Paradise Sky

“It was, but let’s go to the livery to talk about it.”

There was a part of me that was concerned. He was, after all, mostly a white man, and he could have an arrangement with Golem to lead me into a trap, and all I had was the popgun. I reached in my pocket and gripped it, but not with confidence. It was like the fellow that grabs at a straw when he’s drowning.

The walk to that livery seemed the longest in my life, and when we got there he unlocked the door, which had been padlocked, and let us in. There was soft lantern light glowing inside, and it gave the place a pleasant look. There was some smell of horses and their leavings, but mostly it was a comfortable aroma, and it was warm inside. Golem didn’t jump out of the shadows and hit me with a rock or shoot me with a gun.

Fact was, Cecil guided me to a desk where he kept his business ledgers and took a bottle out of the drawer and got out two glasses. I didn’t say anything about not being a drinker of alcohol, not under the circumstances.

“I suggest just a swallow,” he said. “Enough to warm you but not enough to give you liquid courage, which could get you killed.”

I sat in a chair in front of his desk, and he sat in one behind it. I pulled my hand off the derringer, picked up the drink, and put it to my lips but didn’t drink it. I can’t even stand the smell of it. I put the glass back on the desk.

“He is about Mabel Jean’s business,” he said, leaning forward to take hold of his drink.

“Mabel Jean?” I said.

He downed the whiskey, poured himself another from the glass.

“She is a guide to peculiar interests, is how she describes herself, or maybe that ain’t exactly what she says. Something like that. She comes over here once a month, on Tuesdays, that’s today, and hauls my ashes for a free buggy anytime she needs it. It’s kind of a lease agreement.”

“She’s a madam?”

“Yeah,” said Cecil. “And a little more. Not all them she services want to get the standard piece of ass. I say she caters to peculiarities, more so than the China Doll brothel. It’s pretty much straight in and out there.”

I sat silent, waiting for him to get to the point.

“Thing this man of yours likes is different. He likes beating the whores, and Mabel Jean arranges it.”

“The whores know this? That he’s going to beat on them?”

“They expect a certain amount of abuse and a certain amount of extra dollars for it. He wants to hit them with whips, but Mabel Jean only allows cloth strips bound into a wooden handle. That way the whores get a sting, not a wound, and a man who likes that kind of thing gets his feelings settled. The man you call Golem, I’m sure it’s him, as he was described to me today by Mabel Jean during our moments of lease payment. She rarely mentions her customers, hers being a private business. But she’s scared of him. I think she thought I might do something, which I won’t. I’m not crazy. Not after what she told me. She said she was glad to come see me to get out of her place. Said your man used the handle of that cloth whip on her girls, and not just to hit them with it. He won’t leave. He’s tanked up on liquor and hasn’t paid for a drink or a fuck. And the two bouncers she’s got, both colored like yourself, they both got broken up by him. Went home in a hurry, one on a stretcher. When me and her finished our business, I locked up and was on my way to the hotel to find you or leave a note. I was hoping you might want to kill him. I figured that was your plan. It could work out all around.”

“He’s at the whorehouse now?” I said, half rising from my chair.

“He may well be,” Cecil said.

“Where is this place?”

I was shaking like a leaf in a storm as Cecil gave me directions, and a bloody haze was swimming before my eyes.

Cecil finished his drink, looked at mine, then at me.

I nodded.

He took my glass and downed it. He got up, got my guns.

He said, “I said one pistol, but I figure I’ll get in as much trouble for one as all of them. The rifle, too, right?”

I started digging in my coat for the claim checks, but he said, “Naw, I know what’s yours. Two of them is real interesting. That pistol with the shotgun load, that looped rifle.”

He tore the tags off and gave them to me. He said, “Marshal asks if you gave me your guns I’m going to lie, and if it comes down to me getting in trouble with the marshal, I’m going to call you a nigger and say anything I need to say to keep my ass out of the jail. We understood?”

“We are,” I said. “You keep the rifle here. It don’t work out for me, I don’t come back for it by tomorrow evening, then you can have it.”

I took a breath and put the pistols in my coat pockets, made sure they would pull free quickly. “You telling me about this to help me get my man or to get in good with the madam?”

“One thing helps another,” Cecil said.

I walked out of the livery and started up the street. It was a goodly walk. It was a building down below the stockyards and holding pens. I slid around back, seen there was lights at the back windows and some sliding out from under the door. There was a lantern with red glass in it hung over a long nail above the doorway.

Getting my grit up, I opened the door and slid in. It was a hallway, and on the walls there was cloth hangings of all colors and designs, and there was a painting of a naked woman riding a horse in a wide gold frame. She was lying sideways on it, and she had long blond hair and looked sleepy, like maybe she’d forgotten her nightgown and had gone riding not fully awake. To the left was a flight of stairs with the wall on one side and a railing on the other.

An older, meaty white woman with hair as rough-looking as a horse’s mane came sliding into the hallway from a wide opening that led into a room where I could see a fancy red couch, a blue chair, more paintings, and a broken-down piano. I took a guess right away that was the place where the bouncers got bounced. The woman was wearing a pink dress, and the right side of it was torn. A titty that looked like it belonged to an old milk goat was dangling out.

The woman said, “You got to be the one Cecil’s sending.” She tried to poke that wild titty back behind that ripped dress, but the rip didn’t leave it any place to go. It stayed free and in action.

I almost laughed. Cecil had set me up to do this job, just as I thought. The woman, of course, had to be none other than Mabel Jean.

“Unless you’re overrun with colored men with pistols in their pockets,” I said, “I’m the one he sent.”

“He’s up there,” she said gesturing up the stairs. “He’s got girls with him, and I don’t want them hurt. Some of them are still working off their room and board.”

I could hear him then, and I recognized that voice as surely as I would have recognized that of my mother. He was yelling about how they should arrange their asses, and he was saying, “Sing, you jezebel, sing.”

I could hear the girls start in singing “Buffalo gals, won’t you come out tonight.” Not a one of them whores could have carried a note in a bucket with the lid tapped on tight.

“You look smaller than my niggers, and they got broken up,” she said.

“This here pistol improves my stature,” I said, drawing my LeMat from my coat pocket.

“That’s what they thought,” she said.

“Them bouncers was armed?”

She nodded. “I think that big bastard got shot once, but nothing he took note of.”

“You don’t say?”

“I do say.”

I took that into consideration, put a foot on the stairs.

“Be sure and kill him,” she said. “I think he’s the unforgiving sort.”

“I’m not going up there with the intention of giving him a flesh wound,” I said, and continued up the stairs.

I was about at the top when I heard a smacking sound, like someone had slapped their hands together. Then one of the girls let out with a yip, and on behind that came a bloodcurdling Indian-style yell that I knew had come from Golem. It was so loud and surprising I almost filled my pants.