘something’to refresh her look, what with the heat of this long summer.

  It was a warm August evening – a beautiful evening, after a burning hot day, and it being a Friday, there was much noise and festivity on the street. Beneath the rattle of the tram and the Salvation Army choir, singing its lungs out on the corner of Elm Street, there came laughter and chatter in a score of different languages. It was the busy, noisy, carefree sound you only heard in Trinidad when the hot, dust-filled prairie wind had eased at last, and the sun had cooled, and the long working week was almost over. Miners from the neighbouring camps were piling in off the trolley cars, the brick-factory workers were making their way from the north end of town, and the distillery workers too, and the shop clerks, the farm hands and the cattlemen, the hustlers, the rangers: they were all on the streets that evening. Trinidad was wearing its glad rags. I remember reflecting that it would likely be a busy night at Plum Street.

  The door to Mr Carravalho’s shop stood open as I waited, and I was content to linger there, catching the evening breeze, listening in on the chatter. But my tranquillity was interrupted suddenly by angry shouts from the street. There, framed by the store’s door and only a few yards from where I stood, three men had appeared as if from nowhere and, in the space of a second – the second it took for me to locate them – a violent fight had broken out between them.

  I recognized all three men. Two were private detectives, from the notorious Baldwin-Felts detective agency, hired by the coal company to report on revolutionary activity among the workers. They and their like had been throwing their weight around Trinidad these past few months. They roamed the streets with handguns tucked under their shirts, picking fights when and wherever the fancy took them. Nobody seemed to stop them – except Phoebe, my boss and the proprietress of Plum Street. Phoebe didn’t ban many men from our parlour house, so long as they could stand the bill. So it was a measure of how brutish they were that she had banned entrance to all the Baldwin-Felts men. They had a reputation for violence, here and across Colorado – all over America in fact. Wherever employers hired them to harass and intimidate their workers.

  The third man wasn’t much better. Another out-of-towner, come to Trinidad to make mischief. It was Captain Lippiatt, employed by the other side. He was a Union man. And I knew him, because he had visited us at the parlour house.

  The three men stood chest to chest, eyeball to eyeball, in the middle of North Commercial, the spit flying in each other’s faces: three great bulls of male-hood, of pure and dangerous absurdity, it seemed to me. I had no wish to be anywhere near them. I slipped deeper into the store.

  Inez, on the other hand, seemed unaware of the danger. She looked up from her skin-freshening packaging, and exclaimed, ‘Oh my!’ at such a volume that one of the spitting men – it was Lippiatt – paused momentarily to glance in.

  ‘Mr Carravalho, what are they doing?’ she asked, ‘What on earth do you suppose they’re arguing about?’

  ‘Union men,’ he muttered, shrinking a little behind his high wooden counter. ‘Hush up now, Miss Dubois. We don’t want them coming in here.’

  ‘All three are Union men?’ she asked, staring brazenly and without dropping her voice. ‘Then why are they fighting? You might have thought, after all the trouble they cause, they would at least have the decency to agree with one another.’

  ‘There’s a bunch of them in town this week,’ he replied. ‘Causing trouble. Some kind of delegation at the theatre. Talking about a strike—’

  ‘But they’re not all Union men,’ I interrupted. I wasn’t supposed to speak to the likes of Miss Inez Dubois. And nor she to the likes of me, except in a soul-saving, charitable capacity. Mr Carravalho looked shocked and embarrassed. They both did. But I persevered. It wasn’t that I had any special loyalty to the Union men (far from it), but it struck me as just plain ignorant to pretend that the battle on our streets was being fought by only one army. ‘One of them is, but the other two on the right are Baldwin-Felts men. You know that, Mr Carravalho. They’re coal company heavies. And it’s no good taking sides. Those men are as bad as each other.’

  The fight, meanwhile, seemed to have disbanded. Lippiatt was gone. Even so, the two Baldwin-Felts detectives lingered. They crossed over to the far side of the street, looking cautiously about them, dust whipping round their boots. The Friday night crowd gave them plenty of space.

  ‘What are they doing?’ Inez asked.

  It was hard to tell. They were leaning side by side of each other against a power post directly opposite us, hands resting on guns that poked ostentatiously from under their shirts. They gazed up the street towards the Union offices a few doors down, but nothing happened.

  ‘Well!’ Inez sighed. ‘Thank goodness for that! Is it over? I should be heading back.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re right, Miss Dubois,’ Mr Carravalho said. ‘It’s rather late for a lady to be trekking the streets. And on an evening like this. With the Union coming into town.’ He shot me a glance. ‘You hurry on home. Will you be taking that?’ he indicated the package still in her hand.

  She looked down, remembering it. ‘Why yes!’ she cried, as if it was quite the boldest and happiest decision she had ever settled upon. ‘Sure, I’ll take it! Why not?’ And while Mr Carravalho wrapped it, she looked again, past me – through me, I suppose – to the street outside, where the two detectives had still not moved on.

  ‘They really ought to get going,’ she muttered, sounding nervous at last. She squinted a little closer, noticed the hands and guns. ‘Aunt Philippa says they are quite trigger-happy, these Union men. Do you think it’s safe to walk home?’

  ‘Pardon me,’ I said again, ‘but those aren’t Union men.’

  She wasn’t listening. ‘It’s getting so rowdy, our little town,’ she muttered; I’m not certain which of us she was addressing. ‘I really don’t know why we have to put up with it. I begin to think – Oh! Oh Mr Carravalho! Oh my gosh—’

  Captain Lippiatt had returned. He must have dashed directly into the Union office, snatched up the gun and turned straight back again. It explained, perhaps, why the Baldwin-Felts brutes had lingered. Perhaps they had known he was coming back.

  Lippiatt charged towards them through the scattering crowd. ‘See now,’he shouted, ‘see now, cock chafers, see if you’ll repeat what you just said to me!’ He shook his gun at them. ‘Do you dare say it now, sons of bitches?’

  In an instant the street emptied. On the corner of Elm Street, the choir stopped its singing and melted into the retreating crowd. But we were trapped. Directly before us, the detectives snatched up their own guns. Lippiatt was already beside them, his handgun poking at them. There was a confusing scramble of limbs, and more cursing, and then a shot. One of the detectives had been hit in the thigh.

  Inez screamed. I put a hand on her shoulder to quiet her and she buckled bene
ath my touch. I let her fall.

  This was not the first shooting I’d seen on the streets of Trinidad, nor would it be the last. But it was the closest I had ever been: so close I could swear I heard the soft thump of bullet as it hit his flesh. Afterwards some of the blood got onto my silk shoes, and no matter how well I scrubbed them, it would never shift.

  There came another shot, this one from the handgun of the other detective. Lippiatt staggered back. Another shot, and he fell to the ground. And this I can never forget – the first detective stumbled forward and aimed his gun at Lippiatt as he lay helpless at his feet, and he shot him through the neck. Tore a hole through Lippiatt’s neck with the bullet. And then he shot him again, through the chest. That’s when the blood began to flow.

  A couple of Union men appeared within moments, while we stood still, looking on, frozen with fear. They carried his body back into their Union lair, a thick trail of blood following them along the way. Lippiatt was dead. And I knew his name because last time he’d been in town, he paid me a visit at the Plum Street Parlour House. He was an Englishman. Or he had been English, once. Just as I had. It was the only reason I recalled him at all. Perhaps the only reason he chose me before the other girls. We didn’t talk about our Englishness in any case. Nor about anything else, come to that. Very taciturn, he was. Unsmiling. Smelled of the tanner – and my disinfectant soap. But they all smell of that. And he left without saying thank you. I can’t say I was sorry he was dead. But even so, it was a shock, to have been standing right there and seen it happen … and to remember (dimly) the feel of the man between my legs. And then there was Inez, collapsed on the floor at my feet. Poor darling.

  I was shaken up. We all were. But Inez seemed to take the drama personally, as if it was her own mother who’d been slain before her eyes. She sat on the floor, her long blue skirt in a sober pool around her, and her little hat lopsided. She wouldn’t stand, no matter how Mr Carravalho and I, and finally Mrs Carravalho, tried to coax her. She simply sat and swayed, face as white as a ghost.

  ‘That poor man,’ she kept saying, with the tears rolling down her cheeks. ‘That poor, poor gentleman! One minute he was alive, right there beside me – he looked at me! Didn’t you see? Only a second before he looked at me … And now he is absolutely dead!’

  3

  Perhaps, while Inez is down there on the drugstore tiles, grieving the death of my old client, I should pause to explain something about our small town of Trinidad.

  Forty years earlier it had been nothing: just a couple of shacks on the open prairie; a pit stop for settlers on the Santa Fe trail. Then came the ranchers and the cowboys, and then the prospectors. Elsewhere, they found iron and oil, silver and gold. Here, in Southern Colorado, buried deep in the rocks under that endless prairie, they found coal. It was the ranchers who settled in Trinidad. It was the coal men who made it rich. And in August 1913, our little town stood proud, a great, bustling place in the vast, flat, open prairie land. Trinidad boasted a beautiful new theatre, seating several thousand; an opera house as grand as its name suggests, a score of different churches and a splendid synagogue; there were numerous schools, two impressive department stores, a large stone library, and a tram that ran to the city from the company-owned mining settlements, or ‘company towns’ in the hills. There were hotels and saloons and dancing halls, and pawn shops and drugstores and stores selling knick-knacks of every kind, and a large brick factory, and a brewing factory and – because of all that – but mostly because of the coal, there were people in Trinidad from just about every country in the world.

  In 1913, Trinidad was the only town in Colorado that tolerated my trade. Consequently, there existed on the west side of Trinidad – from that handsome new theatre, and on and out – a district a quarter the size of the entire town which was dedicated to gentlemen’s pleasure: saloons (uncountable) and – according to the city censor – at least fifteen established brothels. Which number, by the way, was the tip of the iceberg. It didn’t take into account the vast quantity of independent girls – the ‘crib’ girls, who operated from small single rooms, and who worked and lived together in shifts; nor the dance-hall girls, nor the pathetic ‘sign-posters’, who worked not in rooms but wherever they could: in dark corners, shoved up against walls behind the saloons.

  For most of us (not perhaps the sign-posters) Trinidad was a good place to be a whore, and a good place to find one. Snatchville, they used to call it. Ha. And the punters came from far and wide. Prostitution wasn’t simply legal in ol’ Snatchville, it was an integral part of the city. There was a Madams’ Association – a hookers’ mutual society, if you like – so rich and influential it funded an extension of the trolley line into our red-light district, and the building of a trolley bridge. ‘The Madams’ Bridge’, folk called it: built by the whores, for the whores, although really the whole town benefited. It meant the men travelling down from the camps could be transported directly into our district, without getting lost along the way, or disturbing the peace of the better neighbourhoods. The Madams’ Association provided medical care and protection to the girls, too, so long as they were attached to a brothel. And a recuperation house, not a mile out of the city, where we could retire for a week or so, if we needed a break.

  Trinidad was wealthy: cosmopolitan in its own provincial fashion, conservative and yet radical. It was new, and crazy, and busting with life. But for all that, it was only a small town.

  From its centre, where North Commercial crossed Main (only a few yards from where Lippiatt was shot), the entire city was never more than a ten-minute walk away: the library, where Inez worked, the jail, the city newspaper, the City Hall. Everything was clustered around the same twenty or so blocks. From the red-light district in the west, with its saloons and dancehalls, to the ladies’ luncheon clubs, church halls, and elegant tearooms in the east, the distance was hardly more than a few miles.

  The ladies of Trinidad spent their dollars in the same stores. We attended the same movie theatres. We washed the same prairie dust from our hands and clothes. And yet, it was as if we lived in quite separate realities; as if we couldn’t see one another. Only the men travelled freely between our two worlds.

  Inez and I, living side by side in a small, dusty town in the middle of the Colorado prairie might, our entire lives, have brushed past one another on the sidewalk, at the grocery store, the drugstore, the library, the doctor’s waiting room, at our famous department store – and never once exchanged a glance or a word. Inez and I were as shocked as each other by the evening that followed Lippiatt’s death.

  … I suppose, at this point I should also explain something about myself, too? I don’t much want to, and that’s the truth. But how in the world (the question begs) did an educated English woman, thirty-seven years old and the daughter of two Christian missionaries, find herself divorced, childless and working in an upmarket Colorado brothel? How indeed.

  Well, because we all find ourselves somewhere, I guess.

  It’s all anyone needs to know. There, but for the grace of God … This isn’t a story about me, in any case. It’s a story about Inez and Trinidad, and the war that came to Snatchville and tore us all apart.

  So there Inez sat, or slumped, on the drugstore tiles. And there were Mr and Mrs Carravalho hovering around her, polite but, I sensed, with a hint of impatience. Outside, there was panic in the voices now, and anger too. The Carravalhos wanted to close up and get home as quickly as possible. But Inez, wrapped in her own horror, was oblivious to their concerns. I might have gone on my way, come back to the shop another day. I had plenty else to do, and I was meant to be working that evening. But Lippiatt’s blood was still slick on the street outside, and I didn’t much relish the idea of venturing into the angry crowd myself. Not yet.

  Mrs Carravalho disappeared into the back of the shop and returned with brandy. A single serving, for Inez – until her husband sent her back for the bottle and three more glasses. I took mine, swallowed it down and felt better at
once. Inez took only the daintiest of sips, and continued to whimper.

  I told her she’d feel stronger if she drank the thing down in one. She looked at me directly, I think for the first time, and immediately did as I suggested. The alcohol hit the back of her throat and she shuddered. The three of us looked on, intrigued, as the brandy continued its internal journey, until at length she looked up at the three of us, considered us one by one, and grinned.

  ‘Thank you all so much. I think, perhaps …’ She belched, and I laughed. Couldn’t help it. She glanced at me again, uncertain whether she dared to laugh too, and decided against it. ‘I think I should probably head home.’

  ‘Excellent idea,’ Mr Carravalho said.

  His wife looked at her doubtfully. ‘It’s set to turn pretty mean out there. You want my husband to escort you?’

  ‘No, no!’ Inez said, though she plainly did.

  ‘Well if you are certain,’ he answered quickly.

  I took her empty brandy glass and placed it with my own on the counter. I said, ‘We can leave together if you like. Just until we’re through the craziness. It’ll be much quieter on the other side of Main Street.’

  There was an embarrassed pause.

  ‘Well I’m sure I don’t think … Honey?’ muttered the wife, looking at me suspiciously. But Mr Carravalho was apparently too busy to notice. ‘I really don’t think,’ she muttered again.

  ‘What’s that dear?’ He was locking up, counting notes. Protecting the business.

  Inez ignored them and turned to me. ‘Which way are you headed?’ she asked boldly, and immediately blushed. ‘That is to say, I am headed east. Perhaps. I mean, for certain, I am heading east. And I don’t know – if maybe we are headed in different directions?’