Savage Girl Read online

  Virginia City was most definitely a “my God” kind of place. Like a riot at a carnival. The north-south avenues in the town were so infernally busy that a buggy could wait a full half hour to cross them. New arrivals and Comstock veterans alike trotted along pushing wheelbarrows piled high with their belongings, weaving in and out amid the wagon traffic.

  I amused myself, for a time, by dropping back and walking a few feet behind the cross-dressing berdache, Tahktoo. Passersby, those not too boiled to focus, allowed a look of confusion to pass over their features before they walked on. Was that . . . ? Man? Woman? The berdache existed in the crowd like a question mark.

  Just then a wild-eyed creature ran pell-mell past us down “A” Street toward the iron-fronted, vaultlike headquarters of Wells Fargo, a handful of blue dirt gripped in his fist, screaming out, “The assay! the assay!”

  No one else paid the yowling fellow any mind, but my mother turned her head to follow his progress. He dodged wagons and drays until he disappeared. The assay, the assay. Would he be trampled by mules? Swindled at the government assay office when he attempted to place a valuation on his scrap of ore? Or would he be the newest entry in the swelling ranks of Washoe millionaires?

  Virginia—locals dropped the “City”—was a town that drove men mad. There is a hole in the human heart, Anna Maria once informed me, part of her effort to school her son in the ways of the world. It is deep and cold, she said solemnly, and can never be filled.

  Except by gold.

  From beneath our feet as we walked came the muffled whump-thump of explosions, repeating every few minutes. I could feel the force rise through my ankles. They were blowing apart veins of silver in the mines below the town.

  If gold could not be found to fill the hole, then silver might do.

  My mother had clearly worn the wrong clothes. Dressing Anna Maria this morning, Tu-Li told her, “You will be the only woman in fashion west of the Mississippi.” Her trailing silk overskirt with its ruffles, pleated frills and ruching, her bonnet, a parasol! All in white. She looked like an angel, a stern angel, the kind that might knock you on your behind.

  But here in the Washoe Valley, white was redundant.

  The street, the mountain that rose over the town, the canvas wall tents and saloons and banking establishments, and especially the men—all were covered in alkali grit, plaster white, fine as flour, taken up off the ground by the constant, hellish wind, swirling out of the myriad man-made holes in the earth, stinging the eyes, burning the lips, sweeping everywhere before settling on everything like thick cream on a spoon.

  Until the whole place resembled a whited sepulcher.

  Dust and wind, dust and wind. You went to Virginia and what did you find? Dust and wind.

  It hadn’t mattered what my mother wore. She could have been in mourning black and she would have wound up in white. Dust freckled Tu-Li’s blouse of deep indigo blue. A Negro, walking those streets, magically became a white man. Dust lay ankle deep on the porches and walks.

  “A” Street, the first thoroughfare settled in Virginia City, was no longer the busiest in town. By 1875 it had been fifteen years since miners carted the first “blue stuff” out of the earth.

  Blue stuff.

  Wet, mucky cobalt gravel, at first carelessly discarded, considered only as a waste by-product of the tiny bits of gold-flecked ore it carried within.

  Some genius finally bothered to look at the blue stuff closely, and the detritus revealed itself to be silver ore of the highest grade. Silver ore can be made to pay at six-percent purity. This was sixty-eight percent.

  Bonanza!

  A dismal wagon-track crossroads in the middle of the Nevada nowhere saw itself instantly transformed into a silver-rush boomtown. Within a week after the discovery, “A” Street was packed thick with tents, plain-board shanties, and had wooden-framed storefronts going up.

  Virginia. Or the Comstock, for the man who gave his name to the first famous mine. Or the Washoe, for the valley it faced. The Silverland. The residents called it by every name except its own. They cursed it when it came up dry, and worshipped it when it came in blue.

  The assay! The assay!

  Above the town, silver seekers had carved the slope into numerous narrow ledges, dotted with rictuslike wildcat mines, the face of the mountain eaten away and pitted as if with a wasting disease.

  Overhead, the turquoise reaches of the sky flooded with the sparkling sunlight omnipresent in the West. So different from our home in New York City, with its dull cloudscapes in every season, even summer.

  But what amplitude Virginia had in sunlight it made up for with a total lack of vegetation. No trees, no shrubbery, no green grass. Only sparse sagebrush, its pungent, earthy scent floating on the ever-present Washoe winds.

  “Give way!” came a shout.

  We all jumped back, nearly run over by a dray muscling past, its flatbed stacked with gleaming silver bricks under a loose sheet of flapping canvas. The slouch-hatted bullwhacker managed to hold the reins loosely in one hand and a bottle tightly in the other, while his cargo’s guards, two stone-faced men propping scatterguns against their thighs, sat stoically suffering every jolt.

  Late afternoon, near the end of the second shift in the mines. The work at extracting wealth from the earth ran on around the clock, day and night, every day of the year. Capitalism, as my political-economy professor at Harvard said, was a perpetual-motion machine.

  My mother brushed off the mud that clung to her snow-white hem after the near collision. She stepped forth under the balconies of the flat-fronted buildings, an intrepid schooner navigating between Scylla and Charybdis.

  My father styled himself a social scientist, but I considered Anna Maria to be the more discerning observer of the family. The raucous Nevada settlement offered much in the way of spectacle: mansions, parades, cockfights, bear and bull baiting, duels, bicycles, nitroglycerin, wild Indians.

  Whiskey over all. Virginia City averaged a booze-soaked murder a day.

  We proceeded past the Nevada House, inviting diners to take meals at fifty cents but with a smell of rancid grease wafting from inside that repelled all appetite.

  Next door a bounty stockade, stinking also, stack after stack of ill-cured wolf pelts, bearskins, immense piles of mountain lion hides, the maculate coat of a jaguar nailed to the pine-log wall, eagle and hawk carcasses collected in heaps.

  A bounty officer lounged at the portal of the place. Hunters got paid in government money (fifteen dollars for a wolf skin, ten dollars for bear or cougar) for their exterminating efforts. Coyote, fox, lynx, bobcat, wolverines. Man the predator clearing out competing predators, claiming his territory.

  What really distinguished Virginia was its saloons. We had only recently arrived in town and were staying not more than a week, but I most wanted to investigate these popular gambling-and-drinking venues, the site of so much rascality.

  Enter and lose your shirt. Leave and win a kick in the pants.

  “I am interested merely as a witness,” I told Anna Maria. “Not as a participant.”

  “A witness is a participant,” she said.

  The Red Dog. The Old Globe. Bucket of Blood. The Silver Queen. The Suicide Table.

  And now, at the far south end of “A,” my personal favorite so far, a dangerous hybrid establishment, Costello’s Saloon and Shooting Gallery. The threshold of the front doorway, I noticed, had been set with dice.

  Through the saloon’s single window shone an amber whiskey gleam. A peppering bang of gunshots could be heard from the interior.

  “Just ahead, madam,” Tu-Li said, motioning my mother forward. Tu-Li had been out at dawn to bring our garments to the Chinese district to be laundered. There she heard of a place to visit that might attract the curious of mind.

  “Just ahead where?” Anna Maria said, halting and holding on to my arm. “There is nowhere else to go.”

  “A” Street stopped just past the saloon, dead-ending at the steep rise of the mountai
n. Above, the ledges and mucked-out mine holes. The men working them appeared, in the slanting afternoon light, like scarabs crawling over the raggy surface of an Egyptian mummy.

  Garish billboards punctuated the slope directly above town. Carter’s Livery. Balthazar Bier-Keller. The Melodeon Hall of Dance. A large freshly painted sign for the International, the town’s respectable hotel, in which we had taken a floor.

  “Where?” I said.

  Tu-Li bowed imperceptibly and motioned with her open palm, a maître d’ showing diners to their table.

  An alley ran alongside the saloon. Lined on both sides with carts, booths, tents and hovels, the pathetic offerings of peddlers, hawkers and cheapjacks of the type that crowded the whole town, ancillary commerce to the mines.

  At the mouth of the alley, a hand-painted sign.

  SAVAGE GIRL, it read.

  Or rather the sign had originally spelled out SAVIJ GIRL, and then someone with more orthographic sophistication had come along and corrected it.

  “Here?” my mother said.

  Tu-Li nodded. “You will see,” she said.

  The sign, the misspelling and the subsequent rectification somehow struck me as particularly dispiriting. I could read a whole history in it. The entire alleyway stank of poverty, failure and claims that hadn’t proved out. I was ready to pop over to Costello’s for a glass of beer and some target practice.

  Upon the apparition of three tourists and a Zuni hermaphrodite approaching the mouth of their little hell, the vendors in the alleyway of broken dreams woke up and began to beckon Anna forward. She was, in her European finery, clearly the mark.

  Come buy my patched-together mule harness, come buy my rusty Ames shovel, my mended socks, my rags, my nightmare.

  No, no, no. I witnessed my mother at the moment of decision. She would definitely not venture into the little alley.

  Tu-Li had led us on a goose chase.

  Anna Maria would turn around, push her way down “A” Street, retreat to her hotel suite or, further, to our family’s private railcars, parked on a siding of the Virginia & Truckee line, waiting to whisk her across the endless plains to the East, out of the tiresome, ever-present alkali wind, back to civilization and happiness and our clean, dustfree, sparkling existence in Manhattan.

  “No, no, thank you,” Anna said.

  “I think you will like it,” said Tu-Li. “It is what you look for.”

  “Absolument pas,” Anna said.

  But I had a different idea.

  Beside the words, the weathered wood of the Savage Girl sign had a smudge upon it. I leaned forward. The sign maker had drawn a picture, very crude, a hairy animal countenance with oversize, oddly human eyes and a woman’s mouth painted in lurid, now-faded red.

  The hand of the wind stirred the dust in the little lane. I shivered, feeling a frisson of . . . of exactly what? Fear? Attraction? I couldn’t say.

  Anna Maria had planned a rendezvous with my father at the Brilliant Mine just before sunset. We had arranged to meet Freddy after completing our walkabout through town. By the slant of the sun, Anna Maria could see that it was getting close to the agreed-upon time, and she wanted to hustle us along.

  “I think I will go down for a peek,” I said. The dirt of the alleyway had been laid with muddy duckboards.

  “We must join your father, Hugo,” she said. “Tu-Li, Tahktoo.”

  “Come along with me,” I said to Anna Maria. “You who have forced open so many closed doors in your life.”

  “Flatterer,” she said.

  “Just a brief look,” I said. “Unless you’re fearful.”

  She hesitated. Then she took my arm and we headed into the alley. My mother could never resist a challenge.

  Avoiding the peddlers tugging at our sleeves, we followed Tu-Li along the little lane. There the alley ended at a tongue-and-groove façade with a plain pine door, two blacked-out and boarded-over windows on either side. A barn of some sort, constructed of exhausted, peeling wood.

  The building stood at the bottom of the slope, but the ground behind it fell away into a gulch before rising, so that which we stood before actually represented the building’s second story. My mother looked over to me, on her face a bride-at-the-altar mix of anticipation and disquiet.

  The portal’s homely plank boards had a peephole. As I stepped forward, the door cracked open.

  Blocking the threshold appeared one of the oddest-looking beings I have ever encountered. A human toad of sorts. His slits were like eyes. A white-coated tongue emerged from a lipless mouth, and behold, he spoke.

  “We don’t allow no women.”

  Addressing my mother, who from my experience was easily up to the task of dealing with wart-giving creatures of all stripes.

  “Young man,” she said, giving his humanity the benefit of the doubt, “you must let us in.”

  “No women and no Celestials,” the Toad said. He looked at Tu-Li, who stared back at him evenly.

  “No women?” Anna said. She pulled the berdache forward. “What about my friend?”

  The doorkeeper could not wrap his mind around Tahktoo. I witnessed the tiny engine of the man’s brain seize up and begin to smoke.

  We had gotten this far, and we weren’t about to turn back.

  Anna Maria said, “I’m entering.”

  “We don’t allow no women.”

  “Not allowing,” my mother said, “is not allowed.”

  More brain sizzle from the doorkeeper. He couldn’t handle that one either.

  Then, as if he had been jerked up to heaven by an abrupt act of rapture, the Toad suddenly disappeared with a yelp.

  In his place stood a huckster in dundrearies and a blue-checkered suit, smiling, bowing, gesturing us forward. His nostrils flared. He had the look of a man who smelled money.

  The Toad might not recognize a three-hundred-dollar silk gown, imported by Anna Maria this year from Worth in Paris, but the huckster most certainly did.

  “Madam, madam, please, you are most welcome,” he said, correctly assessing my mother as the true power in the group. “My name is Professor Dr. Calef Scott. I will assure your safety and comfort.”

  “Thank you,” Anna Maria said.

  “My assistant, Mr. R. T. Flenniken, has his marching orders but, like so many individuals of limited capacities, is burdened by a pronounced inability to modify his instructions with good judgment. In short, he is a fool.”

  During this speech he ushered us into his establishment. If his assistant resembled a toad, Scott himself was a stuffed duck.

  I waited for my eyes to adjust to the interior but then understood that the barn was not just dim, it was wholly dark. Canvas tent cloth had been stapled to the walls, obstructing the late-afternoon light coming through the gaps in the planking and also, I realized, keeping out the peering eyes of the nonpaying public.

  “We ask a small token, madam.” Dr. Scott winked, and my mother pushed a gold eagle into his hand.

  It was too much. The dollar entrance fee for each of the four of us, times five. Scott smiled like a happy child.

  “This way, if you please,” he said. “I will place you in complete segregation from the hoi polloi.”

  We had entered upon a gallery or balcony of some sort, a narrow platform that ran the length of the barn, with a sagging railing marking its far edge.

  The gallery gave out onto the two-storied barn proper. We stared down from our second level to the rectangular floor below, thirty by fifty feet, an unswept dirt surface scattered with straw. In one corner stood a large cage, its door haphazardly shut, a soiled blanket tossed over it that obscured its interior, barely visible in the gloom anyway.

  On the opposite side of the space from the cage, an odd edifice, a tall, circular galvanized tub, perhaps five feet high and almost the same in diameter, its lip spilling over with water. A stock-dipping tank or some such.

  A slim pipe angled down from high on the far side of the barn, eye level with we who stood in the gallery, pos
itioned so that it dribbled an uneven stream of scalding water into the tub. The pipe, and the surface of the bath itself, threw off wisps of steam into the murky shadows of the interior.

  Tapping into no doubt one of the myriad local hot springs. The overflow from the tub drained away down a gutter cut into the dirt floor.

  “Where is she?” called out a greasy workman among the audience. The five-o’clock show, the second of six performances daily.

  The ragged company of spectators packed close to the rail. I counted seventeen of them, with more coming every minute. The dude beside me casually tossed the lit stub of his cheroot to the floor of the gallery, not bothering to stamp it out. I stepped on the burning fag, thinking of the firetrap barn we were crowded into, and the fellow glared at me as though I had somehow trespassed.

  Whiskey vapor, tobacco smoke, sweat, exhalations of eggy bad breath. The foul human stink engulfed us more as the audience grew in size.

  Far from being made nervous by the hurly-burly around her, my mother assumed an expression of intelligent intellectual engagement, as though she were observing some indigenous foreign tribe, that she might one day lecture upon it.

  Dr. Scott maneuvered us to a corner of the gallery, where a chastened R. T. Flenniken, whom it amused the doctor to dress in livery, quickly positioned four rickety wooden chairs, fawning and smiling all the while.

  Scott made as if to withdraw but addressed Anna. “Madam, I discern you may be a woman of some parts. If you wish to discuss the natural phenomenon you are about to witness, I will make myself available after the spectacle.”

  He backed away, bowing.

  Then, at the last moment, his glance fell on me. With the practiced eye of a showman assessing his audience, he gave a secret smile and tugged at my arm. Pulling me away from my mother, he physically positioned me in the absolute far corner of the balcony, right up at the front, shoving aside a drover dressed in chaps to put me there.

  “Keep a sharp lookout and you’ll see something,” Scott whispered.

  Then he left.

  A long, restless beat.

  “Where the hell is she?” the workman repeated. “I paid my dollar!”