Brimstone

I went in. It was dark and smelled of coal oil and smoke, full spittoons and sweat, cigar smoke and booze. It wasn’t crowded. There were men lining the bar, which was two planks on a couple of fifty-gallon kegs. There were some cards being played by candlelight at a few unmatched tables around the room. Half the tables were empty. And along the wall past the bar was a small flock of desperate-looking whores. The pickings looked slim. But repulsive. I pulled my hat down over my eyes and went to the bar, squeezed in among the other men, for concealment, and ordered a beer.

“No beer,” the barman said.

“Gimme what you got,” I said.

The barman poured something from a jug into a dirty glass. I sniffed it and put it down.

“Frenchie around?” I said.

“Her?” the barman said.

“Her,” I said.

The barman shrugged.

“Over there with the rest of ’em,” he said. “Pink dress.”

I looked at the whores. It was hard in the dim light, and I almost missed her. The pink dress was dirty. Her hair was ratty. She was a lot thi

I went back into the despondent street feeling tired and tight across my shoulders. So we’d found her. I didn’t want Virgil to see her in this setting. But it wasn’t for me to decide. It was the only setting she was in, and we’d spent a year looking for her. I started back up the street toward Los Lobos. For maybe the first time since I’d known Virgil, I didn’t know what he would do.

5

VIRGIL DIDN’T SAY A WORD from the time I told him we’d found Allie to the moment we stopped outside the rat hole where she worked. I had the eight-gauge with me, simply because I was more comfortable with it than without it, especially when I had no idea of what was going to happen.

Virgil studied the Barbary Coast Café.

“In there,” he said.

“Yes.”

Virgil looked at it some more. Then he nodded once and started forward, and we walked in through the front door. Virgil stopped inside to let his eyes adjust.

“Where is she?” Virgil said.

She was right where she had been. I nodded toward her. Virgil looked at her for a considerable time. Then he nodded again and walked over to her and stood in front of her. She looked up at him, forcing her customer’s smile, started to speak, and stopped. The smile remained in place on her immobilized face. Virgil waited. She stared.

Then she said, “Virgil?”

Virgil nodded.

She said, “Virgil.”

Virgil nodded.

She said, “Oh, sweet Jesus, Virgil, get me out of here.”

“Yes,” he said.

He took her arm and they started toward the door.

“Hey,” the barman said. “Stairs in the back.”

Virgil showed no sign that he’d heard.

“Whores ain’t allowed to leave the premises,” the barman said.

A fat man with a droopy mustache and long, greasy hair came from across the room and stood in the doorway.

“You pla

There was a scar at one corner of his mouth, as if someone had cut him with a knife. He was wearing suspenders and no belt, and he had a Colt stuck in the right-hand pocket of his pants. With fluid economy, Virgil pulled his gun and slammed it against the fat man’s head. The fat man went down. Virgil guided Allie around him and out the front door.

The bartender said, “Hey.”

I looked at him and shook my head. Then, with the eight-gauge leveled at the room, I backed out the front door and started up the street behind Virgil and Allie, keeping an eye over my shoulder at the Barbary Coast Café. Nobody came out.

Off the lobby of the Grande Palace Hotel there was a one-chair barbershop, and in the back of it was a small room, run by two fat old Mexican women, where you could get a bath. Virgil took Allie in there.

“Scrub her,” he said to the two women. “And wash her clothes.”

Allie stood motionless and silent.

“What she wear after?” one of the women said.

“We’ll worry about that,” Virgil said, “when she’s clean.”

6

ALLIE LOOKED LIKE A KID. Her hair was clean and straight. She wore no makeup, and she sat barefoot and cross-legged on the bed, wearing one of my clean shirts, like a dress, with the sleeves rolled.

“I could step out for a while,” I said. “Get me a drink. Let you folks talk.”

Virgil shook his head. So I sat on a chair in the corner of the room and was quiet.

“You run off,” Virgil said to Allie.

“I was ashamed,” she said.

“You sick at all?”

“No, honest to God, Virgil,” she said. “I haven’t got nothing.”

“All this time you been whoring?” Virgil said.

“I know, but I been lucky. I haven’t caught nothing.”

Virgil nodded.

“You been whoring since you left.”

Allie nodded slowly.

“Mostly,” she said. “I had to live, Virgil.”

Virgil nodded.

“You did,” he said.

There was nothing in Virgil’s voice. The single oil lamp next to the bed lit Allie pretty good, but it left most of the room sorta dark. The silence that hung between them seemed heavy.

“I was ashamed,” Allie said. “And after Everett shot Bragg, I was scared.”

“Of what?” Virgil asked.

“You,” she said. “That you’d find out about me. Me, maybe, maybe I was scared of what I was.”

“What were you?” Virgil said.

“I was an awful woman, I wanted everything, and being a woman, alone, out here in this country with no rules…”

“I had rules,” Virgil said.

“And I was breaking them, Virgil. Only way I knew to get what I wanted, feel like I wanted to feel, be how I wanted, only way for me was to fuck somebody.”

“Fucked a considerable number of somebodys,” Virgil said.

“Yes,” Allie said.

It was a child’s voice, piping out from the fresh-scrubbed child’s face. Virgil was silent. His face was in shadow. I was nearly invisible sitting away from the light in the corner.

“I shoulda stayed with you, Virgil.”

“Yes,” Virgil said. “You should have.”

“But I was bad, just bad, all I can say. I run off and I tried but I could never find a decent man, never nobody like you, Virgil. And they passed me around and I kept going down, down, and down, and…” She stopped talking and took in a deep breath, and let it out very slow. She did it again.

Then she said, “I had to do some awful things, Virgil… awful things with awful men.”

Virgil was silent. Allie looked down at her hands folded in her lap.

“Awful,” she said.

Virgil stood suddenly and walked to the window and looked down through the darkness at the ugly street.

“And now?” he said.

“I guess I’m awful,” she said. “I look awful. I feel awful. I ain’t worth no man’s attention. I ain’t worth anything.”

“You changed any?” Virgil said.

“I don’t know,” Allie said. “I’m at the bottom, Virgil. I can’t go down no further.”

“Think you could change?”

“I’d like to. I can’t stand this no more. I’d surely try.”

“What you think we should do?” Virgil said.

He was still looking down into the street.

“I don’t know,” Allie said in a really small voice. “I might just die.”

Virgil didn’t move from the window.

Still looking down into the street, he said, “Sooner or later. Everett, you got a thought?”

“I don’t, Virgil. I don’t believe it’s mine to think about.”